Overview

The piece asks who gets to decide what counts as reality, why noticing can be treated as a breach of social agreement, and how later archives can falsify a life even when they appear to preserve it.

Form and structure

Its late postscript imagines future scholarship reading distorted biographical traces, making the work both a present argument and an anticipatory archive of its own author.

Connections

Selected quotations

More quotations from this work

Corpus fingerprint

Source footprint: approximately 957 words · 2 image elements · 1 embedded-media element · 18 heading elements.

Strong lexical motifs: Roads, Cars & Transit · Gods, Devils, Ritual & Magic · Mouth, Voice & Utterance · Wrongness, Error & Breakage · Eyes, Looking & Witness.

Nearby publications:I Drank What?

Lexical fingerprint

reality-as-possible [Distinctive construction] · reality-as-presently-organized [Distinctive construction] · Why am I expected to absorb this? [Novel turn of phrase] · Why is the civilized person the person who agrees not to notice? [Novel turn of phrase]

These are source-attested formations indexed for lexical distinctiveness; inclusion does not assert global first use.

Structure and contents

Publication footprint: approximately 1,007 words · 2 image elements · 1 embedded-media element · 14 distinct heading markers.

Visible structural markers

  • I DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING
  • You wonder if it’s “A.I.”
  • TURN THE CHANNEL . . .
  • I won’t see you for a while.
  • reality-as-presently-organized vs reality-as-possible
  • STAGE DIRECTIONS (AND PROVING GROUNDS)
  • I CALL UPON
  • Orris, ambergris, labdanum, benzoin, myrrh, olibanum, ambrette, narcissus, tuberose, heliotrope, mimosa, cassis, osmanthus, champaca, ylang-ylang, frangipani, magnolia, neroli, petitgrain, galbanum, vetiver, patchouli, sandalwood, cedar, oud, saffron, cardamom, davana, blackcurrant, tobacco —
  • CARS
  • FX
  • CAGLIOSTRO RUBEDO
  • I DO NOT ACCEPT YOUR EXPLANATION, EXPECTATION, OR APOLOGY
  • EX GIRL
  • POSTSCRIPT ~ ( - :

Named material with encyclopedia nodes

James Quentin Devine · Mundus vult decipi · Cagliostro · BLUE HELL · Lost Eros

References linked directly from the publication

Publication

Published 2026-08-11. Read the original publication ↗

The obvious numbers

The road sequence names 13s, 69s and 420, then calls them “The obvious.” The corpus is therefore not innocent of canned numerical symbolism; it can point at the reader’s preloaded associations while using them. See Charged Number.