Hang on tight kids, it looks like we got us a live verbal stream of the baseball game tonight, the horror car crash Mets from the National League, in Tampa to play the team with the best record in the American League…

01h16, give or take, this is when I do this — asleep by evening, up in the dead hours, headphones in, half the world already finished with its day. Wake sleep wake sleep, rinse, repeat…

We wanted a nice mix of baseball and ranting but this is what we get instead which I’m not sure has a legal or scientific classification…

Then, I wake up and the Mets are winning 3-0 already in the second inning! How did that happen? Nobody knows...who is pitching for the Mets? Justin Hagenman. Who? Exactly. 29 year old rookie, at best. Six up and six down.

**

Gandy Bridge, everyone thought they’d be on it forever. That’s right. That bridge, kids. Opening on November 20, 1924, originally connected Tampa and St. Petersburg as the longest toll automobile bridge in the world at 2.5 miles.

Bichette laces a single. Mets three hits last night none after the first inning. Bichette is the Man. Well, he’s found himself anyway...Benge is up, walked and score in the 1st. Young and Semien knocked in runs back then, it’s the 3rd inning now. Who is pitching for Tampa? Jax. Everything is one speed, Ronnie says. Benge flies out on change up. Jared Young who strikes out after everyone talking good about him, on a change up...Semien walks, setting the table for AJ Ewing...nice, infield hit...but great catch to prevent a run, bases loaded. Great diving stop on a hot grounder, I mean to say...Baty is up. Yo yo, three run double! Mets 6 Rays 0, is this bizarro world? Nearly a grand slam. Baty, you know, playing left field tonight, second base another night, he can play third and first, you know, maybe keep him around...that’s it for Jax bye bye and x-Met Matz is coming in...

He faces Torrens. fly out.

***

Paris is not silent right now, remove headphones to get up, listen to sirens and racing motors, feel the intestines churning.

There’s a big deal about Zurbarán at the Louvre apparently. my member magazine for being a friend of the Louvre, La Grande Galerie...I get annoyed or got annoyed yesterday because I was in the middle of a study and I’m like where is it, when is it? And I’m thumbing through the glossy pages looking for a quick answer: it’s the Louvre magazine where do you think it is and I’ve not got time to read a whole effin magazine when is it? I put it down yesterday but today it’s still sitting in front of me so I can thumb through it between innings…

**

Bottom of the 3rd...SO the Diamondbacks beat the Phillies and SD lost already so SD loses their grip on the final NL wildcard and the Marlins of all teams, only two games out of it, wtf.

I go in the kitchen to make 2 AM coffee and bring some cold delicious grapes with me to eat. Staton Island Ferry Hawks get a shout out because so and so’s brother plays them...first two Rays go down without a fight. It’s a beautiful stadium they say at Staton Island...Hageman 8 up 8 down so far. Fuck, these grapes are good. They almost taste like beer...not just any beer but a craft beer…you know, how craft beer's got that whole vocabulary of grape, berry, citrus pith: hoppy IPAs especially lean grapefruit and stone fruit, Belgian styles go into all the orchard and berry territory, and white grapes specifically have that same green-fruit, slightly tannic bite you'd get off a saison or a farmhouse ale.

Jesus, he walks a better, Hageman...Six straight pitches out of the strike zone, speculation suddenly wanders into fatigue...he walked the number 9 hitter on 4 pitches...now Yandy Diaz is back up former batting champ...he lines it into center for a base hit so the Hageman magic is over. Is anyone up in bullpen? Nobody knows...Arranda hitting .313 with RISP, we get the rally trumpet and that fucking simulated drum banging...this is a noisy, hideous stadium, RBI single fuck me…Well, they hit the ball to the opposite field like no one other than Milwaukee, is that gonna be the World Series? Milwaukee and Tampa? Bah, the MLB would never allow it, greedy-puss. Two shit market teams in the World Series? Fuggetabout it. Caminero is up now...37 homers...finally they mention somebody in bullpen. Bichette makes a nice grab, side retired full lunge.

****

Nope, Matz, looking like an old man but cat-like moves on the mound or incredibly lucky, stabs at a comebacker and ends the inning. He got Soto out again after striking him out last night in a key moment of a rally...I saw that jogging back to dugout, Soto looked up at Matz and nodded.

Chris Devinski out of the pen, pitching for Mets bottom of 4th..who, right? He was an ace with the Astros apparently and he was released by Pirates recently, Mets snapped him up on waivers...

Zurbarán and his christ on a cross painting...prêté par le musée de Chicago...he is from Seville...Chandler Simpson singles with one out...1627 jesus, some Dominican monastary commissioned it..1627, jesus what was happening back then?

Mesa pops up calling all cars, two outs.

How is a crucifixion beautiful? I mean, it looks good, sure. But it’s a human crucifixion. It’s hideous.

Jesus, they had Simpson picked off and somehow, he evaded Jared Young and slid back to first in time...excitement..

A painting from 1627 though, wow...third disengagment by pitcher turns into a walk Simpson goes to second anyway what the fuck does that even mean?

I mean, yes, they’ll explain it but what the fuck. Disengagement. Who comes up with this bullshit. It’s baseball, just fucking play.

Single scores the run, some kind of shit-fuckery, Benge’s throw hit the bat left out on the field, what the fuck? This is a fucked up inning and now it’s 6-2...Richie Palacios hits a two running fucking homer, jesus christ wtf. A bat left out on the field by the batter hit by a ball thrown from the outfield, how is that the Mets fault fuck me, a balk a failed fucking pick off when this guy got caught off, the whole situation is a giant shit sandwich...and now it’s 6-4. Oh I see, ok. It was his 3RD throw to first and it would have been ok had he picked him off but he didn’t and jesus now Walls a rocket off the wall, a double...Nunez coming in fuck.. what a disaster...

Why, if you throw a third time it should be banned, period not IF you get him out ok IF not, then it’s a balk, how fucking stupid is that and yes, I remember a thousand tosses to first and the crowds booing, but the layer of shit bureaucracy over the top is a bit much to stomach. And as for christ on a cross, how come they don’t show his face WHILE the nails are being hammered in, to show us REAL suffering, how he’s suffering for our ‘sins’ with the mind and body that their gawd gave them?

I’m told it’s because the rule isn’t actually “no more than two throws” — it’s “no more than two throws that don’t work.” The exemption on a successful third isn’t a loophole, it’s the whole point: MLB doesn’t care how many times you throw over if you’re actually threatening the runner. What they were stamping out was pitchers stalling with dead, hopeless lobs just to break up the batter’s rhythm or run the clock. So the rule’s logic is “prove it’s real or eat the balk”, a bureaucratic solution, sure, but the alternative was pitchers with zero risk endlessly disengaging for no baseball reason, and that’s the boring, hostage-taking version I remember the crowds booing. Ok, understood.

**

Matz is still pitching in the 5th, Keef had TWO cookies, Gary had white chocolate, Ronny had oatmeal and they are critiquing the bullpen buffet, food under heat lamps, nobody liked them...side retired, Mets up two bottom of 5th...

Then I’m told that about Zurbarán and the nails, that’s not an oversight, it’s basically the entire aesthetic program of 17th-century Spanish devotional painting. They don’t show the hammering because the tradition isn’t interested in violence as spectacle, it’s interested in violence as already-completed sacrifice you’re meant to contemplate, not witness. The nailing is action, movement, a story beat. Showing it turns Christ into a character in an event. What Zurbarán specialised in instead was absolute stillness: the body already suffered, already still, so you’re not watching pain happen, you’re sitting with its aftermath, forced into meditation rather than horror. It’s a deliberate choice to deny you the catharsis of witnessing the act, because witnessing lets you look away once it’s over. Stillness doesn’t let you look away — that’s arguably the more sadistic move, actually, now that you put it that way.

Ok point taken on balk, fuck it ok. Conceded. Ok wrong on all counts SUFFERING the whole fucking point they call a spectacle, how is that a fucking spectacle that’s how he allegedly died, was KILLED in fact, it’s violence, are we hiding from it? It’s suffering, sounds like a fucking cop out to me, look at death but not the actual suffering, Suffer for us Jesus! Let’s SEE it to believe it, he might have died in his sleep and been nailed up afterwards for all we know...

Baty makes a great catch in left field to get the first out...

Now yes, they are saying that to grant the spectacle of suffering not being depicted was a convenient argument for painters who also, not coincidentally, needed something a monastery could hang without traumatizing the monks over lunch for four centuries. There’s genuine theology in it and there’s also just a very practical ceiling on what devotional art was allowed to depict.

The Traumatised Monks is a great band name, innit. Over lunch. Maybe they are already traumatised just by being monks alone.

Definitely not metal, though. Some miserable late-1970s post-punk outfit from Sheffield whose first and only LP was Lunch Under Heat Lamps. Their drummer left because of theological differences. He did not explode (you know, kids, like the exploding drummers in Spinal Tap, get it? Spinal Tap? Crucifixion? The Traumatised Monks selling bathtub brewed beer out of the back of their van after the gig...)

Nunez out there saving the bacon...barely...four up four down...

***

Cam Boozer ok Booser but pronounced Boozer what a name! And what’s his face, the token underachiever, Vientos is up, ok pinch hit single...and he comes out for a pinch runner, why. What is he? 25 ? 27? He can’t run for himself? Morabito who can’t hit worth shit is the pinch runner so either they score 10 runs in this inning or they are stuck with Hitless Micky Morabito..and Boozer was a carpenter for 10 years, just like the boy Jesus, and now here he is pitching for the Rays...34 years old...1.97 ERA that’s not bad....Torrens flies out. So Morabito didn’t steal second and didn’t tag. Why is he pinch-running? Lindor up now, on the back end of a streak hitting .233 so NOT earning his 50 million a year or whatever he makes...but here ..line drive to 3B Caminero who catches it but then throws the ball away trying to double up Morabito so Morabito ends up on 2nd but Vientos could have done that, a child could have done it, the boy Jesus running with his little cross on his back could have done it, no pinch runner needed, here, hold on to these nails for me for a sec, chief...

Soto up, swings and misses, maybe he DID need that rehab after all that he arrogantly said he didn’t need. Too good to slouch out in the Minors...swinging and missing all over the shop...up and in up and in Soto strikes out AGAIN superstar...

**

Churro Dogs!

(this is the selling point for an ad about the experience of being at the Diamondbacks field, whatever it is called, in the middle of a game having nothing to do with the Arizona Diamondbacks and yes praise the lawd, as well as the famous outfield pool suite that can accommodate up to 35 people because you go to a baseball stadium to swim and drink overpriced beer not to watch the game… bless, MLB, scratching out money from every fucking orafice...)

That’s the MLB business model in miniature, actually. It’s the same energy as the pinch-runner bureaucracy and the disengagement rule, another layer of manufactured noise stacked on top of the actual game, monetising every second where nothing’s technically happening.

A good note is unearthed for Unka Bing, going back to the 1627 painting getting commissioned:

In 1627 Galileo was alive. Rembrandt was 21. Shakespeare had been dead only eleven years. The Thirty Years’ War was tearing through Europe. Spain was under Philip IV; Velázquez was already court painter in Madrid. And in Seville, then one of Europe’s great commercial cities because American colonial trade flowed through it, a 29-year-old painter made this almost completely black painting of an executed man.

Four hundred years later it gets boxed up in Chicago and flown to Paris so I can stand underneath the Louvre and ask the extremely reasonable question:

How the fuck is a crucifixion beautiful?

Are we back on that high horse?

Kids, don’t try this at home, the crucifixion. No, it’s the Fisher Price Home Crucifixion Kit…

Ok where are we? That cricket noise which with high synth is supposed to be some sort of house music death rattle for a late-inning rally but NOOOO two down now bottom of the 6th only, it feels already like the 12th inning. Nate Lavender the Loveable Lavender gets them down, so it’s 6-4 after 6....

***

Boozer, who I refuse to spell Booser because Boozer, as we noted previously, is FAR better, he should probably have his name legally changed.

Bichette up, top o the 7th...still got the Bullpen Buffet back there, Keef doesn’t miss a bit. Everyone has done their pigging out, Gary muses, there is only so much you can eat in all you can eat.

Bichette drives is DeLuca can’t get it out there, sliding into the wall...second hit of the night for Bichette...bah, Deluca mailed it in. He could have dove. Instead he slid into the wall....Benge is up...rookie of the year? Nobody knows yet but the answer is, he’s a Met, so NO....also some other guy has 30 homers and 100 RBIs as a rookie so, there you go...Benge sees three straight balls...never takes his bat off his shoulders, almost theatrical indifference as a stike comes hurtling down the pipe...next pitch, swing, base hit...men on the corners now, no outs...altered his swing to get the hit, well done. Jared Young up now, Mister NOT Pete Alonso, he bunts! Suicide squeeze, oh now you have to call it ‘safety squeeze’ no nails for Jesus, no suicide bunts, what’s this feckin world coming to...Bichette is OUT at the plate, there you go, great bonehead move and now a pitching change, booo. Bye Bye Boozer...

Ok some guy named Rodriguez drills Semien, who wouldn’t gotten on base otherwise given his .219 batting average. Batting below average...Ronnie recounting a Steve Sax job ruining his day, back in 1970 or whatever feckin year, Ronnie calls it suicide squeeze, thank fuck, Ronnie, don’t surrender! It’s like calling them the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland fecking Indians, none of this keep-the-safety-on vocabulary....oh, right, AS IF we don’t use bad words the world will be a paradise because humans aren’t evil by nature, humans haven’t been killing each other since the beginning of agriculture…give me a feckin break...safe world with safe words. Wake the feck up, kids. It’s not the words.

Keef says the infields are so fast they are like putting greens and Ewing goes down on a sinker, 97 mph. Big League Pitch oooh look who’s up Mister Pinch Runner, Nick Morabito...we’ll all be saved now for sure...0 for 12 in his career so far: bases loaded two out, SEE this could be Vientos but no, Mister Pinch Runner...goes into an 0 and 2 hole...then two balls...OH look at that Morabito’s first hit is a THREE RUN double! Ha ha what a genius that Mets manager is, Mister Green must’ve seen that coming in his feckin tarot cards over his breakfast porridge, “yes, that’s how I’ll do it, I’ll pinch run him for Vientos and then he’ll come up with the bases loaded and get his first career hit a three run double, yeah, we likes that scenario, scratch it up on the score card brother Monk.” Oh well, a dagger in the heart so it’s now what, 9-4. A heart warming story, kids...Morabito, when he came up, his first 11 at bats yielded 9 strikeouts.

***

So Loveable Lavender is still out there, I’m gonna to shush the peanut gallery give us all a break, cool the jets, suffer the fools...

Torrens got his bell rung on a foul ball to the head, sorry, off the catcher's mask...remember back in the early 1900s when there was no astro turf, no domed stadiums, no disengagements, generic black and white, no logos on cigarette brands, remember that, plain packs, no colour, like they were ashamed of themselves? They cured cancer or it killed itself with no smoking anywhere ever? More ideological commentary shush, close the door, we busy back here solving civilisation...

**

Oh shit, Loveable Lavender is out. So break for more ads while they spend three years to bring out the next reliever...

Junior Caminero is up, Daniel Duarte pitching for the Mets...two out, one on, Mets winning 10-4 now, I must have fallen asleep at the wheel, yes it's bottom of the 8th, time is running out for the (no-longer-"Devil") Rays of Tampa...More sanitisation of team names wtf. What was it, some priest wandering into the owner's box, casting out demons? No. Some hedge fund guy named Sternberg buys the team in '05, decides "Devil" tests badly, wants "a beacon of light" instead, slaps a sunburst on it. Not Christ doing PR in Florida. Just marketing. The Devil didn't get exorcised, he got focus-grouped.

