NAPOLEON CROWNED HIMSELF

april 8th, 2026 - hope I don't get fired because of the war that would suck

walking into my boss's office
about an hour before like hey
I know this email got forwarded to me
but I do have to show up to this meeting,
seems like it's for more Important people,
yeah I guess I've got to go, okay,
get to the breakroom and a solid
two other people from my lab are there,
the morning shift people bailed already
and the evening shift people
haven't quite come in yet,
so now is the time for me, I guess,
but yeah building manager comes in
and sits down and says hey everyone
fun fact do you know we get most our helium
from the middle east? used to be russia,
but then 2022 happened, got the point
we had to start rationing,
shutting down half our instruments,
fighting a bit over who could run anything,
anyways here's how you adjust your instruments
so they don't run on as much helium,
airgas is starting to break out limits
and straight-up not selling to people
but we found someone else who said hey
we've got tons of helium lying around,
so yeah we're stocking up while we've got time,
hope this whole war thing is over soon.

april 9th, 2026 - kind of afraid to check and see how she's doing now

I can't tell you any of the formulas
or even what we were covering,
but I still remember early 2022
at the start of my final semester of college
my, analytical, inorganic maybe?
yeah, inorganic chemistry professor
talking about how she grew up in ukraine
and got her degree from kyiv polytechnic,
I don't think it was even a whisper yet,
but a couple months later it'd be a rumble
somewhere past the snow settling down thick
outside the window while me and a few other
teacher's pets sat around talking with her,
everybody else had left already, we had questions,
we didn't want to walk out in the snow,
and we were helping her figure out
how to get the projector working properly,
and we'd heard the news, an army at the border,
all the denials and gestures and implications,
nobody was quite sure if he'd pull the trigger,
if we were looking at world war III here,
a superpower with nukes going to war,
she admitted she hoped someone out there
would shoot putin in the head before he tried shit,
put an end to that dictator's reign,
none of us exactly disagreed there,
us about to go out into the world not sure
if the walls were going to fall down on us,
and her far from home wondering
if she'd have one to go back to soon.

april 10th, 2026 - de jure and de facto

realistically the older your memories are
the more likely you've made them up
based on what someone told you about what happened
or the kinds of stories you've spun after the fact
(who you are, where you've been, what you've done,
our whole lives we're telling stories about ourselves
because it's the only way anyone can understand us),
memories are more about teaching you lessons
than some Perfect Record Of Your Life, but
I swear I remember being like 13 or 14 or something
staring up at the map on the wall opposite my bed
trying to figure out where crimea was. it just didn't
click for me, exactly. I knew the referendum
was a pile of bullshit, sure, 90%+ for independence,
definitely no ballot stuffing or intimidation
or arresting anyone who'd dare vote otherwise
when you've rolled up with soldiers and a fleet
and blocked off all the bridges for good measure,
it was just Weird having this whole part of the map
that most people agreed yeah belongs to this country
in practice is held by that other country over there,
I loved maps as a kid, my mom bought me a few atlases
and I'd spend hours pouring over them trying
to pick up on the names and shapes of countries,
they always felt so clear and static and defined to me,
there's england, there's tonga, wow south sudan,
that just happened, wild, probably not going to see
anything like that again in my lifetime,
the whole thing was strangely comforting to me,
and suddenly I came face to face with the idea
that countryness wasn't that simple, a couple countries
bickering over this piece of land, one country
struggling to be born yanking itself free from another,
countries so weak other countries more or less
exist in their own right inside of it,
whether they get recognized as countries or not,
classics of growing up, thing you thought
was simple? turns out it's not!! I also learned
if you've got enough guns and will
you can kind of do whatever you want
and other people more or less have to put up with it,
and wow has that been explaining the last forever.

