4.25.2025 - Weekly Digest
4.21.2025
Yesterday (Sunday) for the first time in the fifty days I’ve been keeping this blague I opted not to publish something. I had a whole series queued up and drafted, ready to roll out in episodes, a two or three part banger on a job I had a while back and how fucked up the situation was. Prudence stayed my hand.
Having published nothing of note doesn't deter me. Maybe it should but who's to say. I spent years toiling over the same bucket of words I called a book. A count of 90,000 at one point. I got it down to half that. Now it’s looking like it’s going to top off around 30 and I’m fine with it. It’s also more readable. ‘User friendly’ they’d say in the vulgar workplace argot we’re all diseased by now.
Something building. A cyclical way of feeling. How it sometimes is in spring. Internal rhyme without purpose or accountability.
New ideas. All the old ones revised and hacked apart and reassembled into freakish parodies of original thought. Need more new now, more raw.
The way I operate on myself: words by thousands from the fingertips. Like I'm taking digital emetics. Notebooks (unlined, for drawing) to hash out order. Arrows and sketches and phrases all over the thing until it resolves into a coherent idea. Cram it all into place on the laptop. Only device I own of any value. Like trying to fit several dozen unmatched socks into a drawer.
When I'm tired of hearing my own voice I give it to the imaginary folks.
Not recommended methods.
4.22.2025
Driving around MidMichigan. Dad is at the wheel, a friend with me in the back. What is this place? They speak French here he says. I think of my great aunt who came back to live in the states with my grandfather’s brother after the War. She spoke French and was sweet to the kids and I knew she was different but didn’t know how. This part is Quebec, Dad says. I never knew we were so close the whole time I say. We go to a gas station convenience store. Through a window a woman with her head in her hands. The floors are dirty, spotty, there’s a smell of burning wood. To spend your whole day in a place like this. To spend your whole life standing around waiting for other people to come in and buy shit. I had a few jobs like that when I was younger and they were all excruciating. Some jobs really can be done by machines. From what I've seen the machines agree. Also I've been re-reading Asimov and that's a pretty big concern of his. The funniest and probably most alarming of the robot stories is the one where the robot goes from self-awareness straight to fanatical anti-human religion with almost no steps in between. Which if you have a positronic brain might just be the speed at which logical processing moves, but as a human storyteller I feel like he burned through some rising action there. Not that I'm complaining. There's something about that era of sci-fi where the writers were just so excited about their ideas they couldn't help themselves and were in a rush to get it all out. I can relate. The more I try to structure and package material for reader consumption the less I care about it.
4.23.2025
So there’s this book I’ve been reading for almost two years, a collection called Septology by the Norwegian author John Fosse who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I try to read at least a book by each winner. It’s rare an American or even English writer wins, so it makes me feel worldly and sophisticated but mostly it reminds me of how universal human experience is, how we all look pretty similar when you extract and examine the brain out of your own context.
I read about two pages a day. I'm getting close to the end and I'll probably start over again when I get there. It's immersive, like being in a simulation where you're riding around in this old painter's head as he plods through snow and relives painful memories.
He writes in long sentences that go on for days and it brings me back to the writers I used to love, the modernists who didn’t care about crap like punctuation or format or structure and how revolutionary but ultra-chic that seemed a hundred years ago, and how I used to write like that when I was a teenager and in college and it was cathartic and the few people who read it seemed to really like it even though I didn’t have much to say, or I had a lot to say but it sounded like whining because I didn’t know about anything more complicated than how things felt, but now when I use that technique and I jam it up with interesting verbs and proper nouns it creates a texture, and I don’t think I have synesthesia but I do have a textural tactile relationship with prose and when I look at a passage I can imagine running my fingers over the words and feeling the valleys and crests and the rougher and smoother points like I’m reading Braille or brushing the surface of a pile of Legos and it pleases me and makes me want to make more.
4.24.2025
Public place, zombie attack or something. New York I think but it’s a specific location, clinical.
Something's coming loose.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds tonight. Will be there when this post goes live. It's been thirty years since the first time I saw him, at Lollapalooza. Matt sends me a new Ministry song. Ministry played that same concert, at Pine Knob outside of Detroit, same town where my mom lived as a kid. Ministry got real pissed at all the douchebags pulling clumps of sod out of the ground at the top of the hill and tossing them down onto the concertgoers on their blankets lower down and closer to the stage.
We saw Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and I went to a side stage and watched Guided by Voices do 'I Am a Scientist' and was hypnotized by them. Later we saw Jim Rose and the Circus Sideshow and he pumped a 40 oz. of malt liquor into a guy's stomach then sucked it back out of the guy's stomach with a tube and then he or the original guy or someone else - details fuzzy - drank it, warm and mixed with bile and other stomach acids.
I don't remember much from Nick Cave's set but I'm fully expecting to be transported when he does Wild God under the spotlight and probably twenty times before that. Will update tomorrow for the digest if anything cool comes to mind during the concert.
Update: very cool things happened. It was a dark lovefest and I'm pretty sure everyone in that arena feels like we got our souls scrubbed. They played everything I wanted to hear, even 'Weeping Song'. The crowd was awesome and he was in love with them too. They screamed appreciation at Warren Ellis and the rest of the Seeds. If he's coming to wherever you are on this tour, go. Even if the only song you know is the one from Peaky Blinders. Whether you know the music or not. Powerful crazy communal.
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