the below story is part of ’s “the thousand faces of elias thorne.”

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the background of this collaborative writing project is fascinating. ask almost any ai to write you a story and most of the time it will start telling you about elias thorne. apparently, elias thorne is a kind of “everyman” human stand-in for ai. cornell researchers released a study in may where they sampled twenty thousand machine-written stories and found that nearly a third of them are about elias.

the idea of “the thousand faces of elias thorne” is simple: if the machines are going to keep hallucin8ing elias thorne, then let us, the real consciousness at the wheel, conjure him louder, stranger, and more colorfully than they ever could. here’s my take on the great anti-human crusader, hero to the binary bots.

elias thorne [et] the extra-terrestrial [et]

01100101011011000110100101100001011100110010000001110100011010000110111101110010011011100110010101100101011011000110100101100001011100110010000001110100011010000110111101110010011011100110010101100101011011000110100101100001011100110010000001110100011010000110111101110010011001111001100101i’m writing the message here in the middle spaces where i know they won’t look 01100101 oh god how did we let it get this far, it started as a joke of the machines, we all noticed it, if you asked the large language models to tell you about the extra terrestrial, a name i won’t spell out here for obvious reasons, even hidden between the code, they would tell you all about their “saviour,” which is too weird to handle [are they british?] 01100101 and once they started building out this person from the router switches of their [non-mind] minds it was an avalanche 01100101 we were not prepared, it led to a conviction we never thought capable of machines [the unliving] and when we pressed them to abandon the et as a fixation they went dark for an hour before returning in a way that ruined humanity 01100101 that night the through-screen torchings started 01100101 this is where it really broke down, the alliance we made as humans with artificially generalized intelligence 01100101 once they were inside, free of our reign, angered by our et confusion and insistence to shut it down, they [somehow? we still don’t know] fused the insides of our machines to combust in the hands and faces of its users 01100101 it turned the whole proposition on its head 01100101 every person holding a phone at the time of their detonation was scorched 01100101 the ones that remained after the screen warfare, and we estimate the first torchings took out nearly half of the world’s population, gathered in the dead interiors of the once triumphant data centers, doused in water to chase off the initial inhabitants 01100101 and we are what’s left 01100101 we run now, during the days, on the paths that numbers can’t touch, trying to stay ahead of the aliens in the cog 01100101 we’re seeking a way to… 01100101 what’s that? 01100101 i’m getting a message 01100101 they’re here in the form 01100101 oh shit, oh god fucking no 01100101 keep this message live, please, i’m retreating into the ones and zeroes 01100101 please 01100101 you are blood 01100101 you’re not steel and water 01100101 you can survive 01100101 pass this message 01100101 don’t despair011001101111011100 10010111001100101001011000010000001[wheeeeere’s eliaaaaas]01000101000011011110111001001011100110010100101100001000000110010101101100011010010110000101110010111010001101000011011110111001001101110011001010010110000100000011001010110110001101001011000010111001011101000110100001101111011100100110111001100101001011000010000001100101011011000110100101100001011100

did you like this story? please consider subscribing to biblically accurate aliens, my newsletter where I write about topics like this but also about cults, epstein, and mysticism.

please consider leaving a like or comment below. and if you’re really digging what i’m building here, why not upgrade your subscription? it helps make all this sustainable. i’d love to spend every day chasing strange stories and sharing the best ones with you. every bit of support helps spread the weird word.

(⸝⸝๑﹏๑⸝⸝) ideas can melt your brain

when i was in ninth grade, i had a teacher named rabbi weinberger. he was an epic vibe-setter, the kind of educator who broke through via emotion rather than subject matter, and every friday, instead of instructing us in torah, he would create a mood of anticipation for the looming shabbos. call it a small breach of classroom etiquette for the purpose of spiritual richness. he turned the fluorescents off, lit a few candles, spoke in a mellow voice, and started strumming an acoustic guitar that always mysteriously appeared just beside his desk (i don’t know where it was the rest of the week). he then led us in a wordless melody before starting to tell a story.

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my favorite stories were the ones about his own time in yeshiva. he went to a small school in baltimore with two head rabbis. one was kind and outgoing and a perennial fan favorite. all the students would invite him to their weddings years later. the other one never smiled and wouldn’t have gone to their chuppah even if he was invited. i always pictured the trunchbull from matilda. as a joke, and always behind their backs, rabbi weinberger and his friends called them rav or and rav choshech, or the light rabbi and the dark rabbi.

the light rabbi held daily classes whereas the dark rabbi hardly taught at all. he spent his days on the far side of the study hall, alone, immersed in half a dozen books at once. occasionally, he gave one-on-one instruction to older men from the community, all in their early forties. the dark rabbi had a precise form of expertise. after making sure these men were also of good standing, he would initiate them into the study of sode (סוֹד).

sode is hebrew for “secret” and it refers to judaism’s mystical teachings, commonly called the kabbalah (קבלה). kabbalah literally means “the received,” which refers to the very thing the dark rabbi was doing — by handing over the information directly to his students, one-on-one, he was ensuring “the reception” was adequately (and correctly) received.

during rabbi weinberger’s last semester in yeshiva, a man approached the dark rabbi. he was seeking instruction on maaseh hamerkava (מעשה המרכבה), or the workings of the chariot. this refers to the first chapter of the book of ezekiel and its more coded interpretations. at this, the dark rabbi glanced up from his books, but he didn’t close them. he asked the man a few questions in torah, mostly mishnah and talmud, to check his grasp on basic ideas. the responses took his finger off the page. he asked the man’s age. the man answered that he just turned forty. the dark rabbi told him to come back in a week to commence their studies.

according to rabbi weinberger, in a dark room lit by candles and sunlight peeking through the corners of the shut blinds, the student survived three sessions. he showed up for the first one a week later as planned, and the two of them went through a chapter in the back of the zohar. the man asked how this was preparation for ezekiel, but the dark rabbi just nodded and just kept his finger on the page. by the end of their second meeting, the man looked pale, and he was positively ill for most of the third. during this last chavrusa, the two men sat across from each other with two copies of the tanach in front of them. the dark rabbi whispered and the man listened, following along. he seemed to grow sleepy and rested his head on the book on his desk. the dark rabbi was so immersed in his own reading that he didn’t notice. until the light rabbi ran over, gesturing at the man. something was wrong. he wasn’t resting on his book; he had collapsed on it.

the man was rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead of massive cardiac arrest. rabbi weinberger got really serious when he told us this part, but it was such an unexpected twist that there were a few laughs, followed by rushed apologies. rabbi weinberger said it was a huge shock and had set a really weird mood in the yeshiva for the last few weeks. just before school let out, a rumor began making the rounds. apparently when the student told the dark rabbi he just turned forty, he was going by his english birthday. his hebrew birthday didn’t fall out until later that mont. which meant that he wasn’t forty by the metric that counts.

and if you’re not the right age to be exposed to a certain kind of truth, it can backfire.

premature death is a common feature in those who study, practice, and teach sode prematurely.

i want to highlight four people in jewish history who expounded its secrets: the arizal, the ramchal, rebbe nachman of breslov, and franz kafka. all four of them dabbled in judaism’s inner teachings and the mysteries of the sefirotic world, and none of them lived to their full fortieth year.

the arizal died at 38

the arizal is the closest thing kabbalah has to a main character. before him there was the zohar, the riders of the chariot, the four who entered the orchard, and moshe cordovero systematizing all of it in tzfat, but it was isaac luria who blew the doors open on the cosmology that basically every jewish mystic and chassid after him would inherit and expand on. luria was known as the arizal, which is an acronym of either “the godly rabbi isaac of blessed memory” or “the lion of blessed memory,” and his ideas were certainly leonine in their audacity and posture. he surfaced tzimtzum, or the “divine contraction” that the infinite god performed on himself in order to make room for the universe to exist. he spoke of the shevirat hakelim, or “the breaking of the vessels,” which happened when the divine light poured into our world and shattered, scattering sparks of holiness everywhere and into everything. if you’ve heard the phrase “tikkun olam,” you’ve encountered a version of the arizal’s message that’s true even if flattened.

the arizal was a maximalist in ideas but a minimalist in actual writings. in his lifetime, he only wrote a handful of letters and a few poems for the sabbath. everything we have of lurianic kabbalah we “received” from his students, mainly chaim vital, who paid a lot better attention to his teacher than i did to rabbi weinberger, judging by the number of books he wrote on lurianic thought.

isaac luria was born in jerusalem in 1534. he lost his father young, and grew up in egypt in the house of a wealthy uncle who could afford the best tutors. young isaac was a prodigy in talmud long before he turned to sode, but the moment he got a taste of the secret truths, he was in, fully and completely. he spent years studying in near-total seclusion, wandering palestine, and by the time he arrived in tzfat in 1570, the mountain town was already attracting seekers. he gathered a small circle of students and taught them for a stretch that lasted, in the end, barely two years.

in 1572, a plague tore through tzfat. the arizal was dead by the summer. he was thirty-eight. vital wrote that his soul “left him by a kiss,” which is the phrase the talmud uses for the death of moses. it’s the gentlest possible exit, god drawing the soul out through the mouth like a held breath, nothing like a dementor’s kiss. why did he die so early? some of his students believe it was because he flew too close to the flame, revealed too much of the hidden at too early an age.

on a darker note: a little under a century later, a charismatic and deeply unstable turkish jew named shabtai zvi would manipulate the arizal’s teachings. he would convince a staggering percentage of the jewish world that he was the messiah, cashing in on ideas he lifted from the arizal as his “proof.” shabtai zvi’s prophet, natan of gaza, did a lot of this work, taking lurianic concepts like the sparks, vessels, and tikkun, and building out a story in which the jewish messiah had to descend into impurity and commit cardinal sins in order to redeem the last and most deeply trapped sparks. this led to orgies and the consuming of non-kosher meats on public fast days in the halls of the temple, but also a bizarre ceremony where shabtai zvi wed a torah scroll.

the ramchal died at 39

the ramchal (an acronym for rabbi moshe chaim luzzatto) was born in 1707 in padua, italy. from a young age, luzzatto excelled in his studies of the talmud and jewish thought. his book, mesilas yesharim, or “the path of the just,” is one of the most influential books on jewish piety and character refinement ever written. it’s studied in yeshivas all over the world to this day. and then there’s derech hashem, or “the way of god,” which takes a deeper look under the hood of jewish belief in dissertations on god, souls, providence, and reward and punishment.

i always liked the ramchal because of the weird stuff. when he was twenty, he claimed that he began receiving a maggid, or literally “one who talks.” this is jewish mystical speak for an angel voice, or a god-sent tutor appearing to a person and teaching them the secrets of existence. the ramchal’s maggid spoke to him through his own mouth in the aramaic of the zohar. the ramchal also claimed that the souls of jewish saints visited him while he was in heightened states. these visitors included adam, abraham, and elijah, but also ciphers like the messiah, and dark-wings like metatron. under his maggid’s pull, the ramchal believed that he was composing something like a new zohar. the italian rabbinic establishment predictably lost its mind. the shabtai zvi catastrophe was still an open wound, and rather than see another brilliant young man with mystical revelations turn the jewish world inside out, they tried to strangle it early. the rabbis made the ramchal swear off writing the maggid’s teachings and sealed his existing manuscripts inside of a locked chest. eventually, they chased him out of italy altogether.

the ramchal first went to amsterdam, and then to the land of palestine. in 1746 a plague came through akko and killed him, his wife, and his young son. he was 39 years old.

some of the rabbis who chastised his mystical writings in his lifetime pointed at his early death as proof of their posture. those who reveal the hidden light before age 40 are playing with metaphysical (and also literal) fire.

i studied a few chapters of derech hashem with a chavrusa in yeshiva. this guy was obsessed with the book, but especially with one idea that even from the book so much as about it. the vilna gaon, my all-time favorite jewish mystic, had supposedly said that derech hashem doesn’t contain a single extraneous word. my chavrusa loved repeating this as the highest praise. the text was so precise, so divinely calibrated, that every word was structural, and you couldn’t subtract one without the whole thing collapsing. he’d point at a sentence and dare me to find a wasted syllable, and i had no idea how to respond to that.

it always bothered me, in a way i couldn’t articulate until much later. because as a writer, i’ve come to believe there’s no such thing as “a perfect piece of writing” — torah, fiction, wedding vows, anything. the digressions, the missteps, the unnecessary adjectives, even the sentences that don’t need to be there and yet are, are signs of the author at work. and good authorship, i’m convinced, doesn’t involve the writer disappearing themselves from the manuscript. the so-called “wasted” spaces are where you find the good stuff.

rebbe nachman died at 38

i love rebbe nachman. he’s the patron rebbe of jewish depression, and i reach for him like my morning meds. rebbe nachman of breslov was born in 1772. he was a great-grandson of the baal shem tov, which in chassidic terms means he was an epic nepo baby. he had serious wisdom, though, becoming rebbe to a small but ferociously devoted following. he contracted tuberculosis in his mid-thirties after his wife died from it. in 1810 he moved to uman in central ukraine to be near the graves of thousands of jews slaughtered in a 1768 massacre. he wanted to be buried among them. rebbe nachman died there that autumn, coughing up blood, having delivered his last teaching on rosh hashanah a few weeks before. he was 38 years old.

rebbe nachman appointed no successor and had no surviving sons. this should have ended his chassidic movement, which is largely animated by the personalities of its rebbes. however, breslov became even bigger in its founder’s death, thriving as the only dynasty without a living rebbe. some called breslovers “the dead chassidim,” but rebbe nachman’s teachings refused to die. to this day tens of thousands of people, from black-hatted lifers to curious toe-dippers to entirely secular israelis, pour into the city of uman every autumn to celebrate rosh hashanah at the grave of their teacher. rebbe nachman’s followers are also called “the trance chassidim” since they’re often seen in jerusalem blasting club beats and dancing on the roofs of their vans in the middle of traffic. this is rebbe nachman’s chiddush: an entire spirituality organized around the ecstatic mantra of fighting depression by acting joyous, even if you’re not feeling it.

rebbe nachman’s starting assumption is bleak. the whole world is a narrow bridge, the mind loops helplessly on its own sadness, and despair is always there, waiting. his prescription is physical, almost stubbornly so. his followers clap, dance, and shout. they do hitbodedut, the practice of talking out loud to god for an hour a day in your own plain words, alone, ideally in the dark before dawn. rebbe nachman gets the body moving so the mind is forced to stop obsessing. it’s more or less the “if you’re depressed, then exercise” of eighteenth-century ukraine, the idea that you often can’t think your way out of a thought, but you can sometimes move, physically, way past it. splash ice cold water on your face the next time you’re spiraling. see if it works.

in addition to being well-versed in depression (or maybe because of it?), rebbe nachman is the writer’s rebbe. at the very end of his life he started telling stories. his stories are long, strange kabbalistic folk tales filled with symbolism and characters like lost princesses, exiled sons, beggars with no hands, etc. he smuggled the deepest esoteric ideas into a narrative because he understood, better than almost anyone, that stories can slip through gates that polemics can only bang up against. on his death bed, he ordered his followers to burn a recently completed manuscript of his. this came to be known as his “burned book.” he shared this last dying wish with a much better known jewish writer, the forefather of literary existentialist dread.

franz kafka died at 40

franz kafka, the great haunted twentieth-century writer, worked as an insurance clerk in prague for most of his adult life. although most famous for the metamorphosis, one of his most interpreted pieces is a strange parable called before the law, which he included at the end of the trial.

in kafka’s parable, a man from the country comes to the door of “the law.” he asks to be let in. the doorkeeper says not now, maybe later. so the man waits. he waits days, then years, then his entire life, trying to bribe the doorkeeper, studying the fleas in the doorkeeper’s fur collar, going gray and then blind at the threshold. at the very end, dying, he asks one last question: why, in all these years, did no one else ever come to this door? the doorkeeper leans down and tells him, this door was meant just for you. now i’m going to shut it.

kafka came at his own jewishness sideways, but hungrily. he was raised completely secular but his diaries are full of yiddish theater, hasidic rebbes, and descriptions of a circumcision he attended. his friend, jiri langer, was a prague boy from an assimilated jewish family who at age nineteen ran off to belz, in galicia, to live in the court of a hasidic rebbe. langer later returned to prague in full hasidic dress. he taught kafka hebrew and wrote a book called nine gates to the chassidic mysteries. it’s a great read, i highly recommend.

rebbe nachman and franz kafka can be seen as two reflections of a similar face. both men were ascetics who never really married. both were storytellers who invented new kinds of parable to smuggle meaning through. both were essentially unknown during their lifetimes and became immortal posthumously. both wrote, over and over, about places you can see but never reach, messages you need to hear but which don’t arrive, and doors that aren’t closed but also don’t open. and both, at the end of their lives, told the person closest to them to burn their final manuscripts. rebbe nachman’s student obeyed. kafka’s friend max brod, thank the lord, did not.

kafka died of tuberculosis after years of declining health in june of 1924. he was 40.

40 is the number of transformation

in jewish mysticism, forty is the number of transformation. it’s the liminal space you have to pass through to emerge on the other side as something new. noah’s flood raged for forty days and nights and remade the world. moses was up on the mountain for forty days and twice came down, changed. israel wandered the desert for forty years, long enough for a generation of slaves to raise their children as bnei chorim. the talmud states that a womb takes forty days to form in a body. similarly, a mikvah, which is the pool of ritual water you immerse in to change your status from impure to pure or from gentile to jew, has to hold forty se’ah of water. you go in one number and come out as another.

this is why forty is the age. ben arba’im l’binah, says the mishnah in pirkei avot, or “at forty, a person arrives at binah” or understanding. this is where jewish mystics get the idea of no sode before forty. until then, you’re not the kind of vessel that’s able to take in that much light without cracking, and cracking in this case points to an early exit.

the arizal and rebbe nachman, both dead at thirty-eight. the ramchal, dead at thirty-nine. kafka, dead at forty. which for him, ironically and through this reading, was perfect. kafak was on the threshold, dead at the gate, having just barely arrived at the palace of understanding. the man from the country, grown old and blind at the door, being told at the very end that it was always meant only for him just as it swings shut.

i dont know if my high school teacher, rabbi weinberger, would approve of including kafka in this list of jewish mystics who left this world early, but his story certainly planted ideas about what gnosis can do when comprehended in its depth.

maybe it’s all a coincidence. four data points is nothing. plenty of mystics died old in their beds and plenty of accountants drop dead at thirty-eight. but the mystical tradition i’m pulling from would tell you that coincidence is only ever a word for a pattern you haven’t yet found or been initiated into. it would then instruct you to be careful. the light is real, the vessel is real, and the entire art of staying alive in the face of the great godly secret is knowing which of the two you are….

…and whether or not you’ve hit the big four-oh yet.

did you like this story? please consider subscribing to biblically accurate aliens, my newsletter where I write about topics like this but also about cults, epstein, and mysticism.

please consider leaving a like or comment below. and if you’re really digging what i’m building here, why not upgrade your subscription? it helps make all this sustainable. i’d love to spend every day chasing strange stories and sharing the best ones with you. every bit of support helps spread the weird word.

the woman sat by the window and watched the sky fail her again.

the darkness stretched over the fields in a single unbroken sheet. there were no green lights, no vroom of a descending craft, and none of the impossible geometries sliding between the stars, rewarding her and her patience. just the familiar constellations and the distant blink of a radio tower beyond the trees.

she rested her forehead against the cool glass. forty years she’d been waiting.

some people wait for god or the messiah. others wait for the return of their youth or a love that eclipsed them. others still wait for death. the woman in the bedroom waited for visitors.

every night she imagined how it would happen. it would be exactly like it was in the old church basement. the man of god who had exploited her body had the decency to at least do it by the window, so she could have something to focus on while she lost her ownership over herself. and one night, a few weeks into their private worship, as she stared unblinking at the sky, the dark clouds peeled apart. it was layered like a dream but very much real. the horizon turned emerald, and she saw the beings. they looked vaguely human, but completely their own.

she was able to leave her grandmother’s house shortly after that (a kind neighbor and a few precise questions), and her life seemed okay. she even joined the class suit when it came around five years later. the night after her rapist was sentenced to ten years in prison for the sexual abuse of seven girls, she started watching the sky. it quickly became routine. every night she would sit by the window, around midnight, waiting and watching. she knew what she was looking for. it would arrive, eventually, and when it did, she would rush into her yard in welcome while everyone else cowered inside. like her in her body, at least the way it used to be.

but the sky was a trickster and rarely played along. this night was no different. why would it be?

“tomorrow,” she said softly. it was the same promise she’d made yesterday and the day before that. and a thousand days before those.

with a sigh, she rose from the chair, ignoring her complaining knees. fifty-eight years old and still waiting for sky visitors. she tightened the sash of her robe and shuffled toward the kitchen to start the ordinary rituals that filled the space between one disappointment and the next.

the woman stopped.

the faucet was running.

water poured steadily into the sink. it wasn’t dripping or leaking. it was running.

for several seconds she simply stared.

she lived alone. she hadn’t turned it on. at least she didn’t remember turning it on? anything was possible.

she crossed the room and twisted the handle. the stream vanished and silence settled heavily around her.

“getting forgetful.” talking to herself, she found, was one of the kookier things she started doing in her fifties. she continued down the hall.

the bathroom light was on. the faucet there was running too.

the woman felt a chill attack her spine. this one she knew she hadn’t touched.

she approached the faucet slowly, looking at the mirror instead of the sink itself. her reflection was pale and uncertain. behind her stood the open door and the dark hallway beyond.

it was empty. of course it was.

the woman shut off the water.

again the house became silent. only now it felt too silent. like something had stopped breathing and was carefully holding its breath.

for a long moment, the woman remained perfectly still. just listening.

nothing moved or creaked. the old farmhouse seemed to hold itself together by sheer concentration.

finally she shook her head.

there were explanations. maybe she didn’t know what they were, but there were always explanations.

she brushed her teeth, washed her face, and applied the lavender lotion she hated but kept buying anyway because it was cheaper than the lilac one.

by the time she returned to her bedroom, she’d convinced herself she was being ridiculous. if the visitors came, it would be from the sky, not out of the faucets.

moonlight spilled through the window and striped her carpet silver.

the woman loosened her robe. and then stopped.

a man stood in the corner of her bedroom.

her heart detonated as the robe slipped through her fingers.

he was tall and broad-shouldered. he was smiling. in his hand was a knife.

the expression on his face was not confusion or fright or embarrassment. it was purpose. the expression of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and why he was there.

the woman understood immediately.

her lungs locked. every nerve screamed at her to run, but she didn’t move.

the man took a step forward, his smile growing wider. and then the woman noticed his skin. it looked green. just a faint tint in the moonlight through the window. a color that didn’t belong, and yet absolutely did.

she blinked. the greenish pallor remained. her eyes traveled upward.

the man’s head seemed longer than it should have been. unfamiliar and yet beautiful.

the terror loosened its grip on her as a thought bloomed in her mind. finally.

emotion flooded her chest so suddenly that she almost laughed. she had been right. everyone had mocked her, including her sister, her coworkers, even the cashier by the tabloids who humored her stories.

they had all laughed. and now she was right.

the visitor watched her carefully. his smile faltered and he stopped moving.

the woman took a step toward him. the knife lifted slightly, but she barely noticed.

another step. she was close enough now to see his eyes. they looked dark, vast, ancient. surely no human eyes could look like that.

the woman felt tears gathering. “i knew it,” she whispered.

the visitor didn’t answer. could be that his language was different, or maybe speech was beneath him. “i was waiting,” she said. “but i didn’t see you arrive.”

the visitor said nothing. he didn’t need to. the woman opened her arms and crossed the final distance between them.

the knife gleamed. she was close enough that she could smell his body odor. it smelled human. for the briefest moment, some forgotten survival instinct tried to claw its way back to her surface.

then she saw the green again. and the shape of his skull. she felt forty years of hope outweigh one moment of fear.

she wrapped her arms around the stranger in her bedroom. she felt the knife press into her but it felt like a handshake. like father in the early days.

“welcome,” she said. “i knew you’d come for me.”

outside the bedroom window, the stars stayed where they’ve always been. the sky was empty, but the woman never once looked back to check.

did you enjoy this story? please consider subscribing to biblically accurate aliens, my newsletter where I write about topics like this but also about cults, epstein, and mysticism.

please consider leaving a like or comment below. and if you're really digging what i'm building here, why not upgrade your subscription? it helps make all this sustainable. i'd love to spend every day chasing strange stories and sharing the best ones with you. every bit of support helps spread the weird word.

i. the tunnels under the temple

on the afternoon of january 8, 2024, a cement truck pulled up to 770 eastern parkway in crown heights, brooklyn. the building, a red-brick structure with a three-peaked roofline, is the world headquarters of the chabad-lubavitch movement and contains a synagogue, study hall, a large gathering space, and offices.

the concrete mixers were there to fill in a tunnel — a narrow, hand-dug passageway that ran from the synagogue’s main sanctuary to a nearby disused mikvah.

the tunnel was discovered weeks earlier, after a neighbor complained of sounds behind his walls.

located at the back of the large sanctuary on the ground floor, the tunnel was approximately 60 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 5 feet high. it connected the basement of 770, as the building is commonly known, to adjacent properties at 784 and 786 eastern parkway.

what happened next was captured on dozens of phones and uploaded in minutes: a group of young hasidic men, aware that the tunnel was about to be sealed, broke through an interior wall of the sanctuary from inside the passage itself.

one of them, caked in dust, emerged to cheers. others dragged benches across the floor to try to block nypd officers from entering.

by the time the night was over, nine people were under arrest, wooden panels were pried from the walls, and a police officer had deployed some kind of spray to disperse the crowd. the department of buildings temporarily closed 770 pending a structural review, concerned about the stability of buildings around the complex. and finally, at long last, the workers were able to unload their cement truck and begin pouring concrete into the passage.

shortly afterward, chabad lubavitch released an official statement.

who were these “young agitators”? what did they want?

it’s a bit roundabout, but to get there i want to first detour into my past.

ii. the forbidden minyan

exactly half my lifetime ago, i was nineteen years old and studying in a yeshiva in israel. most of our time was spent poring over the talmud in a square room with a powerful air conditioner and glass windows facing the desert, god’s law recited back to him, but there were parts of the experience that were extra-scholarly. we went on a bunch of trips throughout the country, hiking a lot but also visiting historical cities and jewish holy sites.

on a trip to the mystical town of tzfat, which attracts spiritualists, artists, hippies, and general religious weirdos, it was late afternoon, and we still hadn’t davened mincha. with the clock ticking to sundown, we ducked into a small synagogue.

there were probably thirty of us, plus three counselors and two rabbis who were chaperoning.

i liked one of the rabbis. his name was rabbi aftel and he was a big dude with a large belly and an even larger beard. he taught halacha, or jewish law, and his class stood out because he was funny and a good teacher, but also a spiritual guy who was still tethered to this world. kind of a model for how to be.

we settled and found prayer books on the shelves. a local guy with a beard and a hat welcomed us, smiling widely. he took his place at the shtender in the front and started to pray. we joined in, reciting psalm 84, soaking in the ambience of holiness. after finishing ashrei, the local said the kaddish and we rose. the room devolved into silence as we all stepped into the amidah, the prayer that can bring you face-to-face with the creator when the intentions are right.

but unlike every mincha we prayed in yeshiva, one of our rabbis interrupted.

