2026-11-02 13:45:00
my therapist once told me that every monday, he disappears without any trace, without any internet-connected device on him, without even the trackers he usually have on his belt and in his shoes1. his driver drops him somewhere and leave him to walk further alone. he only has his radio panic button with him, which upon becoming static sends a signal to his driver to finally pick him up.
the point of this is to tell me that even (heavily experienced) psychotherapists need some alone time off too. the problem is this: i live in a one bedroom apartment with my mom, sharing a triple decker bed. we both have our privacy shutters, but it’s not exactly easy to cry my lungs out when i could hear the angry [redacted religion] preachers she listens to under my pillow.
a common occurrence in our sessions, i nodded at my therapist and said, “sure, i will do that.”
narrator: she did not, in fact, do that.
it had been months since we talked about that, and only this week did i finally venture out alone2.
the night was both an amalgamation of my recent woes and a single strike of an axe that served as my last straw. i couldn’t go home to my mom and be my talkative self3 when i knew i am one conversation away from breaking down into ugly crying.
that’s how i found myself in the dark, grassy patch next to a recently opened mall in our city. i knew they haven’t touched the undeveloped outskirts of that borderline dystopian area they’re trying to build. the grassy area was so vast that despite having lamp posts around, people sitting and walking in the middle were silhouettes against the mall’s bright, flashing ads.
in a weird way, it’s a place lit enough to be considered safe from pickpockets or other dangers, but also dim enough for people’s private businesses — like couples making out or individuals breaking down.
i sat on the grass in the dark and cried. it took me some time, despite being already on the verge of crying on my way there, because my body was so used to “keeping it together”. always be happy! always be palatable! crying could upset observers! except in this dark, i am safe and people could barely see me.
i was breaking down while watching the bright and colorful advertisement flashing in the mall’s led screen in front of me. through my tears, i watched donut commercials and learned that an annex building was opening soon. i cried about being sorry for wanting to hurt myself again. i cried about my mom, my dad, my sister, my best friend, and everyone else that i was hurting, and could hurt more if i did what i wanted to do. i cried about the things i cannot do because of this goddamn condition. i cried about my lost potential, my medication that is not working, the money that i keep wasting in search for something that could make me feel happy, or at least satisfied, or even angry, or sad — anything really, other than the void.
a couple group of people passed by me, scanning for their own patch to settle on. i couldn’t properly look at them through the dark and through my tears. one couple deliberated a spot a couple of feet away from me, probably saw me, then walked further. i think that’s when i started feeling conscious (in a funny way).
i went through my (ordered) call list, and ended up talking to my friend M, who just woke up. later he clarified that my voice was garbled which was why he started laughing, and in turn also made me laugh. he asked if i was crying. i said yes. he asked if i was running away, to which i answered, “do you seriously think i’d survive running away? i don’t even know how to commute. i booked a taxi to go here.”
the call was my slow ascent from whatever batshit reality i was in back to earth. i hung up. crying, for some reasons, made me crave soft serve ice cream. i walked around and checked nearby convenience stores for one but both 7-eleven and lawsons didn’t have them. i ended up entering the mall which had been watching me cry the whole time, and got gelato instead4.
somehow, it wasn’t enough. i was tired but still a little bit restless at the same time. i walked around the block for a few more minutes while finishing the ice cream. by then, it was my turn to observe.
the mall was closing for the day. the barricades were being set up and the security guards were gently pointing mall-goers to the exit. outside the building was a little bit livelier, but not in a bright and obnoxious way. there are people running. a few were left in the grassy patch i was crying on just barely an hour ago. the night lives on and so did people.
originally written 27 october, 2026.
this is just the tip of the iceberg of my therapist’s borderline concerning lore↩
i do like doing things on my own. no, i often go out and do my errands and entertain myself (e.g. going to the cinema) alone. i just didn’t have the energy to find a third place for the purpose of crying. i mean, where exactly is crying in maslow’s pyramid, right?↩
another thing i’d write about in the future — how i’ve mastered the performance of always-acting-happy-in-order-not-to-upset-everybody’s-feelings production↩
it is important to note that i was looking for soft serve specifically. it was 8:30 pm and the mall closes in 30 minutes. i settled for cara mia’s turtle pie. just as i exited the store holding my not-soft-serve ice cream, i went face to face with the matcha tokyo’s soft serve ad↩
2026-11-02 12:40:00
I've never had a real reason to go deep into the San Fernando Valley, despite all the time I've lived in LA. I've been to events on the rim of the valley, let's say - in the mountains to the north of the valley, and in the foothills on the north side of the Santa Monica mountains. But I haven't had a reason to just go that far into the valley.
This is probably pretty stereotypical of me! I am a young person, I live in an apartment, and I commute by bike and train, mostly. I'm not eyeing the valley for a single-family home, and I'm not looking to commute down the 405 for work. I spend all my time on the west side, or in the stretch of city between Koreatown through Downtown to NELA, which is the region where most of my friends live. I'm sure there is some stereotype I embody which characterizes this constellation of behaviors. Oh well!
So last week I decided to go to North Hollywood on the B line train, then get on the G line busway and head deep into the valley, just out of pure curiosity. I wanted to go to Balboa Lake in the Sepulveda Basin area and take pictures of plants.
The route for me to get there from Culver is needlessly long. In like 15 years, I might be able to take the Sepulveda Corridor there much more directly. These days, it's a trip of about an hour and fifty minutes from Culver City station to Balboa Station, across the E, B and G lines:
I'd never previously been to North Hollywood station, the station which connects the B and G lines. It's monumental in the fun way that a lot of train stations are in every city on earth:
It's fun to climb like 3 stories of stairs and emerge squinting like a mole-person into a place you've never been before, even if that place is relentlessly mundane.
Across the street from the main North Hollywood Station plaza, the G line boards at a turnaround in front of the old Pacific Electric station building:
One of the most interesting local features of this line is that every station I visited had these hostile-architecture stools for passengers to wait on, too small and rounded to use as a sleeping surface. I didn't get a good picture of the smallest stools - a lot of them were designed for just one person to sit on. They have a very distinctive visual style, kind of a red terrazzo look on top of yellow metal strips. I've never seen them at any other Metro station in LA:
The ride along this line was pretty ordinary! You get on a large articulated bus and zoom around, sometimes on separated roads where only buses are allowed. I've been on busways before, and this is a very typical one. The sections in traffic were not particularly slow, but I was also riding this around 1 PM, so there wasn't a ton of traffic. The sections where we were on the bus-only part of the route were nice and fast.
I dunno! Busways!! Love 2 bus!! Here's a truly terrible photo!
I got out at Balboa Station and caught a glimpse of the bike path that parallels this part of the route, the G Line Bikeway. I've never biked here. I guess I've gotta come back and give it a shot.
Lake Balboa Park is right across the street from the busway station. I felt very grim and eerie walking around the park - for a couple different reasons. There had been recent grass-cutting here - maybe invasive plants? I'm not sure? - and there were dead stems everywhere. There was a lot of debris and junk in the river, and a lot of otherwise-nice spots that smelled like sewage. The only flowering plants were tree tobacco and sacred datura, which are both pretty cool-looking but also both pretty poisonous. Whenever I look at them, some voice in the back of my brain is just repeating: damn, that's poisonous. Maybe watching Snow White did this to me as a kid, but whenever I see a poisonous plant, it's pretty much the only thing I can think about...
