Those Dutiful Dogtrots Down Airport Corridors

Sitting in the Detroit airport for the flight home as I type this, all flights from Baltimore into Detroit are delayed and all flights to Baltimore possibly but not yet delayed, no explanations offered, so hear: the most shocking development of a happy trip to see my daughter: I expected, anticipated, and prepared for this to be an immersive Modest Mouse vacation, but the reverse happen, I must have already overdosed during the recent binge when hoping to overdose on them this trip, and Destroyer, who I overdose on every Maine vacation, every Michigan vacation, and who I had every intention of avoiding this trip to not deepen my Destoyer slump, came on on Bandcamp shuffle, and I'm addicted again

I provoked no one - it was baseball hat weather, too warm to wear the red hat of last post, which is the only provocation I would have attempted - we LUCKED OUT February in Michigan weather-wise - and despite my son-in-law's cousin's best attempts to bait the big family dinner into political debate (from a centrist Democrat's point of view), no one took the hook. All dirt roads started in packed snow and melted into mud over the five days, Jeep-Americans think they are invincible so they're recklessly dangerous, more hubris than politics I'd bet. No pro-maga signage, no Eff Ice signage, people in stores and restaurants perfunctorily Midwest polite, always a jolt for an East Coaster (and they can identify an East Coaster within two sentences a East Coaster speaks). It's one of the reasons my daughter lives in the Midwest. Too muddy to disc golf though I did explore and found three courses I will play next time I'm here in not-Winter, this one first
 




Yes, the big font is back and it's solely for my eyes. Yes, this a filler post against the rest of this week awaiting me at work. Smaller grid than usual below, partly because I was not online as much, mostly because we seem to have hit a lull in the clusterfuck as I suspect reassessment and replanning on next steps in our immiseration and elimination frantically continuing at Shitlordco. I suspect Dump's dumping himself in an Oval Office press conference and his panicked staff ordering all cameras turned off and all journalists kicked out getting zero mention in major spew-organs opens up vast scenarios for more of Dump's shit, and that ginormous Middle East war all the worse people in the world have boners for. Clusterfuck? Perfectly at home with this dread, dark leaves form a thread

If ICE Pulls You Over, Say These 4 Words Immediately
The Upcoming American Holocaust: Connecting Billionaires, AI, ICE & Trump’s Concentration Camps
Insiders Poised To Profit From Trump’s Deportation Boom
Comply or die			Warehouseification of detention
State of the Apology, 2026					Contempt of Court
The Unreliability of the White Proletariat
The Plot Against American Women
"The regime is now dictating what political views are acceptable to air on television and paramount/cbs are collaborating in that censorship"
The Increasing Attacks on Francesca Albanese Presage a New Dark Age
The Making of the Deportation Machine
What to know about the disastrous Potomac sewage spill
{ feuilleton }			Maggie		You need weirdness
A Landscape Artist in Winter: Andy Goldsworthy
Updike reconsidered >				"It’s one thing to fall out of fashion, another to fall out of favour, and Updike seems to have fallen out of both while still being suspended mid-air, cushioned by the thermals while posterity figures out what to do with him"
This was not only a Destroyer vacation, it was a Clientele vacation

ON THE ROAD

John Updike

Those dutiful dogtrots down airport corridors

while gnawing at a Dunkin' Donuts cruller,

those hotel rooms where the TV remote

waits by the bed like a suicide pistol,

those hours in the air amid white shirts

whose wearers sleep-read through thick staid thrillers,

those breakfast buffets in prairie Marriotts—

such venues of transit grow dearer than home.

The tricycle in the hall, the wife's hasty kiss,

the dripping faucet and uncut lawn—this is life?

No, vita thrives via the road, in the laptop

whose silky screen shimmers like a dark queen's mirror,

in the polished shoe that signifies killer intent,

and in the solitary mission, a bumpy glide

down through the cloud cover to a single runway

at whose end a man just like you guards the Grail.

