Hi everybody. There are two more pieces to read in my Substack publication, My Special Interest.

‘Ceremony of Innocence’ (readable here) takes its name from W B Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’. It’s a chonky essay about the origins of astrology and astronomy, and archaeological evidence that suggests (often very strongly) that human beings have been tracking the movements of the stars, and reading into those movements, for longer than we’ve been doing just about anything else. In other words, astrology may be one of the things that makes us human, and one of very few practices that unite cultures throughout history, and all over the world.

The most recent upload leads with a slightly provocative question: Was Jesus of Nazareth Autistic? (click here to read it) This question isn’t definitively answerable, but that’s not the point. Thinking about the idea that one of the most significant literary-historical figures in all of human history was in fact neurodiverse, in some way, can actually be very interesting. This piece was informed by my reading three texts – a novel, a nonfiction book, and an academic article about the role of “collaborative morality” in the “emergence of personality variation and autistic traits”.

In other news, I’m back in Bangkok, staying in a wonderful flat with three Frenchmen, in the room of a friend I met first in Ukraine, in the village of Polyanytsya, in the gorgeous Carpathian Mountains. It’s good to be here, among friends old and new. Today, I baked bread and chocolate chip cookies, and drank wheat beer in the afternoon. I also went to the gym in the morning, but only managed about 30 minutes before I was too sweaty to touch anything. It’s hot season in Thailand. Next week I’ll start my massage therapy course, and the week after that is the biggest holiday in the Thai calendar: Songkran, aka Thai New Year.

I’ll leave you, just for the stinking hell of it, with a video of the inimitable Tom Waits reading a poem by the incorrigible Charles Bukowski. See you when I see you! X