Tag: war column

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Dispatches from the King's Motel

War and War and War, October Style

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by Shep

“The One Where Derek Gives Up”

He never could handle two things at once. No one is surprised he couldn’t hack it. I am in desperate need of anonymity at the present time, for reasons legal and emotional. Derek has left his column to me. As for the byline, let’s stick with Shep for now. Everyone in New York knows who the fuck I am, and that’s all that matters. I need to stretch my legs a little, on the page, before I start signing my government name to any reportage. I have been out of the game, sent to the nuthouse and heavily sedated for fuck know’s how long and I need some months to get my sea legs back.

“The Autumn Everyone Posted Their William T. Vollmann four-volume BOX SET of Novel”

My president, Our Most Aggrieved Champion of the American Dream, SCRATCH GOLFER, regularly recurring secondary character in THE EPSTEIN FILES, certified pervert freak GENIUS MOST POWERFUL AND SEXY MAN ALIVE, Mr. Gravy Getter himself, the sometimes senile snoozer plus pants shitter, sent his Best Flim Flam Man, collaborator and recipient of vast sums of America’s treasure in this Historic Smash and Grab Job, Steve Witkoff, United States Special Envoy to the Middle East1, to Russia to negotiate a prisoner release, and Steve Witkoff, American Tycoon, sat across the desk and told President Putin he, like America’s President, is a humanitarian and he, Witkoff, commended Russian President Putin for that. The war with Ukraine is lost2. Allegiances are shifting, power is being negotiated. Ukraine will have to cede their lost territory and Crimea will forever belong to Mother Russia, elections will be held and a new, badly damaged and grieving Ukraine will begin the long process of recovery. A cooling of tensions. Government contracts for reconstruction and security will be awarded to the West, in the spirit of Baron Victor Rothschild, “When there is blood on the streets, I am buying.”

“You want it to be one way, but it’s the other.” Paraphrasing Marlo from The Wire.

The midterms are Tuesday. It’s Thursday, late, almost Friday. A blue wave, a blue tsunami. A rigged election. A ballot controversy. Who knows? Maybe all of it. Maybe that’s the point. My prediction: Democrats control the Senate, Democrats control the house. That is also my personal political preference at this precise moment in the history of American political affairs. A defensible position, I might add. We need to get the fuck out of Israel’s forever war with Iran with the strait operating at the very least 75% prer-war capacity. The madman sometimes needs someone to save him from himself. We the people. Likely it will be the other way. 

“This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened” – Don Draper3

Pardons will need to be issued, data deleted or manipulated. We will return, likely, to the chore of following palace intrigue (a hobby I abhor), and endless rounds of ultimately useless investigations and the empire will continue to slowly slink its slitherly self down further in the eyes of its people, its neighbors, its earthmates, and the Lord. 

“It’s dire times back home. Bankruptcies are up, suicides are up, but nevertheless we have hope in this President that he can take us to victory here,” Senator Roger Marshal (R, Kansas)

The downfall of the prestigious law firm, Weil, Gotshal & Manges, is a leading indicator. We are in for dire economic times. Firms are preparing their financial restructuring, private equity, and bankruptcy teams. Stay in cash and treasury bonds, kid.

The president is still filling arenas across the country selling his midterm messages. He has several new comedic bits. He is in his element. He imposed tariffs, a tax hike passed onto the people. When the Supreme Court ruled he had to give some of the tariff money back (billions4 of citizen’s dollars) he gave the cash back to the companies. He started an unwinnable war with even more billions5 of citizens’ money that raised the gas prices for everyone for the foreseeable future. Millions and millions and millions will proudly wave his flag, many many many millions and millions will silently walk into the voter’s booth and make sure this damn country isn’t taken over by a bunch of commie bastards. These are the patriots. This is the country and times we are living in. It is unmistakably funny. 

Have I reported on Sports yet? I have no idea what Derek’s column was actually supposed to be about. In Sports it is happening and teams are winning and losing and everyone is losing money gambling. Fashion? Kylie Kardashian wore the $50 million dollar diamond encrusted bra at the Victoria Secret6 fashion show.

