The Rat Is an Accountant

Best Spring ever? Weird to say, astonishingly vibrant colors, it should not be this kaboom on April 18th, and blossoms usually glowing in a May sun glow differently in April sun's angle, Spring sideways too

• Last night top story at Pour Yucking Fuckington Wost: AUSTERITY!
• Re: above: debt cult
• The world's most powerful basket case
• Shitlord option one: ride out the Trump shitstorm (w corresponding violent civil unrest) through inauguration of whatever shitty Democrat gets elected who then spends his or her political capital the next four years destroying what remains of social safety net while our shitlords prep a smarter, slightly more decorous cracker-whisperer (Hawley, Cotton) for 2024 (call the plan *Obama Two*)
• Shitlord option two: Death of a Nation, with motherfucking Democrats fully complicit: But where is the opposition? Where is the opposition? They're on VACATION until next month, with 20 million Americans out of work, facing ruin, and armed thugs assaulting state capitols while an authoritarian madman urges them on
• Reminder: armed crackers in the streets delight motherfucking Democrats
• Biden's new attack ad criticizes Trump for signaling his cosplaying cracker warriors to take to the street tries to out-demonize Trump on China
• Remember Democratic voter suppression in 2020 primaries when Democrats whine about GOP voter suppression this coming November 
• Shalala gives the game away (as well as puts a Three Dog Night song in my head)
• His decree
• New normals, new norms
• Maggie's weekly links
• Stronger than....
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links 
• Fetish Fanning: Kate Bush, yo
• On Picard, which I am not going to buy (though I am rewatching DS9 more off than on, lordy, it's good when it's good but it's 80% filler)
• Reminder: Shudder to Think
• We cannot be created for this kind of suffering: on McSweeney's brilliant *Toxicon and Arachne,* my favorite book of 2020 by miles

RAT MASK

Joyelle McSweeney

The rat is an accountant. 12 newborns ablaze
in a hospital fire. The eggshell shatters once
then goes on shattering and is smashed beyond
what one countenance can countenance or
count. But not the rat. Tidy about its person,
it shits neatly at the doorstep. Tidy in the mind,
it counts the foolscap lining the brain
where the great odes were written, drafts
shored up against the bleed. How the sea
stimulated the portholes. How Keats suffered,
strapped to a pony for the riding cure. He
coughed up two fawns that fled
the sopping pleural wetlands of his lungs -
also ungulates - which threw their offspring up
through the throat of the great poet,
that they might enter the eternal
treasury of the stars. Through the strait gate
and the narrow. The instructions for storage
were printed on their backs in white spots
but the code for their retrieval has been lost.
So they sprinted off, the precious fawns,
into the dark river with its wrist, its thirst.
Its lust, its list, its amethyst.