What if no Senate Democrat *wants* Schumer's job and all are grateful Schumer takes all the abuse and disdain and ire and contempt and loathing and fire? Ditto every congressional Democrat Hakeem Jeffries? No one who would replace either could change the donors' dictates, let Schumer and Jeffries reap the hate. You still haven't your Democratic Party apostasy yet? Of course you have. Holyfuck, listen to this, loud, LOUD! off this album:
Heard that first on a WFMU DJ's show, she plays terrific music but enjoys her mic-breaks more than the music she plays, in a three hour show she's talking when not whining about her life a minimum a sixth of that time, thank goodness for archives so I don't need listen live and can skip over the mic-breaks, every single one of them. Revolution, yo. Imagine, a problem I can solve on my own without counting on Jeffrey Epstein's emails to save me. Yesterday was Andy Partridge's 72nd birthday, XTC one of the rotating bands in my moribund if not abandoned My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, and this song off either my third, fourth, or fifth most listened-to album of my lifetime:
The clusterfuck is like the wound on the inside of your lower lip caused by an accidental bite that swells so much that you keep biting it, making it worse each chomp, it's that or go hungry or drink your shitty meal through a straw and fuck that, you keep biting your inner lower lip and pretend that's resistance. Time to go hungry for a day or two, I think, then eat, ouch. Shakey, who is beloved but not in the inner or outer circle of rotating musicians and bands for the three non-chaired seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, is eighty today
"We work full-time to afford rent. We have insurance and can't afford healthcare. It's not an accident—it's by design. Let's have a look at how it's done"
"One of the craziest things happening right now is how there's been report after report after report showing that Epstein really was an Israeli intelligence operative, based on publicly available documents, and yet it's had no measurable impact on mainstream media or politics"
To it's credit this psychotic tirade from Bezos Post's Editorial Board in the first sentence contains the phrase *Generalissimo Zohran Mamdani* but does NOT use the word *gulag*
"Republicans understood there is no opposition party, just a grifting machine that exploits and then betrays its own voters over and over again"
"American politics makes a lot more sense when you realize that the GOP is afraid of pissing off the GOP base, and the Dems are afraid of pissing off the GOP base, but neither party is afraid of pissing off the Dem base"
A veil of haze protects this Long-ago afternoon forgotten by everybody In this photograph, most of the now Sucked screaming through old age and death.
If one could seize America Or at least a fine forgetfulness That seeps into our outline Defining our volumes with a stain That is fleeting too
But commemorates Because it does define, after all: Gray garlands, that threesome Waiting for the light to change, Air lifting the hair of one Upside-down in the reflecting pool.
I waited a day to post this monologue and the grid below (I've stopped trying to stop), both fat with contempt for and loathing at motherfucking Democrats' contempt of and loathing and FEAR! of the ascent of Zohran Mamdani (and those who defiantly and fuckyouingly, against company orders, voted for Mamdani), especially it's leadership, specifically the senator from New York who said he didn't endorse Mamdani for mayor (and said he voted and strongly implied he voted for Cuomo) because his self-legacy is first and foremost his loyalty to Zionist Israel, so we could enjoy the total magafreakout at Mamdani's win for a day. Hey, my Brian Jonestown Massacre binge continues. Yes I know Anton is a whack asshole. FMA.
Then there's the ex-CIA-operative Democrat that won the Virginia gubernatorial election whose margin of victory was twice that predicted because of the Mamdani-bounce who stink-eyed Mamdani in her post-victory comments. Yes, Trump will savagely invade NYC with the worst of his goons the day after Mamdani's sworn in, that's nothing compared to what mountains Democrats will move to ensure Mamdani fails and his winning strategy discredited. Economic populism, fuck that. Tuesday's successful election results the worse possible news for professional Democrats. This is at least the third time I've posted this song in 2025
Holyfuck, I love that song. I've received texts from the bots of Bernie Sanders, Gavin Newson, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, Hakeem Jeffries, the senator from Israel, both my Maryland senators, my congressman, many more, in the glow of Mamdani's victory asking me for money to maintain and increase the anti-Trump anti-maga momentum while no doubt simultaneously in urgently scheduled zoom meetings top Democrats and their Shitlord donors debated strategies on thwarting the anti-Trump anti-maga glee and momentum from the base before said Shitlord donors turn off their $hit $pigot