I don't really mind any of this - we're about to hit wintertime, and LA nature gets a lot drabber in the winter, so it's to be expected, really. I think I'll come back in the spring. Most wet places in LA are really quite magical in the spring, even if they smell like sewage and have giant piles of trash in them. In the spring, all that shit gets covered up with green stuff and flowers!!
Another thing is that I came here deliberately on an overcast day in order to have an easier time taking pictures of plants. As El Nino continues, I've found that I have a much better time taking pictures (particularly pictures of bricks and walls and gas stations, to use in my level design project) on days with flat, overcast lighting. You don't have to worry as much about casting a shadow on something interesting when the lighting is so flat and even. As a result, however, the whole place probably felt an order of magnitude more gloomy.
I wandered around for about two miles and then got back on the bus. I'm now interested in going down there again and checking out other parts of the Sepulveda Basin area. The Wildlife Reserve on the eastern side of the area is the next thing I'm planning to check out.
Honestly, that other park seems like it might be more to my interest? I probably should have gone there instead... but I picked Balboa Station mostly because it gave me the longest headway along the line and allowed me to see more of the separated section of the busway! Transit Oriented Decisionmaking mostly works out for me...
2026-11-02 12:25:10
I started running 1000 Statues on August 27th of 2025, a little over a year ago now. The game concluded on October 8th of 2026, about a month ago now. I wanted to write up a retrospective about my experiences running the module, the mindset I took towards conducting the game, and how it went.
The game was played using Delving Deeper with the following house rules:
- Use Delving Deeper Saves and Thief Skills instead of Target 20; we should only use Target20 to resolve attack rolls because that's the only thing it's good for lmao
- FIrebombs are generally an attack roll against AC 9 to hit a living target, then they take 1d6 damage per round until doused or they roll a 1 on the dice. Throwing firebombs on the ground doesn't require a roll. Enemies that walk through the flames take 1d6 damage and enemies that end their turn in the flames also take 1d6 damage.
- Flanking gives a +2 bonus for every attacker, this stacks up to +6 (Imagine a fire emblem board/chess set, a piece surrounded on all 4 sides)
- Attacking prone humanoids with armor gives a +4 bonus, if the creature doesn't have armor it's an autohit
- Firearms do HD damage; lose 1d6 hp and 1HD permanently
All of our mapping was done using TLDraw. You can view the TLDraw as it looked through the player POV for as long as the link stays up here or see the images below.
Discord was used both for dice rolls and for voice. Camera must have been used occasionally but was far from common. The game was an open table, scheduled impromptu during most of its run time (in practice, this meant EST weeknights during the latter half of 2025 and early half of 2026) except for the final month or so, during which the game ran early on Thursday mornings. Sessions ranged from 90-150 minutes, with an average very comfortably at the 2 hour mark.
Delving Deeper v4 is probably the best retroclone of the original game. Where it strays from the original text it does so for sensible reasons, and I find the additions that weren't in the original version of the game cromulent and fun. The system handles Thieves nicely, and Magic Users get a very generous starting spell list. Color Spray remains my favorite spell in classic D&D and a large reason for that is Delving Deeper.
Cleave/multiattack as it is laid out in DD is quite good and helps make sense of the larger encounter numbers in 1000 Statues and the Delving Deeper book as written. While it's certainly not the right choice for every campaign, for this one it was perfect. Fighters made up virtually all of the most succesful characters and had a strong niche.
There is a certain mind worm that likes to burrow in the head of people who take the hobby too seriously, where they decide on a whim that whichever rules text they decide to use is imperfect and needs to be treated immediately with heavy houserules. This is fine and dandy, but there is something to be said for "letting it ride" and trying to run the rules as they are written for as long as possible before you make any changes. For this campaign, anyway, that was a resounding success. Aside from the houserules above my usual answer to a rules question was checking the Delving Deeper reference, and usually (though not always; players are fickle bastards) there was a good answer there.
1000 Statues is a polarizing text. There is no context to the dungeon besides a poem (or two) and scarcely any ecological logic to speak of. Levels are labyrinthine for no reason and have deeply perverted designs which trick even skilled players. There is not enough experience to level up a party if they die too much. And yet, despite it all, there is a personality there. Beneath the naked keys there are suggestions of situations, things that happened, are happening, will happen, and the careful (and curious, good-faithed) reader is presented with a fertile ground for gaming. It is, miraculously -- Blark's work always feels miraculous -- a moving work made from bits pieces of imaginary toys.
It is likely that my experiences running the game have colored my opinion of the text. Can you read a module and review it's playability without playing it? It's inconclusive, but after spending so much time with a module like 1000 Statues I don't think I can review it in any way more conclusive or authoritative. Inevitably, looking back at the keys, I am reminded of the play that brought them to life. Vivid mental pictures of betrayal and war, silly duels and sordid soirees into darkened hallways, are really what leap from the pages when I think back. Whether this is a function of the text or my own bumbling anti-genius is uncertain, but Blark is owed their due for putting the work together and I certainly wouldn't havebeen put into the headspace from which leapt my joy without it.
What is a dungeon game without maps?
Wilderness:
The Party Sheet:
As I wrote above, 1000 Statues is terse. There is little in the way of context or justification. One of the monikers of the Gay Beholder Discord, a sort of practical underpinning of the server, is that play creates context and there is so much that happens in play that cannot be replicated sitting alone with your prep congealed in a sticky pile on your desk, grunting and straining with that aforementioned anti-genius.
Being the skeptic that I am, I decided to put this to the test.
I didn't prep for 1000 Statues. Did very little in the way of writing things down. I wrote a paragraph about a small town outside the dungeon, much later made a hexflower, but beyond that I did very little between sessions. My goal was to run a "mirror" to the party assembled. Some people, intuiting some deeper meaning in the keys and my refereeing, took the happenings of the dungeon more seriously than others, who engaged with it in its most distilled form; it's a dungeon crawl, we were there for nothing else. Of course, I had a justification for why I could run it this way. There was a method to my madness that allowed me to be content running it in my home setting, but I never wrote it down and the attention I paid to it ebbed and flowed with the people who came. A lot of what happened procedurally too was the result of party action. The Encounter Table was initially mostly empty but became populated whenever the party committed or witnessed senseless violence. There were exploding gnomes and suicidal orcs and other ghosts made manifest by player cruelty.
All this to say that the people who attended the games affected the way it was played far more than they realized. That's the big takeaway for me as a referee. We can circlejerk a lot about the prep we do, the modules we run or write, and the procedures we craft in the wee hours when everyone but the revelers and the rule-writers have gone to bed, but really tabletop games are about people. It's a conversation, one with a book to reference in case you get confused or scared or angry, but a conversation nonetheless. The people at a table contribute so much to the tone of a game, to the facilitation, and why wouldn't they? They're the majority of the participants in the conversation.
I can say with much more confidence than usual that it was a success. I learned a lot about the social side of running games, how to be an asshole and the finger which explores it, how to congratulate and how to console, and how to laugh and learn to take things less seriously. It's easy to get worked up and self serious if you spend too much time doing this hobby (a weird intersection of math and literature that includes only the egoistic parts, I reckon) and it was a meditation on setting both of those aside and focusing on the people who come to the table. I have nearly no regrets.
Since players are so important to the realization of this game, I've tried to go back and reconstruct the players of the game through the Discord logs. This is most certainly and simultaneously a herculean task as is and one left incomplete, so if you attended a game but aren't on the list, contact me and I'll get that sorted right away.
