FOR A WHILE it was, and still is—obviously, lookit—all that I can write about.

Because it’s what I think about a lot of the time.

In 2024 my wife and I lost our first son a few days after he was born.

We knew this was a possibility because he had a very serious heart defect caused by a mutated gene that caused cardiomyopathy.

At the end of this past March (2026), I got a book in the mail. Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader.

I told Rae, my wife, Look, I got this for 3 bucks, free shipping.

I told her I was excited about it. Excited’s not the perfect word here but I felt a very specific, pointed kind of excitement. I was looking forward to reading one of the essays in the book called “Fathers, Sons, Blood.” I didn’t know what it was about but I could guess. I knew from reading his other work and some interviews, he also lost his first son.

I told Rae, You know Harry Crews lost a kid, too?

Then I said, And so did Larry Brown.

After Henry died, I’d read Crews and Brown because they knew what it was like. I re-read Harry Crews’s Childhood and I think I read Larry Brown’s Billy Ray’s Farm and a book called Conversations with Larry Brown I bought in Oxford, MS. It felt right to buy that book there at a time I needed it.

Sometimes it feels like dads don’t get cared about when something like this happens.

I write about this because I think about this every day. I send my writing to places that say they’re interested in dignity or spirituality or “real” writing and I get no response or I get emails like:

“Thank you for your submission. I feel like a fool for saying so but unfortunately can’t place it in the first run, though it was a pleasure to read.

This one was so hard to pass up on. Feels crazy to do so honestly, but it’s really a matter of volume rather than quality, in that I am looking for a little bit louder, more raucous work to publish in the first run. You made me question that intent though, because the quiet intensity of these stores [sic] hit so so hard. Crazy good stuff. I’m a big fan of your work so thank you for submitting and please don’t hesitate to submit when I open again in the fall. Also if you’re ever in NYC definitely hit me up!”

I don’t know what’s better or worse. Sometimes I’m happy to fly under the radar. They don’t know.

Other times I want my writing about Henry to be out there because if people read about him, it’s almost like they get to meet him, like if he was here. This is Henry.

How do I say what I mean here? I can’t really describe it.

I don’t know. There’s no way to describe it.

It’s impossible to describe what it’s like to hold your child as he dies.

Grief may be the loudest thing. “Quiet intensity” — yeah, okay.

What is loud work? I have a few guesses at what that could mean and my guesses have a whole lot to do with a kind of shallowness.

When I got the Crews book and told Rae about the essay I wanted to read and about Crews and Brown, she asked me something like, Why don’t you write about that?

I thought it was a good idea.

I sat down and read “Fathers, Sons, Blood.”

Crews said, “A man does not expect to be the orphan of his son.”

He said, “If I had to do it all over again, I’d do it the same way.”

And he said, man to man, to his infant son, his second son, “‘It’s just you and I now, Buckshot,’ I said, ‘just the two of us.’”

I get what he means and I think I want to steal that nickname for Henry’s little brother.

This is all I can really do.

You live with it. Everyday. You walk by people in the grocery store and you think: They don’t even know.

And you keep living with it.

And sometimes you get mad about it.

You walk around with a chip on your shoulder, aware of your own madness in grief, singing, “You don’t know how it feels…”—Tom Petty voice—“...to be me.”

You think about it and you don’t stop thinking about it and you see something out in the world that makes you hurt.

You look at your second son every morning while you sit on the couch with him, with your first son’s little brother, while his mom gets a couple more hours of sleep and you think: This is incredible. This is crazy.

And you think of all the possibilities. And how the past couple years went. How you’ve been humbled on a daily basis. You think it’s not supposed to be like this but I wouldn’t change a thing.

And you think, looking at your child: He wouldn’t be here like this, now, right now, if it weren’t for his older brother. If it weren’t for what happened to his older brother. That if his older brother lived, maybe years from now we’d have that second son but he would be a different child. And maybe we would have named him the same thing, but he’d be a different person, a different younger brother.

You live with it every day. The odd, sharp grace of it all. Among everyone who doesn’t get it or doesn’t know or doesn’t care.

Among those are others who have other things to live with.

And then you hum another song to remind yourself: “Less of Me”—you like how Roger Miller sings it. And then you start to sing the song:

Let me be when I am weary / just a little bit more cheery / think a little more of others / and a little less than me.

Because you need these simple things to break the falling.

8/26/26

BLAST2MAG@GMAIL.COM

I WAS TRYING to convince the old Marine that he should tell me his name. We were standing in a loose circle completed by one of the other guys, Josh, who also parked and lived in his vehicle at the lake’s lower lot when the gate wasn’t closed for the season. Watching our dogs figure out their order in this parking lot, we took the energy and primacy of dogs, their speed and facility as they sprinted half-snarling across the packed gravel and into the tree line and back, and applied it to the logic of the woods around us. New in the spring. The measure of expansion one is responsible for, witness to. The absolute miracle of blank contentment one moment, blank-eyed aggression the next. And applied it too against the failings of those we knew to be corrupt, unfit to set forth laws. Dead in the Fall. The essence of a dishonest snarl.

The November heat was making us feel giddy, alert and boyish in the desperate sunlight one last time before the creeping Winter closed the mouth of creation for a few blessed months of stasis.

The Marine’s little Rotty boy, although already huge, was just a puppy, and helplessly in love with Corazón, my female Malinois. Josh had a frantic Aussie/Pit mix who yelped from inside his camper.

‘My girl’s not spayed,’ he said, angling the air with his hand. ‘You never know. Little guy might be old enough. When do dogs’ nuts drop?’

He vibrated his way over to his camper, stuck his head in the door, and screamed at his dog to shut the fuck up.

The Marine hooked his thumbs into the molle straps on his chest harness and looked to the side, showing me his jugular. The universal sign of recalcitrance.

‘Man, I went in to vote the other day.’

I knew better than to ask for who. What I cared about was his name. Last name, street name, grunt name, whatever. Josh started walking back over to us, looking down at the gravel.

‘Had my camera on on my GoPro, strapped right here. So I could record the proceedings accordingly. Didn’t even make it a few steps into the firehouse there in West Hurley before I got stopped. They said Sir, you can’t record in here. I was all what the fuck? Like I can’t document my right to free speech?’

‘Insane,’ Josh said, pulling out a lumpy joint as he re-inserted himself into the circle.

‘How is that shit even legal. You guys wanna hit this?’

Cora drove her snout into the fulcrum point behind the Rottweiler’s shoulder blade like a killer whale, sending him tumbling cartoonishly end over end across the gravel, yipping submissively. Hackles up, she followed and then towered above him like Ali over Liston.

‘Cora! What the hell! Sorry about that, man.’

‘Naw, let that little fucker learn,’ the Marine laughed. ‘He needs to see what a dominant female can look like. Your dog is beautiful, bro. Too bad you got her spayed. Their colors are perfect opposite. Them puppies would be hella gorgeous.’

Someone at this lake proposed that their dog fuck mine at least once a month during the high season. I considered a houseful of Malinois/Rottweiler puppies. ‘Do you guys know Patrick? He stays here too sometimes. Camps up on the ridge trail there.’

I pointed behind The Marine and Josh to the steep rise in the hill just beyond the parking lot. Poured concrete steps hunkered in the dirt and leaves in a few surviving runs, broken branches on a huge fallen tree providing the last series of handholds to the ridge’s summit. Expecting a baby in the summer, I’d started sprinting up this hill whenever I came to the lake with Cora, challenging myself to use the remaining steps and broken branches to ascend the hill with maximum efficiency and speed, convinced that excellence in this would somehow equate to excellence in being a father, since I’d started a family so late in life.

The Marine looked at me flatly and shook his head no.

‘Don’t know him either,’ Josh said, passing the joint to The Marine.

‘Thought you might,’ I mumbled. ‘Oh but he doesn’t have a car. He’s been tenting it.’

I thought about adding that Patrick had been an organizer for the Occupy protests in 2011, at the very start, living in a tent in Zuccotti Park; that he’d been arrested with a bag full of hammers and done some real time on trumped-up domestic terrorism charges. The furthest we’d ventured as a trio, politically, was casting vague disdain at government overreach, both State and Federal. It was a thrilling little dance, but valorizing Occupy, or seeming to, might have brought the music to a halt.

‘He was really involved with this Ayahuasca church over in Olivebridge, too. Regular peeker behind the curtain. Like every weekend for at least three years there.’

‘You peek behind the curtain too many times,’ said the Marine, ‘You just become a fuckin’ stage manager. Cleaning up after Oz when he’s done tricking Dorothy and her friends with his bullshit. Easy to suck the magic out of that with too many reps.’

‘Never tried that stuff. But I’m sure you’re right. I hired him to help me demo this house out in Margaretville,’ I said, and pulled on the joint. ‘Nice guy, terrible music, not the best worker in the world.’

The Marine laughed and then grimaced.

‘Yeah, you’ll get that with a lot of the guys around here. Pick-up work in construction is where you’ll get all types. Not usually the most stable ones.’

‘That might be good, though. Not for the work — fuck the work — but for the mission. For what really needs to be done. Not everybody is going to lead, you know?’

The Marine spat and looked across the lot at his house, parked next to Josh’s.

SO I HAVE three tools. Transience. Gratitude. And music. All the other ones have been lost or have lost their edge. They might still be in Zuccotti. My life is hourly. I am full of ekeing people. I come from an ekeing people. I seek no reward from the world. I am expected in the woods. I have my petty dogmas, Percy! But I am not an idea centered around the self. I seek fecundity. I seek more booze. Do you remember what I told you about Don Juan? Are we still working out in the Cats tomorrow? Find me. My phone ran out of minutes.

I SQUATTED IN Patrick’s camp, staring down at the handwritten note. Josh and the Marine never really left the down lot. I was up on the ridge trail, where Patrick’s camp was. The piece of paper was secured by a pack of Newports filled with grey rocks and little black feathers.

‘Oh shit,’ I said to Cora as she snffed hungrily around his tent. ‘This is his little shrine.’

There were larger black feathers, a dry-stacked ring of bluestone shards, a single sacred turquoise stone, and a hand-carved shillelagh laid across it all like a blessing.

His camp was just a few meters off the trail, entirely visible from it. He had a pretty nice kit. Tent with no holes, hiking backpack, a deerskin drum.

‘Where could he have gotten off to,’ I asked the dog. She whined, broke a branch off of a dead tree, and sprinted into the woods, shaking the branch violently like she was trying to break its spine.

Probably at the deli, which was walking distance from the lake and his camp, right on the side of the road that was the gateway to the Catskill mountains. Something to really look at a few hundred million years ago. Now reduced to seething little hills.

The trails at the lake kissed the bottom of this expanse; you could definitely get lost and die in there if you really wanted to. Or live, and pitch a complaint against all that was wrong with co-habitation and taxes in your life. I walked the trails with Cora every day, especially now that I was trying to keep tabs on Patrick and keep him alive, at least until the demolition phase was over. I didn’t see any nips or flasks anywhere. He was the cleanest no-shit alcoholic I’d ever met.

THERE WAS A liquor store directly next to the deli.

‘What’s the difference between a drunk and a real fucking alcoholic?’, he’d asked me over the wind as we drove west into the Catskills for our first day on site. Like every single other one, this client was an up and downer — apartment in the city, house upstate they had no clue how to work on. Patrick had been, impressively, awake and outside, red-eyed, coffee in one hand and sprite bottle full of vodka in the other when I pulled up to his friend Chewy’s house at 7:30 that morning to pick him up.

After about six shots of vodka in the coffee and a violent coughing/hawking attack, he’d become downright chipper, bouncing around in the passenger seat as we hit the 55mph zone and I slowly pushed the needle to 63.

I looked over at him in reply and then back at the road.

‘The drunk knows what time the liquor store closes. The alcoholic knows what time it opens.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Percy, Percy, Purse. I’m good at being both. But you’re only one at the beginning of the day. Today I’m an alcoholic, of course, but good god am I fucking ready to work.

Let’s do this. Can we pay out at the end of day? You speak Spanish right? Tu vampiro está pinché listo, man.’

BYPASSING THE PARKING LOT completely, Cora and I took the hobo trail to the deli. I tied her leash to a bollard, told her to sit, then stepped through the glass doors and their friendly little chime. The owner, Shah, looked up and tipped his head towardthe booths by the windows. Patrick was sucking on a vape and attending to his phone, charging it and drinking a huge coffee.

He looked up and grinned like the cheshire cat. His head was at least two times the size of mine. I was taller than most of my friends. Patrick towered above me.

Friendly fractured drunken ginger giant.

‘Yoo-hoo, Boss. You saw my note?’

‘I saw your note. Took the hobo trail here you showed me. Loved that writing. You should lay down some poems and put out a little chapbook. I’d print it for you at Staples,’ I said, suddenly becoming a publisher of alcoholic tent-dwellers. ‘It’d be like samizdat. We can leave a copy at every gas station and liquor store between here and New Kingston.’

‘I mean dude. My very existence is samizdat. I am distributed underground and I will fade away after I incite the working class to revolt.’

He laughed. A deep, weary, Irish sound.

‘We’re a dying breed, brother. Dying breed. That would be sick. I got to go see my kids later. Think we can be back here at the deli by five for the bus? My ex won’t fucking pick me up, she’s pissed about something. Said I showed up drunk last time the kids were at her place.’

For half a second, he sneered. Then his hands twitched and the smile returned to his face.

‘Our old place. But my hands weren’t shaking. I wasn’t screaming. I was actually there.’

‘Of course.’

He knew my wife was pregnant. And that I liked to drink. And I knew I had no idea what having a kid — or kids — was really like.

‘We can end at four today. Of course. And I remember what you told me about Don Juan. You said that Castañeda hallucinated him, that Don Juan was just anotherproduct of Little Smoke. Never would have occurred to me. Kind of blew my fucking mind, honestly.’

‘Do you write ever? You’re always listening to me rant. I think I could write something like Journey To Ixtlan if I got the chance to really hunker down. I have some fucking stories, bro. And I have seen things with my third eye.’

‘I mean. I’ve tried. Who hasn’t, if they’ve tried their hand at some kind of art? Bugs me how still you have to sit. Wouldn’t it be nice to put some of these pages out into the world, though, in a real way.’

Patrick and the Marine would probably get along. Having served and survived, having revolted and failed, they were both janissaries without an empire worth fighting for, thinkers without a system worth a shit to pour anger and purpose into. I was born from a lineage of Officers and Chiefs, Matrons and Protectors, whose message was clear: lead a group of men like this and die. I went to art school instead, but that was all over now. It was time to gather the men of the lake. Even Josh, because someone had to cook the food. We could all fit into The Marine’s van. Patrick and him could figure out their differences around the Gadsden Flag on the road. What I understood about all of us was that some rivers of betrayal will cut a canyon through a mind so deep that it may never be filled in no matter the landslides, storms or earthquakes that happen around it. Our expedition would be punitive and open-hearted. We could make it to Albany before they even knew we were coming.

5/22/26

BLAST2MAG@GMAIL.COM

COLD MORNING ONE YEAR TODAY I have to tell her. I love her teeth crooked on the bottom her green eyes I could drink from and the freckles on her nose. Every person who swipes in at my turnstiles I tell them good morning I reserve have a safe day at work with a wave for my favorites. Lilah doesnt know there are no other favorites.

Lilah runs in a few minutes past 930 which means she is late she says Jamie Alison is going to kill me! Smiling with her crooked teeth I want to tell her they are not a flaw if she ever thought that. I tell her you can blame it on me you can say there was a issue with your card it wasnt working and I was giving you a hard time because Im capable at my job. I wear black suit black shoes every day and I always shave even when it bleeds. I dont let just anyone waltz through not even the guy who owns the finance thing on the top floor if he forgets his ID badge Im like sir I need you to register at the desk for a temporary QR code. He sighs and wines I just laugh say sir I treat all of you the same that is why I am good at this job. He says nothing by not saying anything he agrees.

Lilah laughs says thats sweet Jamie but I think Ill be OK. I say OK have a safe day at work Lilah. Waving back she says you to Jamie and goes up the elevator I dont look at her shape even though I am tempted.

At lunch she comes down with Alison I say hope you didnt give her a hard time Alison Lilahs card here wasnt working which is why she was late I cant just let you up even if I know you even if I like you. In my head I go what kind of like. Theyre talking about something serious probably work related and their eyes drift to mine with kindness patience but not seriousness.

They say all good Jamie thanks for keeping us honest and not slowing down they walk through the spinning doors into the wind.

My shift ends at 2 I only have one more chance to tell her today when better then one year today. When she comes in alone with a salad in her hands red on her cheeks hair out of place I look at the ground then her then the blurred blue painting on the wall and say wheres Alison. She says she ran into an old colleague they are catching up. I look around scared I will see Marcus who is my dickish coworker he does not understand my whole thing but hes not there. There is no one in the lobby but me and Lilah.

I love you instead I say do you want to hang out ever. It feels still dangerous hearing it come out my mouth means there is no light above no walls beyond just wobbly black nothing until she speaks which gives back my breath. Oh she says. Like outside of work she asks.

I say yeah. I have a lot of interests we could talk about and I would love to learn about yours. What kind of love.

She stutters starts stops while I make eyes like come on before it comes out yes actually that would be nice. Maybe Alison can join. I go Alison is your boss you want her to come. She says Alison is my friend to and she loves you Jamie! In my head I go love.

My younger brother who lives in the west village with his boys from college says go to this place called the corner bistro it is a chill vibe with good beer and burgers. Just me and Lilah I would have taken her to a nice spot with crab but Alison is coming I guess Ill just keep it chill vibes. I dont tell dad where Im going because hes annoying with questions about intentions expectations etc when Im being social. Its like dad Im 29 years old Im allowed to be social. I tell mom silent through my mind whats happening I know shes laughing saying Jamie you dog. Its hard to remember her face but that laugh like a turret even at the end I wont forget.

They walk in a few minutes past 6 I am in a black polo shirt with a small stain at the nipple I didnt see when I put it on. I order a beer where is dad to raise his eyebrows. Alison is in dark jeans and a sweater Lilah is in light ones and a sweatshirt from her college. No makeup I dont mind she is lovely then ever. I say my brother went to that college she looks surprised. Her eyes are not as focused her smile not as true but she is here I can trust that.

I give two kisses on the cheeks to them both I say this is the gentlemen way my mom taught me. It comes out that she is dead I dont know if it was asked its been one year since Monday and if Lilah will love me she should know why I wear black. Speaking it saying how it happened her skeleton bones sharp under the green quilt her breath rising falling then falling flat.

Dad singing. I will build my love a bower. By yon cool crystal fountain. We strangely laughed told stories she was always so funny she did voices imitated dad doctor discipline. She loved fails she hid behind doors and jumped out. She was never afraid. People need to know someone is keeping score she came into the building one day and told Marcus to stop giving me a hard time its called empathy. He is capable.

Oh Jamie. We didnt know. Like knowing would change anything can I buy you drinks.

They say no we will buy you one. They return I say thank you for being here with me ladies.

They say are you kidding Jamie thank you for being with us. I have questions for them. Lilah are you a democrat. Yes. Good. The country of Brazil has always interested me from there food to the culture anything like that for you. She loves Italy. Do you like manga. Whats that I can teach you. Do you like comedy movies. Yes. Which ones she has to think. Will Farrel me to Step Brothers. Yes. Wedding Crashers. Yes! I love him to she never said anything about love.