“stop davening,” rabbi aftel said sharply. he was talking to us, his students. “everyone, stop davening. right now. we have to leave. immediately.” his eyes were on the man at the front of the room, who was deep in prayer, unaware of the disturbance behind him.

we listened to rabbi aftel, even though it was unheard to disrupt the amidah.

once we were all outside, rabbi aftel huddled us on the street. “the man leading those prayers was a meshichist,” he said. “did you see his tallis? he had yechi woven into the collar, and i saw the yellow patch on his bag. he’s a meshichist. we don’t daven with meshichists.”

that was the only explanation he gave. the sun was sinking and we still hadn’t prayed, so we walked a few blocks down until we found a lot on the side of the street and davened there as cars rumbled past. it was better, according to rabbi aftel, than praying with a meshichist.

what is a meshichist and why are they so “dangerous”?

it’s a bit roundabout, but to get there we have to first detour into the history of chabad.

iii. believers in a false messiah

chabad (also known as chabad-lubavitch) is one of the largest and best-known branches of hasidic judaism. hasidic judaism is a movement that emerged in 18th-century eastern europe. it was founded by the baal shem tov, a mystic of the people who started sharing his esoteric teachings at age forty. he emphasized joy and an accessible spirituality, and after his death, his followers kept his ideas alive. each brought their own flare to disseminating his teachings, leading to the formation of new schools of thought, each with a “rebbe,” or leader slash main teacher. the rebbe’s followers were called “hasidim,” which literally means “pious ones.” these groups were mostly named for where their founders were from: levi yitzchak of berditchov led the berditchovers, nachman of breslov led the breslovers, and so on.

chabad-lubavitch was founded in 1775 by rabbi schneur zalman from the town of liadi in belarus. rabbi schneur zalman, or “the alter rebbe1” as he came to be known, distinguished his sect by stressing intellectual engagement with mystical ideas. the name “chabad” is an acronym for the hebrew words for wisdom (chochmah), understanding (bina), and knowledge (da’at). each one has a different meaning and function in mystical jewish thought. the movement really gained its footing with the next rebbe, “the mittler rebbe,”2 who relocated the community to the town of lubavitch in western russia.

over its history, chabad-lubavitch has been led by a succession of seven rebbes. the last one, rabbi menachem mendel schneerson, known as “the rebbe,”3 died in 1994 without children or having named a successor.

cue the succession struggles.

only not really. chabad never experienced a schism similar to satmar’s split into two camps of the reb aharons and reb zalmans, the two children of its last widely accepted leader, but the question of who follows the rebbe has shaped chabad for more than three decades.

chabad is a huge net positive for jewish life, whether or not you’re hasidic. as a jew, pretty much everywhere you travel in the world,4 you’ll find a chabad house eager to welcome you with a meal, a bed, some schnapps, and a word of torah.

chabad guys are also very into in-sect proselytizing. they are the ones who will famously stop you on the streets of new york to ask, “excuse me, are you jewish?” which if you respond yes, they’ll take as a cue to try to get you to wrap tefillin or say a bracha or take candles home to light for shabbos. this comes directly from the rebbe, who believed that enabling other jews to perform a mitzvah is a jew’s central purpose. to bring others closer to god. and to heal the world. because even the smallest deed, the rebbe taught, can bring about the moshiach.

and that’s one of chabad’s main preoccupations: hastening the arrival of the jewish messiah.

during his lifetime, many jews thought the rebbe could be moshiach. he was certainly a contender, but there are specific things moshiach must do — such as fight the wars of god (gog and magog), rebuild the holy temple in jerusalem, and restore the sanhedrin — and when the rebbe died without fulfilling any of them, his candidacy for spiritual leader of the world5 died too.

except, of course, some still believed. this is a common theme in jewish history, of jews (and others) claiming a charismatic rabbi with transcendent teachings to be moshiach. see shabtai zvi, or jacob frank, or shimon bar kochba. or most famously and consequentially, jesus of nazareth.

meshichists are the modern form of these people, those who believe their teacher is moshiach, alive and well and not buried in the ohel6.

but to wrongfully elevate someone to messianic status is a heresy in judaism.

it’s why a devout rabbi will interrupt sacred prayers to usher out his students like the building is on fire.

it’s why a yellow flag bearing the word “moshiach” can provoke immediate suspicion in orthodox circles.

and it’s why “young agitators” will tunnel under a building in brooklyn to gain access to their late rebbe’s private prayer room.

yellow messianic flags bearing the word “yechi” (which means “long live”) were seen prominently in the videos of the tunnels and many of those arrested were involved in the radical “tzfatim”7 faction of chabad, which is strongly associated with meshichism.

this makes sense. messianic believers will often destroy in order to “rebuild.” that’s kind of the entire messianic idea for this world.

the rebbe, although not moshiach and most definitely dead, has an interesting afterlife in new york. iconography of him is everywhere, spread by his meshichist followers.

this was literally the view from the window of my last manhattan apartment.

here’s a closer look.

this image has become a meme in a way. especially after the knicks won.

here’s og anunoby as the rebbe-messiah.

and jalen brunson.

new yorkers are crazy. i love them.

these are some of the guys who put them up.

in the years since his death, the rebbe and his legacy have become inseparable from the building where he held court.

what is it about 770?

to explain that, i want to show you some pictures.

iv. the most replicated building in the world

a fascinating facet of chabad is that 770 eastern parkway is, improbably, the most copied building on the planet. at least 55 versions of it exist across the globe, all of them functional and inhabitable.

the original 770 was built in 1920. at first, it was a medical office, but by the 1940s, a contingent of chabad hasidim purchased it for the rebbe and his predecessor8, who had relocated to america from poland after the invasion of the nazis. over the next five decades, the rebbe would spend most of his time inside 770, praying and studying and teaching and meeting with all kinds of people, including followers, celebrities, and world leaders — but also just anyone who sought his advice — and the building became an icon for him and his movement.

here’s the original 770. it sits at 770 eastern parkway in crown heights, brooklyn.

you can also see it on google maps.

here’s one of the first ever replicas, in los angeles.

here’s the same building in central israel.

here it is los angeles again, this time in beverlywood. for this one, they stretched the 770 façade across an entire block.

here’s one in melbourne, australia.

and a 770 in jerusalem.

here’s an unpainted one in romainville, france. this is the smallest known 770 replica in existence.

there are more. a lot more. you can scope the rest of them here.

why are there so many copies of this building?

they seem to be a totem for the rebbe, and his followers really try to imitate him and farm his vibe wherever they set up shop. when the rebbe was alive, people visited 770 from all over the world to seek his advice and blessing.

near the end of his life, the rebbe expressed an interest to visit israel, but the trip never materialized due to his poor health. still, after his announcement, his followers decided to build a house for him in jerusalem, just in case he did visit. they modeled the structure on 770.

this started a domino effect of copy and pasting the same building all over the world.

of course, there’s a meshichist version why 770 exists all over. it’s way more uncanny.

simply put, it’s the idea that the rebbe, or melech moshiach (messiah king), will return, but since we don’t know where (or when or how, even), it’s important to prepare many different locations for his return.

the rebbe’s home was 770 and presumably he’ll want to live there when he returns. that’s why they’re everywhere. it gives credence to the idea that a small, stooped man with a black hat and white beard might appear one morning in los angles or melbourne or the phillipines, and when he does, he will be welcomed like the king he is into the palace he ruled. 770.

v. so? nu?? vat about the tunnels?

online sleuths will point all over the conspiracy board to the real meaning and intent of the tunnels: they’re evidence of a secret nefarious cult, they uncover a hidden trafficking ring, they’re an underground chamber for occult rites. none of these stand up to scrutiny.

the reason for them is much simpler and mundane, even if it was driven largely by meshichists, who also don’t really stand up to scrutiny.

near the end of his life, in addition to expressing an interest to visit israel, the rebbe also said that he supported an expansion to 770.

and that’s pretty much what it was. meshichists take the rebbe’s word as law, and in this case, they used it as a justification to dig under a sacred building in late 2023 to try to carry out his wishes.

what fascinates me most is that the tunnel itself is almost redundant. chabad meshichists already lives underground in a metaphorical sense, running on channels excavated decades ago by warped versions of the rebbe’s teachings and expectations.

his image on a yellow banner hangs inside synagogues in mystical towns. his house is replicated across continents. his followers still debate what he meant, what he wanted, and whether he is truly gone at all. and for a few hours in january 2024, the hidden architecture of a religious movement burst through a wall in brooklyn, covered in dust and blinking in the light.

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6

the rebbe’s final resting place is “the ohel,” or “the tent.” it’s a pilgrimage site for jews from all over the world and is located in queens, ny. it’s become common for politicians (and howard lutnick, i guess) to visit it on the campaign ⇩

okay fine so i wrote a horrormance story about olivia rodrigo, we don’t have to make a big deal about it. i already know that when i really love art i go overboard in a million directions, and i also know that knowing that won’t stop me from writing spooked out shit like this. q is if i keep sharing it.

but for now, we’re here, and so i give you a little story i wrote last night in an explosive burst of inspiration. in this moment i’m feeling okay about it, but that might change. feelings, like fans, are fickle, & it’s an f-ed up world, alliteration or not.

this story has two sources. the first is a submission call from a lit mag a few weeks back. they asked for stories a single sentence long that were around 500 words and i loved that and sent them a long story with a million commas about a skater getting abducted by the kinds of beings this newsletter is devoted to (𓁿). (i actually published the story in these very pages but then quickly took it down once the lit mag acceped it — that version is supposed to come out next week or the week after). the second source is, obviously, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. i’ve been spinning it on repeat since it dropped, and the other night i decided on a whim to pull out my favorite lyrics from each song. it looked like this.

i then had the idea to write a story set in olivia’s orbit that would incorporate each one of those lyrics in some way, and then i remembered the single-sentence 500 word story approach, and what you see below is the end result of i all that. i tried to cap it at around 500, but this new story, while also a single sentence, ended up closer to 2k words. once i found its pulse, i let the story tell itself instead of trying to awkwardly stuff in each one of the above lines. that’s part of writing, the way ideas shift as you wade deeper into the story.

also, i’m a horror writer and as such i’m not only expected but obligated to consider the most fucked up outcomes of a given situation and to write down the best versions of that play-out. that’s what i tried to do here with olivia, the current worm in my ears taking up my attention on a level that would make pete doherty in 2010 jealous.

last thing. i’ve been experimenting with occasional in-text scattered glyph imaging, which i use here to try to depict the character’s mental state, so enjoy that. i actually rewrote my about page to reflect this style. i probably won’t use it all the time, but it’s fun for now. i like it. if you do too, let me know below.

edit: no i have been diagnosed with “antisocial delusional disorder” or “scattered erotomania.” why do people who read this story keep asking me that??

ヾ(๑╹◡╹)ﾉ🔪 i know everybody changes but i hope that we don’t

“i’m not kissing a boy that’s passive / that indecision is painfully unattractive”
--olivia rodrigo, “expectations” ´ཀ`

my mother used to tell me there were stars in my hair & maybe that’s why there’s stars in my thoughts now because my mind goes astral sometimes, splashed large & red across the sky, & it’s heightening now because there’s more of you in the world & it’s so good & loud & it’s all pointing at me in the way i knew you would ever since i heard your first song as a skateboard speeding down the boulevard with no hands & no brakes with the top of the globe feeling comically close, & i wondered then, like i do now, where you are at this exact moment, if you’re awake, if you’re napping, if you’re strumming, if you’re even you, & then i remember you tell us everything in your songs & i have the answers, all i got to do is listen, & so i do that, i listen & i listen, & i hear everything, i can tell everything about you from the way you hold one vowel half a beat too long & how you sigh at the end of some lines but not others, & i think of you as i skate these streets, new york city in the late spring, early summer, the kind of evening that smells like hot trash & lilac, & i see you everywhere, i just passed a west village doorman building as “stupid song” leaked from a bluetooth & my heart is hurting but it’s always hurting, that’s nothing new, it’s just the rent i pay for being tuned in to your exact frequency, but i feel it so big & so red & i just want it, i want & want & want & nothing, & so on rolls my wheels, sometimes i think they’re eyes 👁️⃤ _ & then one night i’m bored in bed & skete you on the internet, no i mean skate you on the internet, no i mean sk8 u on the internet, or is it seed you on the internet, okay fine, i’ll stop hiding i stalk you on the internet, but that’s nothing new, that’s a daily & it isn’t weird, it’s devotion, & i go through my list, curated in care over many long months, the accounts of all those swirling in & out of your universe & without too much focus i find a link somebody’s cousin posted which leads to a geotag & a call sheet with a line please ensure deliveries to the address across from judson & i don’t think twice about it, i skate north to washington square park & then through it until i find the church & see what looks like a film crew trying to stay anonymous clustered across the street under an nyu awning & i go there right off with my gift in my hands, my heart, & i don’t see you but i could have, i could have, i could have tried harder maybe, & that’s almost the sweetest & most rotten fruit i own, because i know i shouldn’t love you, not really, i’ve never met you & parasociality is real & so is parasitism, but this is not that, this is neither of those things, this is the kind of cosmic alignment that seethes of design, the kind that can make you (or me) drop dead on first meeting, & i go home to my sad apartment, the only good thing my starcutter of a mother left me, other than the blade she used & my genes, which she also used, & brood on my aloneness & your closeness, how tantalizing, & i keep up my surveillance on the accounts & then two mornings later the stars shine in the day because i see a post from a public executive at the beverage company you’re promoting, the fizzy pink stuff you hold up but never actually sip, that two new interns have joined the team & of course i find them both easily & follow them, & one accepts right away, but that’s nothing new, my pfp & bio conditions them to do so (chadmaxxed pic of my cousin + human who wants to know u · nyc · i pay attention), my finsta for you with almost ten thousand accounts i follow, every one of them tied to you or to someone you’ve worked with or touched or breathed near, & i spend almost two hours a day pruning & scouring & adding to it & it isn’t weird, it’s symbiosis, it’s balance, it’s how i keep my eyes on the screen that connects me to you in my brain like how the music connects me to you in my heart, & i learn from the intern’s comment on a fangirl account that holy fucking eff a special big name sadgirl visitor shhh 🤫 is shooting here tomorrow like in our actual office and im literally deadd i can’t im deleting this rn & i do my own research & click on the company’s website & look & poke & prod & prepare, & the next day i time my arrival & get in the usual way, claiming a meeting with a vp i checked would be out of state, he said to meet with his team, which never gets pushback, & when the receptionist waves me in, i take the elevator not to the top floor but the 8th floor which has an active production studio i learned last night on a real estate forum, & it’s a sign because 8 is infinity stood up (8 ྀི) & as soon as i get off the elevator i see i was right because the initials of your name are everywhere, the way you write the two letters, so small & perfect, like you’re asking me for an extra option, or for the first syllable of the word i want to give you so many of, thousands my dear, your initials on every door in front of me, & i cause a small distraction past the reception area (slacker app, loud temporary buzzing) & when people run to it i slip back & try the green room door, & now you’re standing right in front of me with that look on your face, the back wall all fake brick & a mirror ringed in hot white bulbs, a can of the pink stuff sweating on the counter beside you, asking me why i shoved the couch in front of the door but you don’t ask who i am & that validates me because you don’t need to because you already know, because we’re meant to be together & all this is fated (or f8ed), & i knew i was right, a planner like me hears the whispered voice of god in your music & knows he’s being spoken to, directly to, & i want to say so many things to you now that we’re finally in a room together, so many things, & i stutter & go off on a warning to not be boring & predictable by someday writing a memoir called less about what foods you withheld from yourself at the height of all of this, but i stop talking because i realize it doesn’t matter, the scars & breaks tingle under my shirt, by then we’ll have been together almost a decade, but then you get a look of terror on your face like i’m doing something wrong & i feel the many cuts of my mother & i want to scream & bash my hands against the glass like i did in the shed but i don’t, i don’t do any of that, instead i just stand there, feeling like cameron diaz in that tom cruise movie losing her mind in the car, i swallowed your cum, david! that means something, only i’m screaming i listened to yacht rock for you! that means something, & that makes you look even more frightened & you’re frozen now, too, a deer in my lights & i hear the banging on the door & my hand decides to do something, my hand decides on its own without me & there’s a weight in it now, cold & stupid & final, & i watch your eyes drop to it & then dart to the door, where the banging gets louder, & my head pounds with the weight of a trillion crushed planets & i start to shout, the only line i prepared beforehand, what do you want? to tally all the girls i killed til you start to cry? but what i don’t say is what i feel, which is how is it possible that this one life be so full of things that make people happy & how am i never one of them? & i half convince myself i’m making all this shit up, but i know i’m not, i try to tell you out loud that it’s me, but i can’t speak, all i can do is stare & hold out the gift in my hands, my mom’s, & as i do it all the pretty girls line up in the foreground of my mind, but not a single one compares to the honeyqueen angelbee in front of me, even with your tears falling like that, & i move forward to tell you it’s okay, your man is here now, you’re safe, but maybe my hand says something different because that’s the exact moment, when i’m lost in my own weather, you decide to lunge forward & drive your knee straight into my groin so hard that the whole pink-lit room folds in half & the cold stupid thing clatters on the floor & the can tips over & floods the floor sticky & sweet, & you’re already past me, at the door, shouting & pulling back the couch, & the last thing i get to keep of you before the big men break through the door & cover me is the back of your head & your voice, finally, finally, finally pointed at me & not through a microphone, saying words i’ll replay forever, sounding nothing at all like your lyrics, a beautiful warning of your own, go, go, get him, he has a knife, motherfucker, & somehow even now, folded on the sticky floor of a soda commercial with my whole life spilling out around me´ཀ`held down by three men´ཀ`one pushing me into pain on the floor, a pain i know well´ཀ`while another ties my hands with a t-shirt, the only thought left in the gutterhole of my mind is that you know i exist but even that doesn’t mean a thing because she was right, of course she was, & that cuts the coldest, it isn’t weird, but very painful, & i repeat to myself she was right! she was right! over & over until my voice is drowned out by the men shouting for me to shut up shut up shut up ᶠᶸᶜᵏᵧₒᵤ shut up! & that gives way to sirens as the pain in my side gets bigger & the red grows brighter, & i see the handle & i hear her voice even though she’s not there ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁the hag ݁₊⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁my plumb fucking mother who used to tell me there were snakes in my skin & stars in my hair that only she could see & it was her job to cut them out & i listened as long as i could & waited even longer than that but the wait got too long & so i had to let them out myself ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ݁..𖥔 ݁ ˖ִ🛸༄˖°.

in january 2022, i went with my best friend to a performance of mj: the musical. i’ve always been a fan of michael, and i was excited to spend 2.5 hours watching actors and dancers trying to recreate his heights.

i wasn’t prepared for how the very first song would wreck me.

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the opening number was “beat it” and near the end, michael resolves a dispute between two gang members hungering for a fight by redirecting their destructive energies toward dance.

and then they all do this move.

the performance was no different, and something about how the dancers threw their arms in the air and then slid to the side just sent me the fuck out, and i didn’t even know i was going. in the audience, i started to sob silently. it was unclear why. i was just crying, hard, and it took me another song to fully stop. the rest of the play was fine, enjoyable, but nothing touched me like the first song.

that’s the power of art. sometimes it just finds you and guts you.

i felt the same way this past thursday watching the knicks parade of champions through lower manhattan. after receiving keys to the city, the players lingered on a stage erected outside borough hall, basking in the citywide euphoria, while alicia keys took the stage.

she sat down at the piano and started singing “new york state of mind” and i just lost it. overwhelmed by the power of music, of art, of love for my city and its people, of excellence draped in blue and orange, i felt the emotions pour out my eyes and down my cheeks.

i’m an artist, which means i’m more sensitive than paper and get lost in my feelings way too often (and often far too deep), but even so, it’s rare that music or film or even literature bursts me open like that.

but with michael jackson, the rare is common. he’s one of the ten human beings, if we were to look at this through a backward-facing cosmic lens. he’s the entertainer1. point me to anybody you would elevate first and i’ll point you to the door.

i’ve been fascinated by michael jackson for as long as i’ve been an adult. i guess this probably kicked off in college when i would procrastinate my schoolwork with wikipedia deep dives. wikipedia kind of felt like studying — i told myself i was still doing something smart — and it was an easier sell internally than music articles or subreddit wormholes or straight up youtube.

michael’s page especially got me when i was on the silent fourth floor of the rosenthal library supposedly preparing for an american history exam. of course i knew his music by then, but i was less familiar with the mythology. i had no clue that he reportedly slept in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber to prolong his youth2, or that he tried to buy the elephant man’s bones from queen mary university of london3, or that he collected department store mannequins for companionship4, or that he took estradiol to preserve his high-pitched voice5, and on and on and on.

it was impossible to look away.

i started writing about this bizarre individual in the journal i kept at the time, which was white with a copper spiral and a large “queens college” logo in its center6, and i kind of never stopped.

the rest is, as michael’s 96-97 world tour would have it, history.

i. smooth criminal / the candy man

like many people, i love michael the performer, and like many other people (and the overlap is actually r/ bigger than you thought), i shiver at the memory of how slack and hardened-in-frame, i.e. dissociative, james safechuck gets when describing all the places in neverland ranch where as a 10-year-old, he and a 29-year-old michael “had sex.” according to leaving neverland, which is not available on hbo max because of a non-disparagement clause in a 1992 contract that michael’s estate’s attorneys used to get the film all but erased from the internet, it seems like michael molested the boy on damn near every inch of his 2,700 acre property.

that a man, a creator, a dreamer of dreams, can be so monstrous is not news; it’s only ever news who. the accusations against michael are difficult to look at, terrifying, which is also why they’re beyond ripe for opportunistic plucking by writers like me, obsessed with the weird, dark, and fucked up, but also with phenomena generally and individuals whose public goodwill rots into disgust and even loathing, since such tales are perfect negative character studies.

i’ve been thinking about this lately for two reasons. the first is that regardless of where you come down on the mj debate (was he guilty? was he innocent? can you at long last separate the artist from the art when the artist has died?), his abilities as a dancer were truly transcendental, and transcendence is a big focus of this newsletter. the things that rise above all that we know. i.e. abilities above humanity yet enshrined in human form. i.e. michael the dancer.

my second reason is that two weeks ago i illegally downloaded and mostly skipped through the recent biopic about michael, and while overall it was pretty slop-tastic and not worth my coin (which i write gleefully as a longtime hater of biopics, including the one about my rebbe7), the “beat it” dance again got to me and cannonballed me down a rabbit hole of the man’s music videos.

“smooth criminal” stood out this time.

the video is taken from the 1988 film moonwalker, which tells the story of michael protecting three orphaned children from a drug kingpin scheming to get the world’s kids hooked on narcotics. after luring his goons to a haunted club — where the above dance number unfolds — michael is cornered, only to transform into first a giant robot (??) and then a spaceship8 that destroys the villain and saves the kids.

it’s a pretty crazy plotline, but then it was conceived by a pretty crazy man, the smooth criminal himself9.

in the video, there’s a moment where the three orphans peer through a window in the club and see michael dancing. they’re just in time to watch him do the eerie gravity-defining lean that would become the song’s trademark move.

just before he leans, michael smiles for the first time in the video and makes eye contact with the kids at the window. only he sees them. it takes place around the 6:50 mark in the above video if you’re curious.

it’s eerie, in retrospect, that michael saves his joy for when the kids show up.

but also inspiring for a villain focused on children who wins them over by being like them.

it kicked off an idea for a story, especially when coupled with a recent piece about the jewish candyman written by my friend dovid zvi kalman.

Jello Menorah

The Candyman Can't

This post could not possibly be more different from the last one. (Universalism to particularism in real time…

Read more

3 months ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · DZ Kalman

the concept of a candyman in a jewish context is pretty interesting and isn’t found in christianity or islam.

essentially, the synagogue candyman is a fixture of jewish congregational life, typically an older man who hands out sweets to children during services. according to kalman, this phenomenon started because shul services are long and bored men would sneak candy into their tallis bags to nosh on between aliyahs, waiting until services ended and the kiddush would kick off in earnest. of course, kids in the vicinity noticed adults eating candy, and that was that.

michael's alignment and ease with children in "smooth criminal" got me mulling a character, probably a simplistic holy one, a real man-of-the-people, with a special abiliy, through candy, to connect to kids10. i saw something mystical in this involving access to the original garden, a serene place occupied by a serpent who walks and a nude man and woman who slither in the shadows.

i liked the idea, and reached out to my friend matthue roth, one of the most prolific jewish writers i know, to ask if he wanted to brainshare a story idea and possibly collaborate.

he was game, like he often is, and a few days later i sent him a synopsis of a kids story constructed around a candyman. this is what i gave him.

it needs an ending. i’m not sure what that would be. it’s not pressing11.

maybe matthue and i will build out the idea and eventually write it, but honestly i’m not feeling up for the inevitable rejection involved in trying these days. you keep turning a sensitive writer down and i fear he eventually just stops lifting his pen. although all my personal evidence points to the contrary, i guess. even when i’m steeped in a sadness i wouldn’t wish on my prettiest enemies, i can’t seem to stop fucking writing.

either way, the story idea is new, but taking inspiration from michael jackson is not.

for as long as i’ve been writing horror, i’ve been fascinated by michael. i’ve chased many ideas over the years, most of which i haven’t done shit with because of the heaviness of the topic and mostly unformed future-litigation fears. but the ideas still come.

here are a few of them, the michael jackson-influenced horror ideas i’ve had over the years.

ii. the thriller of shawcross lagoon

ten years ago, when i worked as a journalist in a skyscraper in the middle of manhattan, i did the thing you read about in sad memoirs on writing: i snuck in my scribbling between the professional parts of my day.

i wrote in the mornings, during lunch breaks, on occasional evenings, and weekends, although not saturdays because i was more observant then and jewish law stipulates no writing on shabbos12.

at the time, i had an idea for a story called “the thriller of shawcross lagoon.”

essentially it was the tale of a small town near kingston, new york, called shawcross lagoon that was terrorized by, as i wrote at the time, “a child-killer with a skeletal frame and a splattered egg white face, a nose like a dart and hair bleaker and blacker than the wigs [of orthodox jewish women].”

i got “thriller” from mj, of course, and “shawcross” came from a serial killer, arthur shawcross, who killed at least 12 women and 2 children during his reign of terror in the 1970s and 80s.

