2025.12
Bradley J. Fest
I do not know how to talk about joy as the world collapses.4
“Tonight is the last night of summer and Thursday the first
real day of my sabbatical,” but we will not have elections
in 2028. “I sat down to write unfootnoted image-based
abstractions about the natural world flowing into ‘quasi-
theoretical diction-meeting-doomcrooning syntax, into
the sludgiest syncopated Elysiumcore’5 tonight and its
sensual-haptic-feuding-feeling-nowness, but thinking
about being alive right now” means rolling down
the window on all that Lacanian Real deathscrontching
at you and your new spouse driving down the street being
punk rockers that are never nostalgic, means confronting
your amazing visage in the mirror and accepting every
inch of it and loving everyone around you and feeling
emotion, emotion, emotion.
[4] And I do not think we can come back from down 18–13 with three straight college-deep transition twos off rebounds in the Sunday game like I made this past weekend.
[5] Specifically Isis, Panopticon (Orinda, CA:Ipecac Recordings, 2004), CD.