Smell of Tar

I’m curious. How did you get here? According to my records you have a Pontiac station wagon with exterior wood panels on the doors, and yet you say God is in your kitchen filching the gas and feeding the mice. That’s not a very Pontiac sort of attitude. You seem more like a Plymouth Duster dude to me. What gives?

Um, how can I say this… I eat junk mail for second breakfast after feasting on broken communion wafers for first.

First?

First breakfast, that is, you should try it—fortified with savior nuggets at the processing plant. Intrinsic. Expensive. Totally formulated with cosmo dust!

A flash and a gash and the trash is ours …

Have you listened to Able Noise, circa 2024, and felt like eviscerating yourself?

Why no? Is it tasty and chock full of aleatoric detritus? Are there tempo changes? Dizzying repetitions rendering one nauseated?

You nauseous?

I mean nautical?

Another flash. The smell of tar presses down on them. They’re unable to take full breaths. They spasm.

A disembodied voice thunders:

Ok, cut! That’s a wrap.

What I’m Reading:

December 9, 2025

America woke up today with a new global label — one normally slapped on countries with collapsing institutions, criminalized dissent, and governments that treat journalists like contagions. 

The United States has officially been downgraded from “narrowed” civic space to “obstructed.”

 Let that sink in.

Obstructed.

That’s the category where democracies go to die.

And here’s the part that should terrify everyone — this isn’t just an academic downgrade or a bunch of international policy nerds wagging their fingers. These civic ratings are the same tools used by governments, investors, international courts, and security alliances to figure out which countries are stable… and which ones are sliding into authoritarian rot.

For the first time in modern history, the United States is being treated as a country in structural democratic decline.

— Dean Blundell / “America Just Got Downgraded: ‘The United States Is No Longer a Functional Democracy’ — And Trump’s America Deserves Every Inch of It” / Substack