A series of very short semi-fictions, speculations, and broadcasts from the American roadside.
I scrolled through the vicious ecclesiastics and berserkers of talk radio, an endless opera of fear masquerading as fury.
You could find her near the pump island at the gas station, singing broken torch songs for anyone who might listen.
One of the finest things I own is a lamp with a stern brass pirate, one hand on his hip and the other gripping a long sword.
A line from Voltaire comes to mind: “If hawks have always had the same character, why should you imagine that men have changed theirs?”
There’s the sensation of a premonition realized, of standing in the future while my brain lights up with aerodynamic phrases like Spaceship Earth and Biosphere.
The end of Daylight Savings Time is my favorite holiday because it creates more night.
A brief note on seeing Barnett Newman’s portrait of “the agony that is single, constant, unrelenting, willed—world without end.”
Ghosts in the machine, glitches in the sublime, and rain-streaked neon. Watching Blade Runner 2049 felt like returning to church.
A brief excerpt from Riot and Devotion.
I gazed up at the oculus while families and lovers whipped me around as they snapped their self-portraits.
A soundtrack for mourning the death of reason.
Half-past midnight on the edge of the Salton Sea. “Everything is a mystery and I’m just a small part of it,” she said. “Maybe that’s all I need to know.”
It seems a tragedy to go through life not knowing the names of the lights overhead.
My thoughts keep returning to one particular line in The Handmaids Tale: “The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others.”
Soundtrack for leaving Iceland: the choral drift of Popol Vuh which sounds like glaciers, mist, and devotion at 35,000 feet.
Meanwhile the president’s seething need for adulation continues to blow through the nation’s skull like a playground shriek that will never end.
A powerful meditation from Andrew Sullivan on the nature of freedom and the psychic beating that comes with living in Trumpland.
The next day a woman with a stern ponytail told us the mural was horrible, that it was not art and, to be clear, she absolutely hated it.
Kōbō Abe meditates on the reasons the mind craves routine: “It goes on, terrifyingly repetitive. One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life.”
Slow-motion strings and liturgical drones from Athens, Greece.
