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Dispatches from the King's Motel

America’s Big, Beautiful Birthday, A Heat Dome, & The Wartime World Cup

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Derek Maine

June, still somehow, 27th, 2026

Austria and Algeria are playing in Kansas City in a strange World Cup game. If the game ends in a draw, both teams get through to the knockout stage. If one team wins then Iran takes the losing team’s spot in the knockout round. The game is 1-1 in the 48th minute. Iran is still alive in the wartime World Cup, but will Algeria or Austria push and attack for Iran on the pitch?

Austria scores in the 54th minute to take the lead. A clinical quick strike for Marcel Sabitzer. Algeria will have to attack for their World Cup lives, Austria defend for Iran’s.

Almost all of the viral social media videos of Europeans (and Australians) experiencing American excess are part of a CIA operation. The captain of Algeria, Riyad Mahrez, scores in the 60th minute. Tie game, thirty more minutes to either pass the ball around and both go through or attack and let Iran through to play in the wartime World Cup on enemy soil. A match break (necessary due to the extreme summer heat and humidity in much of North America) at the 69th minute.

The crowd is loud, storming through my scream. Chants I cannot understand. In languages I don’t know. Any single individual’s experience is so small, our perspectives so thin. The world is everything outside our periphery and we process all of it inside our narrow passage. The world is everything that is the case. The game has slowed to a crawl here in the 81st minute, both teams seemingly comfortable with the draw. Iran waits.

The scoreboard in the stadium switches to a live Messi goal. Roars and roars of roars. Players looked up and watched. The ball is staying in the midfield, passing and passing time.

Pattycake paddy cake out there. The crowd whistles its disgust at the pace of play.

In the 93rd minute Riyadh Mahrez breaks away and scores again for Algeria. Austria is shocked. Iran is alive.

June 28th 2026

In the last seconds of play Austria’s Sasa Kalajdzic on his first touch, with Austria on the brink of elimination puts a header in the back of the net. The game is called. Iran is eliminated in the wartime World Cup.

Russia threatens to blow up “half of Finland.”

July, War(s)

On this, the eve of the semiquincentennial of American independence, in this century of the empire falling, I take two Xanax before lunch, smoke half a joint, and head to the municipal pool. It is good to get out in the community to take the temperature of a thing. We are under a heat dome, the whole east coast. Highs are 103. It has not rained in weeks. I have heard from my people in DC. The city is under construction. Hazards everywhere, smothered in reds, whites, blues. The things a heat dome can do to a city is diabolical. The work of the devil, it is no wonder the defining feature of hell is the heat. There are no skyscrapers in DC, in our nation’s capital. Did you know this? Many people do not. There is an ordinance relating to height and the capitol dome. It’s a city on a marsh. Most people know this. It’s a city with no representation. Important to know this. I have elected to stay back, trust my eyes and ears to my team in DC (I have just this morning enlisted an audio visual documentarian), and, instead, report on the semiquincentennial from one of the nameless, supposedly charming small American towns which, I’m told, make up something called the ‘heart of America.’ There are so many Americas. We can only stand on one patch at a time, looking out. Perspectives limited, obscured by the sheer size of this nation of states.

I am reading Death in the Afternoon under designer Italian shades at the pool on account of the sun and wanting to be a better writer.

A settling high kicks in during adult swim.

I float on my back and study the clouds. The sun bores down.

Until I find the evening has once again gotten away from me.

July 4th 2026

On her big, beautiful birthday I went to one of her lakes, traded the rest of the courier’s hashish to one of her teenagers in exchange for thirty minutes on the jet ski. I sacrificed a touch of my high for water sports, and I did not regret it.

I would eat an ice cream if handed one, but am too stoned to initiate.

