The Hofflebrock

MISSION LOG

  • Chamath

    I was three scrolls into an X session I had already promised myself I wouldn’t have when Chamath Palihapitiya appeared on my screen and said something about manufacturing having SOPs and knowledge work having Steve, and Steve is a single point of failure wearing a lanyard, and I stopped scrolling because the sentence sounded like…

  • The Dictionary Is a Crime Scene

    Every word you have ever said is a corpse with a previous life and nobody is conducting the investigation. I found this out on a Tuesday, which is itself named after Tyr, the Norse god who lost his hand to a wolf, which means every Tuesday you are walking around inside a day named after…

  • A Field Guide to Haunted English

    I was three whiskeys into a Wednesday when the English language tried to kill me. It started with a text I didn’t send. I typed “if” and my phone autocorrected it to “is” and suddenly I had committed to something I was still negotiating. This is the problem. This has always been the problem. Is…

  • The Clock Is Drunk

    I lost February. I don’t mean it was short. I mean it left. One moment I was standing inside it and the next I was standing in March wearing the same pants and holding a coffee that had gone cold during a month I apparently attended but cannot account for. January, I remember. January lasted…

  • Fortune Cookie Factory

    I have been running a fortune cookie factory out of a phone screen for approximately six months and nobody has called the health inspector. The operation is simple. I sit somewhere. A thought arrives. I compress the thought until it fits inside a sentence. I put the sentence on the internet. People open it. Some…

  • You’re Someone’s Anecdote

    Somebody at a bar once pointed at me and said “hey, you’re weird, right?” and I said yes before I realized it wasn’t a compliment. Or maybe it was. The thing about being called weird is that the word doesn’t come with stage directions. It just arrives. You can play it as accusation. You can…

  • The Fire Started Itself

    The world is on fire and nobody lit it. That’s the part that bothers me. Not the fire. The fire I can work with. Fire is at least a thing. Fire has behavior. You can study fire. You can stand at a reasonable distance and take notes on fire. What you cannot do is find…

  • The Shape, Not the Material

    A few weeks ago I wrote about cameras. About the way we turn them on our own situations, the way the act of watching replaces the act of moving, the way the angle becomes the anesthetic and the frame becomes the freeze. I thought that was the problem. I was satisfied with that. I had…

  • The Angle Is the Anesthetic

    Nothing so glamorous as a diagnosis. We have learned to frame our paralysis. The political situation has a topology now. The gender trap has a grammar. The personal decay has a filter. Each frame arrives with its own lighting setup, its own implied camera angle, its own suggestion that someone, somewhere, is watching this unfold…

  • The Medieval Illuminated Manuscript Kraken

    If an operating system exists only in the brain, it dies the moment voltage drops. You are running a complex civilization on volatile RAM. When the power cuts, the data vanishes. Neurotypical productivity advice calls this “lack of motivation.” The Bathys diagnosis is simpler. It is RAM failure. You cannot access the plan because the…