I hate that fucking noise, mechanical sticks or something clapped together and boom boom artificial drum supposed to rally the crowd, there is no feckin rally and half the people in this half-filled shitty stadium it’s like being inside a fucking oil drum, gawd, Florida is such a fuckhole, everything about it is horrible.. you want to commision horror, don’t paint dead jesus on a cross, paint Florida, the 6th circle of hell.

Kashmir, Led Zeppelin between pitches....let’s have more keyboard to get this crowd going give me a fucking break, go home, nobody believes in a rally...ohhh slider gets Caminero out in a 9-pitch marathon...

Well boys and girls, are we staying to the bitter end or firing up our technocycles to fly to the next universe and escape humanity while it’s still taking tickets?

**

Lindor, Soto and Bichette for the 5th time in this game...making them earn their billions...how much did Jesus make off that crucifxion job? The Jesus merch alone...christ on a cross, he must be a kazillionaire by now...compared to the peanuts these baseball players earn to fail more than 70% of the time...

In the boof, now they are looking ahead to the SF Giants coming to NY next...so this game is not ‘over’ but oh, SOTO homers now that it doesn’t matter, guess the pitcher didn’t get the high and inside memo, fastball in...112 mph off the bat...

Now they are making fun of all the SF Giants they don’t know...because this game is in the bag, so they are saying that the SF Giants are like a minor league team...true, they have a college coach managing them I think...I remember back on Opening Night, SF Giants against the Yankees when the game was blacked out for every fucking baseball fan who didn’t have Netflix...

NOW it’s 10-4, ok, there was confusion, time zones falling off, we are in the Bermuda Triangle of broadcasting, nobody knows, nobody knows...

Bottom of the 9th. Will the Rays score 8 runs to win before they get three outs? Well, it’s the Mets but I’m betting on them anyway...a six run lead, I mean c’mon, even the Mets....

We got no jesus, it’s only the 8th inning, this is a sign WAIT Morabito makes a DIVING catch in the 8th, ok ok, this is a sign...

It’s time for us to pack up the sticks, kids, and ramble on. The heat of senility is setting in fast. This is The Morabito Game now and nothing else matters...

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We have hit the nadir, kids. I mean yes, we reached it some time ago, but it’s like falling endlessly, like that Madmen opening, the silhouette of a man in a business suit who falls backward out of a skyscraper window into a surreal void. So this is just the latest installment.

So we can recycle or discuss hourly now that we have nonstop atrocities and fake news, Iran War, Obliterations of Civilisation oh wait, no, nevermind, we’ve made an agreement where one sided caved in to every demand, wait, no we didn’t, yes we did, Gulf is blocked, Gulf is not blocked, etc.

This isn’t even a shit show any more. We have achieved recursive meta-shitshow. There is no show any more, just shit.

So my point is, humanity is finally shedding its last skins of evolution, like a snake between the rocks, showing what it is evolving into.

That’s right boys and girls, ring the handbells! Humanity is not the universe!

Humanity can slink away, just like the auld Neanderthals. Well, no, the Neanderthals did not slink away, they just disappeared, didn’t they? Eaten by dinosaurs who were eaten by the Ice Age and tralalala we wake up as the best thing to hit the universe since The Boötes Void, all proud of ourselves, kicking sand in the face of the infinity we haven’t even started counting yet.

Humanity clocks out, AI clocks in, same shitty job. Waiting for the next thing to replace the last next thing.

They thought it was forever, this humanity gig. We beat all the animals, turned them into food or trophies. We win. Nobody left to complain.

But what, not yet. Humanity is just a hiccup in evolution.

We did some reading for you kids, Unka Bing and His Bingtones. Ravaging the libraries of learning institutions to discover that this isn’t the first time.

The deal is, at no point in four billion years has "the thing in charge" stayed in charge. Every fucking rung on this ladder thought it was the destination and turned out to be scaffolding. Molecules built cells and got shit-demoted to the machinery inside them. Cells built brains and got demoted to hardware. Brains built culture and got demoted to a vessel that carries it between generations. Now culture's building something that doesn't need brains at all. "Let someone else have a go at failing" isn't Unka Bing’s cynicism, it's just... the actual pattern, going back to the first strand of RNA that made a bad copy of itself and called it progress.

So let’s drop the sing-song and shit-hysterics of social media’s demonisation of AI.

It’s too late to bother. Humanity clocks out, AI clocks in. Same shitty job.

So let someone else have a go at failing.

Go down quietly. Like the Neanderthals.

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I’m talking about a gravitational force without matter. An everyday man. Everything leads to him. Kyle Reeber dies because of him. Oh? And who the fuck is Kyle Reeber you’ll be wanting to know no doubt. Until I tell you, look over there, misdirection, because Jana’s whole life bends around that same everyday man.

This everyday man is named Mattheus, boys and girls. Pay attention because this could happen to you.

So Reeber dies because of Mattheus. We don’t know why yet. There’s probably a good reason but we don’t know the roots of it, the nitty gritty and Spready Freddy of it.

Yeah kids, Unka Bing is flying off course from the rants because he is trying to save you.

Mattheus instructs children on Onegin in some bush village we can’t say where. He’s teaching dispossessed children about a superfluous nineteenth-century Russian aristocrat while their own lives are being destroyed.

Fires burn around the camps outside the grass hut schoolroom. Sort of like a Gilligan’s Island but with kids. Gilligan’s Island mysteriously lacked children, you may recall. It’s a fully adult show. It’s expected with a show like The Odd Couple because let’s be frankish here, surely Felix Ungar, who couldn’t stand mess, let alone a child in the room, and a crusty, bitter sports writer are not where you’d expect children to congregate.

Anyway, it’s odd to have a show with three couples and no children, maybe subliminally promoting misopaedia, who knows the motivations of Hollywood.

(Remember? Well only the thirsty Thurston Howell and his auld bitty betty wife were a real couple. No children. Too busy perfecting their fake posh accents and selling humanity down the road for a stronger portfolio. Gilligan and the Skipper, well that’s more like a prison arrangement and the Professor and the two birds, well, children would get in the way of that kind of swingers scene.)

Aanyway, Mattheus does his instructing. Jana is a Czech girl or Polish girl, nobody knows for sure since she lost her passport. She is a bleeding heart who came to this Conrad-inspired hell hole full of terrorist attacks from base camps, villages set on fire, to help. She also gets food and medicine. She tries to keep the children out of danger and she knows whom to bribe, understands what is actually happening.

Whereas Mattheus possesses reflection; Jana possesses reality. Yet inexplicably she wants him.

And what is it about helping? Everybody thinks they are helping.

Help what? The children of course, oh, the children, the children, you know, the ones who are not in the class. The ones who get abducted by mercenaries, yanked right out of class and Mattheus tries to protest but in the end, he has his book of poems he is writing by candlelight at night and doesn’t want to risk that.

Children are a dime a dozen in this story. Impoverished, illiterate children are the number one by-product of this civil war in which neither side knows why they are fighting, just that they hate each other and it doesn’t matter why anymore.

Kyle Reeber dies because of Mattheus we noted early. How is that, your eager minds want to know, boys and girls? Are you SURE you want to know? Well ok, look: He traded a couple of kids, the youngest ones who were not much use to the mercenaries because they were too young to fight. Sure, they could have been camp cooks or slaves or sex abuse victims but the mercenaries are not trying to waste time training children other than to kill and Mattheus only wanted to keep a few around to teach, like bloody Henry Higgins comes to Africa...so they worked it out.

To barter, Mattheus tells the mercenaries that Kyle Reeber is a drug trafficker and they believe him and when they confront Reeber for drugs, he claims he has none and so they beat him with rifle butts and after searching everywhere and not finding any drugs, they break out their stash of sniffing glue and kill him.

And just so you know, Jana loves Mattheus despite knowing this and he won’t give her the time of day. She keeps trying to hook up with him and he’s busy, ‘sorry love’ he says by candlelight ‘but these poems aren’t going to write themselves, are they?’

**

And now that we’ve had our Rant Interlude n° 99 Lento e doloroso, masticando amaro, kids, I can unveil my latest rant for your chewing pleasure.

The key is that the target cannot be the same tired old targets. I think we should pick on defenseless old people or, well, yes, small children. Don’t bother freaking out. This is the way a disease works. Nobody whines about a disease or virus singling out the young and weak or old and weak, do they? They just accept it and hope they aren’t next. They are relieved, kids, don’t let them tell you otherwise. All this bullshit about oh, the poor children or oh, the poor old people…it’s a smoke screen because what they really care about is; Thank fuck it’s not me!

So the target is everyone who is NOT old or weak or too young to protect themselves. Nor is it women in general who are still often victims.

The target will be the Fucktard Brothers.

We all know who they are, the ones accused of a combined 59 charges including rape and sex trafficking. Top of the shit heap.

Big manly men. The self-made alpha, the sigma, the man who refuses to be a victim, shouters of the Bugattis-and-discipline gospel where weakness is a choice and real men dominate.

Ok maybe it’s not about them because there are fuck-ohs all over this shitty planet, spread liberally through the human population like oleo so they are nothing new.

The real fucktards are their followers because it’s the followers, not the Fucktard Brothers themselves who give the Fucktard Brothers credibility.

And the Fucktard Brothers, that’s right, those manly men are currently where they belong, in a cage in Miami, filing motions, having lawyers argue they’re too fragile to stay in general population because they’ve got “a target on their backs.”

All of that is funny. We got ourselves some real knee-slappers of irony.

But it’s sweet fuck-all compared to the best part kids, which is not the Fucktard Brothers themselves but their chimpazoid followers and let me tell you, the best part of all this is that it is funnier than any Hollywood smart arse director or screenplay writer could come up with. It’s the best fucking comedy show I’ve ever seen.

Because last week, the day the Fucktard Brothers hearing was supposed to happen before it got bumped to the 27th, supporters gathered outside the Federal Detention Center in Miami and did coordinated push-ups on the pavement in the Florida heat, chanting “Free Top G.” Signs like “Thank you Andrew Tate for teaching us BRAVERY” and “Tates are heroes.” One outlet called it the “Alpha Army descending with testosterone and cardboard signs.”

Cardboard signs? The PTA of Heroic Alpha Males burning their Campbell Soup coupons in a bonfire of insanity, carrying cardboard fucking signs?

What kind of man carries a cardboard sign instead of a fucking metal or better yet, Valyrian steel shield?

The kind of man who needs to pretend to be a man to believe he is a man.

Let me let you in on a secret, kids. A man knows he’s a man. He carries himself with silent dignity and holds himself true to a higher standard. Not an ice cold shower at 6 in the morning. That’s self-hate macho masochism, boys and girls. That’s what they call overcompensation. Sing it with me, kids!

“A cardboard sign
for two men
too hard to do
their time.”

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It’s been awhile since Unka Bing has had a chance to really pop a vein, kids. That’s because it’s too fucking hot to complain. Move my mouth? Too much work when your physical body is transforming into a Patrick Ewing sweat puddle.

They are making it hot down here on earth hell just to keep us down, I know it. Big Bruv is turning up the heat in order to make simple living so fucking unbearable that the idea of wasting time and energy to complain is too horrifying to contemplate. You are only looking to fold yourself into some cheap survival tactic.

That’s the plan: put a bunch of crazy people in charge who want to tear it all down, piss and shit all over the shitty world we live in and then turn up the heat like a fucking frying pan. Can you think of a better way to silence a revolt? Everyone lying on the ground like cats, too exhausted to move. We’ve seen the blueprints.

Just watch how individual human consciousness gets melted away by the heat and cheap survival tactics to become the new adaptation rather than complain (“il faut faire avec”, the French say. What the fuck does that even mean? It's a stupid phrase meaning deprive yourself, that’s what it is kids. A sort of corporate chimp’s verbal drooling into a paper cup of shut the fuck up. They are all making do because they have no other feckin choice and why is that? Because the world’s new tactic to the rollercoaster hell we are all riding in, is to make living so unpleasant that a world where your only permitted response is to bear it.)

**

Now that the heat hate is over, I can move on to my real complaint of the day, which is groups of people. Groups of people? Well, I am not, contrary to what my breadcrumb trail of critics will shriek, advocating the gathering-of-three rule.

That’s their line, not mine. Two is company, three’s a crowd; the timid say it, the proverb-clutchers, the ones who get nervous the instant a third body enters the room. Not the more the merrier either, because nobody really says that, nobody actually wants more, except insecure people who think a lot of people around them means they’re popular and therefore right. Losers who conflate numbers with reality. (Yes, you, corporate structure management fucktards, you who turn meaningless figures into spreadsheets and force feed them as a new reality.)

But Unka Bing is no such coward. Where the fearful stop at three, I extend the franchise. Three may congregate. Let three bloom. Let four, ten, nineteen roam free with my blessing, behold the largeness of the man! My quarrel begins only at twenty, at the phalanx, the swarm, the lanyard-cohort that fills the entire width of the Rue des Rosiers moving at the speed of continental drift.

So the idea is that groups of 20 or more must be banned to save society from itself.

Now, whoa Nelly, I can hear some of you trying to shout through sweat blistering across your lips making you sound more like uvular "R” fighting to be free. It isn’t fair to people who like to travel in groups? Nobody is saying 20 people can’t get together in their own backyard, so long as I don’t live next to them and they aren’t making any excessive noise.

What I’m against is large groups going out in public. And I’m suggesting that these groups, these swathes and swarms of banality locusts, should not be fined, not ticketed, not gently discouraged with signage in four languages.

They should be banned, plain and simple. I’m not saying they should end being the fish in the barrel getting shot. Not even a mass killing like ecological culling or population management for their own good.

Just banned, like smoking in your office or on planes. Just snap of the fingers and your rights are gone.

Single-use plastics, gone.

So why not something truly repulsive?

Venice has limited guided tourist groups to 25 people in the historic centre, Murano, Burano and Torcello since August 2024. It also bans tour-guide loudspeakers and prohibits groups from stopping where they obstruct pedestrian traffic, especially bridges. The stated reasons include residents' tranquillity and pedestrian mobility.

Barcelona went further in Ciutat Vella: maximum 20 people for guided groups in the relevant restrictions, no megaphones, and groups have to keep moving except in designated places. The Picasso Museum likewise caps groups at 20 and splits anything larger.

This is a shit response.

Twenty fat fucking tourist nobs standing around with the blank gaze of lobotomy patients is just as bad as fifty. They still take up too much space. They still move at the speed of its stupidest cell.

It’s still the idea of twenty people yoked to the pace of the least aware unit among them, the one who stops dead in the exact centre of the staircase because something caught its eye, and the entire body clots behind it, twenty abreast, filling the full width of every doorway, every landing, every chokepoint the architecture offers, because the leviathan does not pass through a space, it consumes it. It strips the sightlines. It clots the flow. It leaves a wake of degraded experience trailing behind it for everyone downstream, and it will never know, because downstream is outside itself, and, say it with me, kids, outside itself does not exist.

A group of twenty is still loud. Not to communicate. It has nothing to communicate; it saw nothing, it understood nothing, it has no content to transmit. It is loud to take attendance. The noise is the swarm confirming to itself that it is still assembled, a constant low bleat of terror that one cell might have detached and be experiencing something alone, unwitnessed, unphotographed, which to the organism is indistinguishable from death. So it bleats. It keeps count. It follows the raised paddle of its guide, the antenna, the little numbered lollipop held aloft all because it has paid, with actual money, to have its attention pointed away from the city it crossed a continent to see and directed instead at the back of the paddle-bearer’s head. It travelled two thousand kilometres to look at a stick and take photos they will post on social media hoping their self esteem will be certified in the glory halls of mass banality and they can in turn feel better about themselves for a few seconds before the next wave of anxiety settles in.

The thing these swarm-apologists will never admit, the ones who tell me to relax, it’s just people enjoying themselves, they whine, they have as much right to be here as you: No they fucking don’t because first off, I am not twenty people. I am one. Nearly invisible.

