Derek Maine
2.1.26
I bet too much money (three weeks at the weekly rate for my room here at the King’s Motel) on Teofimo Lopez knocking out Shakur Stephenson tonight. Shakur won easily.
A large batch of the Epstein files were released, posted on a government website then quickly removed. Dear Leader is splattered throughout the files, forcing underage girls to perform sex acts on him, discussing disappearing and even murdering witnesses, families, and any young girls that talked. Affidavits, police reports, bawdy emails with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier. The Patriots play the Seahawks in the Super Bowl1.
2.2.26
“Another morning of the Number 9 bus not showing up,” my man in the statehouse screams into my voicemail.
He is moving money around, and suggests I do the same.
Because of ai, which no one asked for and no one wants, it’s impossible, in the ten minutes of screen time I allow myself every four hours (weaning is a process, and I have fallen into old habits – reader(s), I beg your patience), to determine if one of the thousands of Epstein e-mail screenshots are real and which are fake. I am having the documents printed out and delivered to me by the courier. He has located a FedEx Kinkos by the state college in town, and guarantees it by this weekend. Not a single fiber of me wants to read this, see this, learn this. But someone has to locate the pulse. Someone has to sort through the paperwork. Who is up reporting at this hour? Charles, who walks up and down the parking lot tonight at the King’s Motel shouting Revelations, is all we’ve got. I have to step up. I have to study the files.
2.4.26
Some time has passed for me, some of the worst hours of my life.
Sick. I am sickness, sitting here four days with printed Epstein files spread out over my duvet cover. Wretchedness. Pure evil. Sick. I have become sickness, crater of worlds. The sick do need to be quarantined. It is best not to let it spread.
Would the sordid details serve you? Would it do to know at all?
I know. Knowing changed me, hardened me, corrupted my sense of hope, decency. The foulness and stench of these powerful, rich, disgusting pricks. Each of them more powerful, more wealthy, more untouchable than the last and all of them paying far, far less in taxes as a percentage than the financial analyst who comes to work every day to be screamed at by department heads for not adjusting their revenue numbers. In decent times these pig men would never show their faces in public, would be jailed or broken and broke and on the run or mightily disfigured by a crowd at a town square or be banished out of society for their crimes, their flaunted, sadistic degeneracy. These are not decent times. If there ever were. They rule the world instead and catalogue each opposition to them to be sent to a data center in Indiana marking Derek Maine as “unfriendly to Dear Leader’s Regime.” They control every lever of power. They know how to use it. They like using it. It got them here, to the top of the world, Masters of the Universe, and a guy still staying across from the bus station listening to Charles scream Revelations every night, doesn’t stand a chance against them.
2.7.26
At the public library where I spend my days writing and napping, to give myself the illusion I have places to be outside of room 26 at the King’s Motel, they have taken down the American flag. It does not fly half-mast. It just disappeared, now an empty flag pole towers above the library. It must mean something.
2.8.26
All things are true at once; in this era everyone is correct.
Silence on my part does not signify a lack of events. Somewhere something sinister happens every second. Something beautiful too. Mostly mundane minutes marching through cities, souls, weeks, office buildings. I am in search of all of it. Intrepid reporter. But the contours of what I’m covering are crooked. There are entire weeks I spend anchored to my bed at the King’s Motel, chewing bubble wrap. Nights I am studying the Fall of the Byzantine Empire, too stoned on weed and Valium to remember any of it in the morning. I trust the Fall of the Byzantine Empire is seeping into my subconscious, settling in, and will reveal its purpose in fiction, in time, as always happens. There are somewhere between eight and thirteen active wars at the moment and over 150 areas of active armed conflict across the globe.