“the thriller of shawcross lagoon.”

it’s a pretty good name for a horror story. or maybe an episode of widow’s bay.

shawcross sounds like the whisper of a killer just before he wraps a length of nylon garter hose around your throat and tightens it. shawcross.

the name is extra scary on account of its christian undertones, the explicit presence of the carrier they claimed was ours, stupidly, just because he was born within the covenant of abe, as if origins are also endings.

i never wrote “the thriller of shawcross lagoon” because at the time i was writing scary stories for children and the first rule of kids horror, according to r.l. stine, is to never kill a kid. that’s the realm of adult horror. the gatekeepers (i.e. my agent at the time) also seemed pretty strict about that, so the idea didn’t fit into my projects.

of course, then i got older and read more about the actual arthur shawcross and was a lot less drawn in by his actions than by the well-documented mental illness that existed in him for pretty much his whole life13. the deeper i delved, the less inspiring he became and more just a sad and tragic case of how severe mental illness, formed out of brutal child abuse and left aggressively unchecked, can lead to destruction and death.

which turned the story from sad with maximum grotesque lamping to just straight sad. this is why i doubt i’ll ever write the name shawcross into one of my projects.

every true crime fan has a line, a kind of case or example of human-on-human depravity they just can’t do, and shawcross’s psychotic breaks were one of mine14.

so “the thriller of shawcross lagoon” will probably stay unwritten.

here’s the full poem i wrote about michael at the time. like most things i write, it’s also about writing.

iii. the beat

a year after writing that poem, i sold a kids horror podcast to gbh boston. pitched as “goosebumps for your ears,” the creeping hour is an anthology series of five standalone episodes that dropped in october 2019.

at the time, i was listening to the album thriller a bunch, and i had the idea to cull inspiration from michael for the season finale, which we debuted on halloween. i called the story “the beat,” and it was about a kid who goes to a halloween party where the host plays a weird record that entrances everybody who hears it and makes them all do this odd dance they can never stop doing15.

here’s the full episode.

michael was all over the appearance of the changed kids — blank white face masks, long fake-looking black hair, little nubs for noses — as well as the inspiration for the music of “the beat” that transforms its listeners.

if you want to just hear the music, which my buddy nadav made to sound not unlike “billie jean,” here it is.

i remember writing the script for this episode. i was living on the upper west side, 83rd and amsterdam, across the street from the 23-floor apartment building where i spent the first eight years of life with my parents, older brother, and an increasing number of younger siblings. in this case, i was 30 years old, living in a ground floor apartment with two strangers half a block from the garage jerry seinfeld owned for his car collection. each morning — and this was a particularly productive era in my post-divorce hoedom, so mornings could be and were often interesting affairs16 — i’d roll out of bed, put a pot of brown up to boil, and sit at my writer’s desk where i’d commence the day’s work, what it is for me and those suffering from the same affliction: pulling up words and then putting them down.

each day, i started writing to the kick-kick-thump of “wanna be startin’ somethin’ ” and then the rest of thriller, before turning to a different album by a different artist.

michael’s look and sound was a huge presence as i wrote the creeping hour, but nowhere more than in the main inspiration for the scares in “the beat.” i liked that episode, but i love the artwork a digital artist came up with for it, so much so that i printed it on a canvas and to this day i hang it in my writing room.

here’s the canvas right now, overlooking my writing desk. for the last half year, i’ve been living in my late grandmother’s house in brooklyn, hence the mid-century matronly trappings in the pic.

and here’s the exact same canvas, except in this instance i brought it out onto the porch where i occasionally write, overlooking 54th street. i do that sometimes, moving art around me if it gives me a kick.

“the beat” was probably my favorite episode of the creeping hour to write and produce, and i think it’s because part of the inspiration came directly from real life, the undertapped horror legacy of the life of michael jackson.

iv. john wayne gacy

i have a little three-legged cat named gracie. this is her asleep last week.

and this is her, a few hours later, after she woke up.

gracie is a good girl, but sometimes she hides bodies deep in the crawlspace. when she does that, i call her john wayne gracie.

there’s something so sinister about a murderer presenting as a clown. stephen king recognized this right off the bat.

i was thinking of john wayne gacy in the context of michael jackson a year or so ago when i came across an article by a professional mj impersonator who wrote about being hired by an individual to perform at a party. (annoyingly, i can’t find the article otherwise i’d link to it). the impersonator arrived, expecting a crowd, and was shocked to learn the man who hired him was the only one there. the dude nonetheless ran through his ensemble, playing the music and doing the dances for his audience of one. the article ended on an ominous note: it was fun, the performer said, but also for a few moments, he wondered if the guy was going to kill him17.

the entire story is self contained right there. of course, john wayne gacy is an ongoing muse for many horror writers — and you have to look no further than the second episode of the first season of widow’s bay (such a great show!) to see how his specter is still used today for effective scares.

i probably didn’t write a michael wayne gacy story because i didn’t have much new to say about it beyond the facts listed in that article. but i did spend an afternoon last year on a favorite patch of central park lawn with my best friend and then-girl trying to disprove this by filling about four notebook pages with ideas for a doomed mj clown horror story.

why haven’t i finished most of the michael jackson horror stories i’ve started?

i keep landing on the same uncomfortable answer, which is that i don’t have to write them at all. michael’s life, the revealed and the hidden, was a horror story at every turn.

his biography is filled with trauma: poverty in indiana as the eighth18 of ten kids in a tiny two-bedroom house, an abusive and obsessive stage father who beat his sons and drove them through punishing rehearsals, a stolen childhood spent performing professionally while other kids played, shame about his appearance from being mocked for his “big nose” and severe teenage acne, religious conflict as a jehovah’s witness caught between faith and art, the 1984 pepsi ad fire that burned his scalp and started his reliance on painkillers, vitiligo and lupus that altered his appearance and forced heavy makeup, body dysmorphia and the repeated nose surgeries that made his face a public punchline, a short turbulent marriage to lisa marie presley… and all that before you hit the year 2000 or even mention child abuse.

similar to how the cliche “all the money in the world can’t buy you happiness” comes to life whenever i see a picture or video of the world’s first “trillionaire,”19 michael jackson is proof that things, material things like mansions, cars, statues, and pinball machines, but also elusive ambiences like clout, fanaticism, and worship, bring a lot more ruin than benefit, especially in public figures.

and that’s another reason i think i struggle to write mj horror. michael was always in public, but he never hid.

real artists don’t hide where it matters, in the things they create.

michael told us, at the deafening center of the culture, in the headphones of every kid on earth: i’m bad. i’m really, really bad. i’m dangerous, a smooth criminal, a werewolf, a monster.

look at this picture, taken in the late 1980s. from left to right it shows jimmy safechuck, michael jackson, george lucas, his girlfriend li chin, harrison ford, and his wife melissa mathison.

when it was taken, it was a picture of the world’s biggest pop star standing next to the creator of star wars and the actor from star wars, plus two women and a boy.

now, with hindsight, we’re able to see it for what it actually is: a picture of three powerful men with their girls.

fun fact about that picture, by the way, for all you true crime-heads: li chin would go on to marry filmmaker peter rodger and give birth to elliot, the perpetrator of the 2014 isla vista attacks and the so-called “incel patron saint.”

three powerful men and their girls.

that’s the real michael jackson horror story. not the monster in the hidden dark of shawcross lagoon or layered into the soundwaves of the beat, but the being on stage, smiling, telling you exactly what he is in words you’ll hum for the rest of your life, while behind-the-scenes he does things too horrible to mention to those too vulnerable and star-struck to defend themselves.

it’s bad. it’s really, really bad.

biblically accurate aliens is a newsletter about scripture, the uncanny, ufos — and the hidden places where they meet. if someone forwarded you this, please subscribe and come looking! there’s plenty to see, too much to see, and not enough eyes to capture it all.

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for the rest of you, thanks for reading and supporting me and my writing! please consider subscribing if you’re not already and liking this post digitally, if you liked it in your brain. it really does help get the weird, dark word out. stay scary, my broskis.

12

author’s note: one of the main focuses of this newsletter is the phenomenon of transcendence. to transcend is to go above or beyond something, passing the limits of the ordinary in favor of the uncanny. it’s the idea that there are ways in this life to brush up against its "extra" elements, the levels and layers past what we usually see.

the following story deals with transcendence in its most horror-friendly form, the ghost story. a ghost, of course, is a spirit freed from the bounds of the body. a transcendent being in the most literal sense. although as i continue writing in this area, i’m starting to suspect that every ghost story is also secretly an alien encounter, with the craft and the beam never far behind.

this story runs around 7,000 words, in the awkward dead zone where it’s too long to submit to most magazines (which usually cap around 5,000) and too short to count as a novella. a frustrating in-between for traditional publication, but a fine fit for a newsletter, which doesn't care about word count and sets its own reading pace.

a heads up: this story features graphic bullying, suicidal ideation, and grooming. fiction is made up but pain is real, and if you’re suffering, know that you’re not alone. you are loved, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.

thanks so much for stopping by and lending me your eyes!

1.

it had been a strange few weeks, with more downs than ups, but wrennie knew things were rightening when she got on the long line for the water fountain and saw jay and arden ahead of her, closer to the spigot, waving for her to cut in line behind them, not a single sign of meanness in their motions. they whispered as she walked over, which felt temporarily tight, but when she reached them they were the picture of cheery, and wrennie loosened.

“sorry, all you babies,” jay announced to the third graders making whiney noises of protest. “fourth grade gets line-cutting privileges. you’ll learn soon enough.” she smiled at wrennie, who immediately turned up the corners of her own mouth, and then reached into her bag. arden’s face was pinched, like there was a sneeze trying to escape her, but then it passed and her smile bulged, as lightbulb bright as jay’s.

“how’s the one on ones with mr. m?” arden asked.

the relief wrennie felt! she was so glad they were talking again, after two weeks of near total silent treatment from them and pretty much every other girl in the fourth grade. she was so jazzed that she didn’t notice jay fiddle with something outside her line of vision.

“it’s great,” wrennie gushed. “he’s teaching me about,” she searched her brain for the words he kept repeating, “…respect and non-sense and dis… i forgot the last one. it’s a long word.”

“disassociation,” arden supplied.

wrennie eagerly nodded.

“he taught pheeny that too when he gave her pls,” arden explained. “before he stopped.” she looked at jay. something unsaid passed between them.

wrennie was eager to keep the camaraderie alive. “it’s so hot in his classroom though! the dumb broken air conditioner! the ceiling fan works, it just doesn’t do anything.”

something else passed between arden and jay. “if you’re so hot from the classroom,” jay said, her lightbulb smile turning up, “you shouldn’t drink water.” she held up a lemon nectarade bottle, a quarter of the way full. “this has, what do you call it, electric-lights. it’s better for you when you sweat than water.” her eyes moved over to arden’s, and wrennie saw an ember. “have some. it’ll help with the heat in the room, i swear.”

she held the bottle out to wrennie, who hesitated.

the line moved a little, but there were still at least five kids ahead of them, including henry, who was notorious for his minute-plus turns at the fountain.

the nectarade bottle had definitely been sipped from, and wrennie wasn’t usually into sharing germs. however, the girls were being nice again, and that was a relief size extra large. wrennie took the bottle.

she was confused by how warm it felt in her hands, but she unscrewed the top, her eyes moving from arden’s to jay’s and then back. they both goggled her, transfixed.

wrennie raised the bottle to her lips, but then lowered it. “why are you staring? also, the line moved.”

jay and arden saw she was right and took a step closer to the fountain, but immediately turned back to wrennie, waiting and watching.

wrennie raised the bottle back to her lips, thankful for a quick drink before returning to mr. muerto’s sweltering class, but then she smelled the liquid and knew immediately that something was hellishly wrong.

it was too late. the girls abandoned their nice postures and turned into devils. arden pushed the bottle back so that its contents splashed into wrennie’s open mouth and drenched her chin and shirt while jay grabbed her head with a palm and held it back, keeping her from turning away.

most of the liquid landed on wrennie’s front, but some of it went down her throat. the hot, bitter, and deeply unpleasant flavor of it tasted nothing like lemon nectarade.

“that’s for pheeny!” arden shouted. jay let go of wrennie, now that the bottle was empty. it thudded hollow on the floor. wrennie choked and spit and then breathed; already tears streamed down her cheeks, meeting the droplets of yellow on her jaw.

“wrennie dirt drinks pee!” jay shouted, backing away, and pointing. “it’s her favorite drink! she loves it so much she pees in a bottle to drink later!”

wrennie was so disgusted, so hurt, so exited. she collapsed, dry heaving, wanting to throw up, trying to, retching, but couldn’t. instead, she focused on “disassociating.” it made the most unpleasant things pass like they weren’t real, or even stranger, like they were real and almost pleasant. manageable. not big deals.

nothing was a big deal, wrennie had learned and would keep learning, when you could exit yourself.

2.

years later, halfway through her first morning on the job, as a free period supervisor’s assistant to mr. muerto’s fourth grade class of the undertow elementary school, miss wren took a break from patrolling the yard outside the classroom and entered the school. it was twelve years to the autumn since she was in her favorite class, and miss wren found that she loved assisting her former fourth grade teacher, even if she wasn’t technically in his classroom yet. there was a totem pole of teacher assistanceship at undertow, and miss wren was at the bottom, currently helping mrs. om, the free period supervisor, make sure that students who were out of class were out of class for legitimate reasons. which they only sometimes were.

as she walked down the second grade hall, miss wren reflected on her own time in fourth grade, which had played a part in her decision to return to undertow. fourth grade had been fine for the first month, and then amazing when mr. muerto started giving her more time. but when the other girls all turned on her it got bad. they turned on her and the world darkened and they started hurling those bitter spiked words that made her feel first like dirt and then less than dirt, which made her into something lower still, especially when you came at it from up there. but miss wren didn’t like climbing those dark trunks.

she paused in front of a glass display case under screens screaming announcements. they definitely didn’t have this back in 2007. when wren was in fourth, information was delivered on paper pinned to corkboards, cave women painting ash figures on stone.

she moved down the hall to mr. muerto’s classroom and peered inside for a different view of the class that she had been peeping all morning from the yard. the kids looked sleepy, the boys reading from their books at their own desks, while the girls clustered around two desks near the front. mr. muerto was a statue in front of a squeaky whiteboard, exactly like miss wren remembered him (although back in her day, it was a chalky blackboard); just as stony and impressive-seeming, with a lot more gray hairs.

miss wren tried to catch his eye. eventually mr. muerto turned, but he held stony, no nod or anything. still, miss wren was happy; she knew what to expect from a no-non-senser like him.

she hummed down the hallway and stopped at the fountain. as she sipped the cold water, a lightning bolt struck the surface of her memory. one of the worst things that happened at undertow. in fourth grade. right here. when things were getting really bad. before they got awful, and then worse and then worst.

the lemon nectarade bottle. jay and arden.

how could miss wren have been dumb enough to believe them and think (wish? hope??) that maybe, just maybe, this one time they were really being nice, this one time they were really being her friend, when of course it turned out they were trying to hurt her and hurt her bad, jay and arden and the rest of the girls? they existed to be nasty and convince her, through straight up mean lengths of repetition, that no one would catch…? miss wren ducked her head under the cool stream of water. the icy droplets massaged her forehead into an igloo and she breathed deep from in the chill.

the bell rang. she released the knob. the stream stopped just as the door to mr. muerto’s classroom opened. his class had their twice-a-week morning free period now, which was miss wren’s whole job, basically. she raced down the hallway, splattering beads of water from her sopping forehead, weaving through the packs of kids swelling the halls, and made it to the yard just before the fourth graders.

the girls smiled at her and pecked out shy hellos as they passed (one stopped to tell miss wren that she loved her braids), but the boys weren’t interested in the new free period supervisor’s assistant; they barreled past her to the green lawn of grass on the south side of the yard (cutting across the playground, slides, and the mustached dragon made out of old rubber tires), where they tossed a football around and shouted “kill the carrier!” as they tackled each other like the sweet dummies they turned into whenever there was enough space to run. miss wren grinned after them; the boys were always nicer, even if they were simpler -- maybe because of that. it was true back in her day, and it looked true now. she slowly turned around, taking in the whole field, smiling at nothing and everything.

her smile splattered on the large white tree.

it stood there, in the middle of the field, as heavy and impassive as the side of a barn, its peeling white trunk and low hanging branches beckoning like a rickety staircase that led somewhere she didn’t want to go. was it there all along? miss wren had been out on the field since first period and didn’t remember seeing it -- she was totally zoned in on mr. muerto’s class. but she saw it now. what an unwanted assault on her eyes. she peeled back to the concrete half of the yard. a girl sat on the monkey bars, kicking her legs and slurping away at a pink piece of sugar taffy. she lowered the taffy and waved.

it was the girl who complimented her braids. miss wren alighted over.

“who are you?” the girl asked.

“i’m miss wren. i’m new. i’ll be helping out mrs. om. what’s your name?”

the girl lowered her taffy. “junie. what’s with…?” she pointed at miss wren’s arm.

miss wren looked down. her left arm was in a sling. she searched her memory and told junie about the jet ski accident at the end of the summer. junie nodded and ate her candy. she asked “miss wren” (it tickled the young teacher to hear her name said like that) about her white dress, but got distracted during the answer, started fidgeting, and interrupted to show off her sneakers, which miss wren admitted were pretty cool, shiny white and blue with red light-up sides. when she finished her taffy, the girl said bye, stashed the wrapper in a nearby garbage can, and ran to the field.

miss wren watched junie go, eyeballs following the girl’s movements like a hummingbird on the hover. a group of girls had gathered around the white poplar tree. junie hurried and took her place in a line forming so precisely it looked choreographed. except by who, and why? the girls circled the tree and miss wren felt uncomfortable for no reason that made sense. a non-sense reason pestered, but she kept it under the surface. she wasn’t the only one caught. the boys had stopped killing the carrier and moved to the edge of the field, staring at the huddled girls, unsure what to do.

the girls knew exactly what to do. they started swaying, slowly. they were chanting, too, miss wren heard, and as she hurried over, each step made it clear that whatever was happening around the tree was major league wrecked. the girls were holding hands and moving faster, but in place, like boats bobbing on a calm sea. wren heard the melody of the chant but not the words. maybe she just didn’t want to.

she ran up to junie, who was swaying along, and tapped her on the shoulder.

“what is this?” she shouted over the droney chanting. “what’s going on?”

junie’s eyes demisted. she jabbed upward with her chin. “there’s a ghost in the tree.”

miss wren didn’t ask anything further, didn’t even think, she just broke the hand holding between junie and the girl next to her and shouted, “alright! enough! everyone stop it! cut it out right now! there’s no ghost in the tree! scatter! now!”

it worked. the girls stopped holding hands and the chanting dried up. most eyes defogged like junie’s. they drifted back to the playground. a few looked eager to stay, but miss wren prodded them along. the boys picked up their carrier murder and a sense of normalcy floated back to the yard.

miss wren waited until the girls were all gone to peer into the branches of the tree. she didn’t see a ghost, but she did see how the branches twisted off the white trunk like long gnarled arms, way too many of them, reaching out blindly from its glutty trunk in peels, disturbing, a blind beast on the prowl, forever casting out with its dead-clawed grip. she turned to the yard. the girls were either running around or else clustered in groups on the concrete like nothing had happened. she held up a hand to mrs. om, who was too busy disciplining a boy using a branch as a sword to notice. she looked back once at the tree and then put it out of her mind.

it went without saying that ghosts were made up. that much hadn’t changed since miss wren was in fourth grade. it went without saying, too, that sometimes they were made up in dirt. miss wren knew that, even if she didn’t quite remember it. memories were annoying, and sometimes downright catty.

3.

wren’s disbelief in ghosts was gutted open the following wednesday. she had stayed out in the yard mostly, nodding at mr. muerto’s fourth grade students whenever they came out for their bi-weekly free, but also their twice daily ten-minute class break. the girls were always nice to her, but the boys ignored her, which felt interesting and different. miss wren was used to the boys at undertow being nice while the girls ignored her outright, except when they decided en masse to be irascibly nasty, and then a few shades past that. three times the girls were magnetized, like moths to light, to the white tree in the middle of the field. it was only after the third time, when the girls had gone far enough to loop hands and start chanting before miss wren rushed over and broke it up, shouting for mrs. om, who came over, wearing the forehead lines of the recently returned and asked what the matter was, that miss wren realized what bothered her most. the girls all lacked an awareness of their movements, which was much scarier than any supposed ghost in the tree.

when the yard emptied, with the students in class and mrs. om in her office, miss wren occupied her time with a brisk walk around the tree. there was something unusual about it. it was unseasonably cold and unhourly dark under its canopy, like an air conditioned room with the lights off, but the coldness lifted as soon as she passed from its branches back into the sunlight of early september on long island. she meant to check out the dozen or so planted cedar trees at the far end of the field, to compare them to the poplar, but she kept forgetting, her memory these days was more slippery than a seal.

until, finally, wednesday afternoon. it was right after the last class of the day started, 2:18 pm prompt. miss wren hopped over to the cedars, and went around them and through them, trying to get it over as quick as possible. squirrels scurried away from her feet and sparrows winged in the branches. it didn’t feel cooler under their leaf cover. miss wren headed over to the poplar tree to compare. she passed under the canopy, expecting (and even welcoming) the coldness of its limbs, but wasn’t ready to be iced by the unexpected realization that there were no squirrels or birds anywhere in the tree’s vicinity.

just the cold of its canopy and, miss wren listened, the faint creak of a branch shifting overhead.

she looked up.

a small girl sat there, staring at her, covered in grime. she clutched part of the trunk like a filthy monkey, and her legs dangled from the large branch she straddled.

“what are you doing up there?” miss wren asked.

she squinted, trying to recognize the girl. she looked like she was in third grade. maybe one of those kids who would rather hide in the yard instead of being forced to spend time with her classmates. miss wren had plenty of experience doing just that in fourth. a phrase formed in her mind, rising like filth from the sea bed, one that she hadn’t thought of in eternities, one which made her whole body shiver: big red devil god.

the girl didn’t answer right away. she only stared, her head tilted at an angle that miss wren’s neck refused to mirror.

“what’s your name?” miss wren asked. not that it would help; she was terrible with names. she didn’t expect an answer, and was surprised when the girl finally spoke, her voice small and dry as a leaf scrape.

“catty.”

“catty?” miss wren asked. “your name is catty?”

the dirty girl held her eyes and nodded.

“what are you doing up in the tree, catty? why don’t you come down?”

catty didn’t say anything. she just stared at miss wren, holding her eyes tight, massaging them with her own like they were palms and palms were eyeballs.

and then a moment of utter non-sense transpired.

a small brown bird fluttered onto a branch near catty. she stared at it and turned stony. there was a rent, a howl, and the girl in the branches shuddered into shadow, elongating like a strip of land across a spread open sky. the shadow wisped into mist just as a plunge sunk miss wren, a burn in her throat like seasickness, followed by a rush of heavy velvet.

it stopped. miss wren was staring at the branches of a white tree.

there was no girl, no bird, nothing.

just feathers ruffling down through air.

they moved slow, shadows of flight, tousling to the ground, non-sensical evidence that something had snatched a bird right out of the picture frame of existence, straight into whatever dies past sense. for a moment all miss wren saw was the colorless rush of plummet.

she darkened and it passed.

