The Mopes

I.

Something like a true depressive’s day. Cold, cloudy, dark by 4pm. An elaborate torpor that caffeine won’t derail. Eating meals with your fingers. Eating cookies. Wear your pajamas all day. Walk 840 steps by 8:30pm … that’s the equivalent of one circuit around the apartment. Calls not made. Calls not answered. The maples denuded and bending in the wind outside. The mopes. The doom scrolls. The writing relegated to this you see before you. What gives? Shake this. (Shake this not).

II.

Scrounge not. Plod not. Spend the day and night in bed. Lower the blinds. Keep the sun at bay tomorrow. Press play. Press repeat. Turn down the volume. Read a book backward & upside-down. Close said book. Close (unsaid) eyes. Tomorrow. Cleanse. Fold. Manipulate. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow … 

III.

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 December 3, 2025 — the day of the coded codex.

What I’m Reading:

It was worse than having a sinking feeling; I was a sinking feeling, an unplayable adagio for strings; internal distances expanded and collapsed when I breathed. It was like failing to have awoken at the right point in a nightmare; now you had to live in it, make yourself at home.

— Ben Lerner / Leaving the Atocha Station