11.21.2025 - Weekly Digest

Note to paid subscribers (current or aspiring) - I know I'm a little behind on the Features. That will be remedied. Expect flurries before December's end.
-JA

11.17.2025

Looking to get my mouth looked at. Do you have anyone who can help? Sure we do. Are they qualified? I mean anyone's qualified to look at a mouth if you think about it. You got me there. I guess my concern is if they'll be trained. How you mean? I mean oral cavity training. Might help if we can tell them what to look for. Isn't that their job? I'm offering, here, to lie back and open my mouth in a perverse approximation of a torture ritual. Can't say what the job is, exactly, until we know what they're looking for. Also depends on who's available. Well who's available? Great question. I like to think I ask good questions. Where did you say you were again? Oakland. No I meant figuratively. Somewhere between meaning and nonsense. Therein lies the truth. My gums aren't bleeding, if that's what you're wondering. But it feels like they could. That's very interesting. Thanks I like to keep folks entertained.

11.18.2025

In Chicago during High Covid there were a select few other loners I'd see on the lakefront between Hollywood and Montrose Harbor, the same ones every day. It was the closest thing I had to a social group.

We never interacted or had anything to do with each other other than occupying the same space, give or take, around the same times every day, more or less, and this was when if you were responsible you didn't go up and introduce yourself to strangers.

I imagined conversing with them, sometimes out loud but stifled by the green cloth mask I'd purchased at a craft store in Logan Square before the Shit got really Real, and I'd imagine who these people were and what they were up to and what they were doing in the public space I'd come to think of as my own. Territorial fantasization, if you want to put a name on it.

I wondered about the freakishly tall guy with the red bandana around his neck and if he was a socialist, maybe a Wobbly like those insufferable people me and an old bandmate performed for on May Day once. I imagined I respected his politics and was better off not meeting him.

One was this tiny woman, built like a baby bird you find on the sidewalk after a windstorm. For her own safety she wore these massive heavy platform boots to weigh her down.

And of course the parade of raving lunatics crashing through the parks, off-trail, yelling things I was also thinking but mostly keeping to myself.

11.19.2025
There was a guy hanging out in front of the school. Nonverbal. He wrote messages on the wide sidewalk in baby blue and pink chalk. Some figures were in yellow, like the pips on the i's. The messages were about love, about finding peace in God, about Truth. That sort of thing.

He was out there for a week or more. I saw him twice a day on my walks. By this time I had a routine. Up the big cemetery hill, regulate the breath, cross by the little free library and enter the driveway of the shrouded green house I like with an old VW bus rusting in the carport. Take the not very secret path by Peter Pan preschool where depending on the time of day a kid will be screaming and another one gripping a boat steering wheel and getting nowhere with it. Up another hill past a shrine to a woman with a head covering: forever in our hearts. Then a steeper hill still and a lazy curve and come back out to where you can choose your own adventure by turning left down to the pedestrian bridge over 580 or right and stay in the neighborhood, down Monticello with a soft 'c', past Karateman's house and then there's this big school, an arts academy, I think, and this guy was out there, chalking up the place. He never responded to my g'mornings or nods and he was out there shirtless a couple times. If he'd listened to me at all I might have given him a friendly suggestion to try to keep a shirt on, being in front of a school and all. Take it from me, I'd say, and neither of us would know what I meant.

Well I never gave him that advice and now he's gone. They hosed his ciphers into the street. Maybe that's on me.

11.20.2025

Read a story about a guy in Siberia who performed brain surgery on himself so he could control his dreams. As in, he drilled into his skull in his shitty apartment and implanted some kind of device in what turned out to be the wrong cortex. His big phobia was being abducted by aliens and he thought this would be a good way to confront his fear.

Now he has a business in Redwood. A business focused on dream research. He has no training whatsoever, just this story about how he practiced on sheep heads then drilled into his brain pan and got lucky enough that he didn't die, that he can still move all of his limbs with his thoughts, that he still has the power of speech to share his bananafuck ideas.

People get funding for this stuff out here. Money just dripping from whatever these succulent trees are called that don't shed leaves in the fall. The game is to be as weird as possible and find yourself a rich fetishist. Makes it seem like the rest of us are playing wrong.

Speaking of which I got to the end of the story and realized it was in a Hearst publication so if you're curious find it yourself but I ain't citing it here.