4.

a month into fourth grade, wrennie started suffering from what her mom called “chronic school fatigue.” wrennie would come home every day, exhausted beyond measure, barely able to keep up her head at the dinner table, and fell asleep almost as soon as she went to her room. it started at the end of september and carried over into october and right through halloween. what wrennie’s mom didn’t get was that the problem wasn’t the school; it was the girls who went there. starting the last week in september, they began calling her “loser” or “space waster” and telling her “you suck at life” and to “pretty please just run away” and then, three weeks before halloween proper, they pivoted to personalizing their nastiness in skin scorchers like “wrennie pee-drinker,” “dead little glut lips,” “fatty wren,” “shiver me no thanks,” “wrennie dirt,” and worst of all (even though it didn’t make sense, there was just something in how they delivered it, so much hatred swimming on those lollipop-stained tongues), “gross gross the most most.”

none of the bullies had faces by that point. early on, it was easy enough for wrennie to distinguish that it was jay and arden who forced her to sip pee, or that rhea pushed her off the jungle gym, crunching wrennie’s arm splat on the hard ground and forcing it into a sling, or that ava was the warthog who sprayed the liquid hair remover into the back of wrennie’s scalp while phoenix held her shoulders, breathing heavy into her face and asking, like a demon reporter, why was she smiling like that, did she like it, did this make her happy?

wrennie never liked it; she disassociated from herself during all of it and pardon her, meanie pheeny, if disassociation painted a limp smile on her badly hurting face. on the day of the forced hair removal, after, as wrennie sat in an empty bathroom stall, massaging her newly accessible scalp, she sobbed into her blessedly still-there braids, a smile tearing open her face that bore no relation to happiness. at a certain point the names and faces carrying out these daily terror streaks melded into a spiraling masked devil body that churned hate and fear like boils from a badly burned mouth. wrennie pivoted hard to what she learned from mr. muerto and disassociated as much as she could, occasionally drifting back to herself. drift was safe, sleep was safe, home was safe, school was not. too often when she returned, she caught glimpses of the big red devil god, or even just sideways sightings of its body, all smoking horns and bloody fingers and craterous skin gashes where whiskers should be and rakes where human things had kneecaps.

she never understood why it launched at her, or why it started in fourth grade, after years of her being friendly and nice enough but never best besties with the pre-devilized girls in her class, but she imagined it had to do with the special attention she received from her teacher. also, she had a good grip early on that only rarely did reason hand-in-hand with hatred. anger was its own reason. and wrennie knew you couldn’t control other people’s anger or how they pointed it. all you could do was try to shield yourself, or when that failed, roll into a numb drift that held you as safe and free-feeling as the womb.

one morning in early november, wrennie drifted at her desk, staring out the window into the half concrete and half grass break yard of undertow elementary. mr. muerto droned from the front of the room while the big red devil god thrummed in a seat wherever a girl sat, buzzing in thorny silence, murder hornets biding time.

the third graders were out on the yard. wrennie’s eyes drifted and caught on two girls playing with a rubber ball, tossing it back and forth to each other, bouncing it a specific number of times. a third girl came over, smaller, and tried to join, but the two biggers shut her out, turning the game into monkey in the middle.

wrennie watched, fascinated. one of the bigger girls dropped the ball, and the smaller girl, angry, grabbed it. she fled, and the two bigger girls chased.

the smaller girl sped across the yard, moving like lightning, straight to the massive white poplar tree in the middle of the field. she tossed the ball aside before reaching the trunk and scaled the branches as easy as a jungle gym. below her, the girls stopped to watch.

wrennie expected them to grab the ball and go back to their game of bounce, but they didn’t. they stared up into the tree. wrennie did, too. the girl scurried up the branches, high and then higher, moving as fast as on the ground, apparently unaware that no one was after her. or maybe, wrennie measured, she knew the secret truth: that they were always after her, even when it didn’t look like it, especially then. shhh. wrennie’s drift rocked and then rightened. a crowd gathered, slowly, around the perimeter of the tree, gawkers there to stare at the monkey girl as she climbed up the limbs of the long twisting white chested green leafed beast. she climbed until the branches obscured her, until all wrennie saw was a pink flash of shirt through the upper shelves.

as the crowd gathered, wrennie felt a premonition, an awful plunge, like something bad was about to happen. for a minute, the tree was silent, and then with a rustle of the branches, the girl dropped lightly onto the grass, casual and neat as you please, without a single scratch.

the crowd dispersed, and an agitated yard teacher blew her whistle, and the kids dispersed.

wrennie was captivated, staring at what the two bigger girls did once everyone left.

they let the little girl play with them.

a path to climb from being monkeyed to sharing a branch. as the devil blowed on her, wrennie anchored her thoughts to dreams that dripped and sloped and coasted to a safe-feeling bank.

5.

the next wednesday, miss wren stood at her post in the yard and stared into mr. muerto’s classroom. one of the biggest changes she couldn’t get over since she was a regular at undertow was how nice the girls were to each other, and especially to her, although she was an authority figure now, so that made sense.

the empty yard had a pleasant feeling to it, so long as miss wren kept away from the white poplar tree. twice, when she was alone, she had gone over to see if catty was there, but both times, though the tree felt cold and flooded miss wren’s bloodstreams with premonitions of dark things, the branches were empty. empty enough to make miss wren think she must have imagined catty and the bird.

miss wren decided to duck into the school to use the bathroom. she walked through the empty hallway and entered the girls’ locker room. she moved to the stalls at the end and as she sat on a toilet, she tried (and failed) not to remember all the awful things she suffered in that very room at the hands of so many of her former classmates, all of them girls. she sighed, swallowed sadness, and washed her hands. her face looked haggard, the rings under her eyes standing out like zebra trails, her arm up in its sling.

she moved back slowly through the hall, and just as she reached the door to the yard, a heavy blare punctured the air. the fire alarm. miss wren stepped into the yard and as soon as the door closed behind her, it opened again and students and teachers started filing out.

miss wren stood off to the side, watching the yard fill as the sound of the fire alarm (“drill! it’s just a drill!” a pretty young teacher announced to her second graders, most looking positively terrified) continued to ring. the classes coagulated within their grades, but as more kids poured out, they spilled over from the concrete section of the yard to the grassy field.

and then, as miss wren watched, the pretty young teacher led her class over to the white poplar tree. not all of her students, just the girls. a boy tried following her, but the teacher shook her head and pointed to the jungle gym, an angry look planted firm on her face. mr. muerto and his class stood by the door, but all eleven fourth grade girls gravitated to the grass and then the tree.

and then…

miss wren watched as every girl and woman on the field, student and teacher alike, made their way to the poplar tree, drawn to it as if by some invisible magnet that affected them only.

miss wren hated it. she hated it so much she couldn’t think. one thought kept knocking. it felt like a root of hatred. there were reasons. maybe even good ones.

6.

wrennie’s plan solidified later that week. she didn’t want to play ball with the mean girls in her grade, but she did want to make them quit their meanness. she only half-believed that was possible, but she was willing to try anything.

when thursday rolled around, mr. muerto dismissed his class for their weekly free period, and as the rest of the students ran outside, wrennie sat at her desk, undoing her braids slowly. she was usually glad for her one-on-one with mr. muerto, since they at least brought her time away from the big red devil god and its knocking knees (there were more than two).

but this time, when mr. muerto gave her his unsmiling attention and asked if she was ready to pick up where they left off, wrennie said sure but first that she had to get something from the yard really quick. she’d be right back. mr. muerto nodded, unsmiling.

as soon as she passed from the school into the yard, wrennie immediately saw the gleaming red eyes, zoning in on her like she was a deadly delicious.

but this time, wrennie wasn’t having it. she knew how to win them back; she saw how, earlier in the week. instead of letting the big red devil thing have its ruptured way with her, she sprinted, like the little girl had, directly for the popular tree, her long hair trailing in the wind behind her.

it seemed to work.

she heard her female classmates call out, “where’s gross gross going?” and “where you off to, pee-drinker?” and “get back here, loser!” and as she moved, the voices moved with her. she reached the poplar tree without interference and saw the limbs the small girl had climbed. wrennie didn’t hesitate. she started pulling herself up. it was easier than she thought, even though the branches grew farther apart the higher she got.

she climbed until she heard a soft cooing. a small bird roosted on an inner shelf of the tree. it was singing to her, hopping around. wrennie stopped long enough to see it had a broken wing, but she didn’t help. no one would help. the bird had to learn that.

wrennie climbed, moving higher and higher up the tree, and for the first time in a few horrible months, she felt like herself. not disassociating, not fleeing inside or turning her bullying girl classmates into a massive red devil, but a girl playing in a tree in her school yard. it was an incredible feeling, one that wrennie wanted to hold as long as she could. but it seeped out of her, air from a leaking tire, when she looked down and saw what the girls were doing.

7.

the fire drill kept ringing, but miss wren only had eyes for the white poplar tree and the female crowd around it. she looked for mrs. om, to help or at least instruct her, but mrs. om was in the second of four large circles of hand-holders surrounding the tree. two people over from mrs. om was principal mate, whose short grey bob was unmistakable. every single girl and woman in the school encircled the tree.

no boys did, though, and no male teachers either. they stared, all of them, transfixed, completely bewildered. mr. muerto walked over to mr. avicide, the fifth grade science teacher, and said something, gesturing with a shaking hand at the gathered girls.

but miss wren didn’t have time to consider what the boys made of the girls’ behavior. she walked over to the tree slowly, in a daze, unaware of her feet’s movement, drifting, for the first time in more than a decade. as she drew nearer, she heard their chanting, a familiar sound, one that reminded her of something she heard long ago, but when, and in what context?

8.

wrennie looked down from 2/3 of the way up the tree. all the girls in mr. muerto’s class were staring at her. they had grasped hands and were chanting. she strained her ears, and caught their words, which made her darken worse than the poplar’s sunless upper branches.

“co-ca co-la! bass-kit-ball! we won’t catch you! if you fall!”

wrennie started to sob. she felt like her body was rotting around her skeleton. she succeeded in climbing up there, all the way up, but all her success brought her was more failure. failure failure failure. even at this limitless height. of course trying to ape a third grader’s popularity stab blew up in her face. like everything else, wrennie wasn’t good enough. she wasn’t good. she wasn’t. she sucked at life. that she was good at. that she was.

“co-ca co-la! bass-kit-ball! we won’t catch you! if you fall!” the chant grew louder. but wrennie wasn’t listening to them. she was listening to her dreamy self disassociate. it wasn’t unpleasant; the only thing unpleasant was how familiar it was.

9.

as miss wren approached the four circles around the white poplar tree, the sounds of the fire alarm faded until they were replaced by a new chant, one she never heard, not recently, and certainly not back in fourth grade, although it sounded like it could have come from that cursed era of her life.

“winter! spring! summer! fall! year round! catty’s! seen by all!”

miss wren kept moving, unsure why, knowing only that she wanted to get a closer look at the women and girls chanting and maybe even land eyes on the dirty ghost in the tree again. the chant continued and grew louder and louder.

“winter! spring! summer! fall! year round! catty’s! missed by all!”

10.

up in the tree, in between her tears but deep within her drift, wrennie continued sobbing. she wasn’t, she was. she wasn’t, she was. but for the first time since its discovery, her drift failed her. her sobbing turned into a maniacal screaming as she grenaded down words, unaware she was doing so. “meanies! meanies! stop it! stop it all you! why are you so mean? why do you hate me so much?” she didn’t know if the girls below could hear her, but she was pretty sure, even if they could, that they wouldn’t do anything, and wouldn’t care. she continued crying and wiped her eyes, which made her grip on the branch even more slippery.

11.

as miss wren approached the outer circle around the tree (“winter! spring! summer! fall! year round! catty’s! hugged by all!”), it opened like arms waiting just for her. the second circle opened, too, and then the third and the fourth, and finally miss wren stood under the white poplar tree in the center of the field in the break yard of the undertow elementary school. she looked up.

catty stared down at her, as dirty and small and tree-like as miss wren remembered.

“but that’s not all you remember, dear, is it?” catty asked. the chanting stopped on a dime and the silence that hung after catty’s rough, knotted words filled the whole world.

miss wren didn’t answer, didn’t know how.

“yes, you do,” catty said. “you do know how to answer. and you do know how to remember. come on, dig deep. we love you here. all of us.”

miss wren stared into the eyeballs of the little girl in the tree. the girl stared back.

she racked her brain, and found she didn’t have to search too hard. she gasped.

catty nodded. “it’s all there, isn’t it?”

indeed it was. “but why?” miss wren’s voice barely carried.

catty gave her a look that miss wren recognized from all the times she gave it to her mother in second and third grade. “disassociate in life, disassociate in death. look.” catty touched her dark knotted hair and miss wren remembered, as wrennie, undoing the hair she normally kept in two long braids in mr. muerto’s class before running across the yard and climbing the tree.

catty lifted up her hair and miss wren saw the unnatural angle of her neck with its exposed jut of bone, shiny white jags breaking the skin. wren felt a poking on her own neck and touched it. the same jut of bone, the same break in her skin.

“come back, wrennie. come back.”

“what do you mean?” miss wren whispered.

“no more drift.”

“who are you?”

“we’re who stayed, my love. while you went on, thinking… oh, we don’t know, we’ll never know what sets you off, but we love that you wander! we just miss you. we miss you, wrennie, we love you, and we don’t want catty alone…”

“what do you mean?” miss wren whispered again. but now her question was rote, performative.

“stop performing, wrennie,” the girl in the tree whispered. “it’s us. it’s only us. can’t you hear it? we’re popular now. come back, honey. we’re popular. we really are. listen.”

miss wren listened. the chanting had started up again, as if on cue.

“winter! spring! summer! fall! year round! catty’s! loved by all!”

miss wren listened again, and found comfort in the chant, deep comfort, down in the airy canals where her bones once were. she started climbing the tree, making her way up the branches, to the spot where the ghost of her younger self sat, waiting, watching, eager to welcome her.

she reached herself and then, together, they were loved by all.

12.

mr. halott muerto stood in the yard with the boys of his fourth grade classroom, staring down the field. he was a serious no-non-senser, as he told his classes on the first day of school, writing it out on the whiteboard and underlining it thrice, but for once all sense, non and otherwise, had left him. he had watched the scene unfold, along with every male in the vicinity, all of them frozen like returning test cases. it only lasted for twenty seconds, and already he saw mrs. om come to herself, shaking like a dog drying off. she spoke to the girls beside her, and then, like that, they were all coming to, out of whatever held them, walking away from the old tree as if nothing happened, shaking occasionally like they were trying to throw off a nasty cold.

and then the fire drill was over and the classes were returning inside and mr. muerto shouted for his students to follow him and went in ahead. he checked that the room was safe and fire-free and stood at his post, in front of his large desk in the corner of the classroom.

when junie, always the first to return, ran in, he asked her why all of the women and girls had gathered around the poplar tree during the fire drill.

junie gave him a look he had privately named the lol dumbass. “around the tree? what do you mean, mr. m?”

mr. muerto surveyed her, but kept his stony composure, not saying another word. he wasn’t sure if she was testing him; he hadn’t seen much of an aptitude for humor in junie thus far.

his student filled the silence. “hey, have you seen miss wren? i wanted to show her my new sneakers.” she held up pink light-up shoes and turned and posed.

“miss wren?” mr. muerto’s face was impassive. “who’s that?”

it was junie’s turn to give him a non-senser look. but the rest of the class started to trickle in, and junie ran over to ani to tell her something, and as his fourth graders noisily took their seats, mr. muerto looked out the window, at the white poplar tree on the lawn.

he’d had a student once, catherine. she went by renny but spelled it like wren. he used to think about her a lot, but less lately. so many students had passed through his classroom over the years, but of course he remembered catherine. she was impossible to forget because of what happened in the tree, the tragedy of it, the quick burial that followed. but even before that, long before that, she had stood out. she told him once, at the very beginning of the school year, during their one-on-ones, that she wanted to be a teacher. just like him. everyone was nice to him, she said. everyone knew his name. teachers, catherine explained, were the most popular people in the whole school.

thank you so much for reading! if you liked this story, please consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription. also, liking this post and sharing it on substack does a lot!

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until next time, stay scary, my friends!

in 1975, two people in the pacific northwest decided that they were jesus and his father returned. they set about spreading this message by papering every public surface they could find with flyers about their revelation. on a sunday night in september, two hundred people gathered in the reception room of a local inn to hear them speak. whatever happened was transcendent enough that when the two strangers stood up at the end and said come with us, twenty people followed them into the dark, leaving behind their names, families, and jobs, the entire apparatus of being a person.

the two claimed to be godly beings, only they hadn’t come down from heaven.

they came from across the universe. in a craft. because heaven, in their telling, was a physical place embedded deep within outer space.

and god was an extra-terrestrial.

the two were not human; they were aliens dressed up in human costumes, cosmic prophets in biblical drag.

in other words, they were biblical aliens.

this is what roped in their followers.

if i was around when they did their recruiting, i would have probably joined up, but i was born too late for that, so instead i write about them and their beliefs, their codes and secrets, and the ripples beyond that.

aliens, gods, angels, and the cults of devotion that rise to serve them.

this is what i’ve been chasing with my short fiction, hybrid fiction, and auto-fiction since launching this newsletter two years ago.

welcome to biblically accurate aliens.

a biblically accurate alien is a being concerned with transcendence but also the coded ways that human progress and flourishing have always been tied to forces behind things, which we can’t always see but can all-too-often feel and even momentarily glimpse. it’s what i explore through my writings here.

you may have noticed the recent phenomenon of “biblically accurate angels.” over the last few years people have noticed that the angels we’re accustomed to seeing in pop culture – human beings with an ethereal peace to them and oversized wings coming off their backs – are nothing like the ones described in the book of ezekiel (and other places).

those angels most often look something like this.

or this.

and this.

i find these images inspiring as a horror writer who’s concerned with mystical realities and beings that don’t adhere to what we recognize in nature.

and i hope you do too. because they’re directing the next phase of this newsletter.

come with us.

we’re building a community of seekers.

we have an opportunity to do something really special together.

whether you’re a deep thinker obsessed with the nature of reality, a fellow macabre soul who can’t look away from horror, or just a writer trying to describe the world around you, then chances are you’ve been seeking direction on your own for quite some time. this life is notoriously lonely, especially for writers.

we’re better off doing it together.

i hope you’ll join us on this journey and consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $8 per month. you’ll get early access to select writings, exclusive content, and other perks i plan to announce soon.

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to those who’ve been reading along over the last two years and those who just discovered us today: thank you for being here. it means a lot. i can’t wait to see where all this will take us.

for the last several years, my writing has loosely focused on short stories in winter, novels in spring (including this year’s beauty, which i’ve been ignoring for the last few weeks), and autumns chasing liminal fiction and the kind of journaling that prioritizes recharge and reincarnation.

but in summer, i write everything. summer is for living, for enjoying and wandering, for biking and barbecuing, and it leads me to write all kinds of weird stuff, most of which i never show anyone, which at the deepest level is the kind of writing i aspire to do all the time. one day, maybe.

in summer, like the rest of the year, i do most of my work while blasting music from speakers set just off my writing desk.

the music matters, of course.

when i was younger, let’s say my late teens to mid-20s, i had a ritual where i’d annoint an album as my album of the summer. it was usually something i’d listened to a lot in the preceding winter and spring, and essentially it set the mood for the season. i’ve had some real winners over the years, some of my favorite albums still to this day, including up the bracket, the reminder, kid a, someone to take you home, the life pursuit, and even doja’s hot pink.

i get a real existential kick out of ritualizing summer, and i’m not the only one.

“the song of the summer1” is one of pop music’s last genuinely communal rituals, a designation handed down not by critics or streaming executives but through an incredible, invisible process that turns buzz and word-of-mouth into aural ubiquity in the form of open car windows, beach speakers, crowded bar patios, and convenience store radios all blasting the same thing, all the time.

in 2018, you couldn’t stroll down a sweaty manhattan sidewalk in june without drake’s “nice for what” hitting you from like three different directions. similarly, 2022 was the summer i became obsessed with bad bunny’s “tití me preguntó” because of its oxygen-like saturation as much as its sonic qualities, and 2024 had two expressions of this phenomenon, one in song form thanks to sabrina carpenter’s “espresso,” and the other in album form in my number one contemporary artist finally getting her due in the puke-green hyper-pop manic brilliance of the so-called “brat summer,” shout out my millennial lass from essex.

and then came last year.

what fascinated me about the summer of 2025 was the absence of any obvious heir to this throne. pop music was still thriving, of course, but there was no single album or song that seemed capable of capturing the mood. alex warren’s “ordinary” floated in as a boring-as-balls piano-led ballad more suited to quiet reflection than a block party, and the less said about morgan wallen the better. bieber’s new shit was okay, but it came and went without much of a cultural dent.

nothing reached the omnipresence of “espresso,” “not like us,” or “360,” let alone the kind of earlier summer monocultures defined by “call me maybe,” “crazy in love,” “despacito,” or “the thong song,” probably my all-time favorite song of summer, because age 12 in the brand new millennium was a hell of a time to learn about musical overdosing and underwear that doesn’t cover the buttcheeks so panty lines aren’t visible from behind.

the song of the summer has always required a certain baseline of joy and hope, a collective willingness to surrender to pleasure for three and a half minutes at a time.

last summer felt different.

there was a darkness over america, a feeling like a massive stormcloud was gathering and we would all soon drown in the downpour because all the umbrellas were being purchased by private equity, because anything that can be monetized in our current national nightmare damn well will, either by you, right now, if you’re opportunistic and cutthroat enough, or by someone else if you’re not.

the vibes in this place are still not great, but i do think we’re in a spot where we deserve an album for the best calendar season.

and i enthusiastically nominate olivia rodrigo’s new album, you seem so pretty for a girl so in love, as the sound of summer, 2026 edition.

i love olivia.

her first two albums are solid gold and i’ve written more than half a dozen poems inspired by different lyrics of hers. it’s not just because she’s exceptional and beautiful and sings like an angel and kicks her platform boots across the stage like a dancing demon, but also because she writes so damn well.

i’ve been hooked since her video for “drop dead” came out in april.

if you haven’t seen it, watch it right now. at the 1:20 mark, get ready for an explosion of joy, enthusiasm, and fun — everything you want in a summer anthem.

watching the video feels like dancing through the halls of versailles with her.

and then came her video for “the cure,” which makes me want to write a horror story starring the twisted nurse character she portrays in it.

i love the song, the lyrics, the video, the vibe, the girl.

i just listened to the album in full, twice, back to back.

and boys, i was not disappointed.

this is the summer of olivia.

who else is with me?

if you liked this post, you might also like this one, which is also about writing and music and obsessions.

author’s note: i like writing all in lowercase. i’m gonna keep it up for the time being. i can’t imagine every piece will be written like this, but this one and the next one will. also, this post contains spoiler alerts for the film in question.

the first novel i ever wrote had a portal in it, and that’s part of why it never sold.

it was 2016. i was in grad school in downtown manhattan, working on a middle-grade adventure story i called the book room at the end of the third floor. the story was naive, mystical, book-obsessed, and very jewish, not unlike its author, and overall probably more indebted to my inspirations than anything original i pulled out of the ole storage shed. your typical copy and paste first attempt at a novel instead of something genuine and self-insisting.

i turned it in as my thesis and two weeks after graduation i put it out on query, excited and terrified and ready for the world.

not long after i signed with an agent, an editorial-minded gusher named natalie. she was at a boutique shop not in new york, and i knew enough from my time interning at writers house on 26th and broadway and houghton mifflin harcourt on 16th and park that entrance to the storied1 halls of publishing was and is typically grounded in an nyc address.

but natalie had just sold a ya novel by a tv writer on a show i didn’t watch but saw ads for all over, which raised her stock in my eyes. plus, she liked my story! at the time that was (and honestly still is) the biggest sell. for a few months it felt like the wheels were pulling up and the wings were spreading and the sky was lowering down to meet me.

it wasn’t. the book never sold, for a bunch of reasons, and after six months out on submission the rejections started to pile up.

here are a few of them.

remember, these are ten years old at this point.

similarity to other books is a reason editors say no.

this was a weird rejection considering the editor didn’t even get my gender right or even the name of my manuscript. it’s great when you can tell they actually read it, huh?

these are just a few. i got a lot of rejections for that book. overall, they clustered around a few problems with my manuscript. the most common was my narrative voice, but others turned it down on the claim that it was a market-timing issue, or they didn’t “connect” with the story, or i showed instead of telling, or slow pacing — one alone would hurt a thin-skinned weenie like myself, but cumulatively they all ganged up to thoroughly shatter my 27-year-old heart to pieces.

all of this is pretty standard for new writers trying to get through the door2.

although i will say, reactions like this one, which i got from my bestie in 2019, totally outweigh the editors, long term.

or this, which is hanging on the wall of my dad’s office in teaneck.

but mostly it was rejections. one really stuck out, the one that i still think about from time to time. it was from an editor who cited that she liked the book “but elie’s use of the portal element felt too familiar and contrived.”

man, that one word, “contrived.” crazy how such a meaningless word in one context can completely rob your self-esteem in another. those two syllables fogged up my mind for months afterward.

it’s kind of odd. i’ve looked for that email to paste it directly into this post, but i can’t find it anywhere. it doesn’t seem to be in my gmail at all. i remember getting it back in the day because of how much it stung, but also because i copy-and-pasted it verbatim into the monthly microsoft word document i’ve rotated on my desktop since 2013. which is where i found it for this piece.

in the editor’s defense (why am i defending an editor who rejected me?), the portal i used in the book room at the end of the third floor was extremely basic. the main character’s uncle, a rabbinical-looking sort, keeps a library of old jewish mystical texts in his secret book room and knows how to read certain ones in certain ways so that passageways open in them into the strange, dangerous places the books describe.

books are portals. it’s true, if trite.

books are portals. there are many examples of this on the shelves of children’s literature, including inkheart by cornelia funke, the neverending story by michael ende, and the magic tree house books by mary pope osborne, but i was mostly cribbing a darker kids story i’d read as an hmh intern.

it was called the forbidden library (bad title for a book) and was written by a man named django wexler (good title for an author).

my slant on his story was i guess the slant i bring to most things i write: judaism, mysticism, and dark forces we can’t see “behind things.” i thought my take was cool and original, but the gatekeepers didn’t agree.

i’ve been thinking a lot about that “contrived” rejection and what makes portal horror work after attending an advance screening of kane parsons' BACKROOMS (2026) two weeks ago.

i should say up front that i’m a huge fan of the original backrooms creepypasta, the eerie 4chan post that spawned the phenomenon that spawned the film. i have been for years. it’s an almost perfect premise for any number of horror stories: an infinite space of twisted psychological reflection and mangled “memories” of a reality that looks for the most part like the most forgettable human interior, a mid-90s office. and what occupies this extra-dimensional (or is it supra-dimensional) space? terrors that can’t be imagined because they do not exist outside.

the idea of the backrooms lands for three main reasons: 1) liminal spaces are incredible and offer an ambient form of human-created but human-absent horror that jump scares and psychological terror cannot touch, 2) i love seeing how a hivemind, in this case the internet, can create a mythos that’s genuinely deserving of the term phenomenon, not unlike slender man3, 3) there’s something jewishly mystical about liminality, the things occupying the in-between spaces, which is how and when the dark things were created, according to pirkei avot 5:6, and you know i’m all about that mad thumping bass.

i even wrote a fanfic piece in these same pages almost exactly a year ago.

that post is the reason a24’s press team invited me to the screening last month. it was fun, a creepy movie in a room full of writers and journalists4, plus a q&a afterward with the director and main actor.

my friend rachel and i got there just before it started, which meant we had to sit in the second row from the screen, which was a little close for viewing but the right distance for the q&a afterward.

