She danced herself dizzy and collapsed onto her bed. Then the fog moved in. She ingested too much of the antipsychotic. It altered her senses. The fog was impossibly thick—all at once—much too thick for this time of year. The air much too briny for this latitude. Seagulls materialized, much too loud and dimensional, like an overly rich headphone trip. She momentarily flashed back to a Pink Floyd planetarium laser show. She mumbled bitchin’ at an errant gull that darted dangerously close to her head. A blinding darkness seeped in from the corners of her vision, an hour later it ceded to a canker-gray and then a faint violet. At once the sound of a sick viscous medium—as if oil was washing up on a gray beach. The ooze swelled up around her. In this manner she was encased. In this manner she teetered under the influence.
Her room an obscure cube.
What I’m Reading:
The old world and the Americas are straying apart at a rate of two centimeters per year, and Home is getting farther away from where I left it…
I’ll tell you diasters might die out if you stopped feeding them firewood. . .
— Asmaa Azaizeh / “Reflection”
The collective wealth of the top 10 US billionaires has soared by $698bn in the past year, according to a new report from Oxfam America published on Monday on the growing wealth divide.
The report warns that Trump administration policies risk driving US inequality to new heights, but points out that both Republican and Democratic administrations have exacerbated the US’s growing wealth gap . . . Meanwhile, over 40% of the US population, including nearly 50% of children, are considered low-income, with family earnings that are less than 200% of the national poverty line.
When pitting the US against 38 other higher-income countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the US has the highest rate of relative poverty, second-highest rate of child poverty and infant mortality, and the second-lowest life expectancy rate.
— Lauren Aratani / “Top 10 US billionaires’ collective wealth grew by $698bn in past year – report” / The Guardian
There are sixty days to explain to the children who do not yet know hate:
today The Nation weeded and counted us among the invasive species.
— Layla Faraj / “Sixty Days”
The name Equator refers to the crossing of boundaries that have been policed for too long, but also to placing equal weight upon ideas and experiences that have long been marginalised. We take the world as it actually is—not as European and American editorial boards imagine it should be. We reject the assumption that a handful of Western capitals should set the terms for the global conversation on politics, culture, and the deepest questions of human existence.
— The Equator team / “Welcome to Equator” / equator.org
My father taught us not to lie then dropped us into a wilderness that kills the truthful
— Haidar Al-Ghazali / “I Left My Sorrows in the Laundry Basin”
The thing about living with someone is that even though you see them every day and can predict all their gestures in a conversation, even when you can read intentions behind their actions and calculate their responses to circumstances fairly accurately, even when you are sure there’s not a single crease in them left unexplored, even then, one day, the other can suddenly become a stranger.
— Valeria Luiselli / Lost Children Archives
Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
— Wisława Szymborska / “Nothing Twice”
What I’m Listening To:
Somebody here is older Macbeth times 2 A lazy suit and bloody hands Come taste your faith in every street The sound of money just kissed me in the face My trousers aren’t the right size I go straight to pocket Take one step up and back to business My mind is closed so my body speaks My mind is clothed, my body squeaks
Juana weaves her homily—one uprise after another, unaware that she’s at the precipice of her irritating anecdotes.
Jean believes he deserves his honorific—the one Juana refuses to use when addressing him.
Gaffes occur in a world ruled by impertinences and reverberatory prayers.
I wish to crochet synchronized heartbeats for them, but my literary physics is pockmarked with black holes—letters and syntactic marks swept up beyond the event horizon.
But hold on, this isn’t about the serial graphemic elements indicating syntax—no, this is about love gone awry. Misanthropy, misogyny, miserliness, and misery. The human condition paradigm.
So why the tangent?
(The tangential has potential, so we diverge.)
Now, Juana deconstructs Jean’s argument and shoves him in his place: You don’t blaspheme in here!
Jean retorts: Midriff-clavichords are the only way to go. Get behind thee, Satan!
