I bought all my Halloween candy from the Asian grocery this year. Just to mess with the little tykes.

Various candy in wrappers. Chinese and Japanese labeling
Five jack o’lanterns

Regarding the problem of small, local businesses being bought out by private equity firms. Would it be possible to build a sort of Green Bay Packers version of private equity (private, not tax funded), in which investment was open only to people within a particular, small geographic area? So that if a dentist or mechanic retires and wants to sell his business, there’s a ready buyer to keep it in the community? I could imagine even this sort of thing getting too big, but I could also imagine it being structured to encourage sell-offs to local buyers.

Empty trail, alone. St. Luke’s summer.
Gold leaves still on river-mirror, gold leaves
Bright against blue sky. The sun too strong
Through broken roof—this crumbling tree-world shelter.
I write my poem perched on crackling bones.

This harvest moon—or hunter’s moon. Who remembers?
Hangs on into autumn daylight, faded glory
Blurred by trails of jet planes, ancient choreography
Lost in busy coming and going.

Seeing this I immediately understood the 1908 reference to “hp” but had never heard of health points or hit points. NB I was minus sixty-three in 1908, but I swear the Edwardians make a hell of a lot more sense to me than you people do.

A woman from Raleigh, N.C.,
In the interest of transparency,
Told me all that she knew,
Whether fictious or true,
Whether trivial or vital—
        and then,
When at last she had finished,
Her store not diminished,
She started all over again.

I told him that it was okay
If he had nothing left him to say,
But it seemed that he’d rather
Go on with his blather
Until his tongue rotted away.

Doug must have had the night off.

Kristy Kreme sign with only HNUTS lit up

So I checked my Amazon “About You” profile, which I read knows all sorts of crazy personal things about people. I use Amazon almost exclusively for business supplies and occasional add-ons so basically it knows I am a technologically fussy artist with a dog (omg wtf right?) and nothing I have not posted publicly here except one rather significant personal detail that is incorrect. Is this page a red herring to hide how much they actually glean from cookies, or is surveillance capitalism less impressive than I was led to believe?