I'm glad you and I had a lovely yesterday break from our never-ending ever-darkening hopeless powerless enfeeblement and despair before Our Shitlords' Deliberate Clusterfuckication of what to them is eradicating your roach-existence, but I need to remind you and me today that regardless the infinitely slim chance that Mamdani's victory gains another inch of momentum it will be in spite of not because of motherfucking professional Democrats, all of whom see more danger to themselves from Mamdani than they ever will Trump. Their jobs depend on it
I like hearing a Dandy Warhols song when one comes on the radio and they will never get a binge, but no, I had no dog in the infamous BJM - DW wars. Yes, I was born without the Lou Reed gene and yes, I hear Lou Reed in many Anton songs, sometimes weird is wonderful
"The country’s highest profile Democratic politicians spent the day valorizing Dick Cheney while Democratic voters were busy electing Zohran Mamdani"
"@Barack Obama is a blood-soaked war criminal, a psychopathic servant of billionaires who has remained silent throughout two years of Zionist holocaust in Gaza. Nothing good can come from him"
"It’s a disgrace that the leader of the senate Democrats refuses to endorse his own party’s nominee, and we should remember it next time we are asked to endorse whatever shitty centrist nominee they want us to support in futuret’s a disgrace that the leader of the senate Democrats refuses to endorse his own party’s nominee, and we should remember it next time we are asked to endorse whatever shitty centrist nominee they want us to support in future"
"Every single Democrat in the Senate - plus Bernie Sanders - voted to confirm Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. The Democrats are not an opposition to the illegal war-loving GOP, they are its enablers
"Remember when this guy had the opportunity to put every banker in jail for 2008, and instead gave them a bailout while he was busy being the architect of mass deportations? Fuck off"
"Remember, when Obama left office, rather than becoming a grassroots promoter of populist anti-billionaire politics, he went and hung out with billionaires and got millions of dollars from wall street"
I'm in, at least for now, though I realize one of my problems with *Shadow Ticket* is the same as one of my problems with *Inherent Vice* and *Bleeding Edge:* I don't like detective novels! and never have
"This demographic already has been / is already being replaced by young American millennial readers fixated on Bolaño, Cărtărescu, Sorokin, Knausgaard, Lentz, Moresco, Krasznahorkai, Tokarczuk, Fosse, Ernaux… We just need more bold anglophone writers in the mix…"
The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios don’t
develop scar-tissue. The tubes burn out, or with a transistor, which
most souls are, the battery or diagram burns out replaceable or not
replaceable, but not like that punchdrunk fighter in the bar. The poet
Takes too many messages. The right to the ear that floored him in New
Jersey. The right to say that he stood six rounds with a champion.
Then they sell beer or go on sporting commissions, or, if the scar
tissue is too heavy, demonstrate in a bar where the invisible champions
might not have hit him. Too many of them.
The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a counterpunching radio.
And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even know they are champions.
Wednesday past's New York Times had two articles (here's one) atop the digital fold on AI in general and Nvidia is particular, Nvidia now a five trillion dollar company, and both articles expressed the now gospel truth that AI's triumph over everyone and everything now a fait accompli and that everyone and everything should fucking give up any and all resistance and comply now before AI assigns you your draft number for eradication. You are designated for eradication, yo, that's a primary and non-negotiable end goal of your AI-ensured enshittification and immiseration. No other alternative is possible. It's been decided, it's algorthimically locked-in.
That's me 95% of the time. That's down from 99% of the time. 99% of the time that 4% decline frightens me but that's down to 95% of the time too. It's not by design, it's not a latent wish. My first impulse when the thought that I should disconnect for even a second from observing and then obsessing over the clusterfuck is to think disconnecting a shameful act of cowardice, that I'm obligated to record and futilely scream about Shitlords and the Clusterfuck at people who 99% of the time agree with me, though perhaps you've noticed a 4% decline of late too. Why do I think it damning and sinful to want and try to be like this?
