I hate opening a newsletter that's mostly just for fun with an ask for help, and yet: this year has been, and probably will continue to be, a unique financial low. I get paid this Friday, but am starting the week with a negative bank balance and would really prefer to be back at zero just to avoid more overdraft fees and also there's a medium-high possibility that I'm going to have to take my dog to the emergency room this week (we're waiting on some test results but it's either early stage renal failure or some other unspecified gastrointestinal crisis). Short-term help, medium-term help (freelance assignments, maybe you would like to buy some art, angry phone calls to the Fordham HR office which for bureaucratic error reasons has kept me locked out of the timesheet submission system for three months which means a part-time supplemental hustle has been effectively in limbo), long-term help (I don't know, advice? Talk me through this??) are all deeply appreciated but absolutely not required. God, this is embarrassing. Let's move on.

They are not commonly seen, but leave ample evidence of their passage, treating fences as minor inconveniences to be gone through or under.

The Wikipedia entry for wombat

Submitted by Wesley.

Dickson, described by Texas Monthly as a “bearded East Texas pastor who favors a backward baseball cap and carries around a plastic toy fetus,” calls himself a “virgin” who attended the January 6 riot at the Capitol—though he claims he did not enter—in support of President Trump.

"The 113-Year-Old Law Behind Anti-Abortion Activists' Latest Scheme", Melissa Gira Grant for The New Republic

Just a hilarious portrait of the absolute Worst Guy. The suburban punk teenage boy part of me snickered at the notion of a self-proclaimed virgin who swears he did not "enter" the Capitol. You...you didn't come inside the building, guy? Heh heh heh.

A number of people have died this way, and it is to my mind the ideal way of dying.

J.B.S. Haldane, I think as quoted in Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine, Lawrence K. Altman

Part of the epigraph of Naomi Oreskes' journal article "Objectivity or Heroism? On the Invisibility of Women in Science", which is a low-key hilarious read. The "ideal way of dying" here is self-experimentation in the name of sciences—infecting oneself with a disease to study it, for instance—and Oreskes does a great job of skewering the valorizing of this deeply unscientific act. (A lot of the historiography of science seems to be people realizing that science is, like law, mostly vibes.)

I've been thinking a lot about what constitutes "the ideal way of dying" because I've been listening to the audiobook of Clancy Martin's How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind. There are some great sentences in it but I tend to listen while cleaning or doing chores, which makes capturing sentences harder. The valorized auto-experiment and suicidal ideation share an illusion of control over something that people have very little control over; both trade in a kind of self-obsession pretending to be self-effacement. But one is narrativized as heroic and the other is prefaced with hotline numbers and treated as a deadly irrational contagion. Even as a trope of horror literature (Dr. Jekyll, the Invisible Man, The Fly) the auto-experimenter is sort of tragic rather than a classic tale of fucking around and finding out.

I have a lot more to say about the suicide book but unfortunately most people who have experienced suicidal ideation learn very quickly that society would prefer they keep it to themselves and the consequences of speaking frankly about it (even speaking frankly about overcoming it) are generally bad, so I also kind of don't want to risk it. But I hope that Martin's book helps address that shame and silence on the topic—in an interview, he said it's important to him to convey that "this is no more a taboo subject than sex is a taboo subject or death is a taboo subject or grief is a taboo subject."

President Biden has been briefed on the situation at the Burning Man festival.

A tweet by Josh Billinson, riffing on a Jim Acosta tweet

I'm not sure it's perfect honestly, but it's definitely evocative.

the future is stupid, yes, but mostly the future is lonely

maeve on Bluesky (don't really see the point of linking to Bluesky posts when it is still nominally a closed beta)

Time passed hard, and the task was the hardest thing she'd ever do.

"Time, as a Sypmptom", Joanna Newsom

I'm not even sure this is how it's lyrically broken up sentence-wise, but just wanted to remind you about Divers.

(Adjacent childish thought: was Andy Samberg marrying Joanna Newsom the millennial version of Pete Davidson getting engaged to Ariana Grande? Fuck.)