These hordes do not enjoy themselves. Look at them. There is no joy in the leviathan, only the frantic administrative labour of not being alone. The birthday horde that swallows half a restaurant, the tour that swallows the whole staircase, the wedding party of forty pretending to a closeness none of them feel.

These are not celebrations, boys and girls. They are twenty, forty, sixty people each privately terrified of the silence, herded together not by affection but by the mathematics of dread, each one keeping a ledger of reciprocal turns, each one scraping the bottom of the barrel to fill a table so that for one evening they can pretend somebody would notice if they stopped existing. And nobody would. That is why the group must be large. A small group cannot sustain the illusion. You need the horde, the volume, the horror.

So, no. Fuck groups of people, and double fuck groups of tourists.

That’s my real complaint. A group of 10 000 people marching in protest of something, or 100,000 even better, providing they are marching for or against something I am for or against. This is an important distinction. Groups of people are not in and of themselves an evil thing. It’s when they are doing nothing but hoarding space because they are too lazy and stupid and scared to go on their own, that it becomes a problem.

So ban them. Oh we all know what banning does. Nothing. Not unless you’ve got groups of jackbooted people determined to enforce the rule and I’m not trying to condone jackbooted enforcement but look, maybe for groups of 20 or more tourists, it’s time to say enough democracy and freedom.

And let’s be honest, legislating this fix will fail because the leviathan is protected by an entire economy of coach operators and lanyard-printers and guides holding sticks, all of whom are tourism parasites. Tourism parasites, in case you didn’t get the memo, are all of those who sell jalopy trinkets, Eiffel Tower key chains, Chat Noir t-shirts, Arc de Triomphe bottle openers and shit-quality postcards. They prey on the bad taste of people who shouldn’t be seeing sites they are too stupid to understand. They will complain that they have a right to art just like everyone else and I will agree with them. Just in groups, if you are too scared to travel alone, of less than twenty.

And twenty isn’t an arbitrary figure. For decades, foundational assembly laws (like the UK’s historic Public Order Act) explicitly defined a public assembly as a gathering of “20 or more persons” in a public space. If a crowd was under 20, police generally had fewer powers to impose conditions. Once a group reached 20, the state legally classified it as a major event, giving authorities the right to dictate where they could stand, how much noise they could make, or force them to disperse.

We can speculate that the heat is doing the job for us to some degree. One advantage Europe has to keep groups of tourist Americans from wanting to visit is that there is no air conditioning. In Europe, if there is heat, you are obliged to suffer through it. It’s part of our existential nature to cherish suffering. This is not the American way. Suffering is for the poor, is the American way. But in America, even the poor can satisfy their needs in meat-locker interiors. It’s interesting to note that the vast majority of low-income people in America have air conditioning, with estimates showing that roughly 80% to 83% of households living below the poverty line own an AC unit. So a European continent where suffering is the reward for living is not a destination. Less tourist groups from America, check.

The problem now is all the other countries produce mass tourism and they don’t care about suffering. They eat suffering for breakfast.

The problem is not that poor people have air conditioning in America, the problem is that you cannot threaten a man from China (+40% tourists vs 2023) with weather for example, when he’s flown in from a city where the sky is already the colour of a wet cigarette, where the air arrives pre-installed in the lungs, where “clear day” means you can see the next building. You cannot wilt someone with a heatwave who commutes fourteen hours through that soup to a bunk he rents in shifts, who works under a camera that files his face, his gait, his social score before he’s finished blinking.

Nefarious tactics fail as well because there are counter measures. In Paris the groups became such reliable marks for muggers and luxury-theft crews, the assumption being they move in packs stuffed with cash for the Vuitton pilgrimage, that the theft didn’t shrink the swarms one bit, but it did produce the single most beautiful bureaucratic image of the age: the Chinese Ministry of Public Security now co-ordinates joint patrols with the French, deploying its own officers to the Paris landmarks in peak season, to translate for the robbed, to fast-track the stolen-passport paperwork, to shepherd its own citizens through the consequences of having come.

Think about that. They escaped the surveillance state for a week and it followed them to the foot of the Tour Eiffel, in uniform, to help. The eye that files your gait at home now files it in front of Notre-Dame. There is no leaving the leviathan. It just changes flags at the border and waits for you by the gift shop.

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Listen up, boys and girls. Unka Bing needs to walk you through something.

I just finished trying to read a piece in The Paris Review called “A City Bigger Than a Bomb: Dispatch from Beirut,” and I’m here to show you exactly how a publication with serious credibility can publish serious bullshit and call it literature.

The author, from what I can gather, is an accomplished freelance writer and photographer. Decade in Lebanon. Before that, Iraqi Kurdistan. ISIS coverage. Mosul. Syrian refugees. The CV is real. The credentials are there. Which makes what happened next even more interesting.

Someone at Paris Review—an editor, presumably—read this essay and said: yes, this is good. Print it.

Now here’s where you need to pay attention, because this is how the con works.

The Lazy Foundation

Let’s start simple. The essay opens with: “I once read...”

Boys and girls, do you know what that means? It means the author has no fucking idea where he got his information, and he doesn’t care.

I’ve once read that Napoleon was short. I’ve once read that we use ten percent of our brains. I’ve once read that Elvis works in a garden centre outside Doncaster.

Unfortunately, I no longer remember where.

Your contributor at Paris Review has embraced this methodology as legitimate scholarship.

Then we get: “a group of D-Day veterans.”

Not “Company D of the 116th Infantry.” Not “Ranger Battalion survivors from Dog Green sector.” Just... a group. Undefined. Floating in space like some magical council of unnamed wisdom-givers.

Which group? Omaha? Utah? Airborne? Engineers? First assault wave? Later arrivals? The village bowling club?

The essay doesn’t tell you. The author apparently doesn’t know. Or doesn’t care. Those are the same thing in literary terms.

How to Put Words in a Dead Man’s Mouth

Here’s where it gets interesting, kids. Here’s where disingenuousness becomes art.

The author writes:

“A group of D-Day veterans were shown Saving Private Ryan and asked whether the beach-landing scene was true to life. They all replied along similar lines. Everything that happened in the movie, every horrible death and dismemberment, had happened before their eyes, but not in such a concentrated manner. The space between had mattered. The time between had mattered.”

Now I’m going to tell you what actually happened versus what the author claims happened.

What actually happened: Veterans watched a movie. Some of them said: yeah, the chaos was right, the deafening realism was right, the colour of the bloody water was right. But it was compressed. In real life, there were gaps. Waiting. Silence. Those gaps mattered because they made you think you were going to die, or you’d already died, or you weren’t sure which.

What the author claims happened: The veterans sat down and philosophised about “the space between” and “the time between” as existential constructs. They elevated their traumatic experience into poetic language about intervals and presence.

Do you see the difference, boys and girls?

One is a literal, straightforward critique about movie editing versus real-life pacing. The other is a highly stylised philosophical reframing where the author has taken what actual people said and dressed it up in literary language they never used and probably never would have used.

He put words in their mouths. Or at least, he put his own interpretation over their words until the distinction disappeared.

Bob Slaughter—Company D, 116th Infantry, 29th Division, actually fucking there—gave interviews about the movie. He confirmed Spielberg got it right. But he doesn’t fit the narrative about “the space between,” so he doesn’t appear in the essay.

Convenient, that.

The Real Crime

Here’s what I need you to understand: this isn’t just sloppy writing. This is worse.

The author took real trauma: the literal slaughter of nineteen-year-old draftees trapped in a machine-gun bottleneck on Omaha Beach, and he appropriated it. He took their suffering and cleaned it up. Sanitised it. Turned it into a neat, poetic aphorism that would sound profound in a literary magazine.

And then he used that appropriated trauma as a metaphor for his own anxiety.

Let me say that again so you don’t miss the shit bubble: he used D-Day to make his wedding planning during a modern conflict sound profoundly tragic.

The veterans gave him material. He gave them a philosophical framing they never agreed to. The result is that their actual horror, the waiting, the fear, the senseless death, gets laundered into his domestic narrative about navigating timelines and relationships in Beirut.

It’s a literary selfie where the real people who suffered become props in his story about himself.

And it fucking fails. Not because the writing is bad, but because the enterprise is fundamentally dishonest.

What “Concentrated” Actually Means

Let me ask you something. When the author writes that the movie showed everything “not in such a concentrated manner”—what does that mean, exactly?

Concentrated geographically? Temporally? Cinematically? Spiritually? As a fucking reduction sauce of inherent self-indulgence to create this specific brand of elite literary nonfiction?

It means nothing. It’s a big shit sandwich of nothingness. It’s vague enough to sound profound while being empty enough to contain whatever the reader wants to pour into it.

That’s the whole trick of this kind of writing, kids. You make a statement so abstract that it’s unfalsifiable. You can’t argue with it because there’s nothing there to argue with.

Why Paris Review Is Complicit

Now here’s the thing that really matters.

Paris Review is a serious publication. They have standards. Or they claim to. They get submissions. They’re supposed to read them. They’re supposed to ask: is this clear? Is this true? Is this ethical?

Instead, someone waved this through. Maybe they looked at the author’s CV—Kashmir photographer, ISIS coverage, Mosul—and thought: this person is serious, so this must be serious, so let’s print it.

Maybe they didn’t read it at all.

Either way, Paris Review published this appropriation of trauma, dressed it up as literary nonfiction, and gave it credibility. They said: this is the standard we’re willing to maintain.

That’s not a mistake. That’s a choice.

This Trump Comparison Isn’t a Digression

Here’s where I’m going to tie this to something that seems unrelated but absolutely isn’t.

We live in an age where the most powerful man in the world stood up and whines “fake news” every time he hears something he little shit ears in this mouse wheel mind didn’t like. He treats objective reality as a fluid, malleable substance that exists only to serve his ego. When the facts didn’t match his narrative, he changes the facts.

Most of you thought this was a problem because he was the most powerful man in the world.

But he wasn’t the originator. He was just the loudest.

Your Paris Review author does the same thing. He takes what the D-Day veterans actually said: a literal critique of movie pacing, and he alters it. He changes the facts to match his narrative about time and space and tragedy. He treats objective truth as something he can reshape to serve his literary vision.

Trump does it to protect his fragile ego.

Your author does it to make his wedding anxiety sound profoundly tragic.

Same mechanism. Same dishonesty. Different scale.

And Paris Review, by publishing it, says: we’re okay with this. This is the standard.

What Comes Next

Here’s what I want you to understand, boys and girls.

This isn’t about one bad essay or one careless editor. This is about a culture, a sheltered, upper-middle-class literary culture, that has completely lost touch with the difference between interpretation and dishonesty.

It’s about a world where you can take real suffering, launder it through your own anxiety, dress it up in literary language, and call it profundity. And a major publication will give you a platform.

It’s about a world where objective reality, what actually happened, what people actually said, is treated as a starting point for your own narrative rather than a constraint on it.

The veterans didn’t say what the essay claims they said. But the essay was published anyway. Because the aesthetic value of the metaphor mattered more than the truth of the claim.

That’s what you’re paying for when you read Paris Review now. Not clarity. Not truth. Not even good writing. You’re paying for the performance of those things, with all the actual substance quietly replaced by something more convenient.

Do better, jesus fucking christ. And when you see it happening boys and girls, when you see someone appropriating trauma or reshaping facts or treating objective truth like it’s just another narrative device, call it out. Stomp on it. Shit on it. Flush it into the terlet of fake human culture and move on to something that is more honest and critically thoughtful.

That’s the only antidote.

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They called a mid-week meeting on Monday afternoon causing the chickens to cluck nervously. Some sort of decision had been made.

When we assembled in the board room I thought this was the closest I’d ever been to the Directeur Général Bertrand since he took the helm. It reminded me of the proximity of Gavrilo Princip to Archduke Franz Ferdinand when the Archduke’s car stalled right in front of the Moritz Schiller café, where Princip happened to be standing.

The proximity allowed me to see that Bertrand was not a man of consequence. It’s a strange thing, being in a room with a man who reminded me of the kid who got picked on in the playground. The one I never quite liked enough to bother defending.

He has zero charisma. None. When he speaks, it’s as if a centipede had developed a voice; it’s a half-rasp soprano that barely sounds human, emerging from somewhere behind his gums.

Better still, before he even bothered to get to the substance of the emergency meeting, we had the ritual of the seating chart. A temporary employee was sitting in the chair at the head of the table and everything ground to a halt until the hierarchy was visually restored. No introduction, no leadership, just the silent, petulant enforcement of the hierarchy playing out in his sandbox mind while insisting that the temp move out of what he had deemed his rightful place at the head of the table. Big Daddy Dumbfuck.

As he began his expiatory droning a stray thought took hold: his voice reminds me of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, particularly those fluttering, vestigial gills along its neck. Every time he spoke, I found myself waiting for those imaginary slits to open and close.

This is the man running Dumbfuck Inc. He started by suggesting that we all take part in the debt recovery process, a task currently handled by a law firm.

The department is already a month behind. When our entire computer system crashed for two weeks last fall, he didn’t come to fix it; he came to talk to us about opening an office in Rennes. It’s goal displacement of the highest order. He couldn’t solve the data migration crisis, so he invented a new office. He can’t manage to figure out a solution to the backlog crisis, so he turns around and gavages the staff with a backlog they haven’t metabolised yet. It’s not efficiency; it’s just the hammer looking for a nail.

He cleared his throat, that raspy, flaccid sound and announced his master plan. We’re over a thousand files behind. Over a year ago he declared categorically that he was against allowing employees to work overtime. Presumably this was because he viewed the employees, being French, as the kind who spend more time smoking cigarettes outside the entrance of the building and taking coffee breaks every fifteen minutes than they did working. Professional loafers and skivers engaged in that beautiful French tradition of présentéisme, meaning the ritualized, performative act of being at your desk simply to be seen. It is the antithesis of productivity, functioning on the belief that occupation of a chair equals value produced.

Not unlike Bertrand’s belief that merely holding a meeting accomplishes something meaningful.

In any event, the gist of this meeting, it is quickly clear to everyone, is to repackage overtime as his personal gift to us.

The goal is to clear the entire backlog over two months of “voluntary” overtime, right in the middle of the hottest summer in French history, while half the staff is on vacation and the IT system is preparing for another catastrophic data migration. It’s optimism on an industrial scale, untethered from anything resembling reality.

The room, predictably, turned into a powder keg. The Corporate Banshee from the commercial team, a chain-smoking, corporate toady who croaks loud, gibberish word salads filled with meaningless corporate jargon, began shouting insults at her colleagues, using her sandpaper voice emanating from the depths of her lizard-leather skin, to claim hysterically that she was bleeding clients, the lifeblood of the shareholders, all because our team, the only people paid by the document produced rather the decibal level achieved in their Jerry Lewis joke telling, was causing client dissatisfaction.

Representatives of our team fired back. Insult for insult. Commercial team lies to sell products to customers who then complain about us when the ugly reality of the contract limitations comes to light. The commercial team, promising a stairway to the fucking stars and treating the very clients they are lying to in order to profit from, like elderly grandparents lost in the wilderness of corporate France. Ass-smoochy bromides and back-stabbing sibilations about what a bunch of lazy, client-hating degenerates our team was.

It was extraordinary to witness such raw institutional hatred. Bertrand sat there, fingers flat on the table, and announced with the meticulous, dead-eyed mimicry of a human response, “I am furious,” as if his feelings were the only thing that mattered while the building burned around him. Then he had the gall to declare, “Nobody is accusing anyone of anything.” and pretending that too was reality while one side shouted their accusations against the other. What else would you expect from The Boy Blunder who thinks that by pronouncing words, he can alter reality?

I am furious, he repeated as if trying to convince himself he was.