Shep writes for farewell transmission 

  1. & new owner of the Los Angeles Lakers ↩︎
  2.  On October 31st, the United States sells $2.1 billion of Patriot interceptors, so perhaps my coda is premature. ↩︎
  3. Spoken to Peggy Olson in Season 2, Episode 5 of Mad Men in the hospital after Peggy gives birth. ↩︎
  4. $115 Billion ↩︎
  5.  $47.1 Billion, to date, reported. ↩︎
  6. Les Wexner’s lingerie company. Jeffrey Epstein was named as the trustee of Wexner estates (see SEC Schedule 13D, Amendment No. 26 [The Limited, Inc., signed March 27, 2002] and SEX Schedule 13D, Amendment No. 31 [Limited Brands, signed September 7, 2005]). On Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, Lex wrote Jeffrey Epstein a card, “Dear Jeffrey. I wanted to get you what you want, so here it is…” and then he drew an inartful picture of breasts. In the same birthday book, the current American president drew a crude sketch of a naked woman, writing, “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday – – and may ever day be another wonderful secret,” signed as pubic hair on the President’s drawing. ↩︎
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Dispatches from the King's Motel

Hot, Motionless Summer

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by Derek Maine

“What was it like waiting for the bomb?”

Like this. It is like this.

I have failed my editors, failed my speculative readers. No column last month. The deadline came, passed. October is here and I left my post in June. Farewell Transmission has been understanding, but I did block my editor’s number sometime mid-August. Speaking of August, this is when things really go off the rails. I was good, really, until August. 

My notes for August and September are so sparse, most of them destroyed, there is no way I can stick to my signature, beloved style of reporting on the ground live as things happen. Filing my report on two months of war, mine and others, will test my abilities (and my editors). I have two months to recreate, two depressive, drug-addled months to remember where I spent two days at sea against my will, met an attache in Washington, D.C., returned to temporary office services work, and suffered several other indignities. The war beat on.

It was a hot, motionless summer.

August began with Dear Leader winning the Senior classic golf tournament at one of his country clubs. He shot 70. He also almost certainly shat in his adult diaper at Senator Graham’s funeral.

Our munitions law, and appetite for war waning, prices rising, Iran announced to the world it will not open the Strait of Hormuz until the American presidency changes hands. 

In mid-August I wrote my ex-wife, “There is an army between us,” only to learn my number had been blocked. The United States attorney general declared Dead Leader never has and never will do something unethical. The law has spoken.

In late August my financial situation soured, my debts piling up, and I was forced to go see Carol, once again, at the temp agency. She placed me in Office Services for an engineering firm where I ate, slept, made copies, collated, jogged, bound, had xanax for lunch and coffee and pie for breakfast. I spoke to no one. My notebook for the rest of August was indecipherable:

The middle managers want to steal my salt! They are but an army of tongues! The reports are due by end of day! A new quarter upon us. Stretch goal: $100 gift card to The Cheesecake Factory, non-transferable.

September came, and nothing improved.

9.8.26

He shit his pants in the oval house, again, today.

9.11.26

Today, the Houthi rebels captured an island and are choking off the bab el-Mandeb strait. Chokepoints everywhere. Twenty-five years ago today I remember exactly where I was. Hunter S. Thompson, in his column for Page 2 at ESPN, understood it perfectly, right away. We are at war and will be for the rest of most of our lives, he said. The party was over, he said. Hunter S. Thompson was a fine carrier of the flame, one of our greatest, and he was, unfortunately, right right away. And who am I to cover a war never ending?

The Red Sea islands control the strait. Ten percent of global trade goes through the strait. The Houthi’s have control over the strait, and the entire western coast of Yemen.

New fronts open.

9.19.26

Common People by Pulp is playing, we are riding in black cars at unsafe speeds.

Saudi Arabia is under attack. Riyadh airport, pipelines, fuel storage tanks, infrastructure.

9.21.26

En route to DC by train to meet with the Ambassador. I am traveling under a cloud of conditions. The roomettes are all taken by mean Russians making their way (slowly) to Chicago. I haven’t the heart to explain to them American geography. So I am sat in coach. I brought Nutella biscuits for my fellow passengers, cough drops, several medications, Helen DeWitt, two plant-based smoothies.

9.22.26

All the signals are jammed in DC this rainy morning, first day of fall.

