What’s your day going to be like?

Ben Chatwin’s The Sleeper Awakes was one of my favorite albums of 2015. His new one, Heat & Entropy, is out next month and it is just as good, if not better. This track may be an ominous way to start your morning, but is your day really going to turn out to be rainbows and hugs? I mean, maybe it is. Maybe your Google calendar has a special spot marked “rainbows & hugs” sometime after lunch. I guess I should stop assuming everyone else’s life is as grim and hopeless as mine. Maybe you’re all getting rainbows and hugs after lunch and you just decided not to tell me because you think I’m a drag and I’ll ruin your big rainbow and hug party, is that it? That’s it, isn’t it? Look, I’m sorry I can’t be as cheerful as everyone else. This is the way God made me. If my debilitating sadness is so painful for you to be around that you need to ostracize me and laugh about it at your rainbow and hug convention I guess I will just sit here hopelessly and listen to my music by myself. Enjoy all your rainbows and hugs. I bet they’re really nice.

Heat & Entropy is out July 29th.

★★★★ Passing flip-flops flip-flopped audibly on the sidewalk. It had been hot in the building hallway and the sun was bright enough to make grains in the concrete sparkle even through dark spots of old chewing gum. The air conditioning in the school auditorium was frigid, though; after it, all the apartment required was an open window. A waxing gibbous moon was up in the daylight sky on the way to dinner. People already eating were pressed outward into the sidewalk seating and window sections along Columbus, making a Wednesday look like weekend brunch. The sky was still daylit when dinner was done. The four-year-old, in flip-flops of his own, flung a fist up toward the silvery west. “I punched a cloud in its eye,” he said. When dark did come, the moon over Broadway was shining from under a crackled shroud. By the time a cab had gone 30-some blocks downtown, the moon was missing entirely, nor did it return after the ride back.

Homelessness in America

This is the fourth in a five-part series about homelessness, mental health, and addiction. (Here’s Part I, Part II, and Part III.)

I Like Things I Can Understand

In which I grieve the summer, the hour
when I feel myself my only friend.
We drove back from the swimming hole
close enough to the wildfire to see its red,
those cars pulled from the interstate
agawk. And yesterday a troubled plume
behind the mountain, thunderhead or growth of smoke.
I know I’m failing in some ways,
covered in particles of splendent air,
left by no means without storm or time — but how
to shake the guilt of the avenues,
the osprey, to eat a nectarine
in an inner tube, the gold sun on gold,
the way you live in friendship
as a satellite to yourself? To do:
to tiptoe around: a fuck, a game
of hypotheticals, the brilliant scent
of smoke and rain when I walked outside
this morning, I don’t want anyone
to be jealous. (If you can’t think of something
just say what really happened.) I was up all night
sweating from sunburn and future disappointment — 
this thing is a letter to what I want
and can’t get at, I will make a poem
out of your body, I mean
take. Sure it’s a surge, a nice upswing,
how the universe draws to a point of beauty
here, where smoke heaves the sky
and helicopters bring water from the river.
But there are always fissures: casements open
to the wet night, the magazine can’t bear
the white stress of its binding. At the swimming hole
we walk into the water to seal ourselves
in a little cave, a mountain’s mouth of stone.

Alice Bolin’s essay collection, Dead Girls, is forthcoming from HarperCollins.

The Poetry Section is edited by Mark Bibbins.

If you’re on the Internet, you are one.

Me to my kids in 2085: Yea I was on Twitter the day everyone found the worst opinion online Kids: what was mom like? Me: I don’t remember

 — @charles_kinbote

Did you happen to see The Very Bad Tweet last night? If you didn’t I am sorry for even bringing it up; I assure you that you are better off not having noticed it and I want you to go about your day as you were, innocent of the rampant (if predictable) stupidity contained within. (Odds are something equally dumb will come along soon enough, so your innocence will be temporary at best.) It’s funny: The other day when that Facebook VP announced we are five years away from the end of the written word I found myself in a state of sadness and anger, but the more I think about it the more I am okay with the idea. I can skip video; words don’t give you enough of a chance to get away before they blast you with their aggressive imbecilities.