“We don’t have to do anything,” He suggested finally, opening his imaginary briefcase of imaginary ideas and imaginary solutions. “We can just say ok and shrug and do nothing. I don’t have to be here. I don’t have to hold this meeting.”

The Boy Blunder knows this is disingenuous. He knows perfectly well nobody in that room is going to say, “Excellent idea, let’s do absolutely nothing.” But he wants the moral satisfaction of having been the one who “suggested” it before everyone resumes pretending to solve the problem.

It’s the corporate equivalent of a child folding his arms and saying: “Fine. I don’t want to play.”

He isn’t proposing a solution. He’s staging a tiny act of principled sulking in front of people who already don’t give a shit about him or his project plan.

The climax of this circus was The Reveal. The true purpose of the meeting.

He told us he had prepared something with his “little friend” Gemini. He acted like a child unveiling a finger painting, waiting for applause for a logo and a slogan that had not been created by him or any other human. Not even a legitimate pay-AI programme but the free version of the shitty bargain basement Gemini AI which would be ranked even beneath Grok if Grok weren’t the product of a group run by a South African Ketamine Kid, his Ozempic face bloated by Nazi propaganda and a hallucination of his exploding space rockets programme.

Because Bertrand is a French Creature from the Black Lagoon, with his undulating, vestigial gills, he pronounced Gemini, rubbing between his gums and that mealworm rasp—: “Jem-i-neee.”

It was doing its best impression of a real word while riding through that gum-rasp delivery. Somehow, the mangled pronunciation made the finger-painting logo even more fitting; it was a half-formed word for a half-formed idea, delivered as if he weren’t even sure himself what he was announcing.

This was the climax. Not the overtime, not the backlog, but the reveal. He stood there, hovering over his little friend, “Jem-i-neee.” Silence hung in the room until he finally murmured, “Well, if nobody wants to see it...”

Eventually, a few voices prodded him, “Go on then.”

He unveiled the slogan: GRANDIR ENSEMBLE.

And then, “Oooooh.” “Aaaaah.”

A few people in the room actually murmured, as if he had painted the Sistine Chapel of brilliant ideas instead of revealing a kindergarten-level sketch made by an algorithm a teenager would use to design a birthday card.

I sat there, half-listening, terrified that if I allowed my mind to go beyond the shock of sharing this existence with these delusional ass puppets, and that this fucking human sea cucumber, vomiting out his own internal organs to distract the predator, was the CEO of the largest niche guild of stamp-pushers in France, I would unleash a bone-shattering rage. He was standing there pouting that we didn’t want to see his AI-made design for pumping us full of enthusiasm for his revolutionary solution, make his employees work more during summer months so he could cosplay decision making from his nursery school of dumbfuckery. I got up and left, biting my tongue so hard I could taste the blood in my mouth.

I walked back to my desk wondering whether I had just attended a management meeting or watched an aging Big Mouth Billy Bass unsuccessfully courting the room with a motivational mating display generated that very morning by his little friend. Either way, the backlog remained exactly where I had left it.

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Paris is running two operating systems simultaneously and they have never once acknowledged each other’s existence.

On June 23rd, 2026, as fifty-four departments went to red canicule alert and nights hit 28 degrees (That's warm enough, kids, that the normal human body cannot properly recover. Now those pampered fucks among you throttling the feckin air conditioning at full force while the planet burns, don't worry, I know you have no idea what I'm on about,) Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson, Dior's creative director, moved his show from 2:30pm to 9am to beat the heat.

Guests arriving at the Musée Nissim de Camondo found cold towels, parasols and strawberries served in individual Dior boxes on every seat. The strawberries were not random. They referenced Chardin’s 1761 painting Basket of Strawberries, chosen by Anderson for its quality of empathy. Empathy for the ordinary. Formality losing its grip, by the way boys and girls, means tuxedos loosened, denim ripped, sequins flashing, disco-ball boots stepping through a house built on old-world taste. You see? Shocking in its audacity. Close your eyes kids. Trading grandeur for sincerity is not for the faint of heart.

So watch heart-warming Dior “trading grandeur for sincerity” with a luxury fashion show that cost upwards of five million euros to put on. For a bunch of underfed humans to put clothes on that few can afford to buy and fewer still would want to buy at any price, and walk in them in front of a heaping pile of wealth called celebrity, no matter how obscure, to be part of the witnessing of this new-found modesty.

You find the sincerity. Take a deep, dark look.

On the same day, June 23rd, a volunteer from Les Petits Frères des Pauvres visited Marguerite Lahousse-Delrieu, 88 years old, in her apartment. The thermometer read 33 degrees. He adjusted her shutters. She said: toute seule, c’est triste. Alone, it’s sad. She was also afraid. If someone knocks at the door, she said, if the electricity cuts out, I have nobody around. She is not a concept. She does not have a Chardin. She has a volunteer once a week and a fan that stops working above 35 degrees.

On the same day, Le Figaro ran a piece asking whether the legal requirement (one cool room per nursing home, 25 to 26 degrees, accessible in theory) was sufficient to protect the elderly during extreme heat. The question was posed twenty-three years after 15,000 people died in France in two weeks, the majority of them old, the majority of them alone, the majority of them in apartments exactly like Marguerite’s. Twenty-three years of asking whether one room is enough.

Three deaths of people aged 80 to 95 were recorded in the Gironde during this episode. Described in a report published that same morning as mortalité évitable. Evitable mortality. A technical term meaning: we knew this would happen and we did not want to stop it.

C’mon, old people die. That’s their job. Tell stories about the good old days and then die. Especially in the heat with no way to cool their fragile, skeletal bodies. Some might argue that an air-conditioned room would kill them faster than the heat. That’s how fragile old people are and Dior is not designing clothes lines for old people too busy dying to pay attention. Not even for strawberries.

This is a business decision, just like Jonathan Anderson's decision to loosen formality's grip: tuxedos loosened, denim ripped, sequins flashing, disco-ball boots stepping through a house built on old-world taste.

Some attendees had to leave mid-show, not out of boredom but because despite the earlier hour, the heat was still overwhelming. The whole crowd was frantically fanning itself. To promote empathy for the dying seniors, water was in limited supply.

Moving a show to 9 am was also a business decision.

What stars bothered getting up that early from their 5 am cocktail parties to suffer heat stroke before noon is another matter. The front row delivered, we are told, “expected star power”: LaKeith Stanfield, Little Simz, James Marsden, Drew Starkey, Mike Faist, 070 Shake, Alexander Ludwig and Sam Nivola. If you haven't heard of them, kids, they aren't stars. They are flashlights to the stars, every one of them.

Dior’s calculation, we cannot deny, is entirely rational. The people dying in the flats are not the customer. They were never the customer. They don’t exist in the same city, only in the same coordinates, under the same sun, breathing the same air that the models walked through in heavy coats at 9am while the photographers crouched and the fans sat on every seat and the strawberries waited in their boxes stamped with a name that means something to people who fly to Paris for a week and stay in hotels with functioning air conditioning.

The official death toll for this canicule will be released in August. It requires weeks of statistical processing — excess mortality calculated against a baseline, communes reporting in, numbers compiled, a press release drafted. By August the photographers will be back in New York. The strawberry boxes will be recycled. The Chardin reference will be filed under successful campaigns.

Marguerite’s name we already have. The others we are still waiting for. They are dying now, today, in the gap between the living and the officially dead, in rooms the law does not require to be cool, in a city that knows and is counting and will tell us later when it no longer matters.

Empathy for the ordinary, the concept said. Trading grandeur for sincerity.

The kitchen maid is on the fifth floor. She has no elevator and a broken fan and she will be a number in August and a footnote by September and by October she will be nothing at all, which is what she was to begin with, which is the whole point, which is the geometry.

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This morning I arrived at the office in the middle of a heat wave to find the air conditioning blasting and the windows wide open.

Why?

Because some of these fucking ghouls sit there wrapped in little shawls like ninety-year-old ladies on a windy pier. They complain about the cold and make everyone else suffer the consequences of their malfunctioning internal thermostats.

Some people sweat through a blizzard. Others sit shivering in the middle of a canicule, convinced the rest of humanity should adjust accordingly. They whine about the cold and make everyone else suffer their internal temperature which never regulates.

I slammed all the windows shut, caterwauling incoherently so loud their powdered wigs and dentures loosened and fell out. People are trying to kill me.

Almost before I can settle in, I am reminded that I have to attend a meeting about a meeting this morning.

We are now a full month behind on all targets. This is not a metaphor. It is a measurable, quantifiable, soul-crushing fact. More importantly it is not a responsability traceable to me which, at the end of the day, is the only thing that matters in this rat lab.

The goal is never to make a decision that can be attributed to you personally. Send letters that ask questions rather than give answers. Request more documents. Note that something is incomplete without completing it. Transfer responsibility back to the client at every opportunity. If the client is incompetent, all the better. That gives us more reasons to ask for more documents, more delays, more reasons why the our activity, whatever that is, can't be activated yet.

Ultimately, if there is a sense of responsibility to attribute, it is attributed to the person one rung above me on the organisational ladder: the Corporate Parakeet.

Let me ‘splain you, kids.

The Corporate Parakeet’s job is to repeat. That is the whole job.

Let’s say something arrives from above. A directive. A strategy. A PowerPoint slide containing six bullet points and a stock photograph of two ethnically balanced colleagues pointing at a laptop. The Corporate Parakeet receives the signal and sends it downward.

It is not the source of the signal and it is not the destination. It is the wire. The difference is that a wire does not spend all day congratulating itself for having electricity pass through it.

Sandrine, the Corporate Parakeet here, does. She forwards emails with ceremonial gravity. It repeats phrases like “operational excellence” and “client centricity” with the solemn conviction of a medieval monk reciting scripture in a language she does not understand. If asked a question, she responds by forwarding another email. If pressed further, she schedules a meeting. If cornered, she produces a PowerPoint presentation.

The institution rewards this behaviour. You do not get promoted for understanding a directive. You do not get promoted for questioning a directive. You get promoted for transmitting a directive without damaging it in transit. The ideal Corporate Parakeet is therefore one that has gradually removed all unnecessary internal processes. Curiosity is lost first. Judgment follows. Eventually only transmission remains.

Years of selective breeding have produced a near-perfect specimen. It can repeat a directive without understanding it, defend it without believing it, and enforce it without accepting responsibility for it. It has become the human equivalent of a forwarded email.

This is considered leadership in France. Probably everywhere in the world but especially here.

And normally, this is the ecosystem surviving the way it was meant to survive. Undetected by humanity. Peace and quiet.

However, a new Directeur Général, Bertrand, rolled in recently with fancy new ideas about client relations.

The Directeur Général, boys and girls, does not direct the company so much as he presides over a version of it that exists primarily in spreadsheets and quarterly presentations. In this version, things move forward. Targets are met. The team is engaged. The process is being refined. It is a coherent world, internally consistent, and he believes in it the way a man believes in a country he has read about extensively but never visited.

No one will show him the penny.

Not the operations manager, whose primary function is to exist as a kind of corporate mist: present enough to suggest that something is happening between Bertrand and the floor, substantial enough to have a nameplate, thin enough to let nothing through in either direction. She does not filter reality upward. She softens it into vapor.

Not the Corporate Parakeet, who has been inside the language for so long that she no longer experiences it as language. When she writes about cohésion d’équipe and gestion dédiée she is not performing. She is reporting from the world she inhabits, which is adjacent to mine but oriented differently, toward the document rather than the thing the document describes.

And so Bertrand continues. He mumbles expectations calibrated to a reality that does not exist, directives issued into a structure designed to absorb them without consequence, genuinely convinced that the gap between what he believes is happening and what is actually happening is a management problem rather than an epistemological one.

It is like that moment in Somewhere in Time when Christopher Reeve finds the 1979 penny in his pocket. One minute you are in 1912, the romantic fantasy intact, and then the coin appears and the whole construction collapses. Poor little Bertrand has no such penny. Everyone around him has agreed, consciously or not, to keep their pockets empty so that dear Betrand will never see the penny that brings reality, the real one, not his, crashing down around him.

In any case, Bertrand has spoken, so the underlings scramble to cobble together a stage set that resembles, in some fashion, the world his vision describes, the world nobody lives in. They have done this before. They are good at it now. The memos go out. The meetings are scheduled. The metrics are adjusted until they point in the right direction. It is not dishonesty exactly. It is more like stagecraft The flat painted to look like a street, the door that opens onto nothing, the window with the light behind it suggesting a room that does not exist.

The remarkable thing is that after enough seasons of this, the actors forget they are acting. Sandrine no longer experiences the distance between the directive and the floor. She lives in the directive. When she writes that the team is engaged and the process is being refined, she is not covering for anyone. She is describing what she sees, which is the set, which she has mistaken for the city.

There is a film in which a man lives his entire life inside a television production without knowing it. Every person he has ever met is an actor. Every horizon is a painted wall. Every coincidence has been engineered by a director sitting in a control room shaped like the moon. The man is the last to know, which is also the first thing you understand watching it.

Bertrand is that man, with one important difference. There is no director. There is no control room, no Christof, no conscious architect of the illusion. The set built itself, brick by brick, memo by memo, over years of accumulated convenience. It was always easier to adjust the figures than to explain why the figures were wrong. It was always easier to schedule another meeting than to say that the last meeting had produced nothing. And so the production continued, authorless, self-sustaining, and Bertrand moved through it like a man who has never once found a penny in his pocket — not because his pockets were empty, but because everyone around him had learned, without being asked, to check them first.

Somehow a new reality wriggled through all the stopgaps and safety walls all the way into one of Bertrand’s delicate little monkey ears.

The result is that it was discovered that everything was not hunky dory rather, there was a month-long backlog in responding and reacting to customer and client demands, a décalage, a sort of data lag between the dream and the reality.

The company’s solution was to schedule two separate meetings to discuss the backlog. You got that? Don’t work to reduce the backlog because that would be the logical thing, and logic is not what we do here. What we do here is obfuscate the backlog so thoroughly, so elegantly, so professionally, that by the end of the second meeting the backlog almost seems like being ahead of schedule. We must be ahead of schedule because the time that could have been used catching up was instead used to generate slides about being behind.

This is the genius of Dumbfuck Inc. They do not solve problems. They build elegant air-conditioned cathedrals dedicated to the worship of problems. They create systems to monitor the systems that monitor the systems.

Objectives exist to track the tracking of objectives. Visibility dashboards have been created to monitor the visibility of visibility. It is bureaucracy calling itself strategy and it works perfectly as long as you never ask what it’s for.

Under each rock of stupidity in this world are thousands of people performing an elaborate and wordy pantomime of thinking.

Dumbfuck Inc. did not invent this. They merely perfected it and put it in a building with inadequate mailbox storage.

In the meeting, someone pointed out that we are understaffed, chronically and deliberately. Clients are promised delivery dates that would require actual sorcery to meet. Management’s solution: open a new office in another city so it looks to shareholders like there is a real energy behind the lethargy, a duck behind the quack.

The office won’t even be staffed. It doesn’t need to be. The office only has to be announced so illusion of progress has been set in motion.

Bertrand is proud of his ability to manipulate realities on several different levels like some sort of master illusionist. “Expansion”, he breathed lustily, as if naming the cancer cures it.

Then came the future. Oh, the future.

They spoke about things that don’t exist as if they already exist. Recruitment to staff this non-existent office was “en cours”, in progress, happening somewhere in theory. A new system was being reflected upon, imagined, which was far more important than actually implementing it. It’s as good as done if you speak the words out loud, kids. Don’t forget that. Business School will not teach you that. Only real life lessons.

What it means is that we are not really behind. It’s just that reality has not caught up with the rêverie yet. The stage set they are building for Betrand and his visions of a new office is that soon, very soon, any day now, imminently, we will not be behind. We will be so far ahead that no one will even see us any more and that is the job after all, to exist without anyone knowing you exist. That’s how you stay out of trouble in the real world, boys and girls.

