Joe Wall
Joe Wall
@admin_jbw@joebelknapwall.com
86 posts
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  • Inexhaustible.

    I woke from an inadvisable after-work nap with a thought wedged in my head: I am closer to 70 than I am to 40. How did this happen? But hell, I know. I lived, I ran, I suffered, I danced, I triumphed, and fell. I’m scarred, I’m neurotic, I’ve seen things I wish I hadn’t…

  • Thermostat.

    I used to have an ongoing conversation, with an old crank I dated briefly before we friendzoned into a contentious state of casual simpatico, on the nature of human happiness. His take was a fairly Buddhist one with grumpy extremes, in that he regarded the impetus to stay positive and happy all the time as…

  • Tom Lehrer gives.

    Just a fresh reminder that Tom Lehrer stands among the great artists of all time for, among other things, relinquishing copyright to his life’s work as he nears the end of his time here rather than having his clutching, wealth-hoarding estate or some atrocious corporate creeps hold his “intellectual property” behind a locked door to…

  • I’d like to propose a toast.

    These things come back like ghosts, faintly but present, and pull the few little threads of regret that have any purchase in my heart. It’s hard to explain that strange little stretch in the middle of the hateful eighties when people like me were dropping like flies while the everyday people in the rest of…

  • an excerpt from Scaggsville (work in progress)

    SPOKES The new and as yet unopened interstate was an broad, empty band of fresh pavement that reared up from around a gentle bend and disappeared around another, heading north and south. We followed the freshly-painted lane lines on the family Schwinns, with me buckled into in my child seat on the back of my…

  • The blue hours, part one.

    I’ve begun to properly embrace what I’ve learned is called a “biphasic” or “multiphasic” sleep pattern, casting away the busispeak “insomnia” and all its attendent judgement of a lack of productivity in sleep, for Pete’s sake, as one more of the wretched impositions of a clockwork life in the planet-wide currency mill, and it’s connecting…

  • Reading: Becky Chambers

    A recent exchange reminded me of a great book I read recently, as an attempt to rediscover the love of science fiction I’d once had, and which had faded with the devolution of sci-fi into bleak pessimism, a perverted wallowing in the supposed hopelessness in our species, diseased and fetishistic lusting for (and after) the…

  • A voice, telling a tale

    I’m a fervent enthusiast of audio media, from old radio drama to modern radio drama and audiobooks of all stripes, and despite being a voracious reader of tattered paper books in my youth (and still, though more on digital readers lately), I’m increasingly of the opinion that, in contrast to the nostalgic claims that books…

  • What we miss in the the hurricane

    One of the things I truly lament about the social-mediafication of the internet is how I’m stuck looking at an endless thread of posts about political creeps, bible-waving hysterics, celebrities I’ve never heard of and care even less about, and other things that have no direct impact on my life that I can do anything…

  • the benefits of knocking shit over

    Honor thy error as a hidden intention. —Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies deck There was an unwanted punctuation mark in my day yesterday when I managed to knock over the nice stainless double-walled tumbler I keep on my desk for water. Being freshly filled, I caused a tsunami, inasmuch as roughly 600cc of…