And Alison are you nice to Lilah at work. Most of the time. Does she work hard. Most of the time. I can trust that.

The burgers come the table is small unstable and the door is opening people pushing my chair scraping the floor. Plugging my ears now time for our questions says Alison do you have siblings beyond the brother no the little brother who is taller my dad is shorter my mom is dead I dont say that imagine I said that. They want to hear about my interests comedy movies like Will Farrel as well as Adam Sandler Chris rock. Brazil like I said. Sports like Knicks. YouTube guys skateboarding. Warm mornings yellow light.

Lilah has a second beer her eyes sink but look around less. Look at me. Look at me.

Alison leave. Fucking leave get her to leave. And its a miracle she stands up! The bathroom I dont know. Go ask someone take your time no rush.

My heart thud breaking against my ribs. Arms crossed my throat strangles the word.

Lilah. I want to tell you something it might surprise you. I try to be a professional gentlemen but truth has its own voice inside my brain like I dont even know whos saying this right now its something outside the Jamie in my head all day. You have no idea how nervous. But she was never afraid. My knees shaking mouth dry and moving its something outside the nice capable guy laughing waving at you every day. Every day of your eyes cool crystal fountains. My parents met at work I think that makes sense. Same space every day but still laughing waving makes two people smile and that could just be the whole thing forever—

Lilah puts her hand cold from the glass on my arm I flex it this could be your protection.

Jamie. Jamie Jamie Jamie supposedly she says again I forged ahead I dreamed smiling or crying but the flinching the wincing I didnt expect. I want to be your friend I do not see you that way but I would like to see movies with you. The pity I didnt expect I know that fucking look its Marcus saying youre mom talked to me and Im sorry not meaning it. Dad standing outside my room what if you came to church with me. Gray hospital light on Moms last face she whispers this is the ultimate fail. Pull back and there is the sad smile of knowing no one knows me better.

Cold morning blind winterlight. That walk across the park through the frost Sandy opening the door no joke about the Knicks sucking just Im sorry Jamie. We lost to the pelicans last night and not even Sandys laughing.

Alison comes back. Lilah takes her hand back. She has been gone how many minutes.

More then a pee. You got to be kidding me.

Were you...while that whole thing was happening. You on the toilet maybe the seats cold the floors wet youre trying to keep youre jeans off it as you...

And Im just here failing.

Jamie says Lilah. Wait what says Alison.

I say it is kind of amazing come on laugh.

Laugh.

She would have laughed.

People turning whispering I hate Lilahs eyes on everyone but me. I say look at me. Look at me laughing. Her hand returns cold and wet. Relax Jamie.

Dont tell me to relax.

And I hate that cold wet feeling.

It is proper hilarious pity you cant see that because you wont look at me. Pity you cant see that makes all the difference.

This is the difference between me and everyone.

No one laughs at the right stuff. We do.

3/10/26

BLAST2MAG@GMAIL.COM

— William H. Gass, The Tunnel

(. . .)

I THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY. MONTHS WITHOUT SEEING HER SON AND SHE fell asleep. I took the tray with the teacups to the kitchen. The light flickered a bit and I was worried the power was going to go out. I started opening drawers looking for candles. In one of them, I noticed a notebook with a red cover. I took it out and opened it. It was my mother Margarete’s handwriting. A kind of diary? Why would she keep it in the kitchen and not the bedroom? Probably because she couldn’t write in bed. Sitting at the kitchen table: the only position in which she was able to write(. . .) flipping way back, in one of the first pages, back around the time she still used to leave the house (there was no information about the year): “09.24. After therapy, I went to eat, at a churrascaria in Marista. I sat at a table, the most distant and isolated table I could find, but two women sat next to me, I think they also wanted to be alone and they didn’t pay any attention to me. One of them wouldn’t shut up, irritated with her husband, with herself, with everything. I had a tape recorder in my purse because I always record my sessions with the therapist, I liked to listen to them afterwards, to think about what is said in the sessions, to go over everything and try to improve as a patient and as a person. My therapist doesn’t know I record. Would it make sense to tell him? I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s allowed. Maybe it’s not polite. I don’t care. I also recorded the woman at the churrascaria. Here is my transcription: ‘Ok yeah, I tried to cut his dick off, but I told him a million times I was done taking this shit, him fooling around without the least discretion, everyone knows, while I bust my ass to keep this shitty house in order and take the kids to school and pick them up and keep the things all organized labeled neatly-piled, and this story is the worst of all of them, I swear, his boss’s daughter, an airhead, I told him to stop, I said I wasn’t going to tolerate this sleaziness, this whoring around, and him saying shamelessly Glauce isn’t a whore, that and nothing else, Glauce isn’t a whore, he didn’t even put in the effort to deny fooling around with that whore, he was silent while I screamed, stayed silent while I also shut up waiting for him to say something, anything, the shame is that he’s such a light sleeper or maybe I made too much noise or maybe both those things, and he hit me in the face when he saw me stopped there with the knife, he was really spooked and he hit me in the face and said he wanted a separation, earlier I had spoken with my sister about this story with the boss’s daughter and my sister the sluts are these men, my husband is a little slut, your husband is a little slut, and all this just completely nauseates me, I know, I know, my sister is brilliant, if she was going to cut someone’s dick off, I guarantee it wouldn’t just be an try, I guarantee that son of a bitch husband of hers wouldn’t wake up until it was too late, you know what she’s like, her husband works with mine and we wouldn’t be surprised if we found out the two of them have been trading or, in the least worst of the possibilities, yeah, that’s exactly it, the two lowlifes screwing little missy at the same time, the boss’s teenage whore daughter, maybe on the same carpet in one of their offices, one fucking the girl and the other one taking pictures, and afterwards they switch and the three getting drunk and banging, their offices are next to each other and sometimes I lose a hell of a lot of time imagining the two chatting about the asses of the cuties from HR and the tits of the new executive director’s secretary and the thighs of the third or fourth wife of the financing guy and, of course, about the firm little curves of princess Glauce, I feel like ripping the hussy’s nose off, cutting it off with one of those garden sheers, that little upturned nose, sometimes I dream I’m him and in the dream I wake up in the morning and climb on top of my wife, which in this case is me, but not in the dream, in the dream it’s that little whore Glauce, and so I give it the perfunctory fuck because my dick is hard because I have to piss, and after cumming on her perfect little tummy, because she still hasn’t had to get pregnant and have a baby three times, and what’s this thing men have about staring at their own dick while it cums?, have you seen when they do this?, does yours do this too?, he takes out his dick and looks at it while the cum sprays all over me, on my stomach, on my ass, on my face, it’s a fixation with their own dick, with their own cum spraying out, I think it’s sickening, sickening, but I was telling you about my dream, well yeah, I was him and Glauce was me, and after I came I finally go to the bathroom and when I stand over to the toilet to piss and my dick empties out in there, it simply disconnects from my body and plops, you know?, and Glauce comes into the bathroom and before I can do anything, because I’m stunned flabbergasted perplexed with my dick which disconnected from my body and fell in the toilet, before I can do anything she flushes the toilet, bye-bye, cock, and I start to scream and wake up and I’m relieved because I know I’m still me and he’s still him, snoring with his stomach in the air as if there was no today or tomorrow, the complete annihilation of time and existence, he woke up and saw me with the knife in my hand and added two plus two and was really spooked, to the point where he hit me in the face and said look what you made me do, can you believe a thing like that?, I made him hit me, is that right?, he fucks the boss’s daughter and who knows how many others, I’m bothered by this and want to get even, and he feels obligated to hit me in the face, oh go fuck yourself, and afterwards said he wanted to separate, I didn’t say anything, my nose was bleeding like hell and he was a little scared because of that, I stained my nightgown, it was awful, and afterwards I said crying I’m an idiot, I said crying it was just a game, I wasn’t going to cut his dick off, if I was actually going to chop his cock off I wouldn’t have made so much noise and he wouldn’t have woken up or just would’ve woken up when the deed was done, and he said it’s two AM and I have to work early in the morning, and he took a pillow and a comforter and locked himself in the library, and the next morning after I took the kids to school I called him in the office and repeated that it had all been a game and that I just wanted to scare him, so that he would pay attention to me and stop humiliating me, and I asked could he at least be a little more discreet, more discreet how? he asked, and I responded you know I know you fuck that other one, that one girl, I can smell her trashy perfume on your clothes and the credit card bills come to the house, I know where you go with her and even what you guys eat and that you gave her a dress last Christmas, I know everything and you know I know and if you don’t help me I won’t be able to continue this farce, and so he got embarrassed and said I’m never going to leave you to be with her, I laughed and said oh yeah, that really makes me feel way better, and he asked what do you want from me? and I responded just that, discretion, you want to fuck a little floozy, fuck, fuck every day if you want, but don’t keep rubbing it in my face, and he stayed silent and didn’t say anything else and after I said tchau and hung up, and I grabbed the telephone and threw it with all my might against the wall, the whole thing shattered, Cleopatra started barking and didn’t stop, as bothered with the whole story as I was, and I sat there and cried thinking of the first time I entered the apartment building, loving that name, Tessália, and we went to look at the spacious apartment, just me and him, our friend the owner of the real estate agency trusted us with the key and said you don’t have to keep scheduling with the agent and waiting until he shows up, he unlocked the door and we walked in and strolled through the whole apartment, I loved the layout and the size of the rooms, the architect is a genius we didn’t even have to mess with anything, and he opened a suitcase and brought out a sheet that was folded up inside and stretched the sheet out in the middle of the living room, as if we had been at Vaca Brava having a picnic, and he ordered, he didn’t ask, he ordered take off that dress now, this was ten years ago, as I took the dress off over my head and afterwards my underwear and knelt on the blanket he also took off all his clothes and it was there, that day, that we conceived Juninho, on that blanket extended in the still empty and half dark living room of the apartment that would be ours, every Wednesday he gets the kids at school, eats lunch at home with the family, the four of us at the table, but next Wednesday I’m going to get the phone and call him and tell him today I’m going to eat lunch at some restaurant with the kids and I’m going to go with them to see a movie, and he’ll say all right, and I’m going to get the kids and take them to the farm and put a drug in their soda and afterwards drown the three in the pool, and what do you think of that, friend?, I think it will teach a valuable lesson to that egocentric lowlife son of a bitch.’ Now, every day, when I read the paper, I will wait for news of this. Will she have the courage?” There were many other similar entries. It seems like, back when she still used to leave the house, my mother made a habit out of recording other peoples’ conversations and transcribing them in her notebook. Afterwards, because she gained even more weight, she quit therapy, stopped going out, and the only conversations she heard came through the television. There was, also, a typewritten letter, a letter signed by Flávia, to the editor of a women’s magazine. The letter was not dated. “Dear editor. The reason for which you rejected my story remains obscure. I know the manner in which I write is correct, selecting words properly, and my friend Margarete, who reads plenty and writes even better than I do, she was a teacher for a long time, this friend of mine made it a point to correct occasional slip-ups and adjust certain terms and expressions, avoiding any grammatical errors. My piece is perfectly legible and fluent. Therefore, there must be another reason. I also understand that my story is of interest to the readers of the magazine, like how some of their stories interest me in many moments. I always tried to look at all sides, recognize my fellow person, exercise empathy. My humanity has never been called into question. I am a successful middle-aged woman, my apartment and my car are paid off, not to mention a highly regarded landscape design firm, and I travel every year to wherever I please. I help my family members whenever I am solicited and even when I am not solicited. I have never fooled anyone, and I have never been dishonest with others or myself. I pay my taxes. I go to mass whenever possible, generally on the last Sunday of every month and on the anniversary of the death of a relative. I beat cancer. I work a lot. In a few words, I am a decent and absolutely normal person. The happenings narrated in my letter which I sent three months (!) ago fulfill, in my opinion, all the necessary requisites to figure in the “I, reader” section. It is a true story. More than true: extremely real. It is my story, as it couldn’t be otherwise, given the parameters of the above-cited section. Besides that, it was the manner in which I discovered, counseled by my therapist and my good friend Margarete, how to overcome all the traumatic events which I survived over the course of the past year. The insane and infantile way in which I gave myself over to someone I hardly knew and who was much younger than me. The imbalance, the estrangements, the despair. The obsession, the sick jealousies, the financial mess. His insistence, his threats, the phone calls, the scandals, the debts I took on without having any legal or moral obligation to do so, debts I took on simply so him and his family of parasites would leave me alone. Which is when I finally discovered the horrible situation I found myself in. The cold blood necessary to take back control of my life, put things in their proper places, recompose myself and restart. The lessons all of us women could take from all this. As a reader (and subscriber!) of the magazine for decades, someone profoundly familiar with your content, I understand that my story was born to figure in your pages. Truthfully, many times in the midst of my torment, it occurred to me that one day this would happen, that, sooner or later, my story would be in your pages. That gave me the strength to persevere. Which is why I ask you, dear editor, to reconsider your decision. If it is the case, I will apply the suggestions you may eventually make. I am all eyes and ears. I am at your orders. Before I finish this letter, I would like to tell you something that happened days after I sent in my story. Something which, if you judge pertinent, may even be added to the original piece, maybe as a kind of epilogue or appendix. A few days ago, I went to dinner with my friend Margarete. We chose a restaurant located in the West Section, next to her residence. I have known her for decades, ever since elementary school, because we grew up in the same small town and we were educated at the same Salesian school. Margarete accompanied me throughout my whole recent Calvary, being indispensable to my recovery, and I was by her side when she most needed it, a few years ago, when she started to suffer from a few health problems. Unmoored by life in distinct moments and circumstances, we knew how to recompose ourselves and move forward. Despite everything. Despite everything. Margarete, it’s true, developed a certain eating compulsion, and gained a little bit of weight in the last few years. But I am certain that, with my help, she will overcome this problem. Going back to the referenced dinner, me and my friend were at the table savoring a good Chardonnay and some macadamia nuts when she donned a very serious expression. I asked if everything was alright, and Margarete responded with another question, about when I had seen him for the last time. Just like that, out of the blue. After a moment of hesitation, shaken with the question, I responded that I hadn’t heard from him for exactly six months and nine days. She put her utensils on her plate and stared at me, still very serious. ‘Did he die?’, I asked, almost in a whisper. My legs trembled. My head spun. So, as if I hallucinated, I saw my friend, my sister, my Margarete spread open a big smile and say, ‘He had an accident with the motorcycle he bought with your money.’ I got up in silence, stumbled to the bathroom and, knelt dignifiedly next to the toilet bowl, put two fingers from my right hand down my throat and made sure to expel everything. That’s it. I await your response, dear editor.” (. . .) I heard a noise from my mother, closed the notebook, put it back in the same place I found it and returned to the living room. She was still sleeping; a nightmare, probably.

(. . .)

ANDRÉ’S NOTE : MY NAZI PAST is a satirical journey through reactionary Brasilian thought. Leandro, the protagonist (and narrator of most of the story), might (or not) be the grandson of a Nazi who hid in Brasil, and he might (or not) have murdered this (supposed) Nazi-grandpa. Down this slippery slope, full of false starts and “facts” described, negated, and rewritten, the book cuts through decades of recent Brasilian history and looks to dig up the serpent’s egg — or the donkey’s skull — lodged in the national soul. It is a frequently self-defeating attempt, mimicking Brasil’s constant self-sabotage (a nation addicted to unraveling what it has woven). But by exposing this & that, in this way, the novel fucks with the geographical, the historical, the political, to reach the extreme freedom of the literary.

HAROLD’S NOTE : I was at a bookstore in Leblon, pensively masticating my cheap sub-equatorial chewing-gum, wondering to myself : why ain’t United-Statesian post-modernism had any influence on contemporary Brasilian fiction. . . ? Gaby comes over holding My Nazi Past (2025) : “I think you’ll like this.” I thought she was joking because : NAZI ; but I opened it, saw the epigraph from The Tunnel : — I found what I was looking for(. . .) There’s many passages I could’ve translated; the one I chose shows off the book’s nested polyphony & gives an inkling of its perverted carnival; I also find it moving : Leandro’s mom who don’t go outside anymore, transcribing alheial anguish, sitting at the kitchen table (not in bed!) : — a student trying to edify herself thru other sorrows(. . .)

ANDRÉ DE LEONES (Goiânia, 1980) is the author of the novels Scorched Wind, Eufrates, Below Paradise, Land of Empty Houses, and Today is a Dead Day. He lives in São Paulo. This is excerpt is the first of his work to appear in English.

2/23/26

BLAST2MAG@GMAIL.COM

I

WHEN I GOT HOME, I realized I forgot my keys, like I always do, and I had to climb over the roof to my patio to get inside again. On top of the roof I looked out at the city and all the lights looked pink and blue and they were spinning like little swirls, little tidepools in the ocean because I was on mushrooms.

II

I’M OBSESSING OVER MEN and addicted to my phone because I’m bored. Drinking a green smoothie. I have therapy later and a yoga class. Trump is president again. Everyone hates women. The whole country is cooked. I’m gonna fucking stab somebody. I’m so far past the point of being understanding. Crossed the street next to this little old lady who was hunched over and walking slow, but you could tell she was trying to walk faster, and a car was waiting to turn and the guy driving the car rolled down his window and said, take your time ma’am, don’t rush. I always want to hide everything. I was always lying and trying to get my facts straight. Danielle and I talked about this. We said that’s why we’re good at writing, because we always had to make up little stories.

III

WENT TO TV EYE last night. I bought a white baby tee shirt with a red deer on it. Then we went to Bonus Room. It was karaoke night. Everyone did the classics. Cyndi, Whitney, Celine. I ordered a dirty Shirley and tater tots. Later, after everyone left, we talked to this boy playing pool. She pointed him out. He saw us both looking at him, we were basically just staring and pointing and whispering to each other, and he came over and sat with us. He asked what we both did. I said I write. He said he paints but he writes too. I asked him what he liked to read and he said mostly old white men and I said I like some white men so he asked who and I said Denis Johnson, because boys love him, and he went on a little rant about how Denis Johnson is about “75% there” and I was like totally. Men always do this, always have to assert some sort of intellectual dominance. He asked us what our signs were. He told us he was intimidated by us, then he tried to have a threesome with us.

IV

WE SPLIT FRIED ARTICHOKES and a burrata salad with arugula and apples and pomegranate seeds. We drank espressos. I drank a vodka soda and then a vodka redbull. It was actually a really beautiful day. Sometimes I feel like I get stuck in the energy of whatever I’m writing. And I’ll feel insane and depressed and hopeless and think nonstop about how terrible and bleak everything is and then I’ll finish what I’m writing and feel good again. It’s a full moon. Or it was and now it’s going away again. I don’t know. It’s getting dark too early. We got lunch in Williamsburg. I had a bacon, egg and cheese with potatoes on the side and then a glass of orange wine. We went to Hotel Delmano. We argued about whether or not anything would be actually better if Kamala had won the election. No clue what to do for Thanksgiving. Going to ignore. We went to Public Records to dance. I wore skinny jeans for the first time since seventh grade. We found some guy to buy us drinks. We went to Happy Fun. Everyone said they loved my coat. I thrifted it but it’s from Topshop. Thanksgiving. Woke up hungover. We went to the movies and saw Wicked. We cried. After the movie we went to Martha’s for pie and coffee and then we went to Ray’s and had Popeyes. We went to Lucy’s and got pho and then walked home. Everything we walked past felt very beautiful. We walked past a broken mirror leaned up against a tree. We walked past a little garden of gnomes and tiny houses. We got coffee at Honeymoon and looked at this children’s book called Little Princess Goodnight. We talked about how everything’s over and how we have to laugh. I asked June if she’d been reading anything and she said just the signs. And I said oh right yeah the signs. The patterns and the signs and the symbols. And she was like you get it and I was like yeah of course.

