to be honest I've just been jamming to bbc radio dance and then falling asleep to radio 3 classical

youtube finally managed to make it impossible for me to listen to music ad free on there by account locking me so I've returned to the old fashioned way

i will say i definitely have my favorites and my least favorites out of these but i defer to the reader on which ones they think are which

in quiet streets

i set up shop

with woven sheets

and bottletops

with shuddered breath

and stuttered sigh

from poisoned chest

to passersby

i pull him out

that devil seed

the gripping want

the frantic need

to break my back

to suck my sap

to find a lack

and make it laugh

i bottle it

go down the road

how easy with

just half the load

—

can i get an amen

can’t i catch a break

i chase it up top

i forgot about the storm

i’m swallowing spit

and my eyes are dry

but it's warm and it's ball one

and the coin flips over

my lungs ache and my heart melts

and it comes up heads

why not give it a try

amen

—

and to all the different kinds of blue

the refuse of a happy tune

the one that comes in afternoons

the now, the never, sometime soon

on waves that tumble to the bay

the green, marine, and robin’s egg

and even mixed with bitter grey

i love you more than i can say

—-

the better than the better is

the trade you trade for knowledges

the mix you mix with sour grapes

(however long that it will take)

to clarify or to begin

to find out where to follow him

–

dog with a bone

all alone

watch her run

watch her roam

mom’s not home

chew the bone

watch her

as she checks her phone

—--

create the world!

enjoy its light!

ignite your flame

to rule its night!

escape the bed, the frame, the trite

and fight the forest with a knife!

—-----

Juliet, 25

sees the ways her lover lied.

—--

i know you

perfect blue

perfect dawn

perfect you

keep me warm

keep me true

perfect love

perfect blue

—--

eye of the needle

watching over me

feverings and visions

tongue stitches

taking lashes

bearing new fruit

—--

hello the halfmoon

that grows when it splits

hello the hart

that the hunter will miss

hello to apemen

picking up tools

hello to apricot

mixed in the gruel

—--

lung splitter

back snapper

gut ripper

leg cracker

little creature

growing old

can you fit

a better mold?

—--

net cast the fish float adrift to be pulled in might be relief

—--

one fine december morning

skies dark, the train is empty

closed circuit captured, strutting

tall man inspects his weapon

quiet week at the bar. here are a bunch of poems i wrote in the last bit

it's a nana special of crushed potato chips with melted butter sprinkled on top

yurrrp

just spatchcocked the turkey for tomorrow

down to 145 for the first time i can remember. progressing well with workouts. the tonsillectomy recovery was horrible for the first 5 or 6 days but then after that I've been golden. medication still working well. i made a whole turkey as practice for thanksgiving and it turned out perfect. life is good.

it turns out that if you constantly say that either you can't do anything about problems or that the problems don't exist, people view you as useless losers

the party of adulting strikes again

tonsillectomy yesterday after a night in the ER -finally

I've been exercising and dieting again and so far I've lost 10 pounds, hoping to lose 10 more by new years - I'm gonna be down for 2 weeks in november for a tonsillectomy but it is what it is

i screwed up the meniscus in my right knee when i was 16 and it's been giving me a little grief lately, but I'm just ignoring it for now and keeping at exercising and stretching until it starts interfering with anything important. i figure it'll be with me for the rest of my life and I'll be damned if i have surgery on it until I'm old and grey, so the only way out is through

we need better jobs and we need to get out of our college town otherwise we never will, and chicago is a good kick in the pants

i had to get the abscess needle drained and then cut open which was more painful than recovering from getting castrated to be honest, i took my first opiate the afternoon after they cut it - but hopefully it's all over

it'll be an adventure anyway

the plan is to move to chicago in the summer so wish us luck

we've had a car for 2 months and already we've fucked it up - i scratched the side paint on somebody's bike that was locked up next to a parking spot, and today my boyfriend had his foot slip off the brake and dented/scraped the hood on a chain fence in a parking garage. luckily both times there was no damage to anything other than our car, but it just sucks because it's a nice car that's only a couple years old, and it was in perfect shape when we got it. i hate the anxiety of having something that is so expensive and so easy to damage. i've been trying not to worry whenever either of us takes the car somewhere and it's not easy to do when stuff like this happens

i don't much like the line about him being "neurodivergent and doing naughty things sometimes" when he raped two women -that's not naughty, that's reprehensible. the overwhelming majority of mentally ill people are not rapists. i get the gonzo journalist impulse to write in this goofy way, but i don't like it here.