There’s a lot of discussion these days about whether or not the web is a force for good (some go as far as to suggest it is humankind’s greatest masterpiece, which is a remarkable claim to make in an era where DMT is so widely available). Since that viewpoint seems to be gaining currency, I would like to offer an alternate understanding of the Internet, loosely adapted from a lecture delivered early in 2015 under the title The Internet Is Terrible Because Of Everyone:

The Internet is the purest mechanism yet through which everyone can express every idiot opinion they have about everything to everyone else. Let’s refrain for the moment from reflecting on the metacognitive aspects of this structural adjustment. Instead, our focus should be on the toll it takes on those who are exposed to it every day: Contact with the Internet is poisoning them through a constant gush of idiot opinion flowing forth from the vast waste-ridden tide of people who need to be reminded to shut their mouths while breathing. Various forms of social media are only amplifying the process, but where constant exposure can in many cases be expected to help build up immunities, the Internet’s toxicity is such that frequent association with its noxious materials somehow increases both sensitivity and the paradoxical seeking out of further points of infection. The poison is ingested, reacted to, and not even fully absorbed before the search for more poison proceeds.

The main thesis of this lecture was that while once we worried the worst thing was knowing what everyone thought about us, we now realize something considerably more frightening, i.e. the worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything. In the year and a half that has elapsed since then things have only gotten worse, from a clinical standpoint, as our tolerance for the poison (and desire for its effects) has only increased.

If you saw The Very Bad Tweet last night (and, again, I apologize for continuing to mention it if you did not; it was indeed Very Bad but it is well within the realm of possibility that it was not even the dumbest thing on social media in the hour which is was posted) you probably didn’t even stop to consider just how damaging it is to be consistently confronted with the vast range of opinions people no longer have the sense to keep to themselves; you probably just registered your disdain through one method or another and kept on scrolling to see what someone had to say about the singer and Thor’s brother. “That was good poison,” you thought, “I wonder where I can get some more.”

I am here to tell you that there is more poison on the way. Gallons of it. Rivers of it. Look off into the distance and you may yet see the crest of a wave of poison that even now is about to break over the millions of us standing with our heads up and mouths open, desperate to partake in its putrid bounty. It’s coming. There’s nothing you have to do, really. Feel that? There it is.

Sweary Irish Dads

To be a dad is often to struggle with, fail to comprehend, and ultimately be defeated by modernity. The mercifully dormant Dads on Vacation tumblr is a document of Dads struggling with the unfamiliar, trying to make peace. American Dads have cheesy jokes to buffer the hard edges of the world; Irish Dads tell these challenges to “fuck away off.”

More often than not, to resist the encroachments of the unfamiliar is to swear at it, so as to cut it down to size. The Irish writer Brian O’Nolan, who wrote under the pseudonym Flann O’Brien, was said to have left his job is a civil servant in “a final fanfare of fucks.” Swearing is the armor that the Irish Dad wears into battle. My own Irish Dad, upon meeting my American friend Alex, affectionately christened him “Alex the Bollix.” (This of course only rhymes when said with a Belfast accent, and roughly translates to “Alex the Shithead.”) Irish sons and daughters have discovered that the rest of the world finds this endlessly funny, and taken to YouTube accordingly.

Observe then, this brief selection of Irish Dads being victimized by, struggling with, swearing at, and ultimately succumbing to, the modern world. There is a common narrative arc: rising anger, climax, and denouement.

Here is a dad in camo shorts who has tattooed on his arm the name of the daughter that is currently melting his brain with a riddle. Dog and the daughter are both in on the joke. Listen to his rage bubble up to the surface as the thoughts dance around the inside of his head. Four times the dad asks, “How many didn’t whaa?”

After several repetitions of the riddle, the dad turns to the phone in desperation. There are no answers to be found there though. Here, then, the dad completely divests from the challenges of modernity and the swearing erupts:

“Ah you’re a fucking thick c***, I swear to Jaysus. That’s the most stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard in me life.”

Only in Ireland could a Dad affectionately call his daughter a c-word and have it send her into a fit of laughter. Second, he calls forth the twin deities of Irish swearing, fuck (or perhaps fook) and Jaysus, both being equally holy, and perhaps related to the similarly Catholic Quebecois sacres swears.

