Three years ago yesterday Nap died. I was Nap's human. Not a day goes by I don't think of him, I think of him every time I climb up or down the steps from my house to the road, he'd sit in my lap when I sat on the top step. Since then, two more cats who considered me their human have died, Momcat and Fleabus. I know few greater joys than being a cat's chosen human. We have three cats still, down from eight four years ago, and I like Stanley and love Rosie and love Olive but my wife is Stanley and Rosie's human and my daughter Olive's, they like me but
Every animal we've housed in the 39 years L & I have been together, cat and dog, found us and saved us, not us them, but no cat or dog has found us now in over a decade. I thought one had in Michigan earlier this April, a black kitten playing on the side of Tophith Rd near Munith, I stopped my car three straight days, it ran to me each day and purred in my arms, on the third day I took a box, on the third day it wore a collar and a tag. I still need rescuing. I'm a hot-mess. Iggy won't save me, not even today on his 78th birthday
Sideways too, I'm soaking in it, Madge. Will I be eating catfood in Magamerica before I can feed it to a cat that adopted me? Will I ever be able to go to a shelter and rescue an animal but have nightmares for years thinking of all the animals I did not take home, who plead with me with their eyes to save them? That won't save me. Neither will The Cure, but today is Robert Smith's 66 birthday, he's four months and a week older than me
"If the cultural landscape is nurtured and defined by the marketplace, the academy, and the web of monied foundations and institutions that make up the professionalized cultural economy, then there will always be a degree of inescapable dissonance for the leftist artist, and for the leftist writer and poet, like myself. But that dissonance is instructive or, at least, it should be. The coercive and conditional nature of the market, the academic institution, the prestigious foundation is designed to discipline the left-wing artist, and persuade them to construct a creative self that is ultimately conducive to and dependent on that capitalist, careerist terrain. At best, it simply tames or otherwise neutralizes any such dissonance. At worst, it enlists the leftist artist to construct a bastardized, supervised dissonance that instead survives, reinforces, and stabilizes the very structures that should be troubled. A dissonance that is decorative, observational, permanently underdeveloped, and loudly commodified."
"For this to have been a deliberate act — which it plainly was — consider what that means. A person within the IDF saw the news that Fatma’s film was accepted into Cannes. He/she/they then proposed assassinating her. Other people reviewed the suggestion and approved it. Then other people carried it out"
My two standard desperate last ditch attempts to end a reading slump are Ishiguro and Murnane for novels and C.D. Wright and Ashbery for poetry and I am now 0 for 4, and as I put down *A Million Windows,* my very favorite Murnane novel, yesterday afternoon it dawned on me than not only can't I read novels and poetry any longer, I no longer want to read novels and poetry any longer, at least for now
I can't blame my eyes (my left eye above): true, they ache after ten minutes of reading, and, true, my left eye literally cannot read anything and won't be able to until its cataract is yoinked out later this summer, but I spend hours online for work and pleasure every day and my eyes ache then too. Need to get right eye's (below) cataract yoinked out too but not until Fall, but they are not why I not only can't read but actively don't want to read, and to be honest it doesn't bother me that it's not bothering me and *that* doesn't bother me at all either
Bots - American, Chinese, Singaporian, Japanese, South Korean - still pinging me by the tens of thousands of hits a day. I don't think it's surveillance directed at me, I said to a digibud relieved but slightly jealous he/she/they not getting the relentless scrubbing, I think it's AI filling its silos, and he/she/they said, it's you for if/when for giggles you're swooped up and shipped to El S.......r because of your grids. I said, grids what I do when I can't and don't want to read but for the first time, and not from fear of a concentration camp, I've wondered if I could stop making these grids if I wanted to (save my peace of mind) and if maybe not wanting to read is an issue that it isn't more an issue that goes beyond documenting the clusterfuck and my motherfucking painting. Music still works
“exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies"
Trump’s in-the-know plan to demolish the US economy
"This. America, as I've said many times, has already lost. Once again for the back benches: China has the tech lead in 80% of areas, more industry than the US/Japan/SK combined, and as Alon notes, regularly completes mega-projects"
"The bedrock premise of American political culture is that the US can go anywhere on earth and kill as many people as we want and it's fundamentally illegitimate for anyone to fight back"
"We've seen this show twice before. It always ends the same way. He drops out, endorses an oligarch he claimed to oppose, and then supports their wars"
⬆
"some anti-genocide people unfurled a Free Palestine flag behind Bernie Sanders at his rally just now and police thugs arrested them as Bernie Sanders looked on and let it happen without saying a word. A minute earlier Sanders said "Israel has the right to defend itself" and repeated his lie about "not one more nickel to Netanyahu" when he opposes sanctions and an actual arms embargo and to this day refuses to recognize the genocide"
"hey remember when bush used the patriot act to expand executive power to dangerous fashy levels and then obama expanded those powers and then trump expanded those powers and then biden expanded those powers? probably nothing to worry about!"
