When God closes one door—it was the wind because there is no God.

                                                                                                –T-shirt seen online

 

From Estudio de la Jungla in San Patrón, this is Don’t Wait Just Tell Me, the anything-but-NPR-news quiz. DWJTM is brought to you by:

They fixed our hot water. Tired of wondering if the water got warmer or you got tougher? Try: They fixed our hot water. An actual technician will access the roof with an extension ladder and service the solar unit so you can bask in the warm flow like the pussy you are. Say it like a digital nomad coming into the full fledge of your entitlement: They fixed our hot water.

 

And by:

Thai bananas. They’re little, but they’re sweet as fuck.

 

And by:

Gym San Patrón. We’re Janky. We’re Dirty. And we play a lot of Eminem. Gym San Patrón: you’ll get a sick pump.

 

And by:

Sauteed garlic. Can’t cook? Sautee some garlic. They’ll never know.

 

And by:

The feeling of disappointment. Specifically: my friend Petr’s disappointment upon discovering he can’t do ayahuasca because of the medications he’s on.

 

And by:

You cheated on your girlfriend in her dream. If ever there was a time to forget everything you’ve ever learned, or even intuited, about psychology, you cheated on your girlfriend in her dream is that time.

 

And by:

The impulse to push fully-clothed people into the pool. Do you ever find yourself standing next to a fully-clothed person poolside and think: it would be so easy, man. The energy would shift. I would forever be the person who pushed them—fully-clothed—into the pool. What is it, but a wish for street justice—the impulse to push fully-clothed people into the pool.

 

And, relatedly, by:

Parties at rich people’s houses. Do you know people who awkwardly kiss you on the cheek in greeting? Do they talk about their gardeners? Their maids? Their real estate deals? Do they sometimes throw catered parties with sunset views of the Pacific and live ambient jazz? If you find yourself at parties at rich people’s houses, try saying: “They fixed our hot water,” before you push them into the pool.

 

And by:

That truck parked over there, atop the bulldozed slope. It reminds you of something. Another life, perhaps.

 

And by:

Email alerts you never signed up for. Subject line: violent crime reported less than .3 miles from your home. Less than .3 miles? But not .2 miles. Dear email alert I never signed up for. Go ahead and round up or down on those distances.

 

And by:

Mickey Tettleton’s face, as seen from the mezzanine of the Oakland Coliseum, day game, late 80’s. IYKYK.

 

And by:

Memories of dial-up internet. Are you looking for a fresh way to impart your age? Try describing your memories of dial-up internet. Memories of dial-up internet recommends onomatopoetic sound effects to get the full effect of your memories of dial-up internet.

 

And by:

The tree guys were definitely watching us fuck. When the landlord schedules tree work on the one afternoon that week your libidos override the stress, and, after you finish, you let your vision swim out the window. There they are with their ropes and saws amongst the denuded branches. They were definitely watching.

 

And by:

Grown-ass men and grown-ass women who say, “grown-ass men and women.” Imagine being a grown-ass man or a grown-ass woman and saying grown-ass when you mean responsible adult. These grown-ass people exist, and they sponsor DWJTM.

 

And by:

Adjunct professors. Legend has it, if you say precarity three times in the mirror, an adjunct professor will appear and extend a deadline out of weariness or the goodness of her heart. Adjunct professors. Some of them are sleeping in their cars.

 

And by:

People who call themselves “a creative.” Just because you leave the word capitalist off your mid-six-figure job description, doesn’t mean we’re nodding with you. We’re nodding at you. Dear people who call yourselves “a creative,” don’t drop the article.

 

And by:

The algorithm. Specifically, the algorithm working to bring the twelve-ear-old boy on Alaska Airlines flight 1373 from PVR to SFO video of instant karma to cheating husbands who get caught. I guess you can’t spell algorithm without moral.

 

And by:

People who invoke “the algorithm,” with little idea of how it works. Dear people who invoke the algorithm with little idea of how it works, thank you for being you. Also, you can opt-out if it makes you uncomfortable.

 

And by:

The aspiring actors who agreed to be contestants on DWJTM. Just look at them. Those are the faces and bodies of our sponsors. They deserve a round of quiet snappy-fingers.

 

And by:

Western pearl-snap shirts. When you want to look like a sharply-dressed nine-year-old who occasionally gets cuffed around by his dad, don a western pearl-snap shirt, and tell that little boy things are going to get better, and, fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, by the time you’re big enough to kick your dad’s ass, you just kind of feel sorry for him.