2/13/26

BLAST2MAG@GMAIL.COM

The Schvitz was in some hood part of East Cleveland. A relic from the 20s. Jimmy, the front desk guy with half his face stroked out, checked us in. He asked for everyone’s names. Me and Ezra said ours. When Ollie said his, Jimmy said, “Is that Jewish?”

Ezra saw us in but had to go back to the car to take a call: a care conference with my Uncle Bruce and his in-patient treatment counselor. The call was where Ezra had to tell his brother that he couldn’t stay back at Ezra’s house when he got out. The process of healing Bruce’s troubled mind entailed figuring out his own housing. Low on the list of what my dad wanted to be doing that day. But no one else could do it where Bruce would actually listen to them. Not like people were queuing to help Bruce. Ezra was both his brother and pro bono attorney, a guardian in service to step in and save Bruce’s life when called to. He’d done it before.

Me and Ollie changed into towels. I ate a gummy. We both signed up for platza scrubs. The hot room downstairs was a concrete basement with bleacher seats. Fluorescent tube lights. Heat blasted from a furnace door. The anti-spa. We sat on the top step. The thermometer said 220°. No one knew if that temp was right, but what else could we trust.

I told Ollie that the girl I was taking to my company’s Xmas party wasn’t the woman I’d been seeing in the city for the past 8 months. I was seeing both, but only one did I chill with once a week. He was like, “Well do you text her a lot?”

“The chick I’ve been seeing?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, pretty often. I can tell she borderline loves me. I feel evil taking this other girl to the dance.”

And Ollie shrugged like No I wasn’t evil. But he never said I wasn’t.

He said, “I’ve been seeing this woman for a few weeks now.”

“You like her?”

“What I like about her most is I want to fuck her all the time.”

“That means you primally wanna have a baby with her.”

“Ah man, I don’t know if I’m cut out for that.”

“We’re denying our animal selves by doing this type of shit,” I said, “thinking this way.”

Years ago my friend Clint visited the city from Baltimore, late February. He said at the dinner he invited me to that he had “baby fever.” That he was ready to have a kid with his girl at any time. The next time I saw Clint in early September, he said his girl was expecting that December. That a week or 2 after he’d self diagnosed baby fever, she was late. We turned up and he told me he didn’t feel ready. The kid was probably 3 now.

Me and Ollie cold plunged and sat for a sec, looking out for Ezra. He must still have been on the phone. So we returned to the hot room. Ollie said he’d only been drinking and eating since he got back to the Midwest.

I said, “It’s good to eat like that every few months. The nourishment binge. I just follow every weekend spent at my parents’ with a 24-hr fast — only water and coffee — then a hot yoga class and 5 straight days of exercise. That regimen rights you, you know?” I caught myself speaking more and more like a personal development podcaster. Like the few answers that barely worked for me would work for everyone.

Back outside the hot room, Ollie and I decompressed on the cement bench. The cold pool was in the 70s and didn’t offer the same relief as the air in the anteroom.

A fat man lumbered from the door to the stairs into the schvitz. Was it? Fuck, the fat man was, I realized with shame, my father. Ashamed I came from him. Almost angry but mostly pity at how far Ezra had let himself go. And because he was a fat fuck, I felt destined to one day devolve into one too. Genetics. I explained all this to Ollie. But I didn’t even want to have to acknowledge Ezra when he passed me on his way into the hot room. I couldn’t face him just then. But when he got close enough, I could see without my contacts in that this man wasn’t actually Ezra; this fat man was way bigger, more Finnish-looking.

We went back upstairs. Bootstrap had arrived, was stripping down at a locker in the dim nap room. We all 3 hit the downstairs heat again quick and then went up to the dining room.

The dining room was austere like a smokey bingo hall. A framed picture of Israeli general Moshe Dayan presided over the folding tables, tables partied by bros who smoked cigars indoors and played cards. I heard only a couple dudes talk about the M-ohio game tomorrow; both from around here, Cleveland somewhere. Neither dude sounded confident. I felt smug in a cheap way.

Bootstrap obliged the Lucky Strike I offered him. Him and his wife just had their 2nd daughter last month. Their wedding was the day of the M-ohio game in 2021, the game M broke the curse. Which Ezra lamented he couldn’t go to. But Boot’s wedding made the short list of legit excuses for skipping it. Boot had been friends with my brother Saulty since they were 10-year-olds. They grew up partying together, smoking, drinking, and then taking pills. But when Saulty followed me to college on the west coast Boot slouched deeper into opiates. He took a job at a tourist island in Lake Erie where months of security footage showed him pocketing cash that belonged in the register. He almost went away for a while. But Ezra helped him. And Boot had been mostly sober since then. He married his Recovery sponsor’s sister.

Now worked at a meat purveyor in Cleveland. They supplied the Browns, a bunch of restaurants, and the Schvitz with their steaks. I asked Boot how work was going and he explained the intricacies of animal protein distribution. I asked him, “You ever gone and seen how it was made?” Morbid curiosity my own bitchassness precluded me from facing.

“Yeah they took us on a field trip down to one place outside Ashland.” That day, he said, he was recovering from a nasty hangover, a time he fell off. I asked him what it was like to watch it happen. He said, “It’s as gnarly and real as you would imagine.” I imagined a cow bucking wildly in a cramped pen, the worker struggling to aim the bolt gun. Boot said that place wasn’t even that big, that it only butchered like 50 cows a day. That seemed like a lot.

And I said I respected that at least he went to see where what he sold came from. He faced it and was OK enough with it to continue selling it. I said, “It’s a bitch move to sell that product and not see how it’s harvested.” Like I knew anything. I was on a work call a year ago with a pedigreed woman whose LinkedIn said she used to work for Tyson Foods. No way she’d ever visited the factories, saw her money get made, sat with the scale of conscious suffering to feed our fat asses. Healthier to ignore that ugliness and instead outfit her condo with the knick knacky candles from her registry I didn’t mean to find. At least Boot went there.

Ezra pulled up to our table, was back from the car. He’d shed his winter coat and changed into a towel, well lighter than the Finnish dude I mistook him for earlier. Ezra cracked the seal on the bottle of Grouse we’d brought and poured his plastic cup mostly full. They were the small cups though.

I asked, “How’d it go?”

Ezra said that, on the call, when he said what he had to say, “Bruce was miffed.”

“People can help you along,” Boot said, “but at the end of the day you gotta claw your own way outta the well.”

We briefly hit the steam with Ezra. Sat on the top step. The dial said 230° now. Some dude tossed a bucket on the oven rocks and the wave of scalding air charged us. Ezra winced like someone had waxed his leg hair with gorilla glue. He said, “It’s searing,” and hit the cold pool.

We all followed him upstairs and ordered dinner. After draining most of the Grouse, our waiter brought the food. Rye bread, butter, and a pickle platter with spicy tomato peppers. Then the steak: a slab of ribeye slathered in minced garlic and broiled in a fire chest oven. I ordered mine medium. Last time, I ordered it rare and couldn’t sleep. I felt like I was 90.

We ate and drank the Grouse. Then the attendant called my name for the full-body platza scrub. Ollie, he said, would be next. We all went down to the hot room. Then the attendant told me to get naked.

I said, “Completely?”

“Yeah. Now lay face down.”

My ass was cracked toward the room. The attendant covered my head with a cold towel. I was blind but could hear some dude in the room say, “I guess some guys are Ferraris and some guys are Buicks.” The bad joke was all of us, but my nakedness instigated it.

I told the attendant not to scrub my 5-week-old tatt with the bristles he abraded the rest of my body with. The scrub amplified the heat, my disorientation. But for a while I felt blank. Cooked. After it was done, I grabbed for my towel to go immediately upstairs. I only realized when I got up there that I’d left my sandals. Ollie and Boot were blasting cigs at our designated table. They’d seen me strip for the scrub, but then must’ve left. Ollie said, “How was it?”

“Good,” I said, a diplomatic lie they nodded along to. “But honestly,” I said, “that shit was kinda gay.”

Boot said, “Oh we saw.”

Ollie said he crossed his name off the list.

Ezra came back from lounging in the dim nap room. He shook what was left in the Grouse bottle and downed it. I asked Ollie if he’d had any and he shook his head No. Me and Ezra had killed the entire thing. Our father-son fellowship, fortified by lower-mid-shelf Scotch.

When Boot had to return to the missus, we all figured it time to go. On our way out, the cashier recognized Ollie from some show he’d booked last decade. He asked Ollie to sign a baseball. No idea why a baseball. Ollie obliged him the autograph and the grill guy requested a selfie they snapped in the kitchen.

We got in the car and stopped for gas just before the turnpike entrance. Ezra told us to get cans. He didn’t want to make the 90-mile trek back to Toledo dry.

Ollie said, “You serious?”

And Ezra said, “Ollie, I do not give a fuck.” Ollie later said to me that that’s how you get a DUI. Which, 2 weeks later, visiting my brother in Washington state, we got pulled over in his car on I-5. Expired tags Saulty had warned us about. Ezra was driving. We had open cans. My chest pounded, thinking about what Ollie had said. But we were white men who’d gone to college. The cop let us go. As we drove off I said, “I almost shit myself back there.”

Ezra shook his head like I was a complete rookie. “When that cop walked up,” he said, “my blood pressure did not change at all. Not at all.”

11/28/25

BLAST2MAG@GMAIL.COM

Dircinha had an aura of black light. Pretty, but she gave him goosebumps. Peralvo told me later that at the beginning, he couldn’t see her aura: not everyone allowed themselves to be read by his gift, almost one fifth of humanity was immune. He thought the goosebumps came from the things the girl begged him to do with her in the back of the pantry, between rice sacks, under the bed, in the closet, back behind the chicken coop in the yard. Vaporous Dircinha, in her incomplete fourteen years, blondish curls and transparent skin stretched over a map of blue veins, was overcome in these moments by an urgent carnality, and suddenly Peralvo saw it. He saw it and he was afraid. The light of Dircinha Queiroz, sharp & clear, capable of transforming night into day and day into night, distorting everything that approached her. When he realized he was in front of an entirely new aura, he was frightened: was it malignant? Observing Dircinha up close, while she trembled from pleasure and fear, sticking to him like an albino tick, he concluded: no. If it was malignant, it would only harm its bearer, not the world. A few days after his discovery, someone caught wind that maybe that pesky little mulatto, the horror, was taking liberties with the girl, it was revolting even to imagine, a creature so innocent. They were forbidden from seeing each other, and in less than a month, Dircinha was falling off a cliff cleared by dynamite on one of her dad’s rock quarries. Her body was light as a feather but fell straight, scraping on the granite wall down the whole thirty-meter drop, before smashing into the ground. They said it was an accident, that she slipped, — a freak accident, — but Peralvo knew it was nothing like that. Dircinha had an aura of black light.

IN THE MIDST OF A GREAT PUBLIC COMMOTION, fainting, wails, a procession of hundreds of people dragging feet through the streets, Dircinha was buried on a Saturday, the eve of the game between América from Merequendu and Palmeiras from Laje do Merequendu, scheduled in Laje’s stadium as the main attraction of the neighboring city’s anniversary festivities. The regional classic was one of the biggest events in Serra dos Ossos, with a history of bloody rivalry, dating back to when Palmeiras was still called Palestra Itália, memories now fading in the minds of the oldest folks. That year, everyone said, the richest families in Laje, the Texeiras and the Laureanos, had put aside their ancient feud to jointly fund the importation of two or three professional players from corners where soccer was more developed, Uberaba, even Campinas, to field a damn good team capable of laying such a beating on América that it would be forever recorded in the annals of the championship.

In comic contrast to such opulence, Merequendu’s team had been neglected by their patrons. Tattered uniforms, threadbare cleats, late bonuses that had been accumulating for months, they were barely capable of fielding eleven bumpkins that wouldn’t disgracefully disgrace themselves in front of their rivals. At the cemetery, América’s coach, Chico da Dora, was the image of defeat, and the Doctor and Zé were alarmed when they greeted him.

The idea came from the Spaniard, Zé, right at the moment in which the first shovelfuls of earth fell on the coffin of the daughter of Totonho Queiroz and the wails increased in volume.

— Take Roliña, Chico.

Chico da Dora’s eyes lit up.

— Come on, no way, — the Doctor cut him off — The kid’s only sixteen.

— The same age as Pelé when he started to play for Santos — mused the Coach. — But the thing is, I don’t have another dime. The team is riding in the bed of a borrowed truck tomorrow. I’m counting on Palmeiras’s people to at least feed us some mortadella sandwiches. If Rolinha wants to play for free, he’s in. Does he have cleats?

They asked Peralvo, and he was down, and his guardian, far from creating obstacles, started to like the idea. The next day, while the extremely young craque was on his way to the neighboring town, eating dirt in the bed of an old FNM truck next to his miserable, squalid, toothless companions, José Burgos de Saavedra y Arrabal and the confraternity of his bar — Legs, Carilla, even Tripa — went for a plush ride in the Doctor’s bottle-green Oldsmobile to bless the debut of the future best player in the world.

That match, which I’ll never forgive myself for having missed, would be immortalized in the sporting annals of the region, but not for the reasons which the Palmeiras fans would’ve predicted. As soon as they arrived, the Doctor and his crew were shocked by the jubilant atmosphere reigning in the city that was completely covered with green and white flags. Shabby but imposing pig sculptures made from bamboo and cloth decorated almost every street corner. Laje do Merequendu boasted the pride it felt as much for its pungent porcoculture as for Palmeiras, in a zoosoccerific combination, which, curiously, anticipated by a few years the most famous team from São Paulo.

— What a pigsty — snorted Tripa.

— It’ll be tough — exhaled Carilla.

They stopped at the bar of the Doctor’s acquaintance to drink beer, eat mandioca with torresmo and wait around for game time. The bar buzzed like a beehive, everyone talking about a certain Chicotada, a slick suprasalaaming Black, who thought himself the Sultan of Brunei, walking around on the tips of his toes, never caught without his silk suit, but anyway: better to leave the man alone, he was by far the biggest craque that had ever stepped foot in these parts. He came from Ponte Preta to earn, they said, a bigger salary than the city’s Prosecutor.

— You guys are brave showing your face around here — said the bar’s owner, a crosseyed Turk named Tarcisio, to the Doctor. — It’s going to be a landslide.

— We’ll see about that — said the Doctor.

— Keep dreaming you damn cross-eye — mumbled Tripa, but the other didn’t hear him or pretended not to.

— Respectfully, it’s going to be a slaughter. Friends, friends, but anyway. . .

— We’ll see about that.

What almost one thousand people witnessed that evening, perched on the rickety wooden bleachers of a hole-ridden field that passed for Palmeiras’s stadium, was the greatest individual performance by a soccer player in the history of their lives, past and future. The author of this masterpiece wasn’t the so-called Chicotada, who hardly justified his arrogance, but a mulatto kid with red hair and a pouty lip whose ragged red jersey swallowed him up. Alone, Peralvo couldn’t do much to stop Palmeiras scoring one goal after another. América’s team was truly a disaster, legitimizing all of Chico da Dora’s pessimism that threatened to defeat them before the match even started. But there was one thing, yes, Rolinha could do: immediately avenge every goal his team conceded, and then avenge it doubled, tripled, hissing around the field like a hurricane, as if he was made of a different substance than the other players, pure spirit whizzing around clumsy posts of meat. He’d sombrero flick it over players’ heads, bicycle kick it, nutmeg all in sequence, hit them with moves that were yet to be named, net it in the top corner from distance, twist the goalie around and walk in with ball and all, later on there were even people who swore that they saw him kick a corner and then run in for a header. It was absurd, it didn’t make any sense. It couldn’t be happening. When the whistle blew to end the first half, the referee felt a weakness in his legs and felt himself the lowliest among men: he’d invented two penalties for Palmeiras and not even that could avoid the disaster. Carilla almost fainted holding on to Legs and Zé. The Doctor looked around at the silent bleachers, and finding it all a bit sinister, recommended that the Merequendu fans, who, apart from the bar mafia counted another half dozen stragglers, only celebrate internally. The scoreboard counted six for the home team, ten for the visitor. All ten for Peralvo. Where would this end?

We’ll never know because the first half was the only one played in that match. The players were leaving the field when the heavy torpor that fell over the crowd exploded suddenly in revolt.

— It’s a fix! Someone yelled, and over the ruined fence that separated the bleachers from the field started to fly rocks, bottles, shoes. Here and there men with disturbed physiognomies shot bullets into the air.

— He’s on steroids!

— Cancel the game. It didn’t count!

— Kill the sarará!

As if answering the last command, two farmhands in cowboy hats squeezed themselves through a hole in the fence, each of them clutching a rifle, and they went running after Peralvo. Apart from the show-stopping performance from América’s young star, that was another never-before-seen aspect of the match. Sure, blood had been spilled a few times in the history of the Serra dos Ossos classic, but only in fights between fans. Never had anybody seen a player be literally hunted on the field.

The second part of the spectacle was even harder to believe than the first. The farmhands, who would later be identified as the brothers Demazio and Damazio, Colonel Bento Teixeira’s henchmen, unloaded ten rounds of lead aiming at Peralvo, one for each goal he’d scored. The first four ten meters away from the target, the next four from five meters, the last two almost at point blank. The golden boy from Merequendu dodged all of them with the grace and precision of a prized bullfighter. One shot ripped his shirt. When the smoke cleared, the crowd saw four fallen bodies on the field in the midst of blood puddles and screams of pain. The assailants booked it so they wouldn’t be lynched. Of the four that had fallen — two with red jerseys, two with green jerseys — only one was dead, stretched out on his back with his eyes and arms open and a tremendous shot in his heart. Even as a corpse he was elegant: it was Chicotada.

Sérgio Rodrigues is a novelist, literary critic, and journalist: the author of eleven books; a Mineiro that adopted Rio de Janeiro as his home; and one of the most celebrated authors in contemporary Brasilian literature. O DRIBLE won the prestigious Oceanos Prize in 2014.

TRANSLATOR (HAROLD)’S NOTES

THE MOVE — Published in Brasil in 2013 as O DRIBLE which means “the dribble” : referring to Pelé’s attempt to pull an insane, defiant, heretical move on Uruguay’s goalie Mazurkiewicz in the 1970 World Cup; the attempt: a grasp at aesthetic glory, was a failure, like many other moves in this book.

MARIO FILHO — (1908-1966); one of the most influential Brasilian sports writers of all time; there’s a stadium named after him, — that you might have heard of, — in Rio : it is colloquially known as Maracanã.

SARARÁ — A term for a light-skinned person with red hair; its first usage in this excerpt is affectionate, but later on, when the game is being played, someone in the crowd yells it with derision. It comes from a Tupi word for red ant.

