9.05.2025 - Weekly Digest
Reminder: pledge to find 10 readers for Without a Gun and your paid subscription is free! For life! That's a long time, or as long as either of us need it to be.
Also: you can look through the archives (160 posts as of today) by clicking on the 'Without a Gun' header in this email.
Considering some changes and upgrades to the look and use of the site itself, so if you have any useful feedback hit me with it in the next week or so.
-JA
9.02.2025
Did Morrissey die? Keep hearing The Smiths everywhere. The restaurant by the movie theater, drifting out of car windows. Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now. Then at the dusty cafe this morning on Sutter. Off the socials and it's entirely feasible in this life to not catch such news unless it's spoken of directly. Impossible to keep up with shared references. Hey is this the name of the guy who owns that football team? Really none of my business. Solar events, weather anomalies. No one agrees on anything and I can't say without qualifying if that's necessarily bad but I have to think not being forced to focus on the same spot on the horizon all at once must be help some of us grow. Evolutionarily 'n' all. It's about who's telling you where to look and when you don't trust anyone who's not a friend of your invisible friend group who's left to argue? As such things spread. Lateral references which if I were pressed I'd posit that's how thought and language work anyway. We are become analogy. Pulses that say Hey What Do You Think of This and Do You Like It. Every axon needs a dendrite amiright. Morrissey's not dead by the way but I heard he's a pretty big jerk.
9.03.2025
Sidewalks are symbols of neighborliness, right up there with little free libraries. When I'm in a place with no sidewalks I like to install them at night while everyone's asleep, only there's always that one person, a lady with insomnia whose remedy for an unquiet mind is to stand over the kitchen sink and stare out into the night. Maybe she expects to see a raccoon or a deer or an armadillo depending on where we are in this. She's concerned about crime, you can be sure about that. Sidewalks lead to a four thousand percent increase in burglaries, she heard somewhere, so when she sees movement just outside the cone of light from the street lamp, a shadow that resolves to reveal a clumsy guy in a ninja suit from the costume store unrolling a prefabricated length of sidewalk like he's laying down sod over the droughty patch of prickly grass out there, you better believe she's gonna do something about it, only she doesn't expect me to be so open about all of it, so disarming, and when I explain how civil my motivations are, that I'm just trying to bring a sense of community to things, a sense of order and peace and respect, she's a little bit surprised at how this makes her feel, and that's how you're gonna beat 'em, I always say, one insomniac at a time.
9.04.2025
To block out the world I listen to music that sounds like the interludes you hear in NPR and PBS programs. Bubbly little snippets of melody. If a song has words in it I start thinking about the words and then all I can think about is words and how words sound and do they even mean anything and whose business is it anyway? Soundtracks, scores, synthetic triads, samples from ancient jazz tunes no one living has ever heard played live. The click of a ceiling fan as backbeat. Dogs snoring on either side of me in duet. Anything, even a leaf blower on a loop or a semiregular Delta faucet drip. Windchimes in discord with a super pissed off crow. Maybe it's not the absence of words but the need to be free of deliberate human noise. Unmuffled engines and the clueless shouting into speakerphones. Knowitalls chattering just out of sight, on the other side of a fence or in a room down the hall. Talkers and yellers and sneezers and subvocalizers. Hush.
(my obsessively long pan-generic instrumental playlist)
9.05.2025
In this one I'm working for a tech company and there's this giant red devil hanging around the office and everyone knows he's there and we're trying to do our jobs and every once in a while he leans over and eats someone at their desk. It's gross too, with lots of chthonic slobber and demonic fluids everywhere. You'd think we'd be alarmed but there's work to be done, whatever that is. I ask one of my coworkers what we're supposed to be doing and she says we'll find out at the meeting later. Meanwhile this rapacious crimson metaphor swallows the person I think is my boss, maybe? The office is divided by membranes and in one section we still have desks and computers but there's no gravity so I decide to float around in there for a while. Still, at some point I'm going to need to go to the other part where the monster is and I think, this is what you get for working.