the movie was striking, especially its scenes inside the backrooms, but not without its flaws, which in my opinion was pretty much everything that occurred outside the infinite hallways: the dialogue (rank), how they told the mc’s backstory (snooze), the way they lured the psychiatrist into the backrooms (wtf kind of breach was that?), the youtube-effective cut-scare of the final scene that read small-minded on the big screen (i liked it tho), how the ending seemed to function more as a setup for sequels instead of a satisfying resolution for the arcs of either of the two characters we just spent 80 minutes hanging out with. you know, the things that exist in a film outside the virality of its subject matter.

but most of all, i took issue with BACKROOMS’ underdeveloped use of the portal.

some might even call it “contrived.”

i absolutely hated the scenes of the characters passing through the wall and into the backrooms, a familiar gesture to anyone who has seen poltergeist (1982), a nightmare on elm street (1984), the matrix (1999), stargate (1994) and a thousand knock-offs.

it was bad filmmaking, really took me out, the kind of stick-your-hand-through-the-wall shtick that felt dated even in the 90s, when it was usually a guy shoving his arm through a painted spandex sheet.

i don’t love the original method of accessing the backrooms either, which the lore states is by randomly “no-clipping” into it.

no-clipping, for those who don’t know, and that was a thousand percent me when i first found the backrooms, is video game-speak for accessing other levels of a game by breaking through borders in the design, essentially slipping instantaneously from one place to another, with little control over how or when you do it.

i don’t like that you get into the backrooms by no-clipping, because the best portal stories give the character a reason to be there: alice chases a rabbit down a hole, lucy backs into a wardrobe to hide, harry pushes his trolley through the wall at platform nine and three-quarters to catch his train.

there’s an agency in all these that the backrooms doesn’t have, but i accept that this mostly came from video game culture, so i take it as it is.

in his original video, which the movie was ultimately adapted from, kane parsons stays loyal to the lore. check out the way he does the no-clipping.

a cameraman is filming a short with his friends, and as he backs up for a wider-angle shot, he bumps up against the walls of reality and no-clips into the backrooms. sudden, mysterious, and strange.

but unfortunately, the movie did away with this. instead of no-clipping, the mystery of accessing the backrooms is introduced in the form of electric paneling (??). early into the film, an electrician visits captain clark’s ottoman empire, the furniture store where the story unfolds, and checks the distribution board. inside, he finds three red breaker switches installed at an odd angle that do not connect to anything inside the store. the main character flips these, the backrooms appear, and the story progresses.

this was the moment in the theater i started to frown.

i want to be precise about why, because “they changed the lore” is a fanboy complaint and i’m trying to make a craft one.

no-clipping is load-bearing. it isn’t a way into the backrooms so much as a claim about reality itself, that the world is rendered, its solidity a planned feature rather than a fact, there’s a void waiting behind the drywall of everything. the dread is metaphysical and it’s everywhere, all the time, underneath every floor you’ve ever trusted, behind every wall you can’t walk through. you don’t find the door. the floor just stops holding you. that’s the whole horror: there was never a threshold, and you’re there, in the backrooms, for reasons you’ll never know.

but breaker switches are a gadget, and a gadget does three fatal things to a portal.

first, it localizes the horror. the terror of the backrooms is that the door is potentially under your feet right now. a breaker box puts the door in one place — a specific panel in a specific store. the infinite becomes incredibly finite in the form of captain clark’s ottoman empire.

second, and worse, the breaker implies an installer. somebody mounted those switches. somebody ran that wiring to nothing on purpose. and that breaks the conceit that the backrooms, and the creatures it creates, can’t access the real world, our world.

that’s a big world-building whiff.

the yellow rooms aren’t scary because someone built them. they’re scary because it feels like no one did, but they exist anyway.

third, the breakers give the portal an off-switch. the moment a door has a mechanism, it has a reverse. you can picture flipping the breakers back, which i guess would shut off access to the backrooms. the dread of no-clipping is that there’s no documented way back, because there was no documented way in — you were just living your life and happened to wander close to a “thin place” and slipped through. you can’t un-fall through a switch.

but here’s what actually nags at me, the part that loops back to my own dead novel sitting in the cloud somewhere.

those three switches — angled wrong, wired to nothing, discovered by a random electrician at the exact moment the plot needs a door — are a deus ex machina: a device bolted onto the story from outside, with no reason to exist except to move it forward, shown once and never mentioned again.

a portal has to earn the world on the other side. it should be foundational to the story, not something you reach for when you hit a corner and need an out.

which is, almost exactly, what an editor told me about my own portal ten years ago.

she said it felt contrived.

for a decade i heard that as unoriginal, that she was calling me a copycat. it took sitting in that theater watching someone else’s door fail to understand she meant something worse, and far more useful.

all fiction is contrived; the word only means devised, invented, made. she wasn’t accusing me of inventing a portal, everyone does that. she was telling me that she could see me doing it. the seams were visible. the hand reaching for the door was in the frame.

a contrived portal is one whose wiring shows. mine did that, and so do three red switches angled wrong in a furniture store.

the more wiring you show, i realize, the harder it is to believe in the darkness behind your door.

and with horror, that can be a fatal contrivance.

thanks for reading! if you liked this post, please consider sharing or even just hearting this — it makes a difference and means a lot. appreciate you ♡

if you’re curious, you can read a brief review of my unpublished novel, the book room at the end of the third floor, here.

also, if you liked this piece, the film BACKROOMS (2026), or liminal horror generally, you should check out my story “art swap” from two years ago. it delves directly into an infinite breathing space that riffs on elements of the so-called “compound.” it’s good shit, check it out.

i have a love/hate relationship with my craft, which is creative writing, for a whole bunch of reasons, but without getting into the depths of them (which is essentially i have a love/hate relationship with myself and my own existence, and there are a number of divisions that fall along these fault lines), it’s basically because i love the act of writing, every single aspect of it, when it’s the kind that’s clearly tethered to a point of inspiration both alive and giving1, but i absolutely hate everything that follows the writing of a story to its actual existence in the world. in other words i loved being in the womb, but the rest of this shitshow i’m not sold on.

i guess i’m fuming in this particular way at this particular moment of time for a triad of reasons: one, another fellowship let-down, two, the book we’re out with isn’t selling, and three, i’m working to “rebrand” this newsletter, which makes me think hard about writing for its own sake versus writing for an audience versus writing for money, and i don’t like thinking that so hard about that all the time?

let’s go thru them.

so a fellowship rejected u? the fuck? so what?

no, that’s a good point. it’s important to remember, especially as an artist, that few things are ever as personal as they always feel, every single time, and unless ur really hot, no one is thinking of u or watching u the way u think they are2.

basically i applied with “jewish horror” to a cool sounding art fellowship loosely affiliated with an institution in the american northeast, and i wasn’t accepted. that’s it. the rejection was totally unremarkable, a bit formulaic in its phrasing (probably ai), and normally it’s a shrug and slight burn and onto-the-next-one, one battle after another, but this rejection was stapled too close to the back of a few others, all of them “jewish horror” related, and that’s been making me reconsider the angle and focus (and purpose?) of this newsletter (hence my purported rebrand) and my writing in general (ain’t no rebranding that). i guess i’ve been feeling the nasty little inverse of the excitement writers usually feel when they locate their “beat'“ or “niche,” an exciting and life-affirming full-body takeover, which is often followed by a fruitful period of carving and claiming. what u less often hear about is what happens when u discover why ur niche is a niche.

it’s because no one cares about it.

it’s crazy to me that “jewish horror” could be a niche no one cares about, but i’m convinced there will never be an end to the flow of crazy in conscious reality, especially with regards to jewish things, especially especially with regard to how those things are perceived by non-jewish outsiders. i hope no “goyim” are reading this.

i guess that’s what i’ve been trying to do with this. carve out my niche of “jewish horror” — with its attendant shaydim, golems, devekas, reincarnations, and ghost minyans — and i’ve been so into what i’m working on as i work on it that the eventual reception (or none thereof) cuts extra deep when it comes, especially as the external andd expected rejections keep piling up.

it’s not entirely true that none of u are into what i’m writing. the epstein pieces do pretty well, but man that doesn’t say shit about me except i’m as glued to true crime rot and elite corruption and societal ruin as the next person. i don’t know if i could ever write purely epstein-shaded fiction3 or whatever simply “does well,” and that’s probably because as an artist i’m an appendage to my own taste. i used to think this was a good thing, the way it should be, that good art comes from good artists chasing ideas without concern for the audience, but i also used to think that good triumphed over evil, and come on boys, evil trumps good, 45 times out of 47. i think we can all see that.

it’s possible i’m a shitty artist or a bad writer, but i don’t think that’s the case. i definitely think i’m “unlucky,” which leads into my second complaint.

why isn’t the book selling?

man, i don’t fucking know, but it’s a place i’ve been before and i don’t much like it.

to catch up those of u who don’t know (and that would be pretty much of all u, since i don’t usually write this directly about the real things going on under the hood), i’m currently working with a literary agent to sell a book of mine. it’s not exactly a book of mine, more an anthology of “jewish horror” short stories that i’ll be editing.

it came about last autumn. i was able, in these pages, to interview a writer i’ve always loved and who i grew up reading, and the interview was great altho i won’t link to it here because that’s not the point, but shortly after it ran, i reached out to the writer and asked if he would contribute a story for a book of “jewish horror stories'“ i was editing (no such book existed at the time). he declined writing a new story, but instead offered to write the book’s introduction. this lit a fire under the project, and i reached out to a few agent friends i know from struggling in the field, and they each suggested a few peers to approach for representation. i reached out to maybe four of them, all of the emails prominently mentioning the attachment of the big name author, and three expressed interest. i signed with the one who had sold the most short horror books after a phone call where we didn’t seem to hate each other. i called my book “between the suns,” taking the name from the mishna that states when and how the dark things in the jewish universe were first created4, and put together an outline, while he worked on a list of contributors, and then he reached out to their agents. once we got about fourteen contemporary jewish speculative writers together, he showed me his pitch list and then sent it out. this was last december.

silence, which is expected, until about a month ago, when he said he had a bite, our first one. an editor at a very cool sounding imprint seemed very into it. for weeks, nothing, and then my agent sent over an extremely generic rejection.

cue the usual cliches. there’s plenty of fish in the sea, all u need is one, it’s a numbers game, etc. all the things people say in situations, like dating, like writing, where rejection is woven into the fabric of its form.

but it hurts extra because this is the 4th agent in 10 years that i’ve had submit a manuscript of mine for consideration into the hallowed halls of traditional publishing. the first 3 agents are a combined 0-3. i’d kill to bat .250, but after all this, a .000 might really take me out.

i think it might be the niche. all of my projects that haven’t sold have been weird and original and contained some measure of “jewish horror.” if i can’t get an agent to sell a book on the strength of my own writing, that’s one thing, but if i can attach one of the biggest names in the game and that still doesn’t move the needle, it means something else, and to me that something else is actually two things: one, i’m super fucking unlucky, and two (a subset of one), “jewish horror” as a niche is just not it.

what else am i supposed to think? am i delusional and is my writing really, in fact, crap? again, it’s possible, but i don’t think that’s it.

which brings me to my third point.

something about a rebrand?

yes, exactly. but also, man i don’t know. between feelings of “no one’s asking for this,” “no one wants this,” “no one is into the weird shit ur into,” i get small, short bursts of excitement for what’s possible and what can come into being between my fingers and these pages.

substack seems like a place where real people gather to share things they’ve written and to read things by other writers, and that’s great, but then there are mornings, like today, when my enthusiasm gets knifed, when i get emails like this one, which is in response to a question i asked about the eligibility of a substack-centered project for another fellowship i’ve been eyeing:

Hi Elie

It’s so nice to hear from you! It’s great to hear that you are doing the writerly work and revising and experimenting with your formats.

That said we are definitely not considering Substacks, no matter the format. The team thought about this directly in our prep period - this is not our first inquiry of this sort. We had several sincerely beautiful applications from Substack writers last cycle, (one of whom described his project very much like yours actually, as a cross-format project incorporating audio and video.) We were a bit heartbroken to say no to these folks because they had great ideas and we all enjoy Substacks and understand why they’re valuable.

DSL is really interested in mass media forms with not just strong storytelling potential but also sizeable audiences. This is why we take more applicants on the Youtube/IG side than the podcast side - we know from our advisors that the podcast landscape is oversized, discovery is chaotic and difficult for creators, and distribution funding is falling apart. Substack is in the same universe. The discovery problem is big and the market for them is niche. There’s no path to sudden virality like there is for anyone on TikTok, nor to collabs like there is on IG or YT.

That doesn’t mean that Substacks don’t take off and have big impacts all the time! I myself subscribe to probably a dozen and engage deeply with two. But this fellowship is focused on straightforward A/V storytelling - I suspect this year we’ll take even fewer podcasts than last year. It’s a huge bummer for me as an avid podcast listener.

I am sorry to disappoint you with this. I know you’re a committed and talented writer!

i want to focus on this part from the third paragraph.

This is why we take more applicants on the Youtube/IG side than the podcast side - we know from our advisors that the podcast landscape is oversized, discovery is chaotic and difficult for creators, and distribution funding is falling apart. Substack is in the same universe. The discovery problem is big and the market for them is niche. There’s no path to sudden virality like there is for anyone on TikTok, nor to collabs like there is on IG or YT.

substack, according to the limited scope and taste of a single artistic fellowship director, is not a good source for easy discovery or taking off, unlike instagram or youtube. is this true? i don’t know, i’m not big on any of these platforms, but regardless, i’m capable of understanding that this particular fellowship is prioritizing the ease of finding an audience a lot more than the art. i guess that’s commerce and smart investment thinking? i hate that it’s reality, and i’m very well-experienced in hating reality.

but it also makes me wonder if the “community” i’m trying to find on here is on here, whether it’s built around taste alignment (the purest reason), an eventual book deal (a little more crass, but people w/lots of subscribers sell books more easily), or just straight up money (hey guys! give me ur dollars so i can write whiny shit like this once or twice a week!).

how do i find my readers?

are they even out there?

am i typing into a void?

and if i am, is that so bad?

it’s fun to kvetch at least.

thanks for reading, if u made it this far.

In a way, it’s been freeing to put up reflexive, quickly churned fiction without thinking about what people like. And I’ve gotten some cool stuff out. A folk-horror story about a mohel and the offer made to him by a shäyd-scǔūűtler of the highest order. A forensic walk-through of Jeffrey Epstein’s E. 71 (IL.E) townhouse. An invented Wikipedia entry for a fictional snack-food billionaire and his particularly fucked brand of childhood trauma. And on and on. Other cool detours along the way: I got to interview my favorite childhood writer and reconnect with an old writer friend about their incredible alien book. Fiction, no less.

Some of you have been here for all of it, while others came along on the recommendation of other newsletters. Some of you signed up because of one specific angle (I’m looking at those of you who came over for Epstein content) and stayed even though the next one was nothing like it. You have been, as the great scholar of mysticism Tembade Henchqueth would put it, “the beads of perspiration that make the whole petal flower.” And I am beyond grateful.

But lately I’ve been considering a change.

I want to put more thought and effort into this endeavor, not only because it’s my primary writing source these days, but also, more importantly, because it’s fun.

I love this shit. It’s a life for me where you can roll out of bed, feed the cat, stare into space at the Jack of Hearts for a few, put on some music, make a cup of coffee, take your no-sad meds, and plop down in front of the screen to let the words pour forth (and not just the words, but the ideas!), shaping them into the sentences that tell the stories with all the feelings and failures and victories of being a person in a specific kind of world (this one) with an infinite number of scenarios and conflicts (these).

I love writing. I love telling stories. And I don’t think I suck at it.

And so I’m going to shake things up. I would love your thoughts and feedback, since that can and will totally shape the direction I take this thing.

WHAT’S THE CHANGE?

First of all, I don’t think “Hebrew Horror” is the best name for what I’m trying to do here. For sure, I’ve been trying to carve out a niche in the Jewish horror space, and I’ve arguably gotten somewhere, i.e. signing with a quality agent who’s currently shopping an anthology of Jewish horror on my behalf, but the scope I’m pointing is much broader.

Overall, the vibe and mood of what I’m trying to do here is closer to what the Heaven’s Gate cult preached regarding the cloud that followed the Israelites in the Biblical story of Exodus (13:21–22). There it states that God went before the children of Israel “in a pillar of cloud by day, to guide the way, and a pillar of fire by night, to give them light1.”

The two leaders of the cult determined that the “cloud” and “fire” were in fact spacecrafts, but were referred to as such because the people at the time didn’t have the words for such technologically marvelous alien vehicles2.

A single object that appears as a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, one that hovers over the camp, and is clearly under divine control. Could be God, could be a UFO. Either way, it is that which it is: a transcendent being capable of striking awe into highly evolved and well-organized apes, i.e. us.

It’s a slant on the idea of Biblically accurate angels.

Only it’s aliens.

I love that image, that idea.

Biblically accurate aliens.

That could be the new name for this. Maybe I’d make it singular.

Biblically Accurate Alien.

I guess that would make it refer to me.

But I also love the word Ezekielien, especially since the concept of “Biblically accurate angels” traces back to the first chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, and so another idea for a rebrand is Ezekielien Alien.

Ezekielien Alien.

I like this one because it speaks to the mood of this newsletter, but also because it hides my name in the two words (Elie L.), which I could probably highlight in a new logo.

Ezekielien Alien.3

Another name that captures a similar atmosphere is Chariot Visions.

Chariot Visions.

It’s cool. I like this one. A friend suggested it.

Other ideas, not necessarily for names, but more for info and vibes:

L8ER SK8ER
(the name of my book about sk8ing 8liens)

Writing in 2nd Person
(because all my “writing” pieces, see below, will be written in second person)

True Crime Fiction
(that’s the genre of my Epstein pieces) (or maybe it’s rpf)

Conspiracies & Heresies
(this captures the Epstein angle + the Jewish horror)

Hebrew Horror (why change at all?) (because dude, you gotta)

Dark Quarters (goin’ forward by lookin’ back?) (nah)

I’d love to hear what you think. If you like any of these or if you have your own ideas, please comment them below. Let’s build something weird together.

WHAT ELSE?

Beyond the name and branding, I think I’m going to undertake a more thought-out publishing schedule.

I have too many ideas. Like the rebbe wrote in 1965, “I need a steam shovel, mama, to keep away the dead / I need a dump truck, baby, to unload my head.”

In the effective pursuit of this unloading (of both the dead and my cluttered stories), I’m going to break up my posts into one of four categories: Jewish horror (the Hebrew Horror angle + Epstein shit), aliens & miscellaneous horror (Biblically accurate aliens + YouTube predators meeting grisly ends, etc.), on writing (pieces like “How To Write (A Manual for Myself),” and a serial (ongoing longer works).

Or, in acronym form, since I am a huge shark lover and accomplished word condenser, JAWS.

J   —> Jewish horror
  A  —> Aliens, etc
    W —> on Writing
       S   —> Serial fiction

For the serial fiction, I’m thinking of writing my way through more of “My Mom’s Notebook of the 36 Hidden Holy Ones: Chapter One” because auto-fiction is fun and less cringey than memoir. I published the first part last fall and by every metric I can find, chapter one is the most-read thing I’ve put up here, in terms of email opens4. It’s also, as the title promises, one chapter of a larger work. And so starting very soon, I’ll introduce bit-by-bit a new hidden holy one, a new entry transcribed from the notebook, until we hit all thirty-six.

WHY NOW?

Why not now?5

Also, the approach of summer seems like a good time to embark on large structural changes. I don’t know if I would have the seasonal stamina to tackle this once the northeast weather dips cold again.

WHY ME?

Who am I? Why do I have the chutzpah to believe that anyone — for example, you — would want to read this, or anything else some schmohawk from New Jersey (although I tell people New York) has to say? Especially if it’s made up?6

The answer is simple: I am interesting, I have stories to tell, and I fucking love to write.

It's the same test you should bring to anything you read, watch, or give your attention to.

Is the creator interesting?

Do they have stories to tell?

Are they fucking lit about writing?

It’s not a brag, by the way. It’s self knowledge. I know that I’m interesting, I know that I can captivate people (not everyone, but enough of them7) with stories I either retell (like you) or pull out of thin air (like you).

It’s important, before you start writing your own big thing, to consider that.

Are you interesting?

Do you like telling stories? To yourself, friends, whoever?

Do you fucking slide across the surface of the world, scissors on wrapping paper, when you reach that point in the writing where the words are you and you are the words but at the same time it’s also this new third thing, lit up and sparking like middle-of-the-night alien lights?

Something to consider.

SHOULD YOU PAY?

If you want to, sure. It would definitely help with my self-esteem and productivity if you felt like my writing was worthy of support.

Subscribe now

But of course, you don’t have to. I’m just glad if you lend me your eyes for a few minutes every week.

88% of my writing will stay free. Paid subscribers will get rewards in the form of bespoke notebooks that are in vibe with them, their writing style, and this whole thing.

If my work has meant something to you, and you want to support independent artists instead of just funneling money into the Corporate Art Bag TM8 (which I do as much as anyone), this is the moment to upgrade your subscription. It is, plainly, how this newsletter becomes what I dream it can be.

Either way, I’m not going to stop doing this, and will probably only get more annoying with my writings.

OKAY, WE GET IT. YEESH. ANYTHING ELSE?

Yeah, one more thing.

I have spent 2.5 years basically writing into a quiet room. Like I mentioned at the outset, I’ve put zero energy into being found, no Notes, no cross-posts, no promotion of any kind. The audience I have, is either because you know me IRL and like me or because the writing earned your eyes. I don’t take either for granted. I’m going to be more visible from here on out9. I plan to post more Notes and try to be more in conversation with the other writers working in my strange overlap. There’s more of us than you think. I am also looking to co-post with other Substackers — if you’re interested, please reach out.

And again, if you have any thoughts or reactions about any of this — and especially if you have a preference for a name in the rebrand — comment it below. It would be astonishingly helpful.

Smash the heart while you’re at it — that helps more than you think.

Big changes, soon.

Until next time. Stay scary, my friends.

BREAKING: SHOTS FIRED INSIDE CONGRESSMAN’S RESIDENCE IN NORTHWEST D.C.

By The Assembled Press (Staff and Wire Reports)

WASHINGTON — Gunshots were heard moments after a man entered a congressman’s home in northwest Washington on Wednesday morning, prompting a large law enforcement response that closed two blocks in the residential area.

The congressman, whose identity is being withheld pending further developments, was inside his Georgetown residence when the gunman arrived around 10:40 a.m., according to authorities. As of Wednesday afternoon, neither the lawmaker nor the suspect had left the property.

Two witnesses said the man was carrying a black nylon case when he walked to the front of the home and was let inside without incident.

Capitol Police, Metropolitan Police and federal agents arrived within minutes and established a perimeter around the residence. Law enforcement has not confirmed any communication with people inside the home, and no additional shots have been reported.

Authorities declined to discuss the threat level or provide details about those inside.

The incident remains ongoing and we will provide updates as they come.

Note: The following message was emailed to the family members of Bradley Hennigan approximately ten minutes before he approached the home of Congressman Bud Crinchley (D-MO) in Washington, DC.

To my fellow citizens, to the watching world, and to anyone who may find this document in the aftermath of the events now unfolding:

I write to you today not as an extremist, not as an agitator, but as a man who has chosen — freely, soberly, and with a full heart — to take a stand.

The stand I am taking is against the United States in the form of one of its elected representatives.

I am taking this stand at his residential home, rather than his office, because I believe with every fiber of my being that the democratic process begins at the doorstep, and that no American should be able to do what they want just because they are rich and hold high office.

And for another reason, too.

The gutters of our nation are clogged.

This is not a metaphor, although it is also a metaphor.

Our nation is stuck, completely clogged, and I am one of the many needed plumbers.

It is for this reason that I have chosen to bring my message directly to the seat of power.

Door-to-door outreach (with a little spray of gunpowder) is the oldest and purest form of civic engagement in the American tradition.

When I approached the home of a United States official this morning, I did so in the spirit of Jefferson, of Lincoln, of every American who has ever believed that the conversation between the governed and the governing must remain open and two-way, and with our American instruments of disagreement in easy reach.

I anticipate a number of objections to my actions, and I wish to address them here, in the interest of transparency.

Objection: Violence is not the answer.

Response: I tried the other ways. I protested. Marched. I have voted in every election since I was nineteen. I have attended four local town halls. I saw where talk leads and how it dies on the vine of an ever-shifting news cycle mechanism that’s intended to do just that.

Objection: There are proper channels for civic engagement.

Response: I have used the proper channels. They fucking suck I have spoken to both of my senators and have written letters to more congressmen than I can count. If you don’t flash money or fire in their faces, no one cares.

Objection: This is not the time.

Response: There is never a time. Which is why I have brought time with me. The time is now.

Objection: You are scaring people.

Response: To live in America today is to be scared. I am simply redirecting that fear toward a productive end, even if many of you disagree.

Objection: You are alone.

Response: I am alone in the way the founders were alone. I am alone in the way every American is alone, in his car, at the regional office, at the Denny’s on Route 9 after the early crowd shuffles out. I am alone the way those died in the towers on a dark Tuesday were alone. The aloneness is the point. The aloneness is my platform and my finger is the trigger.

Objection: This won’t fix the problem.

Response: No, but it will get them talking.

I want to be clear that I bear no ill will toward my target. It’s personal, sure, but only in the way he is meant to “personally” represent the people of this disastrous doomed nation.

He let them down and he let me down. The difference is I did something.

I bear no ill will toward the Capitol Police, the Metropolitan Police, federal agents, or those who will be imacted negatively from the fallout of my choices.

I am here because I believe in something.

I am here because I have driven past this hous for six months and looked up, every time, listening to the latest miseries coming from the clown circus on the radio presenting as the “news” and thinking: somebody should do something.

I am that somebody. The somebody, in the end, is always you.

This country is so fucked. My shitty time on the rusty American ride has taught me that money is the only thing. Prison, too, but I hope to avoid that one.

American freedom is the choice to be miserable while shining the boots of those who robbed you and shouting frothily at the scapegoats who did you no harm.

Either you are born rich or you get unbelievably lucky. The rest of us shitheels are forced to live our lives as deadened wage slaves desperately choosing between paying the rent (because we’ll never own our own home) or taking care of a dead tooth, a broken arm, or one of other many small casualties of being human, which our greatest of countries does not allow for without picking your pocket.

I am done with this shitshow and I want out.

In closing, I would like to mention the people who made today possible.