TORRESMO — A fried pork dish that can be made in various ways, including here with mandioca (cassava); I had torresmo in Ouro Preto that changed my life: I think about it almost every day.

CRAQUE — The ubiquitous Brasilian term for a superstar; literally from CRACK, a player so good he cracks open the game; an explosion of experience.

CHICOTADA — A nickname that literally means lash, like from a whip.

11/10/25

BLAST2MAG@GMAIL.COM

1.

SHE WANTED to get fucked, and she wanted to get fucked up too. She didn’t have any insurance at home—insurance was what she called booze in the house to come home to. She was at the bar, and the bar closed at two, and the liquor store closed at two too, so she’d have to leave the bar early to grab her insurance. But she didn’t wanna leave the bar early—or she didn’t wanna leave til she at least had something to take home and fuck.

It was 1:15. To make it to the liquor store before it closed she knew she’d have to leave by 1:40 at the latest. She had twenty-five minutes to find someone and get him out the door unless he had some more booze in his truck.

She knew whoever she’d find would have a truck and men with trucks usually had something to drink in them. But that might not be enough to get them through the night. So she had twenty-five minutes to find the guy, figure out how much he had to drink in his truck, and get him out the door if it wasn’t enough.

She spotted him across the room, she thought he wasn’t exactly very good looking but he’d do, maybe his cock was alright. Sometimes she thought she could tell just by looking at them. Even a not so good looking guy she could tell if maybe he had a better looking cock than his face. And this guy looked like you’d hope his cock was better looking than his face. So she locked in on him. Waited for his eyes to look up and look her way so she could look at him and hold his gaze for longer than was appropriate, and that was her universal signal, her universal signal for you might just fuck me tonight. His eyes finally met hers. They held contact for a bit before any expression changed on either of their faces, and then a little smile appeared on his, and then a little smile appeared on hers and he waved her over.

She sat up from her chair and her tank top was up over her little pot belly, she pulled it down and sucked her little pot belly in and walked over to him as sexy as she could being as drunk as she was. She said haay to him, he asked her how she was doing. They bullshitted for about 30 seconds. They didn’t tell each other their names. She said she wanted to keep on partying and the bar was closing soon. He told her he had a bit of liquor in his truck. When she asked him how much he said it was enough to keep them busy a little while. She asked him if he was sure it was enough and he said he had half a bottle of whiskey and a few beers and she said fuck in her head cause she knew that wasn’t enough, and if it was enough for him he didn’t drink like she did. She convinced him to get the fuck outta there anyway. She needed cigarettes. He said lemme finish my beer.

They both tipped their drinks back and she poured too fast for how open her mouth was and some of it poured down the side of her face and she worried it was gonna fuck up her make up. She had a thick layer of foundation around her mouth where the little holes were from when her skin was real bad when she was younger. She filled the holes in with the foundation and then blended it into the rest of her face like she was sculpting clay. She grabbed her tank top and pulled it up to dab the side of her mouth and as she did she made sure to suck in real good cause she didn’t want him seeing her little pot belly. She knew from looking in the mirror if she sucked in real good you could hardly tell it was there. But if she relaxed a little it would bulge out and fold over the waist band of her jeans. She dabbed the side of her mouth real gentle, careful not to fuck up the sculpture of foundation.

They got out to the parking-lot. They started walking towards his truck. A quarter-ton, single cab. A small truck. She laughed. She asked him if that was his truck, he said it was. She asked him if he had a vagina or something, he told her fuck you, it’s reliable. They got in, he reached behind her seat and grabbed the bottle of whiskey. There was a case of beer with about four left in it at her feet, she grabbed one, cracked it and took a sip. It was piss warm but she didn’t mind. He opened the half bottle of whiskey and took a shot then passed it to her. She took it, put it to her lips and held it up for a good three swallows. He cranked the truck and they rolled out of the parking-lot.

He tried to make small talk with her, asking what she did for work, asking if she had any kids, asking if she had a man at home. She ignored him for the most part, she turned up the radio singing along to dixie chicks or some shit like that, swigging on all the alcohol. It was taking a hold on her. After a couple minutes of not looking at him she turned her head towards him and took a good look. She hadn’t noticed how off-looking the silhouette of his face was in the bar. Something was changing inside her. She relaxed her stomach, no longer caring if her little pot belly bulged over the waist band of her jeans. She asked him if he had a fat bitch of a wife at home. She said I bet you’d love to get your hands on this pussy. Sticking her free hand between her legs. She told him she hoped his cock was prettier than his face and she said she hoped it was bigger than his faggot truck. She really wanted to hurt him. She wanted her words to make his heart hurt.

Her words did hurt him, but he didn’t have a fat bitch of a wife at home. He lived alone, he hadn’t had any luck finding a nice woman. In fact he probably hadn’t had a woman who wasn’t his grandmother in the truck beside him in a few years. He didn’t like the way he looked, he was self conscious about it. He didn’t really have a chin, his face kind of just turned into his neck, not much of a jawline either. A bit off-looking. He’d heard it his whole life. When he was young, in his early teens, he always thought when he got a bit older his chin would finally come in. He had been waiting for that moment for thirty something years.

She asked him where his chin fucked off to? That one hurt him more than all the others. He tried to laugh it off, passively, like he did all his life when his evil fuck of an Oldman would point it out.

They pulled up to the store and she got out of the truck, he didn’t follow. She stood beside the open door and asked him if he was gonna come in. He said he’d just wait there for her.

He sat there thinking, he really thought he should leave. He didn’t need the poison in this woman’s words getting to him. But he couldn’t leave her, he wasn’t built like that, he’d wait for her. He’d get her back to her car or her house or wherever it was she was staying.

In the liquor store the lights were bright. He could see her through the windows. She held her hand up to her forehead to shield her eyes from the light. He watched her stumble the aisles looking for what she needed.

In the aisle she spotted a kitten out of the corner of her eye. The kitten approached her, she rubbed up on her shins. She picked the kitten up and nestled it close to her face, she told the kitten how pretty she was. She saw the kitten had a little collar with a heart-shaped name tag on it. She held the little heart in her hand and read the name engraved on it. She put the kitten down and picked up a 12 pack of beer off the shelf. At the counter she asked the man working for a mickey of Smirnoff and a pack of Export A Golds.

He saw her come out of the liquor store and walk towards his truck. She held up the case of beer in one hand and the mickey in the other. She gave them a little jiggle and smiled at him. He reached across the seat and opened the passenger door for her. She hopped in the truck. She said the cocksuckers wanted 17 dollars for a mickey. He told her he might just take her home, he told her he had work the next day and he hated being hungover at work. She told him not to be a pussy, she told him if she got good and drunk she might just give him some of this. She put her hand between her legs again and pulled on her crotch.

She was fumbling through her pockets looking for her lighter. She couldn’t find it so she asked if he had one, he told her to check the glove compartment. She flicked on the light above her head and opened the glove compartment and started rifling through papers, she noticed a prayer of St Francis card and an invitation for a funeral. Lovingly Remembered Sheryl Didsbury April 2, 1955 – December 9, 2023.

She spotted a white lighter somewhere between all the papers, she grabbed it, lit her cigarette and put it in her pocket. She told him you know white lighters are bad luck don’t you? He asked her why she put it in her pocket then. She said well Im getting rid of it for you, I don’t think there’s any such thing as good luck for someone like me anyway.

That hurt his heart, hurt it more than when she asked him where his chin fucked off to.

He told her he might just take her home or wherever she wanted to go. She told him to take her back to her fucking car, she said she needed her car and she wasn’t gonna take the bus back over to the bar in the morning. He asked her if she was sure, he told her she was in no shape to drive. She said she didn’t give a fuck, if she had to she’d sleep in her car.

He started to drive back towards the bar. She cracked another beer, lit another cigarette, and stared out the window, glossy-eyed. He looked over at her a few times. She pretended not to notice. He wanted to say something. Couldn’t think of the words. He thought to himself she is pretty pretty you know. Now that she’s just looking out the window with no hate in her eyes.

They stayed silent for the rest of the drive. He pulled up beside her car in the bar parking-lot, she got out of the truck, she stood beside the open door for a moment. She told him she met a kitten in the liquor store named Cheryl. She slammed the door behind her before he could say goodnight.

2.

SHE CAME-TO and her mouth tasted something fucking awful. She didn’t have any water in the car but she reached back behind the seat and found a warm beer on the floor. She cracked it and took a few swallows. Something about the taste of warm beer in the morning. It made her feel things. Like camping with your friends as a teenager. She found her crumpled pack of cigarettes and was about to take one out and light it but decided not to. She remembered sometimes the first cigarette in the morning made her feel things too, things that weren’t quite as nice. Might make her feel memories from last night or last week. Ones that aren’t far enough away. Ones that hurt more. She usually liked to wait til after a few beers to smoke her first cigarette. Enough beer that the nicer older memories can over power the recent ones. The recent ones that all felt like mistakes.

She looked at herself in the rear-view mirror. Her mascara was runny, that meant she probably had the terrors last night. She put her face a little closer to the mirror to see the make-up around her mouth. She thought it looked pretty good. Sometimes sleeping in her make-up did that to the parts around her mouth—rubbed it in just right.

She picked up her phone, she opened the Facebook app, she started watching reels. Construction sites in India with walls caving in. Make-up tutorials. Deep sea fishers catching never before seen sea creatures. Before she knew it, she had a cigarette lit. Then it was gone. Time passed. She felt nothing—not the past, not last night, not even now.

Watching Facebook reels was some of the only time in her life where she didn’t feel the pang of memory.

She looked at the clock, it was 11:11. She made a wish, she made a wish that her Mom be happy and healthy. She made a wish she didn’t say those mean things to that man last night.

Her red Dodge Neon fired up on the third try cranking the ignition. She had to give it a little gas and let the RPM’s hover around 1500 or it would die out on her. She grabbed her phone and connected the blue tooth to her Scosch AM\FM blue tooth adapter. She found Jellyroll in her Spotify artists and pressed play.

There was an annoying buzzing sound somewhere in the background of the music, the adapter was starting to shit the bed but she was too lazy to try and reconnect it. She drove out of the bar parking lot and decided to head home. She had to work at 8pm and she knew she’d need a nap and a shower before that, and she knew she’d probably wanna stop at BP’s on her way to work to try her luck on the VLT’S.

She hopped on the 5 lane freeway heading south. Passed 3 exits and got off on the 4th. She drove through two new traffic circles, no plants or trees in the middle of them yet, just some top soil, one day they’ll be pretty and green. She passed the 711 then took a right. Her street was lined with brand new townhouses—she never really knew what that word meant—they were just houses that looked all the same, usually split into two units but hers was split into three. Tiny backyards with turf laid down, no fences yet, those were coming. The street had no sidewalks yet either, just curbs and 2x8’s and other pieces of wood making bridges over where the sidewalks will be and where there’s always mud when it rains. It hadn’t rained in a while now though, so the mud has all dried up and the wind kicks it up and blows it all over, making everything new look dirty and dusty.

She entered her place from a door on the side of the house. It led to a beige carpeted landing between two beige carpeted sets of stairs. One going up a few steps to a door that led to a suite on the main floor and one going down to a door that led to her’s. The landlords put a lock on the door and a fridge and hot plate down there and rented it as a third unit. She went down the stairs in her dusty black Sketchers slip-in’s and took them off at the bottom. Opened her door and went inside. It was completely dark apart from the glow of the Greys Anatomy season 3 DVD menu playing on the screen of her teevee.

She went to the fridge and looked inside. There was an empty box of Kim Crawford white wine, a few cans of Orange pop, 3 different bottles of ranch sauce in the door, some mayonnaise, a tub of margarine and a jar of pickles. She opened the freezer and took out a bag of potato and cheddar Cheemo perogees. Put a pot of water on the hot plate. She grabbed a roll of paper towel off the kitchen counter and walked over to the bathroom to take a piss.

After she was done pissing she decided to brush her teeth. She grabbed the tube of Crest tooth paste, it had no lid and the threaded bit where the lid screwed on was caked with dried up tooth paste, she squeezed some out onto her tooth brush. She paced around a bit while she brushed. She liked to try and brush for 30 seconds on each side, top and bottom. She knew she was supposed to do this ‘cause when her electric tooth brush used to work it did a little break in vibration each time you were supposed to switch sides, when 30 seconds was up. She left the charger for her tooth brush in a hotel room in Puerto Vallarta last year and hadn’t gotten a new one yet. She still brushed with it anyway and did her best to guess when 30 seconds was up.

She pulled up her tank top and sucked in her belly, looking at herself in the mirror from the front and then from the side. There was a little wooden block on the counter beside the bathroom sink, it said THE BEACH IS CALLING on it.

Her water was boiling by the time she got out of the bathroom. She put 8 perogees in the water, stirred them occasionally until they all floated. She strained them, dumped them in a bowl, grabbed the margarine, dropped in a forkful and stirred til they all had a nice plasticky shine to them.

She walked over to the couch with her bowl of perogees and sat down, grabbed the Xbox 360 controller from the floor and navigated her way through the Greys anatomy season 3 dvd menu til she found episode 7 and pressed play.

She hadn’t had her internet hooked up but she didn’t really care, if she wanted to watch Netflix she just watched it on her phone and her TV wasn’t smart anyways. She had even glued a little magnetic phone holder to the corner of her coffee table, the corner that’s closest to her face when she’s lying down on the couch. She thought if the phone is that close to her face, it’s the same size in her vision as a big screen teevee that’s 5 feet away, maybe even bigger.

She put her phone onto the magnetic holder. Vertical, not horizontal, so she could watch Facebook reels while she watched episode 7 of Greys Anatomy season 3. She finished her perogees and put the bowl on the coffee table. She laid down on the couch and put a pillow under her head, she wriggled around a bit til she was in the perfect position with both screens in her vision. The pillow had the word DREAM embroidered across it in big capital letters.

3.

HE HOPPED OUT of the excavator to get a better look at the trench he was digging. He examined the walls and floor of the trench, he liked them smooth and level. This was especially satisfying when he was digging through clay, like he was right then. You could curl the excavator bucket all the way in and run the bottom side of the bucket along the trench floor, smooth it out and sculpt it flat. He looked the however many hundred feet down the trench he had just dug, admiring how straight and smooth it all was. He walked over to his work truck to smoke a cigarette and make a coffee while the pups prepared the cable to be pulled down the trench line.

His work truck was big, an f250 crew cab with an 8-foot box. He thought about what the woman he met last night would think of him if she saw his work truck, not his little daily driver. He had a Keurig coffee maker plugged into an inverter in the back seat. He liked the Vanilla Biscotti flavoured pods, he popped one into the coffee maker. He grabbed his mug from the cupholder in the front seat, poured a little water in it, splashed it around, dumped it out and put it under the dispenser. The mug said GET SHIT DONE on it.

He walked over to see how the pups were doing backing the truck and A-frame trailer with the cable reel on it to the beginning of the trench line. He saw two of them were directing the driver, one on the left and one on the right, both of them giving mixed signals. He didn’t intervene even though he knew this was stupid. He’d tell them later that only one of them should be giving direction otherwise it confuses the driver. He knew they both just wanted something to do, hardworking kids.

He walked the trench line towards the truck and trailer. The field was dry and the sky was huge and the sun shone down on everything and there was no shadow or shade in sight. To the left was open plain as far as you could see, to the right, houses all the same and far beyond that, on the horizon, the tall buildings began.

He asked the pups if either of ’em had any white electrical tape in their pocket. They both shook their heads no. And there’s none in that truck he asked. Nope. That’s alright he said and walked back down the trench line to his truck to grab some. That happened a lot digging long trenches. You walk back and forth the length of them countless times. Needing one thing on one end and the thing you need is on the other. He didn’t mind though, he found peace in the pacing.

When he got back over to the start of the trench he pulled the end of the cable off the reel. The pups pushed up on the reel from the other side helping it spin so he could get a bit of slack on it. He wrapped the last three inches of cable in white electrical tape and wrote the word SOURCE on it with a sharpie.

He hoisted the cable end up over his shoulder and started to walk. It was easy for the first hundred feet and then it got hard. Once you had that much cable behind you on the ground. Plus you’re taking the weight of the reel cause you’ve slowed down now and it’s not spinning with its own momentum.

He leaned forward with all his weight, digging his feet into the ground for traction and took each step slowly, he looked behind and could see the pups standing at the reel and watching. He yelled at them ok, you can help now. He didn’t want them to help until it got hard enough to where he could barely take a step. If you don’t spread your bodies out far enough down the length of cable you end up either picking up another guy’s slack or barely taking any weight at all yourself.

They pulled 3 runs of cable total, he always took the lead. He knew how much slack they needed at the end and he was afraid anyone else would pull too little. This was something he was trying to work on. Trusting the people he worked with. Relinquishing a bit of his need for control.

Their skin was caked with dirt and sweat by the time they had finished. They were hungry and they would eat before they back-filled the trench. He walked over to his truck and opened his igloo lunch cooler he had had since he was young. He pulled out the disposable foil pan that held 3 large cabbage rolls and set it on the hood of the truck.

He had seen on Amazon that they sold plug in electric lunch boxes that kept your lunch warm all day. He had been especially thinking about getting one ever since he started buying cabbage rolls from Barb off Facebook marketplace. He thought imagine how nice that would be, cabbage rolls slow cooked all day in the hot lunch box. Barb sold 16 cabbage rolls for 20 dollars. You got two foil pans with 8 each in them. That got him 3 a day from Monday-Thursday. On Friday he let himself eat 4. He’d go see Barb on Sunday’s to pick up the next week’s batch.

The pups came over to his truck to eat their lunch on the tailgate. Sammy the older and rounder one had a big sandwich that was wrapped in plastic on a styrofoam tray. It was one of those sandwiches that’s a part of a bigger sandwich that they sell sections of at the grocery store that made you wonder how long the original sandwich was. Freddy the younger one had a sandwich too, it was wrapped in a plastic package as well but not the kind of plastic package the grocery store sandwich was wrapped in, not a plastic package that was wrapped by hand. A more machine-like and permanent package. It was one of the pizza hoagies they sell at the gas station. The ones with bread that stays soft for eternity.

Sammy started to tell them about the dreams he had been having lately. He told them about one where he was playing pool with the President of the United States and the President of the United States could never remember if he was stripes or solids. He told them about another one where in his dream Uber Eats had a service where you could get animals delivered to you to hangout with. In the dream he had ordered a bunch of baby ducks, and he was hungover in bed surrounded by baby ducks.

Then Sammy told them about the scary ones. The ones where Sammy wakes up and can’t sit up and feels a weight on his chest and is scared and he thinks there’s things in the room with him. He told Sammy that that was a common dream. That there were ancient paintings depicting people in bed who can’t sit up with Goblins on their chest and shadowy figures in the corners of the rooms. He told them its called sleep paralysis and that it’s been happening to people forever.

He hadn’t remembered a dream in a long time. He wanted to dream of his Mother since she had passed, but hadn’t yet. He went to bed most nights picturing her in his mind hoping that he would find her in his dream world, but he would wake up and not remember a thing.

4.

SHE WOKE UP sweaty and anxious and her stomach felt weird like it did whenever she fell asleep too soon after eating. The Greys Anatomy Season 3 DVD menu was back on the teevee. She had finished the entire season in her sleep again. Her phone screen was still on and was scrolling through Facebook reels on its own. She looked at the time in the top corner of the screen, it was 5:53. She thought about how much time she had. How long it would take her to shower, how long it would take her to drive to work. How long she could play the VLT’s at BP’s for. She locked her phone screen and stood up.

