a jack-in-the-box of new perspectives ready and able to spew prose capes and clang the punchbowl pronouns we prefer bamboo soloists to instant hobble confederates
call the department of vital fractures send for the ensign of contested stunts we got an election to settle
don’t vote for the tinker of dimwits!
What I’m Reading:
For when we talk about wilderness we are really talking about our tortured relationship with the natural world as a whole: our antagonism to it, fear of it, and — yes — our love for it too.
— Cal Flyn / The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness
No need to look at me while I write, she thinks—and what’s this mass of entropy floating next to me? It seems most people go off-camera for the writing bits, then so shall I, she said to the muted cohort. In that instant of muting her video feed, the jingle for Sears Junior Bazaar hit her consciousness:
Jesus! I haven’t thought of Sears since … what 1999? Much less Sears Junior Bazaar, I’d have to go back to childhood—the late 1980’s for that! The air thick with popcorn and candy—intense—when you walked into that Sears on Coral Way. The candy shop was situated at the center of the first floor as you walked in through any of the doors—unless you walked in through the Auto Department annex—then you were assaulted by the smell of industrial rubber used for the tires on display near the washers and dryers. Walking into that Sears on the Miami-Coral Gables line was something altogether different than walking into any other suburban South Florida Sears store—it was a synesthetic experience: smells, sounds and the promise of something novel.
What brings that to mind, 20 years later in Boston while interfacing with folks across the country in my pandemic sanitized living room? This ain’t no Proustian fugue—is it?
Or is it the virus-driven imperative of meeting other writers via Zoom? What about the curious desire of not wanting to be the object of someone else’s gaze through these pixillated distances? Is it the nebulous sack of entropy that constantly accompanies me at the peripheries of objective focus—it’s always there with me, but just beyond my ability to manipulate it in any manner.
Just what the hell was I doing on this date in 1999? I’d know instantly if I cracked the storage closet by the entryway and went into the top Rubbermaid bin, but that’s too facile; and anyway, I’m supposed to be writing in the virtual company of 25 strangers, not rummaging through my closets. But who would know in the world of muted video feeds—and we’re on audio mute all the time. Imagine the glossolalia, the cross-distortion babble, the static ambient noise—the off-camera whispers, the squelched farts, the crunching if we weren’t muted. Better this. I guess.
I guess around this time in August of 1999 I was getting ready to go back for sophomore year at Tulane … Jeez, I hated those two years in New Orleans: total disinterest in—let’s see, what was that progression in two short years—journalism, political science, communications, history. That must be some sort of record-tying feat—four majors in four semesters. If it wouldn’t have for the two years at the radio station, and the film department screenings at Loyola University next door, I might have just wandered off and hiked the Appalachian Trail for years on end—oh wait, I did that anyway. In ’99 I was at the height of my Sonic Youth intoxication. I saw them four times on the A Thousand Leaves tour. Typical me to drive both 700 and 900 miles to see them in DC and New York a week apart—and I’d already seen them in New Orleans and Miami. Every journal I had for a decade was festooned with Sonic Youth stickers—until, like every other bastard geezer, Thurston left Kim for a younger woman. Fuckers, all!
Wo! I’m supposed to be free writing with a purpose here, not getting caught up in an endless pre-millennium eddy … and time always runs … short—and out!
Come to think of it—as most of us writer types jump-cut to black—what keeps pulling at me to return to 1999? It happened to be the year my father disappeared from my life. Last sighting. Last words. Just before I went back to New Orleans for the Fall semester I saw him briefly—his invite, my birthday—at Señor Frogs in the Grove. The last time I ever heard from him was that desultory letter just before that Christmas, setting up the meeting he never showed for, just before Y2K. He was getting progressively worse: drugs, erratic behavior, offering me to drop acid with me just before my high school graduation—and what everybody thought was the topper was his bringing a young woman, only six months older than I was, and presenting her as his new wife. Some of the guys in my graduating class asked me if I could hook them up. Fuckers, all!
Just before my high school graduation he reappeared, after a year and a half absence, and revealed he’d never been more than 10 miles away from me in that time. It begged the question, why no call? But I was so pleased that he wasn’t dead—murdered, I thought, given some of the people he was hanging around with.
I see it as if a dialogue box—a cloud floating over his head reading: I’m back, Maria. Party Time!—appeared. He expected what? An invitation to the Free Kitten show? Well, dear father, I’m 40 and single—with a purpose—and haven’t seen or heard of you for twenty years. I thought you were long-gone-dead-earth-meal, or an ash molecule wafting its way south to Patagonia. Thanks for the creeped-out letter-screed about the medical-industrial complex conspiracy; about the cabal running the world; how Iridology changed your life and can change mine; and how you heal people by laying hands and shooting a laser from your third eye. You’re a stranger to me, as alien as Erich Honecker was to me in 1989—and you saw how well things worked out for him!
