late night logic

Bonus/Hidden track.

P.s: Brodie Milne in 2026 wins the final friend of the year (FOTY) award.

Ruminate by Neil Gaiman (1993)

Cities are not people. But, like people, cities have their own personalities: in some cases one city has many different personalities -- there are a dozen Londons, a crowd of different New Yorks.

A city is a collection of lives and buildings, and it has identity and personality. Cities exist in location, and in time.

There are good cities -- the ones that welcome you, that seem to care about you, that seem pleased you're in them. There are indifferent cities -- the ones that honestly don't care if you're there or not; cities with their own agendas, the ones that ignore people. There are cities gone bad, and there are places in otherwise healthy cities as rotten and maggoty as windfall apples. There are even cities that seem lost -- some, lacking a centre, feel like they would be happier being elsewhere, somewhere smaller, somewhere easier to understand.

Some cities spread, like cancers or B-movie slime monsters, devouring all in their way, absorbing towns and villages, swallowing boroughs and hamlets, transmuting into boundless conurbations. Other cities shrink -- once prosperous areas empty and fail: buildings empty, windows are boarded up, people leave, and sometimes they cannot even tell you why.

Occasionally I idle time away by wondering what cities would be like, were they people. Manhattan is, in my head, fast-talking, untrusting, well-dressed but unshaven. London is huge and confused. Paris is elegant and attractive, older than she looks. San Francisco is crazy, but harmless, and very friendly.

It's a foolish game: cities aren't people.

Cities exist in location, and they exist in time. Cities accumulate their personalities as time goes by. Manhattan remembers when it was unfashionable farmland. Athens remembers the days when there were those who considered themselves Athenians. There are cities that remember being villages. Other cities -- currently bland, devoid of personality -- are prepared to wait until they have history. Few cities are proud: they know that it's all too often a happy accident, a mere geographical fluke that they exist at all -- a wide harbour, a mountain pass, the confluence of two rivers.

At present, cities stay where they are.

For now cities sleep.

But there are rumblings. Things change. And what if, tomorrow, cities woke, and went walking? If Tokyo engulfed your town? If Vienna came striding over the hill toward you? If the city you inhabit today just upped and left, and you woke tomorrow wrapped in a thin blanket on an empty plain, where Detroit once stood, or Sydney, or Moscow?

Don't ever take a city for granted.

After all, it is bigger than you are; it is older; and it has learned how to wait...

👁️

Ray. Ray used to be a butcher till he chopped off two fingers with a boning knife and ended up condensing fiction at the Info Digest. Ray read copious amounts of text. Novels as thick as house bricks. War stories, romance, pulp horror and period classics. Ray didn't care. Rays fingers guided his mouse over everything he thought was bullshit and just deleted it. Bits that caught his attention for whatever reason, bits that glinted in the light, or shone through the water like mother of pearl, Ray would cut out and savour.

He'd turn them over like precious objects, reading and rereading them with satisfied animal smile.

One night when he was working late, his daughter Christine turned up at the door of his office unannounced. Ray shut his eyes to a lot of things, but he wasn't blind. He could see she was sinking deeper and deeper into a place where there was no light. He asked her happened and the secret she'd been keeping from him poured out from her like a warm bloody rush. Ray grabbed onto her and held on. He felt like a man attempting to revive life - trying to bring it back from another realm. He knew he had to get them both up for air, swim them towards the surface toward the light. Ray put Christine in the passengers seat of his car and pointed it north. He drove through the night, the bonnet devouring the white lines of the highway.

Christine didn't stir until the heat of the morning sun filled the car. She sat for a long time in silence, gathering up the pieces of recollection available to her. The highway unfolded and unfolded. Eventually she looked over and asked her father 'Where are we going?'

Ray looked at her for a moment and said 'Back to bloody nature.’

https://youtube.com/shorts/L59XP65I9LA?si=gsGgZpHzI76QzSxP

Another paradigm shift beckons

You see, no one's going to help you Bubby, because there isn't anybody out there to do it. No one. We're all just complicated arrangements of atoms and subatomic particles - we don't live. But our atoms do move about in such a way as to give us identity and consciousness. We don't die; our atoms just rearrange themselves. There is no God. There can be no God; it's ridiculous to think in terms of a superior being. An inferior being, maybe, because we, we who don't even exist, we arrange our lives with more order and harmony than God ever arranged the earth. We measure; we plot; we create wonderful music. We are the architects of our own existence. What a lunatic concept to bow down before a God who slaughters millions of innocent children, slowly and agonizingly starves them to death, beats them, tortures them, rejects them. What folly to even think that we should not insult such a God, damn him, think him out of existence. It is our duty to think God out of existence. It is our duty to insult him. Fuck you, God! Strike me down if you dare, you tyrant, you non-existent fraud! It is the duty of all human beings to think God out of existence. Then we have a future. Because then - and only then - do we take full responsibility for who we are. And that's what you must do, Bubby: think God out of existence; take responsibility for who you are.

This one’s optimistic

today is the first day of the rest of your life

the renaissance is nigh