A few days after I delivered a ~15-minute diatribe about how astrology is BS—useful BS—but only as useful as any other random prompt for contemplation and self-study, my partner sends me this extremely precise call-out of all my Libra character flaws/features. Hmmmm.
Planners love talking about how new freeways and wider freeways “induce demand” but what’s the term for tearing freeways out, closing lanes, and shutting off routes?
Personally pulling for “repulsed demand”—and ready for it.
Love to hear rumblings of something, think it sounds like some BS, and then read an exhaustive and brilliant essay that removes all doubt. If you read one thing on the so-called “Dimes Square” scene, highly recommend this piece by James Duesterberg.
Watching The Rings of Power, I keep wishing someone would give the show the Wizard People, Dear Reader treatment, endowing these batshit scenarios, fantastic costumes, and non sequitor performances with the narration they truly deserve.
A tack-sharp photo of my dashboard.
To the license plate reading “DDDADDY”—you may have won this round, but I promise to keep on fighting. I WILL have your photograph on my phone.
“Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolf?” asks last remaining sheep in family targeted by notorious lupine mutton-hunter. “Me! I’m afraid of Virginia Wolf!”
As a writer both half-seduced by and totally unable to see how to actualize the “Thousand True Fans” hypothesis, I found this essay by Dave Karpf quite helpful. My internet work remains 100% unmonetized.
Sure everyone, including me, a billionaire, would be safer in a society where all prospered. But consider my thrills of fear as I consider the scary masses beyond my compound walls.
I’m thinking back to that moment a month ago: wife in labor, I’m driving to the hospital as carefully as possible, feeling serious and sacred. I look up and see, through a trick of the light, two adjacent business signs, merged into one: “PANINI PSYCHIC”
“howdy pardner”
An enchanted doorway beckons.
CALLING ALL ANNE RICE STANS – Don’t miss the latest essay by my partner, Lisa Locascio Nighthawk. It’s an appreciation written after the death of the literary mother of the vampire renaissance—Anne Rice—interweaved with a searching meditation on the author’s loss of her own mother two years ago.
I DESIGNED A LIT MAG – The Noyo Review is launching its second edition today (1/29), and you’re invited to a Zoom reading at 4pm PST. Even if you can’t make it, go check out the journal’s website (designed by yours truly) and read some of the exceptional pieces from the winter issue.
NEIL YOUNG, FELLOW ANTI-SPOTIFY TRAVELER – If you don’t want to leave Spotify for software reasons, leave it for moral ones: they’re bankrolling and standing by their high prophet of antivax dumbassery and death. You’ll be in good company.