Kings & Criminals Who Are Extinct, Who Disdain This World, & Who Rot, Corrupt & Shallow, as Fields I Disced

Got my first middle-finger for wearing my red anti-nazi hat that L knit me, dude in a big-ass Dodge Ram with those yellow Virginia don't-tread-on-me license plates flipped me off, pulled in front of me and into my lane, hit his breaks, when I moved over a lane and, at the 55 mph speed limit, passed him, he moved behind me, flashed his lights, then sped past me flipping me another bird (I did get one thumbs-up and one I-need-to-get-one comment in MOMs, the local organic grocery store). I have a PDF of the knitting instructions, let me know if you want one

Of course I'm enjoying the magamerican meltdown over the Woke Assault on Helmetball that was yesterday's halftime show by Bad Bunny (which I did not see, nor the game, though I know that if the New England Patriots were playing they were wearing the fugliest uniforms of any sport anywhere). Helmetball is theirs, magachoads', not yours (and they can have it), and this halftime all in Spanish but the sign in English that said LOVE > HATE is, to them, even if it was not fully meant to be, an attack as serious as blaspheming White Jesus Cracker. Coupled with American athletes at the Winter Olympics making traitorous statements against King Dump, Michigan this Friday through Tuesday visiting our daughter and son-in-law, wearing this red hat while driving a car with Maryland plates, I will count the one-fingered salutes. There's one party store on Seymour Road near Portage Lake I'll avoid, but I'm wearing the hat. Revolution, mofos. If not us, nobody. 

Yes, one size smaller font, test-driving, I'm not THIS blind yet. Rest of monologue is the grid. Yes, the Larry Levis and Cindy Lee tags are new, first new ones in years. Have I ever mentioned that *Flesh and Blood* is one of my favorite songs?

Look at what we allow
Vital reminder >	"The last Democratic presidential candidate was a pro-fracking, pro-genocide, pro-ICE, pro-military industrial complex, anti-Muslim, anti-Medicare for All, anti-living wage corporate tool"
The mendacity of cowardice of the billionaire class
"It's a little deranging to feel on the cusp of something important when the people in charge think it's Wednesday and they're busy still trying to strike two-party bargains in a room with one occupant"
⮩	Hope, I remember hope, no one in power has changed, things will get worse before they get better if they ever do, but hope in the humanity of at least some other humans, I'd forgotten
Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users
"Officials in authoritarian regimes frequently make absurd false statements in public to signal their loyalty"
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism
"hard to think of a better example of "you may not believe in class war, but billionaires know they're in one" than this"
NIMBY, but for concentration camps
Concentration Camps				Concentration Camps
Reflections on recent literature on the destruction of Gaza
"Only a lying center-right genocide apologist would get mad at leftists for correctly pointing out that an AIPAC-funded, pro-ICE, pro-cop, pro-Wall St, pro-fracking and anti Medicare for All politician calling themselves a progressive is laughably ridiculous"
Never Forget Gaza And What It Means About Everything
How Jeff Bezos and Amazon became instruments of authoritarianism
AI becomes Washington’s newest weapon of hegemony
DOGE Lives On Through Russell Vought
The Actual Gavin Newsom Is Much Worse Than You Think
The criminal elite exposed in the Epstein files are burying the truth
"I didn’t have “the Atlantic running cover for a bunch of pedophiles” on my bingo card except what’s this oh noooo see I did have it on my bingo card ohhhhhh sorry…."
The Epstein Files Are Hazing You Into The Pedo Gang
Epstein and the end of alloparental civilization
You’re Paying Taxes to Billionaire Pedophiles Who Bomb and Maybe Eat Children
"you know it's bad when they would rather us think that a rando staffer has unfettered access to the social media accounts of the President of the United States, where we also now know that world leaders direct message him"
American Imperialism and the End of Sovereignty
The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in the US					Early Capitalism
Extreme Inequality Presages The Revolt Against It
WARNING FROM THE PAST - REPORT FROM TODAY			Bezos Post editorial page blasts uppity Tidewater Virginia negress
Uppity Tidewater Virginia negress tells Ted Cruz to fuck off							⮨
Shitty fuck-up gets shittier					American violence
Two Titanic Structures Hidden Deep Within the Earth Have Altered the Magnetic Field for Millions of Years
Transfiguring the immanent domain
Maggie		The spectator, at this point, is certain to wonder whether he must now endure a football game in print
Helmetball is the single greatest metaphor for the United States of Assholes, period
⮩	Since I slag on the NFL constantly I need to say that their Bad Bunny choice was solely a business decision and had zero intent as a Fuck You, Dump, but credit, if that's the correct word, the shitlords that run the NFL for signaling, if only for their own bottom line, there are dwindling profits in Dump
Facing a pandemic of slop					{ feuilleton }
Have I ever mentioned that *Flesh and Blood* is one of my favorite songs?

THE POET AT SEVENTEEN

Larry Levis

My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying   

Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where   

I spent it all, extravagantly, believing

My delicate touch on a cue would last for years.

Outside the vineyards vanished under rain,

And the trees held still or seemed to hold their breath   

When the men I worked with, pruning orchards, sang   

Their lost songs: Amapola; La Paloma;

Jalisco, No Te Rajes—the corny tunes

Their sons would just as soon forget, at recess,

Where they lounged apart in small groups of their own.   

Still, even when they laughed, they laughed in Spanish.

I hated high school then, & on weekends drove

A tractor through the widowed fields. It was so boring   

I memorized poems above the engine’s monotone.   

Sometimes whole days slipped past without my noticing,

And birds of all kinds flew in front of me then.

I learned to tell them apart by their empty squabblings,   

The slightest change in plumage, or the inflection   

Of a call. And why not admit it? I was happy

Then. I believed in no one. I had the kind   

Of solitude the world usually allows   

Only to kings & criminals who are extinct,

Who disdain this world, & who rot, corrupt & shallow

As fields I disced: I turned up the same gray

Earth for years. Still, the land made a glum raisin   

Each autumn, & made that little hell of days—

The vines must have seemed like cages to the Mexicans

Who were paid seven cents a tray for the grapes

They picked. Inside the vines it was hot, & spiders   

Strummed their emptiness. Black Widow, Daddy Longlegs.   

The vine canes whipped our faces. None of us cared.

And the girls I tried to talk to after class

Sailed by, then each night lay enthroned in my bed,   

With nothing on but the jewels of their embarrassment.   

Eyes, lips, dreams. No one. The sky & the road.

A life like that? It seemed to go on forever—

Reading poems in school, then driving a stuttering tractor   

Warm afternoons, then billiards on blue October   

Nights. The thick stars. But mostly now I remember

The trees, wearing their mysterious yellow sullenness   

Like party dresses. And parties I didn’t attend.   

And then the first ice hung like spider lattices   

Or the embroideries of Great Aunt No One,

And then the first dark entering the trees—

And inside, the adults with their cocktails before dinner,   

The way they always seemed afraid of something,   

And sat so rigidly, although the land was theirs.