thenightlymirror

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NGC 1275 Core with a black hole © Hubble

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The moment a residential tower was targeted in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza City

Covering events is not an easy job. We are exposed to difficult situations while reporting the news to you

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History has been called an enormous jig-saw with a lot of missing parts. But the main trouble does not consist in the lacunae. Our picture of Greece in the fifth century B.C. is defective not primarily because so many of the bits have been accidentally lost, but because it is, by and large, the picture formed by a tiny group of people in the city of Athens. We know a lot about what fifth-century Greece looked like to an Athenian citizen; but hardly anything about what it looked like to a Spartan, a Corinthian, or a Theban - not to mention a Persian, or a slave or other non-citizen resident in Athens. Our picture has been preselected and predetermined for us, not so much by accident as by people who were consciously or unconsciously imbued with a particular view and thought the facts which supported that view worth preserving. In the same way, when I read in a modern history of the Middle Ages that the people of the Middle Ages were deeply concerned with religion, I wonder how we know this, and whether it is true. What we know as the facts of medieval history have almost all been selected for us by generations of chroniclers who were professionally occupied in the theory and practice of religion, and who therefore thought it supremely important, and recorded everything relating to it, and not much else. The picture of the Russian peasant as devoutly religious was destroyed by the revolution of 1917. The picture of medieval man as devoutly religious, whether true or not, is indestructible, because nearly all the known facts about him were preselected for us by people who believed it, and wanted others to believe it, and a mass of other facts, in which we might possibly have found evidence to the contrary, has been lost beyond recall. The dead hand of vanished generations of historians, scribes, and chroniclers has determined beyond the possibility of appeal the pattern of the past.

What Is History?

E.H. Carr

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My job is like The Bear with more corpses.

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Memorial Day weekend, Harms sees a post from a woman she met recently that she’s going on a sudden vacation for the weekend and needs someone to watch her kid.

Now, this sounds pretty crazy to her that someone she just met is going to allow her to stay at her house for three days to watch her 14 year-old kid, but she volunteers.

She brings her 6 year-old little girl with her, and calls me up, because they are maybe 10 minutes from where I work. I meet them at a pizza pub down the street, and this is where I have to explain Benson.

Benson is OBSESSED with Mr. Bungle. Yes, Mike Patton’s Mr. Bungle. She knows his entire discography. She can recite the entire early history of Mr. Bungle, demo by demo, record by record. She does this while speeding around the kitchen in a baggy black S.O.D. T-shirt and trucker’s cap, walking the same circle over and over again.

I say “she” in the loosest terms. Me and Harms have our suspicions, and Benson says she goes by he or she, but NEVER they. She’s non-binary but not woke about it. Whatever.

I stop calling her by her dead name and call him Benson for the rest of the night, which he prefers.

The night starts off with Harms taking the kids to buy birthday paraphernalia for the cat, this gray longhair named Smokey. So, I’m just sitting in some strangers house with their cats for a half hour. We have a birthday party for the cat. I break out my tarot cards. We listen to some records and interrogate this little non-binary kid. Harm’s daughter loves the tarot cards.

I say, we have to keep this hush-hush, but who would like to take a golf cart ride around the cemetery? Everyone. Amelia sits up front and tells me her ideas about reincarnation. I tell her about Jorge Luis Borges and eternal return. They love it.

Me and Harms love these kids. And it was like this weird spontaneous family that felt perfectly right. We talk for another hour or two. Benson wakes up to pace some more. You can tell he likes the audience. He’s being himself at full volume.

In the morning, I get a text from Harms asking wouldn’t it be funny if I came over to watch the kids so she could talk to an old boyfriend of hers for a few? She says he’s over there now, teaching Amelia how to use a switchblade. I look at my phone. Put it down.

Later I get a text that they dropped him off and want to get dinner somewhere. I meet them for some ice cream. You can tell Amelia and Benson are getting on each other’s nerves a bit. I feel like Harms’s little girl is learning what it’s like to not be the coolest kid in the room, what it’s like to be a little younger, not punk enough. She’s trying to act up a little, and it’s both sweet and a little sad.

They come over to my place, and it’s clear that they are the first visitors I’ve had in over a year. It’s not a place for visitors, let alone kids. I clear off some chairs, put on some music, and sit at the kitchen table with Amelia to do another tarot reading. I try my best to pay her some childlike attention. It’s funny, because all my friends’ kids are about the same age. With a teenager, they’re like appropriately aged versions of my lowlife friends, but with Amelia, she’s a goofy little girl. You have to be a goofy little girl.

