no other gods before me

just thinking about the state of the world, “sick dad energy,” Elon Musk and reality TV and Yaldabaoth-type shit. Maybe I wouldn’t ordinarily explain exactly what I’m getting at, but hey we live in a strange timeMy dad wrote once—to an old girlfriend, a woman who was not his wife and not my mother—that being a new dad was the nicest thing that had ever happened. “She smiles all the time,” he wrote to her. “She smiles at me.” The old girlfriend remembered that pair of sentences, the way he’d chosen to describe the miracle of my infancy, so she wrote them down in her own letter, four or five years after his death, in a letter written in blue calligraphic hand on pale blue stationery, folded into thirds, because she had since become an educator in Europe. And what John was trying to tell Joanie was for the first time he was at the center, how dazzling it felt to be the sun an infant was orbiting, the one true creator of the universe. And I’m thinking about it darkly now—but yours was the…