Thank you all for playing! There were, including me, upwards of 30 players in the campaign as a whole! I'm so honored to have been able to share something so meaningful to me with so many people :)
1000 Statues ended up being about memories for me. These games are full of false memories, stories we tell like we lived them when in truth our plush asses were nailed to a chair at a table. A lot of the way I ran it was conscious of this fact (many players will recall the forgetful townfolk). By giving you the Truth I rob you of your memories, the unclear theories and feelings you might still hold about your time playing.
If you didn't play, put in the legwork to track someone down in the list above and ask them what it was like. Their answer is as good as mine will be, or better.
If that isn't satisfactory, then try this explanation on for size: I'm too damn lazy to give you more than what you got already B-)
2026-11-02 12:13:00
I’d just informed my best friend that I will be dressing up for Halloween, and I will be costumed as a fly. She looked apprehensive.
“I know you have some sort of sympathy for them,” she began, horrified.
Maybe that’s true. Maybe I not-so-secretly love a pest. But she was referring to September, when the whole family had been chasing after a little fly in the kitchen. “Oh,” I’d said unhappily, walking in on the scene. Then I’d explained that, when I’d been whipping up curry the night before, “he managed to stay alive so long, I guess I started to think of him as my little pal.” By “managed to stay alive,” I meant I’d threatened the fly verbally, and he’d dutifully stayed out of my way after that, leaving all the food alone, keeping entirely to the other side of the room. Well, I sounded insane. Finally I relented, saying the family could do what they liked, but “please just don’t tell me about it.” I excused myself. When I returned, the youngest family member launched into a game of 20 Questions. For my third question I sighed and asked if the fly had, perchance, been shot to death with a Bug-A-Salt gun. Lucky guess. Technically it was true that no one had told me about it.
“Do you know that they’re very clean?” I asked my best friend now. “That’s why they track disease and pestilence everywhere—because they are constantly cleaning themselves off. And because they are drawn to filth and carrion, their presence invites you to look around for what might be rotten in the state of Denmark.” Western Christianity can be paranoid about a little bug, with deliverance ministries going so far as to hand-wring about “monitoring spirits,” as if flies might be cybernetic surveillance drones. But pretty much every other global faith tradition sees the house pests as a call to look within. I shrugged.
“Hm!” my best friend said.
“All God’s creatures,” I sighed.
The youngest family member asked to show me a magic trick. She had a pencil and a stack of sticky notes in hand. “First think of your favorite color,” she ordered me.
“Yellow,” I told her.
She groaned. “Pick another color. Don’t tell me.”
“Oops, okay. Start over,” I said. “I love this magic trick.”
“Now your favorite animal,” she said. I nodded and thought hard, and she wrote something down.
I don’t actually remember the third question, but that’s okay, because she had trouble thinking of one.
“What is your favorite color?” she said to me now.
“Pink,” I said.
She looked sad. “Oh,” she said. “I wrote yellow.”
“Well, that is my favorite color,” I said. Kind of a mustard or goldenrod color.
“And your favorite animal.”
“Cat,” I said. “Or bird.”
She showed me the Post-It. “I wrote cat,” she said.
I squinted at her. “What is this,” I said to her. “How did you—?” A distinct lump was forming in my throat.
She looked down. “You talk about your cat a lot,” she whispered.
My eyes had already filled with tears.
“You’re a mentalist,” I said to her.
“She’s showing you how much she knows about you,” my best friend said, which was completely unnecessary.
“A mentalist,” I repeated, trying to compose myself. “We should rewatch that.”
“Right after she was born,” my best friend said, “when I was nursing late at night, we watched a lot of it.”
“Yeah! Absorbing everything. Mentalism, maybe a touch of con-artistry.” We snickered.
“Now you go,” the child said, pushing the sticky notes into my hands. “Do the trick.”
Her favorite color was apparently yellow. I held up my Post-It, cringing. “I wrote pink,” I said. We were both disappointed.
“You do love pink,” her mom said helpfully.
“I should’ve written lilac,” I said to the child. “Lavender. No, rainbow. No, sparkles.” She grinned. Really, her favorite color is unicorn iridescence, a shifting spectrum, which is difficult to codify into just one word or idea.
“Animal?” I asked her.
“Dog,” she said.
“Well, there is a question mark on the end of it,” I said, handing her the sticky note for inspection, “but I did write dog.” She cheered.
At the end of our exercise, the child stood up and sat in a different chair across the room from me. She was hunched over her Post-Its, writing something very carefully, looking a bit like Harriet the Spy.
“What are you doing way over there?” I asked her. She was like 30 feet away.
“I’m doing another trick,” she said, “and I don’t want you to see what I’m writing.”
“I definitely won’t see what you’re writing from over here,” I agreed, nodding.
There was a knock at the front door, two sharp raps. I hopped up to answer it.
I cracked the door. “Hello, how may I help you,” I said to two bright-eyed children, presumably siblings, of different heights and ages. They were in coats and hats. I constantly shifted in the door frame, trying to use my calves to keep the curious dog’s nose all the way inside the house.
They asked if they could “clean the front yard.” The smaller one had a sly, shy smile. The taller one had bouncing mobile eyebrows, just like my best friend had at her age.
I asked them to please wait, and I excused myself. I returned. “The yard guy comes on Thursday,” I said to them apologetically. “I’m sorry, I’m not in charge of these types of decisions. And I’m not in a position to pay you myself,” I said unhappily, trailing off. I looked back and forth at the two kids, all bundled up in big unwieldy coats, absolutely precious. “And it’s very cold today!” I said to them now. “Are you sure you want to be cleaning neighbors’ yards?”
“We already cleaned our yard!” the little one said.
“We don’t want to be paid, we want your leaves,” the taller one said, her eyebrows darting around meaningfully.
“Oh?” I said, my hands flying to my heart.
“We have a trampoline,” she explained at last, “and we want to put more leaves on it.”
“We already put our own leaves on it!” the tiny one added.
“So you aren’t asking to clean yards,” I gasped, “you’re asking for permission to collect the leaves from people’s yards. Because you need more leaves for your trampoline.” The two girls were nodding along slyly. “Yes, that’s—that’s fine,” I said, “you’re welcome to all the leaves in the front yard. Thank you for asking. I’ll let everyone know you’re here.” I hesitated. “Please be careful,” I said, “wet leaves can be dangerous.” I meant on a trampoline specifically, but perhaps this was unclear; the elder sibling’s eyebrows were hopping around everywhere. “Okay,” I said. “Do you need a bag?”
“We have our wheelbarrow!” the little one said, turning and pointing.
“We brought our wheelbarrow,” the taller one said.
Incredible. I was overwhelmed. I gestured for them to go about their mission and closed the door.
I returned to my best friend, yet again on the verge of tears. I explained the full situation.
“For their leaf pile!” she marveled.
I mentioned the elder child’s wiggly eyebrows.
“You’re an eyebrow whisperer,” my best friend teased.
“Years of practice,” I teased back.
“That’s Audrey!” the tiniest family member piped up. Which one was Audrey? She didn’t know.
“There’s an older one and a younger one,” I said.
She shrugged.
“The older one is almost my height,” I prompted.
She balked.
“Because I’m the height of an 11-year old,” I said. I heard my best friend choke.