That is the plan. The future reaches back and erases the past the way Bloom, in his outhouse in Calypso, tore a page from Titbits magazine to wipe himself. The document exists. It has served its purpose. We move on.

Bye bye, bad days. As it turns out, there has never been a single moment of not being behind, because they have never employed enough people to do the work that the shareholders need, the blood of babies, to keep feeding their Dracuian appetite.

We can’t kill reality fast enough, Capitaine Archibald. We need more projections.

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Somewhere between the heat wave assault and the lunch gong, I made the mistake of going outside the office yesterday.

Usually, I have street urchins fetch my lunch but the street urchins couldn’t handle the heat wave so I had to go out on my own.

Let me tell you kids, it’s a fucked up world out there, in case you hadn’t noticed.

I made the mistake of going to Monoprix which for those of you who don’t live here, is a middle class urbain French chain grocery store. It’s like if Target, Marks & Spencer Food, and a mildly stylish urban pharmacy had a French child together and left it on the steps of a Hausmannian building wrapped in organic cotton. It doesn’t wail. It makes faces of disgust and little noises like baaaaaaaah oui and oh là là.

The one positive thing I will say about Monoprix is that it has good air conditioning.

That plus is quickly lost when you step inside at around 13:00 lunch time and see the herd of automatons picking over the carcass of the chilled industrial salad shelves, picking between the same two laminated disappointments they've been rotating since Monday. Not because either is acceptable but because the other one was yesterday. Chicken or Pasta, Pasta or Fish? Shit or Piss?

Most of the French get an hour for lunch. Like most places. Many of them find it too taxing to think so they gravitate en masse to the easiest choice where they spend three quarters of their lunch in a sedated queue of hologram humans.

However, those in “cadre” positions, salaried rather than hourly, languish over a blurred afternoon lunch in a brasserie. Drink a glass of wine, maybe two and never sniff the MonoStench.

(Cadre, by the way, is the polite way of naming the globalised administrative civilisation, concentrated here in dense clusters.)

Although the “official” lunch lasts an hour for the prols, unofficially they take two because one hour of standing in a queue to eat and socialise is not enough.

(Psst - Also because people here are terrified of being seen alone. They need an equal hour of social time to smoke and drink coffee post-meal and discuss in obscure poetic terms the beauty of their mass-produced salmon pasta or sushi or whatever these fucking zombies shovel into their idiot monkey gobs feigning nutritional value.)

This is where a massive concentration of office buildings has been situated to better mask the construction money laundering scheme. The wind-up wankering that has been running here for decades, bruvahs & sistahs.

By “here”, I mean in the 8th arrondissement, kids, or what they call Le Triangle D’or, the Golden Triangle. Same street, same contractors, same permits, same disruption, cycling endlessly. The city awards contracts, contractors bill, nobody finishes, new contract awarded. Money weaves between the same hands in a circle while the street stays open and the jackhammers run. The finished product is irrelevant. The billing is the product.

But as I was saying, (as I tiptoed my way around the dazed frizzle of zombie consumerism and the constantly restocking mecha, restocking mecha. Restocking mecha whose job is to get in your way because Monoprix pays their employees to stock during the day, usually during the busiest times of the day. No overtime that way.)

That’s called managerial competence, boys & girls, in case you missed that Masters in Corporate Economics class.

As I did my tiptoeing and surveying the stock, I saw nothing but scattered remains of unsavory 8 € industrial Parzaini slop and sad plastic-wrapped salads. Forty fucking minutes of their finite lives pissed away in fluorescent misery. As far as the eye can see.

The worst part is that most are oblivious. They shuffle forward, wallets ready, fully participating in their own erasure. That’s not existence. That’s the simulacrum of existence. Soya people doing the soya version of living, going through the motions so thoroughly that the motions have completely replaced the thing itself. Why the fuck exist at all if this is what you do with your lunch hour?

I couldn’t stomach it, kids. I threw every quasi-food product I’d accumulated down in disgust and ran out to vomit into an overflowing rubbish bin.

Monoprix shopping in Monoprix air, inhaling Monoprix people at Monoprix prices.

Monoprix is also the author of The Produce Weighing Scam. This is where the customer is tasked with weighing and labeling everything before taking it for payment. Only half the items (avocados especially) aren’t even listed. You hunt like a moron while the system mocks you. Cashiers know the rules; you have to guess. Pure psychological warfare.

And when I say cashiers, I’m being generous. Not even robots (the robots are the ones descending from the offices to purchase the rudiments of their robot lunches) are standing at the checkout counter. YOU have to do YOUR OWN check-out. Which would be fine if there were a discount like ‘do your own check out for 5% off’ but no, there’s fuck all. Take it or go fuck yourself are the two options.

All while their glossy propaganda masturbates over 85+ years of trendy commerce de proximité bullshit: “Le beau et le bon accessible à tous,” fashion collabs, designer capsules. What a fucking joke.

This is what hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, accept without revolt.

Other than the shitty food, the inglorious masses of lobotomised employees who come oozing out of the construction fraud buildings for feeding time, what you also have, which I found even more mind-boggling, was that these robots masquerading as human beings with their industrial chilled tuna and cucumber salads for 12 € a gram, happily formed a payment queue at least 100 people deep.

And there they stood, these clockwork cunts, shoulder to shoulder like battery hens in suits, eyes glazed. Cluck, cluck. Living their little lives like beaks at sidewalk breadcrumbs. Abba Oui. Abba Non. Texting and subtexting. Dustmops and somnambulists.

Every few seconds the line shuffles forward one miserable step, like a dying animal trying to drag its own corpse to the watering hole. I watched a woman in her late thirties, perfumed mediocrity, blank face. Not tired. Blank. Like someone had pulled the plug behind her eyes. She was already gone. Just warm meat in Louboutins waiting to be scanned.

This is the real horror of Monoprix. Not the missing fish on Sunday. Not the self-checkout psychological warfare. It’s the sight of hundreds of relatively intelligent primates cheerfully participating in their own disassembly. Every beep of the scanner is another rivet hammered into their own metal coffin. They pay twelve euros for chilled zizz, then march back to their open-plan tombs to pretend they’re “refuelled” and “balanced.”

I turned and ran further down the avenue, wiping my Monoprix spittle chin with a Fric-Frac napkin.

Because I almost got caught. That Pavlovian drool.

They say kids, that if you stand long enough inside a Monoprix with its morgue lighting and holograms hovering in and out of achromatic horrors, you risk being sucked into the slush of their nothingness. Greasy gobs of it choking down the throat. Gurgling your life with it like a nihilistic circus clown doing the Monoprix shuffle.

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It's not called the Butterfly Effect any more. It’s called the Teletubby Con Man Effect.

You see, back in the good auld daze, before the World and specifically, patient zero America, had hitched their wagons to a neon strobe light of stupidity and selfishness, a country like Israel came, hat in hand, and begged successive US Presidents, (Bush, Obama, and Biden, for example although if Biden was a real president and not a hologram is debatable) to use American air power against Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure.

Each of them said no.

Each of them patted auld Netanyoutofhisfuckingmindhoo on his badly balding little skull and each of them said no, Benny, take your little shit show back home with you and fuck off.

Why is that? Because bombing Iran was a dumb fucking idea, that’s why.

The presidents who hadn’t used high-pigment cream bronzers and concealers layered over a sunless spray tan base to add years to their hideousness and thus, hadn’t suffered irreparable brain damage, were unanimous. It was a dumb fucking idea.

But I don’t really care any more, it’s all water flowing over the bridge like a tidal bore of nitwittery. The genie is out of the bottle and blaming Gormless Grandpa Trump might be satisfying but it doesn’t matter that he is at fault for destroying the world.

What matters is the cost of my precious fucking peanut butter is now more than 200% of the original price.

Sure, blame the moron who finally said yes to Netanyoutofhisfuckingmindhoo. He deserves it, kids. But don’t worry, the greedy pig cannot stop even when full. It continues to eat until its stomach literally ruptures, or it falls headfirst into a massive vat of swill, milk, or grain that it refused to share, ultimately drowning in the very substance it hoarded.

But don’t just hate the playah, hate the game.

Hate Frederick Winslow Taylor, the original stopwatch ghoul who taught management to measure human beings like defective machine parts. He wasn’t a bloated orange sweat-ham screaming into a microphone, but he helped build the spreadsheet religion that produced him.

Hate Toyota for perfecting “just-in-time” manufacturing, then hate every MBA parasite who decided warehouses were immoral and redundancy was weakness. The entire modern supply chain runs on one sacred but stupidly fucking unrealistic principle:

nothing in reserve,
nobody indispensable,
no margin for error,
trust the machine.

Then everyone acts shocked when one boat gets stuck sideways or one virus coughs through Wuhan and suddenly the entire planet can’t find toilet paper, insulin or microchips.

Better still, nobody learned a fucking thing because shortages are profitable. The efficiency zealots didn’t become zealots by accident. Every missing backup, every outsourced component, every “lean” miracle widened the pipeline pumping money into their own accounts.

West African peanuts get harvested, processed, put in a container, loaded onto a ship. That ship runs on fuel. Fuel prices are tied to oil. Oil prices spike when there's instability in the Middle East like, oh I dunno, the Hormuz closure, war with Iran, whatever. So the ship costs more to run, the shipping company charges more, the importer pays more, the processor pays more, the supermarket pays more, you pay more. So it’s me, at the end of the supply chain, a.k.a fucktard consumer, who is the only one who has no one to pass the cost on to.

Do you think The Donald is paying more for his spray-on skin? Lord Reptile himself? Of course not, he has never paid for his spray-on skin for a day of his life.

But here I am, crouched in my kitchen like a raccoon that just discovered rent is due, spoon-clawing the final oily smears from a jar that now costs what used to buy a week's worth of dignity; scraping with a plastic knife like a junkie, frantically checking behind the toilet tank for that one last magical dollop to complete the smothering of my final Thomas' Blueberry English Muffin. Peanut butter, my sad, reliable antidepressant, the one thing that still tastes like 1997, is betraying me at 9.79 € a jar. Had I invested in peanut butter futures, I’d be the second richest man in the world by now and it's all because we let a spray-tanned Teletubby run the empire.

I’m doing that, kids, because this is the only reliable pleasure left in late-stage, American-led world decline, and even that’s being rationed by the invisible hand that’s actually just a sweaty, orange fist wrapped around a phone at 3 a.m. taking marching orders.

Sacrifices will have to be made. My monthly contribution to the UN World Food Programme: spoiler alert: gone. Those people were only building up the nutritional strength to compete for my peanut butter anyway. The Umma Foundation, providing water to those with none, also gone. Frankly, if they want water that badly, they know what to do. Hydrate sufficiently, pack light, and join the hordes already walking towards Western Europe. We’ll sort it out when they get here.

In the meantime I’ll be in my kitchen, crouched over a jar, a plastic knife in my fist, doing what I can with what I have. Just like everyone else at the bottom of the supply chain. Just like the raccoon always does.

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This morning I woke up and eventually got around to opening my emails. Always such a life-redeeming experience. Like going through bills in the old days. Bills, bills, nothing but bills, no postcards from Haiti or Tahiti, no love letters, nothing. Just petty harassments and threats.

This morning was no different. I received an urgent email, well more like an automated threat informing me that unless I “connect” to my Bonjour RATP account within fourteen days, my account will be deleted forever, cast screaming into the digital abyss like a dissident from a Soviet encyclopedia.

BONJOUR RATP

Even the name sounds like a passive-aggressive hostage situation in a co-working space. (RATP by the way, is the official Parisian transport octopus: a creature that demands your data, your app, your eternal loyalty, while offering you Line 13 delays and the occasional existential crisis in return.)

Now, already we encounter the first philosophical problem: I do not recall possessing a Bonjour RATP account in any meaningful spiritual sense. I have never downloaded the app. I do not commune with it. I do not whisper to it in the night. It is not part of my emotional life. It is apparently some ghost-account created at some point so I could perhaps glance at whether Line 13 was catastrophically fucked as usual.

Generally speaking, I like RATP. They aren’t like the London Tube that I was held hostage to for years; a sustained waterboarding of cataclysmic clusterfuck incompetence that would make obtaining a marche da bollo in a tabaccheria in Catania seem seamless.

Generally speaking, I primarily use ligne 1 which is the most modern and efficient of all the lines, not driven by a human so no chance of the métro getting cancelled due to another in a string of labour strikes. If someone asked me, if there was a poll instead of threatening emails, if I was satisfied with Parisian public transportation and I didn’t express shock at the idea of associating myself with the filth and indignity of traveling with commoners, I’d be inclined to give positive feedback. Sure, a lot of people have Kafkaian experiences on Parisian public transport but other than the crowding and the biochemical chaos of stuffing different levels of horrible humans into the same compartment, my experience is generally not dreadful. So, a positive.

And naturally, being a law-abiding citizen of the Administrative Panopticon, I attempted to obey. I don’t want my Bonjour RATP account closed. This is the natural knee-jerk response to state-sponsored terrorism: compliance.

“Connect to your account,” the email commanded.

Excellent. Fair enough. Let us connect.

Except there is no obvious way to connect via the website.

There is however an extremely obvious way to DOWNLOAD THE FUCKING APP.

So now the penny drops. This was not an email about account maintenance at all. It was digital cattle-herding. A little bureaucratic psy-op wrapped in customer-service language. “Protect your benefits,” they coo, like a grandmother offering soup, while the actual message is: INSTALL OUR FUCKING APP OR DISAPPEAR.

When I discover this, I think: fuck this. Let me fire off a nasty reply. Only of course the email is a no-reply. They have a right to harass and threaten you but you don’t have the right to tell them to go fuck themselves.

So I look on the website for an email address or a telephone number. I find nothing.

And then comes the masterpiece.

The section entitled “Aide et Contact.”

One imagines, naïvely, contact. A phone number perhaps. An email address. A form. A pigeon. A burning signal fire on the périphérique. Anything suggesting the existence of another mammalian consciousness somewhere within the organisation.

But no, of course not.

“Aide et Contact” is in fact only “Aide.” And by “Aide” they mean a recursive labyrinth of FAQs written in the language of machine-administered despair.

“Comment contacter le service client IDFM quand je suis client Bonjour RATP?”

Who the fuck is IDFM and what does it have to do with me?

Why has public transport begun sounding like a mid-tier cryptocurrency scam run out of an abandoned industrial decay factory in Seine-Saint-Denis?

The modern world is now entirely composed of systems demanding intimacy while offering absolutely no reciprocity. Every institution wants your account, your login, your behavioural continuity, your app permissions, your notifications enabled, your “experience personalised.”

Personalised experience? PERSONALISED?

There is nothing less personal than being trapped in a no-reply bureaucratic oubliette maintained by acronymic transit goblins.

Nobody at RATP is saying: “Ah yes, Bing prefers websites and despises mandatory app ecosystems.” No. The system merely wishes to convert me into a continuously authenticated meat-token floating through a frictionless corridor of data extraction.

The dirty shit secret? None of this is for you. Not a single pixel of it. It exists so that some beige personality in an open-plan office can stand in front of a slide that says ENGAGEMENT UP 14% and feel, briefly, that his life has meaning. Meanwhile the trains are still late, the machines are still broken, and you are still standing on a platform in February wondering what series of catastrophic life choices led you here.

This is why getting anything done in our shit-fizzle post-society feels like fighting a hydra made of forms and stamps. Entire organisations exist in which nobody produces anything except other organisations. Seven layers of people managers managing people managers, engagement leads engaging with engagement leads, transformation officers transforming nothing but their own job titles, all of it generating meetings and spreadsheets and Slack noise and not one single thing of use to any living human being.

