I Attended the Burial of All My Rosy Feelings

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.”
American Freefall				Shitocracy Doctrine
The New Legislators of Silicon Valley
"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"
From Trump to Milei, the far right is betting that spectacles of revenge will compensate for steep economic sacrifice
"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"
can't make this stuff up				Today in No Shit, sherlock
"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 Fascism Expert at Yale Who’s Fleeing America
⬆	"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"						⬆
European capitalists push for war
"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"
Google is Acquiring Tech Firm Founded by Ex-Israeli Intelligence Officers for Record $32 Billion
You can’t survive on ramen and Natural Light
"Business journalism sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks. Oh, and it sucks some more after that"
The hidden phenomenon of working homelessness
National	Park	Service	Rewrites	History	of	Underground	Railroad
"this shit fucken sucks and if you have any other take than that you are an absolute soulless shiteating dullard"
Maggie's		Already dead			Transactional
{ feuilleton }			Ars Poeticas, by Juliana Spahr
ANOTHER COUNTRY SMELL (a short story from the collection EVEN MORE DIFFICULT TEXTS)
Lost in the Landscape: Caspar David Friedrich
The Future of Literary Culture
Dean Wareham interview						Bible lit
On Destroyer's *Dan's Boogie*

TRANSACTION

A.R. Ammons

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.