9.24.26

When I travel south I feel wild and free, reckless. When I travel north I feel anxious, jittery, constantly aware of my own skin. When I travel west I feel untethered, an orphan, consumed with possibility, lonely. When I travel east I walk into the Atlantic Ocean.

9.26.26

At my friend the financier’s wedding in Darien, Connecticut. I am clad head to toe in powder blue and on several conflicting drugs at once. The shuttle arrives any moment. Something the train conductor called a ‘nor’easter’ is apparently bearing down on the Tokeneke Club and the rest of the Connecticut coast. We are not far from Greenwich, someone said in line at Windsor Street Coffee. I don’t know what that means. But I am wide awake and investigating.

9.28.26

They were out of creamed spinach at the private equity steakhouse and Linda was disappointed, already in a mood.

And the rest of the month, including excuses

I began this assignment with Farewell Transmission with selfish intent. I suppose it’s true all writers take on every assignment with selfish intent. Finding no publisher for my 500-page novel beginning with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, covering wars and failed literary movements, a grotesque sigh on our contemporary times, I set out to write a monthly war column with the idea a publisher (or agent, tastemaker, influencer, or critic) would stumble upon my project and immediately request the Wartime Author manuscript to take to auction. This did not happen.

A new war in Iran opened up, and my capacity to take on fresh horrors, while working with my editor polishing up the manuscript for my own war novel, began to seriously fade. I simply could not take on these two tasks at once. The choice was to continue following the wars and writing the column, or finishing my manuscript. I chose, sometime in August, perhaps foolishly, to turn my attention to the manuscript. 

Here I sit and type a failed columnist, with a homeless novel. I survey my options. I could enter my manuscript sometime in October in Fiction Collective 2’s annual novel contest. Evan Dara was a past winner. This would be excellent company. I could submit to Rose Press, who published Scott McLanahan and Matthew Gasda, during their open reading period in November. I could bribe Cash4Gold with cocaine to publish my war novel. I could send it along to Hesse Press, a house I am increasingly impressed with. But each option seemed impossible. The manuscript would likely not be “contest-ready” by the end of October (my own fault). Rose Press is lovely but all of their covers follow the same visual lineage and I did not like the idea of Wartime Author written in cursive font, plus I doubted I was cool enough for a hip press. I am too terrified of parties, New York, and Los Angeles to get in bed with Cash4Gold. I am too scared to blindly submit to Hesse Press and do not know how besides. I could, and likely will, self-publish. What another headache! And for what and for whom? To sing my sign into the void, perhaps. 

All of these things require my attention and an executive function I severely struggle with. And I am tired. Tired of writing a widening war, unceasing and stupid. Tired from my own poor choices, reckless lifestyle, and unpleasant personality. Afraid of my ex-wife, and Baltimore. I am, therefore, moving out of the King’s Motel at the edge of a faceless, motionless mid-Atlantic capital city and into a more suitable, responsible studio apartment. I am drying out for real this time, and I have deleted the phone numbers of all my drug dealers. If I am to give this novel a chance, I must be serious, sober. 

And with that, I bid you adieu. With apologies, this will be my last dispatch for Farewell Transmission, who have been nothing but the kindest souls and have agreed to pay me for the remainder of the year (a blessing I did not deserve, but am nevertheless grateful for). All of my focus belongs to Wartime Author, and making it the novel it deserves to be, and finding a home and (hopefully) a few readers along the way. 

With love,

D Money Maine

Derek Maine wrote about the war for Farewell Transmission.

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Dispatches from the King's Motel

May, 2026

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by Derek Maine

May 1, 2026

Dear Leader says we will be taking over Cuba. “Almost immediately,” he promises. New wars spawn.

May 2, 2026

I have a new method to quit smoking. Charles told me about it. He said every time you want a cigarette you eat one. It’s supposed to disgust you and yet you still taste the tobacco, the leaves get stuck in your teeth. I have been shitting filters for weeks.