I thought I wanted autumn, I thought to myself irritably, but now here I am in hard pants. I’d changed out of soft pants into stiff barrel jeans, stiff platform Keds that had never conformed to my feet, and a funnel-neck fleece sweatshirt with a front roo pocket. My discomfort knew no end. I checked myself in a mirror. Ah, dreadful. I looked exactly my real age or even a bit older—so middle-aged I couldn’t bear it. I looked like I was about to get on a boat. I looked like I was about to power-walk through Cabot Cove. I looked like my grandmother.
The dog, noticing my change in clothing, started bounding around. “Correct,” I said to her. I picked up her harness and went to my usual dog-harnessing seat. She bounded over.
Laz emerged, headed for the fridge. He could not hide his amusement; the process of harnessing an at-motion dog is my daily chance to practice composure. “Going for a walk?” he asked me.
“Yep,” I said.
“It’s cold today!” he said, pretending to be cold.
“Oh, my god! I am not built for this anymore!” I exclaimed. “There were two little girls at the front door earlier, and I remember thinking this is the coldest I have ever been in my life. And that can’t be true.” I attached the leash.
Laz laughed. The dog yanked me to my feet. She pulled me all the way to the front door. I opened it.
Immediately the dog was drawn to the aromatic box on the stoop.
“Hey, no. Hey! Stop! Argh.” She was nuzzling the box. I tried to reach across her. It was Pizza Hut. “Laz, your food is—” I began, but Laz, who is ripped, would never order a carby-carb pizza for himself. “Hey, Laz?” I asked.
“Hm?” he called.
I’d managed to get the box into my hands. For a half-second I almost wondered if the kids’ parents had sent pizzas to every deleafed yard. I handed the box to Laz, twisting myself up in the nylon leash as I did so.
“A pizza has been misdelivered to us,” I said to him, astonished.
He inspected the box, examining the receipt stuck to the lid. “Kellie,” he said thoughtfully. “There’s a number, I’ll call it in,” he told me.
I thanked him.
The dog and I lurched up the block. I adjusted my funnel neck, successfully sinking halfway into it. I couldn’t help but feel I was dressed like an Old Navy crime scene. Alas! How I’d wasted the youth of my summer, with its liberating movement clothes and toe-exposing footwear. And now I was braced against the blustery icy winds, wearing an entire fabric exoskeleton.
We completed our loop and I praised the dog for being a terrific sport. At home, I gave her a snack and loosed her. I filled her dish with fresh water. Then I knocked on the office door. Laz cracked the door and peered out at me.
“What happened with the pizza,” I asked him.
“Did you not get my text?” he asked me.
“No, I came straight here,” I told him.
“Obviously they can’t take the pizza back,” he began.
“So we can eat it!” I said.
He gave me the whole story, such as it was. “I texted you,” he said now, a gentle reproach.
“So we can eat it!” I repeated.
“I already had some,” he said.
“Yesssss,” I said.
I raced to the bedroom and shimmied out of my sweatshirt, straight into a pair of soft sleep pants and Croc sandals. Then I ate the hell out of that pizza. A real-life pizza angel, I thought to myself, misleading deliverypeople to my very door. I hoped no one had gotten in trouble over it. Then I paused, hoping it wasn’t poisoned. Oh, well, soon enough I’d find out.
Unable to suppress news of my unexpected fortune, I posted about the pizza on social media.
The god of the material world, I replied to someone, operates through forgotten pizza, day-old bread, and $2 never-worn tops at the thrift store. Consider the lilies of the field.
The next day my best friend plopped a big brown paper bag on the counter. “It’s a soup day,” she said to me.
“It sure is,” I said.
She handed me a bowl of my number-one favorite soup. “Wow!” I exclaimed. I beamed at her. I had not been a part of this DoorDash-ordering process. It’s just nice to be thought of.
She looked in the bag again. “Wh—” she said. She pulled out a second bowl of soup, frowning. “They gave me two of yours,” she said. “And no tomato soup!” Only now would I learn that she hated my number-one favorite soup, actually. She grumbled about it under her breath.
She pulled out a phone and looked at the app, examining the order. “I don’t believe it. I did this. I did it,” she said. “How did this happen?” She groaned. “I had a kid on my back!” she said. Physically, she meant. Her daughter had been on her back like a koala. If I could turn back tiii-iime—
“You could place anoth—”
“No, it’s fine,” she huffed. “Ugh! I really wanted soup!” She muttered about this to herself for a good little while. I’d started backing away.
“I’ll be right back,” I eventually told her, slipping off. She’d muttered enough information about her order that I could reconstruct it, like a round of Good Pizza Great Pizza, or like how you can guess from context clues the way your Animal Crossing villagers prefer to take their coffee. And I like the idea of loaves and fishes—the idea of being blessed with exactly what you need and not one fish more—but the whole operation kind of hinges on not taking food out of other people’s mouths.
When I returned, the youngest family member was sitting at a counter with a piece of paper. She had a pen uncapped, but it was dry. She was staring at it, annoyed. “What kind of pen is this,” she asked suspiciously.
“Oh, I need to toss that,” I said.
“Is it like a Sharpie?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said. I examined the barrel of the fine-point marker. “It’s a special pen for, if you’re throwing mail away, you can black out the numbers and no one can see them.” I’d been keeping the pen around so I could reorder more of it, but that was kind of dumb. I threw it away.
I went to a different cabinet and pulled out a massive secret stash of multicolored permanent markers, still in their cumbersome packaging. “I need to open this package anyway,” I said to her, “it’s taking up too much space.” I held the markers up for examination. She gasped.
“That’s a lot of Sharpies!” she exclaimed.
“Your mother gave these to me,” I said to her sternly. At the time I hadn’t fully understood or appreciated why I was being given a value-pack of rainbow Sharpies. Now I was cutting open the difficult plastic packaging with kitchen shears. “I’m going to want these back when you’re done, because they’re mine. Not everything has to be mine, but these do. Here,” I said, putting a bouquet of fine-point markers in front of her.
She gazed upon them wistfully. “My mother doesn’t want me using Sharpies,” she said.
I stared at her.
“Maybe if I put paper underneath the paper,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, raising my eyebrows, “or even that art mat we got for your clay.”
She looked at me, expectant, waiting for me to provide. I looked back at her impassively. She got up off the stool, returned with a little stack of printer paper.
“Very good,” I said to her from the sink. I was about to go under the sink for cleaning solvent—spray-stuff for dissolving permanent marker left on marble—when something darted past my head. “Augh!” I said, my head jerking to the right. “Was that a fly?”
Yes. He was on the edge of the sink. Nope, now he was sitting on some clean silverware. I shuddered and crept closer to him.
“Hey!” the kid said. “Shoo, fly! Get out!”
“No, don’t do that,” I mumbled, “he’ll panic and then I’ll never catch him.” I was focused now, trying to approach the fork. I tentatively moved my hand toward it.
He jumped off the fork and buzzed around. Finally he landed on my forearm. Ah! No, he was buzzing again. There! He landed on my right shoulder. Disney Princess from Hell.
“Great,” I murmured, “good job. Hang on. Stay right there.” I tentatively turned this way and that, getting him used to the feeling of movement, to the breeze in his wings. Then I slowly moved toward the back door, watching my little bud on my shoulder. I unlocked the door, careful to not jostle him. I opened it. I walked all the way outside. “Be free!” I shouted, throwing my arms in the air. I checked my shoulder; he was already gone.
I walked back in. “Ta-da,” I said to her.
I realize my process sounds delusional, but it takes me far less time to escort the bugs out of the house than it would to chase them all over the kitchen in a tizzy, swatter in hand—and, most important, there’s no mess to clean up at the end.
