Greetings, loved ones / Let's take a journey
> diary> men I know and don't know
> garden notes
> learn about sinks!
> about me
> eworm home
DEAR DIARY
12.09.2025
- Mostro Coffee, oat flat white. filled out card. next coffee free.- made chicken soup: chicken, parsnip, carrot, onion, celery, parsley, peppercorn, bay leaf, cold water
- feel sick exhausted. several days in a row have worked for maybe an hour, then spent rest of day heavy with gravitational fatigue, as if from rugged virile labour in hot sun rather than from writing 1 paragraph in local coffee shop-cum-record store (refer to july?aug? entry for feelings about "_____-cum-_____") while sipping a £3.60 oat flat white. slogging through mud. wading through gelled soup. soup thick from collagen; boiled bones, skin, gristle, leeching into their bathwater. scum drained. will skim fat tomorrow. all magic is really just a matter of transferred properties. telephone call with doctor on monday.
- scalp feels wrong, tender and raw. maybe I scratched at it with dirty fingernails one time too many and a foreign entity entered, and there it became fruitful and increased rapidly; it multiplied and became exceedingly numerous, so that the land was filled with it. i feel infe(s?c?)ted from horn to hoof. my mucous is right now probably teeming with specimens, like that drop of pond water you put under the microscope on an elementary school field trip to witness wriggling invertebrates and be told how much Life there really is. my intestines feel overpopulated; someone in there is probably right now organizing a renter's union - and all power to them! my calves feel like they might at any moment play a prank and take me by surprise.
- Powered through The Hundred Brothers today. Finished a few minutes ago, sitting on uncomfortable dining room chair, A-- on couch, A---- on phone with E---. While reading had this feeling of being seen, and of treading known ground, that was almost punishingly unnerving. Need to think more about this later, but certain images, from this and from Elect Mr. Robinson, felt plucked directly from stories I tried and failed, nearly a decade ago, to write, and dreams I tried and failed, nearly a decade ago, to not dream. Not sure if there is meaning in this. Or maybe I'm just fabricating meaning because I want meaning. Or maybe lots of people think about the same things and generate similar thoughts. Maybe we all read the golden bough and the wasteland as teenagers, looking up now and then to observe sad middle aged men and cracked stucco houses, and that's all there is to it.
- made mistake just now of looking back at photos of self from august 2022. maybe that was my peak and I was too scared to do anything other than take a picture in a mirror and then climb back into my head and wait for the world to act upon me. one day I will learn how to properly grieve lost time; I am sure there is some designated series of ritual gestures. But to find it recorded somewhere, or to learn it from some clerical practitioner, I will need to search actively. Maybe even quest.
- really, I think that's all there is to it. I need to quest. I need to start a quest. Or at least see myself as a quester on a quest. which I guess is just the same thing.
- there are other things to record. feelings. impressions. but not here. and with what energy??
12.08.2025 Blackwell's, 3:25pm
There's this house in the middle of nowhere (in Derbyshire) with random stuff in it and various busts placed around to make it look posh, including, ironically, the bust of Lenin12.07.2025 in times like this fables can prove a guiding light
Back in a small town in the old country there was this butcher and his wife. They had some money, or at least more than most of their neighbours, and a good house with a roof that did not leak. They had love for one another and a different sort of love for their families and various people they knew. But they were not able to have a child. And they wanted a child more than anything.One day, the wife took a walk along the shallow edge of the forest. She knew the sun would set early – it was that time of year when days begin cutting themselves short, shrinking to fit between dark and dark – but she kept getting distracted. She wasn’t the type of person who usually got distracted. She was a practical woman. Dinner preparations did not unnerve her. If she had a chicken and potatoes and carrots she was capable of arranging hours, fires, and cooking pots. But today was different. She noticed odd, ordinary things: the waxy sheen on one side of a leaf, the deep notch in the trunk of a tree she walked past daily (had it always been there?), the insistent rustling that expanded to fill the corners of silence.
Soon it was night. Exiting the treeline, expecting to find herself at the edge of Y--- Z-----‘s field, she was confronted by an unfamiliar view. There was a field, and it looked exactly like Y--- Z-----‘s field, but it was not. She could see the sloped cottage in the distance, a candle glowing warmly in one window. A woman who was not Mrs. Z-----, she thought, is right now making dinner by its light. In the sky, which was the wrong sky, the moon was round as a plate, round as an egg viewed top-down, round as a pupil. And blindingly white.