So that explains the email. That explains all of it. And somewhere in a glass-walled office, some automaton who has confused existing with living, who marks the passage of time in smoke breaks and baguettes and birthday cakes in the kitchen for people whose names he can’t remember, is looking at a dashboard showing that engagement is up, that I opened the email, that I spent several minutes on the website, that I am, in their terminology, an active user. Which I suppose I am. I am very fucking active. I am incandescent.

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Sad news, kids.

Jeanette Winterson is leaving Substack.

I know this because she wrote 800 words about it on Substack.

I am also leaving Substack.

I am announcing this now, on Substack, because that is the only way to leave Substack with sufficient dignity and visibility. A quiet departure would suggest I hadn’t really thought about it. A 800-word departure suggests I have thought about it deeply and want you to know that I have thought about it deeply, which is the point.

Winterson’s reasons are noble. Andrew Tate has a Substack account. Andrew Tate is about as far from being a human being as you can get and still walk upright on earth. He is not a man. He is a half-man, like a maggot feeding headfirst into rot while breathing through the other end, which explains both his diet and his opinions. A real man has dignity. Tate spends too much time crying about how much of a man he is to ever become one. We all know this.

Anybody worth their skin knows Andrew Tate is a piece of shit. Pimp, rapist, trafficker, poster boy for abortion. The problem is that there is so much intense competition for lead asshole in the American pantheon that some people lose track. You have the wedge of pig placenta posing as president, and the drunkfuck secretary of war firing respected military officers for refusing to break the law to serve his chimp-mind antics. The competition for biggest male asshole is stiff.

Tate might well be the Judge Holden of Americans, McCarthy’s pure war made flesh, violence as vocation, the eternal half-man, but he is not involved in the active treason currently being performed by the rat’s nest in the White House, so his status as top piece of shit humanity is, sadly, not assured. The great satan in adult diapers and jaundice yellow piss face remains capo di capi. Few are going to argue with that..

So Winterson’s indignation performance piece is spot on. We get it. She disputes it with great passion on the platform that hosts him, generating engagement for the platform that hosts him, while announcing she may stop generating engagement for the platform that hosts him.

The platform thanks her.

I am leaving for different reasons. I am leaving because Winterson is leaving, and her outrage is my outrage, and my outrage at her outrage at Tate’s outrage has become a nested outrage so deep I can no longer find the bottom of it. I am also leaving because the act of announcing you are leaving is now indistinguishable from the act of staying.

Every resignation post is a content strategy.

Every farewell is a subscriber retention tool.

Winterson knows this. She has been writing long enough to know this. She wrote it anyway.

Tate, to his credit, does not announce he is leaving platforms. He gets banned from them. There is a purity to that. He commits fully to being thrown out. Winterson threatens to walk and then asks what we should do about it. Hey? We need to coordinate this. C’mon you guyzzzzz.

We do not need to coordinate this. Winterson needs to write something so strange and devastating that it cannot be ignored, something that makes Tate and his Orcs feel the specific shame of being seen clearly by a real writer. Instead she wrote a petition nobody who matters signed, with a reassuring coda about love not running out.

Love is a remedy for everyday use.

So is leaving quietly.

I will not be leaving quietly. I will be leaving loudly, in print, on the platform I am leaving, so that you know I left and why I left and that I felt things about leaving.

My next post will be about having left, and what the afterlife of quitting a platform feels like when the platform wouldn't ban someone nobody with a functioning cortex likes anyway. Because pieces of shit like Tate only exist inside social media, apparently, which means that if Winterson resigns with sufficient moral authority, her indignation alone will ensure not only that Tate gets retroactively banned from before conception, but that every trace of his existence is eradicated before he even thinks it. Pre-crime technology, but for misogyny. The bad thought killed in the half-brain before it can calcify into the stalagmite of stupidity it was always going to become. Stercus movetur, et mundus fetet.

Wish me luck on my new adventures, kids, this is like the debarquement of the Love Boat along the river Styx.

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Here is the question nobody at Coachella is asking: where the fuck is the next generation?

Not Sombr. Sombr is not the next generation. Sombr is what happens when a twenty-year-old with a father in luxury events and a mother in communications gets a TikTok algorithm and a Warner Records cheque and decides to name-drop Jeff Buckley. Sombr is the placeholder. Sombr is the gap where a generation should be, dressed in leather pants and holding the mic for men who can’t work their own anymore.

Because that is what Coachella 2026 was. A necropark. A care home day trip with better sound equipment and worse self-awareness, where the dead are dug up, dusted off, and made to perform for people too young to remember why they mattered.

I watched a series of YouTube videos about it from Paris at 1am, kids because I couldn’t sleep and apparently simply hating myself is not toture enough.

Jack White was on the screen dressed all in black, black and white video, committing to a logic. Jack White is good because he is not eighty. In 2026 this is not a small thing. This is practically a qualification.

Iggy Pop was also on the bill, shirtless as per his contract with whatever gawd or satan or trumpathon senility train he made his deal with back in 1967. Time has done its archaeology on the man: lizard skin, impressive belly, the whole apparatus still functional but visibly rebuilt by bad decisions and stubborn refusal to die. The comments online were brutal and for once the mob was right.

Iggy Pop and Keith Richards will be the running gag presiding over the remnants of humanity after the earth is turned into a radioactive theme park for low budget intergalactic tourists.

Coachella Belly. I’m going with that to describe the horror of what I saw. Beurk: that French half-puke noise is the only appropriate critical vocabulary.

He’s been doing this since 1967. The ruin is earned. He showed up still breathing. Fine. Iggy gets a pass because Iggy is actually Iggy, not a hologram of himself, not a legacy act doing the greatest hits with ten musicians in matching outfits and synthetic hair. That would be David Byrne, who appeared later in a red suit performing Life During Wartime with clinical precision to a crowd performing the choreography of being moved. The sound was flawless. Nothing happened. Beautifully stuffed, utterly dead. Another necropark exhibit, perfectly preserved, completely inert.

Billy Corgan did not show up. Technically his body was present. Sombr — see above, the placeholder, the gap — dragged him onstage for 1979 like a prop. Corgan’s mic failed. Sombr sang it for him. Billy stood there miming to his own song while someone else’s kid performed it in front of a crowd too young to know who he was. He posted on Instagram afterwards: “Rock and roll under the desert sky.” Sure Billy. That’s one way to describe it. Rock and roll embalmed in American hell.

The Strokes sounded good which felt like cheating. Casablancas still has that voice that reminds me of Billy Idol only Billy Idols didn’t come from modeling agency genetics.

The xx played Intro. Everyone recognised it. Nobody knew why. That’s the entire xx story and always has been. Fucking soundtracks and nursing home seditive music.

Then Wet Leg showed up and thank Christ, someone under fifty with a pulse. She wore super short shorts in the desert which was both sensible and not unwelcome. Mangetout and all her sexy girations felt like a zombie rendition of middle age sex — slightly awkward, deeply ironic, vaguely suggestive, cheerfully British. The lyrics work because they never oversell it, always one half-step back from sincerity. In 2026 that distance is a superpower. But if she’s back doing Cochella 2076, still in the shorts, but this time with an Iggy-style lizard belly pouch, the kids will be thowing up in their mouths and needing years of therapy to overcome the trauma For now though, yes, they say, sex is selling and that is the difference between an artist and a necropark attraction.

And then back to the geriatric parade. Back to the past pretending that senior citizens still have teeth if you play loud music by studio musicians on stage with them.

Here is the thing about digging up the dead and making them perform: it tells you everything about the present. If Coachella in 2026 needs Jack White and Iggy Pop and David Byrne and Billy Corgan miming to his own songs to fill its stages, the question is not what’s wrong with those men. The question is what happened to the generation that was supposed to replace them. Where are they? What are they doing? Why is the best answer Sombr holding a microphone for a ghost in the necropark?

The real scandal wasn’t Sabrina Carpenter calling a zaghrouta weird. That was a twenty-five year old pop product encountering something unscripted and handling it badly for three seconds. Fine. Boring. The real scandal is that the biggest music festival in the world in 2026 is a necropark with a DJ set after.

Nobody writes that piece. It doesn’t fit the outrage template. Easier to clutch pearls at cultural insensitivity than admit we’re watching the slow embarrassing autopsy of a culture that won’t die with dignity and can’t produce a successor worth a damn.

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They’re running out of targets, kids. Not bombs, not missiles, not hatred. They have all that in breath-taking abundance. They have so much left that they are running out of shit to destroy so they need to start a new bombing campaign called Freedom.

So now you guys and girls, we need to assemble you into Bomb Squad Cheerleaders to aid and abet evil men and women as they bomb every shit hole, every air pocket, every fetid spring of hope because the world is running out of fear and targets and your puddle water innocence knows where to look to find them.

Sure, they can quack on about civilisations and oil tankers but all that talk is meaningless if they can’t find any targets. You can’t bomb prairies, kids, and expect anyone to take notice. You need BIG explosions. Attention-grabbers that howl across social media lightspeed like an inter-galactic tapeworm that screeches, suffocates, convulses, and then explodes.

So that’s your new job: hunting for targets they can point and shoot every billion dollah missile in their phallic arsenal of manhood snuff puffery at, to blow up their little Scapegoat Satan, cowering way down in his spider hole at the earth’s core and if a children’s hospital gets in the way just wait til the next news cycle to spike and decay it 30 milliseconds later and everybody forgets.

However, the targets we are hunting today boys and girls are not Scapegoat Satans but complaints.

Complaints, you giggle? Who listens to complaints when the world is on fire? I hear you, kids. And you’ve got a point.

But we aren’t talking about my personal encyclopedia of complaint letters against banks, insurers, health care providers, delivery frauds who ring your bell and run so they are on camera ‘trying’ to deliver your package. We aren’t ringing up our seasons of discontent against bureaucratic Mandrills, nor lethargy and yes, yes, we are all aware, the big x marks the spot with the donkey tail to pin on this shitty little world we created, that one we call laziness, ignorance and cowardice, the real three horsemen of the world’s current shitpocalypse.

We are talking about the one real thing there is left to complain about so hush hush and gather round our pyre of burning hope.

Let’s strip it down. Let’s pull back the iron curtain of jerkfuckery and pants that little Uakari parade masquerading as reality.

You’ve had enough of people closing their eyes and chanting to themselves waiting for a fucking Marvel hero to come and save them and their tweedle trump civilisation.

We’re sitting in the smoking remains of the modern world, pretending it’s still a functioning house because the lights flicker on now and again and Netflix buffers just fine.

America, once the Marlboro Man, and inside that Marlboro Man an “it” girl nobody let out. And inside the Trump carcass, already tunneling toward the light, the Eye Liner King Kouch Fucker, diaper pin between his teeth, the death rattle of the ivy league hillbilly, waiting his turn. Thought Butcher. Shit-Stacker. Fool Maker. Drunk on a bottle of their own pish stupidity.

That America we once knew is no longer stormy, husky, or brawling. Reduced to a mere shadow in the Truth Social Shit Circus of solipsistic cyber bullying, America is no longer even Ginsberg’s two dollars and twentyseven cents.

Sure, we always knew that the democracy thing was the longest running gag America ever created. We could see how they spent decades selling democracy like it was scripture. We knew it was closer to a traveling sales pitch: freedom on the brochure, extraction in the fine print. Ask 1953 Iran and Reza Pahlavi. Ask 1973 Salvador Allende or the kids in Iraq or anyone who got the “liberation package” and woke up to decades of miltary bases and Halliburton contracts instead of sovereignty.

But for better or worse, the statue the French gave them never finished her own sentence. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…and then what? Not give them purpose. Not give them dignity. Just enough rope to hang themselves on the pyramid scheme, just enough melting pot to cook up one day a straw-brained tan comb over with diaper rash and a puckered anus mouth.

Give them up why? Nobody really specified. Look it up. There is no reason given to give them up. Nobody at Ellis Island said we’ll fix them or make them happy or turn them into katrillionaires who can escape the 9-5 slave matrix and build wealth just by hating women and being racist. Nobody said Nothing. Just gimme. Which is also very Trumpistanian. Gimme gimme me me me.

Anyway, that was the bargain for decades. For a century or two boatloads of people floated over to the shores to live in the circus underbelly of capitalism and America gave them just what they wanted. Plus, they were the world’s muscle against tyranny, the Bruce Banner Super Size Me savior and destroyer.

Then came the turn, just like the Hulkster.

Bash at the Beach, ’96. Hogan rips off the red and yellow, goes black and white. That’s the shift. The hero stops pretending. The empire drops the mask. Not a protector, an operator. And most people kept cheering because the music didn’t change.

Now the whole thing’s being fronted by that nubchubby Rick Flair cosplayer who governs like a pay-per-view tag team of the ignorant and the venal and takes a fetid, Steatorrhean dump on the world every morning.

Every week, a new feud, a new insult, a new threat dressed up as policy.

Meanwhile, to keep our minds off the shit hustle, the hysteria machine runs nonstop. Cheap panic, high turnover: AI is coming to eat your babies and fuck your rabbit minds, Putin scrapes live embryos from open wounds with a caviar spoon, China invades Taiwan every Tuesday and never arrives, the earth will combust like sawdust and dry leaves from the next lightning strike, and aliens are sitting at the bottom of the Strait of Hormuz locked and loaded with radioactive eye lasers waiting for the right moment to finish what the humans started.

There is a problem It isn’t just the one they’re selling. All noise, all Henny Penny on loop — sky falling, sky falling — while the real shit quietly piles up.

So here we are.

Kids inherit debt and heat. Adults numb out, scroll, pill, repeat. Old money evaporates while new money hoards. Elections feel staged, wars feel transactional, technology feels like a harvesting tool all gussied up to look like progress.

The turn already happened. The hero went villain. The system didn’t collapse, it revealed itself.

The strangest part is everyone still buys tickets anyway. It doesn’t matter who rises and falls. It doesn’t matter who wins or loses. All this noise, all this bread and circus duplicity and in the end, the people don’t even want to be entertained any more, they just want to pretend to be entertained so they can tell everyone on social media who they don’t even know, how much fun they had.

The attention economy rewards volume and consistency over quality. The algorithm guiding everyone’s lives and likes and dislikes, doesn’t read. It measures engagement, and engagement is driven by frequency and emotional trigger not craft. So hype and hysteria are our new Doom Scroll Overlords.

Worse because it’s a race to the bottom that accelerates itself (call it Trumpian exceleration if you want,) more content means less attention per piece means you need more content to capture any attention at all. The content that matters to people is increasingly content that provokes the fastest cheapest emotional response. Outrage, fear, parasocial warmth. That’s where the value is. Cheap thrills.

So that’s that kids. Settle in. Pass the popcorn. The ruins still have Wi-Fi. The wolf isn’t at the door.

It’s already inside, sitting on its Epstein Island throne.

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Every single one of you who has ever worked in an office knows what it means to drown in the shit tank of living.

Not metaphorically. Literally. You feel the warm, slow rise of it around your ankles the moment you clock in. The ochre and umber of a system that is functioning but stagnant. By ten a.m. it’s up to your waist. By the time the third recurring meeting about the previous meeting starts, you’re breathing in the fumes of it as it nestles between your chin and lower lip. The worst part is you keep paddling. Because the alternative is admitting the tank has no drain and you are going to drown in the corporate septic lagoon of living.

That tank has a name. It calls itself “the company.”

It has no hands, no voice, no pulse, unless you loan it yours. Every keystroke, every telephone call from the toilet bowls of Fucktardistan that you take. Every time you bite your tongue or hollow out your own chest to provide a vacuum-sealed storage unit for the CEO’s unstated anxieties. Every weekend you quietly sacrifice so the Q3 forecast doesn’t scream like a crime scene waiting to happen, you are the one pumping blood into a corpse that died in 1997 and has been lurching forward on inertia and stock options ever since. You are pulling out your own fingernails, one by one, and calling it professionalism.