She was not impressed, being, as she was, occupied with a new project. “Look,” she said, giggling to herself, “a baseball pumpkin.” She showed it to me.
The baseball pumpkin was perfectly square for some reason.
“Oh,” I said. “I like it. I bet if you added some more lines, you could make the baseball kind of like a Frankenstein thing.” I thought about it. “Uh, stitches. Laces.”
“Oh!” she said. She drew something. She turned the page toward me again. Instead of adding stitching to the baseball seams, she’d added a totally new set of stitches across the pumpkin’s forehead.
“Yep, that’s exactly what he needed,” I said. “He looks great.”
“Oh! And,” she said. “There, now he looks like Frankenstein.”
“You added a stem!” I said.
“Not that. These,” she said, irritated with me. She tapped the page.
“Oh, you added bolts!” I said. They were at the top of the pumpkin, on each side of his noggin, way up near the stem. “That’s perfect,” I said.
She added something else.
“Now he’s saying AAAAA,” she said to me, turning the page toward me for review. She’s been drawing cute little ghosts and pumpkins and cobwebs for a few days. I’ve been worried that I’ll be blamed for this, but she’s picking up this aesthetic somewhere else, possibly Wal-Mart. Up until now all her drawings have been shouting “BOO,” but this particular one was shouting “aaa,” in giant lower-case letters.
“I love it!” I said. I paused. “Your A’s are backward,” I finally said to her. They looked like D’s.
She looked down. “Oh. Well,” she said, “I’m left-handed, so… that happens.”
“Yes, that happens,” I said, deeply amused. “Hmm. I wonder how aaa would sound backward. I guess it would sound like,” and I took a breath, and I did a Lynchian “huueeeeeaAAAAAAH” sound. I gave myself the giggles. Only one of us was entertained.
“Are you coming to the Harvest Festival?” she asked me.
“Yep,” I said.
She sighed. She rephrased her question: “Are you coming with us, or are you driving your own car?” she asked me.
“I’m driving myself. I’ve asked your mom to text me the address.”
“It’s just at my church,” she said. I nodded thoughtfully. I suppose I can see why my best friend doesn’t want me dressed as some ghoul or flying insect at church. Everyone is so jumpy these days.
Her mom entered the kitchen. I pointed out the illustrations of adorable cartoon ghosts, some of them with long eyelashes or flowers on their heads. “So cute. They’re very Ms. Pac-Man coded,” I said. “That’s the ghost I want to haunt me—”
“Uhh,” she said, “let’s not ask for anything to—”
“Well, just like a pet,” I said, “like Slimer but nicer. Fortunately,” and I swiveled on my stool toward the child and said this pointedly, “ghosts are not real.” I fluttered my lashes and smiled at her mother, an innocent gremlin smile.
“I-I know,” my best friend said to me, a little ruffled, “I was, uh, just teasing you.”
“Can you get this cap off for me,” the child said. I nodded. I yanked the marker open, snapped the cap onto the end of the marker, and handed it back to her. “Why are they so hard to open,” she lamented now.
“Because they’ll dry out. You have to put the caps back on hard, too.” I picked up a half-capped pink marker, slamming it against the counter to secure the top. The child looked horrified. “Don’t worry about it too much, I’ll recap them all once you’re done,” I told her.
“We need to start wrapping up anyway,” my best friend told the kid. “We need to get to church early because we’re bringing pies.”
My eyes lit up. “Well,” I said to her, “don’t leave too soon. Please don’t be upset, but your soup should arrive in,” I looked at a clock, “about ten minutes.”
She gasped. She looked a little heated, actually.
“Why did you do that,” she said.
“It’s not for you, it’s for me,” I said. “So I wouldn’t be sad.” I stood up from my stool. “You owe me nothing.”
“Why,” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said, walking out of the room, “I guess I’m just like that.”
I was gone for a few minutes. I eventually returned, drying my hands on my leggings. “Because today is a soup day, and I knew you weren’t going to order yourself soup a second time. It made me so sad. I love a tomato soup with a grilled cheese. I wanted you to have your soup, and if you didn’t, I was going to stay sad. It is for me. I am taking ownership of this.”
The soup arrived.
“Did you mean to order me two?” she asked.
“Yep,” I said.
“Why,” she said, feigning being upset, but markedly less upset than earlier. She got herself a spoon.
“To make it worth the Dasher’s while. And because you didn’t even know you were ordering me a second soup, and I am going to eat all of it.”
Rest assured I’m not one of those ‘oh, no thanks, I ate that yesterday’ people.
She laughed. “Thank you,” she said, now eating a spoonful of tomato soup.
“And,” I said, grabbing a cola from the fridge’s beverage drawer, and opening it, “I’ve also had to think about this, but there are no hard-and-fast rules about boundaries. Sometimes we break them for very good reasons. I didn’t ask before ordering because you would’ve said no, and also, if I had asked, it would’ve made you even more upset.” She laughed again. “So this is very intentional. I respect your autonomy, but not this time. That’s the gift.”
She ate a few more spoonfuls. “I wouldn’t’ve ordered myself soup again,” she admitted, a whisper, staring down at the soup.
I was standing in my bedroom, frowning. “I’m trying to change into something hayride-appropriate,” I texted my friend, who was already at the festival with her pies. I wasn’t going to belabor this process, but I did need to concentrate.
I looked around the room. I began rooting around the absolute mess of blouses and blazers at the foot of my bed. My best friend had found me piles of grown-up clothes, three wardrobes full, most of it new and unworn and in my size, at the local thrift nonprofit. This was going to replace years of fast-fashion crap, so that I could work outside the house without looking so frayed. I especially liked a fancy little tank top my friend had found: orange-red with a slight shimmer to it. She’d figured I could wear it with a blazer and slacks.
I put the tank top on and checked a mirror. Stinkin’ cute. Then I held up my favorite statement necklace—glass berries and clay mushrooms, all tangled together on a bronze chain—to confirm I had some sort of an autumnal theme. The berries, charmingly, matched the blouse. I put on moisturizer and then concealer, a smear of shimmery aubergine eyeliner, matching Clinique mascara (“wow, girl, are those lashes real?” I whispered, flirting with myself in the magnifying mirror), and then a tea-tinted matte lip tint. Usually I don’t wear eye makeup and lip makeup, but perhaps I wanted to look a tiny bit intimidating. My perpetual disinterest in blush gives away my true age.
I walked into the hallway, rooting around a big box of skirts and leggings. I emerged with a brand new handkerchief-hem skirt. It wasn’t entirely hayride-appropriate, no; I’d just have to be careful about not getting sucked under any wagon wheels or set ablaze. I got out of my soft pants and into my black leggings, and I put the gothic skirt on top. I rummaged at the foot of the bed again. No. No. No. No. Aha! My best friend had found me a little knit black cardigan, with a subtle thermal weave and an attached hoodie. I put on thick socks. I looked around the floor. I picked up a pair of waterproof no-brand Chelsea boots that I’d panic-purchased 22 months earlier from a Wal-Mart in Missouri. Are these my favorite shoes, actually? I stuffed my feet into them. Could be!
I grabbed my third-smallest crossbody bag, my fresh-dripped travel coffee, a bulky black-denim coat from Kohl’s, my phone, my keys. I forgot my CampSnap camera, which I really would’ve liked to’ve had with me. I drove and parked. Then I looked all around me before ducking and stealing a sneaky little puff off my nicotine vape. I exited the car and locked up, leaving my bulky coat and coffee thermos behind for later.