She walked over to the bathroom and turned the shower on. She picked a ball of wet hair out of the drain and tossed it into the toilet. She took off her socks and held them up to her nose and smelt them. They were hard and smelt sour so she folded them in on each other and tossed them into her laundry hamper. She did this to hide the smell, but this annoyed her when it came time to doing her laundry, having to separate them again before putting them in the washing machine.

She took off her jeans and tank top, walked over to the mirror in her pink thong. Turning her back to the mirror and looking over her shoulder to see if her ass was dropping. She thought her ass looked alright, she thought that was one thing she was blessed with, a round ass.

She slipped off her thong and walked over to the shower, checked the temperature and got in. The curtain was bunched to one side and when she tried to slide it across the rod it stayed stuck together. She had to use both hands on either side of the curtain to separate the sticky folds. Once she got it spread across the rod she looked at the yellow and brown stain across the length of the bottom two feet of it. She thought it looked like a mountain range.

She grabbed the green shampoo bottle, the one with the koala on it. She shook it hard trying to get whatever remained inside to the top of the bottle. She squeezed hard and a tiny dollop came out. She unscrewed the cap, filled the bottle with water and dumped it on her head.

She finished her shower and wrapped a towel around her body and a smaller one around her head. She stepped out of the bathroom and walked over to her phone on the coffee table. There was a text on the screen from MOMMA. It said, hey sweet heart could you stop at dollarama on your way to work and grab me some foil pans? And some emojis of hearts and stars.

Her Mom lived in the suburb on the opposite side of the 5 lane freeway from her. Just across an overpass. It was built a year or two before the one she lived in. It had sidewalks and fences. The traffic circles were green and beautiful.

10/28/25

BLAST2MAG@GMAIL.COM

At one point, long ago, it meant: He who is worthy to represent the kingdom protect the clan from disease famine weather must go into the dark night the deep forest below ground slay the dragon the lion the snake return from Hades unscathed, hell harrowed, survived to tell the tale, sufficiently initiated proven cosmically worthy to ascend to the heights of Olympus—

Were tangible traits demonstrated told to us down here below to guide us through our annual Samheins dark winters of disease death and discontent, a symbolic light to carry us through, to shine our way into the depths of December, beneath the soil, and back up and out come spring, a golden bough an ear of corn an evergreen leaf that never dies while all else, leaves on the sacred deciduous Oak — primeval source of our fires our homes our hearths — wilt and die—

Was the fire we light at peak midsummer for John, to sacrifice to Balder, killing Nordic Apollo, the Sun, marking the end of his annual reign, mourning the end of his manifest expansion, when the cuckoo bird the herald of spring departs for the otherworld, when we must sacrifice to a light source in place of the sun,

And so plucking the parasitic evergreen mistletoe off the Oak bark with a gold rather than iron blade, never allowing it to touch the ground, maintaining its elevatedness semi divinity aboveness, carrying it like a solar torch like Aeneas at the gates at Avernus aloft against whatever shadows we must face—

Or like the Pictish kings revering the parasitic cuckoo bird, apparently all male, leaving their immaculate eggs in foreign nests, avian lothario kings reproducing unconstrained, unthinking, virility incarnate, the same zygodactylic overseer of Zeus and Hera’s sacred wedding, only to leave at peak illumination to migrate elsewhere till the vernal return of investment to reap his corn, ever leaving, where I go you cannot come, its seed its eggs its light something for others to tend to be concerned with sustained by.

AND SO, in one sense, yes: Christ, born like Mithras like the sun in the darkest week of the year, self-expired like Attis beneath a tree, torn apart and resurrected come spring like Osiris, like Orpheus like Hercules harrowing below before ascending — in one sense, like Persephone abducted underground, who doesn’t arise come spring but whose rebirth literally inaugurates it, Christ is like each previous deity of vegetation.

But see these myths these rituals these protections are not uniformly executed are not intellectual nor in the least bit Enlightemented, Eli’s sons in the house of God where Hannah brings miraculously birthed Samuel are not, despite what they seem, actors of God, they are snacking on the burnt offerings, fornicating with the wives bearing sacrifices begging only for a Brighter Future, the rituals evolve and amalgamate according to Convenience, to changing taboo, Saul tests David over and over to see if he is worthy to reign to represent the land, David’s own son tests him (and is killed), Hippolytus is slandered by Phaedra dragged to his death by Neptune, his horses, his father, and only with Diana’s divine union is he resurrected, protected, famine and disease are inexorable and we regicide prophylactically, though if that doesn’t work if the king doesn’t want to face this fate this stress each year, how about we sacrifice the first son instead, he amends, or rather a slave will do, dress him up like me let him eat and drink and enjoy the harem, the people won’t know the difference, any show of death and rebirth over a feast and drinks and sex will suffice—

(And Dante is FURIOUS, these fake popes priests diviners…)

So, yes, it’s true, the deities of vegetation do share all that,

And a pedant might say the Angel Gabriel was but a serpent in one of Herod’s temples to Apollo, but—

That’s not the point.

That’s not the story the myth that defeated Rome.

THE MYTH is the sudden heightened humanity the microcosmic anthropomorphism of this New Story, the sacrifice is no longer hand to hand combat, a firstborn son, a stand-in slave,

the sacrifice is in you,

the divine union with the Venus goddess morning star Virgin Mary is in us,

it’s Beatrice in the Rose; it’s the Virgin Mary to Saint Bernard, glowing in Mary’s beauty as the morning star reflects the sun,

It’s the protection to rule your mortal passions,

The annual sacrifice is now the slaying of the dragon who stays stuck in his cave, hoarding his jewels in you; of your mortal passions,

However you, like Michael, wielding literal, physical iron from fallen meteors, can will it,

Binding yourself to your sacred fathers like Dante does Augustine Aquinas Dominic Benedict Peter James and John,

Unlike Cuchullain the cuckoo king Arthurian Gawain inseminating every nest they come across—instead inseminating the earth, digging down into seeding the soil,

Accepting Jove’s lightning not as inclement weather but as Exalted, granting my tongue sufficient power that I may leave behind a single spark of glory for the people yet to come, —even after your exalted vision loses its power,

Even after you fall.

Accepting your fall underground beneath the sacred tree like autocastrating Attis,

The sacred marriage between Venus and the regicided King no longer theater to witness, to indulge in in the town square, to watch slackjawed as snuff film on your phone—

But between you and Mary in the Rose in heaven,

renouncing the Maenads of the spirit who will only tear you to pieces and scatter your body across the land, leave you singing decapitated in the river,

lighting your own candle your own Balder’s fire,

sitting self sufficient in silence in stillness looking up like Zoroaster awaiting dawn your sacred union with the arrival of the literal morning star—

10/17/25 1:11PM

BLAST2MAG@GMAIL.COM

— , INKLINGS , —

IMAGINE YOU’RE ONE OF THE WORST MEN IN HISTORY . . . —

really, imagine you grew up in Genoa in the 1450s :

a fetid rambunctious city of shit & seabreeze;

you got streetwise tending your father’s cheese-stand in the center of town:

merchants, housewives, slaves come to you diffident & headpatty, lauding you in Ligurian : “Cristoffa!”,

and your heart stops sometimes when you see an unctuous bastard pull out a coinclunk sack, thumb thru his bounty with fingers covered in pig grease,

you can smell the gold mingling with his olfendous taint sweat in the Mediterranean sun,

he’ll toss you a coin that means nothing to him, flashing gunkcovered teeth, as if mocking your grubby house, your father’s stifled career,

— people live in PALACES in this damned city! how does one get a PALACE?!, —

and you go home, there ain’t room to spin in a circle without getting socked in the jaw by your brothers or earning a beating from your father,

— it was such a violent place, all of Genoa, the screams of the tortured, murdered, lynched were as familiar to you as the rooster’s crow at dawnbreak;

when your brothers would look out the window, crown the frenzy with mad jeery hootage, you’d shudder, run down to the docks

with one of the books you stole from your friend Amerigo,

whose house was a decadent Babylon, whose parents would whisper disdainfully about you, “vilànin” they’d call you behind your back,

they don’t stoop so low as to address you :

a little bumpkin who don’t deserve to clutch the hem of bratty Vespucci’s blouse,

but you’d sneak into their library when Amerigo was busy abusing a slave, that rich runt took everything for granted,

he had access to a whole world you couldn’t even dream of,

you stole anything with travel in the name : Sir John Mandeville, Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo,

you’d sit atop mossy rocks, all alone, by the water, there :

the pullulating immensity of the horizon,

. . . nothing meant as much to you as Canto 26 of the Inferno : you learned Ulysses’s speech by heart :

do not deny yourself the chance to know, following the sun, the world where no one lives, consider how your souls were sown, you were not made to live like brutes or beasts, but to pursue knowledge and virtue,

and you think

Genoa is too small for my heart, I want riches, I want life, I will have the World,

forgetting Ulysses was damned,

your reading is interrupted by screams of someone being broken on the wheel. . .

—

. . . but you didn’t know the truth about violence until one day,

there’s a slave girl who works the cheese-stand with you, a girl in horror-shunning giddy bloom;

they renamed her Maria but she talked to you in Spanish (the first hint of your facile linguadaption),

told you her real name was Khalijia,

how they killed her parents, captured her in Granada, brought her here, your dad bought her,

you couldn’t believe someone your age had suffered as much as her, someone with real thoughts, someone so beautiful,

she said, Can you keep a secret? anything, anything, I’m going to run away, you suddenly had an escape plan : you would go with her; —

she lived in a closet in your house, you’d stay awake some nights, after making sure everybody was asleep

crawl over to the closet, sit there, listen to Khalijia breathe,

I can have her right now, she’s just a slave, if she’s awake I’ll take her,

but she doesn’t stir, you lose your nerve,

go back to your hard bed, wrap yourself in threadbare blankets, sleepless & sick with desire,

but one day, when you were feverish, too ill to work the cheese-stand, Khalijia was there all alone : Ottoman thugs swooped in, stole the day’s fare,

plucked wages out of her dainty, gentle fingers,

you heard when she came into the house, weeping, devastated, you would’ve given your whole life to stop her crying,

but your father is furious,

he takes out a leather strap, starts whipping her,

you’ve never seen somebody you love, you realize it then, you love her, screaming like maimed criminals,

and as you stumble over in your sickly haze, your dry throat desperate to scrape out a “STOP!”

your father pulls up Khalijia’s garment,

he looks up, looks you right in the eye, and he smiles, —

nor filial duty for my aged father, nor the love I owed Penelope. . .

Khalijia & your home & your family are dead to you.

You’re 14. You go to sea.

. . .

— , TRIUMPH , —

IMAGINE YOU’VE BEEN LANGUISHING IBERICALLY FOR 5 YEARS . . . —

you’re alone, waiting for an audience at the court of Castile:

you close your eyes and it’s like you’re lying awake on your flea-ridden mattress :

Beatriz’s head on your chest, your hungry sons snore on the floor next to you : you are bread for three emaciated orphans,

you can’t sleep on land, too accustomed to the ocean’s pendulation,

you stare at a leak on the ceiling, — it’s been raining in Lisbon, — the water drips down . . .

you’re 35 years old nel mezzo. . . (you can never remember the rest of the terza),

you’ve seen all there is to see; when you were a boy, the wonders felt like reading Mandeville :

the first time a Leviathan banged the hull of your ship, reared its monstrous head, you puked & wept in terror & ecstasy;

but now when you leave and return, life runs away without you : —

it’s a tapestry with missing swaths, you try to mend it haphazard, truncated;

when you left for Africa you left your first wife & baby, you returned to a gravestone & a grim-eyed grown boy;

you’ll never be Caesar,

you’ve felt since you were a kid that Christ chose you for a special mission, but you’re less than special,

all your swashbuckling horsesense has left you centless & risible,

King João brings you to court so you can tell your mad plan to his friends and they slap their knees and cluck like chickens,

“who gave you these circumferences, Colombo, —Pliny?!”

but they don’t know and you can’t tell them how

an old friend came looking for you years ago, Alonso Huelva, an old sailor back on land with a naufragated madness & a dead crew;

he banged on your door, bedraggled, haunted, sick, you hadn’t seen him in years, here he was demanding a place to stay,

you pitch him a cot in the corner with the cockroaches so huge they hew hunks of human flesh,

but nothing scares a man that’s faced storms on the Cape of Good Hope;

while your wife & sons are away, begging for money from her relative in Coimbra, Huelva stays up for three drunken days,

tells you a breathtaking story, thru coughing fits punctuated with globs of green spit on your floor,

he’d gone past the pillars of Hercules, found a land of gold & jewels & new trees & clouds of colorful birds & strange men;

“Huelva,” you say, “I didn’t know you were Marco Polo! Your New Atlantis sounds magnificent!”

and you laugh in his face, a laugh that tastes like whiskey and the sour gloom of this tumtemulent night, but Huelva doesn’t laugh, he leans forward,

looks you in the eye, pulls a ragged piece of parchment out of his back pocket,

a map,

“This is where it is Cristóvão. Take this map. You could find it. But look at me, my entire crew is dead! If you return from this land, you will be cursed.”

he didn’t say another word and he went to bed, the next morning he’s dead;

of course he’s dead, you laugh to yourself, a curse! HA! old Huelva found the Garden of Eden!,

but that day the idea sprouts roots : if there is a New Atlantis,

you could be its King, you could get rich, famous, maybe this is the purpose your Savior had in store,

but nobody is gonna fund a journey to find the Garden of Eden, you have to come up with a better plan to dupe your regnants : a new route to India!,

King João laughed you out of the room with that one,

which is why you’re now in Castile, about to face the doleful Catholic Monarchs,

they’re desperate for gold, they need a lottery ticket :

—

“OK Colón! We will give you three ships. You are now the Admiral of all the Waters. You will be viceroy of all you encounter, for the Crown of Castile.”

you can’t believe they said yes, it’s an absolute whirlwind, you don’t even get a chance to say goodbye to Beatriz & your sons, you send them a letter,

—

soon, you’re the Admiral of a three-ship fleet, leaving the port of Cadiz. . .

. . . —> —> —>

it’s the easiest journey of your life, 33 days (33, my Lord!),

you thought you were immune to novelty, but you can’t believe what you’ve found :

the smell of flowers intoxicated us as we approached the shore, the colors are so marvelous, everybody wondered and took pleasure in the sight,

everything on all these coasts is so green and lovely I do not know where to go first, my eyes never weary of looking on this fine vegetation,

you step on shore, ebrious & exhausted with victory.

You are the King of a New World.

. . .

— , CATASTROPHE , —

IMAGINE YOU’RE ON YOUR FINAL TRIP TO THE WORLD YOU DISCOVERED . . . —

you’re all alone in the middle of the night keeping watch:

you’ve kept watch so long your eyes are beginning to bleed, you haven’t slept in weeks, you haven’t changed your clothes in months,

maggots crawl in the pulsing sores on your swollen feet in your bemerded boots :

this is the 80th straight day of storms, as you crawl along the coast in a ruined ship looking for a semblance of safety, you are Christ in Gethsemane,

he had it easier than you, he knew exactly what fate awaited him,

you’d gleefully accept crucifixion rather than being eroded by the wind & rain while you eat rotting biscuits amidst a crew that despises you;

. . . all you have on these night-watches is your fiendish memory, the only person that can relate to you in all of history is Adam : you experienced Paradise :

weeks of pure conviviality under a clear blue sky, swimming in the supreme ceruleanness, dining with the glimmering natives, eating their strange food,

going to bed with comely giggling girls,

you should have stayed, rather than going back and telling everyone : the Monarchs were stunned you found anything, sent back a tenfold fleet,

filled with learnéd mercenaries who looked at these sea-faring people in their brilliant canoes,

these people who distinguish thirty directions of wind, sail for hundreds of miles paddling in open vessels,

and they called them idiots, like they called you an idiot because they had no sense of the life of the World, the life of the Sea,

—

. . . but you soon realized you were in rogueworld, your due spoils would be hard won;

you fell in line with the requisite brutality, you’d known slavery all your life, seen every guise of it,

but you’d never seen the transition from happy peace to forced labor like this : stolen freedom deforms a man’s face,

it shocked you how your heart shook when they looked at you with hatred,

but one day you didn’t care :

a dead worker was a paucity of gold, you threw them in the pile, moved on, the local blood would fecundate the soil,

—

don’t you think you deserve these storms? this torture? didn’t you deserve being dragged back to Castile in the brig in chains after your third voyage?

aren’t there sins on your heart? you think back to Alonso Huelva, can’t help feeling but that this whole thing is a curse,

your grievous culpa :

the doubt gnaws at you like the beetles in your hat :

maybe Christ’s light had nothing to do with this, maybe I was victim of an infernal ingannation,

lightning strikes the water right in front of you, knocking you on your back,

it’s so painful to get up and for some reason you think

of that beautiful girl you brought to your captain’s quarters late in the second voyage, she was screaming, you subdued her, wrote later in your journal,

she was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails I wish I had never begun, but then I took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, she let forth such incredible screams that you would not believe your ears,

eventually, we came to such terms that you would’ve thought she had been brought up in a school for whores. . .

you put your pen down and realized you were trying to be funny and felt sick, you were your father writing about Khalijia,

you had never escaped anything; you kept telling yourself

these natives weren’t people like you were a person, but you’d been so close to them, looked them right in the eyes and smelled them, —

what if someone treated Beatriz like that? your wife who wasn’t a wife because you never saw her, you didn’t know her, your life was a miserable nightmare at sea,

these months of storm were the pinnacle of all you’d done : a worthless, worthless life,

but if you make it home alive (where is home?), you’ll get your money from the Catholic Monarchs, retire, live leisurely,

enjoy your sons & your wife & your fortune; you close your desiccated eyes and feel a sweet anticipation : —

but it will never happen, you’ll go back to Spain, demanding a 10th of all the wealth found in the world you discovered,

the Monarchs won’t even answer your letters,

you’ll follow their court from city to city on a mule, pale & hectick & swollen with flu, syphilis, gout,

and on the way to Valladolid you will stumble off your mule

fall like a dead body falls

penurious & wasted

—

but for now, in the midst of the storms, you have a moment resembling joy, thinking one day you’ll get back to Genoa,

you’ll sit on the rocks you sat on as a kid, and you’ll look out at the sea and be proud of all you’ve done.

You never will.

History will despise you.

. . .

10/13/25

BLAST2MAG@GMAIL.COM

Three wealthy and prominent men (Adolphus Philipse, Stephen DeLancey and Pieter Schuyler) commission an eccentric Albany-based scholar named Samuel Kip in late 1723 to write a disquisition on the first one hundred years of the New York colony. . .

