There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.

“At the point a school gets to nine or ten students who should have been kicked out years ago, or who should never have been let in to begin with, the problem isn’t the number of families who aren’t missionally aligned. The problem is that the school’s stated rules and goals are not the school’s actual rules and goals. At nine or ten, whatever behaviors or beliefs should have gotten a student kicked out have become sufficiently common that they are not so much a violation of the school’s written rules as obedience to unwritten rules. A school of video game junkies and wannabe influencers is a school for video game junkies and wannabe influencers.”

-from my latest for CiRCE

Over the National’s last five albums, Matt Berninger has come to rely more and more heavily on a specific lyrical formula.

I was doing something random and specific/

You were doing something even more random (with too many syllables)/

Sardonic question?

It practically writes itself.

I was selling peacocks to priests in Berlin/

You were eating nachos in the dark with Frank Lloyd Wright’s ghost/

Isn’t it nice Christmas only comes once a year?

Or…

I was confessing my sins to broken stoplights on April Fool’s Day/

You were explaining to a telephone psychic that childhood ends the day after your last toy breaks/

Am I better off than I was four years ago?