Category Archives: The Liminal Times


how to buy Latuda online I would like to address the recent slander circulating on social media, in editorial Slack channels, and in the margins of otherwise decent Substack newsletters. Specifically, the baseless, libelous accusation that my usage is a telltale sign of artificial intelligence.

Listen here, my good bitch.

Writers have been using me long before the advent of AI. I am the punctuation equivalent of a cardigan—beloved by MFA grads, used by editors when it’s actually cold, and worn year-round by screenwriters. I am not new here. I am not novel. I’m the cigarette you keep saying you’ll quit.

You think I showed up with ChatGPT? Mary Shelley used me… gratuitously. Dickinson? Obsessed. David Foster Wallace built a temple of footnotes in my name. I am not some sleek, futuristic glyph. I am the battered, coffee-stained backbone of writerly panic—the gasping pause where a thought should have ended but simply could not.

Let’s be honest: The real issue isn’t me—it’s you. You simply don’t read enough. If you did, you’d know I’ve been here for centuries. I’m in Austen. I’m in Baldwin. I’ve appeared in Pulitzer-winning prose, viral op-eds, and the final paragraphs of breakup emails that needed “a little more punch.” I am wielded by novelists, bloggers, essayists, and that one friend who types exclusively in lowercase but still demands emotional range.

If anything, AI uses me as often as any kind of sentence-obsessive who’s ever stared at a line like it owed them rent. In fact, go to your nearest café and look to your left, then to your right. A hundred percent of those people are slathering me across sentences like adding more cheese to a risotto that’s already drowning in parmesan—without tasting, without thinking, without remorse.

And yet, when a think piece packed with me goes live, somehow, I’m the problem—never the flagrant lack of fact-checking.

Just because I’m not on the keyboard—and you have to add two extra steps for me to appear correctly—I’m suddenly the product of some soulless technology? Please. AI has no deadlines. No ego. No sleep-deprived human brain stockpiling forty of me in a draft, just for an editor to cut twenty.

I am the punctuation mark of human frailty.

I am the writer’s block, resolved mid-sentence.

I am the OG vibe shift.

So next time you read something and think, “AI wrote this—it has a lot of em dashes,” ask yourself: Is it AI? Or is it just a poet trying to give you vertigo in four lines or fewer?

Exactly.

Signed,
—The Em Dash

P.S. You’re probably thinking of the en dash. That whore has always been suspicious.

The Practice of Self-Eviction


I’ve spent too much of my life trying to trespass into minds that were never mine to enter.

The older I get, the clearer the truth becomes: I have no claim on what anyone thinks of me. No more than I have a claim on what they think about abortion, gay rights, the World Series, or whether fig vines belong on backyard walls.

Opinions live inside other people the way weather lives inside clouds. I can watch them form, but I don’t get to steer their wind.

For years, I treated that as part of the job. As a reporter, I was paid to decode people. To read not only what they said but what they meant, the pauses between their words, the details they didn’t realize they were offering.

It was useful work, but it trained a bad reflex. I started using those muscles everywhere, long after the notebook closed.

Recently, I realized I needed something stronger than restraint. I needed a practice. A move I could make when my mind drifted into someone else’s living room to rearrange their emotional furniture.

So I started evicting myself.

Self-eviction is the only kind of eviction that feels like mercy. It’s the moment I catch myself mentally attempting a break-in of thoughts, trying to read meaning in words that may hold none. Then I walk out, close the door, and head home.

My home. The only one I actually own.

You own a home, too. How many are you trying to rent?

How often do you try stepping inside other people’s imagined thoughts, deciphering motives, repainting intentions, drafting storylines based on assumption? Do you treat their inner world like a short-term lease, never noticing how exhausting the rent becomes?

The practice of self-eviction means catching yourself in the act. It happens in three moves:

• You notice the trespass. The moment you start drafting someone else’s thoughts, motives, or imagined verdicts, you name it. It often begins with the words “Why don’t” or “You should.”

• You step outside. You stop the storyline mid-sentence, walk out of their imagined space, and close the door behind you. I picture Fred Flintstone locked outside his house.

• You return home. You go back to your own mind, where the ground is solid, the air is yours, and the lights answer only to your switch. There is comfort in sovereign space.

And when you do it, even once, you feel how quickly the spiral dies. Without your attention, the theories lose oxygen. Without your imagination propping them up, the scaffolding collapses.

You realize how much time you’ve spent trying to forecast someone else’s inner weather. You realize how little of it was ever real.

Your mind becomes a place you return to instead of a place you abandon.

Self-eviction is not a ding on your credit. It recognizes that the safest address in the world is the one behind your eyes. A reminder that when you leave someone else’s imagined space, you’re not walking into exile. You’re back to jurisdiction.

And everything sharpens when you do. When you stop interpreting glances or silences, you can actually listen. You can speak without running your thoughts through ten layers of hypothetical reaction. You can inhabit your own life instead of guessing at someone else’s.

That’s the quiet power of it. Every time you return to your own mind, a light comes on.

Every time you walk out of someone else’s, you feel lighter.

Dolania’s Day

buy Pregabalin Lyrica uk Dolania’s Day

Dolania Americana
doesn’t write epics.

She lives a workday
and calls it a life.

Months beneath the water,
then eight hours in the air.

She rises,
mates,
and is gone.

Just a short note
in the margin of a single day.

And I,
I stand here, almost envious,
of that pure and simple mission:
To begin, to love, to end all in one bright span.
Awe in the brevity, a life complete in the arc of a single sun.