W E The People entered the home of the Crisis Actor illegally. This is true. Why deny it? We certainly weren’t going to be invited in. There was the matter of him knowing  our faces, from those days when we picketed on the gum-spotted sidewalk or  confronted him at his car in a parking garage downtown, our accusations drowned out  by the scrape of skater boys. And, of course, there was the restraining order. Legal lines had been drawn and, yes, we decided to cross those lines, which resisted no more ably than strands of cobwebs stretched across a basement doorway.

9/23

Therapist (Dr Keithe) says to keep running journal of treatments, reactions, flare-ups, etc., note as happen and/or at end of each day (and take care not to let documentation of obsessive thoughts become obsessive itself (I told her saying this improved probability that it would, she said this reaction was her intention, to provoke me)), this will help with analysis, seeing progress, where to go next, etc.

The Terribles include 3 novels published since 1982, and gumbos two genres: The Christmas novel and The Washington novel. In The Terrible Twos, Dean Clift, a former model, ascends to the presidency after the death of his predecessor. Manipulated by the rich, he starts on the right but changes his politics after the First Lady's death and a visit from Saint Nicholas during “a dark night of the soul.” His enemies invoke the 25th amendment, which removes Clift from office after he makes a bizarre television appearance where he describes the visit and recites the Bill of Rights, which for his enemies is a communist doctrine. After his ouster, Jesse Hatch ascends to the presidency, but the power behind the throne is Rev. Clement-Jones, the most powerful man in the government because he knows Jesse Hatch’s secret and is blackmailing Hatch. Clement’s only threat is the head of the Sons of Odin, a white nationalist group that worships Norse Gods. Their candidate is Termite Control, a necrophiliac, who has suffered from Cotard’s syndrome since childhood. The Sons of Odin’s only reason for running for political office is to raise money for the group by selling Termite Control spray cans signed by Termite, his nickname taken from General Westmoreland’s description of the Vietnamese as “termites,” for $1000 each, but a scandal hits the Hatch administration and Termite’s numbers rise in the polls. He becomes a serious candidate, which requires a change in his image.

The desert was decreed to the men. That is why, in my eleventh and final term at Deep Springs, I was called a dairy boy when it was my job to wake up at four to milk the cows at four thirty and do the same thing in the afternoon. The cart we (Trey and I, another member of my class) pushed down to the barn in the dark early morning was the longest-lasting vehicle on campus—constructed some time in the forties, with two mismatched tires and an old DC license plate hanging on with the help of rusted baling wire. The dairy barn is the oldest structure on campus built, yes, by the men and for the men, but really for the persistently female cows, who lumbered in to meet us and eat the grain that we’d put out for them as we prepped their teats for milking. After, as we pushed the cart with a shotgun full of milk back towards the main campus, made, again, by the men and for the men, it was easy to forget what others call me, what I call myself, in the early dawn and majesty of the lighted desert. But that truth lingered in the morning air: it was for the men, this education in that rock over there, this project of reverence.

Editor’s Note: The following article is by a team of physicians at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School with a strong commitment to global health equity, reflecting on their working experiences. The case studies they share involve sexual assault and trauma, which may be distressing for some readers.

What if the brain’s pink impulses can only disappoint us, what if why, wearing that black,
backless address, is not a who?
We are the ones who do the crimes: and yet you are the wanted one.
The episodic soul is, like a sitcom, filmed in unreal time.
To care about this sort of thing is as wise as a digital clock.
But if the sky weren’t trapped in days’ and nights’ revolving door, the undomesticable
zodiac would use our every coffined litter as a tray.
And arguably London is more spit than shine, for days;
but does it not shine somewhere: somewhere so clean we can see ourselves in everything?
If you can, give voice to the throaty red anthurium, to the window, to the wall
that makes these rooms’ matter, and these stanzas, matter.
Through change, a whipping post becomes postmodern art.
Through change, a Second Advent turns to venture capital.
The episodic soul is moving at a quickening remove
from this unchecked, unbalanced world of checks and balances . . .
Dances a totentanz and sings otototoi
at billions of creatures clocking off into the void.
Then comes to us our luck, like a black cat
in a dark room, purring ergonomically.
Then sends it us, price-guns like tasers at our hips,
to value all the world – its messianic shabbiness.
Both pearls and vinegars have mothers, it now seems,
and the mother of invention is necessity;
and boy do we need you.

The same thing that makes a rat a rat and not a knotweed,
scampering across the third rail at Downtown Crossing.
He is after a half-eaten BLT that somebody has flung
between the tracks. And one of his front teeth is chipped
and he is winning. The thing that makes a knotweed
spread its thighs out west until its veins can supply a body,
then another. What makes a horse a horse if not
the gleeful declaration of such from the seventh train window
that day? There can only be so many poems about
staring Barrels down. A country only being a country at gunpoint
or between the coal-laden tracks of work boots. Instead:
a country is a country because I say so. Because I hold your hand
while waiting for the train and when you reach for my waist
I can think myself a rat stumbling upon a rare feast.
Because when we leave the station the snow will be gray
and falling in lazy circles from the low-hung clouds
like the ash that follows some great fire—
but still, I know we’ll stick our tongues out to catch the flakes
like the small things we are.

Cars angstrom up Abbeyhill, horserace hats bobbing towards
Holyrood Palace with modular suits and kilts. Today’s event is
royal or political just as grace and water are. A car lets a harried taxi
driver out, bestowing the former, while a shop called ‘Return of the
Mac’ advertises sweatshop tartan. And still the beauty of stones and
sash windows, six panelled like the abs of the actor who has a house
nearby and pays tax in fully legal ways. The sky threatens rain and
weather discourse, and I eschew the pub for America like my Irish
ancestors. My America is plundering the other americas for their
coffee beans but I enjoy the seat, peering at ‘Ye Olde Christmas
Shoppe’ through a July fug broken only by steak-bake fumes from
a Greggs van. We go to the polls in two days and the image of
removing soggy pastry past all use and consumption feels too
benign. If the palace walls should fall, water dry up, stone fissure
and windows fall; if the actor’s smile seems only naked-smug, and
all Americas reach for each other; as Christmas becomes neither
here nor there, then or now; if the secular holds and Greggs
crumbles, may we yet find grace beyond spasm of trafficked
generosity. As someone clears their throat in Holyroodhouse, the
taxi driver escapes Abbeyhill and reminds himself to renew his tax.