neurologist Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow died from an injury sustained during surgery his colleague had been ‘treating’ with narcotics; ON COCA, a reference to cocaine, was sigmund’s first publication —

it was after Matthew Weiner’s press junket that I witnessed MaryAnn Snyder-Körber’s reiterating my primary education in modernism as an entanglement with consciousness through a lecture on the game Sophie Freud’s son, who eventually borrowed his grandfather’s occupation for his own, misrepresented as a client by Beyond the Pleasure Principle in prose: Ern[e]st had been born six years earlier, March the year of Freud’s November publication about ‘repetition compulsion’ or ‘repeat-to-master’ (which is how I remembered Weiner’s gloss on Austrian, though was Blakey Vermeule following?)

Fall 2024, a eukaryotic infection bloomed under my right eye like the nastiest pimple ever containing hazardous pus. The first time I was forced to report conditions medically the physician misdiagnosed anxiety as asthma; this winter I snapped when an Austrian family friend urged me at the dinner table to appeal about this to a doctor. Have you seen the accuracy my father’s artist hands achieve with pencil, paint, and pixels? When surgeons master their scalpels on par with Michelangelo, I’ll believe the trauma sold by hospitals to insurance companies is nought for an experience worth repeating.

BTW a quick soundbite from the Secretary of State of Illinois about REAL IDs, minus a discussion of id (hello!), is on my new Bandcamp for free if you’re streaming or $5 to buy.