This past week was my first genuinely quiet, normal week since the beginning of January. I rolled off both of my work projects at the end of September and as of yet have not been assigned anything new. A week on the bench is not unusual in my profession or with my employer, but I have not had more than a couple of weeks without billable work since before the COVID era.
So I spent some time reviewing documents and running numbers and seeing what the future might look like if I am not given any new work and the company decides to relieve itself of my presence. Depending on the specifics of my exit I would be okay for between three and six months, and unemployment insurance could float me for maybe a few more months besides. I would rather stay employed where I am until I retire (assuming there is still a world into which to retire in five years) than be forced to search for either a new employer or a freelance gig.
Reading
In the past week I finished reading both Diane Seuss’s frank: sonnets and Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny. Two books which on the surface are worlds apart, yet there was no real dissonance when reading them one right after another. Seuss writes close to the bone and her poems tore my brain down to the bare wood and wires in the best way possible. I regret not having read any of her work years ago.
Damnation Alley is far from Zelazny’s best work, but the quality of the writing is good, and occasionally outstanding. Given its post-apocalyptic setting and Zelazny’s poetic prose, Damnation Alley could be read as a distant descendant of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Of course Zelazny wrote Damnation Alley almost two decades before McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian, but the prose in each is both beautiful and grotesque.
Writing
I have a total of ten drafts for the poem I want to submit to the “Hello, Future” time capsule project. Somewhere in the middle of all those drafts is the final version which will be read in 2076. Maybe. Hopefully.
Weekly Writing Prompt
Subject: Art, Apocalypse
Setting: Urban
Genre: Mystery
Listening
Del tha Funky Homosapien, “Mistadobalina,” from his 1991 album I Wish My Brother George Was Here. I heard this while Z and I enjoyed coffee and breakfast at Kaffeine Place, our neighborhood (and most excellent!) Korean restaurant.
Interesting Links
- “BRICS and the Chronicle of a Multipolarity Foretold: On sovereignty in the age of hybrid warfare” (Nel Bonilla, Worldlines)
- “Pentagon says the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamed” – Fascists always love performative cruelty.
- “The Eight Stages of Civilizational Collapse” (John Walter) – an appropriate follow-up for the return of public executions.
- “Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature.” (Emily Temple, LitHub)
- “South African human rights lawyer Navi Pillay wins the Nobel Peace Prize“