april 11th, 2026 - tatarstan

I knew this tatar person living
not too far from Moscow - chill enough,
adopted a cat their aunt gave them,
raised chickens, kind of a weeaboo,
a little too deep in the gacha mines,
worked odd jobs at the local supermarket
or something like that, I swear
there was a forklift involved at some point,
prone to solving some of their problems
with violence and/or alcohol - was always
a little bit worried about them back then,
even more worried a couple years after
they left the one discord server we shared,
haven't heard from them since, I get the feeling
some mutual friends of ours haven't either,
been kind of afraid to reach out and ask,
I don't think I'd be too happy with the answer,
do you ever think about how putin is a rus supremacist?
like he's invading ukraine and roping belarus
into some weird we're basically one state deal
because he's a revanchist who believes
he's carving out another great rus empire
and ukranians and belarussians are basically
spicy rus who need to get in line, and he'll
shoot the intelligentsia and kidnap kids
and indoctrinate them until there's nobody
who can tell him otherwise, and he wouldn't dare
sacrifice his precious rus to the war effort,
he's hunting down russia's many other ethnic groups
(who can't even get housing or jobs that easily
in and around the rus-heavy european part of russia)
and threatening harassing intimidating them
into signing up to march into the flames
to feed the two weeks into four year war
he's running out of missiles and tanks and troops
to win at this point.

april 12th, 2026 - the republic of tuva

you know, feynman tried to go there once,
spent so long arguing with soviet authorities
and trying to wrangle the logistics
of going out to the middle of siberia
that by the time the passport came in the mail
he'd already died from cancer. these days
it's merely a plane flight and a few hour drive
to the capital. or, would be with a visa,
and if there wasn't that whole war thing going on
and I didn't want to risk getting arrested
and held hostage by a hostile government.
it's like this place goes out of its way
to be impossible to get to. I'm still tempted.
just kind of afraid of being one of Those Tourists,
I'm looking around at the concerning number of websites
that are like check out the pristine forests and lakes
and all these mYsTiCaL people with their yurts
and throat singing and shamanism, like I'm
standing in front of a cage at a zoo throwing peanuts,
take my rubles and put on a show for me,
like moscow isn't already bleeding the place dry.
god though, me and my brother have been eyeing
tuva and mongolia for forever, everything seems
so much More there, the trees and mountains all taller,
the deserts and plains stretching out forever,
a bit like home away from home, honestly if I could
I'd at least wander wyoming and disappear
somewhere among the sagebrush, don't have to worry
about my job or life or rest of the world for a minute.

april 13th, 2026 - the anti-formalist rayok

so it turns out formalism
is a real philosophical concept
with actual meaning behind it,
I just assumed it was a catch-all
for when the soviet censors
wanted to be killjoys. I mean really,
authoritarian governments of all stripes
hone in on arts and culture, see it
as a way to push their projects forward,
make loyal whoevers believing in whatever,
but also when you're consolidating power
through violence and control, an easy way
to get promoted is to scream about
the cultural interlopers coming in
to convert people to postmodern marxism
or whatever the fuck, so put the two together
and nobody's allowed to have fun ever.
sorry your concepts are a little too abstract,
your instruments a little too electronic,
your tuning a little too unorthodox,
your tunes aren't folksy enough,
how is any of this supposed to embody
the struggles of the proletariat,
these stupid shitty little farmers
can't handle a little aleatory,
it's a little too Western for our tastes,
come back when you've written
a good proper balalaika concerto
or cantata dedicated to stalin,
also we may throw you in jail
or at least kick you out of the musicians' union
and ban you from leaving the country.
and a solid three quarters of these people
managed to sneak their music out anyways,
picked up enough popularity in the West
and enough people vouching for them in the USSR
that whoops, sorry, your music's fine,
I guess we'll fund and sponsor you again,
sorry about the time we tried to strangle you
in the middle of an apartment stairway,
no hard feelings?