"Kyle Langford, a 20-something Nick Fuentes acolyte, is running for governor of California on a platform of deporting all male undocumented immigrants and then giving all the females one year to marry a "Californian incel" to avoid deportation"
"A useful reaction for political elites who “didn’t see this coming” would be to reconsider how smart it was to be a condescending, dismissive prick to everyone who tried to tell you it was coming"
Will the same Leonard Leo (who gave us 5 or 9 on SCOTUS) and his army of judges working diligently to dismantle every New Deal and Great Society achievement take down Trump over tariffs?
"Totally silent about every one of Tr*mp's depredations until the stock market and Harvard are affected. That's our Obama"
This mthrfckr signed American bombs given to Israel to drop on Gazan citizens
"I've said this a couple of times, but until news coverage of the trump administration makes clear "the doj and fbi will not prosecute republican crimes, or crimes by people they favor," journalists are lying to you"
Third full-body self-portrait, the top one 8x8 in real life, the bottom 6x6 in real life, not only can't you see the three-dimensional layering in the below you couldn't see the below perfect rectangle in real life, fine metaphors abound
54 links below, the fuck. Do you think there is ONE person on the planet who personally knows Tronald Dump in real life that genuinely likes him, much less trusts him? Thinks he has a good heart and good soul and ever does anything not in direct service to himself? Yes, he's a hero to his Crackerchrister-American base (who think he has a good heart and good soul and acts in *their* behalf) and, yes, he's the greatest weapon shitlords have ever had at their disposal for achieving *their* aims, but surely they hate him, loathe him, are contemptuous toward and comprehensively don't trust him, think (and hope) they can rein in his reign if/when needed, but remember: they despise you more - they hired Dump specifically to hasten your immiseration, disposable peasant. The head above a representation of the seconds of unencumbered glee I felt hitting basket with teeshot on Emmitsburg 14 with my green teebird a few weeks back, the body beneath is me typing this paragraph. The fuck am I posting on Fridays now, the few of you here are many times fewer on the weekend. Cease bleggalgaze here. Bonnie Prince Billy below, my favorite song off one of my favorite albums of the 2025 so far:
"Capturing a person against their will without due process is called kidnapping. Transporting them to another country without due process is called human trafficking. A squalid extrajudicial prison for people found guilty of no crime is called a concentration camp."\
"The Supreme Court has ruled, temporarily at least, and perhaps permanently, that the United States government can deport anyone, including a US citizen, to a foreign country and then maroon them there on the grounds that they no longer have control of them"
"It’s long been my contention that you can understand Trumpism as the synthesis of two ideological currents, which were long dormant and marginal in the American political scene, and then came roaring to prominence"
"The failure of the left to offer a plausible path out of the worsening social fallout paved the way for Trump’s electoral victories. The legitimation crisis from which Trumpism emerged was a result of the strength of American capital, not its decline"
"Viewed in light of the president’s psychological need to dominate, it is almost certainly true that his flagrant abuse of the rights of migrants, asylum seekers and foreign-born students in the United States — snatching them off the streets to be imprisoned or, worse, sending them to an unaccountable foreign prison with no practical legal recourse — is just the beginning. In the same way that there was nothing that could stop Trump from imposing a tariff regime that, in his mind, humiliates America’s rivals, there is nothing that can dissuade him from using the coercive power of the state to dominate those he disfavors at home"
"Some might ask: How could David Brooks be a longtime columnist for the NY Times when he couldn't see what was right in front of his face? Others would say: David Brooks is a longtime columnist for the NY Times *because* he couldn't see what was right in front of his face"
"A lot of very frustrating American political behavior is explained by reasoning something like this: A pathologically mentally unbalanced moron surely could not receive a major party presidential nomination, let alone win, twice. Therefore if he seems like one, it must all be a clever act"
"Members of Trump's cabinet, as well as Congresspeople and Senators, are being instructed to wear a tribute to their inglorious, convicted felon leader"
"I will never stop reminding people every time I see his name that the entirety of the Democratic leadership, Pelosi, Hoyer, Jefferies, Clyburn, went to the mat to ensure that Cuellar kept his seat despite his GOP favorable voting record, FBI investigation in a safe blue seat over a progressive woman"
^ Yet another opportunity to begin your obamapostasy, you dope ^
the jetsam sighs,
flooding the front hall,
with the fragile violence etched
on the captain’s forehead:
some got off at the next-to-last stop;
others, less fortunate
were lost on the trail,
pines and mist carrying over
until the exit wicket
displaced all thoughts of a former, human time.
We, it was reasoned,
led lewd lives, belong with the bears.
A very few carry enough energy to
create a kinetic bonding arrangement.
These are the so-called sad ones
eating alone in restaurants,
drying their hair . . .
The dandelions are dead and the mud
of summer. They
tell of roasted meats, be oblivion
but a decade away
and the waterfall, unused,
is ruined, it is ruined, is not to stand.