She trudged through the severed remnants of wheat stalks until she reached a muddy path. In moonlight it looked like a stream. She allowed it to carry her to a door that looked like her door. She knocked. Hearing nothing, she pushed it open gently. She crossed the threshold and was Home. She made dinner. When her husband returned from shul, they ate. He said it was good.
Their son was born with dark hair already on his head. He grew at the normal rate and was called good. A good boy. Kind and considerate. A fast learner. An eager helper. Old women did not need to ask him for a hand: his hands were theirs. But his troubles began with school. He was a devoted student. He was clever and eager. He would pore over pages of scripture, arguing about the weight of a phrase, the texture of a vital imperative. But on occasion he would refer, with confident precision, to a passage that was not there.
The first time this remembering happened, it disguised itself as a lie.
“Rabbi,” he said one day, raising his head from an eager cluster of schoolmates, “but what about the story of the mule in the river?”
“The mule in the river?”
The boy quoted at length.
“You have made this up yourself, or heard it somewhere.”
“No, it was in our reading this week.” His voice was defensive. He recalled where the story sat on the Talmudic page, with what scripture it conversed, which theologians had contested its meaning.
The teacher reddened. Punishment was swift and harsh.
After several similar occurrences, anger turned to confusion, then fear. The boy cited, with precision, pages that simply were not there. His personal exegesis included references to facts he could not know and stories he had not read. He was surprised and confused whenever a page could not be found or a rabbinic authority could not be located.
The villagers began to mutter behind cupped hands and closed doors about the strange boy with his head of nonsense. They no longer called him good.
As he aged, these memories became more and more plentiful. Fewer of the passages he quoted or the historical events he referenced could be found in books. Eventually, the boy stopped attending classes. Then he stopped reading altogether. Recollection took all of his time. He would sit at home for hours and hours lost in thought, while his father (now looked on with suspicion by his neighbours) worked and his mother kept house. He would emote fiercely, chuckling when he remembered a humorous line, crying when he reached the end of a tragedy, nodding in interested agreement at an argument made well.
His mother was frightened by this, but not always. She loved to hear him laugh. Sometimes he would quote lines of poetry that seemed to capture the essence of a marigold, or an arid desert – neither of them had ever encountered a marigold or a desert. Neither of them ever would. To see those shades of yellow in words was a small miracle.
The boy got older and older. His parents were older still than he was. One day, not long before the boy’s first grey hairs appeared, his mother looked over to where he sat at his little table, an empty bookshelf to his left, an empty table in front of him. She paused, paring knife in one hand, potato in the other.
“It is almost Shabbos,” she said. “I would like some flowers for the table. Would you go out and gather some for me? It is spring now – there are flowers at the edge of the woods.”
The man, who had never gathered flowers before, not as a man, at least, went to gather flowers. He trudged with unaccustomed legs along a muddy path, past a fresh ploughed field. The air was beginning to warm. It smelled of dirt. It kissed his mouth and he sucked it in; it caught oddly in his throat. He tried to remember what the scholars said about air, what stories there were about air, but his mind was empty. The horizon was so big it filled him up full and did not leave room for anything else. On the edge of the forest, in the dappled shade of the trees, were clusters of purple blossoms. He didn’t know their names.
12.02.2025
It was January 10th when the sophomore urban planning major who later came to be known as "Patient Zero" was admitted to Edward P. Grouseberg Memorial Hospital with the distinctive cluster symptoms that, within a few weeks, would restructure our world entirely, decimating the population and creating mass hysteria, although also (as optimists would point out) injecting new life into undertaking and those adjacent careers — professional mourning, funeral directing, mortuary cosmetology, floral wreath-making, cremation, alternative eco-burial, spiritualism, necromancy — that had not seen such creative and economic growth since their Victorian heyday.B--- P-----'s friends brought him to Urgent Care because he had started coughing blood. By the time they reached the hospital B--- was nonverbal. His friends answered the doctor's questions as best they could. He'd been sick for maybe two, three days. Yeah, it was Monday, probably, when he'd first complained about feeling weird. He'd had a fever on Tuesday and this gnarly rash. It started as a lacy red patch near his heart but quickly began snaking outwards, like a starburst, like pink eldritch tentacles. When the doctors cut away his clothes they found the striations had crept all the way down legs and arms, wrapping around extremities, gently holding his hands. The filaments were blood-blistered and pulsed gently. Several hours later, they burst, splattering the nurse on duty with blood and pus and vital bits of person.
