In All My Years As a Pedestrian Serving Juice To Guests, It Never Occurred To Me Thoughtfully To Imagine How a Radish Feels. She Merely Arrived

Barring the unexpected, two new folk moving into our house end of August (they are only five weeks old now), both children of ferals in York, Pennsylvania, rescued by a friend of L's, a crazier cat-person than even us (though we have more garden statuary), I'll soon be able to walk into my house and yell, Lucy, I'm home




Our next door neighbor is luckily (if you're me) or unluckily (if you're L) named Ricky, so Bob, short for Babalu (L did not get my allusion when I said Bob Alou the missing fourth Alou brother, the fuck am I old)





I love all cats but love black cats best. Strangest days of my life, I'm reading, and enjoying, and now jinxing Henry James' The Ambassadors, attempt number 54,798 at reading James, at the insistence of two English professors and longtime friends I promised years ago at a Thursday Night Pints I'd keep trying James' late great trilogy (Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl the other two) until I get it or keep trying until end times if necessary. I can't name Bob Lambert since Lambert, aka Corrente, a lost blogbud, already taken, I can see why. End times? Have a grid below the Miles Davis, today is his centenary

Our Brains Are Normalizing Atrocity							☟
"The psychopaths are conditioning us, through sheer repetition, to inhabit their moral universe of the medieval dark ages, in which prisoners are tortured and raped as a matter of operational routine, and the response of the civilized world is a furrowed brow and a State Department briefing about the importance of continued partnership"
They want us dead				Ben-Gvir is Israel
Huckabee tells Lebanese being bombed to thank Israel for seedless watermelons
Another day's necessary duhtrumpduh
Arlington Cemetery website drops links for Black, Hispanic, and women veterans
United States of Assholes					Expect a 2ionist false flag attack on the United States in the next two weeks
The far right is being racist. Here's why it's the left's fault						Starting	⮨
Criminal projection		Continuing Imperial Depravity--A Rant
How did we get here from there?					The People Do Not Need Permission
We are ruled by motherfucking sociopaths
are ruled by motherfucking sociopaths we
ruled by motherfucking sociopaths we are
by motherfucking sociopaths we are ruled
motherfucking sociopaths we are ruled by
sociopaths we are ruled by motherfucking
who are fully supported by motherfucking Democrats
The Geopolitics of Class War in a Post-American World
New man-made horrors beyond comprehension dropped
"Nothing to see here, just the son of the President marrying the daughter of the accountant of a notorious child sex trafficker who was best friends with the groom's father"
The Coming Faculty Class War, and Other Prophecies
The Great Indigestion				You will own nothing
Israel just KILLED a team of rescue workers in southern Lebanon today in a DOUBLE TAP strike. A father and his daughter were killed, then rescue workers were ALSO bombed upon arrival.
Hegseth’s Desperate Crusade for Masculine Validation
☟	Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R.
Authoritarianism and Mediocre Elites
The Zombie Revival of Dead Confederates
The Deafening Silence Of Rockstars On Palestine
A sick twenty-first-century take on strength and weakness
Things the Pope can say but students and faculty at Ivy League universities cannot					Withdrawal
Maggie		They Call It Stupid Hot For a Reason
Olga Tokarczuk uses AI to drive over the bones of her own novels
Barthelme, the Houstonian					{ feuilleton }
Taking the villian's part: on Gass' *The Tunnel*
Shakey	Robert Fripp Still Unsure Why Hospital Shaved His Balls After Heart Attack

THIS ECONOMY

John Ashbery

In all my years as a pedestrian
serving juice to guests, it never occurred to me
thoughtfully to imagine how a radish feels.
She merely arrived. Half-turning
in the demented twilight, one feels a
sour empathy with all that went before.
That, needless to say, was how we elaborated
ourselves staggering across tracts:
Somewhere in America there is a naked person.
 
Somewhere in America adoring legions blush
in the sunset, crimson madder, and madder still.
Somewhere in America someone is trying to figure out
how to pay for this, bouncing a ball
off a wooden strut. Somewhere
in America the lonely enchanted eye each other
on a bus. It goes down Woodrow Wilson Avenue.
Somewhere in America it says you must die, you know too much.