we’ve got 70-mile gusts ‘ got 2 feet of snow forecast ‘ icebergs in plymouth harbor . . .
(we’ve got 18 hours of this)
we’ve got the nor’east apocalypse blues!
What I’m Listening To:
Is anybody out there please? It’s too quiet in here and I’m beginning to freeze l’ve got icicles hanging from my knees Under fifteen feet of pure white snow Is there anybody here who feels this low? Under fifteen feet of pure white snow
— Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds / “Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow”
How could I forgive myself if I left you alone in the crowd. The sky rains down iron and the earth’s an old carpet getting shaken out. From the crowd, the hospital is far, the sky persists in its deliriums, blue and green are gone, and there’s only ashes in my eyes.
— Nasser Rabah / “The Hospital is Far Away”
But then, here she was. Living in the minor corner of the real. In a forgotten country. Without TikTok edits or multiplayer games. Barely even a meme.
— Lydia Millet / “Tourist” / Atavists
every shout from any distant window wakes me from my deepest dreams so I follow it like the blind man who raids the air with his hands toward enemy territories where his eyes were smuggled and a ransom demanded I hear the wind in my fingernails
— Sargon Boulus / “Story Without a Moral”
It turned out the plastics industry was well aware that many products marketed as safe BPA-free alternatives actually release other damaging chemicals. For years, corporate scientists had been studying the problem and burying their own damning findings. At the same time, the industry had worked to cast doubt on research from outside scientists-often employing the same methods and consultants that the tobacco industry had used so successfully to discredit the science on smoking.
— Mariah Blake / They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals
I’ve sold my hair, bowed to the brogue of dreams and agreed as a mermaid would to walk on knives. Good dagger be good to me.
— Tory Dent / “Ocean Park”
Two things are simultaneously true:
1. The Iranian regime treats its people with extreme brutality and cruelty, and we should honour the citizens seeking to overthrow it.
2. A US attack on Iran would turn a crisis into a catastrophe.
— George Monbiot / Bluesky post
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
— W. H. Auden / “Epitaph on a Tyrant”
What I’m Listening To:
The world’s changing, no it ain’t You’re just scared to death through hate Scared to death through hate Scared to death through hate
I live anachronistically. I be free in that manner. I like to write ungrammatically / seldom swing a red mark / because* I don’t prostate myself to red marks. I do not submit. I won’t entangle myself in the prevailing system no mo’. I speak relativistically. Think that way, too. We all make choices and believe in our own thing. I speak strangely. Recondite pronounciations. I say strange+abstruse+ugly ‘tings to suit my headspace.
And so I’ll say this to you /
icy fingers linger / thoughts fritter away / ideas spiral up into the borehole in the sickly green sky / maybe spanglish says it best /
me cago en el state of humanity …
(maybe that doesn’t capture it so well)
i dance a jig on a bumper crop of needless death… don’t do needles, kids… concentrate+synthesize ° then utilize ° your divine discontent… live and create in the midst of the desert…
… we must imagine sisyphus happy …
they ain’t no choice but to push on … get above thee, boulder!
I forgot to tell you! The hairy (back hair) guy we saw the other day, on Perkins St., is howling man!
I saw him yesterday, shirtless and in shorts again, in 36 degree weather during my bike ride.
He was doing a variation of his howl (much lower) and rubbing his hands over his forehead and eyes (like Curly from the 3 Stooges—I swear!) and everybody stopped at the intersection of Perkins and Jamaicaway were staring, mouths agape, at him. Traffic locked.
Poor Howling Man cracked. (world was too much with him)
Oh… and… f*** ur tariffs! U saggy orange kumquat!
What I’m Reading:
In twenty thousand years, when the dust settles on this earth and the despair, and its fires burn out, and it recovers from horrors that today seem endless, and the planet returns to what it was twenty millennia ago— green with blue water, and white clouds always— then we will meet.
