extreme pithiness has made me wordy. the things I say are so compressed, my interlocutors demand more context, making me say huge strings of words I otherwise wouldn’t say. I should’ve just said things regularly

epitomes of things have an iron grip on representing them

new books arrived from printer to @fonografeditions.bsky.social hq

hey man is everything ok? I noticed you were gazing into the abyss so half-assedly, the abyss wasn’t even pretending to gaze back into you

if you memorize more digits of pi than someone, you should be able to criticize them, but if they later memorize pi to a further digit than you originally memorized, that should invalidate all your criticisms—until you memorize pi to an even further digit than them

Happy Father’s Day. This is my favorite kind of dad post.

hfd

Tom Hanks to star in Computer Man (2027) based on a script sold to Universal by David Koepp after an intense bidding war, about a man who is also a computer, but also, at the same time, a man, trapped in a maze that may or may not also be a computer. Spielberg to direct.

hey man is everything ok? I noticed you are an aggressively nice do-gooder who isn’t constantly explicating trauma, yours or others’, and is relentlessly offering to help anyone with anything they might need help with while remaining completely indifferent to what it might mean

“seas are for aquamarine things”—thing I dreamt the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said when unveiling a new submarine prototype that was exactly like all previous submarines except it was painted aquamarine

hey man is everything ok? I noticed you were leading a few hundred untrained yeomen armed only with axes and shovels against the emperor’s professional army in an attempt to stop the construction of a dam along a stream that has for centuries supplied your tiny village with water

hey man is everything ok? I noticed you were crashing weddings and physically grabbing guests to tell them about the time you mindlessly shot an innocent bird out of the sky while aboard a ship, leading to phantasmagoric consequences that completely altered your perspective

WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS: AN ANYONE CAN PLAY GUITAR MYSTERY

dreamt sully sullenberger (as portrayed by tom hanks) and whip whitaker (denzel washington’s character in “flight”) became playable fighters in a new mortal kombat game. people were mad in the dream because they retired subzero and scorpion to make room for them

hey man is everything okay? I noticed you discontinued your CSA even though it regularly supplies you with a cornucopia of nourishing and locally grown organic fruits and vegetables that are objectively more flavorful than their supermarket equivalents

lost in the Backrooms but somehow my phone still works. watching Sully (the only movie I have downloaded on my phone) to pass the time. Tom Hanks’s performance is incredib—oh shit a giant Tom Hanks portraying Sully is coming hold on i gotta run through some labyrinthine corridors

tom hanks appeared in my dream last night to scold me for not watching sully more than once. I saw it in the damn theater I said diffidently. You could’ve streamed it too, he pleaded. I have kids, tom, I can’t be rewatching 10 year old films that aren’t even good. he began to cry

hey man is everything ok? I noticed a blinkered venality beclouding the redemptive potential of all your aesthetic grasping

hey many is everything ok? I noticed you genuflecting in the grocery store in front of the ground beef and doing the sign of the cross in front of the buns in the bread aisle and muttering arcanely while swinging a censer of incense as you paced back and forth in the beer cave

hey man is everything ok? i noticed an 80k word document saved to your desktop that seemed to be a gritty cyberpunk retelling of anne of green gables

copying and pasting is a form of AI. people we need to be manually retyping that shit

hey man is everything ok? I noticed when we fled a scary cave, you ran head first into every single stalactite, and every single stalagmite you tried to hurdle hit you squarely in the crotch—meanwhile i was weaving though the very same obstacles with no issue, like the wind itself

the prose in my latest novel is so breezy, people can read all 500 pages in one sitting and remember nothing about it, and the prose in my 500 word flash fiction piece is so turgid, not even one reader has ever finished it, but they all have a million opinions about what it means

“mandalorian and grogu” is how I have always referred to fiction and poetry, and I’m sad that they are now making it mean something else

hey man is everything ok? I noticed a pretty big asteroid hitting nearby where you live, causing an incomprehensible cataclysm

hey man is everything ok? I noticed your sworn allies, fatigued by the frequency of your psychological collapses, and baffled by their esoteric character, were beginning to ghost on you

hey man is everything ok? I noticed that since the dawn of time, another continent was plowing into you at the rate of an inch per year, causing huge mountains to form on you

We need a new “We Didn’t Start the Fire” song about recent current events, but not by Billy Joel, by one of those new cool people that have a billion followers on tiktok, like Amanda Spaxola or Devirka jeMure or whatever their names are

The Met Gala is being attacked by a giant cowboy hat with spider legs, skittering here and there and tucking fleeing celebs up into its digestive sac. Disgraceful.

every spiritual discrepancy: resolved youtu.be/u5rBhhlkm2s?...

hey man is everything ok? I noticed you were inexpertly milking the treasure trove of intellectual property you technically and legally control

adding “this is not my tombstone. it is my stepping stone” to the list of things my wife won’t let me put on my tombstone

hey man is everything ok? I noticed you read the last line of a haiku first, the first line second, and the middle line last

hey man is everything ok? I noticed your gritty, unflinching civil war drama—a masterpiece of action, acting, production design, and cinematography—had a discordantly lush synthpop soundtrack, recasting our nation’s greatest tragedy—and triumph—as something to simply dance or shop to

our village woolmonger’s suit against the weaver’s guild is a legal gordian knot with ramifications for trade across the duchy, yet every stable boy and tavern wench with a fucking garment to their name is popping off with an opinion like they’re monastery-educated jurists

one of the only downsides of actions is consequences. but it's a big downside.

hey man is everything okay? I noticed you’re tagging the albums you’re adding to your bandcamp page as ambient despite them being full of pulsing house style beats in 4/4

peasant farmers, tavern wenches, and stable boys don’t know shit about the types of things blacksmiths, wool merchants, and weavers get up to

was dressing a hotdog and had the thought: “ketchup is consolation. mustard is advice.”

hey man is everything ok? your normally wet, piglike eyes are even more glistening and porcine than usual

trying to help sci fi writers break out of their ruts open.substack.com/pub/markleid...

everything I say is an artfully veiled sarcasm, a joke of such sophistication that anyone who falls into my meticulous trap of belief immediately reveals themselves a boorish rube of the highest caliber. whereas everything you say is an honest admission, a disgusting truth borne of an ugly soul

the beatles having a song called "mean mr. mustard" is a joke id make about the Beatles

hey man is everything ok? I noticed your data recording instruments were registering a profusion of unprecedented and fragmentary signals, indicating that some kind of outlandish activity capable of defeating all of your attempts at analysis was at hand

the words that make up the title THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU are unpleasant and the order in which those words appear is upsetting

some of y’all need to spend less time worrying about ben lerner and more time just “been learning” what good literature is