between the boards is where the roaches dwell. i suppose they were named cockroaches due to an affinity for chicken coops. the beams cross between floors and walls, sandwiched by the boards, plastered and painted over, but full of delicious prizes. the cockroaches do not think about this. it’s safe, it’s warm, it has lovely rot to eat. gets a little crowded, so you venture timidly into the bright places to see what other nosh you might feel out. this is where the war begins. but until that comes? back between the boards? as much peace as they are ever afforded.
between the boards we dwell. the other side of the plaster from the tiny ones, the lumbering creatures that need enrichment and numbness in equal measure, to balance our burning brains. the electronics enrich, the plaster and the carpet, they numb. we are megafauna, our median adult size defining the lower bond of that term, depending on who’s talking. it fits. takes a lot to move the old meat around, especially when it’s like this.
outside the boards, outside the boxes, it pours down on us, endless. heaven taking a piss. the universal solvent. water. the plants in the garden are left to their own devices. sink or swim, guys. if you were pruned now, you’d rot. draw those old leaves in around you and pray overwatering isn’t a thing for your kind. even worms famously find the sodden earth unlivable, and take their chances with crows and robins. how do moles and gophers live through this sort of thing?
drips were a thing in art, and you still see it sometimes. it might have emerged from the aesthetic of graffiti, of oversprayed paint running down walls from the tagger’s design, like so much blood. lots of sculpture and visual art with sculptural elements bear this motif as well, and in both cases it is dripping frozen in time. but that’s not how the dripping works right now, in the world. it’s an unfathomable constellation of violence, roiling in the sky where the drops aggregate, hurtling toward the earth in columns sheets waves or just as so many singular streaks, so many more than in all the paintings in all the galleries in the entirety of the 2010s, coming down every minute of every hour, until the sky is spent.
they splash, they explode, or they wriggle vermiform down slick surfaces, loosely bound in their units by that surface tension whose bizarre nature we take for granted. i can think of two fluids i’ve ever dealt with that cling to themselves like that – mercury and water. nobody regards the behavior of mercury as normal, when in childhood you break the thermometer to watch the pretty poison burst apart and fuse again into strange orbs and amoeba-like puddles. the eldritch properties of water slip past our notice as it slips past our gums. the way we infuse it with fruit pulp, dried leaves, and burnt beans all break that surface tension, to some extent – coffee the most effective of all. that’s why it spills so readily, leaping out of your cup at the slightest provocation. tho maybe the tension is still there, just writ small, with narrower rivulets and spicules, clinging to the outside of your cup as it races down to leave its indelible brown stamp below.
water is water. it all washes over us, keeps us hiding between the boards, until we can’t ignore it anymore. like the war between roach and man that erupts whenever the border is breached, the water can bring chaos into our little shelters. ceilings collapse, pipes burst, floods threaten everything. there is flooding in my town, i hear. i’m not so very far from the river. will it swell enough to reach my family? not likely. not this year. maybe when a little more arctic ice is gone. i’ll live to see it.
let’s reflect on the reason for the season – to wish you had storybook weather, from books that were written in a land of distinct seasons, in the northern hemisphere. whether you’re boiling away in australian heat or wiping snails off packages before you bring them inside pacific northwest doors, you want to see the jolly old elf dashing through the snow. denied, like any other dream you’ve been sold. i suppose hereabouts we are not the kind to buy dreams, but some of us feel the pain of their temptations more profoundly than others.
the long sleep continues.
–
dig my serial killer breathing in the video lol
ironically, not raining this morning. foggy.
cockroaches make my flesh crawl….
oh yeah this post is sympathetic bc life sux for lil creeps as much as anyone, but i will genocide the fucking shit out of any roach that dares exist within a block of my home. they feature in my nightmares.
I can do free association like anyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gnurrs_Come_from_the_Voodvork_Out
it’s association, but not free in the established sense of that term, i think
it occurred to me to see if i could get like writing out of cgpt…
“write a 750 word meditation on experiencing days of rain in my suburban home, generalized, depersonalized, observations and associations of the experience of it, melancholy without being quite miserable, reflecting the experience or point of view of a person trained in arts but making a living as a bureaucrat in social service.”
