6.20.2025 - Weekly Digest

Some playful surrealism this week. Makes as much sense as anything else ya ask me.

Note: don't forget to upgrade your subscription if you want to read next week's feature piece, The Montreal Project [02].

-JA

6.17.2025

There's this show you only watch in batches, three or four at at time. It's about a game where you roll some dice, sometimes three and sometimes six, and whatever the outcome you're assigned a weapon from a list with the corresponding number. Whichever weapon you get, say a dagger for argument's sake, that's what you use the rest of the game. Now you're in a hallway of infinite length. Doors, identical, on either side, the glow of an exit sign at the end but never close enough to read it. Pick a door, any door, and now you're in a focus group, or maybe it's a support group, either way you're seated quietly in a circle with the other participants whose names are unknown to you even if their faces are familiar. Everyone trades stories and sips coffee from styrofoam. Turns out you're all addicted to television shows about complicated games with no apparent objective. When the session is ended everyone pulls a name from a hat. Let's say it's a fedora, an old one with a hard bump in it from exposure to the sun. Whatever name you draw that's who you're supposed to stalk for the rest of the game. Whether you decide to attack your person is up to you, and your person can decide if they want to attack you as well. Back to the hallway and the doors only this time some of the doors are locked and some aren't. Doors open and close at random. Sometimes another player emerges, looks around, tries another door or proceeds down the hallway toward the orange glow from the exit sign. You search for a while. You have not found your assigned person. What would you like to do next?

6.18.2025

What are we doing? Oh right the gameshow thing. This is what's happening with that: you chase yourself across a featureless plain. The mood is deadly but flirtatious. Now the floor is scrolling newspaper script, too fast to read and besides you don't want to take your eyes off yourself. A friendly bird would come in handy about now. No bird arrives. You still have the dagger by the way. Also not of any apparent use. From somewhere off to your right on the scrolling but otherwise featureless landscape a noise emerges, a low, long drone like a sustained note on a didgeridoo, and you can't really tell if it's getting louder but it doesn't feel like a positive development. You would change direction to skew away from the sound if only You up there would do the same. This is an uneasy relationship you're in with yourself. Difficult to define. You wonder if You feel the same way. Anyway the noise is still going and definitely not diminished. To make things more complicated, the text on the newspaper scroll is starting to develop texture. You can feel the relief under your shoes, minor at first but increasing in scope and severity. You have to skip a little to avoid falling over. And still you can't make out a single word.

6.19.2025

You have this brilliant idea to stop running. You stop running. Turns out the word-strewn floor is churning like a treadmill and you fall over quickly, your cheek indented by a capital M and your limbs threaded throughout a sentence of excessive length. Up there the other You is receding. It's hard to know if this means they're winning or if you're losing or if there's any consequence to any of this at all. Whatever the case you retreat from the horizon and the noise from off to your right is at least as loud as it was and all of this has your instincts keyed up in flight mode and you wobble to a standing position and rest your weight against the word 'through' - the letters are bigger now. It's like everything's designed to increase your sense of urgency. You resume the chase and up there your double is a diminished speck, no, more like a spastic asterisk shifting shape and orientation but seemingly still in the same place. You're finding your stride, I can do this, you say to yourself (but not Yourself) and you're on the verge of establishing a rhythm and then you make the mistake of looking down and trying to read the text.

6.20.2025

Nothing to do now but relax and let the current take you. You slide down, hanging loosely onto a jumble of words too three-dimensional in their orientation from this angle to mean anything other than failure. The landing is mercifully soft so you're welcome for that. Here at the bottom of the page you can see now that nothing you were doing ever made any difference. There's a freedom in this, if you think about it, but also depending on how you look at it a palpable sense of imprisonment. Up there at the top the other You dances across the top line, the title, too far up there to make out but it's bold and confident and you know in the innermost chamber of your heart that it's clever and apt and better than anything you'd come up with on your own. The text itself looks important but also somehow hollow, like whatever generated it never expected anyone to actually read it. Devoid of color or joke or metaphor. You wave up at You up there but if You sees you they're not letting on. If there's a lesson in this you're on your own to find it. You stand there for a while. You discover the meaning of the game. You keep it to yourself.