The shittiest people in the world hate Zohran Mamdani and their second Mamdani meltdown will make the first seem only a hissy fit, Jeff types as he sits in the rental at the northern tip of Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula, steady hard rain erasing my plans to return to Camp Greilick Disc Golf Course to play a third and fourth round at what is one of the best if not the best course I've ever played, goddamn it
That's 14 from the tee box, my only bird there, twice. Plays across an old Boy Scout camp, it's not only a terrific course but a four mile walk through gorgeous dense woods filled with the loudest, most varied birdsong I've ever heard, I've never played anything like it. Holes are hard but fair with clear lines and fairways. Below is Myles Kimberly Disc Golf Course in Maple City, 12, my partner Justin teed to thirty-five feet and I hit the bird with my Alpaca at Tuesday Night Doubles two evenings ago, there were six groups of two, we finished second and won $4 each. Doubles tonight at Bear's Den in Kingsley, I played it Wednesday morning, all tunnels but a few holes, so lots of driving my teebird from the tee box
Zohran Mamdani's name did not come up at all Tuesday doubles at Myles Kimberly (though the round ended while votes were still being counted), but remember, the shittiest people in the world hate Zohran Mamdani and are already conceding the midterms to Trump because of Mamdani's "Communism," an evil and sinister mixture of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society, *imagine* how much shitlords hate and fear him. Reminder - corporate Democrats abhor Zohran Mamdani more than corporate Republicans adore him. Meanwhile, here's what the far less dangerous than Mamdani six conservative Supreme Justices ruled today
I predict no one, but especially me, will mention either Mamdami or Leo Leo's SCOTUS' rulings tonight at doubles though if I had to bet if one was it won't be Leo Leo's SCOTUS' rulings. United States of Assholes. Public service announcement, if you are ever in Leelanau County they have a stern warning for you
I don't know that I'd be as avid a discgolfer if I lived in Michigan. I played the 4th Best Disc Golf Course in Michigan yesterday according to udisc, out of 18 just one truly interesting hole, Number 17, and interesting only for its gimmick
Your teeshot MUST land in the circle - if you land outside the circle you take a one stroke penalty and play what is now your third shot from where the disc lies. I actually parked it and birded, my only one at that course and only my fourth of the six rounds I've played so far at three different courses. I've seen artificial islands spray painted around a basket at tournaments (I have not played a tournament in at least twenty years - they suck as an event and I suck as a player = no) but never a constructed island, I approve. And full confession - I can't huck 300 feet and of the 54 different holes on the three courses I've played only a half dozen or so are short of three hundred and almost all of them are open fields with trees only around the baskets. Maryland courses far more technical, much more wooded, they are as disliked by big arms as much as open field courses are disliked by noodle-armers like me. Fine metaphors abound.
Leaving to play Rolling Hills south of Ann Arbor as soon as this is posted, there is an 18 hole regular course and an 18 hole putt-putt course, will do both, never played a disc golf putt-putt before, laugh. The two chipmucks who live under that deck of this cottage will not shut the fuck up, chirp. As predicted for this trip, Lambchop's been in my ears
And of course I collected links. Vacation has not helped break the novel-reading slump, I've tried a reread of Ishiguro's *Buried Giant* and first read, second try, of Faulkner's *The Hamlet,* nope. I can't escape the the clusterfuck, documenting it, it's like the tablets I keep, it's how I process. No Pick-up Truck American versus Subaru-American encounters to speak of on the road, conversations on the courses have been strictly disc golf related, the few I've had. No doubt professional Democrats plotting their Musk seduction attempts now even as Musk divorced Trump for not stealing more of your money than Trump already is. Going to Kalamazoo tomorrow for this with kiddo and her hubby, yay! No Destroyer this trip as planned except what comes up in shuffle, but a pleasant and unplanned but welcome Tindersticks binge, holyfuck, I forget sometimes how much I ! Tindersticks
"It’s actually good that the Abundance Movement is finally being very honest that it sees unions and workers as the villains. There’s no pretense anymore. The mask is finally off. They are now screaming about their motives. So at least there’s no deception, which is good"
Richard Butler turned 69 yesterday and *Forever Now* must be one of my 15 most listened-to albums ever
ALCOVE
John Ashbery
Is it possible that spring could be
once more approaching? We forget each time
what a mindless business it is, porous like sleep,
adrift on the horizon, refusing to take sides, "mugwump
of the final hour," lest an agenda—horrors!—be imputed to it,
and the whole point of its being spring collapse
like a hole dug in sand. It's breathy, though,
you have to say that for it.
And should further seasons coagulate
into years, like spilled, dried paint, why,
who's to say we weren't provident? We indeed
looked out for others as though they mattered, and they,
catching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night
in an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly.
But it's not over yet. Terrible incidents happen
daily. That's how we get around obstacles.