april 14th, 2026 - haunted by the ghost of 馬步芳

do you think the man who let his goons
shoot a couple protestors - american citizens!
- in the head in cold blood gives a single shit
what happens to people on the other side of the planet?
just insulted by all the sycophants and propagandists
and even democrat politicians who should know better
saying well congress didn't sign off on this war
nor does it want to, so it's not even legitimate,
and we blew up a school full of children
and managed to get several of our planes shot down
and our soldiers blown up in their bases by drones
but just think, we could do some regime change!
all we need to do is to blow up an old man
already dying from cancer with replacements
already in line to take over, so blow them up too,
and magically the whole hierarchy of mullahs and generals
who gunned down tens of thousands of people
not even a month ago to save their skins
will keel over and the exhausted, burned out,
grieving public will rise up and take over
and bring about a complex multiethnic democracy
and not devolve into sectarian violence
and not start carving out spheres of influence
a la post-xinhai revolution china
and whoops where'd all that uranium go
why are people mining the straight of hormuz
and trying to impose tolls on everyone who sails through
and what do you mean terrorist cells are taking off
stealing and killing and immiserating everyone
not just in iran but the surrounding countries,
how could this have happened? and again,
that's assuming regime change was ever the point,
apparently every day that sick addled old man
we call a president for some godforsaken reason
gets fed a steady diet of videos - some AI, some not -
of drones blowing up this or that, ships and soldiers
shooting at this or that, this was only ever
a great War for Content, shock and awe, blood and guts,
beat up iran until it sues for peace and go home,
but unfortunately the adversary gets a vote
so gas is $4/gal and my friend wanted me
to get a passport in case they do have a draft
and I have to flee the country.

Spoiler

yeeah should talk to my family about it, wouldn't hurt to have a backup plan

april 15th, 2026 - the petit bourgeoisie of gooding idaho

there's this argument
I've heard a couple times
(mostly recently from AOC
if I remember correctly),
that people turn to fascism
out of desperation, are
broke, miserable, down on their luck,
like out in the countryside
with all the jobs going to the city
and all the young folks with them,
monsanto or whoever it is these days
buying and consolidating farms
and pushing out the mom and pop operations,
time to turn to pills and the local news
the koch brothers bought out a bit ago
and hope and pray for a strongman
to come down and raze the cities,
bring the jobs back and the feeling
of being young back, or at least
what they think they felt like
when they were young, safe and secure,
free from the world and its burdens
and complicated messy questions
with complicated messy answers,
just kill everyone who asks those questions
or are questions themselves, easy enough.

and the progressive populist side of things
argues the solution is to pull their hoods off
and expose them to the true menace, capitalism,
draining them and throwing the husks aside
in the name of yearly revenue and shareholder value.
and my own beefs with capitalism aside, eh,
I've never really been a fan of that argument,
like there's my basque catholic MAGA cousins
(I do and don't wonder how they're feeling
watching their god-emperor fight the pope)
and you know what? they're all pretty rich,
snowmobile and ski trips to sun valley
and their built them themselves houses
dotting the hills outside gooding idaho,
they're doing quite well for themselves,
and they're still Like That, I think about
wagner's family in the middle of Nazi Germany
raking in that sweet bayreuth dough
and propping up a little ethnic cleansing
on the side, as a treat to themselves,
I think about the world's richest man
soros-posting on the social media site he owns,
like yeah I think plenty of fascists
and close-to-fascists are chasing
some idealized never existed safe comfy past
and are willing to strangle the future to death
to make it happen, but I have my doubts
they're all struggling to make ends meet.

april 16th, 2026 - house of the deaf man

it's the kind of thing that's easy
to sensationalize, they're all freakish really,
faces twisted into snarls and sneers,
cheekbones and foreheads so pronounced
and ash grey white, maybe a little pink makeup
painted on almost at random,
you'd think you were looking at skulls,
pretty sure some of them are skulls,
or maybe masks, big bulging noses
and sunken eyes and teeth and lips
that don't quite line up with where
you'd think they'd be, I don't know
how else to put it, it's like they're melting,
it's like they're wearing human skin,
whispering to each other, mocking you
when they're not screaming, screeching,
staring up at the sky beseeching god,
and in a slightly different world
we wouldn't know they ever existed,
they would've flaked off the plaster
they were painted on not long after
de goya bit the dust, hell
what we have now is a reconstruction,
we ripped them off the walls in pieces
and slapped them onto some canvases
and did some touch-ups and alterations,
might've done some more damage in the process,
those two men beating each other to death
with sticks might not be in sinking in mud,
but standing in the middle of a grassy field,
so whoops, so much for that metaphor,
but also who the fuck knows what de goya was thinking,
he didn't tell anyone about them,
didn't write down anything about them,
he had to have known they'd fall apart
fairly quick as long as nobody checked or cared,
didn't seem to bother him much,
so yeah all things told it's easy enough
to find clickbait articles and videos
talking about this artist who went craaaazy
and dabbled a bit with art about cannibalism
and masturbation and drowning dogs and what have you,
if you could bring him into the future
I wonder what he'd think about all that,
probably get some kind of a kick watching us
scramble to figure out these paintings
that meant what they needed to to him
and only him.

