in honor of The Onion officially taking over InfoWars, what’s a conspiracy theory you 100% believe?

Elvis Costello experiences time backward and wrote "watching the detectives" about a partner obsessed with Supernatural

I was kind of into the whole "geese are a psyop" thing until I found out that apparently Geese is the name of a band

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005)

Sondheim - Sunday In The Park With George - Beautiful YouTube video by Some Days You're Barbra

All things are beautiful! All trees! All towers! Beautiful!

youtu.be/m4e1g36zg-Q?...

Text of Black Telephone by Richard Siken, 1/4 There are two birds in your head, raven and crow, and only one of them is yours. A ghost and a robot doing battle, singing like telephones, the phone is ringing, a headache word. You are dancing with the birdcage girl, banging your head against a cage that isn’t there. You want to say yes: yes to the bathtub, yes to the gumdrops, no to the laughing skullheads. The holes in this picture are not flowers, they are not wheels, and the phone is ringing ringing, a headache word, it’s ringing for you. This is in the second person. This is happening to you because I don’t want to be here. Is there anything I won’t put words around? Yes, there is. And so there are gaps. And so naturally things try to get into the gaps. I imagine things because I like them or sometimes I dislike them and I am afraid of them and I live in an imaginary world. The phone is ringing and I don’t want to hear this. The T.V. is on and I don’t want to see this, I don’t want to rise to this occasion. I stood the yard in my everyday clothes singing Wings little monster, listen to my soup bones. Does it help? What does this have to do with the airplanes and the buildings falling down? I’m a romantic, an absurdist. I am bad with facts and I get confused. I’m a hostile witness. I didn’t want to see this, talk about this. I wanted to testify to something else. The phone rings and you pick it up and it’s bad news. Now what do you do?

Text of Black Telephone by Richard Siken, 2/4 There are many ways to write about war. On one end, there’s clarity, facts, the updates and the eyewitness accounts. On the other end, there’s Paul Celan, a holocaust survivor who wrote poems in the language of his oppressors; weird, fractured, tragic, and beautiful lyrics that render the experience of confusion and meaninglessness and loss. But I don’t want to write about war. I had other plans. I wanted to talk about monsters and terror, not war and terrorism. But since September 11th, monster means something different than it used to. Not only are we trapped in our bodies, drowning in gravity, but we’re stuck in our time, too. Down here, in these years in which we live. Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa says that as a writer, my primary obligation is to write. He adds, however, that this should not be incompatible with concern for the place where I live. “If you are a writer,” he says, “and there is no freedom where you live, you cannot say that this is not your problem.” It is difficult not to feel obliged to participate in the public debate and commit oneself politically, but I don’t know anything about these kind of things. I’m still trying to figure out the difference between comedy and tragedy. I’m the last person to ask about right and wrong. For two weeks, I watched the constant coverage on the television. I couldn’t get my head around it. It seemed too simple, too one-sided, too much of a good versus evil thing. I am wary of the simple. Perhaps I am being unreasonable, but I still believe that there are answers that aren’t yes or no.

Text of Black Telephone by Richard Siken, 3/4 Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole. I doubt that I’m the only one who feels this way. It’s the core of monster making, actually. Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable—your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers—and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves. Oh we’re a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them We’ve been to the moon and we’re still fighting over Jerusalem. Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper. I didn’t want to write these pages until there were no hard feelings, no sharp ones. I do not have that luxury. I am sad and angry and I want everyone to be alive again. I want more landmarks, less landmines. I want to be grateful but I’m having a hard time with it. The phone rings and I pick it up and I really wanted to do something else with my hands. It keeps coming back to that: what do I do with these hands? Let’s say the dead are watching us. What should we do with our hands? Let’s say that aliens are watching us. What should we do with our hands? Let’s say that the world isn’t made out of love, let’s say it’s all paratroopers and suckerpunches. Does this really change anything?

