I need to do an extra show

of things I thought might come up in this one; much too much for two hours. I will begin this show with a (relatively) long piece of music that is a (relatively) short part of a much longer piece of music. The length of the silences between sounds at the beginning will make you think something is broken. It is, but not in the audio. This audio concerns the end of an empire as seen by a bad standup comedian, and when you when you get near the end, around 8 minutes, and hear a sort of halo of soft high-pitched shrieking, you'll know it's the sound of stars dying, the scream you don't hear unless you're among them, and all that history, all that fucking empire, as memory, as radiation, is slowly dying among the dying stars, redshifting from brown to maroon to burgundy to ... not finally black. We don't see the end. A pixel of interference. A skin-tag of radio static. Maybe get that checked out. Melanoma aliased in megahertz conversion to the "visual."

Say that last bit as many times as you want, but make sure it gets slower and slower.

And "trigger warnings," life is short, don't go making it any longer, but at least some parts of this episode are going to contain frequent mention of sexual violence, both actual historical incidents and as a structural principle of the 250 years of politics we're all so very excited to celebrate and, apparently, relive this July, if July ever happens. There will be survivors, but no very good reason to keep calling it "July." Can we put a fucking bullet in Caesar Iulius already.

Which is also why August is called August. Julius, Augustus. And the entire world of the Latin calendar pronounced it "YOO-lee" or "JOO-lee" until almost exactly the Declaration of Independence, and literally nobody knows why it changed. Except for you. America is a stiff breeze.

I don't yet see any reason to recount any of this sexual violence in detail, but we will be aimed at a man, and then a great lineage of men, who spent their whole goddamn lives on it, so I cannot promise with certainty that I won't have to describe something horrific. I probably won't, but I might. You take your life in your hands when you ask any question about France.

(Which is not a joke, and I'm going to explain at least 50% of why it's not a joke. Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen. You notice that Man comes before citizen, they aren't the same thing, and only one is capitalized.)

M

P.S. I almost forgot – if you're reading this from CENTCOM at Al Udeid in Qatar, and realistically one of you might be, book a hotel room. Any hotel. Book it now. If you wait till you know why, you're gonna hit the second-greatest NO VACANCY in the history of Bethlehem.