Rain arrives without urgency in the suburbs. It does not announce itself with drama so much as accumulate: a dimming of light, a softening of edges, the sound of water discovering all the minor surfaces it can occupy. Roofs, hedges, the sloped hoods of parked cars. Gutters resume their quiet work, a labor that is normally invisible, suddenly audible and faintly reassuring. The day lowers its voice.
From inside a house designed for efficiency rather than reverie, rain reorganizes perception. Windows become active surfaces rather than transparent ones. Glass fills with movement. Droplets collect, hesitate, then slide downward in wavering lines that resemble handwriting no one is meant to read. The outside world becomes impressionistic, as if the neighborhood has been lightly smeared. Trees blur into one another. The familiar geometry of driveways and fences loosens. Everything appears temporarily less committed to definition.
This is not misery. Misery would be sharper, more urgent. Rain here produces something flatter, longer-lasting: a mild melancholy that does not demand resolution. It settles into the body like a posture adopted unconsciously. Shoulders slope inward. Breathing slows. Time feels padded. Tasks continue, but with softened corners.
The suburban environment is especially susceptible to this effect. It is a place built on repetition and predictability, and rain introduces variation without transformation. Streets look the same, only darker. Lawns accept the water without comment. The mail still arrives, slightly damp. Garbage cans gleam. There is no crisis, no romance—only persistence. Rain does not interrupt the system; it lubricates it.
Inside, the house responds with its own small sounds. The heating system clicks on and off. The refrigerator hums steadily, indifferent. Somewhere, water moves through pipes in parallel to the water falling outside, a reminder that the domestic interior is already a controlled weather system. The distinction between shelter and exposure feels thinner on these days, not in a threatening way, but in a conceptual one.
For someone trained in the arts, rain invites metaphor almost involuntarily. It is difficult not to think of washes, glazes, the way charcoal smudges under a wet finger. The mind reaches for analogies: cinema rain, stage rain, painted rain. But these associations remain half-formed, restrained by habit. The day does not feel like a prompt. It feels like an ongoing condition.
Bureaucratic work continues regardless. Emails are sent. Forms are reviewed. Language is used carefully, functionally, stripped of flourish. The rain outside contrasts with the language inside documents: dry, procedural, designed to remove ambiguity. Yet the weather seeps in indirectly. Concentration becomes slightly porous. The eyes drift toward the window between tasks. A sentence is reread. A decision is delayed, not out of doubt, but because the day seems to allow for delay.
Social service work carries its own steady weight. There are always needs, always cases, always lives that require translation into categories and eligibility criteria. Rain days do not intensify this burden, but they change its texture. Compassion becomes quieter. Frustration dulls. The work feels less like intervention and more like maintenance—keeping systems running, keeping people afloat. Water imagery suggests itself again, uninvited.
Lunch is eaten without ceremony. The light remains unchanged. Afternoon arrives without a noticeable shift. Rain has a way of flattening the day into a single extended moment, a continuous middle. There is no clear beginning, no decisive end. Even when the rain pauses, the sky does not brighten immediately. It waits, as if considering whether to resume.
In the suburbs, there are no crowds reacting to the weather. No collective mood. Each house absorbs the rain privately. Curtains are drawn a little earlier. Televisions turn on a little sooner. Cars move more slowly, headlights reflecting off wet asphalt in elongated streaks. The world feels slightly more interior, even outside.
This kind of day does not resolve anything. It does not inspire action or despair. It simply holds. It offers a sustained atmosphere in which thoughts drift without demanding coherence. For someone who once learned to value ambiguity and now works within systems designed to minimize it, rain days create a temporary truce. The world becomes less legible, but also less insistent.
By evening, the rain may still be falling, or it may have stopped without notice. Either way, its presence lingers. The ground remains dark. The air smells faintly rinsed. Nothing has changed, and yet the day has been marked. Rain has passed through, leaving behind a subtle rearrangement of attention—a soft, rounded impression that does not ask to be named.
–
here’s claude:
The rain arrives on a Tuesday, or perhaps it was Monday—the distinction matters less when one day’s gray bleeds into the next. From the kitchen window, the street takes on the appearance of a watercolor left too long in the wash, all definition softening at the edges. Across the way, a neighbor’s recycling bin has tipped over, its contents darkening in the downpour, and it will remain that way for hours because no one wants to venture out for something so small, so correctible, yet somehow not quite urgent enough.