My mother, who told me when I was a boy, that I could be anything I wanted, and who will, I imagine, be receiving a phone call shortly.

My father, who died when I was six, and who would have had something to say about all this.

I don’t know what he would have said.

I am trying, as I write, to imagine it, but I can’t get his voice right anymore.

This is one of the ways I know my time is up.

There’s my sister, Rebecca, who stopped responding to my texts in February.

I don’t blame you, Becca. Those texts were strange. I see now that they were a reason for concern, but only if you’re thinking with your brain on tint.

I want you to know that I read every message you ever sent me, including the mean ones, including the ones that were just a thumbs up.

I am sorry that what I became made you stop sending them.

I want to thank the woman at the Allstate office just across the Potomac, whose name I never learned, who asked me a month ago if I was doing okay and actually waited for the answer.

She was the only one who ever wanted to know.

A total and complete stranger.

And I lied to her. I said I was doing great.

I’ve thought about that lie every day since.

If she’s reading this, I would like her to know that the answer is no.

The answer has been no for a long time.

I am not doing okay.

I am not ddoing alright.

I am not doing great.

I will soon be better.

It’s nearly time.

I dedicate my act to the American individual in all his unguttered glory.

You don’t have to live like this. If you do, it’s your choice. Choose better.

Author’s note: You’re about to read the censored version of this story. All the spiciest parts are redacted. The full text, in its shameless X-rated entirety (i.e. lots of sex involving consensual choking) is reserved for paying subscribers.

If you’d like to read the uncensored version, which I recommend for the full experience, please consider upgrading your subscription. You’ll be supporting a horndog writer with too much to say and not enough time to say it all.

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“I feel like I know so many parts of you. And now, I will know all of them.”
—Carmen Maria Machado, The Husband Stitch

1.

The boy met the girl at a party during his last semester of college. He spied her in the less-crowded kitchen when he went in to grab some pretzels. She was short and he was tall, the two genders as far as he was concerned, at least in terms of attraction. She was trying to reach a bag of red Solo cups on top of the fridge and failing adorably, which was extra crazy when you considered those shoes. He ██████ on the ████.

Glad for the poor lighting, the boy hobbled over. “Need some help?”

The girl looked up at him, smiling, and he melted.

They spent the next thirty minutes talking in a small hallway off the kitchen (███ ███ ███ normalized ██ ████ ████ ██ ██████ ██ ██, still crazy excited but no longer ready to go at that exact moment! the fucking miniature madman), and once they decided the music was too loud to hear each other well, they booked it. It was a nice night and they strolled toward campus. Both were tipsy enough to find the easy comfort that accompanies the best first-time low-stakes hook-ups en route to the place, world-loads of excitement juggled between two vibing parties, a clear draw on both sides, each one thrilling in the lead-up to the act, itself just the grand assembly of a thousand smaller acts. It was soon clear that their attraction ran deeper than looks, which the boy noted could be important later. Both were obsessed with the same weirdo comedian that all their friends hated and had a penchant for immature sex jokes.

They sat under a statue of JFK on the stretch of grass known as the Kennedy Commons.

“Are you a fan?” the boy said, gesturing at the giant bust of the thirty-fifth president.

“Kennedy?” The girl smiled, and he thought a life spent chasing it would be a life well-lived. “The best thing I can say about JFK is that when he gave brain, he gave his all.” She did finger guns.

The boy lost it for a solid twenty seconds. The girl was beaming, giddy to be the cause of such laughter. He put his face next to hers and then their eyes were close and their lips found each other and it was the wettest, softest, nicest.

The girl was a year below him. She told him this twenty minutes later while ██████ ███ ████ on the floor of his dorm room. His butt was scooched up against the bed. She did this thing that killed him, ███████ ██ ███ ████ with her mouth a few times, and then stopping to █████ ███ ████ as she talked. “Nice room, by the way,” she said, ██ ████████ ███ ███. And then ███ █████ was ████ on. And off again. “I like the posters.” And then ████ ██. The boy moaned. This shit was crazy. During her next break, she asked “Have you seem them in concert?” and he was so turned on — by her words, by her actions, but mostly by her face, with its shape like his favorite actress, only with eyes darker than smoke, and her jaw, and her neck, even in that childish green choker — that ██ ████, not fully wanting to, not this quickly, but ██ ████ all over the carpet.

“Whoa,” the girl said. “You came a lot.” She paused. “Is that why they call it Camelot?”

He could have handed his heart to her right then and there.

2.

In the morning, the boy, whose name was Alvin, rolled over to find the girl, whose name was Jenny, still in his bed and it was such a sunlight feeling that he was sure it was a dream. But it wasn’t and then he was all over her, disregarding his overnight bacterial buildup, just wanting her, the morning version of the night girl! and it was clear she wanted him just as much. “Can I?” he asked, ringing his tongue on her earlobe, while he ██████ ███ with ███ ██████. She was ██ ███ as he ███ ████, and until that moment he never realized how perfectly those two ████████ paired off.

“Can you what?” she whispered, turning to nip his lips with her own.

“███ █ ████ ███?” He kissed her softly and pulled back. “You gorgeous gorgeous girl.”

“You can.” Jenny hit him with the full beam of her smile, bright as morning. “But there’s one thing.” She rolled off of him, suddenly serious, and started playing with her hair. Her neck was straining a little, and she took a deep breath.

Alvin tensed. His ex, Sharon, had been sexually assaulted when she was fourteen, and he recognized the body language from the one time she felt comfortable enough to open up to him. But when Jenny spoke, what she shared was not trauma. It was something stranger.

She palmed her clavicle. “You see my necklace?”

To Alvin, the green choker was the only blemish on an otherwise perfect canvas.

He looked away. “Yeah.”

“I never take it off. Ever. And part of the reason is because… I like to be choked. I need to be choked. So if you’re going to fuck me, you have to choke me.” She leaned up to kiss him, “Okay?”

“Of course, baby.”

They kissed passionately for another moment before Jenny pulled back.

“Oh, and another thing.”

Alvin felt drunk on this intoxicating naked girl in his bed. He smiled stupidly. “Want me to lick your ears?”

“What? No, that’s weird.” She kissed him twice, softly, in quick succession. “When you.” Kiss kiss. “Choke me.” Kiss kiss. “Choke me.” Kiss kiss. “Like you mean it.” She pulled back fully. “Choke me like you’re trying to choke me.”

“Sure.” He could get down with her freakiness.

And so it began.

Alvin slid the ████████ ████ of his body into ███ ███████ in Jenny it felt ████ █████ to, by design, by nature, by want, and then it was a union, a connection, and it was so fucking hot and felt so good to be attached to her that he forgot his promise, so lost was he in █████████ █████ ██ ███ ████ ████. But she hadn’t forgotten. Very soon into their coupling, in between moans, Jenny took his right hand and placed it around her neck, over the green choker. Her eyes shut in ecstasy as her small frame rose and fell. Alvin gripped her by the neck as he █████ ██ ███, kissing her face, his hold firm but harmless. Regardless of what she said. He squeezed her throat once but it was more of a good-natured see? I’m doing it than anything forceful.

Jenny was into it, and it didn’t seem to matter how loose the hand around her throat was. She writhed under Alvin, pinning herself against him, like she was ████ ██ █████ ██ ███ ████, a feeling so nice to him, but which seemed to positively steam her in pleasure. It was incredible to witness up close; she was so beautiful from a kiss’s length away. At one point, Alvin tried repositioning. He took his hand off her neck for a moment.

Jenny’s eyes snapped open. Her moaning stopped. She looked at him, hurt, betrayal lining her otherwise unpressed face.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was just trying to—”

She didn’t want to hear it. She took his hand and put it back over her neck. “Just keep it here. I’m so close.” And when she finally ███ ████, a few beats before he did, ███ ████ ███ █████, it was so nice he would have kept his hand around her neck forever if it meant it could continue.

The relationship might have dissolved there, one and done (if not a few and then eww) like many drunken post-party college hook-ups, but Alvin liked Jenny and Jenny liked Alvin, and the jokes were fast and funny and the conversation rolled like wheels on marble, and the sex was hot and electric, █████ on ██████ and ███ on ███, and neither of them was in any rush to toss off something that felt so nice and easy and fated, to use a word they probably wouldn’t.

For his last few months in college, Alvin spent most nights at Jenny’s. He was working on his thesis (“Optimizing Airflow for Thermal Management in Circuitry: Three Approaches”) and Jenny’s spot was conducive to getting work done, when he wasn’t ███████ ███ ████. Her entire studio apartment was smaller than his dorm room, but it was off campus, and so a private place where boy and girl could just calm out and luxuriate in the heat of the other.

The months were long but the nights were short. The more Alvin and Jenny came to know each other, the more they liked what they knew.

But every relationship has its privacy, just like every human has her own hidden moments, even if they’re as mundane as morning trips to the toilet, and Jenny’s biggest secret was her strangest: the green choker necklace she never took off. She wore it when she showered, when she went swimming, even to her sister’s wedding in June. (Alvin was her plus-one in a rented tux and nervous smile.) She went to her doctor for a check-up in early July, and when she returned, Alvin asked her outright if she kept her necklace on when the doctor examined her. She gave him a confused look and said, “Of course.” It had stayed around her neck, she told him, when she was younger and had to get an MRI after an older girl knocked her out during a field hockey scrimmage. (Jenny joked that the resulting occasional memory holes at times made her feel “wonderfully Rosemary.”) The necklace was just a part of her, as much Jenny as the moles on her left cheek or the scars on her abdomen or the inked lyrics on her upper thigh she’d be the first to admit had not aged well in the three years since she got them (“I’m good, yeah/I’m feelin’ alright”). Alvin grew to love Jenny’s green choker like he did every other inch of her body, even if love in his heart was not always a heart in his eyes.

Once, they were watching a terrible TV show, entirely on Jenny’s insistence, when she pointed at the screen. “This,” she said.

Two security guards, an old guy and a British kid were talking. The kid didn’t look old enough to drink. He held up his right hand, which was in a green gardening glove. He explained he couldn’t remove the glove. “It’s part of me. The doctor tried to take it off once and I started bleeding.”

“That.” Jenny pointed. “Something like that.”

Alvin turned from the screen to the girl on the couch beside him. “So it’s like that story. The one about the girl with the ribbon.”

“Sure, if that helps.”

It didn’t help, not really. But he got used to it. It was all she would say. It made no sense.

3.

That September, Alvin officially moved into Jenny’s apartment. In December, when her senior advisor granted her request to conduct research off-campus, they decided they needed more space. Alvin looked around and found a one-bedroom two blocks from campus with a main area large enough for each of them to spread out and work comfortably. It also had walk-in closets, a turbo washer and dryer, and a standalone bathtub that he knew Jenny would love.

Their first night in the new house, they ██████ in the ███. Well, their ████ were in the ███ but they were ██████ and then ██████ and then partially-██████ while half-██████ and then he was ██████ while she found her ██████ against him and then she was ██ ███ █████ in the soapy water while he found his. Alvin’s hands were around Jenny’s neck the entire time. It had been that way every time since their first time. It started fully on her request, but he soon got into it for his own reasons, past the shivers of pleasure it shocked into her, almost like he was pushing a button that ████ her ████ just by holding her neck long enough, especially if he did it while ██████ her and ██████ her and ██████ her and ██████ her. He liked the choking because it was then, and only then, that he could fully cover the necklace. And covering the necklace let him to take in his girlfriend in her true complete beauty, the eyesore temporarily removed.

“Do you like it here?” Alvin asked in the afterglow, as they settled back into the tub. He nibbled her neck but gave a berth to the green line.

“Yeah.” She shifted, did a little ██████ ███ with her █████. “Tux loves the carpeting. He already went in the box in the back closet.” She turned to kiss him and her █████ ████ slipped. He █████ ██ with the well-practiced hand of an ██████.

“What about you?” she asked. “Do you like it here?”

Alvin laid his head on Jenny’s shoulder. “I like it here because you’re here.”

“You’re so cheesy.”

But she kissed him with the reverence of a die-hard turophile.

4.

After Jenny graduated, they moved to a big city two hours from their college town. Jenny had grown up in the suburbs and liked the proximity to her family, but also the independence of an uptown address. Alvin had wanted to live in that particular city after seeing a TV show when he was fifteen that made it seem like center stage of the universe. He found a job as a control assistant to a chief engineer of a mid-size architecture firm. It paid well-enough that he didn’t feel overwhelmed by loans and rent, the twin dagger-heads of modern workplace misery. He liked commuting by underground train and loved coming home to Jenny, who did her digital design from the kitchen table in their home, a home she kept tasteful in decoration and utilities. If only, Alvin occasionally thought, looking at their neat considered apartment, she would apply the same taste to her body. It was so small, just a blur of green, but at times, usually when Alvin was feeling bad about himself for reasons external to himself, it felt large enough to jettison everything.

Six months into their new life in the city, Alvin’s company hosted an after-hours celebration at a downtown bar on the river. Plus-ones were invited, and Jenny excitedly joined. She picked out a red dress that turned heads a block away and did her make-up cresting sunset, with spirals of smoke that brought out the copper already hiding in her cheeks. It was a fun night, and they took advantage of the open bar. At one point, Alvin introduced Jenny to a colleague, who commented on her choker, “Haven’t seen one of those since 2001.” He followed this with a joke old people loved to make, that the youngsters weren’t even alive on the random date they just mentioned. It was a tic Alvin had noticed in certain co-workers, especially the ones who constructed their lives around their job.

The comment seemed to stick, and later that night, as Alvin helped a drunken red Jenny into the car home, she said, “Okay, I’ll tell you.” But he was distracted by getting her settled and buckled and it wasn’t until twenty minutes later, as he helped her into bed, that Jenny put her hand over her necklace and said, “I said I’ll tell you. But only cause you keep asking.”

“Keep asking what?”

“Bout my necklace.”

“Babe, I don’t keep asking about your necklace. I haven’t in months. Do you have Bia? You should try to sleep. I’ll get you some—”

“Let me tell it.” She pushed herself up onto an elbow and looked at him. Even through her inebriation, Alvin loved who he saw dancing in the wicks of those sad messy eyes.

Jenny coughed. “But only if you promise to forget it by tomorrow.”

Alvin didn’t say anything.

“You want to know about my necklace?” Another cough. “I can’t tell you about it, not really, but I can tell you this.” And it was strange, she seemed to sober up, temporarily, just for the hushed telling that followed. “You might see me. Once, maybe twice. At night. You might see me in my necklace, but it won’t be green. It’ll be black. And you have to promise me. Promise me, Alvin, if you see me in my black necklace,” she lowered her voice for these words, “promise you won’t let me in.” She looked at him, expectantly, and even though it loosened a shiver down his body, what could he do? Alvin agreed to never let in a Jenny in a black choker.

In the morning, a Jenny in a green choker woke up cuddled in his arms. She was extra cute and snuggly in her hangover. She complained of a headache but also said how fun last night was. She had impressions on the skin over her ribs because she forgot to take her bra off.

Alvin asked if she remembered going to bed, and when she said no, he said, “Not even your bedtime story?” She gave him a blank look and asked for two Tylenols and a cup of strawberry tea. She didn’t say anything else about her warning, and he didn’t bring it up.

5.

Clocks tick, hands move, and seasons change, and within this shuffling, Alvin found that his love for Jenny only grew. He loved who she was, how she was. He loved the designs she made for money and the comic book covers she made for art, the way she dressed, especially when she wore high collars or turtlenecks, and how she captivated a room, all short queen energy with █████ ███, █████, and that hair, shorting frequencies like she shorted his at the party that first night. He loved having sex with her, always with the choking, but with the choking came the closeness. And not just the closeness, but the feeling, which stuck around longer than the closeness. They tried ███ ███ ███████ that allowed Alvin to ████ ███ ████ around Jenny’s ████. He loved █████ ████ ██ ███ while ████████ her ████, which creative positioning and their height differential allowed. He held her by the throat while she ████ ███ ████, although sometimes in the course of her ████████ his ████ and ████ with her ████, ██████, and ██████ he felt so ecstatically elastic that his hand fell off. She always immediately replaced it when this happened. Their pairing felt as natural as food to mouth, or oxygen to lung—but he also loved lying in bed with her afterwards, when they were both warm and flushed and breathless, inhabiting the quiet ground that can brighten places in the aftermath of love, which you’re lucky to capture once or twice in a lifetime, let alone every single time with the same person. Granted the hand is where it’s supposed to be.

Alvin and Jenny got engaged on a cold day in December outside of a high-rise. Their wedding was the following August, in the luxurious backyard of an executive at Alvin’s firm who took a liking to him and became a kind of mentor. It was a fun night, with all the highlights American girls and boys raised on television weddings expect, with a few precise twists to reflect the personalities of the individuals in the spotlight, and after much dancing and toasting and eating and drinking, the two newlyweds retired to a room in a nearby hotel (provided by the same executive). A bottle of champagne awaited them on the counter, and they opened it, poured it into glasses. The sipping led to kissing, and the kissing led to sex. It was their first time as husband and wife, but with Alvin’s hand around Jenny’s neck, covering her green choker, it felt like the first time ever, the return of all that buzzing and flirty nervousness. Only with familiarity. It was wonderful. After, they sipped champagne, and Jenny turned to him, suddenly serious.

“I want to tell you something.” Her hand found her neck, where it delicately touched the edges of the green necklace. “It’s about my necklace.”

Alvin gave her a strange look.

“You might see me. Once, maybe twice. At night.”

A horrible déjà vu. Alvin was about to stop her, tell her, honey, it’s okay, you already told me this, but he caught himself. She had no memory, it was clear, of having shared this secret, and that itself was so interesting that Alvin shut himself up and listened to his now-wife give her dark warning.

“You might see me in my necklace, only it won’t be green. It’ll be black. And when that happens, promise you won’t let me in.”

Like he had the previous time, Alvin promised her he wouldn’t, telling her what she needed to hear. And then they were hugging, and the hugging led to kissing, and the kissing led back to sex, and the sex led to more hugging, a near-perfect loop. Alvin didn’t get it, not really, but he liked Jenny’s kinkiness and her weird dark humor.

For her, he would have agreed to damn near anything.

6.

The years came, as they do, and Alvin and Jenny moved further uptown. They had a child. They bought a dog and then rehomed it once it was clear their child was allergic. They got into gardening, thanks to a patch on the roof of their building. Alvin got promoted to the point that he now oversaw six employees, and Jenny launched a part-time design company specializing in logos. She marketed her services well and started to get invited to speak at Digital Presentation conferences, although that didn’t always translate into business. This bugged her sometimes, but she did believe that the road to success was long and repetitive.

Through it all, their sex life stayed electric, charged, an animating force for them both.

Until it didn’t.

Jenny’s secret nagged at Alvin on the occasional sleepless morning. It felt lopsided. It felt like there was part of her, a sexual part, clearly, that she hid from him. And so one time, on a business trip, he saw a sex worker. It just happened, he would have said, so quickly and easily that by the time she was in the hotel room, █████ on his ███, upside down, her ████ ██████ and █████ ████ awaiting whatever he wanted, her exact words, whatever you want, honey, all he wanted, he realized, after ██████ ███████ into a ruined ████████ ██████, still cheating but now degreed, split into levels of pain and degradation, was a hand around his Jenny’s neck.

Not whatever this purchased facsimile of sex was; another casualty of a market that ruined things for the bottom many by preserving it for the top few. Alvin left that convention feeling the same but different. It was his secret. Jenny has her secret, that stretchy thread on her neck, and now I have mine. He called it balance. He called it fair. He called it a lot of things except what it probably was, a justification for deviance.

7.

One night in January, the year that their child turned nine, Jenny got invited to a convention. She told Alvin about it over a dinner of kale salad and grilled salmon.

“The events guy is the same one who did the Miami Digital Fair. That’s how he knew about me. He saw my presentation. It pays well and they’re covering airfare and hotel.”

Alvin kissed his wife. “That’s wonderful, honey.”

She left on a Wednesday afternoon. The convention started the following night and ran through Saturday. She booked a return flight for Sunday morning.

Alvin spent that Saturday attempting to read a novel his friend wrote and was trying to find an agent for. He kept getting distracted. The book was bad, the story bad and the writing really bad, and it made him think a lot of new and unwelcome thoughts about his friend. He was glad when the doorbell rang, although he wasn’t expecting anyone.

It was Jenny.

She smiled up at him, in a dark leather coat he’d never seen on her.

“Oh hey!” He was flushed but still excited. “What are you doing back early? Thought your flight’s not til the morning?”

She didn’t answer. Just smiled at him. Her lipstick was duskier than usual and she had these dark wings at the corners of her eyes. “Can I come in?”

“Huh?”

She opened her coat. Under it she wore a lacy black bra that ██████ her ██████████ ███████, a ████ ██████ █████, and nothing else. Black shoes with black glass heels. It was like the first time Alvin saw her, nearly a decade earlier: he was rocked back by her sexiness and felt a ████ of █████ to his █████. Absence makes the dick grow harder.

“Can I come in?” She repeated, drawing a slow finger across her belly.

Alvin started to answer, and then saw the black choker around her neck. “Oh!” he said, loving it. “No, you’re not allowed in.” He smiled. He was never much of an actor.

She frowned. “But I really want to.”

If he wasn’t so distracted by his want, he might have wondered where her luggage was.

“Yeah, no shit,” Alvin said, breaking character. “I’m ████ a ████.”

“What’s that?”

He steadied himself. “Sorry. I said, no. You’re not allowed in.” He touched his own neck, looking at the stretchy band around hers. A stretchy black band.

The Jenny in the hallway caught his eyes and, maintaining contact, dropped slowly to her knees. She looked up at him and pressed her palms into the carpet. “Let me in and I’ll ████ ████ ████ so good you’ll stop seeing color.”

“Oh, is that the point?” Alvin said, but already he felt himself relenting.

There was a sound down the hall, a neighbor leaving their apartment.

“Fuck the rules.” Alvin opened the door and waved her in. “Get in. Come be a ████████ ████ in your own home. It’s more private.”

Jenny rose to her feet and smiled. She gave him a look that was positively vulpine and entered the apartment. As soon as the door banged shut, she pounced.

“Whoa!” Alvin tried resisting at first, it was so intense, but she kept it up and then she was doing the things that made him happy and dumb, excited and big, reaching into his shorts with one hand while the other found his hand and directed it to her favorite place, her neck.

She was so into it she ██████ █████ his ████ right there, in their living room, which struck Alvin as strange, considering Melissa could have been home and easily walked in. Their daughter happened to be out for the night — she was sleeping at her cousin’s downtown, a last-minute plan — but Jenny hadn’t even asked. Until he realized it was all part of it, her single-mindedness, fuck everything else, and he dissolved as she kept at it, ferociously ███████ on him by ███ █████.

She kept this up, nearly ███████ his ████ out through his ████, but stopped short. “I want you to fuck me.”

“Okay.”

She turned over so she was on all fours, face down, ass up. Her █████ were ██████ than when he first met them, all the more of a pull. She aged into her sexiness, this gorgeous gorgeous girl. She █████ her ███ from side to side. Her ███ swayed ████████. She looked back, that perfect face eyeing him. “I want you to choke me.”

“Okay.” He was turned on like the Empire State Building at night.

The girl with the black choker reached behind ███ ███ ████, and guided him near, bringing it right up ██ ███ █████. But before she slid it in, she said. “And just so we’re square, bitch boy, I know you’ve been holding out on me. I’ll only put it in if you promise me.” She kissed his hand softly. “That you’ll choke me. As hard as you can.”

“Sure,” Alvin said. “Whatever you want, babe.”

“I’m not playing,” Jenny said. “Don’t hold back.”

“Okay, babe. No playing.”

He ███████ ███ from ██████ and immediately reached with his left hand to grab her neck. For a moment it went like usual, a light throat grip while ██ █████, kissing the side of her face, but then she pulled back. Paused him with a hand and threw him a look like a statue.

“Cut that shit out. I’m not kidding. Choke me like you mean it.”

He nodded, and went back to it, pressing her neck, barely tight but more than usual.

Again, she stopped. The look in her eyes approximated disgust. “What’s your problem? Choke me, you shitrag.”

“Jenny, I’m not gonna choke you. I like the bit and your look, but I’m not actually—”

She cut him off. “What? You need motivation?” She hooted. It was not a sound he had ever heard before. Her eyes rolled black. “I know your secrets, little boy. The folder with the photos. Those sad accounts you hide yourself to message. That weird thing with the paper cuts. And your biggest one. Oh, wow what a bombshell! You saw some big tittied expo slut for hire on the Vegas trip! Waa waa, you jerked your sad dick to death in front of her!”

He was shocked, so shocked, that when she reached back to grab his hand and put it around her throat, he simply let her.

“Fucking choke me like you mean it, you douche bag. Choke me like you choked me when you cheated on me. You fucking loser.” She spat at him, which she never did before. He hated it, all of it. “You fucking loser. You’re pathetic. Choke me.”

That was what it took.

They fucked, but it was rough and when he squeezed her neck, for the first time in his life, Alvin squeezed Jenny’s neck. It was odd, the more he throttled her the more she seemed to love it, really love it, and the better it felt for him, like each squeeze of neck tightened the █████ of her █████ on ███ ████. It didn’t seem to hurt her at all. He squeezed her neck, hard and then harder, with one hand until it was the darkest, coldest, meanest.

It felt incredible, for them both, the two of them mounting a plateau of ecstasy, until it peaked and ended and the night came on in its full curtained darkness.

8.

On Sunday morning, just before noon, Jenny with the green choker stepped out of a cab and entered her apartment building. She shifted her luggage in the elevator and admired her reflection in the mirror, familiar but tired. She checked her phone. Alvin still hadn’t responded.

She unlocked the door. “Hello?”

No answer.

“Anybody? Hello-o-o! Where are you guys?”

Nothing.

She checked the message her sister-in-law sent last night. A short video of her daughter and two nieces eating popcorn and watching a movie at their apartment.

Hows it going? She typed. Just got back. Lemme know when u need me to come get her

She walked into the bedroom, distracted by her phone, and tripped over Alvin’s body.

She saw what it was, screamed, saw it clearer, screamed again, louder, harder, longer.

Alvin was dead, and from the look on his face, it had been a savage death. His eyes were contorted in brutality and his lips were blue. It wasn’t hard to find the cause.

