A nine year old boy who has recently dispensed with god and love because they dispensed with him. His father beats his mother on occasion — preferably in the bathroom, because “blood comes out easier from tile.”
And in turn his mother beats him and throttles him by the neck on occasion when the mood overtakes her. In return the boy acts out, he behaves oddly, if you will. One day he eats 30 chocolate bars from the school candy sale while hiding under his bed; another day, he scrapes all the popcorn off his bedroom ceiling in a pique; and on a number of other days, he chunters in his parents’s dialect and overfeeds his goldfish until it floats inert, belly up.
These actions in turn earn the boy a hot rain of metal: belt buckles, from his father, who cannot stand the mess. And in turn the boy — too old, really, to shit or pee his pants — shits and pees his pants. This calls for a hail of slaps, broomsticks, and ashtrays from his frazzled mother.
Eventually the mother has enough and leaves the father, and drags the boy with her to live with her mother; but her heart isn’t in it — her heart is spleen shaped — it was beaten into that shape by her mother — the boy’s grandmother for those losing track.
Let’s not lose sight of the father: he turns into a ghost and hovers about speaking in tongues.
But the boy’s head is on fire. Remember? Because he does not comprehend much of what is happening around him.
Today on the school bus he is so full of the abnegation of god and the abnegation of love that he is compelled to repeatedly nod his head “NO!” This self-abnegation pleases him so, and he begins to pick up the speed of his nods until his head is a blur: back and forth. “NO NO!” And faster and faster, and it seems his head will fly off his neck. “NO NO NO!”
Then an older boy sitting behind him says: “Look at that shit head. He looks like a blender. Hey, blender!” Another boy yells: “Blenderhead!Blenderhead!” They sing in unison.
And the dizziness is the most joyful thing our boy has experienced: the world flying off this way and that. The colors a swirl. The boys and girls staring at him are a whirl… and in a whorling moment of ecstasy our boy crashes his head into the the metal plate that frames the bus seat in front of him. He grabs the top of the seat, and again: bang; again, bang; again, bang, bang, bang.
Some say his eyes rolled white, a girl says he was priapic. But our boy doesn’t care, his head is on fire. This is just where he wants to be.
Coda:
Doctor:As you’ll see here… a cross section diagram of brain tissue appears suberose…
… and here …
This is the way your brain appears after you’ve beat your head into the metal backing of a school bus seat frame. Your head, more specifically, your brain is on fire. You see microscopic shapes floating about your field of vision; they appear as cavorting beasties flagellating about in search of the dendrites they were unmoored from, you’ll never get those brain cells back. The world is vignetting at the edges and objects leave melting traces in their wake. People appear as slugs and leave sebaceous trails as they pass. Voices sound tinny and distant and the grind of the bus is a warm industrial hum.
The beatings, the “throttlings,” the vitriol all slough away.
This dull floating through space — untethered, yet pleasant, despite your throbbing swollen brain — is where you belong. It’s where you want to reside, and now you’ve found your ritual, your daily ablution.
You are happy. And YOU (yes you, dear reader) must imagine the boy happy — as you imagine Sisyphus happy — living and creating in the midst of the desert…
For $20 someone phones me and spits insults, in Cuban-inflected Spanish, through my earpiece. I also invest in seed packs for vanity, narcissus, and temerity. My fingers are refracted in the water backing up in the sink. A clog formed at the center of my soul. I’m unable to plunge it or dissolve it with caustics. The acoustics of these apartments are poor, the walls porous and sound travels easily through the heat ducts and vents. This is abrasion by the light of the full moon on the television downstairs; the Ligeti anti-aria from Le Grand Macabre tamping down from the stereo upstairs; and the constant woohooing by the spectrum kid next door; the neighbor across the hall has the scents of camphor and chicken soup, and Dave Brubeck wafting down the hall; and the elevator squalls Floor 16 too loud. The clog in my soul is not dispatched with celerity. It’s not dispatched at all. The hole in my head is a constant cavil. I speak in acrostics when I deign to speak at all. I missed the alignment of the planets last night. So I pay to have someone call me a comemierda. I eagerly and promptly answer the phone each night at 8:31.
What I’m Reading:
I’m angry that we’ve known that greenhouse gases cause global warming for more than a century and have done very little to stop emitting them. And then I remember where these emissions come from and feel appropriately guilty. I’m sad, desperately so, when I think about all the things we’ll lose. I’m afraid of the disasters I know are coming.
— Kate Marvel / Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet
Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.
— Luigi Pirandello / Six Characters in Search of an Author
To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present.
— Jill Lepore / These Truths: A History of the United States
Nonconformity, when you’re married to it, ends up looking more and more like inertia.
— Eric Puchner / Dream State
. . . I long for the ill-definition of my youth, when I lay on warm park lawn beneath a eucalyptus tree and failed to read far in a great book. Time was so slow and so thick my word-sprung yearning rode its drifts until, overpowered by hunger, I fell asleep in the sun. I did not know that I was happy.
— Jennifer Moxley / “After Turning the Clocks Back”
THIS IS A BOOK THAT DISPENSES ADVICE, COMPOSED by a writer of fiction. As with any such book or craft talk or social media rant or workshop critique, a lot of it is hogwash. I’m talking to myself. That’s all writers really do.
— Elizabeth McCracken / A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction
Having your heart broken is like finding out you have bedbugs—not in an emotional sense, but practically. Both broken hearts and bedbugs require extreme treatment. You can’t just wash your sheets and think that’s enough: Not only is it not enough, you’ve likely made the problem worse by carting your dirty laundry all over the place.
— Suzy Krause / I Think We’ve Been Here Before
All the time I had spent justifying myself. Wouldn’t it have been easier to have been gentle?