 

And by:

Elizabeth Ellen’s Instagram account (@shortflightlongdrive). Come for the cougar stalking the line between avant-tasteful and not not ironic literary hot mom, stay for zooming in on the books in the background. Elizabeth Ellen’s Instagram. I’m liking it for the captions.

 

And by:

Gray pubes. Guys, when they come for you, remember: there’s no silver fox for the cock.

 

And, perhaps relatedly, by:

Having visible abs in middle age. If you have visible abs in middle age, you can fuck down a decade. Having visible abs in middle age—I don’t make the rules, I just abide by them.

 

And by:

The decision to do bufo with your partner on the beach. You want to, but you’ll have to talk about your relationship first.

 

And by:

“I heard it on a podcast.” If you can’t admit you listen to Rogan, maybe you need new friends.

 

And by:

People who hum at poetry readings. Hey, people who hum at poetry readings, your intonations of approbation aren’t helping. We get it, umber rhymes with number. I mean, they’re almost the same damn word.

 

And by:

Language learning apps. Siempre estudiando, pero nunca hablando.

 

And by:

The spit-roasted newborn in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. You’d forgotten about the spit-roasted newborn in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, hadn’t you?

 

And by:

Something you chose to do. If you wanted it to go another way, you should have made another choice.

 

And by:

The man who told the woman in the Led Zeppelin shirt about that one song that supposedly soothes babies by mimicking the sounds inside the womb or some shit. Hey, man, she doesn’t know any Led Zeppelin songs. She’s just wearing the shirt. Also, she just spent a month away from her nine-year-old daughter. She’s feeling seen, but not in a good way.

 

And by:

Pronouns. Specifically, uttering them on bufo as the vocal conduit of an intelligent Other. As in: we, us. Uttering pronouns as the vocal conduit of an intelligent Other. Highly recommend.

 

And by:

Typing away your anger. Don’t just type it. Edit that shit.

 

And by:

“I was today years old.” I don’t know how old I was when I first read “I was today years old,” but I wish I was forever tomorrow years old when I did.

 

And, again, by:

Adjunct professors. Legend has it, if you say precarity three times in the mirror, an adjunct professor will appear and inflate your grade for a good review on RateMyProfessor. Adjunct professors. Only some of them have spouses who make real money.

 

And by:

The inscrutable audio of the video looping on your partner’s phone. Is it a car crash, or someone opening a present? The inscrutable audio of the video looping on your partner’s phone, you can’t not listen to it.

 

And by:

Lavender-infused foodstuffs. Why?

 

And by:

Car air fresheners. No, go around the block again, my endocrine system isn’t disrupted enough.

 

And, relatedly, by:

Non-stick pans. People still use those fucking things.

 

And by:

People who only cook with cast iron. How do you know if someone only cooks with cast iron? They’ll tell you.

 

And—staying in the kitchen for another moment—by:

The person in the house who cuts the pineapple. We’d like to take this opportunity to say what the people in the house who never cut the pineapple but who nonetheless eat the cut pineapple rarely say: we appreciate what you do.

 

And by:

The text that says you’re sorry. Try sending it—even if you’re not sure. The text that says you’re sorry. It’s like sauteed garlic.

 

And by:

Quoting MF DOOM rhymes to people who think they’re fluent English speakers. Sing a song of slap-happy crappiness. He came to flow like it was strapped to his nappy chest. MF DOOM rhymes. The ultimate fluency test. But surely I digress.

 

And, one last time, by:

Adjunct professors. Legend has it, yada yada, an adjunct professor will appear and accuse you of using ChatGPT. Adjunct professors. They’ll turn their Zoom camera on if you will.

 

And by:

The video of the guy who rushed the field at Minute-Maid Park and got away. He scaled the centerfield wall and hoisted himself onto the batter’s eye. From there he disappeared to raucous cheers. Apparently, his wife was at home, pregnant with their first child, and he was at the game with his father-in-law, and getting encouraged by a bachelorette party in his section. I mention this context to illustrate that nothing should dampen the legend, especially not what you know about psychology.

 

And by:

Synonyms for the word mordant. Specifically: caustic, sardonic, incisive, and acidulous. Synonyms for the word mordant. Learn em, use em.

 

And by:

The slow season here in San Patrón. Specifically, the month when expats start greeting each other by kissing on the mouth. We’re talking real, open-mouthed, teenage-style. No one knows how it starts. But we all know how it ends. The slow season. What happens then happens then.