I didn't want to retire, I said to Robert, a 50ish electrician from outside Dexter who I played a round at Hudson Mills yesterday, now I can't retire and never will be able to retire. Robert, who can huck it but can't putt (I can putt sometimes and huck never), said, I want to retire but know I never will and knew I never would but now know I never can. Earlier in the day L and C and me drove to the Detroit Institute of Art and paid full freight to discover their entire wing of contemporary art closed for refurbishing, what we went to see, check the website before going, dummy. Detroit's Hands-Off even started on Woodward in front of DIA, we didn't join. Robert's red discraft driver somewhere in the reeds below, he can huck but not always control
I hate going on vacation, like vacation when there, can't wait to be home though dread the drive tomorrow, fine metaphors abound. Robert, an equal opportunity loather, a Trump hater, a Democratic hater more, and I didn't talk politics once our mutual kinship in despising anyone and everyone in the ruling class and their henchmen established. If I come back this summer he said he'd take me to a Tigers game if interested (I'd mentioned I saw Tiger Stadium, or whatever they call the ballpark they play in now when driving to DIA), maybe, I said, no, I thought. He declared his red disc lost, played his next disc from spot he best guessed the disc flew out of bounds at, moved on. This was on shuffle on drive back to cottage
The DIA is right next to the Wayne State campus, I thought the ginormous cop presence was because of the Hands Off march that the cops were all on campus, not on Woodward Avenue, but no, here's why the cops were where they were
What if Trump's behavior isn't just personal madness?
"He’s at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore,” a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking told The Post. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f---. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”
"The more important question is: How has this insane man managed to gain control of the government of the world’s richest and most powerful nation? That, my friends, is the unfortunate outcome of an economic system that has so profoundly failed to enforce economic equality, and a political system that so profoundly failed to protect its democracy from the influence of capital that it allowed itself to be totally captured by extreme lunatics backed by extreme wealth. And here we are. The whole thing is most notable for its absurdity. If it’s any consolation, all the capitalists who led us down this road are going to lose a shitload of money. Ha ha, fuckers."
"So, let’s sum up. Peter Thiel believes he belongs to an elite group, often understood in implicitly or explicitly racial terms, that is entitled to set aside democratic governance in favor of pursuing a program of technological progress and national restoration. He believes the political means to accomplish this is through a charismatic leader with manipulative, populist appeals to past national glory and against parasitic immigrants and culturally decadent liberalism. For him, even the most milquetoast, reformist liberalism is “tantamount to communism.” He’s obsessed with romanticized fantasies of absolute power, domination, and control. He dreams of wielding the the national security state against enemies both foreign and domestic. He envisioned a kind of imperialist world-state controlled not through deliberative bodies like the U.N. but directly by the intelligence and secret police bureaus. He combines the ideology of white collar, petit-bourgeois intermediary class with its emphases direct management techniques and closely-held ownership with the grandiose, world-spanning designs of an industrial titan"
"One of the strangest emotional states in liberals is when they fantasize about a world that would only exist with a vociferous, partisan leftist ruling party in charge but they somehow think Chuck Schumer will do it instead. Once again: they never even fired the Post Office guy"
"The world that Trump is accelerating through tariffs is a world of militarist ethnonationalisms—highly combustible geopolitics and “fluid” alliances. Militaries will grow. Economies will shrink. And the victims of our policies will rapidly become more numerous. None but the oligarchs shall be spared"
How could so many people in the world’s richest nation be without enough to eat?
"Just to be clear: In Louisiana, the state where Bill Cassidy began the vaccination project he considers to be his most important contribution to public health, state employees are legally prohibited from recommending that parents vaccinate their children"
"The romanticization of Canada by Stanley - and so many others - is laughable & detrimental. As a scholar of fascism, he should know that much of the roots of contemporary American fascist thought are intertwined with the far right movement in Canada - which has become mainstream conservatism"
"I keep thinking about how terrified this man’s five year old nonverbal autistic son is and getting so mad I can’t see straight"
"The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met"
"Video obtained by @nytimes.com confirms the IDF fired on and killed clearly identified Red Crescent medics in Gaza. 15 were killed. Satellite pics analyzed by @ckoettl.bsky.social & @sanjanamv.bsky.social show the IDF then buried the medics andambulances"
Trump's ICE disappeared a 52-year-old mother from Westminster, Maryland
"There's a form of liberal whose self-image is about seeming "smart," who's unfailingly shilled for Dems & neoliberalism & who's been unrepentantly wrong about everything. They've enabled the GOP, they've helped ruin the world & they hate those who've been right the whole time"
"Corey Booker voted this afternoon to keep sending bombs to Israel, which is much, much more meaningful and important than a speech about values, even if it did last 25 hours"
I attended the burial of all my rosy feelings: I performed the rites, simple and decisive: the long box took the spilling of gray ground in with little evidence of note: I traded slow
work for the usual grief: the services were private: there was little cause for show, though no cause not to show: it went indifferently, with an appropriate gravity and lack of noise: the ceremonies of the self
seem always to occur at a distance from the ruins of men where there is nothing really much to expect, no arms, no embraces: the day was all right: certain occasions outweigh the weather: the woods just to the left
were average woods: well, I turned around finally from the process, the surface smoothed into a kind of seal, and tried to notice what might be thought to remain: everything was there, the sun, the breeze, the woods
(as I said), the little mound of troublesome tufts of grass: but the trees were upright shadows, the breeze was as against a shade, the woods stirred gray as deep water: I looked around for what was left,
the tools, and took them up and went away, leaving all my treasures where they might never again disturb me, increase or craze: decision quietens: shadows are bodiless shapes, yet they have a song.
