Posts from Hmm Weekly

Do you know and/or remember what “checks” are?

Once you recognize this pattern, you taste it everywhere.

Meanwhile, ha! I beat you, Apple! I think!

Boiling instant ramen felt like toil in the kitchen.

Fumes of charcoal starter hung on Central Park West. The sky was deep blue in the gaps between the gray-shaded clouds.

Is your grass growing? Outside the regions of carbon dioxide–influenced aridity, presumably it is, as humans have planted it to do, which requires that the grass be cut. A circular activity! Frequently, human beings experience these sorts of circular activities as tedious.

IT’S ALMOST JULY 4, a day when We The People are encouraged to celebrate Independence. Less than a week before that, however, is the final day of June, which means The Brick House’s monthly allotment of Associated Press photos is dissolved. If we don’t use up those images, they don’t roll over to the next month, […]

The wine bar that had closed months and months ago and papered its windows was suddenly open for business and open to the street, with its front glass accordioned off to one end and a bare-shouldered woman in ruffles perched just in off the sidewalk, reading with a sweating glass of white wine on the bar in front of her.

Once upon a time we were supposed to pity the Soviet Bloc for their empty store shelves, left barren by their refusal to participate in consumer capitalism. Now American consumer capitalism has produced something beyond empty shelves: shelves filled with manufactured nothingness.

Sun rode on the shoulders down the station stairs for the return trip.

IT’S KIND OF hard to make out in the pictures, but we had a sinkhole in our tiny Baltimore-rowhouse front yard.

The lawn of Carl Schurz Park and the river each gave off their own humid aromas. Ailanthus crowded in on the transverse at 96th Street on the cab ride back.

We wanted to make sure to get a 1.6 gallon tank, because one issue on which I do basically agree with the previous president of the United States is the inadequacy of weak-flushing water-saving toilets.

Outside, hard sun immediately triggered a sneeze that ruined a nearly new surgical mask.

If you got the COVID, after you recover, the proof doesn’t stay in your blood for long, it’s like the Common Cold, you get one, you get over it, you are somehow not able to get another cold for awhile, and then eventually you get another goddamn cold. I sure hope America is ready for that kinda Reality with COVID-19.