Everything is so stupid and so dangerous at once
Out here is where the monsters are
Come hang out Saturday November 8 at 4pm at The Sinclair in Cambridge for my book release party and Wednesday November 12 at 6pm at the Francis Kite Club in NYC for a reading and some further partying.
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I have to fight so hard not to wake up prematurely every morning. Fully wake up. Surrender to it. Kind of a reverse Freddie Kreuger situation at play. Out here is where the monsters are. Where they are undeniable.
About twenty minutes ago I crawled out of the dark into a different type of dark and had this image in mind. It's been following me around for a couple days.
A few years ago I asked what's the most American thing you can think of it and I guess this has taken its place. The secret police performatively praying over fast food hamburgers before a hard day's work disappearing immigrants. They'd call you a hack for making a joke like that. I feel like one just noticing it having happened in real life.
Of course they're not only kidnapping immigrants. The Supreme Court recently said it's ok to fuck with anyone who... I don't know let's call it seems like an immigrant. People like this guy.
"An Oregon man and U.S. citizen is seeking damages after he said he was stopped and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement without cause," KOIN reported.
Frank Miranda said he was detained outside his Northeast Portland workplace early Thursday morning by masked plain-clothes ICE officers, even after he told them he is a U.S. citizen.
During the incident, which was partially captured in a video shared with KOIN 6 News, Miranda says he showed officers his Oregon driver’s license before they confiscated it and told him, “You’ve been here on an overstay.”
As heard in the video, Miranda said he didn’t know what an overstay was and that he was born in California. The officer said that they were going to bring Miranda in so that they could verify his information, but he resisted.
“I haven’t done anything,” Miranda said to the officers in the video.
“Turn around or you’re going to get the dog,” an officer said. “We’re going to put you in cuffs, or you’re going to get the dog.”
You’re going to get the dog.
Frank Miranda being arrested like that? Come on man. Everything is so fucking stupid and so dangerous at once.
Here's what Noem got up to after saying grace over the burgs.
Kristi Noem praised for ‘staring down’ Antifa. It was a dozen reporters and a guy in a chicken suit
— The Independent (@the-independent.com) 2025-10-08T16:05:20.226Z
God she is so brave.
What do you think she prays for?
And it's fully and perhaps finally cold out this morning. I just went outside and frowned at the state of my yard. The tree will not stop shedding its leaves. Much like I wrote about the tree in question in the book:
"I sometimes imagine it indifferently watching or rather not watching me grow old. Throwing its dead leaves at me year after year that I have to rake up. Like how you treat a hotel room someone else will have to clean."
Read that one here.
Luke O’Neil
I'm still too injured to do the raking though. The pile just keeps getting bigger.
Later during a meeting back at the White House with some of the dumbest liars alive Noem delivered some exciting news to the president.
"Noem also claimed federal agents in Portland recently arrested 'the girlfriend of one of the founders of antifa,'" KGW8 reported. "Noem didn't provide any other details but said she hopes to prosecute her and get 'more information about the network and how we can root them out and eliminate them from the existence of American society,' Noem said, referring to antifa."
Everything is so fucking stupid and so dangerous at once.
I sometimes wonder how people I know who use “A.I.” would think of me if I told them I plagiarized my books. But then again their little computer toy actually did plagiarize my books.
Then fucking die.
Look at this fucking thing from last week. My god this pissed me and a lot of people who loved Kaleb's writing off so bad dude. This is a moral injury. A man dies and not a day or two later some fucking loser is trying to profit off of it. Desecrating his grave.
We eventually managed to report it enough times to get this specific "book" taken down but the "author" in question still has dozens of others for sale.
404 reported on it and asked me for a quote.
Emanuel Maiberg
"I cannot overstate how disgusting I find this kind of 'A.I.' dog shit in the first place, never mind under these circumstances," I told them.
"This predatory slop is understandably upsetting to his family and friends and fans and an affront to his specific life and to life itself. Especially days after his death. All week people have been eulogizing Kaleb as one of the best, although sadly not widely read enough, writers of his generation, and some piece of shit pressed a button and took 30 seconds or whatever it is to set up a tollbooth to divert the many people just learning about him away from his real and vital work. And for what? To make maybe a few dollars? By tricking people? I can't say what I think should happen to thieves like this."
Then I added this but they didn't include it.
"'A.I.' is the tool of and the prevailing aesthetic of fascists leading to a world devoid of meaning or art. And I can't think of a person who more embodied what a Real Writer is supposed to be. An Artist. The antithesis of this shit. Sorry I'm too pissed off to think straight. Not just at this specifically but at all of these talentless vultures. Hacks is too good a word for anyone who uses this shit. At least hacks have to put in a modicum of effort to produce something that fucking sucks."