Well it seems so real, I can see it. I've incriminated myself enough treasonous hate speech-wise that if the Thielverse (see Thielverse in grid below) wants to off me for thought crimes they've silos full of evidence - not that they need it - so that's not driving this. I'm currently averaging, according to blooger stats, over 10K pings by AI bots (and those are only the pings that blooger sees), no amount of shutting up now will save my ass when it's my turn for state violence. Still, for the first time in my life the idea of disassociating, distancing, decoupling from engagement much less embrace of the civic and political world in exchange for what? peace of mind? a good night's sleep? occurs to me, each time microscopically less spiritually repulsive than the previous. Saving myself from constant anger and anxiety (far more for my daughter than for me) at the clusterfuck by opting out of daily swimming in the shitstorm now a infinitely distant possibility, as the grid with a fuckton of angry and anxious links below proves. Would it surprise you to learn there's a new Guided by Voices album? Here's the first single:
"The genocide in Gaza is not a freakish anomaly. It is a harbinger of what awaits us as the ecosystem disintegrates and governments embrace climate fascism"
I have been screaming about these whack motherfuckers for more than fifty fucking years
"A 67-year-old unarmed man. Driving home after a run in Chicago. Didn’t move his car fast enough for ICE, on his own street… so they ripped him out, threw him to the ground, and kneeled on his back until his ribs broke and he bled internally"
The Rise of the Thielverse and the Construction of the Surveillance State
"The ballroom is such an obvious winning political issue for Dems, it’s breathtaking how little they want to talk about it. It will be ugly, omnipresent, a literal metaphor for Trump‘s disinterest in doing anything that actually helps American voters. Run on it, you fucking morons"
"it’s so fucking satisfying to find out, over and over again, that these people really are just as vacuous and idiotic as you imagine. pure, unadulterated narcissism in service of a senile ghoul who had no shot of winning"
Gilbert and his wife Jane were unfailingly sweet, generous and kind to me when I knew them as my brother-in-law's first wife's (who was unfailingly a jerk and an asshole) parents, Gilbert and I talked the above-the-fall-line Potomac, C&O Canal, the AT, and hiking western Maryland
A friend urged Elias Canetti’s “The Book Against Death” on me, gave me a copy, it's on my night stand, maybe, someday, maybe next, probably not, my fault
L wanted to go to a No Kings so we walked the mile from our house to a protest on Rockville Pike adjacent to the Strathmore Music Hall campus. I'd guess over the course of the two hours I was there the attendance peaked at a thousand people when my senator Chris Van Hollen made his scheduled appearance for his five minute pep speech. Judging from the horns in traffic on the always busy especially on a Saturday morning Rockville Pike the overwhelming number of drivers supported the protest, but I do live in one of the bluest precincts in the bluest county of a very blue state. L got flipped a bird by one cracker in a pick-up truck (*cracker in a pickup truck* always puts a J Geils song in my head - think about it - it was in my head the whole week in Michigan for a reason), there were a few undercover cops filming and photographing, but there was no direct maga-confrontations that I saw or heard about afterward on the neighborhood listserv. I wasn't there and am not here now to snark: I wasn't a full celebrant for reasons you can no doubt guess and (are in the grid) which needn't be typed here now and which I did not share with any of the celebrants I interacted with. People liked my sub-throwing antifa guy Free DC t-shirt
Fifteen hours later at three o'clock Sunday morning we drove north on Rockville Pike past the deserted Strathmore Music Hall campus taking Rosie to be euthanized at the 24 hour emergency vet at the corner of Rockville Pike and Nicholson Lane, the only car but three others we saw on the way there. Bad thyroids and bad kidneys the two most common causes for cat deaths and Rosie had bad both, and the thyroid medicines aggravated her kidneys and her kidney medicine aggravated her thyroid. Nonetheless, she got a year and a half more of quality life than the vet's original prognosis predicted, L hydrating her via IV-drip every other day. You'll know when it's time, the vet said, when she's not living but still alive, he said, it's time. Drove back home past the deserted Strathmore Music Hall campus an hour later, Rosie in a cardboard box, now buried next to Nap and Fleabus and Momcat in L's garden. Photo below from 2012, Rosie in a cat-tunnel. I did the J Geils gag twice more, did you catch it? Looney times. As always - as always - fine metaphors abound
"This is the establishment’s emergency brake—the advice they give when terrified of the monster the system creates. The problem is they’re more terrified of the changes required to defeat the monster than of the monster itself"
Silicon Valley's capture of our political institutions is all but complete
"Liberals are NOT opposed to fascism. They support fascism as long as the Democrats are doing it quietly, behind closed doors, and with a charismatic personality"
"in sum: the Secretary of State reneged on DOJ informant deals to bargain w/ a dictator famous for crime-fighting, who did not actually fight crime but got the gang to cut violence in return for better treatment & wanted ppl who knew about that back, all so Trump could do deportation cruelty videos"
"All this is deranged wingnut incitement and the public should IMO be asking why they were sold irresponsible crackpots as Sensible Moderates, regardless of whether their crankery is an ideological commitment or merely tactical horseshit, and why the press keep playing along like it’s real"
Interview w DeWitt and Gridneff, I'm a hundred pages in and, cursing myself for cursing myself, laughing out loud and enjoying - enjoying, imagine - reading a novel
HERE EVERYTHING IS STILL FLOATING
John Ashbery
But, it's because the liquor of summer nights Accumulates in the bottom of the bottle. Suspenders brought it to its, this, level, not The tempest in a teapot of a private asylum, laughter on the back steps,
Not mine, in fine; I must concentrate on how disappointing It all has to be while rejoicing in my singular Un-wholeness that keeps it an event for me. These, these young guys Taking a shower with the truth, living off the interest of their
Sublime receptivity in anything, can disentangle the whole Lining of fabricating living from the instantaneous Pocket it explodes in, enters the limelight of history from, To be gilded and regilded, waning as its legend waxes,
Disproportionate and triumphant. Still I enjoy The long sweetness of simultaneity, yours and mine, ours and mine, The mosquitoey summer night light. Now about your poem Called this poem: it stays and must outshine its welcome.