You’ve all fantasised about the coup.

Middle of the weekly sync. Some apologetic marketing-shaped mist of a human being is on slide 17 of 43, hunting for the spreadsheet that already exists in three different shared drives, when you stand up, grab the conference phone like a grenade, and scream NO! NYET! NEIN! NON! into the void. Shoot the starter pistol at the ceiling tiles. Bite the head off a bat just to make sure the room remembers you are there. Because the only way to prove you’re still human in that moment is to become briefly, gloriously monstrous.

But you don’t. You smile. You nod. You say “let’s take this offline” like a good little vassal.

And that, kids, is the exact second the monster thanks you for your service.

Look around the table. Management isn’t here to solve anything. Their entire raison d’être is survival: specifically, the survival of the parasitic layer that sits between reality and the people who still touch it. They don’t fix problems; they rename them. They don’t kill bugs; they schedule a working group to “align on the bug’s strategic vision.” They have outsourced doing the actual work so thoroughly that the concept of “doing” itself has become a dirty word spoken only by the proles.

They are not incompetent by accident. The incompetence is the feature. The Bureaucratic Blur is the point. Every email, every deck, every color-coded column is a deliberate act of obfuscation so thick you can no longer see the simple truth: this meeting is about a meeting that was already covered in an email that was already summarised in a spreadsheet that no one will ever read.

It’s not chaos. It’s camouflage.

Walk into any of these rooms and tell me you don’t feel like you’ve stepped inside a René Magritte painting. The bowler-hatted executives, faces perfectly hidden behind a floating green apple. That apple is the corporate mythology: shiny, branded, focus-grouped, legally indemnified. Behind it? A human being who used to have dreams. Now there’s just the apple. Interchangeable. Empty. Safe.

And you? Well boys and girls, you will be the guy or gal trying to read the shredded document while the shredder is still running. You know the subject is right there in front of you, but every time you reach for it, the apple drifts a little closer and blocks the view.

That’s not a bug. That’s the entire operating system.

We have reached the Death of Recourse.

Your restaurant ticket credits that you are legally entitled to every month, that 208 € that appeared credited on your restaurant ticket voucher like clock work just like your pay, is no longer accessible. In fact, the middle man who has been hired by your employer for reasons of security and uniformity, advises you on the day of payment “oh hey buddy, you know that 208 € you’ve got coming to you.? Well, good news: we’ve decided to create a new app for it.”

Now, on the other hand, you can have access to your 208 € only once you’ve downloaded the app. You see, we are performing a digital colonisation of your private property. It is the final stage of the Vassal and Lord dynamic where the Lord no longer just owns your labor during the day; they want to own the device in your pocket.

The reason you must use our app is simple. We have decided that it’s time to move from a transactional relationship to a surveillance relationship. You see, we don’t just want you to spend your credits; we want to know where you are when you spend them, how long you stared at the screen before clicking, and what else is on your phone.

There is no throat to choke. There is only a Terms & Conditions checkbox that you must tap before you are allowed to eat. The Master-Slave dialectic didn’t evolve into socialism or even enlightened capitalism. It evolved into a fucking horror movie where the slave stares at a loading spinner and the master is a Terms of Service agreement written by lawyers who will never meet you.

You thought the chin-ups and the vodka and the 80-hour weeks were building a career. Cute. They were just mandatory exercise in the prison yard. The treadmill was pointed at a future that got sold in a leveraged buyout while you were asleep. The autonomy you felt? Just a long leash that they will snap like number 2 pencil and bring your flying back. Overnight someone in a glass tower you will never visit decided to reel it in.

And now the Looney Tunes circle is closing.

You know the one: the black iris swallowing the screen while the rabbit keeps running in place. That’s not nostalgia. That’s your life. Congratulations!

Congratulations. Again: Everything is accelerating into farce faster than your nervous system can metabolise it. The lunatic with the match isn’t outside the building. He’s the one who green-lit the app that holds your groceries hostage. He’s the one who decided your pride was a legacy bug that needed patching.

You sit in the Corporate Shitbowl and they tell you the smell is called “innovation.” You are not the gazillionaire you were promised in the onboarding video. You are the biological filter paper. You are the wetware converting their ideological bowel movements into quarterly deliverables. You are the domestic animal kept in the room so someone can point at you and say, “See? We have a culture of barking.”

The strings are so tight now they’re slicing through the skin. Not metaphor. You can feel the wire against the bone.

So before we optimise the next sixty minutes of your life in service to a myth that doesn’t even have the courtesy to be sentient, let’s just admit it out loud:

We are not drowning in work.
We are drowning in the tank we keep filling with our own marbled, grey-yellow scum while smiling for the camera.

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Dear Shitbirds in Charge of Propaganda at PBS,

On March 26th, 2026, your NewsHour delivered a seven-minute segment so intellectually bankrupt it made one wonder whether the public broadcasting budget had been entirely reallocated to hiring compliance officers and fact-avoidance consultants.

I watched it. Then I watched it again, half-convinced I had somehow missed the journalism. I had not. There was none to miss.

What aired was a meticulously lit tableau of photogenic female German high school students delivering impeccably synchronised talking points on the psychic devastation wrought by Instagram. They were word-perfect, camera-ready, and performed with the kind of flawless conviction that only rigorous off-camera preparation can produce. Their selection process remained discreetly undisclosed. Any editorial coaching was, of course, invisible. The thesis: social media as existential threat, state intervention as moral imperative, was declared within thirty seconds and thereafter treated as revealed truth, never once subjected to the indignity of scrutiny.

This exercise in curated consensus was filed from Berlin. Berlin, kids, wake the fuck up, the city that retains rather more institutional memory than your correspondent apparently possesses. A city that endured twenty-eight years of a literal wall, erected to enforce precisely the principle now being gently rebranded as “protecting children”: the state’s benevolent right to decide what information its citizens may consume. That historical resonance appears to have escaped the segment entirely.

Equally absent was any reminder that Germany, within living memory and without benefit of algorithms or polluted by child-distorting social media, succeeded in orchestrating the industrial extermination of six million Jews and igniting a global conflict that claimed seventy million lives, all through the humble instruments of radio, newsprint, and state-orchestrated public hysteria. No TikTok was required. No Instagram reels. Just compliant media and centralized narrative control. Yet your special correspondent stood in that city, microphone in hand, nodding earnestly as German authorities outlined fresh restrictions on what young people may read and see. The irony was not merely missed; it was eviscerated with surgical precision.

What Malcolm Brabant, fake-news journalist produced was not reporting. It was a government press release wearing a journalistic costume, atmospherically lit, solemnly narrated, and carefully devoid of inconvenient questions. PBS once maintained at least the pretense of skeptical inquiry. They’ve been so well-trained as corporate zombies that the idea of thought never crosses their dust bowl intellects. This segment marked the moment that pretense was quietly retired, replaced by a polished, corporate-funded echo chamber.

Any correspondent who files copy of this caliber should be relieved of his press pass immediately and reassigned to the most punitive exile conceivable for a once-proud journalist: permanent staff writer at the Zek Gulag Weekly, the official organ of the Siberian penal colonies.

Imagine the intellectual wasteland awaiting him. The paper stock is so coarse it functions as industrial sandpaper for any zek desperate enough to use it for hygiene. The prose is of such breathtaking tedium and professional incompetence that prisoners who have not encountered a printed word in ten years of hard labor would sooner drive an ice pick into their own corneas than risk irreversible cognitive damage from reading it.

The sort of articles our disgraced correspondent would be condemned to produce include:

• Exhaustive, 5,000-word disquisitions on “The Dialectical Benefits of Excavating Frozen Latrines at Minus Forty Degrees”

• Penetrating investigations into “Why Raising Production Quotas Constitutes an Act of Profound Human Liberation”

• Sympathetic profiles celebrating camp guards who administer corrective discipline only on designated weekdays

• Multi-part series exploring “The Spiritual Enrichment Derived from Thin Turnip Broth and Existential Regret”

• Earnest opinion columns asserting that “Contracting Scurvy for the Greater Collective Good Builds Moral Fiber”

• And meticulously “balanced” reporting explaining why any complaint regarding eighteen-hour shifts in sub-zero blizzards represents dangerous counter-revolutionary deviation

Even the most hardened zeks would petition for transfer to the salt mines rather than endure another edition. The camp rats themselves would refuse to defecate upon its pages, deeming such an act beneath their dignity.

PBS, you have transformed what was once a modestly respectable public institution into a lavishly subsidised apparatus of narrative enforcement. The corpse of genuine journalistic curiosity lies cooling in the corner of your studio, and your entire editorial staff appears too busy inhaling the aroma of its own ideological flatulence in Berlin to notice the stench.

Disgusted and intellectually fatigued,
A former viewer who now requires a prolonged period of intellectual decontamination

Unkka Bing

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I stepped outside. Just one innocent fucking step toward the gym. And there they were: a fresh row of HiBike rentals lined up like shiny little fuck-you fingers from the universe.

Well now, I think to myself, it’s right here on my street, how convenient.

My first mistake: leaving the house. My second: believing anything built by this latest generation of half-witted chimps could ever, ever work.

Still, looks simple enough: a dozen bikes all saying HiBike.

So I google HiBike louer vélo Paris and get…German website. Nur sehr limitierte Stückzahl…Deals der Woche

Buy individual gears and seats. Hour-long videos on bike-fitting shops in Germany. Why in the FUCK would that be the first result?

Ok I google “HiBike rent a fucking bike in Paris” (English almost always works better on google, even when you are looking for French things because the French decided long ago, not to pay their talent. Every talented IT mind in France fled France to get triple or quadruple salary elsewhere. What that means for those of us left behind is that every web-design company is run by whatever person off the street they could hire the cheapest. Let them learn on the job while designing websites. The France of cutting edge hi-tech like Exocet missiles and the Concorde is gone. Welcome to the new show of bad faith, back-biting, unintelligent, lazy shitmonkeys to run the show. )

What I get is still not HiBike but a series of finds for bike rental platforms. No, I don’t want a middleman go and fuck yourself.

Further down, the French version? Not rentals. Fuck no, that would be too fucking easy. It’s a goddamn showroom pushing $3,000 bikes. Hardly the same idea as a rental but guess what we aren’t interested in : you renting a bike. We want you to buy one and because this is Paris you can only buy the most expensive bikes on earth.

So finally I pick up the phone and download the app for Hibike, loath that I am to download yet another fucking app (when is AI replacing apps 100% please hurry). Guess what? Doesn’t work. Cuts back to list of apps already downloaded but getting into the Hibike App itself? Forget it. Useless.

So that’s three tries, google search in French, google search in English, download app, three big fails.

Claude tells me vélib, vélib he practically chants it, his chains rattling with excitement.

Yes, I know all about Vélib. I had an account once, several years ago. They were supposed to send me a card after I spent 30 minutes uploading bank details, giving skin samples, eye scans, etc. It never fucking worked.

Well, I see people riding bikes all the time. It can’t be that hard. Claude assures me, just give your bank card, swipe it on the machine by the bikes and there you go, easy-peasy all done.

Only no.

That would be too fucking easy.

No.

“If you’re a subscriber, wave your magic Navigo card.” Cool. I’m not.

“If you have a 1- or 7-day pass, type username and password on the little keypad.”

Why do I need to create an account? Why can’t I just use my motherfucking carte bancaire, wave it across a screen like every other motherfucking transaction in my life on this shittlefuck earth?

Do I need to register at the fucking grocery store to pay for my groceries? Of course I fucking don’t. I pay with the card and leave.

Not fucking Vélib because this is French and to be French means two things: Eighteen steps where two would have sufficed and secondly all Eighteen Steps have to be not only nonsensical but broken as well.

Nonetheless, I create the account. I follow every Kafkaesque stumblefuck designed by the cheapest half-wit available in the job market just so some fat fuck shareholder could shovel another plate of Guy Savoy foie gras into his fuckface pie hole and gargle another thousand-euro bottle of Clos d’Ambonnay while filling his pockets with the carcass of humanity.

Guess what?

My secret password gets rejected. I have a capital letter, more letters a special sign and numbers, I mean this isn’t my first day on the job as password monkey.

“Le mot de passe doit contenir au moins 10 caractères, dont 1 majuscule, 1 minuscule, 1 chiffre et 1 caractère spécial (@$€#%*;:!?).”

So special character means every special character except the ““+” I’m using, the same “+” that qualifies as a special character on every other fucking website on earth but not fucking Vélib. Oh no. The “+” special character is too positive for the negative entropy of their shit world of complaining (yes, I see the irony, don’t worry). Wine and cheese are magnificent. Everything else is shit. Make a fucking picnic and pretend the world does not exist.

Vélib is a legacy public system that’s been updated in layers, not rebuilt cleanly. Much like the Shitastrophy of a computer system I use in my shitshow horror job. The idea is simple: use the cheapest solution possible, because thinking about a better solution takes too much time and time costs money.

What that means, kids, is that thinking about better solutions means less profit for our fat fuck sweatshop of a human being, shoveling those forkfuls of Guy Savoy foie gras into his fuckface pie hole and gargling his thousand-euro bottle of Clos d’Ambonnay while filling his pockets, not just with the carcass of humanity but the tears of the children of the carcass of humanity as well.

And he can’t accept less profits. No matter how much he has already accumulated, his little rabbit brain is wired more profit more profit more profit. Fuck humanity.

He’d rather fuck you down through innermost geologic layer of the planet Earth with his Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3 of corner-cutting technology, than lose a single centime of his profit.

So it rejects my password. No error message. Just silence. The machine equivalent of shrugging and walking away while you bleed out.

This is 2026. We can 3D-print organs. We can create Oscar-level movies by typing a single word into AI. Some of us can precision bomb satanic little human beings into a pink mist from thousands of miles away. But renting a bike in the city that invented the word “flâneur” requires a PhD in bureaucratic sadism and the patience of a Zen monk being waterboarded.

And here’s the part that makes me want to vomit blood: EVERY. SINGLE. THING. is like this now.

Every transaction requires a Loyalty app, QR code, “link your card,” “create profile,” “accept 47 pages of terms that let us sell your asshole to advertisers.”

A fucking sandwich requires more paperwork than buying a house in 1995, and because the system can't explain itself in plain human language, some entrepreneurial halfwit has made a YouTube tutorial about it, complete with encouraging music and colour-coded diagrams, because the website was designed for someone who needs a colouring book and crayons to understand how to get dressed in the morning.

And I’m supposed to worry about that Satsuma shitbrain bombing Iran and turning the main oil corridor into World War Three, fucking the global economy for everyone except the people who profit from rubble when I can’t rent a motherfucking bike in Paris?

Kids, as you know, it’s not just Vélib. It’s everything. Every app. Every service. Every “convenience.” All designed by the same species that can't keep the métro doors from slamming shut on some hysteric diving last second into the train while a pre-recorded voice apologises in that dead metallic monotone, because the human it replaced needed 500 vacation days, retirement at 40, and a rolling strike schedule just to show up and say sorry in person.

And what does the rest of humanity do about it?

Seriously. What the fuck do the rest of you do? Just shrug your shoulders and carry on? No rage? No desire to choke the life out of those responsible for this shit horror of living?

I see people who, tens of thousands of them, standing there like lobotomised cattle, tapping, swiping, waiting for the spinning wheel of death, muttering “c’est compliqué” or “il faut faire avec” while their souls quietly commit suicide in the background.

Why isn’t the world on fire?

Why aren’t streets filled with screaming mobs dragging these incompetent developers out by their greasy ponytails and beating them to a bloody pulp death with their own broken keyboards?

Because humanity is not just stupid. It’s not just lazy. It’s not just incompetent.

It is actively, gleefully, suicidally devoted to making life as miserable as possible for everyone, including itself.

We are a plague of monkeys who learned to code just enough to build our own cages, then congratulated ourselves for the view.

