August 25, 2023

Hottest day of the decade succeeds hottest day of the decade. My study is uninhabitable without the fan aimed directly at my head. During a nap I had deeply purging dreams, as if some evil from years and years back had finally been drawn out and purged. When I woke I remembered enough to know that the evil was entirely imaginary, or, should I say, subterranean. Turkeys crowd into the shade of the silver maple. Their feathers look unimaginably hot. The garden looks like a medieval tapestry, or a page from a Book of Hours. 

Donald Trump is arrested in Atlanta, and allowed by his jailers to supply some of the vital information rather than have it taken on the spot. He asserts that his weight is 215, which is so ludicrous all the talk shows and all the social media cackle about it today. Truth cannot be honored even in the tiniest, the most publically verifiable scintilla. Yet people voted for him. People vow to do so again if, against all that is just and holy, he runs again. Trump is among the things that people in times to come will never credit. Police “Internal Investigations” are another; “non-binary” and “gender-fluid” are another