If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

Kurt told me to say that. Vonnegut. I’ve listened to other Kurts as well.
Cobain told me I’m worst at what I do best, and I still feel blessed for that gift.

But if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is. This being my couch, my best friend to my left, a cup of tea she made me to my right, a crappy Mets team on the TV, and a few hours of something resembling rest.

When Kurt told us to say those words, he was referring to those nice times in life… the times we don’t always think to note. We’re wired to notice the danger, the crisis, the drama. Evolution exacted this price: our vigilance for our survival.

And let’s face it, even without factoring in my own personal and familial crises, it feels downright delusional to declare anything is nice right now. The United States of America in April of 2026 is a Salvador Dali fever dream translated through a ChatGPT script running on an Apple IIe.

Then there’s the personal and familial… love carries a weight. That weight has a counterbalance. Love is a seesaw… love is a reminder of who you are…

… so I use this Sunday as a personal sabbath. I use this Sunday to dream a little dream awake. I meditate on my loveseat with the Mets’ divine mediocrity. The celebrants are Gary Cohen and Ron Darling, and they can hold any congregation…

…yet I drift away down memories of conversations and doodles. Gary’s play-by-play baritone cadence — like the gentle murmurs I must’ve heard in mother’s belly 49 years ago…

Journal open, I look at a page and feel that panic of a blank page, that helpless feeling of wanting to create something, to bring something to life, but what? To create something. Okay. But what?

I sketch a cityscape and lose myself in a wall.

I imagine myself on a boardwalk, looking into storefronts, all eyes on TV screens, among Roman aqueducts as the moon rises over a tower of Babel.

I duck into an alleyway, find a door, a smoky room, bare lightbulbs hang, glasses clang, wood tables creak and resonate with the guitar plunking out gentle yet angular notes. Love has a sound when the vibration in the strings matches the rhythm of the heart.

Eye hyperfocus, eye aye captain, I hyperfixate and turn electrochemical impulses somewhere in my cerebrum into neurological communiques along an electrochemical pony express from my brain to my elbow to my wrist to my fingers. How did I ever learn the subtle motor twitches to decode/encode/decode/encode these electrochemical interference patterns across Venn fields of energy that sum how outnumber the parts?

A dirty little secret I’ve learned from that quiet voice behind the curtain in my mind is that I have no clue what I’m doing, and everything good I make is actually coming from a much deeper reserve. I’m just the figurehead… and at first I was like, pshyeah right, and then I noticed that when I stumble and step out of the way of this phantom, he makes things I never would have thought to make. But he uses my hands, he uses my brain, my nervous system, my heart, my soul, and I realize that he is me and I am he and that’s all I will ever be.

And he throws me the keys and tells me to get lost.

Watching me from the page. Watching me while I age.

Reading me like a document. The medium is the message.

My body is a medium, by and large.

Thanks, Marshall, the O.G. Eminem.
Marshall taught me the mundane mundus is actually a fascinating, mesmerizing mirage.
Morality is mechanized by the machinations of marketing and multicolor shoots disrupting monochromity.

The medium is the message.
Sometimes bars meted out metrically meticulously mumbled so as not to miss a syllable. Mention me when I’m missing…

Men shun me when I’m missing out on more modern methods of managing my mentation.

Meditate to manipulate, de-manipulate, and rather stipulate the terms of service of this multifarious Man I am.

My core is in a Planck state and I can’t hold it any longer.
A bird dog in one hand finds a dead bug in a bush.
I play with wordsagain but they’re nothing without concepts
But nothing is a concept worth knowing
And knowledge is sovereignty
And sovereignty is the self.

The emblamated S
On the chest
Of Self twists back
Persists to snap
And kiss his own tail
And hiss hello to the past
And the future good morrow
For this is it and it is now and parting is such sweet sorrow.

Psst
Shhhhhhh

But if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.
To see how far I can go
Going now here
Know where I wear my heart
Let’s leave well enough alone
Well-worn cliches knitted and crocheted
A tapestry wherein
A galaxy within
When this one’s
Wearing thin.