This is a small-ish bridge post, the initial purpose of which was to be a paragraph getting to the listicle I promised at the end of the previous post. Said listicle has been generated, but it ran long, and the cumulative post would have been ‘beyond email limit’, as substack warns me from time to time.

Two writer friends stand at a fork in the road: one is quitting longform fiction, while another prepares a scholarly nonfiction manuscript, knowing full well the precarious state of academic and trade publishing. Across the seas, another writer friend is – finally – winning critical acclaim for their literary fiction, after selling rights to the previous novel to a large streaming platform.

In the previous post, I tried to convey a sense of pervasive deflation, the exhausting hissing of electrified inflatable Santa Clauses, the feeling I have of being absolutely mastered by a cultural force that pulls me in and seeps into my mood. Interestingly, a few friend-readers said that this resonates with how they feel at this time of year.

I’m writing to you from a place near spiritual exhaustion. I’ve had the good fortune of a great and worthwhile year, in my bubble. Three chunks of the world are in garbage time while several growing regions are under aerial bombardment, or on fire. In the Mallee on Monday it will be 46 degrees. But ‘in here’ and ‘for now’, everything is hunky dory.

An observation of a rift is an injured exclamation of diremption. In a rift, something has been sundered from something, wrenched away. A breach has been wrongfully yanked out of the cosmic weave: whether in time and nature, or between people. Rifting is not the distinctness of calmly disparate entities. It is not the multiplying separation of differentiation inherent to processes of growth and becoming.

This is the audio version of this post. I hope this will give another way of thinking about ‘what has just happened’ with the bad choice the US has very intentionally made. To all readers: keep your eyes on the background, watch the supply chain: the Houthis understand something about the world we ‘know’ but choose not to direct foreground attention on.

This is a very surreal moment in human history, as far as we yet know it. The 2024 Presidential Election is a synecdoche for this ‘hole’ of America – not much to add1. I’ve tried to pinpoint this zeitgeist as stupid and stubborn in its surreality: a distended ‘between’ times where even the betwixt is indeterminate because the afterward is unsure. In its stubborn thus-ness, 2024 is not so much the end times as the globular glum times.

It’s Halloween today. This is jarring in Australia, to anyone over the age of 35. One of the things I find upsetting about how Australians have embraced Halloween is the socially necessary use of excessive single-use plastic.

This post is the completed omnibus/guide of this earlier post. To that extent, it’s a paste in of that earlier post, with a few spontaneous edits, plus the added two I did to complete the series. If you want the way back and through, here’s the posts in order. 1) stupid, stubborn, surreal intimations and apprehensions of the 2024 zeitgeist, part one This tried to name the scent of the age, and say why it’s worth risking naming it.

So if e-scooter platforms are the ‘dote’ of a signature 3S, what is the antidote, or ‘some’ antidote, and how do we get there? This is what I’ll consider in the final post of this series. This is also one of my first attempts to integrate insights from psychotherapy into work that is usually informed by social theory.

doom loops of the goods life in our urban communities of fate We find ourselves living (somehow) in a community of fate; perhaps a doom collective of dividuals in a control society; perhaps a foaming co-ommunity of couples alone together in their apartment bubbles, incapable of realising themselves through one another in – full circle – a community of fate. We roll in strange circles; these are surreally loopy times.