— Hala al-Shrouf / “We will meet, don’t be in such a rush”
not much to say on new bike day i just pedal and pedal away like old poor yorick we’ll be some day so for today and some day far away i’ll just pedal and pedal away and seize the day
and that’s okay (bike porn is, anyway)
What I’m Reading:
No ride is too short. Carbs aside, is a small spoonful of your favorite ice cream too little to bother with? Is a two-minute massage not worth the trouble? Pedaling a bike is the same way. It’s pure fun, no matter how short it is. Five minutes of riding after a day of sitting or standing is a great way to unwind.
— Grant Petersen / Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike
She made an unusual, exciting discovery—rosary narrations with warbling wooers at the center of earplug spaces—messages in the marmalades, esoteric concatenations, erotic liberations, scratched phonographs.
Her observational arched eyebrow and nuanced approach to clam ranching led to further explorations with molting morphs, sunken oars, and sedative promiscuities.
Her life was now plunger ready. She continued drafting, something was bound to make sense to her piquant sensibility someday.
And that day was February 18th, 2026 —the day of the coded codex.
Riot now! Feel reassured. Yes, you’re an aspirant, but you’re probably avoiding the difficult threats you don’t want to think about.
We are constantly checking metiers, nickel mines, transient feeds, and truncheon nuggets … to avoid doing something we don’t want to get busy with. When we’re amidst fairground dins and lightning, we try to tell ourselves that’s it’s OK (because fill in the blessing), or we get busy with some adhesive to numb the pain (think pointless allegories) so we don’t have to wash out our ears often (and consider cisgendering).
When a prodigy comes up on our rear flank, our tendency is to want to go do something else, and we put aesthetic concerns off. Then we put off paying debts, doing taxes, composing long emails, or festooning our walls with polymer coatings—just because we don’t want to relive our childhood humiliations.
We put off expectations because it’s uncomfortable. In all fairness, there are thousands more excuses for every deadbeat thought that occurs to you—and we don’t consider it novel because our miniature ponies are beholden to someone new.
Try this: riot now!
A pea for your misdeeds—and think about the fun you’re avoiding.
She shook a fleetingly contentment.
What I’m Reading:
The crowd deranges the road. It grows intoxicated, muttering I am the forest of the dead. The beggars returned to the street and it was blind. I went back to look for my eyes, but I couldn’t find them. How could I forgive myself and the hospital was far.
At 80 miles an hour, about two and a half hours east of Denver, she tore through the state line into Kanorado, Kansas and pumped the brakes upon sighting a half dozen state troopers lined up behind a jackknifed truck.
Thousands of Coca Cola bottles strewn about the Kansas countryside. Welcome, indeed, to the New Coke.
After regaining speed, Maria pictured her mind was like an ancient field plowed by ox. She knew there was a word for this particular thing, she’d come across it ages ago in a Linguistics class (was it Linguistics? maybe…) but now it escaped her. Mile after mile and the idea, the picture, wouldn’t leave her in peace; all through The The’s Soul Mining and Wire’s Pink Flag, it nagged at her.
More than anything it bothered her that she felt the concept corporeally and knew it intellectually but she was unable to term it — to give it a name again — and then look it up. She pulled off to the side of the road and looked at the road atlas.
Maybe there was a public library in Brewster. She’d try it out with the reference librarian there.
Maria’s mind moved in horizontally cascading oscillations — moving from left to right, dropping a degree in latitude, and moving back from right to left.
She sensed the trepanation would dissipate these feelings, but she had failed with the previous two women, and she was oblivious as how to present herself in a manner that wouldn’t alienate the next potential victim.
The counter to this was the mind-numbing blandness of the landscape unspooling past her car windows. The colors were riveting, the saturated greens of the corn and soybean fields, in stark relief to the cerulean of the cloudless sky. Occasionally the boredom was broken up by a metastasizing of windmills stretching back toward the horizon line, or a billboard of Jesus Christ, seeming to hover above the young cornstalks, with the affirmation, “Jesus, I Trust In You!”