Matt Novak
Everything is so fucking stupid and so dangerous at once.
I'm in the middle of one of those demoralizing bouts of stasis and detachment where there doesn't seem to be much of a point in writing anything. I feel like for years my job was to scream that there's a house on fire on the edge of town but now it's spread everywhere.
I suppose I gotta stick around on the off chance the book becomes a hit. That will fix things. That will fix me.
Here are a couple short ones you've maybe read already but that people seemed to like when I posted them this week.
Here is the inspiration for that second one if you never read it. From one year ago this week.
Luke O’Neil
Every day for the past year I have seen or read something that has changed how I think about the world. About people too. Here's one that was published today by a woman named Nour Abdul Latif about living in Gaza:
"The nights of genocide had begun; entire residential blocks burned before our eyes. I held my children tightly, trying to shield them from the terror, but how could I? 'This is a new missile, Mama,' said Jumana, my nine-year-old daughter. 'It makes a sound like a snake when it falls!'"
"After five nights of constant red skies from the intense bombing, we watched the residents of the Al-Karamah neighborhood evacuate, knowing that our turn would be next."
"On the sixth day, I began packing my essentials in preparation for moving to a safer place. It was the hardest task I had ever faced — how could I fit my entire life into a single bag?"
What if anything stood out for you there because for me it was the daughter's recognition of a novel type of munition flying over her head. Imagine being bombed so frequently that you come to know – even as a child – the different kinds of missiles sent to kill you by the sounds they make? By the size of the holes they leave behind. A sommelier's expertise in destruction. And what a bounty of varietals we have delivered to her and so many millions of others like her in our bloody history.
I don't know maybe the title of the book is accurate. I often think that. Not always but often. That's one of the things that I pray about.
Another relevant passage:
I finally got some copies of my own I'm happy to report.
Here are the epigraphs.
Both of those songs fuck me up real good. Listen to them if you never have.
Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 4, 2014
That song Sunrise was among my top few songs of 2024 which I wrote about a lot more in depth here. John aka Young Jesus also wrote for Hell World about his favorites of the year in that one.
Luke O’Neil
I wrote in part:
It's been so long since I heard a new to me act and immediately had to go look up the lyrics. To see if they could stand on their own like I suspected they could. Stripped of the arrangements of what I can only describe as Americana troubadour rock cut with ambient and experimental jazz embellishments.
He sings on Sunrise:
Man, I swear I had a big job
Yeah man, I talked to God
But God was so damn dark
I had to light God’s hеart
So I watched the sun rise
It was likе a balloon
Sent from Hell
Straight to the moon
You're probably detecting a preoccupation with God and Hell here and if you're familiar with my Catholic brain damage that's obviously a big part of why the music compels me. And probably why it will have the same effect on 75% of my readers who as best as I can tell are people who once believed in God and are furious that he didn't end up existing or else people who do still believe in God and are furious that he is absent.
And I of course picked Ring the Bell as one of my favorite Jason Molina songs.
Luke O’Neil
I wrote in part:
This song Ring the Bell just kind of got stuck in my craw today though.
“Why wouldn't I be trying to figure it out?
Everyone tells you that.
Everyone tells you not to quit.
I can't even see it to fight it.”
How an addict is hectored.
How an addict is defensive.
How an addict lies.
And from what I've read of the man Jason Molina loved to lie.
How an addict is blind.
Swinging blind.
The people bothering him are right obviously but he is too. He knows what you know about him far better than you know it.
On the one hand yes of course he is trying not to be the way that he is. Just like many of us are.
But the final line there.
“I can’t even see it to fight it.”
It calls to mind one of my other favorites of his which is I’ve Been Riding with the Ghost.
In Ring the Bell though he’s fighting an actual ghost. Punching wildly at an apparition that is invisible. Something that cannot be destroyed despite the fact that being destroyed in tandem is the only thing it wants. To take you down with it.
I put too many Bluesky posts in this one. It's a fucking mess.
WATCH: ‘Portland Frog’ pepper balled by ICE agents
— Danny K (@dannykpolitics.bsky.social) 2025-10-06T05:39:11.298Z
Everything is so fucking stupid and so dangerous at once.
Paid readers can stick around for a new post-book short story from me, plus the best things I read this week, and I don't know some photos I took of the ocean in Maine the other day. All kinds of shit. Who even knows.