Kirk Israel's commonplace and blog. Quotes and links daily since 2001.
2026.07.01

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2026.06.30
Oh no. I just found out Sara Kaye (née Shansky) passed away at a scarily young age. I sang with her a bit at Tufts and then hung out in Austin one HONK!Tx festival.

Check out her solo artist work or her later stuff with the Titanic Dance Band
You can't write about grease paint and puddles of lovers or chained moons or brandy on knuckles or insanity but if you take a hot enough bath and lie on your back you can feel your blood swimming the crawl through your ass and if you play steel strings long enough you can feel your blood waltzing through your fingertips and if you let yourself laugh loud and hard enough so you're crying and peeing your pants you can feel your blood painting a self portrait on your stomach and it's a beautiful feeling

I took a 60 hour bus ride from rhode island to montana by myself and met a boy who bought me candy in fargo and said have a nice life and it would have made a great poem of passing except i ran into him again on a bus going to florida and it was as if fate had brought me back to that stringy tripping tongue studded sweetheart but he didn't remember the chocolate incident

This sticky stuff needs anger and passion and my stamp card isn't full yet but maybe if i could hate things worse than spinach and thunder i could be okay but spinach isn't so bad in pastries and thunder has a calming sensuality that i want to rip out of my ears so i can say thunder's the burning coals on my eyelashes and the ceramic clams in my fingernails making their way to my hair filling me with kasha and rhinestones

I went bowling with an old friend once and lost and that night he asked if i wanted to take the physical challenge or sleep and i couldn't for the life of me figure out what was so challenging about him when it was clear if i went to sleep he wouldn't call and if i took off my clothes he wouldn't call because we didn't keep in touch and anyway i wouldn't want to be the web of butterscotch between his hangnails

I only keep my shades in a jar so the tree on my desk can get light otherwise i'd spend all my time pining about a boy who could touch both my thumbs with one hand wear butterflies like he grew them in his eyes and kiss my ear like it was a flag but maybe i just need more sex in my life or cigarettes or salmon or Stephen but i think if i could just duct tape all of them to the bottom of my shoe my feet'd get some mileage
2026.06.29
Found a new favorite sci fi author, recommended by ChatGPT actually - Fredric Brown. He wrote in the pulp era, and some stories have that sense of Zeerust, but his range is really wide. Sometimes he leans into the O'Henry / Twilight Zone twist, but he runs the gamut from weird reality warped vibes like Philip K Dick to playing with Heinlein-like themes to reflecting stuff like Kornbluth/Pohl's "The Space Merchants".

Sometimes his works are so short and to the point they're flash fiction, and for me that's an awesome space for science fiction.
Immortality cannot be derived from one's solitary knowledge of one's greatness.
Fredric Brown

I'd recommend the 99 cent "Fredric Brown MEGAPACK"
2026.06.28

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2026.06.27

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2026.06.26
2026.06.25