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The things which you can do happen within and are enabled by society. Society prices in a degree of anti-social vandalism, and renews its strength by enforcing a just equilibrium.

“behind which a luxury hotel is planned // for comic suicides in the next decade.”

Accept it without blinking.

It is not unthinkable that some very small number of Aztecs saw the new fire ceremony three times. They would need to be born near the beginning of a cycle, see another at around 52 years-old, and then live on to the absolute limit of old age. But not impossible.

“we gathered round a fountain by the altars, // performing sacrifices to the gods // under a dappled sycamore. The water // welled up shining there, and in that place // the great portent appeared.”

AI is useful to those for whom AI would be useful.

Elite veteran footballers will speak about the qualities of a good teammate, listing the expected traits – a sense for space, technical ability, chemistry. But the most mysterious is the ability to suffer. Quite specifically that language. “He knows how to suffer.”

nd I listen to music off my phone nd I flip pages of my paperback underneath the ceiling fan

“Gliding she rose and broke like mist from the inshore // grey sea face, to sit down softly before him,”

One of my directors has essentially developed a bespoke grammar of corporate communication and will not allow deliberation to progress until you’ve responded using her preferred phrasing. It’s incredible to witness, I consider her a true artist.

I wonder how I can experience more lovely moments.

It’s funny what lives on inside of you. I haven’t played the clarinet in a long time - but when I woke up this morning having dreamt the sound of the clarinet, I woke up thinking “oh, that’s me.“

I am ennobled by PTO.

A few times every year I come up with the life-changing plan to save my money to buy something beautiful.

Had a horseradish martini on my birthday that was so elegant and so lovely I can summon its cozy glow at will.

“I have loved splendor and splendor follows me.”

At the basilica.

On the peninsula.

Lincoln should have invented Stalinism after Appomattox.

I like to imagine when people in my life think of me, one of the first objects that comes to mind is ‘borderline obscenely large all-black tote bag.’

Oh, when I said “not a problem,” I meant between us as friends. No, no… In corporate’s eyes this is a huge problem.

I feel like if you showed up to The Final Judgement and said “Forgive me Father, I knew not what I did” with the right smile on your lips they would let you Inside.

A senior colleague of mine once said he liked Post Malone because his wife “found him very respectful.”

You can tell when someone comes from good etiquette and when someone had to learn it, and you can tell when someone has never loved the world.

I worry that my heart has fallen to hatred over the last year. It is a real issue. Meditating on it a little, I realize that hatred is not so “wrong” in itself, but it crowds and chokes the heart out of more beautiful living.

No more “Bicycling Beer Bastards”-style sports clubs, we need civic athletic associations modeled after the old and new of the Chicago Athletic Association.

Praying the prayer of last night’s ashes in the raden ashtray.

Come on, Great Lakes Region! Let’s get more Sumerian!

Poetry is how language leaves the mouths of statues.

“One more time, Athena, love me, as much as you can.”

Just overheard an intern asking when you’re supposed to eat.

I have, in fact, made considerable headway towards opening my fourth eye. Had I known your third still troubled you so I would have dropped everything to help. Please write soon. I intend to reach five and am quite experienced in these matters. Forever in your tender care, Rival

In Heaven I’d like to speak to the first person who decided to cover their entire body with clothing. Very interesting as a novel impulse. Almost audacious piety.

I have decided to save up for a new fountain pen, twenty dollars at a time.

Sitting under a floral patterned parasol, sun-drunk and waiting for the breeze, a woman asks me what I am reading. I try to get away with turning the cover towards her, but she squints, so I have to say out loud, “Gravity’s Rainbow.” She asks do I like it and I say yes, I like it.

Staring at my reflection in a palace lake, I caught myself wearing an expression I’d stolen from you as a child.

「余裕感」

A mysterious, remote term for religion – translated from the original into German, then from the German into English as ‘laughing-in-the-garden-ness.’

I take my loyalty to dogs quite seriously.

The Israelified Earth is creating something odd inside me. Some kind of bright mirror of suicidal darkness – every cell in my body is shrieking for the goodness of god, life, grace. I feel like a dog with a sadistic owner rubbing my face in death’s vomit.