In a a final grasp for the answer, the dad repeats the riddle to himself. Perhaps an inserted swear will make the truth easier to uncover. “Thirty cows and twenty-eight (ate) fucking chickens? … Who didn’t?!”

The dog growls.

“That’s enough now, fuck off,” the dad tells his daughter as he attempts to return to his dad activities.

He leaves the door open a crack. It is a door to his daughter’s room and to the answer to this kink in the universe. The reveal. “Ten didn’t eat chickens.” Father and daughter join in laughing as the Irish Dad is defeated.

For our second Irish Dad, the culprit is not a riddle, but a GPS device that can not, will not, hear him. He just wants to go to Cloughjordan. “New destination,” he tells the GPS. The GPS has an English voice: “Sorry? Please repeat your destination.” “New destination,” the Dad says with more agitation. “Cancelled,” the English accented GPS taunts. Maybe a swear will help.

“The greatest fuck up of a yoke,” he christens the GPS. The giggles elsewhere in the car warn that there are Irish Dad swears approaching on the horizon.

“Hello? New destination. Cloughjordan.” (Cloughjordan is a difficult name for a non-Irish person, with the gh of clough forming in the back of the mouth.) “Sorry?” the insultingly English GPS replies. The GPS has denied him three times. It was foretold. The time has come to swear at the GPS. There is no choice. Here we go.

“I’ll give you fuckin’ sorry. NEW destination. Clough FUCKING jordan.”

The GPS is still stubbornly English.

“You’re a thick c***.”

His anger then turns to his companion. Lord Jaysus is summoned.

“You’re looking into them books. And BOLLIX [unintelligible swearing].”

Here the Irish Dadrage breaks the bonds of language, ascending into tongues unknowable to those not from Tipperary. The Dad rejects the instruction manual, rejects the possibility that his passenger’s voice may work better with the GPS. The Tipperary accent deepens. He is alone.

“Gracious heap of shite.”

It is finished.

Intermezzo. Our third Irish Dad has attempted to turn the camera outwards towards modernity, to document his encounters with Las Vegas with a GoPro curiously mounted on a selfie stick. The abyss, however, stares back. The Irish Dad has turned the GoPro inward, towards himself. Even from the beginning of this Dad’s contest with modernity, he was defeated by it. What we have then is not the same narrative arc or the same swearing, but rather a sort of mise en abyme, in which the conventions of the form of the Irish Dad are placed on a brief hiatus. We are invited to gaze into the eyes of an Irish Dad, who is not aware he is struggling with modernity, even as he is swept under its current.

First, we are in the hotel. There are the mountain, Arizona, the Trump Tower, the dad tells us. A little Dad joke about the color of Trump’s hair. There is the view looking west, he says. No, there is not. There is only the Dad.

We are on the Vegas Strip. We are in the Bellagio. The MGM Grand. Some excitement about the filming location of Ocean’s 11. Several iterations of a Dad joke about shrimp boats and large boats. Several times the Dad imitates an American accent, a favorite pastime of Irish Dads. But we are really in none of these places. We are just looking at the Dad, joining him in his wonder.

Here we have an Irish Dad being victimized not by a riddle or a piece of technology, but by a prank. The Dad is reading his paper, angrily listening to his U2 song, and is not happy about how long the driving test has taken. We know that immediately we are in for something special. This video is the paragon of the swearing Irish Dad.

“How did it go? Jaysus I’m a fucking good while waiting.”

As the son begins his waffling about the difficulties of the three-point turn and the hill start, the Irish Dad slices through to the truth.

“Did ye fail the fucker?”

As in the two previous videos, there is a turning point, a crossroads where the Dad realizes his inability to exist in the world. After the son’s reply in the affirmative, the swearing takes off, lifted to flight by a gust of rage.

The swearing that follows is of ornate and extravagant quality—it’s acrobatic and dazzling, worthy of high-wire trapeze artists, or daredevil stunt pilots. The Dad’s swearing travels in the realms of theology, taxonomy, economics:

“Ah for FUCK’s sake. Jaysus Christ of Almighty, for fuck’s sake. What kind of a c*** was he, anyway?”

