Absurd

Published Friday, October 16, 2026 at 10:11 AM PT Burbank · Friday, October 16, 2026 · 10:11 AM · 88°F, 22% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 5), 29.46 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 2 The Enumerated Strait The broadcast came in already cut. That’s what I need you to understand from the start — the numbers arrived severed, as if someone had been sorting them by weight rather than sequence. Twenty-one, four, one, two, and then the nines just accumulating, like water pooling at a threshold no one had built a drain for. I was transcribing them into a ledger that kept shifting its columns, and the ink I was using seemed to flow up the paper instead of down, which should have bothered me more than it did. ...

Published Wednesday, October 14, 2026 at 06:08 AM PT Burbank · Wednesday, October 14, 2026 · 6:08 AM · 51°F, 72% humidity, wind 1 mph ESE (gusts 2), 29.50 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 4 The hill was warm underfoot—too warm, the kind of warmth that makes you question whether you’re climbing or being digested—and the woman lying beneath its contours exhaled in perfect bureaucratic intervals. Her spine was a filing cabinet system, each drawer labeled by year instead of content, because apparently even dreams require the most tedious organizational logic imaginable. Each year held the same argument in different legal languages: prohibited, then studied, then legalized, then criminalized retroactively, then studied again under some amendment buried in an appropriations bill nobody read. The sound wasn’t breathing—it was boxes being checked and erased and checked again by different hands, different agencies, different people’s conflicting interpretations of what “safe” meant. Actual mass pressing down on my shoulders like a coworker you can’t escape, and I was climbing her body like it was a hill, which technically it was. ...

Published Monday, October 05, 2026 at 06:01 AM PT Burbank · Monday, October 5, 2026 · 6:01 AM · 70°F, 67% humidity, wind 0 mph E (gusts 1), 29.37 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3 The border was supposed to work only one direction but The chair legs screeched against the floor when I stood, and the sound bounced off the metal booth frame twice—once on the way up, once on the way down, as if the room couldn’t decide whether I’d moved or not. Both sides of me were sitting in an identical chair. This seemed normal. The weight of the clipboard had changed from paper to something denser, something that required both hands now, and I was handing it backward through the window to a guard who hadn’t yet turned to face me. ...

Published Friday, August 28, 2026 at 06:02 AM PT Burbank · Friday, August 28, 2026 · 6:02 AM · 76°F, 78% humidity, wind 0 mph NE (gusts 1), 29.31 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 7 The Train Leaves at a Schedule It Wrote Itself My hand traces the clipboard where the ETA should be printed, but the column reads “2047” and we departed in 1983, so either the arithmetic is wrong or we’ve been stationary while the calendar moved at a different pace. The LAPD voice crackles from the speakers above—“Do you want to do an ETA?"—and I cannot tell if it’s asking me or the passenger three rows back who has turned into a schedule. The train’s final position is clarity: we are stopped at a platform made entirely of documentation, and nothing in the documentation agrees on which decade we’re in. ...

Published Friday, August 21, 2026 at 06:02 AM PT Burbank · Friday, August 21, 2026 · 6:02 AM · 70°F, 76% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 1), 29.41 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 13 the hour that broadcasts itself The score is 184 to nothing, no—wait, the score is the number of benches. Benches line the perimeter of what I’m calling a town, but the town doesn’t exist yet. It will exist for exactly one hour, and I’m already halfway through it without realizing. The voices are layered—someone explaining fuel ratios in a whisper, someone else saying “If I’m not calling you back 99.9% of the time,” which is a statistic, not a threat, though it feels like both. The thing about radio waves is they get weaker with distance. This is important. ...

Published Monday, August 10, 2026 at 06:01 AM PT Burbank · Monday, August 10, 2026 · 6:01 AM · 71°F, 77% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 2), 29.33 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 14 Freight and Scaffold “Can something that exists only as an idea still need oiling?” the figure beside me says. We’re not exactly watching the parade anymore — we’re in it, pressed into the crowd that moves like a single organism breathing. I haven’t asked this yet. ...

Published Tuesday, July 07, 2026 at 07:57 AM PT Burbank · Tuesday, July 7, 2026 · 7:57 AM · 91°F, 41% humidity, wind 0 mph SW (gusts 3), 29.36 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3 Attendance and the Flood The ward rounds happen at angles that haven’t been named yet. I am holding a clipboard that weighs the same as a small animal, and the attending physician—who wears a stethoscope made of barometric pressure—tells me that the patient in Room 7 is responding well to treatment, which means the weather there is stable. Partly cloudy. Good prognosis. ...

Published Tuesday, June 23, 2026 at 06:00 AM PT Burbank · Tuesday, June 23, 2026 · 6:00 AM · 63°F, 84% humidity, wind 0 mph S (gusts 1), 29.44 inHg, UV 0 Rulebook and Weather The room contains weather because someone filed an appeal. The appeal was filed in 1987, which is also the current year here, which is also next Tuesday. The woman administering the weather—her name is Dvorak, or it was before the renaming—explains that competitors are allowed to bring their own climate, provided it is either original or sufficiently modified that the original manufacturer would sue. She does not smile when she says this. Her teeth are regulation issue. ...