Suburban bombs in the air. Where was I this time last year? Somewhere stuck beneath the pages of Wartime Author and if I had any mettle about me (a little ‘get up and go,’ as they say) I could lug out the manuscript and check rather quickly but inertia sets in, as it often does, and I hear the fireworks, municipal and homegrown alike, and the dogs, hooting and hollering tonight. How long will it last? Is it truly celebratory? What with all these dark forces milling about?

Meanwhile Charles, next door, is blasting some television special. It sounds like Lawrence Welk with explosive diarrhea. I can hear him, through the thin motel wall, giggling. Chortling. The motherfucker is chortling. There’s nothing left but the ride down the mountain of empire, and Charles is chortling.

This July fourth is one of those swampy, endless summer nights. Imagine fireflies. Imagine a heat dome. Skittering children riding motorbikes on the lawn. The city is tensing up. Record heat today, up and down the coast. The night air is a heavy warm blanket. There is no relief, only atrition.

7.5.26

It was so hot the fire alarms went off this evening at the King’s Motel. The leftover fireworks sputtered out around nine, maybe ten. England defeated Mexico in the Azteca, 3-2. I have no reports from Mexico City (where I do keep a few attachés). The heat is making everything seem sinister. Likely I have said this before or made a similar point. This is the curse of the column. I cannot look back in the true spirit of currentivism. And I owe a debt to currentivism. This is me working it off. There are several things I have left out, only one or two on the advice of counsel, and my debts have thus far been spared the shame of being confused for literature. Suffice to say a semi-professional poker player and freelance writer living in a motel at a monthly rate has a few debts to pay. You don’t arrive here flush.

Thunderstorms interrupted the 250th birthday party in the capital city.

An image surfaces of Dear Leader watching himself watch himself on television. Images capture so much more than words and that’s their problem.

July 7th 2026

Iran is attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz again, the birthday party is over. The United States tells the world it does not favor the rule of a player having to be suspended for the next game if he gets a red card and we have been nothing but gracious hosts, sooo……

And in this era it works.

Football, however, no stranger to controversy, political favors, bribes, is still settled on the pitch. Dear Leader made three phone calls to the FIFA President, his friend, and the suspension was lifted for America’s best player in this North American World Cup. 

Then Belgium completely dominated the United States 3-1, and our goalie made a particularly humiliating, comical physical error. All of the host nations are eliminated. Iran resumed their attacks on the Strait of Hormuz. I shot 109 at the municipal par three in expensive Italian sunglasses and globs of white sunscreen glue stuck to my beard. It was an unattractive sight and I was walking and I was playing alone and there was no worse or slower player on the course and I let every one play through until the night manager had to shut the lights off so I gave myself a triple bogey on 18 to fill out my scorecard (I am working on my short game this week). I blame the quaaludes entirely. For all of it, and I apologize too. For all of it, I must apologize.

U.S. renews strikes against Iran, sanctions back on, peace off, war on.

July 10th, 2026

Overheard tonight, having drinks with the courier, a young pastel polo collared man with boat shoes announces to his table “Have fun with your fucking utopian bullshit. I watched Hotel Rwanda and bought a gun.” The courier needs Manny Machado to hit a home run tonight to hit his parlay.

July 11th, 2026

I wrote this during the war. I wrote in those days, my son. I wrote during the war. I was paid to cover it (am paid to cover it) and bring news home to the common people. I am active on several fronts. It was supposed to last ten days, maybe two weeks at most and I was going to grab my juiciest, nastiest byline yet: The Atlantic. I have dreamed, ever since seeing the photograph of the owner of The Atlantic widow and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, on a sunny day in a bath suit looking radiant and sexy sitting on a couch laughing with Gishlaine Maxwell (her own gifts pouring through the lens) of finagling my way into their pages. Real writers write pieces for The Atlantic. The Paris Review. The New Yorker. The widow benefactor. The CIA. The Fleischmann Yeast Man’s winnings in a poker game. In other words, the holy trinity of literary superstardom. This is still a real thing. This is the thing that was supposed to happen for me but the war kept on, past ten days and past two weeks and The Atlantic wasn’t real (my ex-wife duped me, it’s a whole story), and the war kept on and I was looking for a missing writer and I had his manuscript and he was down to only writing by hand for fear of the machines stealing his work and the war kept on and the land use attorney cut a back room deal with The Estate and the war kept on and new fronts opened up and a solider set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy and the wars kept on and multiplied as my own wars, public and private, played out against a backdrop of an empire falling. Presently, the night sky. Everywhere I went, every room I went in, for ten whole years, I heard whispers. It was during the war, my son, I wrote these things. I covered it.

