read the metro section see my name
a bad angel = a good time
LIFE RX 7 OCT 24
the ten of pentacles, and a paragraph from Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X:
“She used a vaguely British accent and introduced herself as Cassandra Edwards. She claimed that she was Oleg Hall's second cousin, that he'd spent many childhood summers with her out on her family's ranch in the Western Territory. She said her father, ‘Duke Edwards,’ was a horse breeder and owned a few planes. ‘He's such a splendidly proud and resourceful man,’ she once told a reporter for a society magazine. ‘It gave you a thrill to look at him. Like looking at the American flag. And he's always kept such a low profile, only he could never teach me to do the same! Why, hardly anyone has ever heard of him, even though he's been so successful in business. And that's just how he likes it.’*”
the aleatory
Some angels have no concept of recompense.
Some angels will really hurt your feelings.
Some angels have not been listening very closely; they bring you the wrong flavor of ice cream.
Some angels do not have any gifts at all except a nickel trick you’ve seen everybody do before.
Some angels stink—really, really smell bad.
This is the way of things, pretend whatever else you want.
Fortuna strikes a match against the curb and throws it at a train.
Some angels go to war and never come back.
Sometimes I miss the world I thought I was growing into. And sometimes I realize that it’s still here, and I still haven’t grown into it. (Cigarette vending machines, dodgy TV commercials, send check or mail order to a PO Box in Golden, Colo., velvet walls in the steak restaurant, etc.)
Some angels are standing on the edge of the ship as it comes into the harbor. Some angels get stuck in paperweights but decide to stay there. Some angels can’t carry a tune to save their lives.
Many angels—more than you would think—have gambling problems. Angels also love ordering one of everything in the bakery. They also love putting things on layaway.
The ten of pentacles is a Very Good Card. It means: All your problems solved forever. It means you get everything your heart desires, especially the things that you have worked hard for and which have taken a long time. In the classical card illustration, it’s a woman in a garden with dogs and huge coins hovering in the air, halfway between being part of the design on a card and part of her reality.
But the thing about a Very Good Card is that you will need an angel around. It can’t keep being perfect, you see, once you finish your little espresso and the sun goes down and Jianni Petrov Axel Hans Udo Gîlbert confess their love, once you have become satisfied and eaten everything and felt every last crumb of sunshine, you will need an angel to show up and steal your car.
What is fortune without luck and zest and legend? Nothing. Mere safety. The same thing you can get when you’re dead.
the assignment
see how whatever you’ve always wanted is already true.
writing prompt
Order one of everything at the bakery, then write the kind of poem the kind of person who would do that would write.
a chune
“How To Rent a Room” by the Silver Jews
David Berman was actually probably the best American poet if you ask me. (I know. I know the other ones. I’ve heard of them. I’m still saying it.) Sometimes, while I’m writing these newsletters, I realize halfway through what I’m actually thinking of when I say something about cigarette vending machines and the dubious PO boxes of Golden, Colo. In this case, that would be the particular strange America which is, in some ways, the actual body of work in all these Silver Jews songs and in all of David B’s poems. Some angels die by their own hand. A lot of them, actually. I don’t know why I’m saying that, what my point is, whatever. Except that I hate how what is dark in people has to somehow get subtracted from everything else about them, when they need all their dimensions to be as beautiful as they are.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
“How To Rent a Room” by Silver Jews
dear diary, I read the first chapter of the new Sally Rooney book and I cannot believe yall are letting her get away with all these sentence fragments. Cannot believe it. Are you all so truly starved for music? Goddamn? Really? Have I got some news you can use. There’s more than a softly bobbling submerved POV which you can sing to. And what about this confused demonstration of third person on p.1? Well now anything I say will sound like sour grapes (and nothing sours my grapes like a perceptual double-bind). But then, oh well, books are about many more things than we think or say they are. And also many things less. I don’t know. I can’t blame anyone for loving the Irish. They’re pretty great. Etc. XS