It was dull, but it reminded her of 1984 all over again. And the febrile desire to listen to either Coil’s Scatology or the Butthole Surfers’s Psychic…Powerless…Another Man’s Sac overtook her. She pulled over again and dug out the “1984” cassette case from the two dozen cases piled on the passenger side floor, the desperate need to hear Gibby Haynes singing “Mexican Caravan” through a bullhorn consumed her as nothing else had since the moment she decided to leave Salt Lake, and now she was out of speed.
How would she make it through the rest of this desolate and unchanging landscape? She looked up, and there to the right of her car was yet another Jesus accepting her trust — it was turning out to be a challenging morning.
And then it hit her — as she stared deep into the blank faded face of the pleading Jesus — it came tumbling out of the torrent of disjecta in her head: Boustrophedon.
“Boustrophedon! What a day to be alive,” Maria said, and shifted the car into drive.
What I’m Reading:
I woke up remembered “It is a day” & went out to make it be a day
i jump off the bed— cold granito floor judders my core— legs & spine ablaze lower brain doused in fire.
i dread the conflagration in my head as i peck away at my dreams like one conditioned inside an arcade game box.
slot a quarter in the box & the turntable i stand upon spins— a hatch opens where i peck at feed.
to eat & not to eat.
so long since anyone’s come by & i had a grain or two. don’t pass me by / i say with shopworn eyes. don’t walk by / i will u to slot a coin.
i haven’t fed in three days— slot some money / honey provender’s behind the door. be a hun / i may be your child’s nugget some day. walk by that pinball game straight into my heart.
What I’m Reading:
How can you show that something is racist, or stupid, or dangerous, or genocidal when nothing means anything?
— Matt Greene / “On the Rise of ChatGPT and the Industrialization of the Post-Meaning World” / Lithub
I just don’t want to be conscious sometimes because when you’re conscious in the ordinary way you have to think about yourself a lot
Dull thoughts like what am I doing?
— Anne Waldman / “How to Write”
He took his hands off her face, turned away from her with a pained sigh, reminding her of other middle-of-the-night conversations that had ended with a pained sigh. Staying up too late, exchanging panic about the children’s futures, what will this planet hold for them by the time they’re our age.
— Helen Phillips / Hum
The most American disease is the dis- ease of self-obsession. In its ruins I find there are questions I never quite learned to ask:
How can I help? What did you need? How will I know?
— Sadia Hassan / “Anti-Elegy”
She heard it constantly. Everything bad was referred to, with a jocular glibness, as the new normal.
ADHD. OCD. Depression.
Agoraphobia. Xenophobia. Paranoia.
Antisocial personality disorder. Most of the diagnoses in the DSM-5. Albeit often at a subclinical level.
Abnormality was the new normal.
— Lydia Millet / “Therapist” / Atavists
I wrote it in coal on snow and on new shoes for the ink has become like mud and the paper, how miserable the paper is!
— Muin Bseiso / “Fingernail Poem”
Repeated exercise sessions on a treadmill strengthen the wiring in a mouse’s brain, making certain neurons quicker to activate. Researchers found that this ‘rewiring’ was essential for mice to gradually improve their running endurance, which suggests that the brain is actively involved in the improvement of a physical ability with practice. “Exercise is not just about muscles breaking down and building up,” says neuroscientist and study co-author Nicholas Betley. “It’s changing your whole brain.”
— Flora Graham / “Exercise rewires the brain for endurance” / Nature Briefing
I was awake, but when I was awake A while longer I woke up and said “I have slept until now,” and now I have stopped sleeping altogether.
— Laurence Wieder / “These Anemones, Their Song Is Made Up As They Float Along”
What I’m Listening To:
If there’s one thing you can say about mankind There’s nothing kind about man
thee istsfor manity reader 