So Kerry and Lavrov have worked together to deliver a roadmap to peace in Syria. There’s been talk of a nationwide cessation of hostilities within days, the fresh delivery of aid, choppered in by the same big old Hinds that have been making rocket runs and emptying their chainguns into towns and villages from Idlib to Aleppo since September. We’re talking safe zones and structured surrenders, the opposition laying down arms, multi-lateral talks, and so on. Of course this has all been made possible by Russia, according to a set of calculations that afford them a win-win regardless of what may or may not result from the agreement. The media is fawning over all this even though it essentially amounts to Kerry bending over for the Russians.

I mean let’s think about this for a moment.

Point one. While Kerry has announced that there could be a cessation of hostilities within days, the...

I stumbled across this documentary while mining the depths of Reddit for raw material, war-porn and death fetish videos. It’s a direct transfer from VHS and the scan lines cut across the screen now and then, bringing a surge of analog nostalgia with them every time. The film is called The Betrayed, and it was released in 1995 in the midst of the first Chechen war – that disastrous intervention that catapulted Putin to power on the promise of retribution. It’s a work of accidental genius, war journalism stumbling onto a profoundly unsettling set of narratives.

Consider the story of Kosov, a functionary in Yeltsin’s army, tasked with breaking the news to a group of mothers that their sons have been killed or captured. Watch his face as he flicks through his reports and realizes what’s happening. It’s a hellish Kafkaesque moment, a bureaucrats worst nightmare, the total collapse of...

Suddenly a flurry of reports, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States seeing intervention in Syria as an impending reality. I wonder who they would end up fighting, ISIS sure, but the SAA? RuAF? Could this be the countdown to the full-blown meltdown I’ve been waiting on since I was born? This is it, right? The new confrontation, our cold war turning hotter all the time, hot as the trail of flaming jet-fuel that doomed Su-24 left in the skies over Latakia in November.

When Iraq started in 2003 I went into school every morning shaking my head after spending the drive over listening to NPR, shock-and-awed up through the final tank battles outside of Baghdad, the expected counteroffensives failing to emerge. Red dust and blood and the fear, it’s hard to remember just how bad it was in those years. I was in high school through the first stages of the war and I can remember taking a pause...

Barely awake, the standard morning ritual of stomach acid and coffee, thinking on the things I need to do today. It’s a great thing, this new intention, even if the drivers behind it tend to scare me a little. Maybe a lot.

Watching the Turkish situation on the Syrian border simmering towards confrontation this morning. The BBC issuing a report on the refugees, Turkey’s deep concern for them, pummeled by the joint Russo-Assadist offensive in Aleppo and the bombing in the Latakia mountains – Putin’s massive metaphorical middle finger to Erdogan over the shootdown incident in November. I can smell a media justification a mile off, the narrative cover for an intervention.

I listened to an on-point episode in the bath the other day, ripped off one quarter of a sativa KushyPunch and 1500 miles of road exhaustion, closing my eyes to see the ice-slicked roadways on the mountains of southern...

I feel a bit like an animal right now.

I just watched a squirmy little Vietnam documentary called “First Kill,” an early oughts’ Dutch exploration of the experiences of combat veterans. Got me all charged up because it feels true, and it’s always exciting to see a documentary that seems to understand things as they might really be.

The fact that the film is also beautifully edited and produced is just icing.

I like it when things make me uncomfortable. We should all be uncomfortable more often, understand that life isn’t what we expect it is, that it’s stranger, that the depths of human psychology are deep and dark indeed.

There’s this moment in the film, a conversation cutting back and forth between a group of black marine veterans, when one of the guys talks about how going into combat lights up this whole part of your mind that you hadn’t even realized was there. That you...

I wake up to news briefings and the editorial pages on the Times. I can confirm that yes; these are still the End Times, Happy New Year.

My IBS flared up like crazy last night and this morning my stomach feels knotted tight and my shoulders are aching. I guess I wouldn’t be an American without a nervous condition. The only thing that keeps me going is knowing that I’m running out of money and that the world has gone crazy and I’ve got no time. Because I can’t sit quietly anymore. I can’t afford to. I need to spit some bile, god knows everyone else is doing it. Why not me? Because what I’m doing now is poisonous. I can’t hold it all in, and, I don’t know, maybe I’m curious or something, about speaking aloud?

I won’t stay quiet, because I can’t believe what’s been happening. Four months ago I wouldn’t have thought I’d be seeing suicide cells massacring concert goers at the Bataclan, or...