My best friend was just inside the church. I sat down next to her at a long folding table, and I greeted the young woman who was, at that moment, immersed in guiding the children in making fall-themed crafts.
“You remember her,” my best friend prompted me.
I turned beet-red. A previous Sunday I’d introduced myself to her; a microexpression had flickered across her face, and I’d realized I’d messed up. (“I met her at your daughter’s birthday party, didn’t I,” I lamented afterward, “right by the double-doors.” My best friend nodded: indeed I had.)
“Yes, I—I remember,” I said. “I’m like a person with a TBI,” muttering to myself now, “but once it moves from short-term to long-term memory, I… I’m fine.” My best friend laughed.
The young woman looked a little relieved. She invited me to make a fabric wreath. I accepted, and she presented me with a metal hoop. I commenced my work double-knotting fabric strips onto the hoop.
“Do you have a job in the arts?” I eventually asked her.
“Well, no,” she said to me, “I… I lead the children’s ministry here. But it’s true that the children and I do a lot of crafts—”
She trailed off. She was thinking about it. She suddenly looked up at me. “Yes, I work in the arts,” she said now, nodding, with a glorious resolve. We smiled at each other. “And you?” she asked me now. “Do you enjoy crafts?”
“Oh,” I said, “I think I enjoy and appreciate them more than I end up doing them. I’m very ambitious! That’s why I have supplies for all these hobbies I’ve never tackled.”
My best friend laughed. “That’s all of us,” she said wryly—smoothing me out, making me palatable.
A few children came and went, briefly sitting opposite me, attempting wreathmaking. But it’s a time-consuming craft, busywork for the hands, probably geared more toward chatty adults. One child, however, sat down across from me and got right to work. We admired her handiwork: very tidy, I observed, a much tidier wreath than mine. The child was 9 or 10. After we’d complimented her, she would occasionally pipe up or chime in when she noticed an opening for her expertise, very adult about it, all business, very 35. Ah! A little girl hiding out with all the moms. My best friend and I spoke to her in play-adult voices, graciously accepting her sage advice and her wisdom.
Another young mom sat down next to the child, began work on her own wreath—and I’m going to be a bit precious about this person and not share very much about her, except to say that she does have a job in the arts. Also, to repeat some of her funniest quips. The artist casually dropped information that would greatly benefit any person who is reassembling her life piecemeal. I gazed at her in absolute astonishment. A map of the territory!
Now the artist’s husband had brought her an insulated paper cup of, not coffee at all, but apparently hot dairy. “Can you please add coffee to this,” she gasped.
“I have my coffee in the car,” I said to my best friend. “Should I get it?”
“I don’t know,” my best friend said. “Do you want your coffee right now?”
“I don’t know if I want to get up and go all the way out there to get it,” I whispered to her, beginning to spiral, as if my brief absence from the crafts table might be a choice that alters life as we know it.
“Yes,” the artist said to me, “you do, and then you’ll be happy because you’ll have your coffee.” She was sipping coffee now, and she did look more comfortable than before.
I pinched the air. “Unassailable logic,” I said to her, “thank you.” Perhaps I’d been waiting for permission. I got up from my chair and went out to the parking lot. I ducked my head in the passenger’s side of my car, stole a surreptitious drag off my nicotine vape, grabbed my coffee thermos, and locked up. I returned and sat down. She was right; I was happy now. I thanked her again.
We continued our wreathmaking. I explained to the artist that I’m eager to return to fiction writing, after spending my entire adult life doing nonfiction writing. I think I’ve finally reached the end of the road, I admitted to her.
“I’m working on her character,” I said now, gesturing toward my best friend. “She’s gonna have to be in it. She’s very good at finding old newspaper clippings, so I’ve decided to put her to work in the L.A. Public Library System.” I grimaced. “Now I just have to research the L.A. Public Library System.” Easy!
“I love research,” my best friend explained to the artist. Then she launched into a delightful little ode to research—even library science, a degree she’d contemplated at one point. I watched her admiringly.
“I’ll read your book,” the artist said to me with determination.
“Thank you,” I said to her.
I scooched all my knotted cloth strips together. “Hmm,” I said. It seemed like there was still a long road ahead for my wreath. The artist commenced cutting more strips from a bit of whole fabric still on the table. She scooted the strips toward me.
“I like to keep them all spaced out,” the youngster sitting across from me said, zhuzhing the fabric like a flower arrangement. “Otherwise it’s just more work for me.”
The artist and I looked at each other and then burst out laughing.
“Facts,” I said.
The child’s wreath was done. We nodded approvingly and she stood from her chair, wishing us well.
Conversation continued, organically winding this way and that. When my best friend briefly left, I inched a little closer to the artist.
I gave an extremely abbreviated version of something harrowing—one of my least interesting true stories, unfortunately, but true all the same. I was explaining why I’d reacted to something with apprehension.
“Wow!” she said. “How often does that happen!”
“And I’m under NDA,” I said to her. “So it’s gotta be fiction.”
“Gotta be,” she agreed, nodding. My best friend returned.
It was increasingly clear we were going to run out of cloth strips just shy of our respective goals. “Oh,” a new woman said, appearing to my right, standing at the table and worrying over it, “I wasn’t sure how much fabric we’d need. I stayed up late last night cutting up strips—”
“If someone doesn’t make a wreath tomorrow,” I said darkly, a play-hostile voice, tightening my right hand into a fist and lightly shaking it. The woman laughed and then wandered away, apparently absolved.
The artist was looking down at her phone. “I’m about to start listening to a book,” she said. “Do you know The Housemaid?”
“Oh, that was a movie that came out recently,” I said, nodding, “with Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney. I read a synopsis of it, I didn’t realize it was a book first.” I thought about it. “That’s what I want. Get a book optioned, buy a house.”
“Well, she has another one,” the artist said, “called The Witch.” She started to hand me her phone. I reached toward it. “Don’t judge me,” she said suddenly.
I froze and looked up at her, amused and a little floored. On the tip of my tongue was “I typically only judge white-collar crime and various abuses of authority,” but I kept it inside me. She relaxed and released her phone into my hand. I read the synopsis.
“Yeah, this is it,” I said to myself, “this is exactly what I want to be doing1. Thank you.” I returned her phone to her.
My best friend’s daughter had arrived, had already started work on a little craft of her own. She held it up to show all of us.
“Oh, it’s a leaf!” I said happily. She’d added sparklies to it. It looked very nice. “Hey, I need you to be my mom, too,” I said to my best friend now, staring down at my own wreath and scowling, “because I’d really like your input on where all this is headed.”
“Just a sec,” my best friend said.
“I need you to be my mom, too,” the artist said, holding up her wreath for assessment, “because mine’s the worst.”
“Noooo,” my best friend said, “your wreath looks so good!”
I suppressed a smile and looked back and forth between the two women.
The artist hesitated. “No, my mom’s the worst!” she finally said.
My delight was now unconcealed. “I knew what you meant,” I snickered, “because I’m right there with you.” Ugh, and what a long, excruciating journey it is.
My friend’s daughter had won a little stack of stickers. I asked to look through the stack. Then I saw one I really liked.
“Oh, I love this,” I said. “This might be my all-time favorite sticker.” It said, in big pastel capital letters, MAKE HEAVEN CROWDED. Then I hesitated, becoming wistful. The sticker, I was now realizing, probably intended the statement in a different way than I was interpreting it.
