Ticks
They looked like stone busts of Roman emperors or something
Gorged on Beagle gore
If not a willing carrier, I have been a faithful one.
Sometimes at night when I shut my eyes, and sometimes, for that matter, when I cinch them in prayer, what flashes up on the walls of my mind is a series of three images. Like the dinosaur slides my daughter switches in and out of the View-Master, which, no matter how familiar, retain a capacity for surprise, the first picture emerges from out of darkness and is replaced by darkness before the next one, and then the next one, appears.
Three deer ticks, each the size of a grape, bigger, are arranged in a loose triangle on a stone splash block at the edge of a house. That’s the first image. In the next one, three blood stains, dark, distinct, are all that remain. In the last, the blood on the stone has likewise vanished. Something or other has washed it clean.
The sequence derives from a memory, or collection of memories, from my childhood in Tennessee. Why I’ve smuggled these pictures across …
Snakes on the Mesa
Inside a packrat’s nest is a kitchen area, with little shelves where different kinds of food are stored. There is also an area like a refrigerator, with better airflow
Nuts and seeds are stacked in the warmer area
Why don’t serial killers ever talk about the good times?
Robert was still back and forth between California and the Mesa. When we first met, some years ago, he liked to watch Hallmark movies. They started with things like a beautiful lost veterinarian whose car broke down and a local farmer took her in and gave her coolant. When he made her pancakes, she realized her boyfriend was shallow and trivial. The lonely farmer and his tame deer — rescued from a hunter — were a better choice.
But once Robert was with me on the mesa, his tastes in programs changed.
He only watched serial-killer series, murder documentaries, and various other shows featuring men disposing of bodies. Screams from his cell phone in the other room kept me awake at night. He found it soothing.
Then he would return to California again, to get things finished up there so he could be here full time. It took him eleven hours each way and he was often gone for a week. The …
Welcome to the Hyper-Feudalist Future!
If not for cosmic-level screwups by Germany and Japan, America would still be an ass-backwards shithole.
That, plus the serpentine genius of F.D.R., birthed the alternate-timeline universe that we inhabit today, which is now run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Palm-sized mind-control devices stream an endless feed of sex, violence, and outrage porn while our neurodivergent elites plan gated communities on Mars.
For those mystically inclined — or maybe just hopped up on Marvel lore — there’s a serious case to be made that we’re living in an alternate timeline, one diverging sharply from the path we were meant to follow. A “universe” where Christianity is doomed to end in failure; where Hegel and Marx — and the rest of the progressive left — are proven dead wrong about humanity’s dialectical march toward progress. A historical itinerary where every attempt to build a humane, collectivist model of industrialization is thwarted by charismatic leaders with dark-triad traits, propped up by the wealthiest actors in their respective societies, hellbent on global domination and imperial destruction. Adolf Hitler. Joseph McCarthy. Barack Hussein Obama. And now Donald J. Trump.
Humanity’s best shot at building a sane industrial society probably ended when Kaiser Wilhelm let his overconfident military brass talk him …
