12.10.2025 - Double Digest
Hey there. Scrambling like a bug up a wet ceramic wall. Working multiple gigs in the dark. Making plans with people whose main quality is not knowing how to make plans.
These are my excuses. Whaddya think?
Wanted to edit last week's posts and we're just gonna toss those together with this odd mid-week digest deal here. I'm moving in a couple days and don't yet know where, so I appreciate your patience. Things to figure.
Also will have some overdue features and some (good) changes to announce to the Without a Gun format and cadence and such soon.
Thanks for being neat.
-JA
12.01.2025
A mild winter. I was never that guy before, never a snow hater, always liked the excuse to stay indoors with books and games and quiet. I liked my evening walks in Traverse City where you have to bundle up and cover your eyes sometimes like you're about to jump out of an airlock into space. The almost total absence of noise.
But going to Montreal from there in January has officially put me off the stuff. So much snow for the first few weeks I may as well have rented a yurt in Nunavut.
The trucks and plows were running 24/7 but they have rules there to protect workers and the mayor was on tv going 'we're doing as much as we can but these guys have to sleep too.'
Relying on cars to wear treadmarks into the ice so you had somewhere to walk. Having nowhere to go if one was coming at you, having to squeeze up against a berm between a Citroen and a Fiat until they trundled past.
Those were the conditions I started Without a Gun in. Sitting in a stranger's kitchen in a technically foreign country while the white stuff piled up eyeball height. Wondering if I'd see America again and if I even cared.
12.02.2025
Oakland is the kind of place, if such a thing can be said about any place, where a silver baron's widow built a mansion in 1888, like an honest to goodness mansion with servants' quarters and I don't know a livery or something probably, in what is now the middle of town, a mansion that served as many things after she died including a recovery home for syphilitic young women in the 1920s.
I've made some queries about renting a room in this place and it looks like it's going to happen. I was pleased to learn that having syphilis is not a requirement to move in. Nor must I be a member of the peerage. Nor a scion. Nor a footperson nor a valet with a hard t.
12.03.2025
This house I've been squatting in for the last three months has been kind to me. I experienced my first real earthquake here. Hummingbirds in the garden I water and where I sometimes sit at night.
Been so long since I lived with others I don't know what to expect. I do know that spending nearly all of my waking time alone is not great for my brain or my writing so I'm looking forward to the opportunity to make small talk with random humans again. Maybe big talk too.
12.04.2025
Hyper- and hypo-fantasia. Too imaginative or not enough. Such a tempting oversimplification. Makes me want to write a series of sci-fi stories.
The idea that we're all on this spectrum. Too far on the one end you're diagnosed schizophrenic, too far on the other you're a Republican cop.
What I do know is our working models for mental health in this civilization have failed us, and like forced lobotomies and female circumcisions this era of so-called treatment with pharmaceuticals will be another horror of history some day.
For one thing labeling everything an illness is a pretty fucked way to go about it. And to have what passes for diagnosis be whether the patient reacts positively to psychotropic medication is embarrassing, potentially criminal, and should result in the loss of licenses for most psychiatrists.
Yeah I think that but my conditions say I'm allowed to think stuff like that.
12.08-11
Okay great everything's in order so let's get you that lease and the key and as soon as the payment clears you can move in, sorry it's a few days past the move-in date already but don't worry we won't communicate for the rest of the week about it unless you bother us and then we'll rewrite the conditions of the lease and run it by you and we really value your opinion; yep we have eighteen tenants already but part of the experience is making it feel like you're the first person we've ever rented to, we like the loose improvisational vibe of that, oh and we should mention the city sent some inspectors by and there's a bunch of stuff not up to code including the electrical wiring and who knows what else lol so there's always the chance you'll have to move out with no notice, so here's the lease again, and yeah this part is quite different, and the rent doubles after two months but don't worry we can talk about it once you're there and we'll need a sizable security deposit of course, you never know with an old building like this what's gonna happen ha ha so we'll get you that final version to sign today we mean tonight after you're asleep so when you wake up at 3 a.m. thinking something's wrong and see that we added some other stuff about how you'll be responsible for cleaning up after the other tenants and also the rent doubles after one month now not two; sure we remember the conversation where you told us that the constantly changing conditions was a big concern for you, that you'd had some bad experiences and there's still enough Chicago DNA in your system to set off klaxons when people are being shady as hell so we got a deal here or what?
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Luke O'Neil of Welcome to Hell World fame has a new book out and he sent me a signed copy because he's a mensch like that. Good guy with a crafty pen and a fully evolved conscience, and his stories have a way of making you feel like he's narrating your own thoughts; kinda creepy but satisfying all at once.
You should all get a copy and read it. I haven't yet but I know it will be good.
