Ashley Husemoller > Recent Status Updates

The immutable decrees of fate can be foreseen, they cannot be evaded.

FIRST LINE: Day had begun to smile and the sun was shining upon the hilltops when a band of armed pirates scaled the mountain which extends to the mouth of the Nile called the Heracleot, where it empties into the sea.

“Up in Illinois, we’ve forgotten what it’s all about. I mean the dead, up in our town, heck, they’re forgotten. Nobody goes to sit and talk to them. That’s really sad. But here — It’s both happy and sad. It’s all firecrackers and skeleton toys down here in the plaza and up in that graveyard now are all the Mexican dead folks with the families visiting and flowers and candles and singing and candy.

“But, stop and think. What does the word ‘witch’ truly mean?”
“Why —“ said Tom, and was stymied.
“Wits,” said Moundshroud. “Intelligence. That’s all it means. Knowledge. So any man, or woman, with half a brain and with inclinations toward learning has his wits about him, eh? And so, anyone too smart, who didn’t watch out, was called —“
“A witch!” said everyone.

Aye, boys, see? Gods following gods. The Romans cut the Druids, their oaks, their God of the Dead, bang! down! And put in their own gods, eh? Now the Christians run and cut the Romans down! New altars, boys, new incense, new names…”

FIRST LINE: It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state.

END OF SERIAL NO. 5 (July 1852, chapters 14-16)

END OF SERIAL NO. 4 (June 1852, chapters 11-13)

FIRST LINE: The note was there, lying beside her plate when she came down to breakfast.

And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of *there* from entering *here*. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,“ said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.

Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty.

He read once about a Sufi prayer that went, “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” That was the prayer in its entirety.

Tattoo idea???

Only in a culture that privileged infallibility above all else could a man like President Invective rise to power — a man insulated since birth from any sense of accountability, raised in a pristine cocoon of inherited wealth to emerge, pristine, dewy, wholly unsullied by those irksome, mortal foibles, grief and doubt.

One day I will be only gently and barely dead

She was Christian but American Christian, the kind that believed Jesus had just needed a bigger gun.

Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul. You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you.

We invented it, this language […] where one man is called an officer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of his own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire. Because of language, this sound stands for this thing, that sound stands for that thing, all these invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we got it so wrong.

I am setting out to write a book of elegies for people I’ve never met. Yes, there is an unforgivable hubris in my imagining any part of their living, and presuming to write about it. There is also hubris in writing about anything else.

FIRST LINE: Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do-over.

END OF SERIAL NO. 3 (May 1852, chapters 8-10)

“The scenes depicted for the most part, a fair-skinned, fair-haired people at play.”
Ah, yes. A planet full of Whitey McWhitensteins because why wouldn’t they be? Judas Priest, Burroughs.

“I was more than willing to take my chances among people fashioned after my own mold rather than to remain longer among the hideous and bloodthirsty green men of Mars.” This irony is so interesting to me. The fact that John misses the fact that he just came from fighting in a civil war & he thinks he’s *not* like the Martians?

In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people; they have no lawyers.

[…] in fact everything of value is produced by the females. In time of actual warfare they form a part of the reserves, and when the necessity arises fight with even greater intelligence and ferocity than the men.

FIRST LINE: I am a very old man; how old I do not know.