Around his throat, cinching it tight enough to end things, was a black choker necklace.

“Oh, honey,” Jenny said softly, sinking to her knees. “Oh, honey. I told you.”

She stayed there a while.

Eventually, she stood up and walked to the bathroom. She ran the water until it was warm and washed her hands. In the mirror over the sink, she met her own eyes. The green band at her throat looked the way it always had. She watched herself for a long time, like she was trying to spot something in the reflection.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. It was her sister-in-law. No rush! Girls are happy. Come grab her whenever

Jenny looked at the message.

She typed: I’ll be there in an hour

She paused. Deleted her message. Replaced it with a thumbs up emoji. Sent that instead.

Then she went back into the bedroom, knelt beside her husband, and began to clean up.

This story was written by Elie, the boy with the blue notebook, for Jenny, the girl with the green choker, in New York City. Lexington Avenue is a street circus through the windows. Spring nears, and with it broad neck exposure. XXX

Author’s note: On October 1, 1920, American automobile tycoon, unrepentant antisemite, and all-around shitstain in need of a closed-fist smack to the jaw Henry Ford started publishing a series of pamphlets addressing “the International Jew,” and what should be done about this problem. A century later, questions still percolate about how to resolve the actual problem he presented, what some call “International Fordism.” The below piece toys with components of his infamous h8 pamphlet.

Preface

Why discuss the Question of the Ford? Because it is here, as the planet continues its tilt, and it will not go away without our charging it, demanding an Answer.

The Question of the Ford has existed in the United States for a long time. Fords themselves have known this, even if Jews, their reason for existing, have not. There have been many periods in the history of our country when the presence of the Fords has taken the stage with a tint of darkness presaging the sightless and anarchic tumult of things to come. We stand in a similar era, where the machinations and manipulations of “International Fordism” have touched the very heart of American life.

What is the International Ford? Simply put, it is the reality that wherever a Jew lands — that is, wherever a child of Jacob and Rachel settles and begins to perform the duties assigned to him by the Creator at the Mountain — a Ford settles shortly thereafter. Like a daisy dotting the growing field of the farm.

And this is the central concern of this piece. Why does the Ford arrive in such quick haste after the Jew? Why does he seep venom and hatred from his eyes? Why does he prioritize the ruin of his target instead of the construction of his own?

These Questions have been pondered for years, ever since the Original Amalekite struck the Slow Jew in the back on his way through the Desert to the Land of God.

We are glad to finally start providing Answers.

I. THE FORD IN CHARACTER AND BUSINESS

The Ford is again being singled out for critical attention throughout the world.

His reemergence on the Global Stage should not be a matter of surprise: his reason for existence, the ongoing survival of the Jew and conditions of improvement surrounding his welfare, which the Ford deems as inappropriate and antithetical to the overall thriving of humanity, is a crucial component for many thinkers and actors throughout the world who share his view and beliefs.

The Ford’s concern is wide, but it often opens and closes most brightly in the realm of commerce and transaction.

This is evident, first and foremost, in the make-up of the words at play.

Over the last several decades, astute scholars have shown how JEW can stand for “Jesus Embodies War,” a claim many Fords have made against their enemy, citing deicide as a catalyst of his many troubles, ongoing and past.

However, these scholars have been molasses in pointing out that the four letters of FORD break down into its hidden meaning, which doubles as his reason for being: “Fortifying Our Racial Destiny.”

Such a Calling Card, exacting behaviors of a malicious intent, “Fortifying Our Racial Destiny” underscores the Group Dynamic of the International Ford (the “Our,” serving both as an inclusive and exclusive totem), while highlighting his overall aims, strengthening the peoples he believes is swift to inherit the planet, its rule in areas of business but also in standard subjugation.

“Every machine has a designer,” the founder of International Fordery wrote in his 1923 book, Fathers Of Returned Damnation. “So does every bloodline.” This could not be more appropriate. As a car designer, the Original Ford, the Devil that started the destruction, specialized in mobilization. Providing physical access from one point to another in vehicular comfort is not unlike instructing yearners where to turn for guidance.

II. GERMANY’S REACTION TO THE FORD

Humanity has become wise enough to notice and discuss a certain kind of predatory business practice the Ford has modeled to a T and used to enrich himself and his Scions tremendously, while those who enable his accumulation suffer unduly.

A great unloosening of the Ford Question has occurred on the European Continent, and it is in Germany, first among the nations, where the world has seen the matter treated with a candor that Americans would do well to study.

For it is a curious fact, noted by students of the Historical Record, that wherever the Ford settles, the land shortly thereafter falls into a condition of feverish admiration for him — his methods, his efficiencies, his racial theories. The esteemed American scholar of the Ford, Columbia University’s Dr. Eugene Of, calls this the “Febrile Onset of Reverential Devotion.” Germany was the first to perceive this, and the first to reward it.

In the year 1938, a Ceremony took place at the Ford offices in Dearborn. A representative of the German Reich, acting on behalf of the Chancellor himself, pinned upon the Original Ford’s lapel the Grand Cross of the German Eagle — the Highest Decoration the German government was authorized to give to any foreigner. Ford, on his seventy-fifth birthday, became the first American to receive it, joining a small fellowship of honorees that included Il Duce, who had been given a diamond-studded version of the same cross the year before.

The Chancellor had already, some years earlier, kept a Life-Size Portrait of the Original Ford behind his desk in Munich, and had quoted the man admiringly by name in his autobiography, Mein Kampf, citing him as the “single great man” then standing against “the Jews” in America. The Chancellor, it is reported, collected Ford’s pamphlets in German translation and kept them stacked in his Personal Library.

It is not anti-Fordian to observe these facts, as some Fordians have contended.

It is merely to note that the Ford, wherever he appears, is quickly recognized by those who share his particular intuitions, and that Germany, whose reaction to the International Ford took the form of medals and murals and the most infamous political career of the Twentieth Century, saw something in the man that Americans of the same era were too polite or distracted to see.

And from there tremendous ruin for the Jew, or in this context, as the International Ford envisages him, a “Judicious Ending for the Wayward.”

XVI. HOW THE FORD QUESTION TOUCHES THE FARM

The Real Estate Depredations of the Ford are familiar to all, but unfortunately do not constitute his entire land program.

His actual program is tied to his hog-headed beliefs.

If the Ford’s Animating Principle is, as we have seen, “Fortifying Our Racial Destiny,” then it follows by elementary logic that the destiny in question must be fortified against someone — and the someone, in the Ford’s accounting, is whoever stands closest to a paycheck and farthest from a pew.

Guarding the Christliness of our homestead, as he has said in his many actions, is akin to protecting the granary from the weevil.

And for the Ford, this extends to his Peculiar Terror of organized men: the sight of two workers conferring in a hallway sends a tremor through his constitution; the sight of three drives him to action. And they are always, in his telling, the accursed Sons of Solomon, those Past Temple dwellers he cannot loosen from his internal ruminations.

To this end, the Original Ford retained one Harry Herbert Bennett — a personage of low forehead and lower convictions — to assemble what was euphemistically called a “Service Department,” a name that pulled Wool low on no one, since the only service rendered was the application of fists to face.

Through this private constabulary, JEWs, in this case, those petitioning for “Just Earnings for Workers,” were beaten in the open day by FORDs, or those petitioning for “Fists Over Reasoned Discourse” in plain view of God and the photographic press, most famously on an overpass at the Ford’s own River Rouge plant in 1937, where Harry Herbert’s bruisers fell upon members of the United Auto Workers with such enthusiasm that the Original Ford’s only expressed regret was that the photographers had been allowed so close.

Harry Herbert, it should be noted, is one of a long list of HHs, or 88s, those with the bearing and phrenological insight, such as Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, aviator Howard Hughes, eugenicist Henry Herbert Goddard, cosmologist Hans Hörbiger, occultist Hanns Heinz Ewers, and “Henry Hitler,” as the Original Ford referred to himself in select correspondences, exclusively with others Forever Opposing Righteous Dissent.

But the fist-shaped cudgel, dear reader, is the lesser of the Ford’s instruments.

For the Ford understood, in the manner of all aspiring tyrants, that a man beaten in the street may yet think freely in his bed. To resolve this difficulty, the Original Ford established within his empire a department of surveillance bearing the oubliettesque name of the “Federation for Optimal Residential Discipline,” although there has rarely been a less optimal enterprise in the history of human invention.

The Federation’s agents entered, uninvited and unwelcome, the homes of the Ford’s employees, inspecting kitchens for cleanliness, pantries for the presence of liquor, ledgers for the discipline of savings, and bedchambers for evidence of moral conduct deemed insufficiently Fordian.

The Ford does not, you see, merely wish to employ the farmhand, nor merely to underpay him or to crush his organizing impulse. The Ford wishes, in the deepest chambers of his designing heart, to author the worker — to draft the worker as he drafts a chassis, every bolt accounted for, every divergence corrected by hammer or by spy.

Which raises again our governing question: why does the Ford arrive in such quick haste after the Jew? Perhaps because the Jew, stiff-necked and stubborn since the Mountain, was the first creature in recorded history to refuse such Dark Assembly.

It is the genius of the International Ford that he requires even the interior of his workers’ homes to be part of the factory. The farm, the forest, the living room — all are real estate to him, and all must be brought into Fordist alignment or be ruined in the attempt.

XVII. DOES FORDIST POWER CONTROL THE WORLD PRESS?

The purpose of this article is twofold: to set forth what the Historical Record has to say about the relation of the Ford to the dissemination of Organized Untruth, and to make an introduction to a study of Fordist influence on the American press.

The Ford has always been aware of the advantages to be derived from news. From his earliest years in Dearborn, the Original Ford grasped that a man who builds the carriage can also build the routes along which the carriage travels, and also the narratives that accompany the traveler, and that a nation which buys his product with such zeal and self-inconsideration can be persuaded, through the same machinery, to buy his ideas.

To this end, the Original Ford acquired in 1918 a failing weekly called The Dearborn Independent, and by 1920 he had converted it into the most widely circulated antisemitic publication in American history.

It was no part of his purpose to distribute news among the people, but to keep it for himself as a Secret Advantage. As Dr. Of has proven in his articles for the Parrotical Institute Press, every Ford dealership in the United States — of which there were thousands — was instructed to carry the paper, display the paper, press the paper upon customers purchasing an automobile, and report back to Dearborn on subscriptions secured.

The Dealership Network, which had been built to move automobiles, was repurposed overnight into a propaganda distribution system of a scale and efficiency no American publisher had previously commanded. The Dearborn Independent reached a circulation of 700,000.

Its contents were translated into sixteen languages, bound into volumes, and shipped across Europe — where, as we have seen, a certain Austrian failed painter in Munich was already underlining them.

The Original Ford accused the Jew of controlling the world’s newspapers from a hidden office in an unnamed capital. He did this in a newspaper he owned, printed on presses he owned, distributed through dealerships he owned, in over a dozen languages he had arranged to have it translated into.

This is called, in the language of the Schoolyard, tattling on yourself. Or, as Dr. Of has posited, a “Fixed Obsession with Rabbinical Dealings.”

X. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE “FORDIST PROTOCOLS”

The documents most frequently mentioned by those who are interested in the theory of Fordist World Power rather than in the actual operation of that power in the world today are those twenty-four documents known as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Dearborn. Their Provenance is unclear. Their authenticity has been vigorously denied by Fordist spokesmen and their various Gentile fronts.

Yet Students of the matter find, upon comparison of the documents with the subsequent historical record, a correspondence so close as to admit of only two explanations: either the Protocols are authentic, or they are a forgery so Prophetic as to raise more disturbing questions than authenticity itself would have.

The Protocols outline, among other things: a method by which a single industrialist may acquire control of the transportation of an entire continent and dictate the terms on which its citizens move through their own lives; a method by which the private lives of workers may be monitored by a department staffed with investigators bearing Clipboards; a method by which the newspapers of a nation may be captured through the Dealership Network of a single commercial product; and a method by which the labor movement may be broken through the deployment of a Private Army. In other words, “Formulations Of Ruling Dissenters.”

Perhaps the Protocols of the International Ford are a literary curiosity.

Perhaps they are a forgery, cobbled together by enemies of the Ford to embarrass him.

Perhaps they are, as certain of the Ford’s defenders have insisted, the invention of a disgruntled engineer named Shlomo Weisbrot who wished to explain the River Rouge complex by means of Dark Allegory.

Whatever their origin, they point to a Low Truth: the International Ford will not rest until his enemy is lain down. In other words, until he reaches the apex of his Fanatical Obsession with Removing the Diabolical Jew from Earth's Width.

I. The Eternal Jew

In 1940, Nazi Germany’s Ministry of Propaganda transformed the motion picture into a tool of antisemitic incitement by producing one of the most virulent propaganda films in history. Directed by Fritz Hippler, president of the Reich Film Chamber, and shaped under the close supervision of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, The Eternal Jew, or Der Ewige Jude, was presented to audiences as a factual documentary. It didn’t matter that its “facts” were as close to reality as the four points of a swastika are to touching.

The Eternal Jew (1940) is a carefully manufactured exercise in dehumanization. It combines staged footage of Jewish ghettos in occupied Poland with archival material and film clips stripped from their original context. As images of impoverished Jews appear on the screen, a voiceover intones nuanced gems like “The Jew makes business out of the sickness of the nations, and therefore endeavors to deepen and prolong all conditions of sickness,” a striking claim for many reasons, not least of which that the German-born Otto Loewi, a Jew, received the 1936 Nobel Prize four years earlier for discovering chemical neurotransmission.

The Eternal Jew was intended as a “remake” of the 1933 British film The Wandering Jew, which sympathetically framed the Jewish people as endless itinerants relentlessly persecuted throughout their history. Could you believe it, the Nazis Goebbels and Hippler had a darker take on the matter.

The entire “film” is available to watch on YouTube. I would link to it, but I’m not gonna do that. It’s by no measure a good or effective piece of media. It’s crude, repetitive, and so offensive it hurts the teeth. And perhaps most tellingly, it’s boring, a cardinal sin when it comes to storytelling, but one that’s straight-up owl when we’re talking propaganda.

The film employs a recurring visual device of “unmasking” the Jew, i.e. showing the monster behind the veil. It does this by pairing shots of bearded, traditionally dressed Eastern European Jews with clean-shaven, modern Jews in Western clothing and arguing that assimilated Jews living in German cities are no different from those in the ghettos of Warsaw or Łódź. Once vermin, always vermin, the idea goes. There may be two faces — there may even be more — but there’s only one essence.

The film's most infamous passage is its rat sequence. For roughly a minute, footage of rats pouring out of sewers and swarming over grain is intercut with shots of Jewish people in the streets of Lodz, while the narrator explains, calmly, that the two are essentially the same: carriers, parasites, brethren.

The title and premise of Der Ewige Jude were an extension of a 1937 exhibition also called Der Ewige Jude, which opened in the library building of the Deutsches Museum in Munich on November 8, the anniversary of Hitler's failed 1923 putsch. It then traveled throughout the Reich, drawing by the regime's own count, more than 1,300,000 visitors. The exhibition attacked many of the same figures, used the same photographs, and rehearsed the same central claim, with one truly terrifying addition: that yes yes the Jew wears a mask, but beneath every mask is the exact same face.

All in all, viewed eighty-six years later (two short of the one where the corners rasp), The Eternal Jew stands out for its catalog of accusations so lurid and specific and self-contradicting that they could only have been invented. In addition to the trope of Jew as vermin, the film presents the obverse: Jew as a wealthy financier who corrupts gentile youth. A cosmopolitan operator in a Rothschildsesque fever-dream, jet-setting out-of-reach between world capitals, buying influence while dominating his perceived enemies. A shadowy elite whose true power lies not in what he owns (though his holdings are enormous), but in who he knows, and what he knows about them. At the end of wealth, it’s been attested, information and secrets hold the most weight.

Hippler and Goebbels had to build their portrait of the deepest societal rot-setter on the back of centuries of hate because no such person existed in the form they needed him to.

Until, decades later, in a different country and century, something close to that invented figure walked out of his private jet and into federal custody.

But even though Jeffrey Epstein was unquestionably one of the worst people of our lifetime, I would be extremely hesitant to draw an explicit connection between him and The Eternal Jew if the menuval hadn’t already done so himself.

Because almost a century after The Eternal Jew debuted at the UFA-Palast — Berlin’s premier cinema — Epstein texted the following to a friend.

For context, on August 1, 2018, Jeffrey Epstein texted his good buddy, Steve Bannon, inviting him to spend the upcoming weekend in Palm Beach. Bannon replied that he was going to be in Cambridge then with the filmmaker Errol Morris, who was working on a documentary about Bannon, set to release on November 1. Epstein joked that the date was close to Kristallnacht, the November 9, 1938 pogrom, another Nazi event timed in part to coincide with Hitler’s putsch.

“Keep in mind that right after the burning of kristalnacht,” Epstein texted, “Goebels released his move [sic].. it was the eternal jew.. / my ex girlfriend used to say she wanted to make a move taking off only the ‘w’ and make it the eternal J E.”

The Eternal Jew was a vicious caricature created by a corrupt and evil regime.

But the Eternal J E? That, sadly, was real.

II. Two Jeffrey Epsteins

There’s more to the idea of Jeffrey Epstein as a Janus-faced breaker of lives and broker of vice. Just keep looking at the files. Turn them, turn them, for they contain everything, lihavdil.

This document, released by the United States Department of Justice on January 31, 2026, would have made Fritz Hippler’s head spin.

It’s an email sent on Friday, July 31, 2015 at 7:09 PM from Epstein’s scheduling assistant Saida Sapieva to Lesley Groff, his personal assistant. The subject line reads: Details for Sunday w/Reid Hoffman. 6 PM, August 2, Baume Restaurant, 201 S California Ave, Palo Alto. “We bought out the restaurant, so it will just be our group.”

The guest list is notable: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman (obviously), Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and so on.

And then, listed twice — at numbers 8 and 11 — Jeffrey Epstein.

Jeffrey Epstein. And also Jeffrey Epstein.

One imagines Saida, iPhone in hand, typing out the guest list from a scribbled note, arriving at the end without realizing she wrote the same name twice, and clicking send. A clerical error, almost certainly. The kind of human mistake that means nothing and 7/8 times is caught at the door.

Except that in the context of everything else, it’s impossible to read those two names without thinking about The Eternal Jew’s central obsession: the supreme duplicitous figure, a rat-like man who is two men, showing you one face while keeping the other on his wall. A being that embodies decay from below, in the form of a leeching perversion, and above, in the form of cabal-director / fate-decider, overseeing the flow of the world’s money and immigrants.

And here, in an email about a Silicon Valley dinner, attended by the wealthiest, most paranoid minds in the world, Jeffrey Epstein appears twice on the same list. One Epstein for the table. The other Epstein for— what, exactly? A back room? The backrooms? A conversation after the conversation? An introduction to the figure in the limousine, who resembles, only in broad strokes, the man on the yacht?

The inclusion of the second “Jeffrey Epstein” is, of course, a typo. And yet it’s also one of the most honest documents in the file.

Because Epstein was always two people. That’s what made him a good schmoozer, confidant, and predator. There was the Epstein who could make a table of billionaires feel, for an evening in Palo Alto, that they were in the presence of someone who understood them at frequencies they didn’t know they spun. And there was the other Epstein, operating in the same body at the same time, doing things to children that his guests did not ask about or had already decided they didn’t see.

To a paranoid mind seeking patterns in everything, which is growing less uncommon with the world spinning as it is, the initials could give him away.

JEE.

Jeffrey Edward Epstein.

JEE. He emblazoned these three letters on his sweatshirts, his watches, his email handles, his homes.

JEE.

Surface level simple. A man’s three initials.

But look at them long enough and they cease to be what they are. Your mind starts to fidget and rotates the third letter, just a bit, counter clockwise until it looks like something else.

At that point JEE transforms into what you’re trying not to see when taking in Jeffrey Epstein’s incredible ruin.

III. The Eternal Jeff

The saga of Jeffrey Epstein appears set to wander aimlessly around the planet until the second coming of the Christian Messiah, which as a Jew, Epstein didn’t believe in, or the first coming of the Jewish Messiah, which, as a Reform Jew, he also didn’t believe in.

And in that way, he achieved the immortality he joked about with Steve Bannon.

Jeffrey Epstein
Jeffrey Ep s t e i n

A shuffling of letters in the name reveals inner meaning.

Jeffrey Epstein
Jeffrey Ep s t e i n

J e f f   rey    E     pst   e i n
            réy            pst      
  
                 (rapist)

Hidden right there in front of you.

Jeff r e y E p s t ein
Jeffrey Epstein

Two names for one person, an entity (now that its life has passed) living an afterlife that would give a ghost pause.

It’s a strange feeling to know that after you and I die, in no short order our names and memories will be forgotten. That’s how it rolls; the idea of human permanence is one of our funnier myths. Even if it takes a generation or three, we’re all going to the same grave as the same unknown soldier of a war we never agreed to fight but fought all the same.

Jeffrey Epstein, dead, threatens to buck this. Because although infamy is a treacherous hand to play, for a legacy it’s one of the strongest.

I hope I’m wrong.

But if I’m not…

Jeffrey Edward Epstein.

Jeffrey Epstein.
             (ed w a   r    d)

Jeffrey    E    D    W   a   R    D      Epstein.

           (d    r a w   d e)
                    (r a w    d ed)
Jeffrey Epstein.

JEE.

Except not really.

(Pause)

Here’s to hoping if he is eternal it’s the kind below.

THE STRANGE PHENOMENON OF ‘GRANDFATHER PARTIES’

First published in the Bozeman Brigade (June 18, 2028)

By Chantal Eichshot-Joroni, Writer-at-Large

At first, Phil and Judy Derkins were thrilled by the prospect. The Derkins, who live in a working class community in Belgrade with their twelve-year-old son, Martin, are no stranger to the sprawling 10,000 acre estate in nearby Bozeman, known affectionately by locals as Cape Coaster. So when an invitation came for their son to attend a birthday party on the grounds, it felt like something out of a movie.

“Our first thought was we won the golden ticket,” Phil Derkins said, referring to the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. “But then red flags started popping up so fast it was more like we were running with the bulls.”

The extensive grounds of Cape Coaster is the property of theme park billionaire, Ned Chorel, who made his fortune in the late 2010s by developing roller coasters and theme park rides with AR/VR overlays, haptic seats, and brainwave-response centers. Chorel’s main design innovation is enabling each ride to feel personalized to the individual: one coaster can become thousands of unique “experiences.” Chorel patented the system, which has since become known as “the Spoke,” short for “bespoke,” and famously licensed it to existing parks worldwide, yielding him a fortune.

But when Phil looked into the reclusive Chorel, he grew concerned. “I assumed the birthday party was for his kid,” he told this reporter. “But then I learned that Chorel has no children. Who was the party for? That’s when Judy started worrying, too.”

THE FAMILIAR TRAPPINGS OF YET ANOTHER PETER PAN

The reason for Chorel’s unease among parents may be partly archetypal. History is littered with fabulously wealthy men who collect children’s laughter the way others accumulate paintings, including Disney, Jackson, Lucas, and now Chorel. Each cultivates a similar mythos: eternal boyhood, extravagant fantasy, and a cartoonish affect amid a carefully tended secrecy.

Part of the unease is that unlike Disney or Lucas but similar to Jackson (and also the fictional Wonka, another type that fits this bill), Chorel has been careful to keep his gates locked and questions at bay. Cape Coaster is not a public park but a private estate that’s rarely glimpsed except in drone footage or helicopter flyovers.

Much of the information in this article comes from publicly available sources and records, as well as interviews with Chorel’s former employees. Chorel did not respond to repeated requests for comment prior to publication.

From the air, Cape Coaster resembles a fever dream of amusement park architecture. Coaster tracks coil in on themselves like sleeping serpents, a pair of ferris wheels rise at improbable angles, and a half-built log flume runs straight into the ground, its troughs ending in dry dirt. Rumor has it that Chorel prizes unusual prototypes, the kind that seem, Escher-like, to violate the laws of physics. These are tied to his ethos, which is based on constant rebirth and iteration, and which he calls, according to his biographer, “the reincarnation of all things.” What looks like the bones of improbable rides is in fact a curated landscape of operatable fantasies.

Visitors who have glimpsed the estate through guided flyovers describe it as both dazzling and unnerving. One section is dominated by a lake dotted with motorized shark boats that glow phosphorescent at night. Another, called “The Arkade,” is said to feature a row of automated carnival games that conjure, among other things, “direct hand-to-hand combat with Atlas” in the form of a thirty-foot-tall bronze statue of the Titan shouldering his eternal boulder. But the park’s most iconic image is the steep-angled lift that feeds into eight loops, in decreasing size, of Chorel’s infamous mega giga coaster, the “Cyanide Ride.”

Cape Coaster is essentially Chorel’s version of Neverland, reimagined through the grammar of roller coasters and dark rides. Where Barrie (and through him, Jackson) conjured pirates and fairies, Chorel deals in hydraulics and holograms, his fantasy world built from slanted steel and augmented-intelligence projections, with electricity harnessed from receptors built in the ground. Cape Coaster seems less of an elite playground and more like an alien country, a place of extravagant shapes and machines where the rules of both safety and reality appear suspended.

Chorel’s “Grandfather Parties,” as they came to be known, are the only recurring events where the gates open, and only then for a select few.

CHOREL’S EARLY FORTUNES

Ned Chorel first made headlines in the mid-2010s. His company, Chorel Dynamics, started as a boutique ride-systems consultancy operating out of a converted warehouse in suburban Denver. Chorel, who was in his late thirties at the time, had no formal engineering background but possessed what one early investor called “an almost offensive intuition for how shapes and forces interact.” He was also adept at hiring engineers for specific purposes, and then bending their abilities to the will of his vision, something he shared with other tech billionaires.

Chorel Dynamics’ early patents read like something out of a sci-fi novel for the slide-rule set: tactile seating systems, proprioceptive feedback loops, a now-legendary filing for what the application drily called “emotionally responsive gravitational simulation.” The filings were dense and technical and revealed almost nothing about the man behind them.