— Amie Barrodale / Trip
What I’m Listening To:
The sun has gone out We sign their papers We line their pockets You should leave now You should leave now You should leave now
— Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke / “The Men Who Dance in Stag’s Heads”
A dream. A nightmare furls in twilight. And plunges the night into stabbing. Stabbing. A post-modern city in twilight. A shambles of yesterday. Stabbing. A slick ruination. Dark pincers of light. Stabbing. Gangs of insanity run through the night. Stabbing. All through the streets. A series of stabbings. Stabbing. Close-ups of plunging. Knives in the night. Stabbing. Stabbing and running. Running and stabbing. Plunging of knives. Seamless. Shuttles of knives. Plunging. The sleep of reason produces monsters. Stabbing. Cascades of knives. Thoughtless. Lunging with blades. Thrusting. Imposssible knives. Imponderable blades. Improbable plunging. Stabbing. Stabbing and sinking. This dream of stabbing. Stabbings and running. A city gone mad with stabbing and running. Like a dream of a matador plunging. A picador stabs the city of dreams. Stabbing. This is a dream. This is a nightmare. A nightmare of stabbings. This stabbing the nighttime. Stop stabbing. A night so polluted.
Then waking.
What does it mean? This city of dreams. This city of nightmares and stabbing. Thoughts are occluded. Mood is diluted. Energy suited to sleeping. Afraid to go back. Afraid to go back to the stabbing.
What I’m Reading:
“We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day…”
A remarkable, if sadly overlooked, fellow (himself a Hustle Job) planking his own thoroughfares to eternity. An equally troubled magpie (beautifully played by the ghost of Mrs. Noir) flops into seclusion for a jest muzzle — a nuzzle of paranoia and pap.
Anarchy leads-off in the pipe room and castor oil repository. Who said what about: What price bananas? This price, this price, man! Get a hold of yourself and temporize, and in due course do nothing. Get yourself a room and a swagger-stick — only to discover that this place is as miserable a place as any other.
Take a plane to Greenland, check the weather forecast in Nigeria, take the slow boat to Caracas. Cock-robin has scrammed!
What the hell are we doing?! Get yourself some chicken soup for the proles! Our collective souls are the life-blood of stall dwellers ensconced in the fibers of the Glory Hole Wall.
The carpenter and cooper are out on call — feasting on maggots and soiled finery. Even Noam ain’t pure anymore!
Pass me the purgative. I’m dyspeptic and sore.
Get me Niz – nil – imbo on the horn!
What I’m Reading:
… Summer is in bones. Cock-robin’s at Caracas. Make o, make o, make o, Oto – otu – bre.
And the rude leaves fall. The rain falls. The sky Falls and lies with worms. The street lamps
Are those that have been hanged. Dangling in an illogical To and to and fro Fro Niz – nil – imbo.
image: vintage christmas card / unknown artist / c. 1900, in public domain
A Grand Idea (redux)
Well, it didn’t snow on Christmas, and certainly not in Maria’s home town by the sea.
Oh, the places she could roam!
Now, the only thing Maria wanted for Christmas was a plague doctor’s mask—with a bonafide beak protuberance for aromatics—and an ankle length black leather cloak, and the wide flat hat.
She looked under the tree and found a small box tagged with her name. She ripped the wrapping off and saw N-95 printed on the box.
Maybe next year, she said.
If there is a next year, said Mr. Munchems.
Mr. Munchems, you can be such a bore, she said to her rabbit.
Listen, Maria, you can’t always get what you want, Mr. Munchems said between nibbles of dandelion greens, but you take what you need, and pass the love along.
But Mr. Munchems, she said, in this world that seems so bereft of love and good will, what is there to take but bad vibes?
What year do you think this is kid, 1969? Bad vibes? Mr. Munchems said. You do what you can. You get ‘bad vibes’ and you turn them into … uh … uh, lemonade … yeah, lemonade!
Mr. Munchems, I think you’re nuts, Maria said. You’ve been eating too many mushrooms.
Listen, kid. Just try and make the world a little bit better place than you found it. Start here at home. Then your neighborhood. Then your hometown. Concentric circles, kid. Just circle out in ever-widening ‘good-vibe-osity!’
Maria was struck with a grand idea …
That night the family enjoyed a most good-humored meal—Rabbit Terrine.
A very merry to all, and to all a good bite!
image: “nights with uncle remus” / milo winter / 1917, in public domain
What I’m Reading:
A true holiday is the day you befriend the void.
— Haleh Liza Gafori / “Holiday cheer or holiday void”
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
What if what I wanted to write what didn’t need to be written?
What is this strange atmosphere that has settled over me?
One of my holy ghosts has scrammed for a patch of stratocumulus, and I feel a tenth of a degree colder.
I’ve patched my pants and holes appear on my socks. I darn my socks and my amygdala grates itself and hides in the parmesan container in the cheese drawer. The cheese drawer wishes to paint vibrant watercolors depicting scenes from Alice In Wonderland, as Salvador Dalí did—it claims to have always aspired to high surrealism, and to have read André Breton’s oeuvre. Breton’s ghost invites one of my holy ghosts over to his cloud perch, and the ouroboros renews itself.
And I’ve yet to write what didn’t need to be read.
And a strange atmosphere is just descending.
And one of my holy ghosts remains still.
And I’m still warm.
What I’m Reading:
ORDINARILY, I DON’T THINK OF A PARTICULAR audience when I write. Posterity, perhaps. But not the reader or a reader or any real-world friend, no matter how close.
— Elizabeth McCracken / A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction
thee istsfor manity reader 