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).
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 …
What I’m Reading:
Its general vacuity aside there seems to be a ceiling to well-being. My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow. Each deeper misery being a state heretofore unimagined. Each suggestive of worse to come.
Floral bottleneck jacket-wearing flâneur for contortionist runway shows needed. If you are 7’2” tall and weigh precisely 147 lbs., please apply at the council bacterium’s office. If you know the choreography to the “backwater cough” and the “continental armadillo,” and are fluent in borehole pidgin you will receive priority consideration. Must possess a contempt argumentation voguing license class 2, and a sack-toned twirl certification. Ability to work in knee-high inertia a must. Please bring copies of dour-faced ornamentations and most recent phrenology chart to the interview. Only serious and sacrament-botched candidates need apply.
Top pay!
What I’m Reading:
Writing is a radical act. It is an act of love, a rebellion in words. Writing is resistance. It is today, as it always has been.
— Elif Shafak / “A Letter to An Anxious Writer” / Unmapped Storylands, Substack
I have never thought this life particularly salubrious or benign and I have never understood in the slightest why I was here. If there is an afterlife — and I pray most fervently that there is not — I can only hope that they wont sing . . . Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.
— Cormac McCarthy / The Passenger
To remain silent Is consent, is wrong, is more Deadly than more bombs.
— Faisal Mohyuddin / “Ceasefire Haiku”
There was a time in my twenties when I derived voluptuous satisfaction from going around dripping blood everywhere. I am a bleeding bloody creature, see how I bleed and bleed, look at all the blood crinkle-oozing out of me, onto my ankles, onto the ground, onto the street, onto your smart shoes. Bright as a ruby, dark as a garnet.
— Claire-Louise Bennett / Checkout 19
And I’ve come to suspect that the ground we walk is less of our choosing than we imagine. And all the while a past we hardly even knew is rolled over into our lives like a dubious investment. The history of these times will be long in the sorting, Squire. But if there is a common keel to our understanding it is that we are flawed. At our core that is what we know.
— Cormac McCarthy / The Passenger
I’ve always thought that we should take Donald Trump at his word. When a candidate for President tells the American people that he is going to use his power to initiate mass deportations, when he threatens to pursue and punish the “enemy within,” we should take it seriously, and not simply wait for it to happen or wish it away.
— David Remnick / “It Can Happen Here” / The New Yorker Daily
Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.
— Cormac McCarthy / The Passenger
Don’t make too much meaning of the fact Depeche Mode is playing each time you should but do not die.
— Karyna McGlynn / “When You’re Seventeen Everything Sounds like a Secret Anthem to Doom”
image: d. klein
What I’m Listening To:
Death is everywhere The more I look The more I see The more I feel A sense of urgency Tonight
The dour psephologist opened her eyes and instinctively reached for the phone. She tore off the charge cord, opened the notes app, and immediately started her thumbs pistoning. She enviviosned the dream as a perfectly composed script from the unconscious — thee paranoiac-critical paradigm! She was dead-set on making it into a short film—nonlinear, of course, and with a disjuncted asynchronous soundtrack. But she set it down in the linearity which it unspooled during her last REM cycle, otherwise how could she explain it to others — others needed clarity. So on she went:
Fade In.
Above the blinding flats of white screen reveries:
I’m flying over anonymous calamities with a courageous lack of temerity—then falling again. I plunge with celerity. A godwit plummet after 25,000 miles.
Think of the honeycombs of catacombs beneath us as we plant our feet on land again. There are rows—or rose and chaplets—along the banks of empire. So many tin-roofed huts we barely see the banks of barley spreading out to the horizon.
I rarely move once on land. But now we walk hundreds of miles—semibreves aloft in a hemidemisemiquaver aleatoric vortex—but it’s really just across the street, yet the zoetropic images flicking about in my vision are testament to the rustication of my senses. I give you abruptly-shaped children in sharp relief from the rheumy discharges of my cerebrum.
If dogma concerns you, I’d look elsewhere. I’d look for monologue arpeggiators . . .
