The thing about living in a fascist state is, you don’t necessarily wake up every day thinking “I live in a fascist state.” Most days you wake up and go through your daily routines; you listen to music on the radio; you go to the movies; you complain about the price of gas; you look forward to big celebrations; if you have a job, you go; if you can afford it, you plan vacations; you check the weather report for the chance of rain or snow; you engage in whatever level usage of social media you’ve become accustomed to; you play games on your phone; you watch streaming TV channels; you listen to your spouse tell you about their day; you tell your spouse about your day; you make plans for the weekend, if you don’t work weekends; you listen to your spouse cry because one her clients died in face down in the street when he had a warm bed but that’s not where the drugs were; you take note of the social outrage at one the death of a homeless woman in a city that has criminalized being human and living outside out of fear and needing to blame someone for everything; you look to make sure the front door is locked between you and the random house search you know is coming because the leadership in the city is complicit; you think about getting drunk, but know it won’t solve anything; you feed the dogs; you order a pizza and make sure to tip the driver; you know watching the State of the Union won’t do anything but keep you up all night and decide read multiple breakdowns the following morning over black coffee, at which point it occurs, once again, that you live in a fascist state.
Tag Archives: coffee
Daybook 2026 //Winter 1.9.26
I dropped my apple this morning and nearly choked on a cough drop. These, too, may become the symbols of an age; it certainly feels like symbols of my age, which is best classified as “Young but Feeling It.” Some apples are hardier than others. Like my mother’s mother, I favor tart pie apples. They remind me of the ones that used to grow on the trees in my mother’s parents’ yard, and long conversations over gin rummy about Jesus, back before I started being people’s great disappointment.
It’s raining and from my desk in the basement, it could be a spring rain. It isn’t. The weather has been kind this week. but all that means is that somewhere on the other side of this rain is cooler weather. Tart pie apples still taste like spring when it is winter raining. Cough drops always taste like winter.
January
rain
tastes
like
cough
dro
ps tart
pie apples
the expect
ation of fall
ing and becom
ing just
a bruised apple
Daybook 2026 // Winter 1.7.26
1.7.26
Begin again.
The world’s machine’s mechanisms run regardless in a pre-ordained program covered in iteration upon iteration of user design models. We are so far from how the soup is made, it’s all a needle prick to the gut and the promise of future health savings.
Begin again, word machine: with your hot coffee, tart apple, pipe, and (different) hip pain. Begin again because they are counting on you. Begin again because you are counting on yourself. Begin with your weapons of choice: a sharpened pencil, bare paper, the naked insistence which fuels you. Move the gears, grease the pistons. Give us a little play.
Begin again.
These steamboat metaphors break my heart. But it is a loving pain, a teary-eyed executioner.
Move, piston. Move.
ma
chine
clang
type
a diction
ary
with
fingers
a fingers
of diction
aries
ma
chine