 

And by:

The one time I hummed at a poetry reading. It was a poem about butterflies migrating around an invisible mountain, a mountain that was once there but which had long ago settled beneath the waterline of a lake. The butterflies involuntarily, the poet assumed, honored the memory of the mountain’s presence in their DNA, describing its shape as they flew around it. I will think of that image when I hug my mother at the end. The one time I hummed at a poetry reading. It was pretty lame.

 

And by:

Writings described as “love letters” to a place. What kind of love letters are you people reading? Where are the Polaroids of greasy genitalia? Writings described as “love letters” to a place. Hard pass.

 

And by:

Iterations of the phrase, Make ____ ____ again. Can we all stop this? Mad libs are for little rubber people who don’t ____ yet.

 

And, speaking of Presidents, by:

The tradition of pardoning a turkey before Thanksgiving. Think about it for five seconds…. When I’m in office, I promise to end this tradition. I will start a new, more apt tradition of butchering turkeys on the White House lawn. If I start at first light, I think I could do 100 turkeys. One for every senator. The ridiculous tradition of pardoning turkeys before Thanksgiving. Make the executive branch executive again.

 

And by:

The MAS AMOR POR FAVOR bumper sticker on the EZGO golf cart parked across from this Japanese-Argentine fusion place here in San Patrón. There are lots of other stickers, but that’s the only one I can read.

 

And by:

That time a friend of mine told me she fantasized about assassinating Donald Trump. Our phones were on the table like two pricked ears. Still, she went blithely on.

 

And by:

The thing, had you said it to your brother, that would have made all the difference. Specifically, when he asked to borrow your mustache scissors before your nephew’s wedding and told you not to worry, he wouldn’t use them to trim his pubes. You laughed. But had you said, “That’s all I ever use them for,” it would have made all the difference. All the more for being true.

 

And by:

Those blue IKEA bags. Loved equally by the housed and unhoused.

 

And by:

Watching survival shows at an Airbnb in Palm Springs with your aunts and uncles after your dad shaved his beard but kept his mustache and made everyone uncomfortable and went to sleep in a motel by the train tracks. If only survival were as simple as knowing what to do with mud.

 

And by:

Not being able to process verbs when you’re coming back from bufo. Specifically, pour, and clap.

 

And by:

The kid on flight 1373 who has crushed a bottle of orange Gatorade, a plastic container of mini M&M’s, a cookie, and two small airline-issued Sprites. Hey, kid, maybe you noticed, but every time you eat sugar your nose begins to run. Think about it.

 

And by:

The reflection of your face in the bottom of your coffee mug. The mug in the mug. So close you can taste it.

 

And by:

Les Schwab tires of Medford. While you wait, the service center’s employees’ banter is just loud enough to follow, but not so loud you can’t tune it out. Les Schwab of Medford is run by social-engineering geniuses, or, what we used to call good people.

 

And by:

The stock market is not the economy. It isn’t. Until you retire on your Defined Contribution plan. Then it fucking well is.

 

And by:

Alert: Burglary reported less than .5 miles from your home. This alert brought to you by ADT Home Security Systems. When every second counts, count on ADT. Act now to get a Google Nest doorbell on us. Monitoring starting at 24.99/month.

 

And by:

Machetes.

 

And by:

Bifo Berardi on friendship: The condition of the groundless construction of meaning is friendship. The only coherence of the world resides in sharing the act of projecting meaning: cooperation between agents of enunciation.

 

And by:

The feeling of ordering decaf at 4:15pm and wondering if it’s really decaf.

 

And by:

Collective nouns. Specifically, the one for all of the unused remaining balances on all of the gift cards in the world.

 

And by:

Dork. The collective noun for people who know and utter collective nouns.

 

And by:

The so-called “internet of things.” For people who like to refer to their dishwasher as “smart.” The internet of things. Monitoring starting at 24/7.

 

And by:

Jennifer Griest’s soundtrack and theme for DWJTM.

 

And by:

Chemtrails everywhere. Tell me: if they’re not real, how are they sponsoring DWJTM? Is the sun dim, or is it me?

 

And by:

People who make their dogs pull them on bikes or skateboards. Dear people who make your dog pull you on a bike or skateboard, you deserve what befalls you.

 

And by:

Jazzy covers of Nirvana songs. Proof that Kurt Cobain could time travel.

 

And, relatedly, by:

That awkward moment when you disparage a song other people seem to be enjoying. Specifically, that jazzy rendition of “Come as You Are.”