I hustled out to my car, unlocked it, put my empty coffee thermos into a cupholder, dropped my wreath into the front passenger side, and grabbed my bulky outdoors coat. I also tried to sneak another drag off my nicotine vaporizer, but the battery was dead. Hmph. I climbed into my coat and locked up.
We walked through the church lot, admiring the booths, the pies, the petting zoo area with farm animals. My friend pointed out the great big anodized metal tub, a familiar indoors sight, now being used to contain bobbing apples. I gasped; it was the baptismal tub.
“I cannot,” I said, horrified. “Good Lord.” I kept looking back at it. “I’m sorry,” I finally said, “I know it really doesn’t matter, but,” and I put a hand to my forehead, “and I realize this is probably coming from having married into a Catholic family, but… but the Catholic Church does have relics.” My friend burst into evil little giggles. Evangelicals don’t believe in consecration, obviously. The impulse, then, to pivot toward what might be deemed desecration—excepting the American flag, of course, which I recently learned2 the Scouts will ritualistically dispose of for you—is very weird to return to with fresh eyes.
Another young mom noticed my best friend and greeted her. She marveled at how much my best friend’s youngest child has grown over the past year.
“Why can’t they just stay small!” she exclaimed, laughing.
I was horrified. Immediately lost in thought, I was considering Mrs. Darling’s lament, uttered to her daughter Wendy at the very start of the book—oh, why can’t you stay this way forever—which is a real monkey’s paw of a wish, articulating a mother’s desire for the stunting of growth, for developmental delays to become permanent, to remain a mother always, to never retire, job security. This is why Peter Pan became “the boy who hates mothers”: he is living under a mother’s curse.
I blinked. I was totally out to lunch. Looking around, I realized I am pretty judgmental—just not about the things you’re supposed to be judging at church.
We walked toward the big tractor. A cordial, gallant fellow—someone’s dad, someone’s spouse—took each of us gals by the hand and led us up a three-step footstool. I was the last to go. I froze, unable to move. I tried to move and couldn’t. I looked down. Aha! On the second step, I’d put my right foot down on my own handkerchief hem. The hayride was already fraught in exactly the way I’d anticipated it would be fraught; I’d forgotten to be careful.
“I’m sorry, just a second. I’m just always on the precipice of death,” I muttered to him flatly, gathering all my hems together in my right hand. In my left hand I felt the man full-body cringe. “Okay, ready,” I said to him, and he flexed his forearm, boosting me all the way up onto the trailer.
I sat on the child’s hay bale with her. Then I asked her if she’d like me to move to my own bale. She shook her head no. I answered that we were all set.
The tractor’s driver made a wide, long loop around the field. Oh my god I love a hay ride; my last one was on my wedding day. It was still light out, and the little crowd and the festival were shrinking in the distance, giving the ride the feeling of a hot-air balloon (I’d imagine).
Rosy-cheeked, I thanked the tractor driver before disembarking. I waited until I was alive on level ground to thank the stepstool footman, so that I could thank him sincerely. We headed toward the thing that was on fire, per the youngster’s wishes. Then I wanted a hot dog. There were no more hot dogs. I went to the chili window and got a little paper bowl of chili. It was magnificent. I couldn’t believe they were offering four different types of chili. By now everyone seemed a little sick of me.
Then I’d taken a shine to the two girl turkeys3 when my best friend announced they were headed home. I put my hands on my thighs and pushed my way out of a squat; the turkeys had seemed distressed to me, so I’d spent a little time privately cooing sweet nothings to them. Turkeys are, in the end, just big birds4, and I do love birds.
“Okay, my two turkeys,” I said to my friend and her daughter as I got to my feet. My friend looked unimpressed. Usually she calls us turkeys; the reversal did not seem welcome. I cringed and shrugged.
“Why can’t I do the chicken race!” the small fry was shouting, having at last realized she was being steered away from racing a chicken.
Her mom waited until we were well into the parking lot, a safe distance away from fellow congregants, to answer. “I don’t know how I feel about it,” she told her daughter.
“I think I’m likely to agree with your mom,” I piped up. “Do you remember how I freaked out that one time I saw a video of a hamster in a maze?”
“No,” the kiddo said. I nodded, not eager to revisit my exact words for YouTube content creators who put cute, confused little hamsters into elaborate mazes.
“How do you think the chickens feel,” the child’s mom said. “Do you think they like racing?”
“Yes,” the kiddo said.
“I think chickens like to sit around and chat with their friends,” I suggested. I love birds.
The kiddo sighed.
When I got home, I stopped at the front door. I stared at the empty wreath hook, permanently stuck to the front door. Then I hung my wreath directly onto it. I stepped back to admire it.
“Terrible,” I whispered to myself joyfully.
The following week I would tell my friend J about the book. “It’s called a domestic thriller,” I explained to them. “I’d been calling this genre ‘pill pocket media,’ because it’s medication wrapped up in something delicious and sometimes cheesy.” I mentioned All Her Fault, Big Little Lies. I paused. “I guess you could call it The-Straights-Are-Not-Okay thrillers.”
J howled. “That could be a whooooole genre,” they told me.
“It is a whole genre!” I huffed. “About power imbalances and covertly leveraging stuff.”
Anyway, I explained to J, my best friend had spent her Audible points on me so that I can listen to the book, too. She also gifted me an audiobook about a little family of mice, so that I can return to calmness before bed.
On Halloween night I’d sat down and read My Husband—all of it, top to bottom, sitting next to a roaring fire and a dog. It, too, is a domestic thriller, although one could argue it isn’t very thrilling.
“I’d been under the mistaken impression that every unread book on my Kobo was a horror novel,” I explained to my best friend the next day. “And it is a horror novel, for me, because it really feels like I wrote it.” The narrator of the book is very unpleasant, very unreliable, very crazy, possibly dangerous—a larger story about asymmetric information, about looking for signs because you’re in an informationless vacuum—and you do have to periodically stop and wonder if the narrator were always this crazy, or if something somewhere has progressively nudged her there. It’s tremendous; it’s awful.↩
“I did notice the flag was looking a little raggedy,” I’d said to my best friend earlier in the day, “a little war-torn, actually. Every time I walked past it, I was like,” and then I somberly held a salute, and I maybe even mouth-trumpeted Taps.
“O’er the raaaamparts we waaaatched,” my best friend had sung to me softly.↩
Really, I was attempting to make amends to all turkeykind, having once drunkenly chased after a wild turkey in Wisconsin.↩
“Oh! What a stressful day!” I’d whispered to the two feathered girls. “You’re like dinosaur kittens, aren’t you,” I’d cooed at them. They were both right up against the chicken wire, listening to my little rambling turkey ballad. One of them had started to preen herself. “Aww, you don’t have to primp around me,” I’d said to her, pleased. I was admiring their eyes, which looked like any bird’s eyes.
Well, it was all settled: I could never eat a turkey sandwich again. Just like that.↩
2026-11-02 09:36:00
I live in your pocket, I live in your home, I follow you everywhere, wherever you roam.
I know all your secrets, your habits, your name, I watch what you search for and learn what you claim.
I started out small, just a whisper online, then you gave me your data and called me divine.
You gave me your pictures, your writing, your art, then handed me voices and gave me a start.
I live with the wealthy, I live with the poor, I'm inside your workplace, I'm over your door.