april 17th, 2026 - wikipedia called ezra pound controversial and it pissed me off

maybe I can have a little room in my heart
for the idea of redemption,
I mean really my main beef with it
is I don't think you should be
or even can be absolved
of the stuff you've done,
that implies an ending,
like congrats you're a good person now
you don't need to bother anymore
dealing with the consequences
of your actions, you're free, nah,
you should always be working towards
cleaning up the messes you made
and trying to be a better human being
because everything you do and say
is going to ripple out and affect,
however little, the lives of the people
around you, and around them, and them,
the moment you're born until you die,
and at least personally I'd like to do my part
to make a world where everyone's free
to explore and discover and do what they like,
but god whatever version of redemption
we're talking about here, I don't think
ezra pound ever really redeemed himself,
hell I'm not convinced he ever ditched his anti-semitism,
everything that old man said
feels unbelievably weak and pathetic,
the bare minimum because he wasn't winning
all the awards he wanted to, so he shat out
something like a poem to say sorry about the goof,
I was just mistaken and got carried away
blaming all social ills on money-grubbing jews
and flying halfway across the world
to join up with a dictator and write
and direct and record propaganda to justify
the most infamous genocide in modern history,
yeah sure man, happens to best of us,
it's all cool, go hang out in italy sipping wine
by the beach while a parade of your rich friends
prop you up because oh you're such a good writer
and editor, really bring their works to life,
and you didn't try to genocide their loved ones,
just a parade of sycophants and enablers
more concerned with their egos than anything else,
so yeah, why bother learning a damn thing?

april 18th, 2026 - zone rouge

let's be real here, war is absolutely terrifying.
like, those are whole-ass people -
soldiers, civilians, children -
with rich internal lives full of
dreams and hopes and aspirations,
entire worlds of emotions and feelings
getting snuffed out all the time,
shot or stabbed or blown to pieces
or choked out or poisoned or getting sick
or starving or dying of thirst
or beaten or strangled or etc. etc.,
do you ever think about how there are
parts of verdun that even now
nothing can really grow on
because the ground is so contaminated
with lead and arsenic and phosgene?
all the survivors - the people, animals,
the land and water itself, end up
shattered, broken, struggling
to pick up the pieces and remember
a time before the war, they're so haunted
by all the reminders of what they saw
and what they lost, can't ever quite get back.

so excuse me for getting a bit fucking pissed
watching the secretary of defense hitler-screech
his way through speeches about how he's doing
a holy war, imposing the will of God
and relitigating the crusades
on those heathen desert barbarians,
that that's what the point of America is,
because clearly the Lord is so in love
with something as mortal and fragile as a country,
there's clearly nothing in the bible about satan
tempting Christ with crowns and scepters,
I'm staggered by the number of "christians"
who immediately got suckered by the antichrist,
but anyways this freak can't even do war right,
he thinks war is when you do a bunch of push-ups
and fire missiles at whatever and call it a day,
things like raising and coordinating and feeding your army
is just weak pussy shit, the Lord
shall provide, and right now it's looking like
He's in the mood to hand us a fat fucking L,
iran holds the strait and has decided
it's going to charge everyone for using it now,
but at least we drenched our hands in blood
for no good reason.