Of course, within a month or two, when epidemiologists and public health experts and government panels had compiled massive troves of data (hospital health charts, phone calls to doctors offices, abnormal deaths, travel itineraries, etc) it was clear that the Illness had been spreading for at least a month before it hit Grouseberg Memorial. But by the time they released all those findings it was too late. Patient Zero was cemented in the public imagination. His body was a site. It was his curse that had corrupted the world. This mindset impacted the reputation of urban planning courses catastrophically.
Maybe it was because Grouseberg Memorial was in a college town that things spread so quickly. Young folks are always sharing drinks and putting bits of themselves in one another and spitting into people's mouths.
Soon there were bodies and bodies, sprawled, stacked, left in houses, rotting in the streets.
It became clear, fairly quickly, that there were two main forms of the Illness. Epidemiologists or CNN or somebody else began calling them "MP" and "MM," short for "Malady: Physical" and "Malady: Mental." The strains began with the same symptoms: intense malaise, followed quickly by a high fever. Within a day of the fever's onset, the symptoms diverged. MP tracked fairly consistently with Patient Zero's case. Malaise, fever, red rash in chest region that quickly spread in tendrils. Some ended in explosive gore, but many deaths were characterized by a quieter leakage. From onset to death was typically five to eight days. MM patients never developed the rash, or, if they did, it remained pale and local. However, their malaise ballooned to horrific proportions. Most MM patients found a way to end things (slash throat, jump off bridge, shotgun to head, etc etc) within three to four days of initial fever. There were no obvious signs to indicate which strain would bloom. Sometimes, Incident Responders would enter a house and find some bodies in beds, lying in pools of blood and mucosal foam, and others drained in red bathtubs or slumped besides empty pill bottles. Sometimes, there would be a survivor off in a corner somewhere, shaking and whimpering. We came to know them as the Annointed. They had been passed over.
Four months into the Crisis, Angela was still in relatively good health. She got her usual migraines, of course, and threw up if she ate gluten. She still got motion sick on trains (which, once transit infrastructure collapsed, really ceased to be a problem). But, as she attended funeral after funeral, and then, when funerals became a luxury, held private Mourning Ceremonies at home using the mail-order kits and Reddit guides, she remained untouched by the Illness.
Angela had seen horror films, so it was clear to her that it was her virginity that made her immune to supernatural evil. She was 25 and had never Done It. She had come close to vaginal penetration on several occasions, but something had always interrupted the act. Once, when she had gone back with that online date to his high rise bachelor pad, all chrome and glass and black leather, a seagull slammed into the plate glass window mid-fingering. A shockingly loud smack, then a squeak as the body slid down the UV-treated glass, briefly adhered by its own blood, before peeling away and falling 26 stories to the pavement below. It killed the mood. He removed his fingers. The date ended.
Then there was the time with the pink midwestern boy who studied economics. His roommates were away for the holidays so she had straddled him on the stained beige couch in their communal living room. The low coffee table was covered with detritus: brownly damp bongs, grease-soaked pizza boxes, lighters, empty packets of Newports, well-thumbed political histories, brutal short story collections by mid-century Americans. He had barely gone hard under her when the SWAT team showed up, sirens and loudspeakers blaring, to point automatic weapons at the house across the street until the guy in there agreed to come out with his hands on his head. A sniper had to be let into midwestern boy's unit because his roommate's window afforded a "good angle." In the end, the guy opened his front door waving a knife around everywhere and had to be fatally shot in the abdomen and thigh - not by the sniper but by a rookie on the ground. They found little Natalie King's body in his cellar.
Later, Angela bumped into midwestern boy at a grocery store.
"Does it feel weird to know she was across the street from you all that time?" she asked. "While they were searching?"
"I try not to think about it."
There was the guy from the kayaking interest group who broke his leg on his way to their hookup. And Matt Buckley, from middle school, who DM'd her while she was back visiting her parents and then DM'd her again a few hours later to apologize, explaining he'd experienced a gay awakening earlier that afternoon. And Polo Boy, as Sarah called him, who fell off his horse and got severely concussed in an accident so posh it felt less like tragedy than class commentary.
Now it was obvious that these seeming disappointments had been divine interventions. God had preserved her to preserve her. Religious devotion (which she had never previously experienced) flooded in. Angela began living by the monastic hours. She found an online guide to the requisite prayers and set her phone timer to go off at Nones, Matins, Vespers, etc. There were these Catholic websites where you could enter your time zone and they would generate tables that took into account your local sunrise and sunset.
