You See I Have Always Been a Rather Dull-Spirited Winch

• My kindle, today in my complicity, tells me I'm 17% through Adam Levin's novel *Mount Chicago.*
• This my first Adam Levin, he has clearly read Stanley Elkin.
• I kindled *Mount Chicago* on a friend's recommendation for Maine to be on a palette of choices once I finished the Bantam paperback of Elkin's *Bad Man* I started before vacation, though the connection wasn't deliberate, I didn't choose to read Levin because I reread Elkin or know about the connection until reading 17% of *Mount Chicago.*
• I pick up a paperback copy of Levin's *Mount Chicago* at Politics and Prose tomorrow, I like it enough so far to jinx it by buying a physical copy, I need handle an object if I want to remember it 
• The 17% I've read of *Mount Chicago* reminds me most strongly of Elkin's *The Franchiser,* next summer's Elkin reread, though it's nothing like it, no quaker parrot in Elkins' *The Franchiser*
• August 2023's *My Right Eye*

• Dealing with a full professor lying to my face, what over not important
• We are not friends but were (sic) not enemies
• I've rendered major service to full professor across many of the many responsibilities I have in the Library as Busboy Unithead, including but not limited to waiving literally hundreds of dollars in fines
• This was not about money
• Whenever said professor needs a Library favor related to any of my Busboy Unithead responsibilities he's in my email, always please and thanking me with always a hint he'll go over my head, bitchingly, to University Librarian if I refuse, which I never have
• I never thought full professor honest though he never bald-faced lied to me but knew he would lie to me eventually if/when
• I chose busboy for my career, busboy my choice, ambitious enough for the life I want
• I've a wife and daughter I love and who love me and six cats, two I adore, two I love, one who's a coward and to this day still won't let me or L touch him (he's named after a kid from the neighborhood I grew up in), and one named after Stanley Elkin (L can vouch) who claws me to bleeding to show how much he loves me (L can vouch)
• Full professor saw I knew he was lying and didn't back down but did not threaten to go to University Librarian if I did not do what he knew I knew he was lying about if I don't comply
• I'll comply. I'm a busboy. August 2023's *My Left Eye*

Why some dementia patients begin to create art
Shitlords and climate change:							⬇
"Think of the electric car delusion – in order to pollute less we apparently need to build an electrical grid spanning the entire globe, replace every single car in the world (trucks and vans included) and furnish them with batteries whose production is one of the most polluting processes known to man."
Liberalism against capitalism?
Can a shitlord be too much of an asshole for other shitlord even if the asshole turns a profit?
The Bidens' Case Will Keep On Giving
bepaalde cose				FRESH HELL
Why the whysplanation bothers him
Maggie's weekly				{ feuilleton }'s
The crumbling junta and stuff #1
The crumbling junta and stuff #2
Screaming, crying, throwing up
Riff on rereading Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic coming-of-age novel
They are NOT America's greatest band but I *do* like REM though I never think about them, much less listen to them, until I see an article like this
Both PJ Harvey's 2023 album and the album in cell below released Friday, beautiful, harrowing, Life in the Clusterfuckocene
You can listen to both (and everything else) once at my bandcamp (and bandcamp enabling shuffle within the past year or two, o my fucking odgay, if I *did* drive to, around in, and from Maine in 2023 I shuffled my bandcamp, I think)
This in my bandcamp when I woke up Friday morning and I guarantee we're listening to it on way to and from hikes this weekend

BREEZEWAY

John Ashbery

Someone said we needed a breezeway
to bark down remnants of super storm Elias jugularly.
Alas it wasn’t my call.
I didn’t have a call or anything resembling one.
You see I have always been a rather dull-spirited winch.
The days go by and I go with them.
A breeze falls from a nearby tower
finds no breezeway, goes away
along a mission to supersize red shutters.

Alas if that were only all.
There’s the children’s belongings to be looked to
if only one can find the direction needed
and stuff like that.
I said we were all homers not homos
but my voice dwindled in the roar of Hurricane Edsel.
We have to live out our precise experimentation.
Otherwise there’s no dying for anybody,
no crisp rewards.

Batman came out and clubbed me.
He never did get along with my view of the universe
except you know existential threads
from the time of the peace beaters and more.
He patted his dog Pastor Fido.
There was still so much to be learned
and even more to be researched.
It was like a goodbye. Why not accept it,
anyhow? The mission girls came through the woods
in their special suitings. It was all whipped cream and baklava.
Is there a Batman somewhere, who notices us
and promptly looks away, at a new catalogue, say,
or another racing-car expletive
coming back at Him?