Text of Black Telephone by Richard Siken, 4/4 My friend Trevis has a New Year’s Day tradition, he tries to experience one hundred and eight emotions as fast as he can. I admire that. He’s ambitious, alive, resilient, flexible. He continues to remember things and yet move forward. He never kept a single promise, but then he never made one. It made me angry, it made me feel less safe, less confident. What he said instead was While we’re here, pass this with me. I was sitting with my friend Chris the other night, outside, at safehouse, drinking hot chocolate and enjoying the novelty of wearing a coat and sweater. “It’s gonna get cold,” he said. “I know,” I said, and then we were quiet for a while. “You know what’s funny about being cold?” he asked, rhetorically, because he knows I’m from Arizona and don’t know anything about being cold. “When you’re cold, you’re not all the way cold, you’re just thirty percent cold.” “Yeah?” I said, not really impressed with his Midwestern epiphany. “The trick is,” he continued “to live in the warm parts. You have to live in the other seventy percent.” So now I say it to you: Pass this with me. Here, in the warm parts. Now in your hands is a book that Drew and I made with our hands. We celebrate it. If the dead are watching, I want them to see us writing, dancing, singing, painting. I want them to see that we still reach out to each other.

This is Richard Siken, from the Winter 01-02 issue of Spork. The website will say it's not secure, so here's some screenshots if you don't feel trusting

thisissporkpress.com/1_3/pieces/Editor.htm

I don't think he will. He shouldn't. But he could

Talisman 3 aka Other Worlds Than These (!!!) has a release date and it's October so plenty of time to reread Talisman and Black House and pray King doesn't fuck it up

have they tried constructing additional pylons even

Re that grotesque Yale report on a lack of "diverse" perspectives in academe: the majority of right leaning people (men) I've met in higher ed have been grotesque sexpests, misogynists, lazy, and incompetent. They can't hack the intellectual part and students hate them. Hope that helps!

"Oh man no WAY live-action Moana is gonna be anywhere as good"

Correct! SO MAYBE DON'T GO SEE IT.

Trying this new thing where email and financials only happen on a laptop on a separate floor from my workspace to help prevent me from doing those things when my aim is to do creative things

Flames
Flames on the side of my face

you guys are right, there are people who did get shot and killed in rap beefs who still didn’t lose as badly as Drake did

You don't find a word sharing a root with "tumor" to be erotically charged?

Was annoyed that almost no time was spent talking about B7 (which lyrically needed a sensitivity reader but musically is my favorite) but I suppose the whole of the memoir up to that point is actually the story of B7

Sleater-Kinney - The Dog/The Body (Official Audio) YouTube video by Sleater-Kinney

I don't mind

youtu.be/mVQAPd3yJsI?...

a hairless rat next to a tiny rainbow colored xylophone. The caption reads "Neil banging out the tunes, April 13, 2006"

Happy 20 years to Neil banging out the tunes 😌

Guy who posts on work intranet all his takes about fad-shaped things that "everyone is talking about" but which no one has actually heard of

DC Metro sign for the “Pentagon City” station.

Where the grass is [redacted] and the girls are [redacted].

How sure are we that dril is not bushmiller

"If you were in charge of Star Trek what would you do?"

Two parters anthology series made with scripts from currently active speculative fiction writers. Free reign on time period, cultural/ planetary setting, presence of the federation/ known entities, canon etc. Just has to be a great two parter

Bela Lugosi's Dead (Right)

Got a Crass doc from the library and Marc said what's a Crass and I said the only punk band

Somewhere along the way I realized I don't actually like star wars just zahn novels

I wonder if cis contraltos have that experience

Yes okay was doing falsetto vocal exercises this morning but that's because bass baritone singing is gender dysphoria territory

I have you down as "author most likely to walk into the woods" but for different reasons

Lotta interesting stuff in Brandy's memoir but none more absurd than everyone (including her) convinced that trying to do soprano shit was a better idea than leaning into her low range which let's be honest is among the best of all time

Screenshot of a two star review from story graph, the text of which reads: dang i made a book club read this

Just finished Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine¹ and checked reviews and laughed very hard

1 which I loved very much

MARIO SAVIO - "Operation of the Machine" YouTube video by HUMAN RIGHTS FOUNDATION

You've got to make it stop

youtu.be/lsO_SlA7E8k?...