an artist must follow the call of their feeling, deeply and truly felt, wherever it may go. this, more often than not, will lead to dark crevices we dump gallons of psychic energy pretending into filling up and aren’t there, even though what lurks within them holds far greater sway on the course of one’s life than we like to admit. call it “shadow work” if you must, but in art we tend to call this “honesty,” or even “bravery.”

Israel (presumably) launched a missile on Tehran, killing Hamas negotiator Ismail Haniyeh. the brazenness of this attack, on the man most actively working towards an end to the hostilities against Gaza, is shocking, even by Israeli standards. Israel is in deep crisis, and has been since before the events of October 7, 2023. expect the political leaders and the military to grow increasingly erratic in the coming months, especially as schisms form between the police and the IDF. & whether or not Iran chooses to retaliate is only a matter of timing; at some point Israel’s actions will draw the region into a wider conflict, one that will likely prompt decisive action by Iran, and perhaps even China or Russia, which will embarrass the United States, who has admitted they will not provide the kind of support Israel will need to survive such a conflict.

meanwhile, the US’s steadfast devotion to supporting the Israelis no matter how appallingly they behave suggests that what’s currently happening in the Middle East is a proxy struggle over the all-but-guaranteed unification of Europe and Asia by supply and transportation routes that will leave the United States out in the cold in the back half of the 21st century. my bet is that once the chips are down, the US will switch focus back to the other front in this proxy struggle, Ukraine.

however, most concerning is the prospect that the US is so eager to back the Israelis in their psychotic, genocidal, fascist suppression of the people of Gaza because, to deal with the cascading crises that US supremacy has wrought upon the world—destruction of the global south leading to mass migrations, along with a hollowing out of America’s own internal hinterlands, all exacerbated by worsening environmental catastrophes—the US wants to normalize the most egregious of Israel’s suppressive efforts. that way, vast surveillance networks, open violence against the poor, assassination of anyone inconvenient, destruction of infrastructure, all appear as business as usual, the cost of living in the Greatest Country in the World. the realization of the virtual Fourth Reich that Western Elites have been building since the fall of the Third. if you have a hard time imagining that, consider that once upon at time police officers didn’t wear bullet proof vests and carry M4s like an army occupying Fallujah. the imperial frontier always comes home, as they say.

anyway, I wanted to write about short story craft stuff today, and I didn’t really do what the Knight of Cups called me to do here, but I would be remiss if I didn’t remind my readers that The Empire Never Ended (And It Won’t Any Time Soon).