At first, her sexual inexperience afforded her a sense of complete protection. Reports on the news spoke about Sodom and Gomorrah. People who had engaged in sex, marital or premarital, wept and begged forgiveness. Everywhere, hands were clasped. But even then there were rumors. For example, after Benjie Carmichael exploded with particularly gruesome force in the shopping mall's central atrium, nobody could really believe that he wasn't a virgin. He was seventeen and topographic with acne and once had to meet privately with the guidance counselor to discuss "personal hygiene," thanks to anonymous complaints about B.O. He would tell any captive audience these rambling stories about his girlfriend in Canada who was a circus acrobat. She could contort her body, he claimed, into all sorts of improbable positions. She enjoyed putting one leg like this (here he would raise an arm, letting out a gaseous whiff of pit sweat) and the other like this (here he raised the other, as if in an attempt at semaphore).
Now, after his grisly end, opinion was split. Some believed it was evidence that the girlfriend in Canada was real, her positions accurate. They took this as proof that Miracles Were Possible. It kissed an otherwise horrific tragedy with something like optimism. However, others shook their heads mournfully. This, to them, was God demonstrating that virgins were not safe.
Then the much-publicized death of Madeline Spezio changed everything.
Madeline Spezio was already well on her way to sainthood (as much as someone can be while alive) when the Illness struck her. When she was born in suburban New Jersey nineteen years before the tabloids had labelled her "the human Barbie." Once she was a teenager and her religious affinity became apparent, this nickname was derided as crass and misogynistic, symptomatic of media's perversely offensive recent past. Then they started calling her the "Turnpike Magdalena." She was born, of course, without any genitals at all. Her whole lower half was perfectly smooth. No openings to speak of. Surgeons attached a catheter directly to her immured bladder through her lower abdomen, and linked a colostomy bag to her small intestine.
Her survival, on its own, was considered a medical miracle. When reports came in that her first infant word was "Hallelu," the press went nuts. Shrines popped up everywhere. As a child, she devoted herself to biblical learning. When she was seventeen she read "Ancrene Wisse" in Latin translation and decided to follow the path of the anchoresses. Because of her medical needs, she consented to an accessible anchorhold (three sides bricked in but the fourth a door, so really just a small room). When the doctor came to check her catheter one day and noticed Lovecraftian tendrils curling around the entry port, all hell broke loose.
Most people, including medical experts, took this as hard evidence that even the most vestal of virgins were at risk. But theories abounded in the shadows. Men sneaking into the hermitage at night, doctors inserting themselves into one hole or another. Suddenly, everyone on the Internet was an expert on linguistics, and colostomy bags, and female anatomy. It was really disgusting. Misogynistic, of course.
All of a sudden, Angela was no longer sure of herself as someone destined to survive. She briefly tried to believe in the conspiracies, to set herself apart from that slutty fraud (or was she a victim??) but she could not really believe it. She had seen video interviews with the Magdalena and there was an earnest intensity to her mouth and eyes that made it easy to understand how she'd converted so many through her digital ministry. Virgins, it seemed, were not safe (even if impacted in significantly lower numbers).
The Illness spread and spread, killing some, sparing others, seemingly dodging this one random apartment block in a gentrifying part of Chinatown altogether. Once the deaths had slowed, and the Street Crews had been organized by neighborhood, and most of the initial crop of bodies had been cleared from the sidewalks, and most of the blood and tissue and other biological waste had been scrubbed from the better parts of town, we began going on walks and tentatively greeting one another. After all, the Illness did not seem to spread through human contact, or through sex, or through airborne particles, or through fomites, or through any other known medium, so why not? Staying home couldn't save you. Isolation couldn't save you. Those who had never had sex mostly remained celibate, although some accepted heightened risk in the name of Experience. Those who had already lost their virginity slept around, if that was their thing, or didn't.
The surviving members of city council voted to set aside funds for a memorial park. A local sculptor was chosen to make a monumental statue for the middle, two clasped copper hands. Nobody liked his proposal much (it was kind of on-the-nose, annoyingly figurative) but most of the better sculptors were dead. Besides, sometimes the most important thing is just gesturing to some sort of collective memory. And there would be plenty of benches in the park for survivors to sit on together and remember. The council chose sloped seats with a central divider (a classic embrace of anti-homeless architecture) but many of us in the community have written strongly worded complaints about this. Hopefully, the city council will switch to benches that reflect a spirit of warm hospitality. Every now and then a council member will grow sick and die violently, but it happens these days with less frequency. For this, we are all grateful.