Diary

CIVIL WAR (Dir. Alex Garland 2024): Not bad, Kirsten Dunst forevaaa, McKinley Henderson is fantastic, Cailee Spaeny is also good though her role kind of sucked, wanted more Nick Offerman; the climactic assault on the White House was actually kind of amazing, the room-to-room, corridor-to-corridor gunfights; like the storming of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks, it looked tactically plausible. Here is the lore as I surmise it: Basically there are “Maoists” in the Pacific NW and boogaloo bois in Florida, but the only consequential separatist force is the professional bourgeois army of CA-TX and the petty-bourgeois rebels are just along for the ride. “The power of journalism” messaging was grating.

Midnight oil; deadline approaching; watching the news.

Many children wilding out today, picked up the new Bookforum, little work done.

People say they got that book in them (hell, I do), but maybe a novel is mainly something you have to find yourself making as opposed to intending to make.

Is it so necessary to have ideas and images sloshing around for years, with nothing but a few prose sketches maybe, before a real project begins?

“Hezbollah attacks on Israel come amid expectations of Iranian retaliation.” (It’s a little more than a week since the attack in Damascus.)

An overturned bubble tea cup on the subway floor, with Princess Peach on the seal packaging.

Eid…children in dresses and henna-stained hands.

My old glasses were in the laundry…

Climbing the steps leading out of the 1st avenue station, I was thinking about how anyone who isn’t Pro-Palestine has got to be a fascist, when a guy came around me. “Move faster, bro! I got somewhere to be.” “Just go around, dude.” “You’re too slow!” “Take it easy, man.” “You take it easy, faggot!” You have to be really coked out to think I walk too slow….

Pour the water over the coffee grounds, sweep the throw rug in my room, in my library, in the common area, swiffer the hardwood floors, put the dry silverware away, wash the plates and dishes from last week, run the trash bags down the stairs to the bins outside the building…

RARE 4.8 MAGNITUDE QUAKE RATTLES NORTHEAST. At first, I thought it was the wind. Here at the frontier of Brooklyn and Queens, the winds from the lowlands hit the apartment building pretty hard. When the furniture wouldn’t stop vibrating, I thought it must have been construction, like a very powerful jackhammer. The cats were completely unfazed, and if they’re not worried, I’m not worried.