 

And by:

Finally internalizing the exchange rate. Be careful, come slow season you’ll be kissing Lorn and Missy on the mouth.

 

And, relatedly, by:

No longer feeling drawn to photograph families of four—plus one chihuahua and maybe a pullet cradled like a doll—riding on a Honda 250.

 

And by:

The image, as described by your girlfriend, of the teller at the Intercam Banco, the woman with whom you cheated in her dream. She looks just how you would imagine.

 

And by:

Fucking on the kitchen counter, combined age 105. I mean, eventually we moved to the couch. We’re responsible adults. Fucking on the kitchen counter, combined age 105. We were there, it was there, the moment couldn’t wait.

 

And by:

The odds that an animal will walk through wet cement. They seem pretty good.

 

And by:

The semicolon. Before LLMs ruined reading by ripping up the contract that said this text is where two individuated intelligences can meet and create, for a little while, something like a third, focused intelligence, harmonic, or dissonant, depending on the tonal profiles, moods, and contexts of time and place and lexicons, and, oh, intent, and that sweet shift of history that posits, temporarily, the timely as timeless—the semicolon said something like: I know what I’m doing here; I have a grasp of syntax. The semicolon—whatever else the sentence containing it says, it says, “I showed up and learned some stuff.”

 

And by:

Nostalgia for a time, not long ago, when if a person wrote that he or she was deeply committed to fostering an environment that allows us to delve into the nuances of this complicated situation to achieve a granular understanding of the intricacies of outcomes affecting diverse stakeholders in a world defined by disparities of privilege that can only be reified by prerequisite intersectional redefinitions of the realities of hierarchies we sometimes unwittingly uphold, we didn’t have to wonder if they’d outsourced, rather than taken, responsibility for their own intellectual engagement. We just knew they were a douche.

 

And by:

The gibbous moon. The semicolon of moons. The Mickey Tettleton’s face from the mezzanine of moons.

 

And by:

Finally looking up that bird and immediately forgetting what it’s called. It might as well have been introduced, in passing on the street, as the friend of an acquaintance who’s leaving tomorrow. This is my buddy, Russet-crowned Mot-mot. He likes to land on the fencepost and survey the quiet Saturday morning construction site before eating termites for breakfast.

 

And by:

Pissing off your oldest and next oldest sisters by inviting and not, respectively, the fathers of their children on a fishing trip.

 

And by:

Recordings of strangers’ conversations on your phone. They go years, dormant, until one day you scroll to April 15, 2017 and hear a young woman’s voice say: a lot of my ideas just seem to come out of nowhere. If I get big or if I don’t, it’s not in my control. I don’t know if I’m gonna be world famous. And another young woman responds: how would you be a famous, like could you like make a skyscraper that was like the biggest one? And the first woman says: I have my like own definition of what world famous is, and it’s like incredibly grandiose. But I have like no idea how I would go about that. I’m just gonna like major in design computation, and focus, and like try to do research in that, and maybe I don’t figure it out, and maybe I do, and that’s, I’m just gonna show up and do the research and see what happens, and whether or not it happens is more about luck than not. Recordings of strangers’ convos on your phone. We’re all just spies in the house of self-love.

 

And by:

My friend Koji’s voice message breakdown of the energy drink brands to which he has, at one time or another, been addicted. I listened to it walking to the bus stop here in San Patrón. Raise a Ghost to the cultural commentary that can make you feel high in public.

 

And by:

The deeply religious woman who sells jugos frescas on Avenida Tercer Mundo tapping the pulp strainer with the back of a knife. If San P needs a matron saint, I hope they call you before they call the teller at Intercam.

 

And by:

The petty hypocrisy of pointing out the petty hypocrisy in your partner’s pointing out of your petty pointing out of hypocrisies in defense of / reaction to their pointing out that thing you do or don’t do around the house. People who hang mirrors behind mirrors know exactly what they’re doing.

 

And by:

When friendship dissolves, when solidarity is banned and individuals stay alone and face the darkness of matter in isolation, then reality turns back into chaos and the coherence of the social environment is reduced to the enforcement of the obsessional act of identification. That’s Bifo again, but also bufo.

 

And by:

Being done with obscurity in every sense except the sense that applies to the phrase “being done with obscurity”; we’ll give ourselves one last debauch at the trough for this, then it’s all clarity and notoriety from there. Being done with obscurity, starting now.