Kings & Criminals Who Are Extinct, Who Disdain This World, & Who Rot, Corrupt & Shallow, as Fields I Disced

Got my first middle-finger for wearing my red anti-nazi hat that L knit me, dude in a big-ass Dodge Ram with those yellow Virginia don't-tread-on-me license plates flipped me off on 270 between Wootten and Montrose southbound through lanes, pulled in front of me, hit his breaks, when I moved over a lane to the slower and, at the 55 mph speed limit, passed him, he slowed up in the faster lane to move behind me in the slower lane, flashed his lights, then sped past me flipping me another bird (I did get one thumbs-up and one I-need-to-get-one comment in MOMs, the local organic grocery store). I have a PDF of the knitting instructions, let me know if you want one

Of course I'm enjoying the magamerican meltdown over the Woke Assault on Helmetball that was yesterday's halftime show by Bad Bunny (which I did not see, nor the game, though I know that if the New England Patriots were playing they were wearing the fugliest uniforms of any sporting team anywhere at any time in sport history, and it's not close). Helmetball is magachoads', not yours (and they can have it), and this halftime all in Spanish but the sign in English that said LOVE > HATE is, to them, an attack as tauntingly insulting as blaspheming White Jesus Cracker by pointing out WJC was brown and spoke Aramaic. Coupled with American athletes at the Winter Olympics making traitorous statements against King Dump, Michigan this Friday through Tuesday visiting our daughter and son-in-law, wearing this red hat while driving a car with Maryland plates, I will count the one-fingered salutes. There's one party store on Seymour Road near Portage Lake I'll avoid, but I'm wearing the hat. Revolution, mofos. Every post but two a year tagged my complicity

Yes, one size smaller font, test-driving cause why, I'm not THIS blind yet (UPDATE! apparently I am this blind from more than three feet in anything less than screaming bright light! screaming big font will return) Rest of monologue is the grid. Yes, the Larry Levis and Cindy Lee tags are new, first new ones in years. Have I ever mentioned that *Flesh and Blood* is one of my favorite songs?

Look at what we allow
Vital reminder >	"The last Democratic presidential candidate was a pro-fracking, pro-genocide, pro-ICE, pro-military industrial complex, anti-Muslim, anti-Medicare for All, anti-living wage corporate tool"
The mendacity of cowardice of the billionaire class
"It's a little deranging to feel on the cusp of something important when the people in charge think it's Wednesday and they're busy still trying to strike two-party bargains in a room with one occupant"
⮩	Hope, I remember hope, no one in power has changed, things will get worse before they get better if they ever do, but hope in the humanity of at least some other humans, I'd forgotten
Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users
"Officials in authoritarian regimes frequently make absurd false statements in public to signal their loyalty"
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism
"hard to think of a better example of "you may not believe in class war, but billionaires know they're in one" than this"
NIMBY, but for concentration camps
Concentration Camps				Concentration Camps
Reflections on recent literature on the destruction of Gaza
"Only a lying center-right genocide apologist would get mad at leftists for correctly pointing out that an AIPAC-funded, pro-ICE, pro-cop, pro-Wall St, pro-fracking and anti Medicare for All politician calling themselves a progressive is laughably ridiculous"
Never Forget Gaza And What It Means About Everything
How Jeff Bezos and Amazon became instruments of authoritarianism
AI becomes Washington’s newest weapon of hegemony
DOGE Lives On Through Russell Vought
The Actual Gavin Newsom Is Much Worse Than You Think
The criminal elite exposed in the Epstein files are burying the truth
"I didn’t have “the Atlantic running cover for a bunch of pedophiles” on my bingo card except what’s this oh noooo see I did have it on my bingo card ohhhhhh sorry…."
The Epstein Files Are Hazing You Into The Pedo Gang
Epstein and the end of alloparental civilization
You’re Paying Taxes to Billionaire Pedophiles Who Bomb and Maybe Eat Children
"you know it's bad when they would rather us think that a rando staffer has unfettered access to the social media accounts of the President of the United States, where we also now know that world leaders direct message him"
American Imperialism and the End of Sovereignty
The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in the US					Early Capitalism
Extreme Inequality Presages The Revolt Against It
WARNING FROM THE PAST - REPORT FROM TODAY			Bezos Post editorial page blasts uppity Tidewater Virginia negress
Uppity Tidewater Virginia negress tells Ted Cruz to fuck off							⮨
Shitty fuck-up gets shittier					American violence
Two Titanic Structures Hidden Deep Within the Earth Have Altered the Magnetic Field for Millions of Years
Transfiguring the immanent domain
Maggie		The spectator, at this point, is certain to wonder whether he must now endure a football game in print
Helmetball is the single greatest metaphor for the United States of Assholes, period
⮩	Since I slag on the NFL constantly I need to say that their Bad Bunny choice was solely a business decision and had zero intent as a Fuck You, Dump, but credit, if that's the correct word, the shitlords that run the NFL for signaling, if only for their own bottom line, there are dwindling profits in Dump
Facing a pandemic of slop					{ feuilleton }
Have I ever mentioned that *Flesh and Blood* is one of my favorite songs?

