3.07.2025 - Weekly Digest

Dearest of Dear Readers,

If you tried to reach me by replying to the original newsletter emails (sent last week) I didn't get it. Even with all the configuring and debugginization I engaged in beforehand I still missed a couple things.

If you reply to this one or future ones I should see it.

If you did not send me a message and have no intention of doing so, I apologize for wasting your time. And, if this makes me sound like a desperate and lonely guy who sits at his laptop refreshing his browser window every few seconds, I apologize for your discomfort.

Moving on! This week! Digest! Weekly Digest!

3.03.2025

New home for a month. Rundown studio in a condemned building. Have seen no rats. Can't speak to whether they've seen me. Kitchen equipped for half a person. Wet towels in the closet. No soap, no evidence that anyone has given any real thought to what it might be like to spend a night here or thirty.

I can fix this, he said to the empty room.

Sheets on the couch to cover the stains that look like someone made a point to bleed, a little bit, on each cushion.

I refuse to be depressed by this or interpret it as evidence of my failures.

Two, or three, I guess, things I won’t complain about: there’s an actual coffee maker here albeit a shitty one and not just one but two toasters in case I need to make a hell of a lot of toast in a hurry.

I can work with this.

Internet is laggy, devices act like you’re waking up them from a nap. Semi-regular hums and drips. Feels like a place where some real addict drama could go down. Haven’t heard anyone yell but the guy upstairs sure likes to sing.

3.04.2025

My new gag is to pretend I left luxury for squalor. Like I'm an actual refugee. 'The word for yogurt looks weird! God save me!'

I'm just here for the cheap aluminum.

The guy upstairs is tossing and turning and every time he moves it vibrates through all the ceramic in the kitchenette.

When he sneezes it sounds French: achieu.

At a table with posus and the cabinet and he goes to the bathroom and I ask the chief justice, since it’s just this group of us in the room, if we can declare him unfit, like when is too much too much, we all know we need to get rid of the bastard. He smiles like it’s a common question, like it’s something he’s been thinking about himself, maybe talking over with others behind closed doors. He gives me a rambling answer about precedent and asks if I know about the case of Garfield versus Madison or something. Then we’re overrun with anarchist insurrectionists who leave my people alone after tasing a few of us to make it look authentic. Then we’re all watching the city burn from a hill and trying to check the news but the apps are down. We build a big gallows and there’s a long speech and we’re singing together.

3.05.2025

Had a dream where Trump stole my shoes. Seriously. I didn't even watch the plane crash of the union and I feel I should be spared such things.

Mont Royal. Went up most of the way and I feel like I know this side of it pretty well. Up to the chalet and the view up there. Down, then, to the lac where kids ice skate and families gather and then I thought I was being clever and was going around the mountain to get home before the snow started again but instead I went through the sprawling Catholic cemetery and was in the middle and it was just me and the suspiciously quiet dead and I pulled out my phone to navigate and it directed me for half an hour past some mausolea and into a snowy field on a path that had a few bootprints in it but was otherwise a meter-deep drift and it took me to a locked gate I couldn’t get through. Now if this were the States I would have found a way through that fence, there were some bent iron bars in places and it was low enough it looked scaleable but of course with the snow drifts that could all have gone very wrong but my main concern was to not get arrested doing something untoward or unsavory in a graveyard in this place where I'm trying to make a good impression. Anyway I made it back, up the slope and back down again and past the statue of Saint George Etienne Cartier and I’m properly sick of that dude at this point but it was good to see him because it meant I was almost home.

People here are accustomed to all of it. They ski and laugh and goof around on the mountain. Maybe I've never lived anywhere. The notion doesn't even bother me. And I know it's not really true but it's just been so long that I felt connected to a place. I've tried to force it, tried to insinuate myself, to prove I'm not an invader. I have no money to ruin things, I always declare. Everywhere I've ever been I got there just too late to be considered a local. Oh you should've been here two weeks ago, that's when it was authentic and cool.

3.06.2025

This sums up all the forethought that went into this apartment I'm renting. The sign is tacky enough, but the bottle opener, its central feature, has been removed, I assume by a feral tenant who couldn't be bothered by the inconvenience of having to walk over to the sign to open his beer. It should be noted that nothing is more than a three second walk from one end of this place to the other.

The miracle of finding a convenient grocery store. I wandered around with my basket dangling from my wrist, like Dorothy, gazing in astonishment at the shelves. Then I bought some yaourt and held it above my head in triumph on the street. I removed the lid and daubed out little blobs onto the foreheads of the devout. After a couple blocks of this I needed more yogurt but I was embarrassed to go back.

Tariffs are invisible and make the air heavy. I went out and walked around some more and discovered I'd looped back around to the first place I stayed six weeks ago, when I was sick and delirious and had no concept of the city beyond the frozen wasteland I glimpsed through the window. Threads connect with other threads. The mind map expands. These little puzzles, identifying them, solving them, all day until we sleep and then we work through the ones we haven't solved, all of that seems to me as significant as it always has and I think I need new problems to solve because the old ones are making me tired.