 

And by:

Nostalgia for times described as when you “never felt more alive.” Specifically, playing homerun derby in Tilden Park, beer-drunk, mid-twenties, with found lost dog tennis balls and shade-kill redwood branch bats thigh-broken, Bo Jackson, in a gopher-mound pocked grassy clearing in a stadium of ancient trees, as the fog turned to drizzle and you banked a fire on the floor of the boyscout bivouac and tossed rocks at the trash can as the light, and youth, but not hope, not drive to write or make music, drained away. Nostalgia for times you “never felt more alive.” Maybe this will be one of those times.

 

And by:

Putting the toilet paper roll on the dowel the wrong way. Of all the cries for help, this might be the loudest.

 

And by:

The lower-middle-class wish for the kinds of parents who took their kids to see art. I’ll go big with this one. Imagine, dear siblings of the culture wars, a cross-country road trip to Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield—A Confrontation, two acres of grain, planted on a landfill, sprouting in the Twin Towers’ shadows. Imagine standing there with mom and dad, connecting words like hunger and harvest. I was the age that it might have been my first memory—had I the kind of parents who took their kids to see art.

 

And by:

What you really mean to say is: we most enjoyed the present that wasn’t this future.

 

And by:

The concept of unextinction. Surely the dire wolf pups, the woolly mouse to mammoth is not the farthest bridge. What’s the end game? I’ll tell you. They’re going to bring back Hitler, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, assorted Caesars and mad kings, and minor bastards like Woodrow Wilson, Rumsfeld, if he’s dead, and Osama and Saddam—to seed the field with recency—along with some of the cruelest cartel bosses, mobsters, and ruthless titans of industry, and place them as babies in secure middle-class families in the first world, raise them soft, teach them empathy, and the names of common birds, nurture their natures until they become deeply committed to fostering an environment that allows us to delve into the nuances of this complicated situation to achieve a granular understanding of the intricacies of outcomes affecting diverse stakeholders in a world defined by disparities of privilege that can only be reified by prerequisite intersectional redefinitions of the realities of hierarchies they sometimes unwittingly uphold, and then, at an appropriate age, say 25, take them to Las Vegas and dress them in such fineries and garb as they were wont to wear in their times and pit them against one another in a cage match for history. The question is, will the dire wolves devour us, or will they whine for kibble like common dogs?

 

And by:

The moon landing. It seems to need a little ad space just now.

 

And by:

Watching the unextincted monsters of history cage match in a future present that makes us tilt our heads back, for it’s time for “it’s time,” and see that needled bufo light, hot gold filaments in a Metatron of ancient alien dimensions, our faces the knobbed gibbouses of all the coveted fuckface cards of the birds we watched in the last stadium called a coliseum, its concourse’s concrete columns configured to replicate ancient petrified trees, and here we are, gathered names, Petr, Koji, Jen and Ben, fully caffeinated, alert to the act of projecting meaning, to threats to the nest, market crashes looping on the phone like garbled tire center voice recordings, the national holiday marking the day the algorithm brought Elizabeth Ellen’s Instagram feed, where cheating husbands get narrative poems, to the boy on flight 1373, the day he decided to get off sugar and run for office, and when it’s time the rest of us, heads still tipped back, sing a song of waiting for the internet, gargling Minute-Maid flavored Gatorade or pouring it in our hands and slapping it on our faces like agua florida in a Point Break remake staged like Hamlet as a side show in Grand Theft Auto, saying, these words fly up; but thoughts remain below: to trim my pubes is all I use them for. The men are cordially invited to caustic celebrations of images you can’t unsee; the baby was there, charred, like lavender-infused foodstuffs they couldn’t bring themselves to eat. And by and by and by like a hymn from a when when they called it revival; they used to know how to name a thing, collectively, on a podcast about telepathy, one man’s mind is another man’s DMT hope-grope, a ten-minute death trip in which he’s never felt so alive, played like the old tape, batteries gone, ghost, slow like dial-up, Thai bananas sweet as fuck. There is something obsessional in this attempt to narrow the range of vibration out of which emerges possibility, and to reduce the unpredictability of future events. The flag’s not still; it comes to us, in us, as we were, two acres of amber waves timelessly beating the shore between the towers and liberty. We know how it started but forgot how it ends: crying out together in mordant ecstasy, precarity, precarity ___. Airbnb but for the huts built on the shows by those who know the mud binds better where the termites nest. Something in the saliva. A taste in the mouth of an intelligent Other. Soaked in bleach. Dire. Woolly. As I want you to be. Don’t wait. Just tell me.