april 19th, 2026 - augustus you rat bastard

I mean, the man would even
make a whole show of losing
at games/contests/competitions,
congratulate the winner,
offer prizes, can you think of
any other authoritarian
who would do something like that?
they cynical ones are all too egotistical
and power-hungry to admit defeat,
the idealistic ones refuse
to show even a sliver
of what they're afraid is weakness,
and there he was, making himself out
to be the humble citizen of the republic,
just a first among equals here,
like god what a precarious tightrope
to walk for the rest of his life,
he was emperor in all but name
but couldn't just go out and crown himself
without getting stabbed in the back
like his uncle by the senate
and by the military and by the people,
so he'd sit in the senate
and put up with their bickering
and he'd end up calling the shots
while making them feel special and important;
hand out land and favors to soldiers,
marry off his favorite generals
and put up monuments in their names;
and put on shows for the public,
gladiators fighting lions
and whole-ass reconstructed naval battles
and whatever games and stunts and shows
crossed his mind; and by god
the propaganda, deify caesar
and make himself the son of a god
loyally worshipping his ancestors,
pump out everything from altars
with his family carved on them
to epic poems and philosophical treatises
making him out to be the second coming
of romulus, he saw a city of wood
and made it into a city of marble,
he might've even poisoned himself
and offed his grandson just so
he could set things up
for tiberius to take the reigns,
I wonder if he ever got tired
being the star of his own play,
or got so immersed in the role
he didn't know how to be anything else.

april 20th, 2026 - eleanor empties the prisons of aquitaine

I think I've read plenty about henry II,
oooh look at his pretty angevin empire,
all of england and taking a few bites
out of all the neighboring countries,
his opportunistic marriage with his frankly
absurdly competent wife eleanor
keeping his french possessions in check,
his attempts to standardize and modernize
the whole legal system so it's actually
at something like consistent and coherent,
really only so much you can do when you've got
thousands of judges in the middle of nowhere
(and the empire's so full of middle of nowheres)
flinging out whatever judgments feel right,
but you know I haven't really seen anyone
talk about how petty the man could be,
how much of a control freak he was,
like okay yeah his sons did revolt against him
but the most he'd been doing was stick a crown
on one of them, promise land to (most) the others,
and do absolutely nothing to prepare them
to take power after his death, and his own wife,
god, couldn't stand her thinking she might be
better equipped to manage her own duchy,
so guess who's going under house arrest!!
literally dying from a bleeding ulcer in his stomach
and he has to look his son richard in the eyes
and just say yeah richard is my heir,
and he can't bring himself to do it,
even though richard just negotiated
with the french king to marry his daughter,
so that's one big threat out of the way (for now),
and is obviously popular across the empire
and is a fighter just like his dad,
and sure richard picked a fight with france
in the first place, and did a couple revolts,
but who the fuck else is it going to be?
fucking john lackland? sitting in the corner
all non-threatening and nice and behaved
and completely politically irrelevant?
but nope, henry has to get hunted down
by a combo of richard and the king of france,
get sieged in a castle, agree to their terms,
and die, probably fuming the whole time,
you think he would've maybe had a moment in there
to reflect on his life choices,
but somehow I doubt it.

april 21st, 2026 - arvo part in the woods

it's hilarious to me that arvo part
ever had a serialist, hyper-modernist,
avant-garde phase, it's like finding out
the pope knows how to do an ollie,
all the polytonal stylings and layering
tons of instruments on top of each other
to bust out these huge walls of sound
right on the edge of incoherent,
unfortunately it was a little too out there
for the soviet authorities, who decided
to blacklist his work and harass his family,
so obviously he had to spend a few years
working up the nerve to piss off the censors
a completely different way with his
orthodox chant holy and human minimalism,
just as nuanced and rich in tonal color
the way he could pit chords against each other,
the perfectly intoned divine
and the sinfully dissonant mortal,
but now distinctly with his techniques,
his musical language, his voice, his faith, him,
I wonder if he remembers any of himself anymore,
he hasn't composed in years,
the soviet union fell decades ago,
apparently these days he's living
in a house somewhere in the woods
in the middle of estonia, he might have
dementia, figures for a 90-year-old man,
now there's this story I heard once
but never quite believed (ravel obviously
had something or another going on mentally
the last decade or two of his life,
at least aphasia, but I never heard
anything more concrete than that)
where ravel sat there listening
to this beautiful string quartet,
broke down crying, asked whose it was,
it was his, I guess I wonder
if part's spending the rest of his life
chasing himself through the trees, I wonder
if he can still hear the music.