May 5, 2026

Iran breaks the ceasefire, attacking the UAE with drones and missile fire for the second straight day. The Iranian foreign minister is in Beijing meeting with his counterpart. The United States’ official opinion is the ceasefire is still holding up. I spent two days in the Lowcountry smoking cigarettes outside of munitions plants and a coating supply manufacturer trying (not very well, or hardly at all) to interview the workers. All expenses paid reconnaissance trip courtesy of Farewell Transmission. I told my editor I needed to get my hands around the means of production, specially volume. Were these guys working overtime? Have production orders changed? Have the bosses been by more, or less? A writer should spend more time with their feet on the pavement, getting the local flavor. You could learn a lot, and fill ¾ of a monthly column, from the munitions factory workers. 

I was too chickenshit to talk to any of them coming or going and was eventually asked to leave by a parking lot security worker. I had taken too many of the wrong drugs at a highly inconvenient part of the day and I paid the price. I couldn’t unclench my jaw to ask a blue collar man what fucking time it was, forget about production schedules! When the rent-a-cop walked up to me I suddenly snapped out of it and ordered a Paloma. I said, “I stubbed my toe on my cigarette,” and he asked me if he needed to call the police or an ambulance. I said “neither officer, I’m no trouble.” I wanted to tell him I was from the papers but I wisely did not. I could tell he didn’t like being called officer, and thought I was being facetious. I was not. He had a gun and a uniform and I was wearing Balmain shorts and had two packs of nicotine gum and a notebook. Everything looked like an authority figure to me. He said he would like to not see me the rest of the day so he can get back inside. I said ‘sir, it’s seventy-two degrees and not a cloud in the sky in Charleston, South Carolina, why would you want to spend it inside?’ But I only said it inside my head as I was walking off the lot. I was unable to secure an interview with a worker at the munitions factory. But not for lack of thinking it was probably a good idea, driving eight hours round trip in a thirty-six hour window, and standing there.

The Chairman of War will not say whether or not America has kamikaze dolphins, but can confirm Iran does not.

May 7, 2026

The Americans and Iranians are firing on each other in the Strait of Hormuz this late hour.

How could a ceasefire hold in these unceasing times? Nothing ceases. Everything happens all at once constantly in our time.

I am going to see Bill Callahan with the courier on Tuesday at the Haw River Ballroom in Saxapahaw, North Carolina. 

Charles told me tonight, outside underneath the lamppost (halos of smoke, moonlight), about a man he ran into some weeks ago, an old buddy, a Marine, Middle East combat veteran, American hero, and the man, (whose name I never got) used to have a wife and kids and a big, pretty house in the suburbs until Covid came along. When Covid came along this man started going out at night and walking up and down creeks behind neighborhoods watching women get undressed and middle-aged couples fuck through their windows. When Covid came he got active again. He was a sniper. He thrived at night. Old instincts, fresh desires. He had his favorites. On the night he was caught, half of his legs in the creek, bitten red by chiggers as usual, a husband shot him in the shoulder with buckshot. His wife left him. His kids found out. It was a pretty small town, Iowa somewhere. So he walked around the country, stayed some places for a while and had a mangled shoulder and kind, misty blue eyes.

May 9, 2026

The school in Iran that was double tapped on the first day of the war was the result of an Anthropic (Claude) agent embedded within Maven, America’s “Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team,” using ten year old data and the American military glanced at the output and approved without any additional research or even a second layer of confirmation.

May 18, 2026

We are delaying tomorrow’s scheduled attack on Iran at the request of Middle Eastern leaders, Dear Leader says. An incredibly obnoxious, obvious political era we are witness to. I blame television. I blame other people. I blame each other. I blame myself. It was probably always going to end up exactly this stupid, how else could it be? 

On to more important things. I prattle too much. Editors cannot handle me. I’m too much meat, no bone. I have the beginnings of a plan. See, well, first of all, here’s the situation. I need to finish my novel. I know, I know, this is the absolute worst literary device and has the insufferable quality of being true to boot but this is who I am.

I have the edits. I have started working through them. In the meantime, I will write a monthly war column and gain readers and interest, and perhaps an ambitious publisher will see the vision, and then think maybe he’s not too old and lazy and living too stupidly to seduce a few readers still. 

The war I cover is the Ukrainian war or that was the war I was hired to cover, I thought, and did cover and still do too but then, of course, Israel, and America. Iran kicked our asses, they will try to tell you different. I wrote it in real time which is the only time I got and you can go back and check my notes, and while you’re at it check my credentials, would you please? I report on wars, for a living, from a motel (where I pay a monthly rate now), at the very outskirt of a mid-Atlantic capital city, I am still the wartime author. 

