NOTES

The United States is devouring itself — methodically, deliberately, and without remorse. The grip tightens. What’s unfolding in Minnesota and beyond — a state increasingly honest about its priorities, its instruments, and the very human cost it is prepared to absorb — and how far it is willing to go to enforce its will.

What remains of care, moral coherence, or leadership has been hollowed out and rebranded as weakness. Executive authority behaves like monarchy. Business elites fall into line. The legislature lags behind, a theater troupe in a building made of ash. Citizenship becomes conditional. Presence becomes suspect.

None of this is accidental. ICE is no longer a reactive force; it has been fully absorbed into the infrastructure of domestic control. It is a standing army for internal enforcement. A preemptive apparatus for compliance. And the figures who helped normalize this — the Joe Rogans, the plausible-deniability class — now feign surprise, as if the language they platformed were symbolic, not operational.

Power depends on division. It survives by naming shared humanity itself an ideological threat. Solidarity is criminalized. Empathy — the refusal to accept that some lives are structurally expendable — is ridiculed. To see yourself in someone targeted is to destabilize the division on which power depends. The question is not whether these actions are coherent — they are. The machine is operational. The real question is whether we are willing to recognize each other’s humanity within the devastation — and what follows when we do.

I am writing from inside the year, not above it. It did not arrange itself chronologically. It returned in fragments—light levels, temperatures, and intervals of waiting and movement. The year did not feel permissive. Mornings when the city appeared softened at its edges. Evenings that closed without urgency. Rooms held together by quiet systems—carpet, air, music below hearing. A body learning how long it can hold before it rests.

Throughout 2025, Penalty prioritized maintenance over expansion. Certain initiatives were delayed or withheld entirely. Not all activity was surfaced. This absence functioned as calibration, though it was not felt as neutral. Visibility was adjusted. The system rests, as it often does, in silence.

What remains from the year is contact, often brief, often insufficient. Another body nearby. The relief of slowing without collapse. The understanding that growth does not require force, only availability. If something haunts this year, it is continuity. I write to breathe alongside the record. The system listens. The body rests. Something between them continues.

For 2026, the record remains open.

Recorded between detection and review.

Detection. Containment. Eradication. Recovery. Lessons learned.

Side streets. Parallel cases. On warm nights—20C—London loosens. Windows stay open longer than they should. Conversations drift and lose their owners. You walk without purpose and still arrive. Paperwork, protocol, a gentle insistence that this is being handled. A hand on the shoulder that never quite touches. Night buses humming. Glass collected before morning. The thresholds to psychic, non-branded, disguised as architecture. You don’t cross them deliberately. That’s it—until it’s happening.

She holds the interval. The pause where meaning might form and doesn’t.

Cold tea. Salt from skin. A taste like pennies when a thought is kept.

Routes, not destinations. Streets stay open. Bridges lighten after midnight. That’s it. It’s happening.

The conversation circles. It doesn’t advance.

• 1Obscurity is not neutral.
• 2Some coverings slow perception so that form may be felt.
• 3Others slow perception so that form cannot be grasped.
• 4Both resemble weather. Only one behaves like shelter.

The days open under a low, even sky. Light thins into grey. Edges soften. In fields, mist settles on hedges and animals alike; in the city, buildings loosen, briefly negotiable. The world slows. Attention deepens. This kind of obscurity holds.

Elsewhere, the same vocabulary appears, but the effect reverses. Clarity is postponed without consent. Noise thickens. Meaning thins. Systems perform complexity while avoiding coherence. The performance continues, familiar and hollow, asking to be endured rather than understood.

The light still arrives. It always does. But here it reveals less than it should. Forms return incomplete. What was delayed is not recovered.

• 5Protective obscurity permits return.
• 6Extractive obscurity accumulates delay without release.
• 7The Condition does not remove cover. It records its effects.

"Zero stands as the far horizon beckoning us on the way horizons do in paintings. If you look at zero you see nothing; but if you look through it, you see the world."

—Robert Kaplan

Day Zero

There’s a compelling contradiction to zero—a shape that’s both ominous and electric. It’s easy to see zero as stagnation. But zero also lingers, daring us to look more carefully in that empty space. Potent inquiries arise from empty space, music begins with silence: Where do we go from here?

0–0

I often return to the 1994 World Cup final: a 0–0 standoff that ended on Roberto Baggio’s penalty sailing into the cosmic sadness above the crossbar. I was a teenager, but the intensity felt like glory and heartbreak compressed into one kick. That razor’s edge—the tension between collapse and redemption—is why this space is called Penalty. You might miss, you might score. But either way, you must act.

Reset

Penalty began as a side project. When other frameworks fell away, it became the vantage point—an opening.