“We lay like slats of meat at the end.” Charles tells me this tonight while I’m smoking outside my room. Charles has been coming around for a few weeks now, which is pretty close to old-timer status in this temporal zone. The bus station is across the street. The train station is across the street. Tent cities fill every empty space across the tracks. The population here is not stationary. These are not stationary times. I told Charles this, tonight actually, and he agreed. He agreed with everything I said the entire time we smoked my joint and my last few Marlboro lights. I like this about Charles. The world is too disagreeable. Everyone is arguing. Everyone is right. Everyone has a point. More men need to learn agreeability, simple courtesy. Charles is in the same war and also other wars we couldn’t imagine. We all are always, and it’s worse than ever everywhere. Charles knows this too. “You don’t get a lot of years,” Charles tells me, under motel moth lighting. “You start to counting them until you wish you’d forget how the hell to count,”
We don’t get a lot of years, Charles, that’s exactly right. We get a lot of seconds though. Innumerable seconds! Don’t spend too many of them whining about already missing them. My friend missed his whole life that way, true story, Charles. He couldn’t make it to twenty-two for fear of nothing existing forever (not even blackness). I gave Charles a pill sometime after I said some of this stuff in a stoned slurp. I am in my bed now. Some things likely happened in the world today, in one of the wars. Charles happened today. Every speck of human experience happened today, somewhere. It was someone’s turn to carry this, and it was someone’s turn to carry that, and we all pass these things around and share in pains and joys, sex and soup, and we have, all of us – all of us who came before, all of us here now, and all of us to come, shared this sacred duty with each other. We will do this until the last one of us lives. Whether the bomb or the sun explodes, science promises us an ending. It is a beautiful thing, this life and this living.
Also: Russia says Poland was behind the assassination attempt of its top general. U.S. military strikes another boat in the Pacific Ocean, killing two. Official death toll for the U.S. military operations in the high seas is at 121 since the strikes began last September 2nd. The United States has staked this legal authority by declaring “armed conflict” against drug cartels. The United States has sidestepped any judicial review simply by labeling all souls killed “unlawful combatants.” The system is power, paid in blood.
2.10.26
A handsome talking head sliced open my eyeballs, crashing through the screen and into my room, wagging his finger at me, “As a percentage of GDP, corporate taxes have never been lower. As a percentage of GDP, wages are at a 40-year low. As a percentage of GDP, corporate profits have never been higher.”
I chased him around with a fly swatter slapping his ass while he giggled until he sucked himself back in the box television. I just took another Valium. This night has to end. A call from Baltimore. Last thing I needed. She wants me to find a key to a storage center in Bethesda. My favorite couch is in there. I travel light, own very little. I do not know where a key to a storage center in Bethesda, Maryland is and she will not consider dropping the TRO until I locate it. Everything is a side quest, everything must be done at once or not at all.
2.11.26
My editor says I am leaving too much on the cutting room floor. My doctor says I am well on my way to an almost complete recovery (canker sores). A nutritional deficiency. Something else to work on. My ex-wife says nothing, which is for the best.
I have not located the storage key, nor have I tried. I slept all day instead.
2.13.26
The El Paso airport is shut down for a week after Secretary of War Pete Hegspeth mistook a get well soon balloon for a Mexican cartel drone and shot it down.
2.17.26
Germany has run out of air defense missiles for Ukraine. Today was the first day of US-brokered and mediated peace talks in Geneva between a former Culture Minister of Russia and Ukrainian national security secretary. Not the kind of emissary you bring in for serious talks. Ukraine has made some gains, their most impressive gains in two and a half years of the war, turning four in a week which was supposed to last three days.
No one ever made the rich richer and the poor happier. Dear Leader is a savant of our times, the character history demanded.
2.19.26
Clavinder? Clarinet? Whatever the situation, it’s my job to follow along and take notes.
My editor sends me a picture of a stained business card, crinkled all to fuck, of a Mr. Ross Martin from SK literary agency (New York City address of course). My editor writes, “he remembered you, will take a call.” I give it the thumbs up.
I order two large frosties (one vanilla, one chocolate) from the Wendy’s by the Greasy Monkey waiting on them to change my oil. I eat the vanilla frosty in the waiting room. Curling is on.
The few of us stuck in there stopped scrolling and watched together. I almost started the Pledge of Allegiance. I felt that strongly. We shared a moment. I ate the chocolate frosty in the parking lot after my oil change, crying uncontrollably, listening to a podcast about data centers. Jared Kushner is going to make a killing in Gaza. The assholes are always winning, in America and probably everywhere.
