Getting up well before dawn—everyone else asleep—and writing in your journal for a while. The small pleasures.

To this person flying an American flag, a Trump 2024 flag, and a Mexican flag, I can only say, good luck.

This sweet Braun travel alarm clock arrived today. A decade ago I had an even smaller, more modest Braun. I loved its friendly little beeps. Somewhere I lost it. In the intervening years I took to using my phone as alarm. Now, partly inspired by this Craig Mod post I’m back on that alarm clock life!

People say the internet is getting worse and worse, but there’s no way I’m not clicking on this.

A day of ill portent but then right at its end my partner and child and I walked out onto the bluffs over the ocean and watched a knife’s edge horizon occlude the sun, and right at that last moment of day a faceted jewel of emerald light rose up, held for a long second, then winked away, into night.

Last night I walked around, and this flag, illuminated by a ring of wan LEDs, made me sad.

Old Glory, flaws and all, deserves better than this. (“This” meant in the broadest possible sense.) I feel sadly reminded of a similar walk, and other light observed, two-and-a-half years ago.

Someday this moment will pass. Soon, I hope.

Our little family recently came into possession of the book The Night Riders by Matt Furie. First published by McSweeney’s McMullens (their children’s imprint) back in 2012, it was reprinted in 2020 (I think) in support of Furie’s campaign of lawsuits and publicity as he attempted to reclaim his character Pepe the Frog from the gibbering goons who had hoisted the character onto their message boards as a symbol of hate. I love this book.

Wordless, its 48 pages follow Pepe and his friend, a rat, as they eat dinner (insects for Pepe, lettuce for the rat), go for a bike ride, encounter a dragon, hassle a subterranean bat friend, go for a swim, escape a giant crab with some help from two Lisa Frank-ass dolphins, and watch the sun rise.

Furie’s style is zine-y and outsider-y, funny but also sharply observed. It does that thing I want all art to do: makes me feel I am experiencing the world through someone else’s sensibility. Though the content is fantasy, the work often feels intimate, even voyeuristic, like you’re pawing through your stoner buddy’s sketchbook while he’s in the bathroom.

The feeling of reading The Night Riders echoes back a memory: a spring evening, riding down the backstreets of Cambridge and Somerville on the orange street bike Thalassa willed to me when she graduated, smoking a cigarette as I coast, the chain slipping clickily off the freehub, the warm evening breeze billowing through my blazer, the pedals slipping under my dress shoes, and me feeling like a bird on wing, like my feet might never again touch the ground.

Whomst among us has not had their wealthy bride revealed to be a vampire ready to feast upon them?

(From Steve and Alan Moore’s newly released grimoire, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic (so far it’s great (no, they’re not related)).)

David Lynch

1946 – 2025

Fix your hearts or die.

Now it’s dark.

Silencio.

Bitcoin mining is SETI@home for assholes.

Arecibo lies in ruins but they’re reopening Three Mile Island to power a chatbot.

Dystopia, sure, but does it have to be this stupid?

Is part of the popularity of Substack and other newsletters simply the absence of pop-up banners, autoplay videos, and all the other crap that make online news sites nearly un-useable?

(Thinking of this article on wooden satellites: amazing story, painful to read.)

Nothing but respect for my president.

Can’t believe some world leaders wake up and think, Seems like WWIII might go rather nicely for me. I wonder if there’s anything I could do to trigger it?

We need a worldwide peace movement to be rid of these Putins and Netanyahus and Bidens and MBSs and Xis.

Peace! Not WWIII.

Grudging respect for this bougainvillea bush that has now twice snatched my hat off my head as I try to run under it.

Hydrangeas, England, July 2024

Google’s decision to align itself with a government determined to strip its citizens of access to safe and timely healthcare is entirely in line with the deprecation of their former motto [‘don’t be evil’]…

– “Google Delists DIY Hormone Therapy Sites”

The ever-popular “pivot to evil” strategy.

… trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest… Dissent must never lead to disorder. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to a democracy, but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education.

– President Biden.

We’re in so much trouble. “Dissent must never lead to disorder” !!

Biden: committed Zionist, author of ‘94 Crime Bill, lied about marching in Civil Rights Movement, hates protesters. HISSS!

To watch (per JC):

• Brief Encounters
• Sunset Boulevard

Los Angeles, April 2024

Home, April 2024.

I’m happy for this guy and wish him the best, but this blurb does not mean what he or the author think it means:

“Omarion does what few others from his generation cannot do: display range on a main stream R&B level that enables him not to feel he’s chasing relevancy.”

Is there a word for writing like this, which is written to sound impressive first and for coherence second?

Bread, April 2024

Putting a pin in this anti-astrology Daring Fireball post, “ECLIPSES SHOULD BE CELEBRATIONS OF SCIENCE, NOT PSEUDOSCIENCE." I want to know more about these tech-y, atheist-y, liberal dudes who hear someone (a woman) talking about magic and just spit with venom!

See:

Astrologers horning in on the excitement about the eclipse is scientific sacrilege.

See:

Actual science is the great accomplishment of mankind. The antidote to ignorance, superstition, religious zealotry, and nonsensical beliefs in general. An eclipse exemplifies, to even the lay-est of laypeople, just how advanced modern science is.

See:

So here’s my “by the way” retort to Montúfar’s aside: how many astronomers today — not in “ancient” times — are also astrologers? Spoiler: the answer is fucking zero.

I’m forced to ask: Bro, who hurt you?

But also—tell me you’ve never been in the cone of totality without telling me you’ve never been in the cone of totality. A full eclipse is a chance to encounter the sublime, in all its terror and splendor. To touch cosmic infinity. The moon blotting out the sun makes rational sense, sure. You can describe it with numbers and equations, yes, and people have done that for millennia. But an integrated life contains more than calculus. An eclipse can transcend the rational. It can destabilize and re-enchant your experience of the world. That’s why people are excited about the eclipse.

Back to John Gruber’s post: it’s not alone in feeling aggrieved about astrology, around the eclipse. For instance, “Mom who pushed kids from moving car was astrology influencer disturbed by eclipse” describes a terrible tragedy that likely had less to do with astrology and more to do with postpartum psychosis, racial oppression, and the wellness-to-conspiracy-theory pipeline—all of which the article spends orders of magnitude less space discussing than it does astrology, which comes in for special ridicule and discrediting.

See:

In 2017, NASA published a webpage dedicated to debunking various myths surrounding that year’s eclipse. One was that eclipses are prophecies of major life changes or impending events.

‘This is a common interpretation found in astrological forecasts, which are themselves based upon coincidences and non-scientific beliefs in how celestial events control human behavior,’ NASA’s webpage says.

NASA notes that it’s only human psychology that ‘connects eclipses with future events in your life.’”

Not as shrill as Gruber, but equally, emphatically anti-magic.

What does this brittle defensiveness mean? Can one be so bold as to hope that it portends a correction-in-progress, the restoration of science to its rightful place alongside rather than above magic?