THE POET AT SEVENTEEN

Larry Levis

My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying   

Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where   

I spent it all, extravagantly, believing

My delicate touch on a cue would last for years.

Outside the vineyards vanished under rain,

And the trees held still or seemed to hold their breath   

When the men I worked with, pruning orchards, sang   

Their lost songs: Amapola; La Paloma;

Jalisco, No Te Rajes—the corny tunes

Their sons would just as soon forget, at recess,

Where they lounged apart in small groups of their own.   

Still, even when they laughed, they laughed in Spanish.

I hated high school then, & on weekends drove

A tractor through the widowed fields. It was so boring   

I memorized poems above the engine’s monotone.   

Sometimes whole days slipped past without my noticing,

And birds of all kinds flew in front of me then.

I learned to tell them apart by their empty squabblings,   

The slightest change in plumage, or the inflection   

Of a call. And why not admit it? I was happy

Then. I believed in no one. I had the kind   

Of solitude the world usually allows   

Only to kings & criminals who are extinct,

Who disdain this world, & who rot, corrupt & shallow

As fields I disced: I turned up the same gray

Earth for years. Still, the land made a glum raisin   

Each autumn, & made that little hell of days—

The vines must have seemed like cages to the Mexicans

Who were paid seven cents a tray for the grapes

They picked. Inside the vines it was hot, & spiders   

Strummed their emptiness. Black Widow, Daddy Longlegs.   

The vine canes whipped our faces. None of us cared.

And the girls I tried to talk to after class

Sailed by, then each night lay enthroned in my bed,   

With nothing on but the jewels of their embarrassment.   

Eyes, lips, dreams. No one. The sky & the road.

A life like that? It seemed to go on forever—

Reading poems in school, then driving a stuttering tractor   

Warm afternoons, then billiards on blue October   

Nights. The thick stars. But mostly now I remember

The trees, wearing their mysterious yellow sullenness   

Like party dresses. And parties I didn’t attend.   

And then the first ice hung like spider lattices   

Or the embroideries of Great Aunt No One,

And then the first dark entering the trees—

And inside, the adults with their cocktails before dinner,   

The way they always seemed afraid of something,   

And sat so rigidly, although the land was theirs.

I've Never Been an Old Woman Knitting By a Fire But I've Played One in Images Where It Meant Being Foolish, a Mistress of Distraction's Indirection

My red hat should be finished today. If you'd like one let me know, I know a knitter, there are currently eleven on order so it will be awhile but let me know. Pathetic, me, not wanting to post on Fridays like recently, especially before the Holiest Weekend and Sunday in Helmetballstan. Rest of the monologue in red in the grid. Exene turned 70 two days ago, she's magashit now, the fuck? it was better before before they voted for what's his name, this was supposed to be the new world