Juana says: You know, I always thought clavichord should be spelled “clavychord”—it has a jauntier ring to it. It’s zingy and fun to say, say it with me “clavychord … clavychord …clavychord …”
Jean realizes his education was fraudulent. All is relative. There is no solid ground. Nothing to rely on. No exit.
There’s a naked preamble about the paradigm of the photocopier. Transient elation ensues.
One must imagine Juana and Jean happy.
What I’m Reading:
Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful! We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead dahlias. But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist; flesh exists.
— Federico Garcia Lorca / “City That Does Not Sleep”
a hapless haptic shadow infinite dashed lines funk seeps in through puncture holes won the night and lost ourselves gloom at the peripheries as fireflies streak the darkness
the darkness harkens headfuls of childhood disjecta loosed our voices freeze in the night sound iced in our throats a pall of smothered silence
there are some good days when voices of exile bray —
the start is the end the mournful rumble we hear widens a crack in our souls
What I’m Reading:
And these days I can no longer find any relief from my house’s infestation of men by fleeing outside because other men, distant men, men who are growing fat on their own cruelty, are making the sky collapse on our heads; every day the sky comes a bit closer, oppressive, so low in some places that it has been swallowing people up out of their lives.
I hear the prattle of death’s rattle as it searches for its corpse. It does not come for me tonight, but its search is in earnest. I can hear the effort in its breath and the lead its step. I’d like to address it, correct its step, elude its attention. Were there enough people in the tower you ask. I don’t know — were there?
I’d ask you to ask, but I know you’re reluctant to engage death directly. There are fifty-five mothers in there, where are they hiding death? Do they all nurse it? Who has the temerity to burp it? Thunder in the anteroom, ice in the basement, yet the casements melt and I feel rather provincial and spun into a dense web of misplaced filial piety. I voted in an elusive election and was awarded electrocution instead.
Proper elocution was de rigueur — Derrida was stuck in your escutcheon, and you forgot the keys to the crypt.
So I’ll elide my vowels for the rest of my days. My days full of short scrums and long pitches. I’d like to spend my remaining middays ordering my consonants into flotation devices — my vices tend to sink like the Kursk or the Graf Spee. I still wish to live in a bathysphere, for I have an abundance of sins at the pawn shop and you’ve got a pocket thick with cash. And here is where you proclaim your hazy thesis riddled with jocular contradictions: spatially condensed sins are best macerated in your urine specimen effusive and elusive. Thunder only happens when you’re draining and evil presses down upon us all.
Upon us all.
Now we track, and contract, the constellations — knocked out of their obstinate orbits: Look, the night sky appears to be scratching its skin off!
What I’m Reading:
Well, we’re barely a nation at all anymore, but I’m glad we’re still in space. We have to be going some place other than down the toilet.
Three astonishments shy of a high-strung melodrama I flickered and boasted about my existential moodiness. I was three compositions short of a wartime screenplay and much too invested in haunting atmospheres. I craved numerous occult tropes of uncanny hunger. In short, I pitched decanters of sherry at obedient patients of the supernatural. Again, I was transpecies extraordinaire with a flat rear tire — passenger side. I was aggrieved and antic, send me a fur fringed papoose as a conversation starter. I say nothing when I’ve got logorrhea.
I evolved out of an overplayed lachrymosity just to change into a tank top made of human skin — ancient vellum, not to worry, I only skin my bestest of friends on alternating thanksgivings. Give thanks for moribund cummerbund fitters, the most underappreciated vocation. I moved in that direction and met the cleanest tapeworm I ever roomed with. Take that to the tripe!
What I’m Reading:
Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots trained on ‘brain rot’ content — vapid social media posts that are the equivalent of mental junk food — are worse at generating accurate information. Researchers found that chatbots given a diet of popular and sensationalist Twitter/X posts skipped steps in their reasoning process (or didn’t use reasoning at all), spat out wrong answers and demonstrated ‘dark traits’ such as psychopathy and increased levels of narcissism.
