By Way of Demonstration, He Moves Mechanically Side to Side While Making a Clicking Noise

D brought along his friend K, the one who likes to ask me about blegging, to Thursday Night Pints right when I've a bad case of bleggal frakes.* Serendipity likes to fuck with me and when it fucks with me it fucks with you.

Why do you think, what did you call it, "Blegsylvania" is dying, she asked. It's that fucking new Kate Bush release, I said, I can't get past how spiritually crushing it is, it's what I would feel like if someone newly colorized the first year of Emma Peel Avengers only worse because Kate Bush did it to herself. What the fuck are you talking about, she said, winning last night's round of ridiculously priced scotch.

Well, we just wrote tomorrow's post, I said, and I'm forbidden to bleggalgaze beyond this line, but Blegsylvania isn't dying, it's just a Wednesday afternoon more often than a Saturday morning just like everything else we supposedly do for fun.

• American exceptionalism.
• Dreams from Wayne's cinema.
• Obama, moral universalism, and realism.
• Man of steal.
• Nixonian!
• Bushian!
• The World's Shittiest Human approves!
• Carterian!
• Orwellian!
• Bellum intestinum. 
• This man must be a prophet.
• What the GOP is telling Newt.
• I don't know why the assclown wanted to openly carry a gun, but he was doing so legally and is less of a threat to me than the police and the DA.
• I posted this a couple days ago but urge you to read and consider the comments. I'd point out only that what I hardly see expressed explicitly is that maybe any equilibrium is as good as shitty humans can negotiate. Maybe it's my roobity, but I'm now as suspicious of the concept of improvement as I am of progress.
• Privatization is theft.
• Our future MOCO.
• Speaking of Kind and unKind, there are new places in Becauses left and right. As always thanks for the Kind, and please let me know if I'm unaware you're kinding me.
• Outer Beltway! There will not be a bridge on the Potomac between the American Legion and Point of Rocks if I have to chain myself to every tree in MOCO.
• Runaway goat causes backups in Gaithersburg!

• The way up is the way down.
• *If any of the three of you who got the Harington care to explain what the frakes are in comments, I'd be obliged. No? That's cool too.
• I have spent many a content hour with Frank Kermode: The manifest sense is the literal one we all grasp; the latent sense is the spiritual meaning, the secret that must be revealed by interpretation. This is true on the simplest level; there is naturally no point to an interpretation that tells us only what we all know already, what inescapably and instantly strikes the eye. An interpretation must either uncover or create a secret. For Kermode, the very existence of a text inspires interpretation, and therefore engenders secrecy.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• More on Roth's Booker: "He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe".
• Fools want noise.
• Any list that makes Magnetic Fields number 97 and motherfucking Nirvana (the Raymond Carver of bands) number one is bullshit.
• Black country.
• Subways.

YOU KNOW

Mary Joe Bang

You know, don't you, what we're doing here?
The evening laid out like a beach ball gone airless. 

We're watching the spectators in the bleachers.
The one in the blue shirt says, "I knew, 

even as a child, that my mind was adding color 
to the moment." 

The one in red says, "In the dream, there was a child 
batting a ball back and forth. He was chanting

that awful rhyme about time that eventually ends
with the body making a metronome motion."

By way of demonstration, he moves mechanically 
side to side while making a clicking noise. 

His friends look away. They all know 
how a metronome goes. You and I continue to watch 

because we have nothing better to do. 
We wait for the inevitable next: we know the crowd

will rise to its feet when prompted and count—
one-one-hundred, two-one-hundred, 

three-one-hundred—as if history were a sound 
that could pry apart an ever-widening abyss 

with a sea on the bottom. And it will go on like this. 
The crowd will quiet when the sea reaches us.