July 12th, 2026

I woke up this morning on the Crystal Coast, hiding from several things at once and still chasing shadows. First thing, a fistful of ice, black coffee. A morning smoke and stroll on the beach, beneath the pylons at the fishing pier. A death in the senate is the first news of the world. The oldest senate on record, I believe. Nothing reaches me here. The aromas of the day: salt air, marijuana smoke, tobacco smoke, aloe vera, Deet. I sit with Martin Amis on the beach for three hours, racing right past noon, while he tells me raunchy, hilarious stories of John Self (in the voice of). Every hour for fifteen minutes I close my eyes and leave Martin and instead join John Self in my dreams, clinking glasses and making a fortune, sleeping with everything. It’s a much nicer way when Martin tells it, but sometimes I like to sneak off.

July 13th, 2026

America attacks Iran for the second straight evening, striking in honor of their fallen senator, a committed war hawk.

The deck boards at my beach house are wobbly and I have gained ten pounds, most of it  fried flounder doused in tartar sauce plus all the goddamn sugar in mojitos, and I am myself wobbly. I finish my last joint of the night in fear of falling through, to the deck below, warped wood, two days rain soaked, giving out.

July 15th, 2026

Smoke from the Canadian wildfires returns, and an explosive diarrhetic parasite is in the food, likely lettuces.

Argentina will play Spain in the World Cup Final. It is the summer of soccer. The summer of shit. The summer of smoke. I am taking my coffee hot and black here on the island. My meals are fried. I have gone surf-fishing every evening and surf-caught next to nothing. The mornings are afternoons instead, and I briefly consider taking up residence at the weekly rate motel in this town instead of the rotten capital city I currently shrivel in but after walking in to speak to the manager about a special writer’s rate and seeing the condition of the place (musty is fine, sour and musty is not; peeled paint and popcorn ceilings preferred but the parade of roaches and mosquito breeding grounds in the bathtub are beneath even my own shrinking dignity) I decided to keep my wits about me and not turn a vacation into a home. People make this mistake. Many do. Yes, it’s true, I am taking a vacation. If there are bombs and deaths outside these beach house walls they have not reached me. I am concerned with the tides and the chance of rain each hour, how, when, and where the yellow snapper are biting and little to nothing else, blessedly. I deserve it. After everything they’ve put me through. I’ve fulfilled half of my assignment: a column every month for Farewell Transmission on the war slash wars in twenty-twenty-six. The money men behind the magazine’s operation forced me to do promotion earlier this week. They asked me to arrive at a time and a place and they put their clothes on me and made me speak nonsense into their cameras. Everyone wants to know what a writer looks like. What a writer wears. The contours of his or her scowl. Etc. Etc. I oblige because I chose to be their jester. I take their dirty money and they take my dirty writing and a couple times a year someone from the New York Times calls to ask for me a quote about the “literary crisis in America,” and I sing for my supper.

I will blur every line there is and disintegrate distinction until you too see reality is negotiable. You can change in and out of them. Reality is not fixed. Reality is more like a menu of options. One of those old tv guides. I put up a shingle today in town. “Discrete Investigations 919-518-4242.”