— Flora Graham / “AI gets ‘brain rot’ from social media” / Nature Briefing
I told you to move my father’s stuff over and put your stuff in there — not the zombies!
You said it was your day of the dead prerogative and quoted dialogue from Hiroshima, Mon Amour.
This is how we doomscroll our days of the dead in the Anthropocene.
What I’m Reading:
While leaders in Europe are grappling with overtourism at popular sites, tourism officials in the United States are scrambling to let the world know that the country is still open despite government shutdowns, political rhetoric, tariff wars, shootings, National Guard deployments, expensive visas, and immigration crackdowns.
— Christopher Muther / “Global tourism is surging, with one notable exception: the United States” / The Boston Globe
An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates / The Message
Long has paled that sunny sky: Echoes fade and memories die: Autumn frosts have slain July.
— Lewis Carroll / “A Boat, Beneath a Sunny Sky”
“On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29 percent more expensive than the best result for your search,” Doctorow claims. “Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen, and you’ll pay an average of 25 percent more than you would for your best match. On average, the best match is located seventeen places down in an Amazon search result.”
From the perspective of these platforms and their shareholders, you might call Stage 3 enrichification. But, for users and business customers, Doctorow writes, this is “the end-stage of enshittification, the stage at which a platform turns into a pile of shit.”
— Greg Rosalsky / “A theory why the internet is going down the toilet” / npr
Parties passionate for power Crashed No words were binding No oaths reconciled When the plague broke us We broke each other
— Rosanna Warren / “They set about wasting the land”
Each of these steps has elements of military theatrics and cosplay authoritarianism, but the more the White House insists on the trappings of war—the troop deployments, the “warrior ethos” grooming, the emergency legal powers—the more it risks nudging us toward an actual one.
— Benjamin Wallace-Wells / “Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the ‘War from Within’ “ / The New Yorker
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey. I belong there.
— Mahmoud Darwish / “I Belong There”
The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates / The Message
What I’m Listening To:
Baby’s on fire Better throw her in the water Look at her laughing Like a heifer to the slaughter Baby’s on fire And all the laughing boys are bitching Waiting for photos Oh the plot is so bewitching
Celibates and Paraphiliacs (dead sooner than later)
Sustain yourself with necro-normative inclinations, make use of what you consume, trap your inner child in an iron maiden. Spend time with your inner critic’s internal monologues parsing the sections of your Id with a rusty chainsaw giving your unconscious a case of terminal tetanus. Sublimate your inner demons to outer space—a wise man once said: “in space no one can hear you scream”—but it wasn’t really a wise man, not some mountaintop mandarin sitting lotus post-mantra, but merely a disembodied voice over in search of narrative sense, shilling a sci-fi flick—a lot of sound and fury signifying dollars for a moribund industry providing opiate delusions. Dziga Vertov once said: “film drama is the opiate of the masses.” I tend to aggress, and find egress repellant in the midst of an imminent dissolve.
Cut to:
So on this Day of the Dead in the confabulated year of 2025 CE (common to exploiters and the exploited, common to prelates and agnostic fronts, common to atheist cutlery and baptismal fonts, common to celibates and paraphiliacs) may we rejoice our dead—in those we knew who sloughed this mortal coil—and have a kind thought for the living (specifically, those who deserve kind thoughts) and may those who live now, whose great desire is to foment anger, misunderstanding, strife and division … well, may they join the dead sooner than later, so their peeps may remember them and rejoice this time next year.
(uncredited image in public domain)
What I’m Reading:
Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody. Nobody is asleep. In a graveyard far off there is a corpse who has moaned for three years because of a dry countryside on his knee; and that boy they buried this morning cried so much it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.
— Federico Garcia Lorca / “City That Does Not Sleep”
thee istsfor manity reader 