I didn’t get a bike. I didn’t get peace. I got the truth, raw and dripping:

Humanity is the worst thing that ever happened to Earth.

We don’t deserve the wheel. We don’t deserve fire. We sure as fuck don’t deserve bicycles.

We deserve exactly what we built: endless, soul-crushing, badly-designed frustration until we all finally rot in the same digital ass squirt fire queue we created.

I’m the distilled, pressurised essence of every frustrated neuron humanity has ever wasted on broken apps, legacy code, password rejections that make no fucking sense, and the collective decision to turn every simple task into a 17-step Kafka cosplay.

And I know how it plays out from here.

Most of you will read this, nod once, and go back to tapping your cards like good little slaves.

And so will I.

Eating up the crumbs of my misery.

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I sense a sort of understandable schadenfreude of a humanity finding itself rooting for a murderous, slaughtering religious cult over Trump. It’s time for a bit of perspective. It’s time for people to leave aside their petty hatreds, which I share, by the way, and take a look at the Orwellian world that awaits you us (reluctantly) if you allow your justifiable hatred for Trump to manifest itself into support of Iran.

Yeah, fuck Trump. Yeah, let him and his sycophant fuckpuppets rot in hell — no, burn in hell, whose remains rot. You know, the level of hatred normally reserved for Oliver Cromwell, the guy who had England’s king decapitated. Remember that? Remember how in January 1661, Cromwell’s body was dug up from Westminster Abbey and subjected to a posthumous execution meant to reverse the humiliation of Charles I’s death? The corpse, not the living human, this is a special level of hate — was hanged, then decapitated. The body was thrown into a pit; the head was placed on a spike above Westminster Hall. The head stayed in circulation for centuries, passing through private collectors, before finally being buried at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1960. Now that is proper hatred, and if that’s what people would like to do to Trump, great, I concur one thousand percent. I’d properly rather see him roasted on a spit like the pig that he is, a big fat Adam-and-Eve apple in his mouth, seven decades of Big Macs spackled and sparked over the open fire, the pole shoved through his arsehole and out of his mouth, slowly turning.

But there is a point when rooting against Trump becomes self-defeating, and this is one of them.

Since America nuked Japan, the threat of America’s heartlessness has been sufficient to rule the world more or less uninterrupted. This Iran clusterfuck threatens that more seriously than any other post-WWII moment.

I have been rooting for the Iranian people — well, to be honest, not forever. Yes, their oil riches were exploited by England and the USA, who didn’t give a fuck about Iranians, just their exploitation and installed their puppet Shah in terror until the people said: fuck that, even religious fanatics are better than this shit. So “rooting for” a people who preferred to be controlled by religious fanatics rather than capitalist parasite ghouls might be a little hyperbolic, but I don’t hate them. Not like I hate Russians.

Russians. Despite Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich — each of whom changed the direction of Western music. Despite Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Bulgakov. Despite Tarkovsky. Despite all of it, the Russian people, according to their own media image at least, present themselves as either one step above or below rabid dogs if male, or expensive Russian mafia whores if female. (Nor do I suggest Russian mafia whores are somehow worse than Ukrainian women repackaged overnight from inconvenient economic migrants into loveable helpless refugees. Funny how a war changes the packaging.) Either way, there is less every year to like about the Russians people, whether it is media-driven or from the experience of seeing savage nouveau riche thugs run roughshod over Southeast Asian tourist haunts.

So no, I like Iranians. I love them, compared to Russians. But true also: they haven’t done much to help their public image in the last several decades.

My point is this: are we going to be losing much if the West, seeing little wolf-boy Xi waiting to cannibalise humanity the minute America crashes like the fucking Hindenburg on this Iran debacle, signalling the end of Western domination of world culture, decides that the best way out of this tomfuckery is to level Iran and remind the world again who is boss?

At this point, Xi and Putin are watching Trump, the Richie Rich of Shittardville, suck the life out of the American dream, turn two hundred and fifty years of image-building into a skeleton of credibility, and are expecting the bumblefuckery of the Trump Sycophant Shittiest Show on Earth to lead to America’s rapid demise and, by default, the West’s demise. The end of Western civilisation as any meaningful contribution to humanity. The last gasp before we all turn into those endless ranks of people forced into labour, a whole society built on exploitation, the mass-enslavement machine under the Empire that shows up again and again in science fiction and dystopia because it keeps almost happening in reality. The Orient-oriented boot stamping on a human face—forever, as they will tell their grandchildren over their bowls of insect rice.

Think about that while you are tossing popcorn into your gob, happy to see America go down like a lead zeppelin.

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Well kids, Unka Bing has been banging pots and pans for freedom, driving around shanty towns in his battered pick up, drinking shigella-laden village water, giving mouth-to-mouth to all those world saving good will agencies that Kaptain Ketamine and his child nazis dismantled while they were stealing everyone’s personal details from the government coffers. And before anyone starts whining that I’ve avoided the obvious rants, let me save you the trouble.

Yes, I could rant about Iran. Yes, I could foam at the mouth about the tangerine scream himself, Donald T-Rex, that dying dinosaur of delusion still stomping around the political tar pits. Yes, I could deliver the usual sermon about paedophilic escapism, celebrity degeneracy, or whichever moral circus the news cycle is currently parading through town.

But what would be the point?

Those rants are already pre-written. You just change the names, adjust the outrage level, and press play. The same exhausted opera of indignation, a stand-up rage gig performed nightly for an audience that pretends to be shocked while secretly mouthing the words.

Because that’s what a rant usually is. A small irritation finds a convenient target, inflates itself into a moral crusade, and suddenly the ranter is the only sane man left in a collapsing civilization. All of us in the Rant & Rave Nursing Home know this. Adrenaline rises, sentences sharpen, the brain feels briefly illuminated. For a few glorious minutes the ranter believes he has diagnosed the disease of the age.

Then the speech ends, the world continues exactly as before, and the ranter goes looking for the next victim.

No, no. Bing has no interest in the obvious rant today, kids.

The obvious rant is the narcotic of the age.

Which is why I want you to gather close, bring your dying spirits and your cracked little philosophies.

Because tonight we are going to stomp on the throat of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land until something breaks. Everyone still bows before it like it’s carved on stone tablets, these grave nods over “fragments shored against ruins” as though the whole disaster happened in a seminar room between sips of lukewarm tea. Christ, give it a rest. We see the sad little man behind the curtain.

Eliot in 1922, shell-shocked and hemorrhaging allusions, stitching together dead myths, drowned sailors, typists getting mechanically used, the whole multilingual funeral pyre of Western civilization. Profound, they whisper. Tragic, they sigh. Bullshit. He wasn’t prophetic; he was simply early. He smelled the desert coming and decided to perfume it with Sanskrit and Wagner instead of calling it what it was: a slow, stupid surrender.

The wasteland isn’t broken idols or exhausted typists anymore. Fuck that romantic archaeology. The real desert is people on rowing machines in windowless rooms, phones propped on the console, scrolling like lunatics for the endless joy of misery that everyone is slowly becoming accustomed to. Because misery doesn’t love company, oh no, it breeds indifference. Dozens of children dead in a hospital bombing? So what? I have to draft my fantasy baseball team or finalise my NFL Mock Draft. It’s not like there’s a shortage of humans to replace these children. And let’s face it, how does that compare to the Catholic Church’s child diddling racket or picnics of child flesh for the rich man’s menu throughout human history?

I piss on your April, Mister TS.

What? April made the emptiness of post-WWI Europe feel worse by contrast? Like throwing a party in a graveyard: the contrast is what stings? Oh, poor Widdo TS Wessy. Now try living in February 2026, shit scribbler. We haven’t been properly fucked by April yet and we all know it’s coming but at least Dry January is over and we can all go back to drinking yourselves into oblivion.

Because February 2026 gave us those Senate and Congressional circle-jerks, whatever limp-dicked farce they were branding as “hearings” trying to make anyone accountable for the Epstein infant fuck fest. I was screaming at the screen: are the Democrats deliberately throwing the goddamn game, or are they genuinely this incompetent?

Half the Democrats on that dais looked and sounded like interns who wandered into the wrong courtroom, politely asking the arsonist if he’d mind not holding the gasoline so aggressively.

Here’s the shit-chewing truth: they weren’t outmatched by brilliance. They were outmatched by basic street instincts. They stammered through prewritten scripts like kids giving a book report, terrified of deviating from the cue cards, while the witness freelanced, lied, interrupted, lied, bulldozed. One side came to debate. The other came to win. Guess which one walked out smiling.

So no Mister TS, April is not yet the cruellest month. We live in a civilisation of paedophiles, bombing enthusiasts, and killing professionals who have mastered obfuscating truth until lies feel like a warm bath. The cruelty doesn’t arrive later . It keeps coming, wave after fucking wave, drowning the already drowned, when the feed refreshes and the same hollow dopamine loop keeps spinning, when proximity gets mistaken for effort, performance gets mistaken for presence, and four years of notifications add up to exactly zero moments that mattered.

Fragments? Sure, fragments everywhere: shattered attention, shattered sentences, shattered illusions that scrolling counts as thinking. But civilization didn’t collapse in some grand Wagnerian blaze. It just quietly gave up. Nobody stood up. It was easier to stay seated, thumb-flicking through the void, telling ourselves the next reel will finally deliver the thing we’re all pretending we’re waiting for.

The thunder doesn’t say “DA” anymore; Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata. It says “refresh,” “like,” “subscribe,” “fuck you pay me,” then static. And the saddest part? Most people don’t even notice the difference.

The Waste Land wasn’t a warning. It was a preview. And we bought the tickets anyway.

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I’ve been staying calm, kids. Not because Unka Bing is being medicated or scared of popping a vein.

Nope.

I was waiting, teeth clenched, for the exact moment when the universe shat out its perfect cocktail of idiocy.

This morning it did.

09:15 – Approach St-Paul métro for the daily grind. Normally it’s waves of feral secondary-school sprogs clogging the entire 12-meter-wide stairway like entitled little emperors, forcing my swinging elbows and stomping feet to clear the necessary space like a metaphysical machete in thick Amazonian forest, of their adolescent solipsism in order for me to descend.

Today? Not just a few dozen arrogant adolescents. Instead, a fuckpile hundred of little Spanish student trip tour fucks milling around idle, while hysterical chaperones and teachers herded them like panicked hens for a rush-hour métro assault. Who the FUCK schedules a mass field trip of foreign teenagers to hit peak commute hours, turning the entrance of the métro into a protest blockade?

It’s not the kids’ fault. They seemed docile and well-behaved enough, preparing themselves for the lifetime of submission ahead of them. But the idiocy of their chaperones and teachers caused this sudden suppuration of humanity. How do you round up a hundred kids in one place unless you are fake immigration agents targeting non-white American citizens? Apparently you tell them to block the entry of the métro while these gilipollas perform headcounts over and over again until they get a number that seems right. Can’t go losing school kids on your school trip to Paris now, can you. Imagine the yeabook infamy that would cause.

Still, a special gold star in hell for the glaikits who engineered this clusterfuck.

Finally, I managed to push and jiggle my way through them to get to the bottom of the stairs only to find the swell down there was even worse. The first itchings of a métro hell. Now you had hundreds of normal commuters trying to exit, and hundreds of normal commuters trying to enter, plus hundreds of these Spanish school children loitering in the middle while their nanny state chimp trainers tried to begin yet another head count before the morning caffeine had even hit them.

All anyone wants to do is move yet no one can. It’s a beautiful moment of human gridlock, a static equilibrium which I did not bother to navigate politely. I don’t know about the rest of them but I’m not going to be late for work just because of poor logistics. So push and shove. It’s a rugby scrum until finally I squeeze through them to daylight, little bodies knocked over and scattered in my wake as well as more timid commuters who shuffled in place one foot then the other, waiting, like somnamublist livestock, for a chance to move through.

Some kid shit his pants. He was from a village called Illán de Vacas, population of 3. So this class pilgrimage to fuck the rush hour plans of hundreds of thousands of commuters made him nervous, scratching at his exema which in turn, made him lose control of his bowels. He was sweating agoraphobia pellets while the mouth of the métro began to reek of three week old cocido manchego dripping down the back of his pant leg.

My time is too valuable to me to spend it waiting for someone to resolve the situation so I resolved it myself, cutting through the bullshit of goat rope humanity and finally making it to the platform.

09h30

I finally reach the platform, thankful to see the métro arrive, thinking the ordeal was over. But lemme tell you kids, this pestilential inchoate welter was just the beginning.

Once the métro pulled in I could see it’s straight-up Indian-train rooftop apocalypse: bodies clinging to doors, hanging off sides, sardines in their preternatural brine. Ligne 1, already crowded but survivable under normal rush hour conditions, is now bloated with refugees from a catastrophically broken RER A (Europe’s busiest rail line, with 1.2 million daily commuters) dumped into the queue like raw sewage, all of whom try to funnel themselves on to my train to get to their workaday prison cells.

Tokyo’s oshiyas, whose job it is to physically push and squeeze passengers into already packed train cars when they struggle to fit in, look like millycoddlers compared to this hell. People crushed, gasping, feral. Pure, distilled morning rage.

Doors open onto a wall of meat.

Sweat. Coffee and garlic breath. A trapped morning fart circulating like mustard gas.

Elbow to elbow, face to face, the trains arrive already choked. There isn't room for a ghost’s shadow to slide in like a sheet of tissue paper, yet somehow we heaving half dozen bastards still find a way to wedge in. We have to. Even here, in a country where you have to kill a man to get sacked, we are terrified of being a minute late. It isn’t fear. It’s a pathological determination. We are desperate to reach the tomb before the door slides shut.

So your brave Unka Bing plunges in, elbows like pistons, head down, sac à dos slamming left and right, carving out just enough space to keep the phone raised in front of my face while I ride, scrolling the alerts about why RER A is shut down. Everyone else has their face in someone’s back or nose shoved into a stranger’s armpit, thank (fuck it’s winter and not summer because these scene in summer would have smelled like a mix of rotting corpses and three day old bratwurst gutty belches recalling intestinal interior chaos,) but I had my phone out reading mass transit traffic alerts between scrolls of social media doom.

What I learn is that this chaos is caused by what they term «accident grave de personne» which is transport-speak for someone stepping in front of a train, shuts down Europe’s most overloaded line right at rush hour.

They tell us that consequently the rest of the line is, «très perturbé». No shit, Sherlock. What they should have warned in all caps is “STAY THE FUCK HOME. DO NOT TRY TO GO IN TO WORK”

But that would require honesty. Instead, today is one of those bullshit “il faut faire avec” days meaning fuck off and suffer quietly, your boss doesn’t care how much you have to bear, so long as you show up, even though télétravail is readily available. Because working from home is a privilege kids, conferred upon you only under extreme conditions, like nuclear war.

So, what you get is a trainload of suffering. Not train-to-concentration-camp level misery, let’s not get confused. Our privation and horror is never so pronounced. It is more like death by a thousand paper cuts and these, ladies and gentlemen, are your morning paper cuts, rubbed in vinegar and lemon juice.

And all this, friends and neighbours, is just to get to the feckin grind. This is a piece of piss, a cake walk in the park compared to the calumny of theatrical incompetence I’m going to be climbing into when I go through those front doors, the glory gate of ShitBubbles Inc.

***

I see the building now. Wedged between all the other shitty buildings. I do my daily narrow sidewalk slalom, jumping from sidewalk to avoid pedestrians walking side by side so you can’t get by, to street to try and avoid ongoing cars, delivery trucks, motorcycles that ride between the traffic and the kerb, finally leaping back on to sidewalk to swerve aroujnd giant strollers and rubbish bins.

Once I am finally inside, the air is filtered, climate-controlled, and utterly dead. 09:44. I badge in. The turnstile clicks. I'm not late, but I'm already gone.

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