★ The yellowing leaves were lit through from the side, and the air was humid and already warm. The clouds were thin but persistent, so that it took hours before the sun could securely establish itself. Camp chairs were set up by the Apple Store. The warmth was as sweet and out of place as honey on a grilled cheese sandwich. Stacked bags of garbage were reeking in the night as if it were July. The moon stood low, its features clear despite the layer of cloud enlarging its light.

JARED is frantically texting his DAUGHTER, who now acts as the shadow President per a recent vote among some members of the White House senior staff. Even for a bright child who knows some Mandarin, the job is extremely challenging. GARY COHN warned her that much of managing is just listening to people bitch. But leading became easier after she learned how to delegate and how to read an indictment. Her job also became easier once she got her own office. She reads her father’s message from inside her shadow Oval Office, a Fisher Price indoor outdoor playhouse.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [perturbed]: Dad, I’m in here. [KUSHNER DAUGHTER exits her Fisher Price indoor outdoor playhouse. She gestures to JARED to sit at the tea party table she’s set up outside her playhouse. Because the chair is so small his knees shoot up very high, like construction site cranes operated by men on the take.] And I can’t pardon you. He has to.

JARED [guiltily]: So here’s my issue. [JARED crosses his leg. His foot is practically on the table now.] Your grandfather blames me for the Mueller investigation.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [practicing her handwriting on GARY COHN’s tax plan]: He also thinks you’re the worst political advisor in history. [KUSHNER DAUGHTER moves her father’s foot so she can look him directly in the face.]

JARED [nodding]: So when I get charged I need him to pardon me.  If I get charged.

[JARED fidgets for fifty seconds. KUSHNER DAUGHTER’s phone buzzes. She responds “Thank you” to an email from KELLYANNE CONWAY listing why job retraining doesn’t work/matter.]

JARED [sadly]: When I get charged.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [drawing a castle and a princess on the part of GARY COHN’s tax plan that would increase the deficit]: Dad.

The clocks go back this weekend, which means everything will be darker earlier. Everything is so dark already I bet you won’t even notice. Anyway, here’s music, enjoy.

★ A momentary gorgeous purple glow heralded nothing but a dull gray morning. The cloud layer was featureless, like a clear dawn sky that had simply failed to ever brighten. No shadows moved to track the passing hours. The temperature was just short of being cold. In late afternoon there was a silvery light in the southern distance, but the shine stopped on the building faces just past 15th Street. Up on the West Side at rush hour there was light on some but not all of the tower tops, again just out of reach. The clouds overhead were acquiring a pink tinge and, a full workday after they might have, beginning to thin out toward blue.

Image: Dave Parker via Flickr

11/2 8:25 ET Buffalo -3 At NY Jets

Remember to turn
Your clocks back an hour Sunday
And bet on the Bills

PICK: BILLS

11/5 1:00 ET At Philadelphia -8 Denver

Eagles are the best
thing to happen to Philly
Since wizz in cheesesteaks

PICK: EAGLES

11/5 1:00 ET LA Rams -3.5 At NY Giants

The Giants couldn’t
Beat a traffic ticket on
The damned BQE

PICK: RAMS

11/5 1:00 ET At New Orleans -7 Tampa Bay

The Saints defense is
Tougher than a bear eating
A taco in church

PICK: SAINTS

Image: SiriusXM Escape via Facebook

Reading about the advent of satellite radio is a little like talking to a well-meaning, yet technologically un-savvy parent—the mix of wonderment and skepticism is, well, adorable. It was way back in 1992 that the Federal Trade Commission began apportioning frequencies on which satellites, from way far away, could “broadcast compact-disk-quality digital sound to homes and cars.” Though, one barrier still stood between you and digital tune-age, as the New York Times noted, “Listeners will first have to buy entirely new radios, which do not yet exist.”

Fast-forward to 2001, and the launch of the newly christened Sirius Radio’s first satellites. I would be remiss not to mention that the currently active pair, floating some 22,000 miles above the Equator, are named Rhythm and Blues. Rhythm and Blues can both receive a signal from ground transmitters, then bounce it back down to us here on earth, where listeners get music, talk radio, sports—whatever they’ve tuned into on the proverbial dial. One of these 30 million people is my dad, in his car, listening to the only station I care about: Escape on SiriusXM.

In my family, we lovingly call Escape “The Xylophone Station.” It is the softest of soft music lineups, a veritable treasure trove of mellow grooves. Or in SiriusXM’s words, “instrumental covers of the great melodies of the past 80 years,” which, well, is pretty much everything you can think of, and things you probably never thought needed an easy instrumental cover.

Screengrab: Facebook

While Germany takes a vacation to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, and America is busy reeling from the Haribo carnauba wax scandal and thus debating whether it should throw away the Fun Size bag of Goldbären America’s daughter got trick-or-treating (or eat it, but never buy Goldbären again), one German has been hard at work, proving his Germanness to his Landsleute.

The German in question is one Hasnain Kazim, an award-winning journalist and editor for Der Spiegel currently based in Vienna. Kazim was born in Oldenburg, attended university in Hamburg, and completed several years of compulsory service to his country (conscription there didn’t end until 2011)—not filing paperwork in some backwoods hospital like most of my friends did, mind you, but in the goddamned German Navy. In other words, Kazim, a German-born and German-educated German, who has worn the German military uniform and currently writes and edits, in German, for Germany’s biggest magazine, is DEUTSCH AS FUCK. I have never seen a Germaner person than this individual, and that includes this Aryan-Nations-looking motherfucker who sings Lieder.

However, because Kazim’s parents are from Pakistan, and Germany has a long history of racial iffiness slash very bad open racism—especially given the recent surge of the Alternative für Deutschland party, the virulent xenophobes and open white supremacists who just gained a hundred seats in the Bundestag—our dude gets his share of trolls.

July 4^th, 2017

Yes, I went the long way to avoid a certain shopkeeper
who grunts at me

and instead I passed a street vendor
selling star-spangled towels and a tank top that reads

I HAVE NO TITS and I wish I was fearless
enough to ask who that shirt is meant for, and if,

at this point in time, we should even consider irony.
I’ve had tits for three decades

so I’m used to going the long way.
Fellow Americans,

I’m going to tell you something I’ve known
since childhood. Men who want to hurt you?

They want to hurt you
because it makes them feel good to hurt you.

The wifi in the Awl office is out so in a couple of hours I’ve got to go in and sit there waiting during the window Verizon gave us for service. I’ve been irritated and annoyed by it since the start of the week but it suddenly occurred to me this morning: For four hours (that may be an optimistic estimate) I will be in the one place in the world where I can be totally and legitimately untroubled by Internet. It’s actually going to be like a goddamn dream. Maybe you guys should figure out a way to disable the Internet at the places where you live and work. Can anyone at this point in time deny that life would be so much brighter without it? Anyway, here’s music, enjoy. I won’t be able to listen to it in a couple of hours but oh my God will that trade-off ever be worth it.