Deranged country / Dejected heart
Today: Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks and The Way to the Spring; and Jídé Salawu, writer and editor at Olongo Africa.
Issue No. 246
Stand By for News
Ben Ehrenreich
Letter to February
Jídé Salawu
Stand By for News
by Ben Ehrenreich
So it begins. The news blasts out from the newsrooms—or wherever it is they make news these days—like a hurricane. Like a city-consuming firestorm. Like the seventeenth once-in-a-century-weather-event to hit since the sixth time you hit snooze this morning. Not on an alarm clock but on your phone, which knows you better than you do and decides you need news, new news, not the old stuff, not just information but a new kind of kinetic screaming poetry for a new and smoother kind of brain. Was that really just this morning? It felt like years ago. Behold the news. It eats time like a mouse gnawing through an encyclopedia. It seethes and it shivers and it sparkles in the light. Beneath all the strobing glitter and noise its core is still and silent. Like snow in the bayou. Like dust settling on bone in a crater left by a 2000-pound bomb. Don’t be fooled, there is no core.
The cabinet confirmation process is nearly complete. An enormous, twelve-eyed, sticky-legged spider has been confirmed as Secretary of Self-Driving Savagery. His erection is something to see! It’s fully detachable. It took Kylie Jenner to the Met Gala last year. They both wore Balenciaga. Cerberus has been airlifted from his previous post in Hades and deployed to guard the border and protect this gilded hell. An actual Rat King slipped through the Senate as Secretary of Selective Starvation. It celebrated by untangling its fourteen hairless tails and announced a fresh, new pestilence. Its meme coin is soaring. The Washington Post Editorial Board expects that this pestilence will be better for the bottom line than the last one, what a waste. A butcher naked but for a bloody apron will be waiting outside your door in the morning with a thirty-dollar stimulus check. You can buy an egg with it! Sparks will jump from the concrete as he sharpens his cleaver on the stoop. Say thank you, sir! Say good morning, sir! Say it like you mean it.
Sorry friends, but all of California that has not yet burned has been declared illegal. Except for the four percent of it that the military owns already and the former concentration camps and any remaining white parts that aren’t too gay. Shaking off the last drops of pee before you leave the urinal is a sign of gender deviance and will be punished with castration live on TMZ. Be a fucking man. All uteruses will henceforth be tattooed “PROPERTY OF.” Don’t even think of saying Gaza. Eleven out of nine Democrats in Congress agree that their only mistake was excess wokeness, ick, and vote to have their limbs, eyes, and tongues removed by AI-powered executioner as a show of good faith. An olive branch if you will. Their severed hands, true to form, claw their way across the aisle. If they round up everyone without papers, who will build the camps?
Keep us breathing fire!
For $3/month you can read this whole post and get our weekdaily newsletter too!