There was raucous dancing outside tent city this morning by the train tracks at the edge of downtown across the street from my smoking room at the King’s Motel, number 26. Vagrants know before we do, always. They feel it in their knees, like the first snow. They search for higher ground and it’s too late for most of us. I keep my eyes peeled, my fork tuned.
2.22.26
I came to the woods to live dutifully. For two days. I am duty bound to deliver a column to my editor every month. I have spent too many days watching curling in my room at the King’s Motel and taking benzos. Subsisting on egg rolls. Applying nicotine patches and sucking nicotine lozenges and smoking cigarettes only once an hour. The whole nine yards. Ever since I read the first line of the letter, and the only line I needed to read before I burned the letter (and almost my mattress), my ex-wife sent from Baltimore, “I tried to love you, and I pray every day no one makes the same foolish mistake.”
My editor, thankfully, wakes me from my winter nap and reminds my column is due on the “22nd or 23rd.” He is a task master. He has advertisers to satiate, his own demands to meet. He must spend all day tracking down writers and their excuses. A pathetic lot!
I checked into a tiny house, rented for two days, in the woods in Eno, outside Hillsborough. I have to resolve the exterior lighting situation and then I can produce a column worthy of their attention.
10:33 p.m. The exterior lighting situation is as good as it’s going to get. I need to follow William Burroughs’ advice and smoke a joint to summon the creative spirits.
11:42 p.m. I came to the woods to gather my thoughts then get them down on paper. My thoughts on what? Most of the things we think we never say aloud, or we never write down. They are just piles of fleeting thoughts discarded. Each of those thoughts could have been an ice cream shop. The first time Dale mortgaged the farm his two nephews came to help him mow the fields, fix a fence post, take the cattle from one field to the other and so forth. The new style is hide all of it, speak a language only you know. How else while they use all the water and the energy to sound like us? To sound like a soul is living here right now, in a throng of other souls, a crush even, sometimes, but always alone in the experience and fully aware of the pain this temporary separateness causes. The second time Dale mortgaged the farm, the boys took the cattle. The third time the whole spread, mineral rights and all. There is a lesson in this somewhere, but it won’t apply and isn’t worth digging up.
11:57 p.m. I need to drink more sparkling Pellegrino and eat something green. I need a sound bath. This would fix me. I need to do a few things less, some things more, and at least one thing never again. My track record is poor.
I need to accept the days smoking in the kitchen with my mother are days past, and they were, indeed, lovely days, and I loved the smell of her coffee and cigarettes. I need to not try and recreate it for thirty more years. I need to accept my mistakes, and my limitations. I need to accept my powers. My style. I need to let the motherfuckers know I’m what’s what and I’m right now. I need to shower more often. I need to stop smoking. I need to run or at least go on walks. Hikes. I need to see trees again. I may need to move out of the King’s Motel and into my adult son’s townhouse, my adult son who sells plastics in Fort Lauderdale. I have to consider it at least.
All of my travel expenses are paid by Farewell Transmission, and my job here is to write a monthly column. I came here to do that, and I came here to edit my novel. I came here to write an e-mail to an old friend. I need to find a publisher for this novel. I think he may have some advice, perhaps even a name or two of a small publisher willing to take a risk on my strain of insanity. I do not know how to start the e-mail or what to put in the middle or how to end it. I do not know how long the sentences should be. I need to think about all of these things. But first I have to make my living.
The United States hockey team defeated Canada in the Olympics tonight. The American hero is dating Canada’s Tate McRae. He is a center for the Devils. His brother was heavily involved as well, and appropriately chugging beer in celebration, and he plays for the Devils too. My editor says I should tape my mouth shut at night. A man in a suit walked the entire line of Canadian silver medalists and handed them each a small plushy of gratitude in a humiliating ceremony. The Olympics is about sport and ceremony and geopolitical power. The Olympics is always and always has been about war. Two fists in the air times two can change a nation. Wars keep nations out, wars rename nations to keep themselves in. The Ukrainian team was led out this winter by a Russian ex-pat in opposition to the war. A Ukrainian skeleton racer was disqualified from competing in the Olympics for refusing to race without his helmet depicting images of his friends killed in the war. The International Olympic Committee would not allow it, and disqualified skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych of Ukraine.