"Bipartisan consensus: endless billions for Israel, tens of billions for ICE, a trillion for the Pentagon - while jacking up healthcare premiums on tens of millions of Americans by 200%-300%"
Meanwhile, in the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Israel
⮩	You do realize one of the main benefits of dispatching magagestapogoons on Americans is that Americans lose focus on the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza
⮩	Reading Edward Said in the context of the Gaza genocide
The Pentagon is Quietly Building Trump’s Concentration Camps
⮩	I made a mistake when I implied I would be sent to the Williamsport concentration camp, I will be sent to a concentration camp no nearer than West Texas, the Williamsport concentration camp will torture and starve to death lucratively paid protesters from Seattle, my apologies. Being blindfolded, shackled, kicked into position by taunting guards and barking dogs and flown to a destination you will never know where you are kneeling on concrete in the middle of the night and beaten if you slump unless and until you are released a key sadistic first class in your future
Organized opposition				The appalling vista
⮩	"'Rule by sheer violence,’ Hannah Arendt wrote, ‘comes into play when power is being lost.’ She continued: ‘The effectiveness of terror depends almost entirely on the degree of social atomisation, the disappearance of ... organised opposition.’ The resistance in the Twin Cities has not pushed ICE and CBP away yet, but it has turned a supposed projection of state power into a floundering tool of homicidal violence. It has also shown what kinds of rot must flourish in Washington in order to keep the goons in Minnesota
I. HATE. MOTHERFUCKING. DEMOCRATS.
⮩	"It's interesting how pretty much none of the Democrats positioning themselves to run for president are actually trying to take advantage of the moment and instead seem to be acting on the assumption that they'll be installed as nominee by the donor class"
I. HATE. MOTHERFUCKING. DEMOCRATS.
How To Message a State Murder Spree
"The latest batch of vomit from the belly of elite depravity is even worse than it looks"
Elite pedophilia isn’t a bug, it’s a feature
⮩	"If you want to be in the top echelon of American (or Israeli, and possibly UK) elites they need to know you can be trusted. They need blackmail. You have to make your bones. Once you’ve committed an unspeakable crime, and they have pictures and video (remember, Epstein had cameras everywhere), well you can be allowed in, because you’re not going to use any power you have in any way the betrays elite interests, because they can destroy you any time they want"
How targeting Black independent journalists creates a foothold for broader civil liberties erosion
Fighting for workers in the age of Trump and the tech oligarchy
Staircase of oppression					Fruits of anger
I. HATE. MOTHERFUCKING. DEMOCRATS.
Starting to Look Like AI Has Killed the Entire Model of College
"The woke scolds are trying to make this about racism. But Musk is right. It's about historical and scientific integrity. When the God of Thunder disguises himself as a swan to seduce and fuck a queen and the resulting baby hatches from an egg, *of course* the baby will be white. It's just science"
The Legal Academy’s Leading Originalists Remain Breathtakingly Full of Shit
Don't forget xymphora				Don't forget Weldon
Some More Efforts, Comrades, If We Would Be Revolutionaries
Maggie		Maximally Perverse Obscurantism
Roland Barthes' Seminar on the Metaphor of the Labyrinth
The beautiful building and beautiful campus that once was the headquarters of National Geographic (long before the abomination that is Kentlands) on 28 near Quince Orchard now home to cops
{ feuilleton }			Blat	Tower of Babble
Right is wrong			Pynchon's *Shadow Ticket*
Prologue to Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction
We're taking a year off from Maine this summer and instead going to the very northern most tip of Michigan's lower penisula (L's in the Traverse City plein air, it's a big deal), I've been Modest Mouse bingeing of late, below is the last Modest Mouse song I will deliberately listen to until late June, Modest Mouse will be the main event in the long drives to hikes and disc golf courses and basic exploration

LIFE'S WORK

Rae Armantrout

1

 

Did I say I was a creature

of habit?

 

I meant the opposite.

 

I meant behavior

is a pile of clothes

 

I might or might not wear.

 

Before all the sowing and reaping

could go on for centuries,

 

before the calendar,

I must have been convinced

 

that my movements

were both mandated

 

and blessed.

 

     2

 

I've never been an old woman

knitting by a fire

 

but I've played one

in images

 

where it meant being foolish

or wise, a mistress

 

of distraction's

indirection.

 

To rock while entwining

is life's work,

 

but I am reckless,

restless