July 16th, 2026

A second heat dome has hit my mid-Atlantic state and I leave the beach house to get back to work, stopping and playing 18 holes at a retirement town (shooting 116, cheating on several holes and giving up on one to sit under a tree and smoke). The highlight of my day. I thought seriously about why I got into this line of work. What keeps me clinging to the life raft of literature in this rotted out psychotic pornographic digital overlay overlaying everything serving you exactly what you ordered (and twelve things you didn’t know you needed)? It’s a fair question. Quite the navel gazing one, I’d caution. I could say I believe in a kind of transference of consciousness between writer and reader and further believing we are all one consciousness briefly separated here on earth and so reading is spiritual undertaking for me and I take it seriously as such, but to say this would not be fitting with the modern style, nor notions. None of us choose the times we live in. I certainly did not. Am I made for them instead? Absofuckinglutely. I removed the shingle this morning, returned the keys to the owner, took out the trash and put in the lock code and ran the dishwasher and headed West (east would deposit you in the Atlantic Ocean) back to the wars, and my existence as a noticing machine.

July 19th, 2026

Iran attacks a U.S. military base in Jordan. Two service members killed, one missing.

My Russian propagandist tells me, tonight, over several coffee mugs of Nolet’s Reserve, a coup may be fomenting in Kiev. He said language matters greatly and I agreed. I assured him I would let him keep his own language if he agreed to a sit-down interview (it has been brought to my attention, by readers and editors alike, in frequent messages, terse and exhibiting alarmingly high levels of executive function, that I ought to report on the war I started to report on and stop reporting on the wars I picked up along the way and especially, please Lord, the private war I started and so I am trying to please my few and faithful readers and my immaculate editors, all publishers past, present, and future, and get some proper journalism done) and he is mulling the offer over at present.

July 20th, 2026

The Tate Brothers are taken in custody in Miami, awaiting extradition to the United Kingdom for serious sex crimes. Dear Leader welcomed them here in February, 2025. Strange.

July 22th, 2026

The house approves Dear Leader’s request for an additional $95B to fight the war in Iran.

July 23rd, 2026

Trade routes. International shipping. Thirteenth night in a row of strikes on Iran. Houthi’s attacked two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea.

July 25th, 2026

I can hear my editor in my ear now. I can hear the ghost of my literary benefactor. “Get to work! Bring me news of the war! Our people are starving.”

I am fucking working here! I am ON THE GROUND! Days, weeks, and an occasional April may go by without much ink touching paper and it may LOOK like I am abdicating all responsibilities, letting down my legion of fans, stealing paychecks from Farewell Transmission, thumbing my nose at my editor, besmirching the good name of my dead benefactor but, like the poem on the wall in a beach house where you only see one set of footprints during the trials and tribulations, when I am not working I am actually working the hardest. And I am also hanging on for dear life. None of this is easy, and none of this felt like my choice. I wanted to get my ex-wife back. For good. I wanted to be a famous writer, and surprise literary conferences with the rare appearance to stunned crowds of literati, academics, and the press. Well, when I was five I probably wanted to be a fucking firefighter. Dreams are a nuisance. Dreams get you a room at the King’s Motel and bed fleas. Dreams get you a still unanswered letter from Baltimore. Dream long enough and you too can cover a war from a behavioral health center. 

I worked plenty this month. I reject all of your claims and insinuations to the otherwise. The war raged on, I’m sure. Empty words, big bombs, a chokehold blockade stalemate prevents safe passage, elections, smoke from Canadian wildfires, the price of goods continues to go up while seven people are getting diabolically richer by the hour. More Iranian citizens were killed. More members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were killed. More American servicemen were killed. We celebrated our 250th birthday. We proved we can cheat and still never make it out of the round of 16 in the World Cup. I sat around, dumbly, and waited. I laid on my bed in the King’s Motel drunk, high, destructive, sad, waiting. Waiting for something to happen, anything, other than what was already happening and the month came and went and circumstances did not improve. Morale remained low.

Derek Maine writes 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.

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Dispatches from the King's Motel

February, 2026

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.