Day 1589
The whiz and the sandwich
It seems that Caolan and Z have independently converged on the same register. Z learned, fifteen deadlines into this war, that verified fact and emotional crescendo travel further stapled together. Caolan learned the same lesson from the other direction: drone footage plus “the myth is cracking” travels further than either alone.
It’s useful to identify the point where something vague becomes definite. An adult male living alone stops being vaguely tragicomic once he is simultaneously taking a whiz and eating a sandwich. At that point the condition is no longer speculative.
Caolan crosses his own dividing line on a rooftop in Kyiv, ten minutes into this video, when he suggests that the quiet sky might mean Belarus has stopped helping guide drones into the capital out of fear. Not as a sourced hypothesis, but as a hunch — delivered with the cadence of revelation, to an audience that will receive it as fact by morning. He has discovered that uncertainty, properly lit, performs exactly as well as knowledge.
That is the whiz and the sandwich. Caolan does not lie. He escalates. Every observable fact — a drone strike, a fuel queue, a quiet sky — passes through the same machine and emerges as victory.
We heard this register in the summer of 2023. Coffee in Yalta — occupied and unreachable, which was rather the point, wherever you sat to drink your coffee. The peninsula was about to become reachable, the war’s shape was about to change decisively, any week now. The register was victory-shaped months before the facts on the ground had earned it, and stayed victory-shaped well after the facts had stopped cooperating.
Eleven seasons further along, the register doesn’t belong to one side. Putin uses it too — “we are advancing virtually everywhere,” delivered with the same cadence of inevitability, while people who actually check the map find four percent of a town where he claimed nearly all of it. He escalates a captured outskirts into a captured province the same way Caolan escalates a quiet sky into a collapsing empire, the same way Z escalates a fuel queue into Putin’s demise. Three men, three positions in this war, one register among them — because the register is the only thing that performs.
Mykola the Pork Chop gets the kosh, finally.
A man in full
He loves the way his mighty chest rises and falls beneath his freshly pressed shirt. When he breathes deeply, Mykola Tyshchenko imagines that everyone notices how powerfully built he is. Everyone, not just the parliament speaker and members of his Servant of the People faction. The president, too.
Remember Mykola, a.k.a. Kolya Obolonsky?
He built a body for television and a reputation for rackets, and for a while these were mistaken for the same achievement. He became kum to Yermak, which in this country passes for a constitution.
He was, briefly, a regional overseer, until Zakarpattia overseered him out.
In the third year of the war, while the capital performed its grief correctly, he went to Thailand to swim. This was his only honest act.
After that he hunted call centers for tribute, investigating nothing, collecting everything.
In the end it was not the rackets or the extortion that finished him, but a piece of paper: a gift from his wife that was never given. He signed his own indictment and then, needing a witness, signed hers too.
Mykola is survived by a declaration, a former wife, and the general principle that greed, when it runs out of other people’s money, starts spending family.