Listening to old Post Malone albums, 7:55 AM. The weather is mild for this time of year, -6 in mid February.

My car is in the shop, a vehicle from a different year. 2017.

Other side rockstar is a sugar wraith, and he wants to stay after he leaves, the pop singer tells me.

The album cover is a deep yellow, clear deep yellow plastic, and the cd has stylized barbed wire all over it. beerbongs &bentleys is the name of the album.

There is snow outside, and 6 years ago the singer tells the public that you can blame everything on him. He confesses to having hurricanes inside his brain, and he sings, trembling, that it isn’t his fault, and that everyone wants something from him.

I wonder if he still plays songs like this today, when he has a son and life is different. Like all country singers, he’s gotten tired of the drinking and the drugs after a few years in the spotlight. Back in the late 50s Carl Perkins, on a tour bus with Johnny Cash, stumbled out onto the beach and threw his bottle of whiskey in the ocean. He was tired of dissolution.

The clouds are clearing and the sun is rising now. I’m reading a political satire about Vladimir Putin while Tucker Carlson is about to interview him.

Things aren’t changing anymore.

Things are changed.

The satire references the Russian thesis “the Fourth Political Theory”, published in 2009, which informs modern Russian politics and explains the strange mixture of Russian Orthodoxy, Communist sympathies, and American-style deterrent politics.

The Russians seem to have embraced their new ideology head on, while the Americans are caught up in old ideas, all of them. They talk about the Republic as if it is eternal, and they act as if the center will hold.

I’ll be reading Thomas Ligotti’s Grimscribe this afternoon. His brand of horror is often described as “otherworldly”. I’m reading it because today I feel that decades past are decades past, and we live in another world.