She cries a little bit when they go.

A few days later, Harms texted me, asking if I remembered what we were chanting together, that one warm October night where we were swimming together in her backyard, gathered around Amelia in her floaties, making huge tidal waves squeezed together like huge sardines.

For the life of me, it’s like she pulled the words out of my memory, and we went back and forth for a few hours trying to figure it out.

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I’ve been intending to write, but it has been a very stressful month.

May is always the busiest month at a cemetery. Mother’s Day through Memorial Day. (No one cares about Father’s Day.) Harper has been especially stressed out and is looking for a new job. Anywhere. There was an opening with the awful manager I had at the other cemetery, and I advised her to just please don’t. Go to the funeral side instead. Anything else.

I believe where I left off, Veronica had said that I make as much as she does, as far as the lifestyle I am accustomed to. Then she handed me a file and told me to just… do the work for her because she had money to make. Great stuff.

Then, Ricky took some customer’s payment for a single upright, which we don’t allow at all in our cemetery, and charged them about half price for it. I said no. They delivered the marker from New Jersey 24 hours later. I said that’s never going in the ground.

Somewhere around this time, we found out the superintendent was quitting. I should have known, because ground stopped installing markers for me entirely. There was a shipment from a nearby dealer of a dozen markers, and then several dozen from our supplier. I asked for these to be done, then I asked for a few specific stones to be installed. Two weeks passed.

They didn’t do anything. If this sounds familiar, it might be because this is that other cemetery’s superintendent’s son. So, this shoe has been about to drop for sixth months. Of course, my bosses did nothing to plan for it.

So, frustrated, I go to the back where we store all our monuments to take pictures of what’s been left there, and I notice, where the fuck is that monument from New Jersey?

Guillermo, my guy in the mausoleum, tells me to follow him in the golf cart. He takes me to a garden at the far end of the cemetery and there it is. It… installed itself. Like some kind of miracle. It just walked to where it wanted to go and planted itself in the ground.

Now, I was sworn to secrecy, but, felt the need to report this miracle to my boss. Maybe he could call the Vatican, or National Geographic, or Chabad or something.

Or maybe Ricky just paid off some of our guys to install this illegal monument and nothing else for two weeks.

That got me real pissed. We had a meeting the next day, and the boss basically said, nothing. He always says nothing.

I have a few markers that I’ve been asking to get installed for weeks. I bring it up every morning. I’m saying there’s a lot of families that are very upset. Big Jim says, “Families are always upset.”

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Every one of us relies on water from the wells, because mankind has polluted all the lakes and rivers. but do you know why the well water is pure? It’s because the trees of the wastelands purify it! And you plan to burn the trees down? You must not burn down the toxic jungle! You should have left the giant warrior beneath the earth!

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind  (1984) dir. Hayao Miyazaki

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Dora Maar - Barcelone.  1932

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So I work at trader joes and as some of you may know TJS sells Israeli goods. Breads, cheeses, snacks, wine, etc. Wellllll recently there's been a big crackdown on lots of stuff especially individual expression. They took down our whiteboards and made it so that we aren't allowed to write on anything. We usually have chalk board lockers we can personalize and those have been replaced with sterile lockers we cannot personalize. We are also no longer allowed to wear bandanas because they have been used to make "political statements." I'm assuming they're referring to keffiyeh. I'm assuming this comes specifically from corporate trying to choke back and keep us from talking about Palestine.

I don't have much to say or any call to action other than maybe contact your trader joes or trader joes corporate and let them know how you feel about the sale of Israeli goods in their stores. Maybe also complain about how miserable your local trader joes employees seem as well. This company is always pretending to be so hippy dippy progressive but it's all for show. Don't fall for it.

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'During the aid efforts amidst the Israeli war in Gaza, a musician plays the oud to bring solace to displaced Palestinian children residing in tents in Rafah.'

from Quds News Network

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An average day for me, as I get older, is just sitting in this chair staring at a wall for hours, occasionally falling asleep. So a day where I get a lot done just feels like, fuck, what happened?

I’ve accidentally acclimated myself to monk time, and now my days are cosmic. Help.

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it's so funny when it affects you long-term

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TEA TIME MOTHERFUCKERS

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Harry Partch, June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974.

1952 photo by Imogen Cunningham.

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