June > Recent Status Updates

Those with men had had the sweetness sucked from their breath by ovens and steam kettles. Their children were like distant but exposed wounds whose aches were no less intimate because separate from their flesh.

Those with husbands had folded themselves inyo starched coffins, their sides bursting with other people's skinned dreams and bony regrets. Those without men were like sour-tipped needles featuring one constant empty eye.

The world is governed more by chance than by intention, as if a madman or a child were sovereign.

(Gazala) “….but if they had rewarded him in the same measure as the power they gave him, then he took only his due.”

Didactic dated boring

Accepting that things change and learning to navigate to wrong turns is a secret to happy life.

...the history of Zipperupus, king of the Partheginians, the Deutons. the Profligoths, of whom concupiscence was the ruin!

Morning poem

(Bruce Sterling) If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters.

Young adults

The U.S. Constitution’s 52 word preamble is a sharp declaratory statement of shared beliefs, which offers no political predetermined outcomes, no special accommodations, no promise to soothe majoritarian impulses.

(Freddie) He took up a pipe and on warm nights perched on the fire escape overlooking Forty-Eighth, puffing, the iron scaffold a periscope that allowed a view of the sleep-churning Hudson while the saxophone of Ornette Coleman barked and bleated on the hi-fi, wringing the city’s death rattle from its harrowed throat.

(Munson) Working vice was a PhD in Shakedown Science.

Grief is a dream-state. The linear markers of ordinary time and daily obligations are wrenched apart. All significant ties lead to the recent past, to a sudden absence and to a struggle with what could or should have been.

Childhood is the lost estate. Children at their happiest enact for adult onlookers a tragic foretelling- the estate will not last.

I had begun this journey following him into the hidden corners of his world and here it ended with him crossed over into the brightest heights of mine.

He brims like a stream in spate, gathering all the knowledge that floods in upon him,…

(Ana)…the Empire was wrought in the image of that which it was made to fight.

this ridiculous, debauched platform was one of the most powerful media tools that a power-hungry mogul could ever have in his political arsenal.

X…overrun by ads for scam dropshipped products and assorted bots (crypto, porn, inscrutable AI conversationalist); amplifying the posts of its angry right-wing owner and his dues-paying users; salting the discourse with bad information, AI-generated fakes, and bad-faith hysteria about crime and migrants; infiltrated by authoritarian foreign governments; presided over …24/7 by…

(1/2/2026) Violet is the great-grand-daughter of Harry?
Grandma Helen was the daughter of Ada and Harry?

(typo) Piers and Elli sat up, riveted.

(typo)…used for Julia’s tax filings and spreadsheet.
…
“Julia has made a lot more money than I, or the IRS, was aware….”

…feelings of autonomy, mastery and a purpose are what generate the best work, not higher levels of monetary reward.

(…the moment when I questioned a wishful solution reminiscent of my primary school indoctrination…) abundance is a social relationship, based on the principle that the means of one’s existence will never be at stake in any of one’s relationships.

… instead of an economy of researchers, tennis instructors, and Michelin-rated chefs, ours is predominantly one of side-street barbers, domestic servants, fruit-cart vendors, and Walmart shelf stackers.

…a lure…requires a choice….the best kind of voyeurism or the telling of a skillful lie.

James Bond…provides a window into the voyeuristic parts of a person’s soul. The parts that crave an intimate kind of escape.
As humans, we all crave escape…. It does not matter how much we accumulate oif any one thing, we will eventually be drawn to its counterpart. Too many thoughts, and we see an empty mind. Too much salt, and we crave the sweet. Too much wealth, and we feel lured to a simple life.