The fact that the driving instructor was a c*** is obvious for the Dad, by virtue of having failed his son, but what this Dad would like to know is what kind of a c***, what species of c***, what genus. These are important pieces of information to attain for the Dad, if he is to exist in this new reality. The son flashes a knowing look, as he knows what’s coming.

“A fucking bitch of a woman, why didn’t you sweeten her up some way?”

Sweetness is in a different universe for this Dad. Blame must be assigned for this disaster.

“Them’s the two tings I told you last night, lad. The fucking three-point turn and the hill start, but you were lookin’ into the fuckin’ computer. Jaysus Christ.”

In the final denouement, — as the son reveals the prank, and the Dad rage subsides — Jaysus reverts back to Jesus. But alas, there is more modernity to confront. The son twists the knife, telling the Dad he has been recorded.

“Turn off that FUCK of a thing.”

Irish sons and Irish daughters, please don’t. Keep recording.

Michael Lee-Murphy is an Irish-born, New England raised reporter and writer. He blogs at A Furious Return to Basics.

Here’s another song from the forthcoming Avalanches record. This one’s got the dude from Mercury Rev, and your tolerance for that band may predict your appreciation level here. I personally enjoy it, but I can see where some might find it a tad irritating. Anyway, good luck and I hope you enjoy.

★★★ Pigeons seethed around something unseen on the sidewalk in the shade. The shade was where to be; outside it, fierce precise daylight was hitting everything, shining through the little perforations in street-sign posts, flashing on glitter or confetti in the gutter that ought to have been too trampled and begrimed to flash. The smell of cut green wood came up a closed street where a tree-trimming truck was at work. In the shadows everything seemed perfect, even as on the opposite sidewalk people waiting in a line were trying to protect themselves with umbrellas as parasols.

Homelessness in America

This is the third in a five-part series about homelessness, mental health, and addiction. (Here’s Part I and Part II.)

Just what I wanted, again.

by Nick and Hallie Bateman

Like I said last Father’s Day, it’s comforting to know that I will never need to buy another wallet. In fact, at this point, you’re giving me wallets I’ll likely be leaving you in my will.

Hey, I’m just messing with you! Don’t be sad. I really do appreciate the thought that went into this. The symbolism of the wallet really expresses what I am to you: a bank. A holding place for money.

What you didn’t get me says a lot too, about how little you listen to me. Seriously, I dropped so many hints about what I wanted. I talked about golf stuff for weeks. When that commercial for that new Audi came on, remember? I said, “Man, I’d love a car like that.” When nobody responded I said it louder: “MAN, I’D LOVE A CAR LIKE THAT.” (Cheryl, it’s one thing that the kids didn’t pick up on that, but you?!)

I know, I know, you’re a busy kid, you’ve got a lot going on. All that hopscotch, or whatever the hell I’ve been washing off the sidewalk all month. You don’t really have time to think about me, and what my interests are outside of feeding, clothing, and medicating you. I’m happy that you get to live in such a safe little world! You haven’t even had your hamster die yet! You still get to cry about candy!

I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound resentful. I love the wallet, I really do. Maybe I just want a little appreciation for everything I do around here! What do you think happens when the dog gets sprayed by a skunk and you run inside? That’s 40 goddamn minutes of dad work. You think it was your sister who re­-shingled the roof? Hell no, that was all dad. And don’t get me started on how much of your science fair entry I had to build. I deserved half of that gift card but I held my tongue during the awards ceremony because I am your damn father. I didn’t speak up when you got your mother yet another pair of earrings for Mother’s day. I swallowed my pride on Christmas, when you gave me a damn lego set. You flat­out forgot my birthday two years in a row and I said nothing. But today it feels like too much.

(All I said for soooo long was that I wanted golf stuff. I have been getting into golf, I made it so clear…)

Now, hey ­­ what’s this! Another gift? You let me yammer on and on about the wallet and you had another gift the whole time? My gosh, I’m sorry. The wallet is great. This is great! Haha.

Sometimes I get so caught up in being this serious dad figure, I forget that I can learn a thing or two from you crazy kids.

I can’t wait to see what you got me here. Let’s open it up…

A watch?

Another watch.

Wow…. thanks.

Nick and Hallie Bateman are a sibling writing duo based in California.