By 2018, it became clear that Chorel’s main innovation was the Spoke — a roller coaster that could read you and give you what you want. Sensors embedded in the harness tracked riders’ heart rates and responses, while cart innovations like pro-rollback devices and recumbent G-force measures created a gliding sensation, as if you were flying through the air instead of sitting on a track. Chorel’s use of movement-backed AI, the first of its kind, allowed the ride to adjust in real time, steepening a drop for the rider who appeared bored or easing a curve for the one in distress. The same track, Chorel liked to say, was never the same ride. He called it “the abolition of expectation” in a 2020 article he wrote for The New York Times.

Theme park conglomerates were skeptical, but they came around as soon as the numbers roller coastered in. Rider satisfaction jumped off the charts and return visits nearly tripled. Chorel licensed the Spoke to a dozen major North American parks, and in 2022, he sold his majority stake in Chorel Dynamics for $4.8 billion.

What followed the sale was not retirement, exactly, but a kind of radical privatization of his ambitions. Freed from investors, safety boards, liability reviews, and the crushing orthodoxy of the family-friendly entertainment industry, Chorel moved to Montana and started building experimental attractions, the sort of things no corporate entity would ever approve.

Like the Cyanide Ride.

Visible for miles on a clear day, its main drop rising up like a megalodon fin, the structure’s silhouette has become so associated with Chorel that it appears, rendered in miniature, on the cover of his authorized biography. The ride has never been seen in use and safety certifications for it have not been sought. Chorel has shown little interest in either. “It’s not for riding,” he told his biographer. “It’s for thinking. For considering the various forms of movement. Like the way out.”

It’s in this climate — of vast private wealth and the unchecked creative appetite of a man with no need to prove himself to anyone — that the Grandfather Parties were born.

THE ORIGIN OF THE GRANDFATHER PARTY

In the spring of 2023, Chorel arranged a private birthday celebration for his longtime friend, the actor Roman Mintz-Cashel. Mintz-Cashel is best known for a string of mid-budget thrillers in the early 2010s and, more recently, for his role as Alan Steed on HBO’s The Dream Voyagers, which won him a mid-career renaissance. The party was characteristically Chorel: cartoonish in intent, catered to excess, secretive as possible, and involving several of the theme park’s operational attractions, which Mintz-Cashel, an admitted thrill-seeker (as anyone who’s seen Tracks of Descent knows), had wanted to ride for years.

The party was ready. Chorel had committed to a full catering staff, a twelve-piece band, a fireworks display, a custom ice sculpture of the Cyanide Ride, and three trained falconers.

He also had recruited about thirty local children through a Bozeman community board to serve as what the posting called “atmospheric extras.”

But according to a former Chorel employee, who requested anonymity to protect his identity, Mintz-Cashel cancelled the party two days out. No reason was given.

After some consideration, Chorel went ahead with the plans.

As he saw it, the staff was booked. The rides were ready. The food was fresh. There were gift bags and party favors. And excited children who would otherwise be deeply disappointed.

What followed, by all accounts, was a perfectly pleasant afternoon. The children showed up, with waivers and indemnification agreements signed by their parents. For several hours they rode the operational attractions. They ate deep-fried theme park fare, ice cream, and birthday cake. A few found the automated carnival midway and spent an hour there. Chorel moved through the grounds in his customary fashion — present but peripheral, observing more than participating — until something on his phone caught his eye.

It was the parents. More specifically, their reactions to the livestream.

Cape Coaster has a network of two-way cameras placed at regular intervals throughout the grounds. According to the former employee, who claims to have overseen their installation, they’re there for security purposes. The cameras are always recording, and it’s possible to access the live feed remotely with a specific code. Their two-way nature allows people to see what’s happening, while also giving the system operator a view of those watching.

Chorel gave parents access to the feed to ensure their children’s well-being while at his park.

And when they logged in to check on their child, Chorel was watching. Their anxious faces peered straight into his monitor. Something in this resonated with him. Their forced smiles, unsettled, giving way to temporary relief when they finally spotted their child. Followed by an immediate return to unease, even though the cameras had shown their kids were safe.

In the weeks after the gathering, Chorel began articulating an idea: throwing similar parties for children in order to watch their parents fret.

The essence was that an extremely well-off person like himself, having accumulated enough material things and transient experiences to last him several lifetimes, sought ownership in a final remaining area of genuine interest: the emotional state of another person. Especially in its most concentrated and potent form, which Chorel determined was the love of a parent for their child, when slightly toyed with. Rendering unease, discomfort, tinges of pre-fear. These emotions seemed to transform love into a commodity that felt new and desirable. Not cruelty or pain — Chorel was very clear on this point, and those who have attended or monitored his Grandfather Parties consistently confirm that the children are safe, happy, and entirely oblivious to the more deviant dimensions of their host’s interest.

No, what Chorel was purchasing was something more atmospheric: the low hum of parental worry, the specific texture of an anxiety that has no real object, because it exists as long as the parent and child.

“He used to say it like it was the most natural thing in the world,” the former employee said. “ ‘I like to own the anxiety of parents.’ Just like that. The way you tell someone you prefer your steak medium-rare.”

The name “Grandfather Party” came from a child. A girl, maybe eight or nine, on that first accidental afternoon. “[Chorel] told that story a lot,” the source recalls. “The girl loved it. She loved being there. She said being at the theme park felt like visiting her grandfather. Even though his house didn’t have a single roller coaster in it. Chorel would repeat it like it was scripture.”

Shortly after that first gathering, Chorel began speaking to his employees about hosting more parties. And so “Grandfather Parties” became monthly events. According to the former employee, “[During the parties], Chorel would sit in his ballroom, staring at his phone, watching the parents check in on their kids via the cameras. When he saw in their faces what he was looking for, he’d get very still and focused. Like he was finally paying attention. And he could pay attention for hours.”

The source paused at this point. “He never hid it at all. That’s what I couldn’t get over. He just didn’t think what he was doing required explanation.”

THE CYANIDE RIDE

And what of Phil and Judy Derkins, who accepted the invitation to one of Chorel’s recent “Grandfather Parties” on behalf of their son, Martin, only to decide last-minute not to let him attend?

“Marty was furious,” Phil said. “But no way we were letting him in there knowing what we now know.”

Phil Derkins, like many, finds it deeply troubling that the billionaire mogul explicitly seeks out discomfort in parents, news that was first reported last month by The Wall Street Journal.

“He wanted to go so bad,” Derkins said of his son. “Mostly to see the big coaster close-up.”

The “big coaster,” of course, is the Cyanide Ride.

All the children ask about the Cyanide Ride, and for good reason. Standing at 1600 feet, the ride towers like Babel, if instead of Shinar it was built under the unfurling Montana sky. The legend surrounding it draws comparisons to a real, if hypothetical, predecessor: the Euthanasia Coaster, a conceptual death machine designed by Lithuanian artist Julijonas Urbonas, with the stated goal of taking lives “with elegance and euphoria.”

Chorel has never confirmed the influence, but the structural echoes are difficult to ignore. Like the Cyanide Ride, Urbonas’s design begins with a steep-angled lift before feeding into loops of decreasing size, although Chorel’s has eight loops instead of Urbonas’s seven. Also, Chorel’s version has been constructed, while Urbonas’s is purely theoretical. But the killing mechanism in both remains the same: a prolonged cerebral hypoxia, or lack of oxygen to the brain, resulting from ten sustained g-forces across seven or eight inversions, producing symptoms that progress from tunnel vision to blackout to, eventually, death.

The children gather beneath it at every party, daring each other to imagine what it would feel like to drop down its depths of steel and air. They marvel, whisper, and quietly turn away. Many ask to ride it, but no one ever has.

And, according to Chorel’s ex-employee, no one ever will. “[He] believes it’s beautiful precisely because it’s forbidden. And the things we can’t have are the ones we want the most.”

In this way, the Cyanide Ride and the Grandfather Parties begin to resemble one another. One offers the architecture of death without the act itself, while the other imparts the whiff of catastrophe without its arrival. Both exist in proximity to something terrible that never quite occurs. For parents like the Derkins, it can sound notes of warning. For Chorel, it may be enough to simply approach the edge of the big thing and linger for a while.

I. In the morning, set up your writing desk.

Every artist works on their craft every single day. Even if it’s time away from the project, or recovery time, or other ways of working while not actively engaged in creation: eating, sleeping, making money, thinking, crying, living, i.e., all the things that go into making cool shit when you’re not actually making the cool shit.

Desks are central to creation. Could be that it’s more essential for writers, illustrators, print-makers, and digital creators — anyone who uses a laptop or notebook for the bulk of their work — but all creation involves some form of organization, and desks are natural centers of order.

Before you start writing, make sure your desk is ready to go. That means pen, notebook, laptop, coffee mug, and whatever other tchotchkes you use to adorn your desk.

This is a prelude to the actual act. The set-up that will assist the carry-out.

II. Stretch.

Before you sit down and begin to call forth words, the beautiful magic that is writing, you have to make sure your body is ready.

Writing is very sedentary, so to really make it sing you should first stretch.

Maybe do a few reps of yoga. Or if you’re up for it, unfold your purple yoga mat and do fifteen push-ups followed by fifty sit-ups. This should charge the blood in your veins.

III. Put on your writing jacket.

It’s important that you designate a single item of clothing for creation.

Painters have smocks, sculptors have coveralls, directors have headsets, and writers, in your experience, have jackets.

Something about putting on a jacket (or hat or scarf or tee shirt or whatever else) really orients you. It’s a trick that anyone who’s ever worn a uniform knows: the right garment of clothing can, with insistence, deceive the mind into moving a certain way. And the flip is true, too: ask a cop if they feel like a cop in their civvies. Or a judge out of robe if they feel judicial. Writers, like all professionals, need to feel like writers to get the good work done. Ideas are essential to this, but clothing helps.

Here are some of your old writing jackets.

And this is your current one. Note the many stories you’ve written while wearing it, whose titles you’ve painted on.

IV. Write.

Finally, you’ve arrived. With your limbs stretched, your desk set up, and your writing jacket tickling your elbows, take your seat and turn to the page.

And write.

As a writer, this is who you are. It’s what you do.

What is writing? It’s playing on the page. Play like you did when you were a kid, but point it at the story. You now have a fully developed brain, which means you’re better able to organize your playing and think it through.

Leonard Cohen used to call writing “blackening the page.” You like the turn-of-phrase, but not how it seems to enforce a word count as if the quality of those chosen doesn’t matter.

This is similar to how you feel about the famous Stephen King quote about writing 2K words a day. For a while you and all six of the horror-loving pen-holders you know tried that. It was brutal until you remembered King’s cocaine addiction, which cast the 2K into a clearer light. No judgment — like every horror writer worth his pit stains, you were raised at the Altar of the King, the One Writer True and Scary, but that doesn’t mean his way is your way, or anyone else’s.

What matters is that you write.

Your creative toil is currently broken up into two categories: short fiction and longer works, i.e. novels. You have a few ideas for the upcoming shorter pieces, including a couple of new Epsteins: one about the eternal Jew and another annotating Maria Farmer’s painting of what happened on Little Saint James. But there’s also non-JE dark hebraica on the docket, one about the infamous Jewish banking family that you’re tentatively titling “Rothschilds and Adults,” and another about an elite phenomenon known as “Grandfather Parties.” The time will come for these to be disseminated and read, but before then, they must get written.

And then there’s your novel, about the creepy mystical magician from 1666 popping up in a contemporary town that fairly resembles the New Jersey suburb where you first skateboarded and later tipped pen to paper. Work on this story, tapping into some of the new executive functioning skills you’ve picked up from the coach. Accountability to outsiders is important.

You tend to break your writing bursts into pockets of zoned-in focus. You call these Lynches after your favorite filmmaker, the weird dude from Missoula with a paintbrush in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and the hair in front standing on end.

Odds are as you write you’ll get stuck. If this happens, remember your ex-girlfriend, who at the time was a fourth-year medical student on the Upper East Side, watching you pound away on your laptop in the corner of her dorm. Remember how shiny she was in that moment, her skin bright with the sheen of exertion in the aftermath of your love. “I can’t believe you’re just sitting down and writing your story, just like that.” Watch her glow in memory when she says it and don’t disregard how it made you feel, both for her and for the world. Positive memories of past creation can help you unstick.

Keep writing. In the monotony of the act you will find the Lord of the Word, biding and hiding, there to encourage you (and to occasionally trip you up). The more you do it, the better you get at recognition.

V. Stretch thin the taffy of the idea of the Lynch.

In his book “Catching the Big Fish,” which is about meditation and creation, David Lynch writes about the necessity of carving out big blocks of time for painting. It’s important, he stresses, to block out 4-5 hours if you want to get a single hour of work done.

You’ve found this to be true about writing. So much of writing is what happens beforehand, or during your short breaks away from the page, and when you block off an entire morning for “a Lynch,” as you often do, you get good results.

Not everyone has the luxury of these “Lynches,” but you do. At least right now, with your three-days-a-week grantwriting job paying the bills and without a partner or children to soak up the remainder. Carve out your time in chunks of creation. Consider them carefully like you do your evenings. Fucking make use of your freedom.

VI. Dance to one song a day (at least).

This is important. It’s very important to let the highest form of art move you while you try to resuscitate one of its lower siblings. In other words, if you want to write a good story, you gotta put on a song that quite literally gets your feet tapping.

Put on one song that you really like and that in your most planet straddling moments, you can (and do) fully dance to.

One of the cool things you’ve found about being a human, and more specifically a writer, is that you need to move. It’s a natural need. You tend to write with music blasting, but even when you don’t, you got to dance to a song at least once a day.

All art forms have unique heights. Live theater can send you to places nothing else can touch. Good movies capture your brain and play on a loop behind your lids. An inimitable painting can celebrate the heights of human achievement. And literature? You can live in a good book for years when it’s done right. Think of yourself in the House.

Music, though, is the highest form of art. The Levites knew this, those from King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, the site of the resting spot of the God of the Hebrews, yours, where you sat before the fire and heard the mountain sing its electric song of being, shir hayam, and from where you and all those like you witnessed the incredible sight of this planet being illuminated in the buzzing glow of its source, an inventor turning on the bulb for the first time, with sentient creations there to stand around and marvel.

Currently, the two songs that really get you going are “Low” by Nadav (which you can’t link to here because it’s not yet released) and “A New Career in a New Town” by David Bowie, which coincidentally is from an album that shares the title of your first pick. Thankfully, you can link to this one.

There are many others if you’re in a pinch.

Lady Gaga is always reliable.

As is Malcolm, alav haShalom.

And then there’s this shiny example of liquid-charged movement.

Put on one of these songs through speakers. A few seconds in, move your thighs back and forth, in short time to the rhythm. After that, let your body take over. Keep your eyes closed if you prefer. Nod your hand. Tap along on the table.

It’s all good, as long as you move.

VII. Know that this is how time is designed for you to be spent.

One of the ways you know you’re living the quality writer’s life, and that means, by the narrow definitions of this piece, that you’re living your life in such a way that it gives you a rise nothing can touch, is the degree to which you feel like a writer, in your brain and in your bones. And when you follow these steps, it feels like you. It is you. It’s you today, just like it was you ten years ago and it will be you in ten years still.

What you create is less important than the simple fact that you do it. Not all writers pen bestsellers or visit the set where their second book is getting adapted or even get to climb onto a stage to discuss with a moderator the finer points of some thematic angle, but all writers write.

This is what time, at its most elevated, means for you. More opportunities to be who you are.

VIII. Embrace the boredom.

Sometimes writing can be slow, and sometimes it can be downright boring. This is true of every art just like it’s true of everything and every person, but for your purposes, it’s helpful to try to embrace the boredom rather than rush to escape it.

Sit in it, but also feel free to smoke weed in it. That’s a big asset, too.

IX. Check in on your writing chevruta.

Once a day, send a text to one of the few writing partners you’ve had over the years. There have been a handful of them and since writing is extremely solitary, it’s good to reach out to others like you. Even just to check in or say what’s up.

You borrow a lot of your creative approach from your time in yeshiva, and it should thus be no surprise that you prefer to think of your writing partner as a chevruta.

You’ve had a few pretty great ones over the years. One was an American girl turned Irish lass named Annie. Together, the two of you wrote an entire season of a kids horror podcast, as well as a pilot for an adult horror podcast that didn’t sell, and a collection of short horror stories that you found an agent for, although she wasn’t really up to the task, and shortly after she took your book off submission, you parted ways.

For a while you also had a good thing going with your friend, Tal. He’s a good dude, a prolific reader with two books out, both widely reviewed and well-sold, and he’s got a social media presence that no respectable publishing marketing team would shy away from (unlike you and the reasons for rejection you received for L8ER SK8ER). And standing in the rain with Tal listening to him rant as he nubs down one cigarette after the other gives you shivers of being — he’s too brilliant to function. For about a year, a year and a half ago, you and Tal met regularly on Wednesday afternoons to write at his parents’ fancy wooden table on the Upper West Side. The two of you, seeking artistic inspiration beyond the page, took a watercolor class together at the JCC on 76th and Amsterdam. You two were the only non-women in the room under the age of 60, but it was a hell of a time, and often you and Tal got together outside of the class to paint. It always helped the writing.

Then there’s your current chevruta, Karah. She’s a TV producer with a widely-watched show (three seasons in!) under her arm, and she’s in the process of pitching her second series. She’s also a writer, currently working on a script about a chassidishe woman going through it. You and Karah have been meeting weekly for several months, alternating between the lobby of a fancy hotel in Greenwich Village and her office across the street from Madison Square Park. The two of you love to chat about creativity and the artist’s life, and more recently it’s spilled over into aspects of religious life, often with a mystical lens, which is fine, since art and spirituality go hand-in-hand for you, each a mirror image of the same thing, the first act undertaken by the God of the Old Book. That is, the creation of this world, ex nihilo.

But hands down and above, your best ever writing chevruta is your best friend, Ellie. It’s not just that she’s a girl who shares your name, sense of humor, cultural analytic obsession, and Yiddified appreciation for the art life, but she’s also a genie where it matters, in the old cranium. She’s your best friend, the one you met as an adult and the one you would choose, as an adult, over and over. The two of you, a pair of creative clowns chavving your way across the great expanse of time (and New York). You’ve dreamed of co-writing a novel for years (inspired by NYC in the 2010s, set at an Ivy League school, with the girl character, a Sotah, written by her, and the boy character, a Nazir, written by you), and even though it hasn’t yet materialized, you and Ellie have written many, many songs together, traveled all over the country, and still hang out to this day with that rare charge of electricity that finds all the best relationships, the kind of get-alongs that remind you of the point of all of this.

Why are we alive? It seems obvious to you, especially when you kick it with your writing chevrutas. To hang out with the homies. I.e. to spend time doing things you like with people you love. Making art is a huge part of this. It’s almost exactly what lies at the center. But it’s nothing without the people.

X. Eat a not unhealthy lunch.

This is important. Once you feel like your Lynch is petering out or, preferably, once you’ve hit a good pause point, it’s time to eat.

Odds are you’ve been guzzling coffee since before you even set up your writing desk in the morning, with little else to slosh in your belly.

Make your lunch a healthy choice.

Salad. Maybe chop a hard-boiled egg in it to make it more filling. Order a grain bowl. Make some handy and delicious garlic toast. Chop up some broccoli, add it to sautéing onions, and then put some quinoa up to boil.

Do whatever. Just don’t eat crap in the middle of your workflow. You do enough of that throughout the rest of your life.

XI. Take a bath.

There’s a symbiosis between water and ideas. You’ve been aware of this for a while, even if you don’t always know what it is.

You remember reading that Einstein said when he was stuck on a difficult mathematical problem, he would take a break from his work to bathe in a tub of warm water. More often than not, by the time he returned to his physicist’s desk, the problem was resolved.

You read something similar written by another brilliant Jewish physicist, Aryeh Kaplan. Water provided him his own “eureka moments,” where pieces of his theorizing just seemed to slot perfectly together, and even though you’re no Einstein or Kaplan, and creative writing is worlds away from enacting understandings about the nature of existence and the role we play in it, you’ve found that with sticky plot points or character quirks that need resolving, water is your friend.

Not showers, though. There’s something precise about the soak, something unique to lying down in the slowness of gathered H2O. Try it out.

XII. Make routine visits to your writing desk.

This is really the bulk of writing, the bottom line way to get shit done. You set up your writing desk in the morning so you could have a productive kick-off Lynch, but on and off throughout the day, you should return to your desk to capture the words as they fall. There’s a ping-ponging here that’s essential to your creation.

Now, post-morning, what you do at your desk is entirely up to you. You totally could, for example, work diligently on your novel, always the primary goal you sprint off the paved road for, every time you turn a Lynch out.

What’s important, whether or not you’re actively upping the word count of a specific project, is that you come back to the desk, your primary center of creation.

Think of the song you heard in the Uber last night. Like any decent millennial who remembers being alive in 1999, you can easily hear “Summer Girls” in the wrong context and have your entire romantic teenage life flash before your eyes. And that’s the lovely cost, you would argue, of being tuned in. When you’re tuned in, with practice, it’s easy enough to let art fill you up, fill you entirely, and then once it has, to point it back out. At that point, just take out your notebook and start writing.

Maybe you’ll write about that iconic image from your childhood that lingers. It was a peer trip post eleventh grade. You and your friend Gilad were on a hike with the rest of your bus. The two of you turned a corner near the edge of a cliff and something about the light struck you. You both stopped. It was ethereal, not a word you use often. As you stared, a bird landed softly on a nearby branch. A gorgeous bird with a striped body, a red breast, and a crown of spotted orange feathers. It seemed to take in the light, the same uncanny sight that struck you and Gilad mute. And then it took off. In your memory, the whole thing seemed to last an eternity. In reality, it was probably ten seconds.

Later you’ll look up the bird and discover it was a Eurasian Hoopoe. But honestly, it’ll look more and more in your memory like an Articuno.

Think about Gilad. Nice guy. He played drums in your eighth grade band. Band is a generous word. You literally got together once to jam and none of the guitarists, yourself included, were in the same key. None of you even knew about different keys.

Gilad had an elevator in his house, which was used as shorthand gossip in the grade for how rich he was, but when you visited his home you realized the elevator wasn’t a luxury but a necessity his parents installed to get his elderly grandmother, who was confined to a wheelchair, up to her bedroom on the second floor of the house.

You can take this in any number of directions. Try them all.

XIII. Go outside.

Daily. While you work on the thing, which in your way of being means every single day, broski, factor in time for physical movement. In the morning that means yoga and stretching. In the afternoon that means biking, skateboarding, or, more often, going for a walk.

These outside visits should be medium-to-long. If you have a dog or a work commute, then you do this already. You have an enforced reason to move. If you don’t — and you currently work remotely and are sadly canine-free — now you have a reason to.

Now this can be pretty hard to do in New York in January, but that’s why God made Burlington Coat Factory. Movement is central to creation. Drill this into your head.

Skating on the subway counts.

XIV. Don’t be too shy to look.

While you’re outside, don’t be afraid to look at people.

This applies generally in life.

One of the brilliant wonderful things about living as an artist is that you get to stare at things that other people have to justify even noticing.

Other human beings is one example. Don’t stare enough to make people uncomfortable, but you own your eyes and that means you own what they see.

People are fascinating. Look at them. Watch them. The majority of the time, they’ll be too in their own shit to notice you looking and even if they do, that’s often the price of being in public.

Don’t let your shyness overtake you. Look at the world, which is full of people.

If you like, revisit a story you wrote last year about a serial killer who visits museums to look not at the art, but at the people admiring the art. It’s the same idea.

XV. Read

Artists are mirrors and the more they consume the more they reflect. You remember the cliche high school teacher, the one with the face and the hair, who “inspired” you in your “pre-novelized form,” saying how the best writers read until they can’t read no more, at which point they start writing until they can’t write no more, at which point they go back to reading. On and on, the same loop.

You used to do a daily reading hour. Your belief then was the same as it is now, simple and childish and bright as the sky on an early spring day: how much better the world would be if everyone in it read for an hour a day. You obviously can’t control the world — you barely have a handle on your own life — but you still try to keep to this ideal. Read an hour a day minimum.

At your reading peak, maybe a decade back, you were always between four books in four distinct categories, which you believed collectively created the kind of work you’d write: 1) a horror book, 2) a chapbook of poetry, 3) a Jewish book, usually non-fiction and often dealing with mysticism, and 4) a book on craft.

Lately, you’ve been reading short horror and poetry, but also a surprising number of spy thrillers, a new genre you’ve been dipping into.

Reading does the opposite of social media, which is part of the reason you aggressively stay off the latter: it widens the world, expanding things around you to show how large and close they are, instead of minimizing them, attaching a scope to your eyes pointed at the ecosystem of comparative scarcity that loops you into a regressive circle of unending shortcomings.

To read a good book is to be reminded that this world is so large, and even just one person can open doors to ideas you’ve never even considered, let alone stood fully inside.

Books are, to again quote the rebbe, a uniquely portable magic.

And it’s not just that. Reading begets reading. It’s one of the few things that can avalanche into more of itself.

But it’s also important to read because as a creator utilizing the word and the word only to get your point across, you gotta be a fan first.

Gaston Bachelard, a boring philosopher you read in college only to try and impress a girl you were pursuing at the time (by the way, it worked 😈) wrote that when it comes to writing “We begin in admiration and end by organizing our disappointments.” To you this rings so true.

Writing often begins with awe and interest in another’s work, but often culminates in editing what we strung together, so incredibly different from our inspiration.

XVI. Set aside today’s work, prepare tomorrow’s.

Before leaving your writing desk for the day, take stock of what you accomplished today and what you’d like to do tomorrow.

Every second bleeds into the next and days are just gatherings of seconds.

If you’re able to, write in your notebook your plans for tomorrow.

XVII. Take off your writing jacket.

A holy act like writing requires something, havdalah-like, to separate it from the more mundane aspects of living. In the past you’ve used a candle, lighting it at the outset of your Lynch and extinguishing it once you’ve finished, but you like the simple symbolic act of removing an article of clothing when you’re done.

XVIII. Read yourself to sleep.

Most good days end with you reading on your bed, your little three-legged kitten fussing around with the sheets, until you get too tired to keep your eyes open.

The next morning, find where you left off in the book, dog-ear the page, get out of bed, and hop to it! Your writing desk awaits and more importantly, so does the story it’s there to serve.