My Fish Comes Unboned, I Weep Pretending Allergies

Remembered this year, the best New Year's song is a George song

Don't always, and forgetting more frequent and frightening of late which combined with lackofuck as only antidote for toomuchfuck plus aching knees and ankles cause fuck it what's another forty miles hiking or discing this week, I pronounce myself old now that I'm 65 and not retiring. L and I tell each other of new weird ouchies and spookies and find relief hearing it's not just the me and this sucks but is normal, mortal. Here's yesterday, Ten Mile Creek Trail, best trail in Moco (especially in the winter, exceptional light the two weeks before and after Winter solstice)





I am out of gouache and clear elmer's glue and every color of acrylic ink and watercolor blocks, living with a limited and diminishing palette and counting canvases like bullet rounds was a blast! felt like practice for our imminent immiseration and ensuing enshittification, I do this with tablets and pencils and once upon time pens too, yesterday today was tomorrow and tomorrow today will be yesterday





I've ordered more, clear elmer's glue, primary and complementary colors gouache and acrylic ink plus lots of white gouache and even more white acrylic ink, cold press and hot press watercolor blocks, 6x6, 8x8, and 12x12. Whatever I call what I make I will continue to make and they will appear there but maybe not here as much if at all because they're two dimensional here and there not three dimensional like in real life. I'm in the middle of three novels, Dixon's *Garbage,* Faulkner's *Absalom,* and Brodkey's *X-Man,* and have been for months and retain virtually nothing of whichever one I read last and can't imagine finishing any of them and am starting Alexis Wright's *Praiseworthy* later today and assume I won't remember what I just read of it when I put it down and can't imagine finishing it either. Hiking with L in an hour, we've agreed to try and not discuss how our life savings will be stolen by Shitlord (blooger auto-caps Shitlord) insurance and private equity wealth extractors. Happy New Year, same as the old year, I've no innovations on how to attack the new year except hiking, discing, painting, reading, reading not reading, gridding the clusterfuck. I did read end-to-end twice Anne Carson's 2024 *Wrong Norma* though the poem below, in a 2024 published book, written in 2017. This song below and the song below the grid both off two of my favorite 2024 albums

Grief, mourning, and solidarity			A Reverent Tribute to Disappearing Creatures
14 Must-Read Environmental Commentaries
"Speaking of Carter-Obama comparisons: While Carter did repent in his post-presidency, Obama has not. You don't see Barack building homes and leaving behind the trappings of power. All he does is tweet out lists of books and music and give paid speeches, pretty much"
☝	When you haven't had your obamapostasy yet						☝
"Jimmy Carter is dead, and the U.S. has never reckoned with the "October Surprise" scandal — the fact that the 1980 Reagan campaign colluded with the Iranian government to make sure the American hostages weren't released before the election. This was genuine treason by the GOP"
Down with the Ship				America in two headlines
"Though he sometimes embraced ‘populist’ rhetoric on the campaign trail, especially against the private equity chief Romney in 2012, Obama’s most lasting achievement in the White House was to confirm the Democrats’ new identity as the party of metropolitan capital: a political formation defined by close kinship with Wall Street and Silicon Valley, technocratic rule in government and elite pluralism in culture."
Deadly Apathy			Theory of the Non-Voter
"As 2024 ends, the prevailing attitude toward the manic stylings and overheated threats of the once and future President, even among his diehard critics, seems to be more one of purposeful indifference than of explicit resistance; call it surrender or simply resignation to the political reality that Trump is twenty-five days away from returning to the Oval Office
Defeating White Supremacy By Living A New World Into Being
"Is US democracy a sham? Biden gave us the answer"
Her Mental Health Treatment Was Helping. That’s Why Insurance Cut Off Her Coverage
A columnist at Crooked Timber discovers angry crackers, something I discovered in 7th grade when I watched FFA assholes drag a black kid into a cornfield and beat the shit out of him for smiling at a white girl in 1972
2024 Year in Photos				A tolerable New Year
Overtonian Defenestration Through Ambidextrous Revisionism
Aging Out of Home in Los Angeles
New and Old Debates on Anti-imperialism and Socialism
"All Of Western Civilization Owns This Genocide"
Civil Discourse in a Time of Genocide
The BBC's Civil War Over Gaza
☝	BBC Staffers Reveal Editor’s ‘Entire Job’ To Whitewash Israeli War Crimes						☝
"I, A Woke, Found Me Here; or, All Things to All Persons"
Trespassing For The Common Good
"The most beloved book in western philosophy; the origin of western political theory; everything else is footnotes. And...it endorses totalitarian rule achieved by lying to the people about...everything, more or less. Ridiculously, impossibly: lies for their own sake
The 7 Coolest Mathematical Discoveries of 2024
Maggie's		Anne Carson interview!			{ feuilleton}
The 20 Most Powerless People in the Art World: 2024 Edition
I know some of yinz dig Robbie Basho's music
Song for the night				Our gods have left us
Watch The Soft Boys Reunite For Yo La Tengo’s Hanukkah Residency
Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out
☝	On the amazing Sikin poem above						☝

SATURDAY NIGHT AS AN ADULT

Anne Carson

We really want them to like us. We want it to go well. We overdress. They are narrow people, art people, offhand, linens. It is early summer, first hot weekend. We meet on the street, jumble about with kisses and are we late? They had been late, we’d half-decided to leave, now oh well. That place across the street, ever tried it? Think we went there once, looks closed, says open, well. People coming out. O.K. Inside is dark, cool, oaken. Turns out they know the owner. He beams, ushers, we sit. And realize at once two things, first, the noise is unbearable, two, neither of us knows the other well enough to say bag it. Our hearts crumble. We order food by pointing and break into two yell factions, one each side of the table. He and she both look exhausted, from (I suppose) doing art all day and then the new baby. We eat intently, as if eating were conversation. We keep passing the bread. My fish comes unboned, I weep pretending allergies. Finally someone pays the bill and we escape to the street. For some reason I was expecting snow outside. There is none. We decide not to go for ice cream and part, a little more broken. Saturday night as an adult, so this is it. We thought we’d be Nick and Nora, not their blurred friends in greatcoats. We cover our ears inside our souls. But you can’t stop it that way.