Coleman Ridge

Yup. One is always missing some criterion or other for right action.

1. Voluptuous pleasure in the rest periods between sets of overhead press.

2. Guilt at so much pleasure when I am moving so little weight.

3. Admiration of the skill that went into finding something to feel guilty about.

New York Lacked an Affordable Housing Portal. So These Teenagers Made One.

Real good kids.
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/r...

Derrida giving you a come-hither look.

Young Derrida had good angles.

The usual term is mixed economy. Capital does what it's good at, government picks up the slack in areas where capital fails, like housing and health care. From each institution according to its ability, to each according to its needs.

Problem is, capital continually conspires against government.

I don't know, but it sounds plausible to me. Early stages anyway. Later stages diverge sharply.

Tiptree wrote a deeply distressing horror story, The Screwfly Solution, about the early physical symptoms of arousal and those of preparation to do violence being similar.

We are of all different tribes, but we have this chilly, inhuman set of economic protocols that let us live heaped up together and still get along. This comes at great social and moral cost, but, on the other hand, we get to live heaped up with people of all different tribes. That is not nothing.

I am reading Marx's Capital for the first time, in NYC, ground zero for world capitalism. It is like Catholicism, very pretty but a little antique.

He says in passing that trade starts up between tribes, and only later within them. That describes NYC perfectly.

Treating people as the gender they want to be treated as requires absolutely no gender theory, comprehension of the psychological states involved, or overarching theory of sexual politics. it is common civility, and as such obligatory.

(This may be my least woke opinion. I'm never quite sure.)

It's pre-Jane Jacobs city planning, from back when they thought that population density causes crime, and that therefore cities should be made as much like suburbs as possible.

We have congestion pricing paying for the subways now, and so should be able to get rid of parking mandates.

This impulse in some women is the only reason I am still married.

This is a warren, and we are a teeming horde, god damn it. Move over and let the new kids in.

In NYC, if you try to build a high-rise, low-cost apartment building in a neighborhood that hasn't any, you get blocked because it spoils the neighborhood's character. If you try to build one in a neighborhood that has them, you get blocked because they have too many. Fuck that noise.

True. Zoning is there to protect property values, that is, to keep housing expensive. Building codes are there to keep people from dying in fires, of electrocution, of sewage in water, of building collapse, of breathing carbon monoxide, and of poisoning.

It is a great word. Now I want to frogmarch someone, and I am not even wholly clear on how it is done.

Reclining cat resting his elbow on a notebook.

I stole it from Mary Douglas's fine book Purity and Danger. She writes somewhere in there that she knew there must be something unexamined and profound in the category "dirt" because her husband had such profound, unexamined, different notions of when something was clean.

Dirt is matter out of place. Once it has left your body, saliva is out of place, and thereby dirty.

Went down an interesting little rathole because I got wondering what might have inspired that poem. In 1925, the US invaded and occupied Haiti, set up a puppet government, and instituted forced labor, at the instigation of the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank.)

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother. You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic. But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains. And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master. There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught — they say — God, when he walked on earth.

I find this poem about the end of the American republic mildly encouraging, because it is 100 years old this year. Likely enough something did die back then, but people reeled along somehow.

If the people threatening to leave the city because of Mamdani only would, he would have solved the apartment shortage.

Some singers, you can never figure out whether they are singing about sex, drugs, or Jesus.

"I hate my verses, every line, every word. Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky. Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch One color, one glinting Hash, of the splendor of things. Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax, The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings." —This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game. Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame. Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self? At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

Robinson Jeffers does a really lovely one here.

True, your strength, senses, and wit fade by the day, but there has always been infinitely more beauty and complexity in the world than you can grasp. It has always been trying to grasp light on water. Nothing has changed.

Like that. A turn. Chances are you do it already, though not that way

"But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies,"

That kind of thing. Mine are kind of mean, because I am kind of mean, but they work for me. Maybe you have some that work for you. Mine:

True, you are no good, but look at how much more than you deserve you have. You are totally getting over.

I take it you mean when the ordinary methods of self-soothing fail. My ordinary means are meditation, exercise, and certain favorite books. When I can't do those and anxiety comes upon me, I use what I call turns.
Some sonnets have turns, a part where the emotion that was expressed is then altered.

Late 70s, East Village. In my spikes and rotting black leather rags, I pass a cute little uptown girl in expensive Fioruuci punk regalia. I am very young. She is truly fine. I scorn her. I give her the cut direct. I am too cool even to see her. I walk directly into a no parking sign.

Ah, well.

Bike messenger, swerve to pass a car, bike slides out from under me like it had turned to smoke, and I am sliding along in the gutter, far too quickly and with far too little road rash.

Some restauranteur had emptied out the deep fryer into the gutter. Worked the rest of the day smelling of fries.

He thinks he is defying his situation, but is in fact describing it.

Till Lolita, the best example of someone using language to corrupt and deceive themselves.