On Surviving One More Year, Ambivalently

Comrades and confidantes, one and all:

It seems the wheel has turned again. As of January 1, I am officially in the last year of my fifth decade. It’s honestly hard to believe, but also the most believable thing. I’m less troubled by it than I feel I should be. Perhaps because the dread dismay that is so called middle age peaked some five years ago. Perhaps because I can’t think of a time when I’ve looked on consensual reality with more distaste.

This is no doubt in part grumpy-old-man syndrome entering the critical phase, but it feels like a reasonable response to the word we live in, all things considered. I often think incredulously of the fact that my father died before 9/11, the lucky bastard. “When I was alive,” my favorite undead narrator says, “I imagined something redemptive about the end of the world.” And yet! “The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.” I’ve seen the future and it’s unbelievably awful, in other words, but also it’s just a drag. You really don’t want to stay around for too long!

Anyway, I’m writing to wish you a happy holiday—and because this is my chance to share (again!) an image that means a lot to me. It features a photo by none other than the legendary Farouk Ibrahim (who as it turns out has an Instagram all his own):

My excuse is the opening of the longer of two newly published pieces that are free to read online: “Jab, Cross, Infidel“, which is one of three essays in the first, boxing-themed part of Postmuslim (in Shenandoah—thanks Anes Ahmed and DW McKinney):

On October 7 I’ve been boxing for two years. My phone wallpaper is a picture of Muhammad Ali with his hands cupping his face, performing salah. It’s the June 1, 1966 issue of Akher Saʿah. “A week in Cairo with Muhammad Ali Clay,” the main title reads … Akher Saʿah—the Last Hour—is our answer to Life magazine, kind of. It’s existed since 1934, but its heyday was the Sixties … Its covers feature incredibly iconic figures, both local and international. But what I can’t get over is the face of American racial pride performing Islam for the benefit of that still triumphal regime. Boxing, Islam, Egypt, America, the Sixties—all in one magazine cover. The image is my mascot. 

The shorter piece, “The World in My Throat“—about the aforementioned zombie apocalypse, genocide, and globalization—is my Kweli Journal debut (thanks Laura Pegram):

At the start of the so called war, I used to wake up convinced there was a dead baby under my bed. Later that baby started to appear in my dreams. He was dying of malnutrition then, looking skeletal—monstrous. As she shambles about, breaking away from the group, the zombie [in It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over] encounters and sticks with a dead crow that talks to her. Early on she wraps the crow in the sleeve of a red shirt and carves out a space for it under her own ribs … I’ve long stopped watching the carnage and the cruelty streaming nonstop on all my screens. But, hidden even from myself, I’ve found a place for the dead baby inside me. He talks to me, too, but like the crow—“Apple Arm Ink Cloud”—he makes no sense.  

Before I share some 2025 photographic highlights, evidence of life, be warned: I may write again very early on in 2026 with news and solicitations—things are moving on fast—and now as ever you may receive a short Arabic poem from me at any point in time.

I love you,

Y

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