12 Comments
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em's avatar

there is no better way to describe this than as a "work of art". absolutely phenomenal. title hit the spot too lol

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ARC's avatar

This is funny, wounded, rhythmically tight. A slow-motion scream from the post office queue as empire frays. im all here 4 it. let her rip

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Jenovia 🕸️'s avatar

"As the wedded companion of life, death is omnipresent—all around us, all the time. What you see is not death in the natural sense—a physical event that atomises one’s consciousness back into the bisque of the universe. What you see is: Zombies. Fossils. Statues. Snags. Abandoned Machinery. Things suspended in states of agonising unrest. And you wonder what it will take to make them work."

EXQUISITE 💥

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Jay3DN's avatar

"Suspended in agonizing states of unrest" is such a perfect crystallization of the feeling.

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Thomas Vigebo's avatar

Just trying to read this, I experienced glitches, pop-ups from my free anti-virus software, misclicks on links, misclicks on notifications from a friend whom I mistype a swift answer to, and then getting back into the substack app I shuffle through app now all jumbled in order

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liam's avatar

amazing writing as usual, i hate checking my emails but seeing a post of yours there always gets me excited!

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polytropos's avatar

i have experienced, or heard anecdotes about pretty much everything you have written in this in the past week! it's eerily similar. and I also haven't seen a hedgehog in 10 years!

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"Tupelo" Honey Steele's avatar

!!!

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Gwen S.'s avatar

Brilliantly written! This part really hit me: "You can’t help but see the self checkouts as a perfect allegory for the sorry societal state. Needlessly complicated systems packaged as convenient to give the illusion of more granted autonomous but functionally unusable unless you have some sort of arch, insider, specialist knowledge of them..."

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Hannah Vincent (she/her)'s avatar

Brilliant x

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Lewis Heriz's avatar

Perfect, really. How it feels to do anything here now. It's funny ("funny") to think we had started rolling out a cutting-edge countrywide superfast broadband network at the start of the 80s alongside the Japanese, and ol' Maggie decided it was anticompetitive, binned it and sold off British Telecom instead. Can you imagine? Can you imagine how different the country would have been. I rarely spend a day without thinking of that at least once.

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AB's avatar

I needed this today. Thank you. Also eagerly awaiting the postcard. 🫶🏽

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