Why would you want to learn a language

joie de vivre. you play for the love of the game and not to win.

the only two things that can get you to learn a language as an adult is sheer necessity and love, and necessity only takes you as far as the grocery store and someday your kids might speak it. you need to love it because the more you learn, the more you discover you don't know. it's like the riddle of the hole: the more you dig, the deeper it gets. the stakes economically need to keep getting proportionally higher to justify the investment, but if it's not an investment to you, it doesn't matter

taking notes for legal hearings -not as a real court monitor, but verbatim notes. I've been doing it for a couple months but I'm finally getting more shifts and making good money

yes, of course - why else would I be here? he cites the same statistics (hosted on a different website) that i used.

to put it another way, when i hear people like mr. berliner talk about media trust and activism ruling over facts, the dogwhistles are too shrill to hear the surface message of "npr isn't very good", which i think we can all agree with. i view it as one of the best options available, but honestly that puts it at "fine" for me because most are just dreck

i am too used to this kind of thing being used as a shuttle for bigotry and polemics about people like me, and the response to the article has cemented that perception for me

well, looking at the statistics, there has been a dip in NPR's radio figures at least based on this back down to pre-trump levels -I've seen other stats on total platforms combined, so including podcasts, online video, etc, that pushes it up to 50 to 60 million weekly consumers. if you cut it to donating members ,i don't know how the statistics have changed because i can't find that data, but you could make an argument either way on whether subscribers would be more or less likely to abandon the station

anecdotally, I'm not sure how to respond other than that my experience has not been the same as yours. i think given our past conversations on the subject that you probably have some insight as to why that is.

i will say that my mother used to be an NPR donator but stopped because she felt they weren't left wing enough. i think the political and cultural war in america demands more partisanship than NPR can provide.

the meds are working and the job is going great

there's a quote i like from a ceo i read: "all the GenZ employees at my company are bisexual and they all have long covid. I'll believe long covid is real when somebody who isn't bisexual has it." in the same vein, i will believe that woke media has gone too far when somebody that doesn't post on bari weiss's website says it

there is no such thing as a news outlet without bias. there are no objective perspectives - even down to the AP newsline stories that are just "a train crashed in india today". you have to choose what to report on even before you worry about how to present it. there is no way to avoid it.

so how do you appear unbiased? you bias yourself to the status quo and the opinions of powerful people. you appear rational by appealing to whatever is common sense - which is the same thing as whatever is the status quo.

there's this weird self-flagellating antiliberalism going around that sees reluctant liberals disavowing their own political positions over and over. some people have internalized the idea that rightwingedness is of the people and leftwingedness is of the elite. it gives the senior financial editors and the oped columnists etc of the world so much airtime beyond their natural habitats.

people aren't turning off NPR, they were never turned on to it. there are better echo chambers out there for people whose common sense, idols, and overton windows are different.

I'm not a doctor, I'm not embassy staff, and I'm not a Russian agent, so my opinion doesn't matter, but this one has smelled to me like "Chronic Lyme Disease but for spooks" since it came out. the combination of symptoms that doctors can't figure out, the belief in a coverup, pinning it on secret russian weaponry - the whole thing is a tall claim with short proof.

the simpler answer is that like chronic lyme, it's a collection of psychosomatic symptoms and random other ailments that get unified and blamed with this label. that doesn't make the symptoms not real, and it's got no more weight behind it than the spy weapon theory, but you can't prove a negative except by showing what isn't true. none of the studies so far have found anything.

my views on this are colored by my biases, but without getting into any of the political side of it, i think that looking at the medical evidence and the announcements made by the US govt etc on this is enough to warrant caution at a minimum when things like this come out