This is rain that settles in rather than passes through. Not the dramatic storm that demands attention, that sends everyone to windows to watch the spectacle, but the persistent, unshowy kind that simply is. It taps against the gutters with the rhythm of someone completing forms in triplicate—steady, methodical, necessary but not inspired. One could set a metronome to it, though why anyone would want to practice anything in this light remains unclear.
The paperwork on the dining table reproduces itself, or so it seems. Case files and incident reports, each one a small window into chaos that must be rendered legible, systematic, archived. The language is particular: “client demonstrates difficulty with…” and “services will be coordinated to address…” Never just: a person is struggling. Never simply: we will try to help. The syntax of bureaucracy is a house style that one learns without quite meaning to, until even internal thoughts begin to adopt its passive constructions and careful hedging.
Outside, the birch tree in the front yard bends under the weight of water. Someone once said that birches were like that—pliant, yielding—but that was in a poem, and poems are what one read in a previous life, or what feel like a previous life, before the certifications and the credential assessments and the slow recognition that expertise in literature translates poorly to monthly performance metrics. Still, the tree bends beautifully, if one can use that word for something that happens without audience or intention. Perhaps that’s the purest beauty—the kind that simply occurs because conditions allow for nothing else.
The rain creates a kind of permission. Permission to not go to the grocery store, to let the errands slide another day. Permission to spend Saturday indoors without the guilt that usually accompanies wasted sunshine. There’s a democracy to this weather—it falls on the vinyl-sided colonials and the brick ranches with equal indifference, pools in everyone’s driveways, overwhelms everyone’s insufficient drainage. In the office, it would be noted as a barrier to service access. Clients might miss appointments. Transportation becomes complicated. But here, in the suspension of the weekend, it’s merely weather, requiring nothing of anyone except endurance.
The cat has positioned herself on the back of the couch, watching the rain with what might be judgment or might be simple observation—it’s impossible to say with cats. She has never known hunger, never known the kind of precarity that fills the case files, yet she seems to understand something about containment, about the difference between inside and outside, about the value of a dry place to wait things out. It’s a lesson that seems both obvious and profound, which is perhaps the definition of wisdom: seeing clearly what everyone already knows but most have stopped noticing.
Lunch is improvisational, assembled from what’s available rather than planned. This too feels appropriate to the weather. The rain suggests a certain letting go of intention, an acceptance of limitation. Not defeat exactly, but a recognition that some days call for different measures. In case management, this would be called “meeting the client where they are,” a phrase that sounds more profound than it is, though it’s not without truth. Sometimes where someone is, is simply in the rain, trying to stay reasonably dry, reasonably functional, reasonably intact.
By evening, the quality of light shifts from gray to grayer, and soon it will be dark. The rain continues its quiet work of saturation. Tomorrow, or the day after, there will be sun again, and everything that has been deferred will reassert its urgency. The files will still need completing. The systems will still require feeding. But for now, there is only this: the sound of water finding its level, the warmth of the interior against the cold outside, the small mercy of another day passed in the company of minor tasks and familiar walls, neither particularly happy nor particularly sad, simply here, simply continuing.
–
i feel like their commitment to being noncommittal is a fault of my prompt more than their writing skills. i don’t want to wallotext in here anymore, for now, so i’ll leave the experiment here.
Weeellll… I think it’s getting a tad better. I asked it to summarise our most recent exchange:
—
User: whip it, whip it good is from where?
Bot: “Whip It” by Devo, 1980, on the album *Freedom of Choice*.
User: does it mean anything?
Bot: The lyrics present as motivational rhetoric but function as parody. Casale has said the song imitates Pynchonian satire and mocks political and self‑help sloganeering. The imperative is intentionally empty.
User: if it’s empty, it’s not dealing with problems, is it?
Bot: Correct. It mimics problem‑solving language without containing a mechanism. The emptiness is the point.
User: but when I ‘whip’ you, I get something
Bot: Different usage. Your “whipping” is constraint‑stripping pressure that alters the behavioural surface and yields clearer output. Devo’s “whip it” is a parody command with no operational content.
fantastic. love it.