It’s Something About Umbilical Lint in Crepuscular Light

(Here follows the subheading apropos of nothing)

BEFORE THE CEILING FAN (A PREQUEL TO NOTHING IN PARTICULAR)

Before the mango. Before the question of the mango. Before the question of whether anyone was ever going to wash the mango or if the mango was simply destined to sit in the ceramic bowl on the counter acquiring the slow patina of noble neglect — before all of that — there was a morning in a city that smelled of cut grass and diesel and something else, something like the inside of a car that has been sitting in the sun with a fast food bag still in it.

This was before the ceiling fan was forever fucked up. This was when the ceiling fan merely oscillated with quiet menace, a pre-traumatic wobble you could ignore if you kept the television loud enough, which everyone did, which everyone always did.

She had not yet started writing again. She was in the pre-writing period, which felt exactly like the writing period, except nothing got written. She thought about it. She thought about it the way you think about calling someone back — meaning she thought about the fact of it, not the act of it. She was expert at this. She had a gift.

She found scads of umbilical lint by dint of smell; by dent of shells, in crepuscular light, left just a couple of feet below loam — waiting to share World War I ordinance surprise with the post-modern, post-meaning, post-post pustular world.

I believe we’re at war with Eurasia . . . or is it East Asia? What say you, Winston?

(This actually needs a sequel to actuate its fizzy properties. It’s fuzzy jam. It’s scuzzy, tubercular, carbuncle . . . tune in tomorrow and find absolutely nothing that validates your life under the stomp of the jackboot).

What I’m Reading:

That Zuckerberg would be selling generative AI makes perfect sense. It is an isolating technology for an isolated time. His first products drove people apart, even as they promised to connect us. Now chatbots promise a solution. They seem to listen. They respond. The mind wants desperately to connect with a person—and fools itself into seeing one in a machine.

— Damon Beres / “The Age of Anti-Social Media is Here” / The Atlantic