AS MY father partook in de nieuwe wereld, I too expended taught labor (though labor of the Caravansary, rather than the field): that of Youngest Boy for my hard-eyed, basalt-haired Walloon-Huguenot mother, a doll-like donative function, playing Marais on the viol and other conformations of Lully on the gitarre; like a Catholic Man of Expertness and Obsequity, not a first century Roman, but still, a Personage, like and different from my father, dancing, smiling, seed-planting; mining, unnaturally but necessarily, medial gray-bearded intonations upon village ministration and Judicature, matrilineality among the Haudenosaunee. Those painful flexes, those instances of Smertan, his and mine, of what I might define as shame in the face of our triumphant homing; and more ill-solvable — and yet another natal generatie advanced — when you contain the many-homed blood of the American. I might be described as piece of that maiden colonial generation. What art thou? Well, for many a year, ephebic, ripped by descendancy, chimneyed by those natural palisades of origin — Amsterdam, Navarre — and moved by a durating love for my distaff artificer. I perfused the acorn with that song of soulchase, of dark and distance’s ambire. A bastard of shape — a loved, white-slated bastard of shape — quintessent of the lot.

To retard the deceptions and affectations of my speech, to stretch at my more dissimulated self, to avoid the eye of my cloth-discerning elder sisters and brothers — of mine own word — I found books, abandoning song, moving seldom, amassing and mislaying time, widening, body and smile each, weighed, j'étais, by Septuagintal integrants, madenned by self-mastery (not its rectitudinous product but by its procedure) and the abstemiousness of Mark, acceptive of improminence, chagrined by man’s odium, impaled by that blackened love of a son’s death, bowled forth by excel in comprehension and virtue (that the act of hand-raising-book is not good-minded for toil spent, but for ego submitted, and, thusly — and to return to that infinite, pre-supernal vanity — the prospectuses made imaginable), by paternal practicality, by the borean vulnerability of my and Margrietje’s companionship.

Not three and twenty, we married up the river — away from the Landgoed and the easterly Kips — a marriage of beloveds but, too, of stinging, gelid Albany, of the slantshot life, of strange-pullulated wheat, of the phatasmic Wilden.

“Meneer Kip, by transcribing those signatures latent within the human and communal sciences by dictating their many transposing lines of narrative validity, might you mean that you seek not to bring your studial focus nuisance?”

“You neglect to cite my key historiographic method,” I respond to my alien. “You collect such tessellated accounts away from the Longhouse.”

“And this method, in turn, a Sumerian wheel toward the post-tribal, panoptical, celestial still?”

“There is no such verity in a world of fragment and spall. We speak here of a respective integrality,” parting, far as I’m apt, like a governing farmer, with the ceremony of the Ale, repressed and oversecure, with no inner heart for the beasts, for that theophagous mateyness.

“And let me ask: do you wish to write primarily of the respective or integral?” Unconditioned as I am to live social vexation and bothered, in penitent admittance, by my fellow punter; too proud for ignorance, too mean for that full curiosity of God’s tail.

“Mon dieu, Sir, that is too much of an unravelment,” my entrant’s eyes fettling into sore and dim, permitting me back into a stance of explication, of Protestant diaphaneity. “Each are rock and water, orthograph and hieroglyph, form and illimit.”

“And might you be Livy or Cicero?”

“And might you ask Sir John Hayward to set his sights upon Lancastrian intrarivalry over the new lingual Diliculum?”

“But surely you would choose the second!”

“Indeed, this is where it turns technic. What of science, but what, too, of catharsis? Might you advise Titian himself that Francis and Suleiman never met in false merriment over an emulsified liquid?”

“And thy ocular organs suggested a wager of war upon The Quarrel, a bonhomme! So — and do accurize me — the aim is much like a Hals needling and cubizing noses?”

“That depends upon social usefulness and fancy, and then upon self-direction. Does the brush-struck man concern himself with occurrence (particularly amid a vacuum of few facts and much time)? The Classicists and Verists, yes. But what of the Mythicists? Proximators, yay, but, too, effectors of the Human Gospel: Raphael of Spiritual Objective, Michelangelo of Self-Possession, Brueghel of Community — of Aspirant Daytime — and Bosch of Omnihavoc.”

“Such are the men for whom we have accounts. All else: lost to the bisonmarring gales.”

“Indeed, to those pyrexias and algidities of the brain.”

“There’s our bonny letterist!”

“This,” with the foreignness, pushed and spent by vexation, of Teutonic certainty, “is where men must engage themselves, for the creatures and objects won’t. Arouse that moment of enervation and skivvy. Think: That, there, is where grass meets wild.

“But what if all, Lord and Man, are The Holt?”

“Friend, no curse levies like that of keenness meeting irascibility.”

“Before I further empurple you: Am I Lord Fauconberg, and might Fort Orange be Towton?”

“Dub me histrionic but I talk of partnerships — funded ones, like Sir Raleigh and Thomas Harriot — that lead not to an excess of feather and horsehair but toward an expansion of knowledge.”

“And you leave for the rest of us the sawing, climbing, lifting and bolting?”

-

A collateral means to state my ambition, insuperable without the Hestian excellence of Margrietje; I range — nay, I ingermanely maunder — but for that square.

Grandpapa — the one, familiar through word and attestation, to you men: the honorable Hendrick Kip — allegedly dubbed me Vrolijk before his passage, a gladness I at least spake and sought to equalize; for such a stance would have naturally, by that Gravity of convergence, destined me a creator but not a protector of my own work, sateen modesty in the stead of bloodfull pride. But my mother was mistrustful of Dutch non-candor, conforming and regarding me as she might a loveful oat, smart and ultimately forgiving, if not precipitously so: honest, a face-to-the-Sancta Sedes Thomas More; humble, much like the watched upon; unbent.

He, Grandpapa, was a kind, strong, controlling, conceited, competitive and connected (in industry, but mainly in heart) man, one who’d perish out upon the quiet of the stad’s limits in minutes (and indeed, a vicissitude for him, for this, principally, is a world made for survivors, and, by such logic, cenobites), affordances granted to his daughter by marriage as to his walled, self-adequate Kleinzoon even while he, beneficed, accepted his destiny as stretched and transmuted, a corrival. But luck for him, as those vulnerabilities were long past relevancy by the time of my birth. I do believe I remember him but I can’t vow to it (adult memory is but the prior day’s performance — a colligation — far more than it is a fugacious point of transcendence). When — amid the height of his service under Stuyvesant — mother first met him, he bid Francis, his Gambian slave, to bring down the bobbin lace (Diocesan in stitch, sinew and shape) he’d brought over across The Deep not yet twenty years prior, the same year of Grandmama’s death, which he’d gathered for purposes elliptical as he consoled mother and vied for words about when he might meet her father, the celebrated surgeon; about when he might learn more, from this Dutch-fluent (though with Gallic maniere, with a flowing, expounding aura of the English diacritic) descendent of de Forest, of those still recent events of familial and general histories.

Mother, like a fatidical tide, lacked Granpapa’s early-century vivacity, but such marks the human course once you incise with perspicuity your glade in the forest; one might say that home eclipses dream.

-

The age between my two mentioned avuses is about that of you gentleman and I — not quite a generation; or perhaps a squat one.

And are we companymen or are we remote? Both, but indeed — and I speak, of course, from a finitude of glare and pocket — to me, it is the hindmost, with word, family and legacy existing between us much like a Daoist thaumaturgy: of Sir Pieter’s mouton-covered red equipage riding down Breede weg; of Sir Adolphus’ aspect, enough for the whole of the royal domain to resemble that capotain-to-foot form, as I proceed up the Gentlemen’s Way through Philipse Patent; of Monsieur DeLancey, in klomps, hair coursing, downwardly canalizing, becoming the very docks. Think of those same winds, but untouched: this is how Grandpapa must have regarded de Forest; and as with politicians, it marked praise not liberally given (Munificence is vouchsafed only to those less edged blades of Damocles. Like a bird, always, your attention goes to that next pneumatic sphere, to the danger aloft). But he was far too latticed with query: Leiden’s aberrancies, the Company, and even, but with far more keep (as with all mortal mysteries), that which was meridional of Barbados.

I FATHOM the kinesis; indeed, it makes one move, collide with and market to the disparate man: What makes distinct his relationship with sun and star that we cannot perchance? What turns him anxiously queer over his Jacob’s cattle and other littoralia — oysters, clams, trout, cod, bass — before even accounting for his Pelt, cervine and attenuated, that stray lore of Labradorian winter; and then, the second pelt, inverted, funneled, placed like a murine urbanity, like a heavier and less profitable turmeric or oolong, in the orlop.

-

“Captain Hudson, I find it knotty to reckon a fluvial structure with such length and diametric confinement that doesn’t end in cessation.”

“Indeed, sir. Gibraltar marks only, say, ten mijl.”

“And sir,” to swelling chagrin, “we’ve already passed a near thirteen since firth’s end.”

“Thirteen?” But what other way to truth than an additional twenty mijl of confirmatory narrow?

“We are working upon the scholarship — the pleonasmic scholarship — of a glazed land.”

“These bronze tribesman,” like the determinacy were all, from food and succor to war, “What is their art?”

“Mate and survive.”

-

The Captain never perched in London more than a quarter-annum — contumacious in the face of aperience, fabular-dreamed, future-possessed; a shallop-bound saler and trafficker of cause.

And, whether in Ice or by the tribal wand, now forever benumbed. How to honor him; by, maybe, describing the flow which made unique and consummated that Sixteenth Century: passages wind and skyward, into grueling planar depths, personage unknown, Commonwealth and Kingdom — the specter and blade of power — legal limina, constricture and invention, the out and gentle, the gradual up, the empyrean knower and known; into that devil of all directions. It is the After-Garden Work — for within the lattice they sweat obversely, with gravid design — the work of the glaucous man as much as the redly wicked, with all hands tasked.

USSELINCX, though adherent to the credences of Bacon (as he would too have been to Locke), experienced such consular tragedies of demise weightily — emotionally gullible to anecdotes of will and risk — so that, in successive years, the extraordinary crevice of Hudson’s disappearance proved more haptik than dialectic.

“Do you fear a national entrenchment?” de Forest, in latent acknowledgment — as would a pathically condoling friend — of his more tight-concepted compeer.

“Does a Lutheran wax solemn about the head and sky?”

“‘Tis such a small land.”

“I appreciate your stocktaking. Like the loom, they need us only to feel the journeyer’s accidie, the worshipper’s despair.”

“Mind the sarcasme, Willem. There’s a future yet.”

Usselincx, soaked in struggle without being turnt from his visions. De Forest too: Stadtholder Maurice’s man but also a keeper of family; determined, but keen on that paragon — even if, circumstantially, Gomarist — of the Plebiscitary Constituency. “Indeed, de Forest, in the shadow of van Oldenbarnevelt’s durance, you see future?”

“His project, to assign to it caliber, is to value us,” de Forest says of van Oldenbarnevelt, “which, in a cavity of his acquitting, ecumenical mind, he believes is mortal grace.”

“And in valuing: keeping.”

“As if your unbelief was never born!”

“But what of the argument that an active soul is an acquisitive one?”

“What if it is merely remonstrative, a Non-Avertive Soul, one stirred by ephialtes and bone scar?”

“Which leaves you naked and two-footed upon the zavanna’s aurora, it seems.”

“Does the capacity for preliminary peace — preliminary in that it’s worldly — not concern you?”

“Why might it?”

“That — and based upon machinery and predicament — you’re evading that inmost apologue.”

“Again, de Forest, you flirt liberally with the soteriologic frontier.”

“Because I cite God’s hand in the Human Narrative?”

“To return to your honest query: you are suggesting that I display a grand vitrine of free will as an offering of gratefulness (of grace) and affordance.”

“And more so for a man of such pelagial breadth!”

“Whereas you — shipping your fellow Paynim to the next Glow of Passion in Castile — lack such breadth?”

“I’d be readied to fight at Maurice’s hip if I didn’t fear it’d all end in dust.”

“And?”

“...Are you dubbing me a Piper of the seas?”

“You dubbed me Outside of Life!”

“You know of my perturbations. I seek to be preparatory.”

“It becomes a torus of endless, Stichomythic depth if you’re incareful. If I interpret properly, Augustine states it is a matter of the Maker contriving the string’s illusion in our borrowed perception. That like an acme unseen, we are offered sight of the grace we already seat and feed.”

“But what if the yarning of thought is the devil bribing us to overshare our gift?!”

“One, again, with that anti-Supralapsarian kineticism!”

“...And what of the Carthagian’s prevenience, is it inborn or, say, a supine bestowance?”

“The Swiss receives you back.”

“But prithee, Usselincx: Why exercise an illusion?”

“Smart, de Forest, but, like the Volga, you are bowing west to east to west.”

“Que sçay-je?”

“All this habituation just to quote a Jesuit?!”

*Characters in order of appearance:

Samuel Kip (1682-1748) - narrator.

Jacob Kip (1631-1690) - father of Samuel Kip.

Hendrick Kip (1600-1685) - grandfather of Samuel Kip and 17th century colonial magistrate.

Maria de la Montagne (1637-1711) - mother of Samuel Kip.

Henry Hudson (1565-1611) - English explorer.

Willem Usselincx (1567-1647) - merchant and founder of the Dutch West India Company.

Jesse de Forest (1576-1624) - Walloon separatist and great grandfather of Samuel Kip.

Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547-1619) - Dutch statesman, revolutionary and Arminian; placed on trial and later executed.

JACK’S POSTSCRIPT:

but such marks the human course once you incise with perspicuity your glade in the forest; one might say that home eclipses dream

The eponymous mention (excluding the onomastic de Forest) of ‘the forest’ in the accompanying passage marks its sole mention in the whole of the book, which, when I sent it to Harold, I told him was (and value-neutral, for poor sentences mark renal-podical constancy) maybe the saddest shit I’ve ever written. He said “funny, I read it hopefully.” I love that and think he’s right; it speaks to my big-bodied boredom that I so discount home. But then, mayhap, if not for want of the dream I wouldn’t have fared all the way back to that hearthless year of 1624.

Jack Houghteling is an American novelist: the author of Goodman (2022) and Sunnyside (2023).

9/5/25

BLAST2MAG@GMAIL.COM

1 . . . †

↻

WHAT IS HISTORY?

I wish I could tell you but my history teacher in highschool was Coach Baine:

a short-fuse fascist former football coach who had a perpetual will-they-or-won’t-they with his employment at the school; — —

won’t they being when he got shitcanned for the eruption of his punitive volcano:

he’d open a can of whoop ass on students for dumb shit like standing to get a tissue without permission;

— : his WORD was the most salient law in the great space of his classroom.

Erumpent-asskickings happened on 3 separate occasions. So I was there under his fourth-time’s-the-charm reich.

You would think someone tasked with teaching history would be steeped in its germane features: a keen awareness of contingency; recognition that actions have long-rippling consequences; & of course:

intimate knowledge that time’s march is undefeated;

— — — >

in Finnegans Wake Joyce retells Aesop’s fable as one of the Ondt & the Gracehoper,

the Ondt is in HELL; the Gracehoper poses him this question:

Your feats end enormous, your volumes immense,

(May the Graces I hoped for sing your Ondtship song sense!),

Your genus its worldwide, your spacest sublime!

But, Holy Saltmartin, why can’t you beat time?

— — — >

Coach Baine was trying to defeat TIME thru CONTROL.

You’d line up single-file to enter his classroom, he’d stand there as each person individually greeted him, “good morning Coach Baine,”

at the end of class, everyone knew to wait until he walked over to stand at the door,

you’d exit single file, “goodbye Coach Baine, thank you,” there was nothing mandatory about this: you could refuse the salutations, but then he’d follow you around all day like a gruff spectre, carrying on an imaginary conversation,

“hey Coach!”, “Oh how you doing Harold?”, “Well you know, Coach, my pussy hurts this morning so I’m not really greeting my teachers,”. . .

his iron reign filtered down thru everything;

every test was multiple choice, — you couldn’t just write out the letter, you had to write: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, or Delta (he was in the marines) or you’d fail.

I mean, not like the tests were fucking hard.

Our curriculum was founded on several months discussion of the compass rose. You know? : North, South, East, & West. Once we’d mastered that, it was time to move on to longitude & latitude.

Seems comical, lax, random: sure. Don’t get it twisted, this was a product Coach Baine’s stiff ideology: the ever-resurrected fascist project to

remove TIME from SPACE.

We were in a history class of pure SPACE.

When he had to give us something other than just directions on a globe, it was drenched with nostalgic delusion:

to learn about the American Revolution, our ur-text was, —no bullshit, —

Mel Gibson’s movie The Patriot (2000) in which Mel Gibson forms a militia of “patriots” and they go head-chopping to secure ‘merica its FREEDOM,

(*eagle screech*).

When in reality, what made the United States’s revolution the most GOATed in the history of the world (by a wide margin) was patience, law, fluidity, & the preparedness to adapt to time’s inevitable change & ruin;

(not the decapitatory instincts that spoiled the French’s fraternity).

We also had the briefest, briefest foray into slavery: a half episode of Roots (1977) that was cut short when a bare breast appeared on the screen: “sorry gang, didn’t realize it was so graphic. . . ,”

(graphic being the boob: not the visceral sins of our forebears).

The best is when he’d put on Game 7 of the 2001 World Series where the Arizona Diamondbacks beat the Yankees: he’d literally cry cause the Yankees didn’t win after 9/11; as if the Diamondbacks were Osama bin Laden’s favorite team. . .

Nostalgia, for the time-denier, freezes history into a mausoleum of relics,

—casts them in the safety of STASIS, —

where you can kneel at the altar of these amber-stuck moments, malleate their memory, celebrate them as divine fixities that don’t seep into your

grave palace of NOW.

Coach Baine currently teaches at the Juvenile Correctional Facility where they put his instincts to good use. . .

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

2 . . . †

↻

PIOUS, PRUDENT PHILIP 2 OF SPAIN (1527-1598) KISSED RELICS ON HIS DEATHBED.

Here’s how Carlos Fuentes paints him at the end of Terra Nostra (1975),

—El Señor, the Eternal Monarch, supreme vinculator of Space, —

holed up alone (except for his servants) at El Escorial as beggars & revolutionaries (TIME) crowd around the Palace:

with delectation his thick lips caressed the shinbone of Leocadia, Holy Martyr and Virgin, who suffered torment in the dungeons of Toledo, it too still covered with skin and hide, very beautiful, and inviting a thousand kisses. . .

often El Señor slept with two of them, the very head of the one the Gospel calls St. Simon the leper, and that of the most holy doctor St. Jerome, a sane, mature, and grave head;

and early one morning, as they carried him his breakfast of dried raisins,

the servants were frightened to see beside El Señor’s head, resting on the same pillow, protruding like a living thing from between the black sheets, the head of St. Dorothy, Virgin and Martyr.

Philip 2 literally ruled the world for 42 years; he was a funereal, morose, sexless, graphomaniacal, neat-freak:

—expunging dirt from under his fingernails like burning heretics in the center of Madrid; —

he sat at his desk all day reviewing messages, deciding on the fate of the world, not minutia’s iota escaped his will, a will irrferrous, wobbly: —

— you read his letters and it’s woe is me, wat do I do?, i’m up so late looking at my papers I didn’t even eat dinner :( ,

there was no possible intervention, he was the crowned reality-fuhrer; if the world & his word weren’t correlated 1 : 1 it was a catastrophe;

Fuentes’s Felipe says,

I would go mad if the world extended one inch beyond the confines we know; if it were so, I would have to learn everything again, begin everything again, and I would know no more than the usurer, the workman; my shoulders,

like those of Atlas, are tired:

I can bear no more weight; nor is there room on my head for one additional fathom of sea or one additional square acre of land;

Spain is contained within Spain, and Spain is this palace. . .