Meanwhile, someone in this world right now is thinking a righteous thought—others are concerned with pimples in the foregrounded glass, while the memeflow streams splenetic in the background!
While the rest of us feed the catastrophe— Mandolins exhort electric car homilies— With righteous vespers at half-past the hour.
Cut To Black.
Silence.
What I’m Listening To:
Can’t you hear the rooster crowing in the dead of the night? Don’t you wanna trash ’em, jackboots step out of line It’s a concrete jungle, stones and tears Fast becoming what everybody fears It ain’t just color the message keeps cutting clear There’s a fire in the western world Fire in the western world
… But I actually think the message and the moment is much deeper than that. What happened last night was that the cord that stretched back to FDR snapped. It had been badly frayed, especially in the Reagan years, but the Depression and World War II had been such deep and defining events that the formula that got us through them—a kind of solidarity at home and abroad—more or less held. No more.
Everything is up for grabs now, including the basic entitlement programs that defined the New Deal. (If you haven’t read Project 2025 this would be a good day to start). In foreign policy terms it’s all far more complicated, and has been from Vietnam through Gaza—but today is a bad day to be Ukrainian, Taiwanese, or a Palestinian on the West Bank. Can things get worse? I think they can, and I think we will find out, here and around the world. But I don’t think it will last either, because the promises on which this new MAGA order are built are mostly nonsense…
— Bill McKibben / “The FDR era comes to an end” / The Crucial Years
What I’m Listening To:
So overconfident, confident, confident They’re so overconfident, confident, confident That’s another red flag, red flag That’s another red flag, red flag
democracy will not function properly without ur participation
VOTE
if we are to salvage this democratic experiment— + hopefully improve upon it + live up to our ideals for once— ***we need a shot in the arm / as we list (towards Atwood’s Gilead) /
VOTE
preferably HARRIS / WALZ
VOTE
we are an imperfect lot but we can aspire
please
VOTE
we can’t improve upon this human project if u don’t
VOTE
What I’m Reading:
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.
nanorhythm nanowrite nanofuckery it’s nanoobjectionable calcification of the non- ossifiable the non- frangible that which is un- mistakable in the homeostatic running of a life no strife nothing classifiable as such in any event permutational it’s the truth it’s factual everything is fractionable as long as the sirens doppler their way out of my life the nanoinfection non- fictional as it is will gas+bloat
as i need inflection points to function correctly let me ease into dysfunction disaffection+dislocation by dissociation
tra la la
la la
What I’m Reading:
I sometimes wonder if my inclination for abstruse ideas wasn’t in fact a form of passive-aggression.
It’s one void after another is what it is, he said. It aint just the one. Like it says in the good book. You think the void is just the void but it aint. It goes on.
— Cormac McCarthy / The Passenger
A crooked growth means it can be a loophole. And a loophole can be a means to freedom. I like being free.
— Margaret Rhee / “Crooked”
“A country that doesn’t believe in facts is not a safe place to build a career in science,” wrote one respondent.
— Jeff Tollefson / “The US election is monumental for science, say Naturereaders — here’s why” / Nature
These days I wake in the used light of someone’s spent life. I am often a stranger to myself; I have no place of origin, no home.
— Cheswayo Mphanza / “Frame Six”
More than 40 climate scientists are urging Nordic ministers to prevent global warming from causing a major change in an Atlantic Ocean current, which could trigger abrupt shifts in weather patterns and damage ecosystems . . . Global subsidies for fossil fuels reached a record $7 trillion in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund . . . Such subsidies show there is no credible effort to prevent such a climate disaster, said professor Stefan Rahmstorf from Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Hers is the kind of presence that registers as an absence. Motherly.
— Tess Gunty / The Rabbit Hutch
Maybe you’d better go eat. You need to keep your strength up if you aim to wrest the secrets of creation from the gods. They’re a testy lot by all accounts.
— Cormac McCarthy / The Passenger
What I’m Listening To:
Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider Girls go to Mars, become rock stars
thee istsfor manity reader 