The plan is I stole a rolling cart desk from one of the office services temp jobs Carol put me in and now, with a proper desk, I can finish the novel. I have not used it yet, or touched it. It’s been here a week, I bet. 

Two Iranian oil tankers made port in China during Dear Leader’s arrival. President Ji had his way with him. Russia and America are struggling, China rising.

Ukraine’s drone strategy has turned the war somewhat in their favor. The superpowers are being tested. All wounds, self-inflicted.

May 22, 2026

Dear Leader has turned Airforce One around, unable to attend his son’s wedding. Iranian airspace has been closed. The Director of National Intelligence resigned. It is the Friday of Memorial Day weekend and I am hiding out at the Crystal Coast.

The courier supplied me with hashish before I departed. My headlights are busted so I can only travel in daylight hours. An awful case of indigestion from the nicotine lozenges, I must take up smoking immediately to defeat it. I came here to fish and edit my novel. I ate dinner alone inside my car in the parking lot of a putt-putt course. The world is opening up to me, and I can sense the intervention of the divine.

May 23, 2026

The hashish empties me out, and I spend the evening splayed out alone, buck naked, catching occasional glimpses of waxing gibbous between mostly stuck clouds. I traveled with sheaths of paper, large binder clipped, Caran d’Ache Ecridor, orange highlighter, index tabs and a clipboard. I am meant to be finishing my edits and finishing my novel. Everything seems so imminent and obvious on nights like this. The whole of it all washes over me and I am glad for it. To lay in the sand stoned is enough. War will always be there. War is happening. We live in wartimes. I cannot count every second.

Dear Leader announces the strait of Hormuz will be opened, a deal ‘largely negotiated.’

May 25, 2026

The encyclical letter is being read aloud at a makeshift Mass on the beach this Memorial Day.

May 26, 2026

Moscow is under attack. The war I was first hired to follow is heating up, and in starkly surprising ways from when I last left it (involuntary). Ukraine is attacking Moscow, a city that has not been touched by enemy fire since World War II. The United States prepares to capitulate to a militant, murderous extremist regime and create a new middle power in the Middle East in the short to medium term. I can see the end of the month coming, and wonder what I have gotten down. Likely not much. My novel is unedited. I have several excuses. None of them are convincing. My ex-wife is in Baltimore, and I do not think I will see her for a good, long while. This time wasn’t as bad as the last (and no charges were filed), but we’ve got nothing but practice leaving each other. I am back in my room at the King’s Motel. I booked a two night stay in Pittsboro, a cabin in the woods not far from the King’s Motel, for the 7th and 8th of June to finish the job.

I predict China makes a move on Taiwan while Dear Leader is still in office, likely around the midterms when America is in the thick of the roil.

My stay on the Crystal Coast was excellent. I read The Information by Martin Amis, seeking clues, and avoided my own thoughts. I turned the safety on. The wars did seem to heat up during my stay in the sun. It all came through me like electricity if electricity was Valium instead. I rustled around my papers and did not open them or make a mark. Is this dereliction of duty? Duty to myself, perhaps. The wars go on regardless.

The yield on the thirty year note is at 5.2% mostly on account of energy prices, the highest level since right before the financial crisis in 2007.

Keep the powder dry. Preserve and protect.

May 27, 2026

I write by mouthfeel, I refuse to fear large language models taking my job as war correspondent for Farewell Transmission.

More strikes against Iran. This is not peacetime. Superpowers rarely take defeats well, and tend to multiply their damages seeking Pyrrhic victories to sell to unwashed masses. I am back in the office buildings, shuffling papers for Carol at my latest temp assignment. I have no one to blame but myself. It’s my country, my war, my ex-wife, Carol’s sadism (a re-insurance company, Carol?!?, really?), my legion of nonreaders, the games on our phone, this dumb century, artificial everything, microplastics, and SSRI’s in the water supply. No one to blame but myself.

May 29, 2026

The Chairman of the Department of War assures select uniformed U.S. service members may be allowed to attend the upcoming UFC match on the White House lawn provided they meet the Department’s standard waist-to-height ratio of 0.55.

Derek Maine writes about the war for Farewell Transmission.