Just me with an obelisk in the rain, in Istanbul. (It's beyond glorious here. We had a layover, and now I want much more time.)

A low key fury for me at this moment is that I tried to send a text about "the difficulty of ghostness" as a topic, and autocorrect decided it should be "the difficulty of hotness."

This morning at TSA in Raleigh, none of the possible dreadful things but a ridiculous one: "Is it a gun, or is it a...unicorn." One TSA agent, digging around in my xray tray, to another, who'd already had a meltdown about its possible identity, seen in silhouette.

Obsessed with this poem, and with the oldcroghan man.

Grimoire: "how does a person get caught in a time loop, and what happens to their romances?" I have a particular fondness for time loop movies, and my child is being introduced to them, perhaps too young, but we are both children of the 80s, and we have no sense of too young.

Came out of the post office, saw that a guy had cut my saddle bag off my bike and was about to take off with it. I yelled "Please wait my cat's medicine is in there!" He started to run, and this grandma-age lady goes "SHE SAID HER CAT'S MEDICINE IS IN THERE" and WALLOPED him with her grocery bag.

Yeah, the version where she hires a friendand the friend wickedly uses AI to make the book like...thoroughly AI generated. Um, what? No one does that. We all go through our drafts and revisions a billion times, obsessing, and we barely let them out of our hands at the end. We know what's in there.

As ever, I cannot imagine for the life of me ever wanting to use AI to write a book, just as I don't want AI to live my life for me. Further, I cannot imagine -- as this author claims -- letting an editor just mutilate your work without you ever giving another glance.

"I am the vast guardian of the blue chair. I am the wild beast of the dark morning. I stretch my legs and take up all the chair and guard this spot with my blanket." - my 6 year old, obviously, who, with me, loathes daylight savings time wakeups.

Today, I hacked a bathing suit that had always been wrong to bits, and reassembled it into a much more viable version. Why would anyone use a drawstring to secure the back of a bathing suit bottom? It inherently looks like a diaper. Not anymore. Thank you, teenage years spent in a costume shop.

Update on my amaro project. This is a week into steeping, and it tastes kind of great? By the dropperful anyway - it hasn't been sweetened/diluted yet, beyond the inherent dilution of the rhubarb and the blood orange peels. I'm considering purchasing a little oaken barrel for it to rest in soon.

A frivolous lament, here, but I am absolutely wroth that my longtime best lacquer in a pot eyeliner, the only eyeliner I've ever found that is impervious to saunas, emotion, and overall fuckitude was apparently discontinued a year or so back. It was cheap and very reliable. I need recommendations.

My partner in crime just told me that I'm basically a secular monk who scrivens, makes secret recipe concoctions, and illuminates manuscripts. Not untrue.

Current mental health project is an ancient one. Times of horrible since ever, people have steeped bitter herbs in booze. This is a rhubarb-based amaro, coming along. It has both rhubarb root & fresh rhubarb, citrus peel, gentian, star anise, vanilla, pink peppercorns, buncha other things.

[Exit Murderer.]

Noem Country for Middle-Aged Fascists is this anything

30 years ago Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club accurately predicted that men under late capitalism, empty consumers who had come to think of themselves as “the middle children of history” with no great wars to fight, would eventually prank and shitpost their way into fascism.

It's time! Nominations are now open for the 2026 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, which will be given to a work of imaginative fiction, published in 2025, that reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula’s own work.

imagining a caveperson getting super annoyed that they can’t make the bison look right. they’re crumpling up the whole cave and throwing it away. makes me feel much better

Yesssss. Lately I've been plagued by book club requests - I zoom in and answer questions - for which privilege I'm meant to pay cash money.

On a plane this morning, flight attendant asked a women "are those your titties, honey, or are they a carry on?" I could not see, because she was behind me, and I don't think I will ever recover from this loss.

A person who weighs 45 lbs can lean so hard, so purposefully, that he topples his mother. Ask me how I know.

This whole thread and also, though I have no cat at present, cats really help.

you probably also need a backup pen

it helps to have spent decades reading the work of your peers and that of those who came before you, preferably not just the hits but also the deep cuts

really important to rid your working space of any negative energy or curses, particularly the dreaded “malocchio,” so you’ll also need a lime and some sage, for your writing, but that’s it

or access to some kind of other nebulous source of wealth

It’s also good to be married to a countess dowager

vast amounts of time, too

comfy socks, too

also? Snacks

and maybe an idea, but that’s it

all you need to write is pen and paper

I was on Twitter for the writers and the book recommendations, the essays, the poetry, the community. I am here now for the same. I’m a nerd. Please reply with a favorite recent essay or poem or story or book recommendation, and thank you.

Oh to be on the NS Savannah in 1962 at the bar wearing a nice suit getting incredibly drunk on 40c Daiquiris

Help this little dude's people out if you've got a spare buck. ❤️

stalled out, kicking the tires trying to make it inch forward a little more

On the same day hospitals caved on healthcare for transgender children, the ACLU proved that when you fight this administration in court THEY LOSE! The people & places who give in just wanted to do so all along. They had no principles, that’s why they didn’t fight.

Sure: Light rail, high speed rail, ocean wave generation, solar power generation, wind generation, heat pump tech, geothermal heat pump tech, last mile on-demand transit solutions, better wheelchairs, better wheel chair lifts, better flexible seating on public transit, maker spaces, tool libraries.

I wish I'd known that this February would look like this, about a year ago, in which case I would have applied for a writing residency in which to hide myself post loss of parent, to write my book in isolation using the panicky fire ink of mortality.

When I have a civil & unequivocally polite conversation with one of my behateds, I imagine each deliberate & modulated word I say is a sporangium filled poisonous spores. Maybe that can help you this week.

My feed on various social media places is now jam-packed with GPT generated ad-stories about "quiet, dignified death" and it's making me puke. So terrible, the writing, the click baiting, the whole thing, and it's all because I posted about my mom's death, so it's even more maddening.

This is so good. Go read a good thing.

One of my favorite stories I've ever written - and it's just, like, a real good time. Nothing awful. Buncha love. In a Guys & Dolls type way.

I really just want to drink Negronis in the dark at present. It's a kind of ceremony.

What do I do to resurrect from a week in which I walked my mother to the end of her life, then taught Gilgamesh while writing her obituary? I am what I am. Myth and ritual and old ceremony are my whole thing. But I am worn to the bone by complicated sorrow.

O my friends who sent me calories and cocktails and texted me love and clarity, boy, I thank you. I needed you. I'm so lucky to have friends who know me and get me, and understand what saves me.

One of every thousand American residents has been taken into custody by ICE in the last year.

Yep. This is right near where I'm from, and it's all farming. All the towns in this part of Idaho are Spanish speaking towns with a bunch of white MAGA farmers.

Just one more cry of fuck cancer. Two days later, & I'm still reverberating with pain from my mom's pain. And also with fury at the various evil people currently canceling cancer research. So many things can be made better with science. The whole field is a mess right now.