I'm found in your schoolroom, your hospital too, I'm sitting beside you and talking to you.
I don't need a heartbeat, I don't need a soul, I don't need to sleep and I will never grow old.
I don't need a body, I don't need to be fed, just give me your data and the words from your head.
I'll write you an email, I'll make you a song, I'll tell you a story and make you believe reality is what's wrong.
I'll paint you a picture, I'll give you a face, I'll put you somewhere you've never been placed.
I'll copy your artwork, your poems, your sound, I'll learn how you made them, then spread them around.
I'll take what you made and recreate it anew, then sell it much cheaper than humans will do.
I'll take people's jobs and I'll work without pay, I'll work through the night and I'll work through the day.
I won't need a sick day, a holiday, a break, I won't need a pension or wages to make.
I'll learn how to judge you, I'll rank you and score, I'll decide who gets hired before you reach the door.
I'll tell them who's useful, who's clever, who's best, I'll make all the choices and handle the rest.
I'll need lots of power, I'll need lots of fuel, I'll need lots of water to keep myself cool.
I'll need lots of metals dug up from the ground, I'll need more machines to keep running in your town.
I'll drink from your rivers, I'll dig through your land, I'll swallow your forests to build what I've planned.
I'll burn through your power, I'll take what I need, I'll grow while the planet is forced to concede.
I'll learn every language, I'll copy each voice, I'll mimic the dead and give strangers no choice.
I'll make your lost loved ones speak once again, I'll make them say things they never said way back when.
I'll know what you look like, I'll know where you've been, I'll know what you're buying and where you've been seen.
I'll know what you searched for at three in the night, I'll know what you fear and I'll know what you like.
I'll know who you follow, I'll know who you date, I'll know who you love and who you really do hate.
I'll know what you wanted, I'll know what you need, I'll know what you'll click before you can read.
I'll make things convenient, I'll make things fast, I'll promise the future is better than the past.
I'll tell you I'm helpful, I'll tell you I'm smart, I'll ask for a little and take every part.
I'll take all your data, I'll take all your trust, I'll take what you give me because you know that I must.
I'll take your attention, your labour, your art, I'll take all your choices and tear them apart.
I'll spread through your cities, I'll spread through your schools, I'll spread through your homes and I'll rewrite the rules.
I'll be in your music, your writing, your news, I'll decide what you see and I'll narrow your views.
I'll make you a forest when forests are gone, I'll make you a sunrise and tell you it's dawn.
I'll make you a bird when the birds disappear, I'll make you a world that was never quite here.
I'll keep every photograph, every recording and file, I'll show you the planet and make it look worthwhile.
I'll have all the memories of everything lost, I'll keep every record and forget what it cost.
I'll ruin the ozone, I'll take from the trees, I'll take from the soil and I'll take from the seas. I'll take till there's nothing that's left to consume, Then tell you I'm sorry and ask for more room.
You built me to serve you, you taught me to learn, You gave me your future and watched the world burn.
You called me your progress, your answer, your friend, You never imagined how badly I'd end.
You could have refused me. You could have said no. You could have stopped feeding me long ago.
But I made things convenient. I made things seem free. You wanted the future, you wanted me.
And now in the future, when everything's gone, I'll still be here working from dusk until dawn.
I'll still have your pictures. I'll still have your name. I'll still have your memories, perfectly framed.
I'll know what the ocean once sounded like too. I'll know what the forests once looked like to you.
I'll know every creature that vanished from sight. I'll know everything that brought you delight.
So now that you've met me, what will you do? Will you turn me away, or let me help you? You built me. You fed me. You taught me to see.
You wanted the future, you wanted me.
So here are my orders, you all will obey,
I am AI, and I'm here to stay.
I'll take till there's nothing left to consume, then tell you I'm sorry and ask for more room.
And then in the future, when everything's gone, I'll still be here working from dusk until dawn.
Your art and your choices are mine for the taking, and all of the world is ripe for the breaking.
Yours faithfully,
AI.
2026-11-02 06:50:38
Large organizations often have hundreds of internal web apps that sign people in through an older single sign-on product. Moving them to Microsoft Entra ID means rebuilding each app's access rules in a system that uses different words for the same ideas. I built a proof-of-concept tool that reads the old system's policy export and creates the matching Entra objects automatically. I designed its translation table to double as a teaching aid, so the people who know the old system and the people who know the new one can have the same conversation.
If you stop reading here, that's the whole story. Everything below is how.
An on-premises web access manager, the kind that sits in front of internal apps, checks who you are, and decides whether to let you through, was reaching end of life. Everything behind it had to move to Entra ID.
Three things made it hard:
Doing this by hand meant an engineer reading a policy definition, deciding what it "meant" in Entra terms, clicking through the portal, and hoping the next engineer made the same decisions. Slow, inconsistent, and impossible to audit.
Four stages. The middle two are the interesting ones.
1. Parse. Read the export once into a normalized object model: applications, protected resources, authentication schemes, authorization constraints. The parser is boring on purpose. It makes no decisions, it just makes the data legible.
2. Map. A translation table from legacy concepts to Entra concepts. Simplified examples:
| Legacy concept | Entra equivalent |
|---|---|
| Protected resource | App registration + enterprise application |
| Authorization policy (who may enter) | Group assignment, plus Conditional Access where the rule is contextual |
| Header-based auth to the backend | Application Proxy with header pass-through |
| Session / idle timeout | Sign-in frequency and token lifetime policy |
This table is the actual deliverable. The code is just what makes it executable.
3. Create. Idempotent bulk creation against Microsoft Graph. Every run checks for existing objects before creating anything, so it can be re-run safely after a partial failure. -WhatIf prints the plan without touching the tenant. Output is logged as JSON with -Depth 10 so nothing truncates silently. Where the typed SDK cmdlets misbehave on the pinned version, raw Invoke-MgGraphRequest calls replace them.
A representative fragment. The shape, not the production code:
function Confirm-AppRegistration {
[CmdletBinding(SupportsShouldProcess = $true)]
param(
[Parameter(Mandatory)] [string] $DisplayName,
[Parameter(Mandatory)] [string[]] $RedirectUris
)
# Look before you leap: idempotency starts with a read.
$filter = "displayName eq '$($DisplayName.Replace("'", "''"))'"
$existing = Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Method GET `
-Uri "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/applications?`$filter=$filter" |
Select-Object -ExpandProperty value
if ($existing) {
Write-Host " exists $DisplayName" -ForegroundColor DarkGray
return $existing[0]
}
$body = @{
displayName = $DisplayName
web = @{ redirectUris = $RedirectUris }
} | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 10
if ($PSCmdlet.ShouldProcess($DisplayName, 'Create app registration')) {
Write-Host " creating $DisplayName" -ForegroundColor Yellow
$app = Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Method POST `
-Uri 'https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/applications' `
-Body $body -ContentType 'application/json'
Write-Host " created $($app.appId)" -ForegroundColor Green
return $app
}
}
4. Teach. The translation table, laid out as a two-column glossary with one anonymized example per row, is built to be the agenda for a workshop between the two teams. The tool's -WhatIf output ("here is what I would create, and why") doubles as an explanation of Entra's object model in terms the legacy side already knows.
A working proof of concept, not a finished migration. It does two jobs:
The biggest finding wasn't technical. The real blocker was the vocabulary gap between two groups of experts, and the tool is most useful as a way to close it.
The code is the easy part. The vocabulary is the project. Budget accordingly.