Izikemonsuta

‘Vulnerable ghosts’ (or Izikemonsuta in Japanese) refers to the state where ghosts turn blue and become vulnerable to being eaten by Pac-Man after he consumes a power pellet; this is also called ‘blue ghosts’ or ‘frightened ghosts….’

1.

The Facebook profile. The LinkedIn resume. The book reviews. The tweets. The surfing selfies. The prep school speech. The Ivy League degree. The family’s wealth. The x-ray shadows. The spinal screws. The Reddit posts about pain. The mask briefly lowered. The background in video games.

Anyone suspected of committing a crime deemed sufficiently dramatic by cable news and, of late, social media is subject to an exhaustive investigation. This forensic inquiry is conducted by a digital police force, and we are its front line.

What the force seeks to confirm about the alleged criminal/vigilante/terrorist/hero/lunatic/genius/anticapitalist/tech-bro depends on where each detective’s vulnerability may lie.

See, in the beginning, it was all chiseled bone structure and thick dark curls, escaping via electric bike. Discarded shell casings inscribed with trigger words and a backpack of Monopoly bills for the lazy cops to find. A blurry screen onto which our despair and fury could be shined.

For the System operating under a veneer of protection that is devised by rank greed and rigged for suffering beyond any rational comprehension — only a Final Boss elimination by an avatar of vengeance would suffice.

They found him at McDonald's, and we swallowed him alive.

2.

In 79 AD, over the course of two days, a mountain erupted in fire. The unsuspecting inhabitants of the cities close by were trapped, either by the roiling earthquake that preceded the waves of lava or by the ash and stones that rained down over their rooftops, collapsing them. 1500 years later, when the site of this disaster was excavated, archaeologists poured liquid plaster into the voids left by the decomposed bodies to recreate the positions they died in.

Mothers holding children, couples clasping hands, sisters embracing — preserved in their last seconds through centuries of time.

A sprawling exhibition explained all this to me by way of a clunky audio guide in the Spring of 1979. I know the year now because after surprising new scientific discoveries were published about some of the volcano’s victims early last month, I googled it. I hadn’t remembered the specific museum where the exhibit took place, that it was the same one where a whale floats from the ceiling and dinosaur skeletons stalk marble halls, but it makes sense that the Museum of Natural History is where I met the ghosts of Pompeii.

I learned from the clippings I found that most of the exhibit I’d seen was filled with tools and decorations. Tools they used for making food or for mending what was broken. Decorations to adorn their homes, to make them more beautiful or comforting. Weapons, too, because, I mean, humans, so of course.

But none of those objects are what I could recall.

Only the bodies remained in my seven-year-old brain.

Grayish-white. Stone-like. Cleaving and fleeing. Balletic somehow. As though a mass game of Freeze had gone darkly awry.

3.

If you’ve been reading this publication for a while, you know that apart from a life-changing class I took in 11th grade, I very much do not have a background in astrophysics. Having said that, there’s an issue I’ve been attempting to wrap my mind around ever since involving the Universe’s expansion. Specifically, an annoying cosmological hangnail of sorts which is the fact that the rate at which the Universe is expanding seems to be increasing. And the thing is, actual astrophysicists don’t fully understand why. They refer to it as the Hubble Tension, so named for what was until recently Earth’s most powerful telescope, which discovered the dissonance between the expansion rate our early models predicted based on conditions following the Big Bang and the faster rate observed more recently and much nearer by.

Attempting to tighten the screws around this confusion, the even more advanced though unimpressively named James Webb Space Telescope confirmed Hubble’s previous findings. This was announced a couple of weeks ago, and I believe our departing President would refer to it as a BFD. It tells us that the Hubble Tension isn’t just a calculation error. It means the old models on which we’ve based our entire cosmological understanding must be missing something fundamental.

What I believe you should be advised of as readers of this extremely free-to-access but heavily-researched publication, again emphasizing my own notanastrophysicist-ness, is that the very nature of the entire motherfronking Universe is currently up for grabs.

I mean, like, the people who’ve been working on this expansion rate problem for many years?

They might need a whole NEW FUCKING PHYSICS to explain it.

4.

