Shorter Intros
And heds and decks too.
On account of limited patience. On account of too many people and too much from them, and too much consternation that turns out to be intractable pain. Psychic pain, probably, from the way that the globe has been spinning, the same in one sense, different in all others. This is not plain speech. The plain speech is that people seem unhappy, on average, and that’s a strange phenomenon. There are so many of them. It’s summer. What gives? Maybe what gives is an increasing sense that a well-lived life that includes (depending on who you are) hard work at work or commitment within family or vigilant and playful maintenance of the creative impulse, that many of those things seem to bounce off of life as currently construed. The machines are winning, and so are the gerontocrats, and the bad ideas, and the neuroses. Maybe the cloud’ll lift or maybe the cloud’ll pour down.
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CLIP YOUR COUPONS
Everything was code for something else. That’s why Frank and Harper spoke so openly when they met in the dairy aisle at Garrett’s. “The eggs are down in price,” said Frank, meaning that the entire network of activists had been contacted en masse via the social media app they favored, a bespoke high-security platform called Ladder. “I’m getting myself some spinach,” said Harper, meaning that she had personally seen to it that those in the Southwest requiring specific action points — the marchers, the sign-designers, the drivers — had been delivered their instructions. “You can mix them together under certain conditions,” said Frank, indicating that two meadows along the freeway had been cut into QR codes that were visible from satellite. “A Florentine omelet,” said Harper, here questioning the success of an earlier month’s initiative, which had involved embedding a writer in the writing staff of a roast of a famous comedian and inserting a joke that gave coordinates that led an ordnance team to a park in Northern Texas in which had been buried a Composition B HE Round, of interest neither for its RDX nor TNT but rather the tiny quantity of paraffin wax, which contained a microdot that when magnified gave up the code to the special room on the lower level of the forever seed vault in Spitsbergen. “Yeah,” said Frank. “They’re good with hot sauce.” Here he just meant hot sauce, and Harper agreed, and they chatted a bit about the old days, when they had dated, when they had loved each other. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]