The palace: El Escorial. Philip built the largest building in the world to remove his Empire from Time, turn it into pure Space.

He built a tomb for his empire; he reinterred the bones of 30 of his ancestors within its walls.

El Escorial is pure, perfect symmetry:

from a distance the palace would look like a fortress, its straight lines fading into the plain and the infinite horizon without a single concession to caprice, carved like one solid piece of gray granite and set upon a polished stone base whose snow-white contrast would lend an even more somber air to the whole.

But a rejection of Time is a rejection of the world. . . ,

I want the Heaven and the Hell that have been promised, I want to be condemned or saved for all eternity, I want that total non-existence that the Father denied the Son and the Man, Christ and Jesus, I do not want to return with claws and fangs and hunger to this world;

I do not want my death to be the material guarantee of a new life, a second life, another life, but simply that: my absolute death, my absolute remission to non-existence, a hermetic absence of communication with all forms of life; this is my secret project, hear me:

let us establish a hell on earth to assure the need for a heaven that will compensate for the horror of our lives; the horror we do and the horror that is done to us. . .

Fledgling Felipe don’t realize perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror;

nature rejects order: preferring instead to proceed with the multiple disorder of the certainty of

freedom. . .

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

3 . . . †

↻

THE GARDEN OF EDEN DID NOT EXIST IN TIME.

Real consequence of The Fall: the clock started running; static paradise upended by death, childbirth, toil; mutability: miserable offspring of motion thru space.

Eden was YHWH’s Escorial: emblem of empire. What is power without a shining monument? Transcendence requires an immutable ever-present fixity.

We can imagine Philip 2 reading Milton’s description of God enthroned, enviously enraptured:

Immutable, immortal, infinite,

Eternal king; thee author of all being,

Fountain of light, thyself invisible

Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit’st

Throned inaccessible, but when thou shad’st

The full blaze of thy beams, and through a cloud

Drawn round about thee like a radiant shrine

Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear,

Yet dazzle heaven, that brightest seraphim

Approach not, but with both wings veil their eyes.

God is so fucking transcendent you can’t even look unless he lets you. . .

Philip 2’s favorite painter was Jheronimus Bosch.

Fuentes has El Señor hold up Bosch’s decapitated head and the eyes project a triptych on the bare wall:

On the left wing, El Señor saw the lost promise of an earthly paradise, harmonious clarity, a light joining together all species of creation, animal, vegetable, and mineral. . .

in the foreground, three figures: a naked youth, seated: the pilgrim of the new world; his face displays innocence, astonishment, and forgetfulness; kneeling beside him is a naked woman with long copper-colored hair. . .

and standing between them, he, El Señor, his hair longer, but the same thick lips, the same prognathic jaw hidden behind the same beard, the same eyes of serene madness, the same incipient baldness, holding the woman by one hand, offering her to the man.

The moment in time from which the whole narrative of The Garden of Earthly Delights unravels is when God presents Eve to Adam like a bride: — — in the timeless moment before the Fall. . .

Englebert 2, a Hapsburg-Burgundian loyalist, probably commissioned the painting around 1498;

eventually, tho, Englebert’s descendant William of Orange became Philip’s biggest Op;

and William hung the triptych in his palace,

Philip was a Bosch nut: he wanted the painting desperately,

so in 1567, he sent his toughest muscle: the Duke of Alba, who laid siege to Brussels, finally pulled up on the Palace of Nassau,

William of Orange fled, but his lackey was there:

Alba got him to squeal on the painting’s whereabouts with a bit of tough love:

they hoisted him on high with a weight of 100 pounds hanging from his feet until his hands touched the pulley, then they added a weight of 150 pounds. They scorched his body in several places. The torture he endured broke or dislocated every single limb of his body. He had no nails left on his feet or hands.

He was no longer able to move, and could not even lift his hands to his mouth to eat, so that he had to forage for his food with teeth as best he could.

YIKES. . . but I wouldnta snitched. . .

There’s no record of what Bosch’s commission exactly was; most think the triptych was supposed to be an allegory of lust.

But it was a really strange painting for the fuckphobic Philip 2 to want so bad.

I think its provenance gotta do with a tale that hung over the Hapsburg head & disfigured the men romantically for generations:

Prince Juan of Asturias married Princess Margaret of Austria when he 19, she was 16; they did a swap: his sister Joanna crossed the sea to marry Felipe the Fair and they sent Margaret back to marry Juan; — —

in one of the best-matched arranged marriages in history, both couples fell madly in love. . .

Juan & Margaret got so busy so furiously & so frequently all his attendants were scared for his life; and their fears proved warranted:

they were married from April 3, 1497 to October 4, 1497 and they fucked so much that Prince Juan literally died,

leaving the Catholic monarchs: Ferdinand & Isabella with no male heirs; paving the way for Philip 2’s father Charles V to become Emperor.

Everybody was utterly SPOOKED; the gravest Charles V ever spoke to his son is when he warned him of Prince Juan:

SEX, EVEN IN THE CONFINES OF MARRIAGE IS EVIL & WILL KILL YOU!

; a warning that so engraved itself on Philip 2 that he repeated it verbatim to his son: Philip 3, 40 years later.

The Garden of Earthly Delights was painted as a sexual warning to the Hapsburgs and the model for Adam & Eve were Prince Juan & Princess Margaret. . .

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

4 . . . †

↻

PRINCE JUAN’S SISTER JOANNA WAS SUPPOSED TO BE QUEEN, BUT THE CROWN WAS STOLEN FROM HER.

Her husband Felipe the Fair, Prince Juan’s exact contemporary (born less than a month apart), didn’t heed his lusty cousin’s doom;

notoriously handsome, powerful: he met a dickswinging demise, —

(such an insatiable cocksman that Joanna wouldn’t let women travel in his retinue):

—passing thru Burgos, one day, a sudden mysterious illness struck him down; robust Felipe, dead by daybreak: — —> POISON: surely.

Two young beautiful & passionate marriages, —the rarest thing for a Hapsburg, —sundered by death. . .

Joanna couldn’t take it, she wouldn’t let go of the corpse. Fuentes surmises that what she really wanted was to get a clear look at his famous penis,

I had only known him in bedchambers black and dark, at the time of his choosing and pleasure, with no warning, with no words, no light, almost without his touching me, for he only looked upon and allowed himself to be seen by the courtesans in innumerable villages

and the country girls with whom he exercised his seigniorial right;

he took me in the dark; he took me to procreate heirs; with me he invoked the ceremony that prohibits to all chaste and Catholic and Spanish couples any delight of sight or touch,

or any prelude or prolonged contentment, especially in the case of a royal pair, whose hurried coupling has no reason but to fulfill the strict laws of descendancy;

do you understand how one’s senses can be suffocated by such ceremony, how we can be left with no domain but that of incorporeal imagination?

Only now that he is dead, I alone can see him, I can see all of him, motionless and subjected entirely to my caprice, night after night in our hollow of cold stone, with no adornment, not even a prie-dieu.

By the end of Terra Nostra, Joanna is nothing but a torso with a head, sealed up behind a brick wall where you can only see her eyes.

In real life, after her brother died, her mother died, & her beloved handsome Prince was poisoned, she was grief-stricken and they called her insane.

Her father Ferdinand locked her away, and when he died, she was the lone Queen, but her son Charles stole the crown & Time from her.

The only people she ever saw in her confinement were servants who lied to her about every detail of the outside world;

—Space, abstracted from Time can be Paradise, but it can also be pure HELL, —

Joanna was empress of the world for 40 cell-trapped years; imprisoned, she could only rule over her solitary concrete inferno;

she died in 1555: history remembers her as Joanna the Mad.

Being a Hapsburg woman meant being summoned to marry your 50 year old uncle: he would fuck you until you died, then go marry another niece. FORREAL.

(Maria Tudor [18] was betrothed to Charles V but then Louis XII [50] swooped in and stole her;

he boasted that he ejaculated 5 times on their wedding night;

there’s no record of how many times Maria came, but I’ll set the over/under at 0.5. . .)

Here is Philip 2’s young wife Elizabeth Tudor in Terra Nostra (Fuentes smelts Time in Terra Nostra: the facts aren’t right, but everything is true),

Still a young girl, I was brought from my native country England, to the castle of one of the great Lords of Spain, who was my uncle. I came happily, for from the cradle I had been told stories of the land of the sun where the orange trees blossom and the fogs of my land are unknown.

But here I found, as if the sun were a plague and the happiness it engenders in our bodies a sin, that the sunlight was shunned, was condemned to perish in deep dungeons, that granite walls were built against it, and that simple bodily gratification was subjected to the contritions of the fast, flagellation, and ceremonial etiquette. . .

I was a proper child of English nobility with corkscrew curls and stiff white cotton petticoats. I was a little girl for a long, long time, my only entertainment dressing dolls, collecting peach pits, awakening late sleepers. . .

I was going to be the wife of the heir and our wedding would be celebrated upon an altar of spilled blood. The ceremony took place; that moment signaled an end to all my games.

Philip 2’s wives: Maria Manuela (first cousin on both sides: dead at 17); Elisabeth (dead at 22); Anna (his niece: dead at 30);

he was gonna marry his 13 year old niece Margaret, when he was 53, but she wrote him a letter saying,

How can I marry a king of the earth if I have already been asked for by a greater lord, the king of Heaven

and she submitted her will to an even older, more supreme fascist. . .

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

5 . . . †

↻

THE HAPSBURG DYNASTY WAS A BASTION OF MADNESS & PERVERSION.

They FUCKED UP all their heirs;

whodda thunk dousing everyone in hair-shirt Catholicism, making incest a political strategy, treating the world like a marble block for your shaping woulda

bloomed rotten sprouts.

The problem is these viscounts of Space want to defeat CHANGE; the point of removing time is to induce pure STASIS. . .

but the grizzly truth about any creation is that it changes away from you;

maybe there was Time in Eden; maybe that’s what God couldn’t tolerate: His Escorial subject to its own thinking; — — —

freedom. . .

The most dastardly challenge to a hereditary empire is that your spawn ain’t your clone;

— the Hapsburgs tried their damndest, just look at the portraits of Philip 2, 3, & 4: they could be triplets, —

children are gravid with Time.

When Don Carlos, Philip 2’s eldest son started getting unruly, starting drifting outside his thrall,

— — —>

(another they called MAD, as if you wouldn’t be kinda nuts: your mom’s dead, your dad’s the most powerful fucking guy in the world [big deal!] but he don’t got a second to talk to you b/c he’s gotta go to mass 10 times a fucking day, slob on Jesus’s bloody knob, and you’re gonna be king anyway and you got all the money in the world, why not party a little and yeah, maybe you’re banging your step mom. . . )

— — —>

he pulled up on him in the middle of the night and arrested him in his bedroom. . .

Don Carlos saved himself a lifetime immurement by dying 6 months later, after repeated hunger strikes, at the age of 23.

In all of Philip’s extensive correspondence with his children (he didn’t see them in person very frequently), he never addresses any of them by name. . .

But the Hapsburg child who got the worst deal is the New World. . .

Philip 2’s great-great grandparents “discovered” the New World thanks to their Columbian lottery ticket,

but Philip 2 was the one who really shaped it,

imagine you’re the czar of clarity; thanks to Christ, you see the transparent root of the world’s mysteries, you decide what’s orthodox: the unorthodox is expelled, or viciously peeled, shredded,

& you pull up on this new land that’s pure flux: a boiling cauldron of shit you can’t understand; they don’t give a damn about your rinky-dink crucifix T:

they don’t relate to this lust for gold to fund ever-expanding projects & wars,

and what results from an unprecedented clash of realities?:

a terrible scene of death, slashed throats, conflagration, frightful war, and in each I was the protagonist, I was the white, blond, bearded man on horseback, armed with a crossbow, armed with a sword, a cross of gold embroidered upon his breast, I was that man that set fire to temples, destroyed idols, fired cannons against the warriors of this land armed only with lances and arrows,

I was the centaur who devastated fields, plains, jungles, my mounted troops trampled whole towns, cities were reduced to dark ashes by my wrathful torches,

I ordered the beheading of the festival dancers at the pyramids, I raped the women and branded the men like cattle,

I denied the paternity of the sons of whores I left behind me, I charged the poor of this land with heavy burdens and at whiplash set them on their road, I melted into bars the gold, the jewels, the walls and floors of the new world,

I spread pox and cholera to the inhabitants of these lands, I, I. . .

A world obliterated by blood & lust & conquest but upon whose ashes rose the ultimate anti-Philipian world;

Fuentes sees Latin America as the answer to trying to construct a Hell or Heaven on Earth, that doomed anti-diluvian1, babbelian project:

this terra nostra, our earth, is MIXTURE, CHANGE. . . there’s a reason why it’s the most dictatorized region on the planet:

ghosts of Philip 2, coming to regain his spectral static throne: skeleton Kings,

as he passed his coffin he paused, immobilized by a sight that raised his hackles; the ancient shrouded King, he himself, still lay there, dead, wrapped in white bindings, crowned with pearl, sapphire, agate, and rock crystal.

He did not know what he did then, or why he did it; he did not know whether he felt love, hatred, or indifference for those remains; he merely experienced a passion, a necessary passion, neither homage nor profanation.

He removed the crown from the body. He placed the crown upon his own head.

I wonder what Philip thought on his death bed, rotting in a puddle of his own shit, his weak voice echoing in the mausoleum of his empire;

reflecting on a life that surely felt truncated, sprinted; a second palace surrounding him of papers, decisions. . .

the blood of the whole world on his hands. . .

he spent his last days in interminable confessions, un-ambulatory, incontinent,

Thus the royal bed was converted into a pestilential dung heap emitting the most evil odors: El Señor lay in his own excrement.

For thirty-three days, the duration of this illness, they could not change his clothing, nor would he tolerate it; they could not move him or raise him even slightly in order to clear away the result of his natural wants and the pus that streamed from abscesses and wounds,

HOLY SALTMARTIN, WHY CAN’T YOU BEAT TIME?

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

6 . . . †

↻

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES (1547-1616) PUNNED ABOUT THE KING’S DEATH.

When the king’s tomb stopped in Sevilla for a memorial service, he read this poem that caused a minor scandal:

I swear to God such grandeur frightens me.
for whom would this great structure, all this wealth,
not hold in wonder with its awesome spell?
By Christ alive, each part’s worth
more than a million; a shame
it won't last a century.
I'll bet the very soul of this here corpse
just to enjoy this spot today has quit
that heaven where he endlessly resides.
A braggart overheard these words and said:
"Oh, Mr. soldier, what you say is true.
And anyone who says it's not, he lies."
And then, incontinently,
he checked his sword with care, pulled down his hat,
he looked away, moved on, and that was that.

The pun here being “incontinent”, a reference to the king’s well-documented diarrhea. And you’ll notice that in the poem he calls himself Mr. Soldier:

at this point in his life, Cervantes was just a disabled veteran known for his bravery at the Battle of Lepanto: the biggest military success of Philip 2’s reign.

Here’s what Cervantes had to say about his wound & Lepanto in the prologue to Part 2 of Don Quixote:

What I do mind, however, is that he accuses me of being old and one-handed, as if it had been in my power to stop time and halt its passage, or as if I had been wounded in some tavern

and not at the greatest event ever seen in past or present times, or that future times can ever hope to see.

If my wounds do not shine in the eyes of those who see them, they are, at least, esteemed by those who knew where they were acquired; it seems better for a soldier to be dead in combat than safe in flight, and I believe this so firmly that even if I could achieve the impossible now, I would rather have taken part in that prodigious battle than to be free of wounds and not to have been there.

The wounds on a soldier’s face and bosom are stars that guide others to the heaven of honor and the desire to win glory, and it should be noted that one writes not with gray hairs but with the understanding, that generally improves with the years.

I mean Lepanto was probably WILD as FUCK: 130,000 men fought each other at sea with almost 500 ships;

motherfuckers literally jumping ship to ship stabbing each other, canons blaring, and Cervantes was sick with MALARIA; I don’t mind him gassing himself up, that’s a bit more impressive than say. . . playing basketball with the flu.

But something else is glaring in that prologue quote: a radical acceptance of Time. . .

Fuentes imagines Cervantes cooking up Don Quixote in the chaos of battle:

certain he was dying, he imagined once again all the adventures of those heroes, all the transformations of those knights with frustrated illusions, the undertakings possible only in an impossible world where the external and internal faces of men are one, without disguise, without separation, but impossible in a world that masked both, one for appearing before the world and another for fleeing from it—

the world mask, simulation, the escape mask, crime, passion forever separated from appearance: madmen and dreamers, ambitious and enamored men, criminals; he imagined a knight maddened by the truth of his reading, insistent upon converting that truth into a false reality, thereby saving it, and saving himself.

What is Don Quixote about but a man trying to remove himself from Time?

It’s no coincidence Nabokov called it the cruelest book ever written: the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance had a very cruel model:

DON QUIXOTE IS PHILIP 2.

In Terra Nostra, a friar tells the Chronicler (Cervantes):

Let others write the history of events that are apparent: the battles and the treaties, the hereditary conflicts, the amassing and dispersion of authority, the struggles among the estates, the territorial ambition that continues to link us to animality; you, the friend of fables, you must write the history of the passions, without which the history of money, labor, and power is incomprehensible.

Cervantes wrote the history of the passions underlying Philip 2’s whole empire, and he turned the whole brutal tragedy of it into a comedy.

And this has become Philip 2’s true lasting monument, not El Escorial, not the pointless wars, not his descendants:

the last of which was the heirless Charles 2 who,

I think,

was the only (and I use this term warmly & respectfully)

retarded emperor of the world,

and when he died at 38 years old, the doctors found that his body kept the score of the Hapsburg corruption:

the heart the size of a nut, three great stones in the kidney, the liver filled with water, the intestines gangrenous, a single black testicle

and all that’s truly left of Philip 2’s memory is an ever-changing mutable tale of a foolish errant Knight

who tried to abolish Time. . .