This will always be the Olympics America defeated Canada for the Gold and the Silver medalist Canadian hockey players were handed plushies in Milan. This is the kind of image America loves, devours.
I did not watch a minute of it. I did not count on hockey figuring into this. I do not have a sports reporter on staff. The staff is stoned. The staff is of no use. The staff steals spare change and fentanyl test strips. The staff is ill-equipped, not qualified. The staff is sorry, in every sense of the word.
2.23.26
Dear Leader announces 15% tariffs. El Mencho, Mexicans most wanted drug lord, is killed by the Mexican military. U.S. tourists are ordered to shelter in place. Military helicopters fly over Puerto Vallarta. A twenty one year old armed man was shot and killed driving through the secured perimeter at Mar-A-Lago. One Battle After Another won six BAFTAS including Best Picture. The world is unfolding much like Our Man in Havana. I will read the rest of the letter next month but no one can make me go to a storage facility in Maryland.
The attention economy, the loneliness economy, the sex economy, the mints and matches by the door economy, the economy of fear, the wartime economy, obviously, and of course, the computer economy, the computer, the buttons, screen image, text language economy.
I am neither authorized nor qualified to tell this story.
A string of bad horse racing bets sends me into a spiral before ten am. There is violence in Dubai.
2.25.26
I am still on the lam from my editor. I have not turned in my column. The woods rerouted my energies. Someone hacked my accounts. They are demanding $100.
2.26.26
Reports are coming in from several directions at once. My identity was (briefly) compromised and my accounts controlled by agents (provenance unknown, but I am covering several wars at once and fronts are constantly in motion, so any stereotype you prefer and would bolster your correct worldview please do insert your preferred provenance), held for ransom. Two and a half days. They tried to call me over dinner. They tried to call me while I was placing AL East futures bets. Absolute monsters. I regained control and the haters of American letters can suck on their tears. Dead, rotten fallen angels they are. Reports are coming in, from the courier and across every wire at once, Americans have killed an American citizen in their ongoing seafaring mission striking a Cuban boat alleged to, I’m certain, be smuggling in the drugs our country is desperate for. Our man in international waters.
In the woods I could hear them, the coyotes, at night. The coyotes by the King’s Motel are mostly scavengers. They subsist on the side of the road. Out here they hunt live stags in packs, howling through late winter under a thin moon. My typewriter arrived today, a new model. I am testing it out. My editor asks if I had been waiting for the state of the union before filing my column. Yeah, that’s it. I reply. I don’t tell him I was removed from the public library this morning. My accounts are frozen. My assets are dwindling. I found your stupid storage key, but I am in no rush to get to Bethesda. I am being blackmailed. I don’t tell him they found me running down the side of the highway with nothing but socks on, screaming “I am the wartime author.”
2.28.26
The United States has attacked Iran. Dear Leader says to be prepared for American casualties. Dear Leader says this is what happens during wartime. Sam Altman strikes a deal with the Department of War mere hours before the attack. He sells his autonomous weapons and surveillance state to some of the greediest, morally deficient perverts and power hungry whores the world has ever seen.
Dear Leader, in a video address sporting a gauche white “USA” flat brim baseball cap, encourages the Iranian people to overthrow their government. “The hour of your freedom is upon you.”
Of course I turned in my monthly war column yesterday and of course no one is answering at the printing press. Presumably they are tied up in pamphlet production.
War is always an acceptable distraction. Markets rejoice, world leaders congratulate, murder machines buzz and click, America goes boom.
Derek Maine writes about the war for Farewell Transmission.
1Editor’s Note: Palintir ran ads for voluntary mass surveillance under the guise of finding lost dogs with Ring doorbells. The partnership has since been dissolved.