Last month, two days after America’s own man-made disaster was confirmed, a team of archaeologists and geneticists who had been conducting DNA tests published some revelatory determinations about the sex and ancestry of five Pompeii volcano victims.

Revelatory because what we thought we knew about the inhabitants of that ancient Roman city? Turns out, we didn’t.

The woman wearing a gold bracelet, whom we assumed was a mother, holding a child we assumed was hers? That woman was, in fact, a middle-aged man. His ancestry traced to Africa, and the child he held didn’t belong to him, at least not biologically.

Presumptions about the nature of kinship, which labels correlate with family, who is responsible for nurturing, and the borders we build around love were passed along as facts. Now, centuries later, what was obscured by layers of ash and filled in with myth is being rewritten in the elegant script of deoxyribonucleic acid.

Listen, we would certainly never draw the same limiting conclusions now, not with all our gigabytes and smart appliances, not with our land acknowledgments and trauma sensitivity, not with our opened minds around gender norms and embrace of diverse family systems, not with our ability to tease out junk science from actual fact, not with our capacity to look into the farthest reaches of space and see backward in time.

Compared to people who made little pots out of clay two millennia ago?

Come on.

We’re training robots over here, for fuck’s sake.

We’ve evolved, man.

Pablo Carlos Budass

5.

Confession Time:

It was a fairly short journey, but I ran most of the laps.

Yup.

Your girl is talking about the North Jersey Drones.

I wondered if it was China. I wondered if it was aliens. I wondered if it was our own government. I’m not proud of this, but when Chris Christie seems freaked out, I get freaked out, too. According to TikTok’s Dr. Bethenny Frankel, a nuke from Ukraine is missing, and she knows someone high-ranking who says the drones are looking for it. Because drones can sniff radiation at night. Something like that. My niece tells me I need to research plasmoids. A House Representative says he has it on very good but hush-hush authority that an Iranian mothership released the drones off the Atlantic coast. This is the point at which I remind myself the United States Congress currently claims more than one literal raving lunatic as its member.

Eventually, I discovered an article in the good ole Grey Lady explaining that the location, direction, and size of flying objects are exceedingly difficult for the human eye to discern at night. Without a visible horizon point to indicate distance, we lose perspective, so what appears to be hovering overhead may be moving away from us instead.

Another way of putting it is this: Our species doesn’t see well in the dark.

Here’s the thing about New Jersey: They have a shit ton of airports and, therefore, an even shittier ton of flight patterns. So, the drones turn out to be primarily helicopters and planes. They aren’t secret or interesting. They aren’t malignant or organized. There is no conspiracy or coverup. Not like the multi-decade-long concealment operation around actual UFOs, anyway.

Chris Christie, Dr. Frankel, me, the Congressman, and maybe you, too, were just doing what humans have done since the dawn of time: filling a void of information with an ash layer of anxiety and the pumice of hope, casting about with what’s most available: the things we fear or the things we long for, and probably a little of both.

AP Photo/MartyA45

6.

Two days before Christmas, in a Lower Manhattan courthouse, Luigi Mangione pled not guilty to first-degree murder and furtherance of terrorism, among the multiple state and federal charges he was arraigned on. The man alleged to have shot Brian Thompson in the back was bound by shackles, wearing a wine-colored sweater and chinos. He looked young, which is not the same as looking innocent. Depending on which moment the cameras captured, he seemed resolute, stone-faced, or delighted.

Despite no members of his own family being in attendance, a large crowd gathered across the street. They chanted their support and waved signs overhead, quoted the bullet casings, and cursed UnitedHealth.

FREE LUIGI, they said.

And then there were the two dozen women who stood outside before dawn, hoping for one of the publicly allotted seats available in the courtroom gallery.

It was freezing on Monday morning in New York City. 13 degrees Fahrenheit, to be precise. Still, for hours, they waited to be near a stranger. In the kind of cold where you can see your own breath.

The kind of cold where, if you don’t pay enough attention, a human could turn blue.

The Vulnerable Ghosts’ Japanese name, “Izike” (or “Ijike”), is derived from “Ijikeru,” a term for someone who has become fearful or become the opposite of what they were before.