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

8/15/25

blast2mag@gmail.com

MARCH 25, 2021

AND IT’S no small thing that they are at last headed out onto the town with a real reason to, the necessary impetus to really commit—

Last they’d tried John had led Ruth aimlessly for blocks around inactive Soho streets past closed storefronts a couple sidewalk setups but it was then still February still too cold to sit outside so just leading her further and further down deserted ways stray shady outdoor dwellers skittering past like bad omens an intensity to their journey since Ruth had wanted so badly to do something social something festive and so had gotten dressed up in that elegant careful way she liked to and John had been game, doing his version of this, tucking in his coffee-pocked off-white tee tightening his belt and leading her, initially decisive till numbly scanning his map for possible spots and as one, two, a third turned out closed, of course they were, sensing her losing more and more faith in him as they crisscrossed down and over, down and over, going Maybe this way there’ll be something but there never is anything till finally they hit the Acheron of Houston and shaken by the onslaught of cars of grumbling monstrous long haul thoroughfare thru trucks John had looked over at Ruth her freezing tensed up frame exhaust fumes from passing semis disrupting the integrity of her generally pristine center-parted hair her long regal coat her semiexposed bosom heeled feet and seeing her like that, John had had to call it, a primordial failure of unforeseeable ramifications, saying

You’re cold sweet girl why don’t we head back

and what a deflation that had been what a terrible acceptance of the world as it had become, for all his rants about how the tyrants wouldn’t win, how they would live their lives free no matter how the world tried to prevent them they hadn’t been able to, had he planned things better they might have but he hadn’t, they’d gone back and had some wine maybe, they might’ve been too tired by the time they got back, only this time that wouldn’t happen

John wouldn’t make the same mistake twice

Let’s stick to West Third

Let’s go back along Bleeker rather than down into treacherous purgatorial South of Houston

And he takes her arm

And he could harp on how she’s dressed but he doesn’t, it’s a bit they do, how she’s gonna make him have to fight someone how lovely she looks, though this sometimes upsets her, why can’t he just compliment her, he stays quiet, he’s at this point just so pleased to be out, happy to see her happy, happy that Life is no longer one long endless unknown, there has been some shift, a change in his intergenerational pattern, his years of solitary anonymous toil have not, by some uncanny turn of fate, been for naught, a good thing had happened at last, the Establishment was rewarding a real Artist a Knight of Faith, one unconcerned with Worldly concerns, how good for Art this was, how rare, a contract had been signed, he can for the first time just maybe view himself as an autonomous economic subject worthy of spending his hard earned funds in a leisurely way on his loyal loving wife Ruth

And now they head back along the way they this morning came

And the energy feels different, they’ve stayed in the college vicinity, there are a handful rather than no people out and at the first establishment they come upon, a frail sidewalk shelter with some outdoor heat lamps going, a strange setup where there’s a waist high half door over which they are serving what look to be some real artisanal concoctions, some real potent spirits, and John this time assertively goes how about here, here’s good, and Ruth, sensing a difference in John’s tone, finally able to be the good loyal wife who obediently follows her husband where he leads her like her namesake since if he isn’t doing his part she can’t no matter what she feels follow him, there’s nothing to follow, and there are three tables and one of them off to the side is vacant like God put it there just for them to sup together on this glowed lifechanging night and John, witnessing the effects of this mode he’s understood for a while now, even often preached about, extolled the virtues of, of deciding things for her to relieve her of the stress modern women are under under late stage girlboss capitalism, of having to play both feminine nurturing and masculine moneymaking decider roles, this riff they’d do was funny and scintillating because of the grain of truth it held, while also being totally false, as the best riffs tend to be, of her being helpless and fragile and him needing to be a masculine moneymaking decider to rescue her out of her partial, ribspawned state, since of course she was the one who’d worked all pandemic, she had the apartment with the space and baseline hygiene necessary to accommodate their nightly cohabitation—

And it’s true, he worked too, he’d been working, making money like his role required, only this step, tonight’s, marked a shift, since it was for his art that he was receiving compensation, it was for his art that he was, as of today, receiving institutional representation, the seismic shift of this, Yes go ahead have a seat here, I’ll go see what’s good with ordering, he tells her, and he seats her facing away from the sidewalk, into the little sidewalk hut so that way he can sit on the inside looking out, he can keep an eye out for any encroachers, a not completely unreasonable consideration these lockdown days what with the outdoor dwellers pushed out onto the streets into the subway tunnels while the proud vile technocrat class reveled in this class rift, enjoyed their own imprisonment, never left their houses, their bedrooms, ordered in Sweetgreen, did deals over high speed 5G internet, but in any case those who did leave who forged their way into the night had to do so sipping twenty dollar cocktails literally on the streets while the drug reliant and mentally ill, with nowhere else to go, roamed uninhibited

And on top of that these setups extended literally into the street and so sitting on the inside meant he would get hit first, would deflect any vehicular impact should a wayward driver drive directly into their sidewalk hut, which also didn’t seem totally unreasonable how jutted out into the street it was

And so John really had all bases covered when it came to protecting his sweet gentle Ruth

And he says let me see what’s up sit tight

And Ruth says yes okay, seeming held and girlish and cared for rather than confused and strained and exasperated like she’d been last they’d tried to go out

And John feels good about this

And they don’t have menus to give out, just one taped onto the front of the waist-high stable-door ordering station like prices or height regulations for a carnival ride

But he’s just sat Ruth and he feels so pleased that they’re out they’ve finally done it they’ve gone out on the town despite the restrictions and he doesn’t want to make her get up again he turns back and sees her sitting so cute and content the angle of her head makes it seem like she’s glancing off to the side slightly thinking of something so he tells the waiter Hey no menus no problem snaps a pic of the menu and takes it back to Ruth under the tent into the safety the warmth beneath the heat lamp—

I don’t know where it was, some bar, I took a picture of the menu, I can show you—

Were we fighting no we weren’t fighting

well What do you mean fighting—

And Ruth sips some seventeen- or nineteen-dollar basil mint thing and John sips something spicy with jalapeño in it

And the moon rising to the east full and looming

And John’s just brought them back, two garnished potent potion goblets, from the stable doors to them

And he’d take her coat but it’s still quite nippy out despite the heat lamps

To you

To us

To speaking our visions into existence

To an unlikely light at the End of a Long Dark Tunnel

And they sip and they banter and John feels like he can finally hold her like he isn’t only a burden on her and the concoction hits their synapses and they’re buzzing now and it’s so tasty they drink faster than they should and the sun is down and it’s still cold out and once they finish they say let’s do one more, drink it slowly this time shall we, and they agree

And John gets up and gets another of each

And it’s only then that he can finally relax and says so what happened why were you so late did you have therapy

And Ruth says yes I had therapy we went long today

And why did you go long

Well there was the thing with the meds, Ruth says, since she’d been panicked earlier that week since she’d run out of her stimulants and they weren’t allowing pharmacies to give her more

And so they’d had an emergency session earlier in the week, she and her other therapist, her psychiatrist, the one who prescribed her meds, to adjust or rather triple her Wellbutrin

And now that the stimulants are back on, we were talking about that, about how I was adjusting to all that—

But she doesn’t stop there, something mixes in her brain as the second drink hits and she starts going in in the way she sometimes does, reckless and vitriolic

Hopeless and fatalistic and laughing at her fatalism

A glimpse of which John had seen before, that night in Vermont, that text thread around the Election, that Great Conjunction fight around Christmas, her writing

Nietzsche wrote, “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.” Yes, but only when one has been living with the thoughts for so long, time has disarmed them. For me, this took about eleven years. Friedrich, how long did it take you?

I didn’t want to hurt myself anymore so I started outsourcing. That was how it had all begun anyway. I just wrote: in New York City, it is easy to find people who will hurt you. But that is wrong. That is New-York exceptionalism. The truth is, it is easy to find people who will hurt you everywhere and that makes this uninteresting—

writing about these dire things and deflecting them with wit and humor in a way she could do so well but that nonetheless was unsettling when that line between fatalism and humor wasn’t calibrated like it only can be on the page

Without the calibration on the page, the calming effect of multiple edits, to write the sneering and vitriol down, to then look at later, after a sleep, some sleeps, to then identify it and cull it, without this tamping, with alcohol, when the sneering at the hopelessness just sprays out and gets reiterated in speech

Or just earlier that day, how unusual Ruth had been acting, texting John manic, at one point out of the blue exclaiming, with no preamble, John I feel so ALIVE!! And it must have had to do with the meds, being back on the stimulants, she’d been weepy and on edge all week—

And I sit there, mouth dry, head light, unable to form words, it’s all a nightmare, my life will be One Long Nightmare from now on

And then the quiet detective looks at his cellphone and leaves while the talkative detective says It’s gonna be alright man we’re just waiting to hear back from some people to see that things check out and so you were saying about her History

And there was of course the direct recurrence of what happened the year before happening in the exact same way again but things don’t work like that we can’t see how things end up working out but it’s true it was a different view of the world to treat sadness as a symptom expecting the cure versus living perennially outside the center and the center providing nothing

a different sense of difficulty of discomfort maybe those two views were water oil things that shouldn’t mix

Were it only so simple as all that—

8/9/25

BLAST2MAG@GMAIL.COM

1. U MUST BE READABLE & COMPREHENSIBLE. . .

TRANSMITTING THE MESSAGE: THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS.

BLAST: CONVOLUTION. . . BLAST: ERUDITION. . . BLAST: ORNANITY. . .

BLESS: ILLITERATE CHRIST: CRUCIFIED FOR SPEAKING TO FISHERMAN, BEGGARS, & WHORES IN SIMPLE ARAMAIC.

THE MESSAGE: CONVEYED THRU STORIES ALL CAN UNDERSTAND.

U MUST SPEAK TO THE PEOPLE IN THE VERNACULAR.

BLESS: WILLIAM TYNDALL: BURNED FOR SPEAKING TO THE PPL.

BLESS: THOMAS MUNTZER: MAIMED FOR SPEAKING TO THE PPL.

BLESS: LUCIFER: ETERNALLY DAMNED FOR SPEAKING TO THE PPL.

IF THERE IS A MESSAGE: MAKE IT UNDERSTOOD TO ALL.

IF THERE IS NO MESSAGE: BE SILENT.

2. U MUST BE UNREADABLE & INCOMPREHENSIBLE. . .

IF THERE IS TRUTH: IT CAN NEVER BE UNDERSTOOD.

BLAST: SIMPLICITY. . . BLAST: DIRECTNESS. . . BLAST: LUCIDITY. . .

BLESS: UNSATISFIED EVE: FOREVER EXPULSED FOR NOT SUBMITTING TO THE LIMPIDITY OF ORDER CALLED EDEN.

THE BOUNDARY: DEMARCATION WHERE INTELLIGIBILITY DIES.

U MUST REEK OF THE ALIEN TO YOUR CONTEMPORARIES.

BLESS: COLUMBUS: WHOSE EYES BLED FROM THE VIGOR OF HIS HORSESENSE.

BLESS: GIORDANO BRUNO: WHOSE NAKED FLESH CORUSCATED FOR HERMETIC GUARDATION.

BLESS: MARIANNE FRITZ: WHOSE BLOOD CURDLED FROM TRISMEGISTUS’S POISON.

TAKE THE TRUTH: HIDE IT DEEP IN THE DARK FOREST.

NOTHING CAN EVER BE UNDERSTOOD.

3. U MUST PARTICIPATE IN THE FOUNDATIONAL MYTHS. . .

AUTOMYTHOGRAPHY MEANS NO DIVISION BETWEEN U, TIME, HISTORY, LITERATURE.

BLAST: LINEARITY. . . BLAST: DISHARMONY. . . BLAST: FICTION. . .

BLESS: DIVINE DANTE: CONDEMNED TO A LIFETIME OF SALTY BREAD FOR QUESTIONING ADAM AS HIMSELF.

THE MYTHS: PATRIMONY AS ESSENTIAL AS THE PLACE YOU WERE BORN.

U MUST REALIZE OUR BROTHER HUMPTY DUMPTY SHATTERS DAILY.

BLESS: DON QUIXOTE: SO ILL WITH DELUSIONS HE MADE THEM HIS LIFE.

BLESS: VICO: SO FESTERED WITH CYCLICALITY HE PENURIZED HIS FAMILY.

BLESS: JOYCE: SO BUBONIC WITH INVENTION HE MADE LUCIA INSANE.

TIME’S DETRITUS IS A CORPSE: PICK AT IT LIKE VULTURES.

WE ARE EVERYTHING THAT EVER WAS & WILL BE.

4. U MUST NOT TURN AWAY FROM THE BLAST. . .

THE HORROR OF THE WORLD IS YOUR PROBLEM.

BLAST: DESPAIR. . . BLAST: MOLLIFICATION. . . BLAST: DISTRACTION. . .

BLESS: DRUNKEN NOAH: FOR PATRIARCHING THE FLOOD & REBUILDING AFTER ANNIHILATION.

THE COMFORTABLE: FATTENED & CIVILIZED TO IGNORE UNSAVORY REALITY.

U MUST BE RUTHLESS ABOUT THE BEAM IN UR OWN EYE.

BLESS: BOSCH: WHO SHOWED SIEGE TO KINGS & STUCK HIS FACE IN HELL.

BLESS: JACQUES 1: DEFENESTRATED FOR OBLITERATING THE COMMERCE OF FLESH.

BLESS: FAULKNER: WHO CASTIGATED HIMSELF FOR THE SINS OF HIS FOREBEARS.

DO NOT LET YOUR HEARTS BE AMELIORATED BY PABLUM.

U ARE NOT & WILL NEVER BE: INNOCENT.

5. U MUST ASPIRE TO THE HIEROGLYPH. . .

OUR INTENTION IS TO REBUILD THE TOWER OF BABEL.

BLAST: LANGUAGE. . . BLAST: METAPHOR. . . BLAST: INTERPRETATION. . .

BLESS: TUBERCULAR SPINOZA: DEAD AT 44 FOR SPEWING THE PHLEGM OF TOTAL UNITY.

THE URSPRACHE: AN ASPIRATION TO PURE UNMEDIATED MEANING.

U MUST SEEK THE BARBAROUS UNIFICATION OF FORM & CONTENT.

BLESS: ATHANASIUS KIRCHER: CODELESS ERRANT FORGOTTEN DECIPHERER.

BLESS: HILMA AF KLINT: SACRIFICED AS A VESSEL FOR TRANSMISSION.

BLESS: JOHN COLTRANE: SELF-SUBSUMED & LOST IN ASCENSION.

WE REJECT THE UTILITY OF THE ROSETTA STONE.

THERE CAN BE NO BUFFER TO CONVEYANCE.

6. U MUST WELCOME MYSTICAL VISIONS. . .

GOD IS ONLY PRESENT & REAL IN THE HOLY SPIRIT.

BLAST: REALITY. . . BLAST: PNEUMATOMACHIANISM. . . BLAST: DENIAL. . .

BLESS: PROPHETIC MUHAMMAD: WHO ACCEPTED COMMUNION WITH GABRIEL & TRANSFORMED THE WORLD.

THE DIVINE: AN INHALABLE EVER-PRESENT PNEUMA.

U MUST AFFIRM CREATION AS AN UNTERRESTRIAL FEAT.

BLESS: MARGERY KEMPE: PARTURATOR OF 14 CHILDREN SHE REJECTED TO BE CHRIST’S CHILD.

BLESS: CHICO XAVIER: PSYCHOGRAPHER OF 496 BOOKS WHO CLAIMED AUTHORSHIP OF ZERO.

BLESS: MARIA VALTORTA: ATTACKED & BEDBOUND FOR 28 YEARS TO TRANSCRIBE 15,000 PAGES OF MESSIANIC MESSAGES.

NEVER ACCEPT THAT THIS WORLD IS ALL THERE IS.

U ARE GOD AS MUCH AS HUMAN.

7. U MUST GO OUTSIDE. . .

OUR BLESSED WORLD IS A CARNIVAL OF SUBLIME CACOPHONY.

BLAST: ISOLATION. . . BLAST: PURITY. . . BLAST: SILENCE. . .

BLESS: DESTITUTE ST. FRANCIS: WHOSE BAREFOOT SOUL SPILLED OVER THE WORLD LIKE A FLOOD.

THE PEOPLE: A NUMINOUS GARDEN OF ENTHUSIASM.

U MUST EXPOSE URSELF TO THE EFFULGENCE OF THE METROPOLIS.

BLESS: CERVANTES: FACELESS PIRATE, PRISONER, ADULTEROUS KNAVE, SANITIZED BY HISTORY’S VARNISH.

BLESS: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: HUSTLER, LECHER, COINER, WHO CROAKED SYPHILLITIC & JOKING.

BLESS: MOTHER TERESA: ZEALOT, SERVANT, FLOWER, WHO SPENT A LIFETIME KISSING LEPROUS SORES.

COSMOPOLITANISM IS AN ATTITUDE OF DEVOTION.

IMMOLATE URSELF IN THE BONFIRE OF THE BLACKTOP.

8. U MUST BE AN ANCHORITE. . .

OUR BLASTED WORLD IS A MAELSTROM OF OBFUSCATION.

BLAST: NOISE. . . BLAST: VANITY. . . BLAST: HOOPLA. . .

BLESS: FETID ST. ANTHONY: DESERT-DWELLING SURMOUNTER OF BOREDOM, SLOTH, WOMEN: AFFIRMER OF PROFOUND SOLITUDE.

THE EARTH: A STORM THAT MAKES U POROUS TO TOXICITY.

U MUST ISOLATE URSELF TO PRESERVE THE INTEGRITY OF UR SOUL.

BLESS: JULIAN OF NORWICH: WHO EXULTED THE SOUNDS OF DIVINE LOVE AGAINST THE DIN OF EXISTENCE.

BLESS: THOMAS AQUINAS: WHO FORTRESSED HIS LIFE BEHIND AN IMPENETRABLE CHASTITY BELT UNTIL A MOSQUITO SLIPPED INSIDE.

BLESS: HENRY DARGER: WHO NEVER KNEW ANYBODY.

IMPERMANENCE IS A DRIP BY DRIP DELUGE.

IMMURE URSELF IN THE COFFIN OF THE DROPS.

9. U MUST BE MEDIEVAL. . .

THE ONLY WORTHY ATTITUDE IS A FERVENT OTHERWORDLY JINGOISM.

BLAST: SCIENCE. . . BLAST: SKEPTICISM. . . BLAST: LEGITIMACY. . .

BLESS: THE SHROUD OF TURIN: WHOSE PRANKSTER VISCERATED THE BLOODY OUTLINE OF CHRIST’S SACRIFICE.

THE FORGERY: A HOLY OBSESSION WITH TRANSMOGRIFYING THE REAL.

U MUST SHAPE WHAT IS LIKE PERFERVID CLAY.

BLESS: MOSES DE LÉON: WHO TOILED OVER THE CRUCIBLE OF GOD’S SECRETS TO ANONYMITY & DISDAIN.

BLESS: DARWIN: WHOSE MINUTE ATTENTION MADE HIM A PERPETUAL HERETIC.

BLESS: MARIE CURIE: WHO WAS LITERALLY INTOXICATED BY THE MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE.

THERE IS NO AUTHORITY TO WHOM U MUST BE ACCOUNTABLE.

UR WORK IS BETWEEN U & ETERNITY.

10. U MUST BE AN IDIOT. . .

THE FOOL IS THE ONLY BEING WHO CAN SPEAK FREELY.

BLAST: WISDOM. . . BLAST: INTELLIGENCE. . . BLAST: RATIONALITY. . .

BLESS: HIDEOUS SOCRATES: AMBULANT COURAGEOUSLY DEATH-ACCEPTING ABOMINABLE ANNOYER.

THE BRAINIAC: AN EGO-BALLOON THAT MUST BE FED EXCREMENT.

U MUST PANEGYRIZE URSELF AS A COCKROACH.

BLESS: OTHELLO: RASH HEEDER OF BAD COUNSEL WHO DEPRIVED HIMSELF OF TRUE LOVE & EARNED HELL.

BLESS: NAPOLEON: SWASHBUCKLING CAESAREAN ALEXANDRINE WHO WOULDN’T STOP UNTIL TRAPPED BY WATER.

BLESS: BENJY COMPSON: IMPRISONED FOR KNOWING ALL-TIME IS EVER-PRESENT & THAT MEMORY IS TRUE PERMANENCE.

WE ARE & WILL EVER BE WORTHLESS MORONIC NOTHINGS.

U MUST RECOGNIZE THAT THIS IS UR FREEDOM.

8/6/25

BLAST2MAG@GMAIL.COM