You stood me up on the day before New Year’s—before the world was to fall apart crushed and darkened by Y2K. I didn’t exactly expect Party Time! Woo Hoo (… and I feel pins and needles) — but I didn’t expect you not to show. To leave me expectant, wanting a still small token, at Señor Frogs. What’s the use in trying to rationalize this? Why do I find myself here again in a mindless moment?
It’s so vivid, and it haunts me, that last time I saw you: that dayglo green grass seemingly irradiated by the sun unleashed from its cloud cover. You were on a Santeria trip insisting your poor-man’s version of Madame Sosostris (did you ever get around to reading Eliot, I wonder) read my future—with her histrionic staring into my eyes and death grip on my upturned hand—it was laughable, but I kept a straight face more out of shock than sobriety. How sober were you, I wonder. Your reassuring nod, when she brought over the frozen cow’s heart and passed it all over my body to cleanse my aura, did nothing to assuage my anxiety and only proved how far I’d go to spend a couple of hours with you. Hoping. Wishing.
But now time’s up again … and now I’m back, as we writerly types listen, then ensconce ourselves behind our black boxes—long live black-box-video-feed-mute! But I’m dropped back into this boxful-o-reverie. Actually, this feels like a tale told by an idiot signifying over-caffeination and over-tiredness.
What did you mean by this game, long dead-dad, of the trailing twenty-year-old missive? How you have burrowed like a trojan horse and reappeared like a recrudescent virus. You were always a fucker(!) and you shall always be. And what the hell am I doing ensnared in this sepia-toned vortex?
If things had happened differently… what?
Would I listen to Up With People instead of the Butthole Surfers?
Would Elizabeth Gilbert be my touchstone instead of Kathy Acker and William Burroughs?
And instead of Eraserhead would my favorite film be Runaway Bride?
I don’t know. I don’t what, or where else, I’d be if those weren’t some of the most obtrusive memories that impinge on my consciousness in the darkness of the video feed mute.
What I’m Reading:
. . . Station wagons for all their air of safety always feel unsate to me. The way nuclear family should sound comforting and yet it only ever sounds like something that’s going to explode.
We vow a deathbed compact. We saga prototypes, classicists, & evergreens. We ordinance in & out of time. We be farcical masons. We ebb & floe like Greenland ice sheets under successive heat domes. We sailor-skid spanner ewers. We peso sunsets in silence. We illumine penny bardos. We are, oui.
What I’m Reading:
I want the fact of death to not flatten or destroy me, but rather to push me more toward the world.
among the profuse obtuse linearities of custom — socialized behaviors not being my thing but my proscription.
I am the punctum
that pontificates upon this day — the hypotenuse to the left notwithstanding — again, I am eye.
What I’m Reading:
Up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, we are an army of hungry ghosts, me and all these other versions of myself who sleepwalk through different houses across the city.
dollops and dogmas the commandment zone oil well an outdated mule out to pasture / in the drum something off-key this way hums
all is commercial— the conifers / the lightning sponsored by exxon / flooding brought to you by shell / wildfires subsidized by us
a dash of access a collection of comforts slushy cowardice / paralyzing nutrients / the unspeakable
a death like goldenberry
What I’m Reading:
Around 56 million years ago, a sharp rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere led to severe global warming that transformed the planet’s surface, which led to a widespread decline in forest cover. This decline during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) could have parallels for what could happen as a result of human-driven climate change, say researchers. The PETM isn’t a perfect analogue for modern day, but “what we’re looking for is guides from the past about what can happen”, says palaeoclimatologist Gabriel Bowen.
— Jacob Smith / “Ancient forests declined after CO2boost” / Nature Briefing
& indiscriminate: avocado rot, football, cracked soap dish; dropped eggshells, embryo gone. Gather mutilated joy. Smelted promises. Aloft, here & now. In open air. Gather your heartbreak, wind- ing & windowless. Animal the shadow, lurking at the edges of your mouth.
— Marcus Wicker / “How to Continue Loving the World Despite Years of Impediment”
The newfound Church of England also believed in converting the “savages” and in the concept of terra nullius, that land inhabited only by non-Christians — i.e., Indigenous Peoples-belonged to no one. The British used the principle of terra nullius to take over the entire continent of Australia, where it remained the basis of law until 1992. The British argued they could take the land because Indigenous People did not claim ownership of it: the British believed they did not use it to grow food or farm it. And if Indigenous Peoples weren’t using it to farm, the settlers coming from crowded England, Ireland and Scotland must have thought it was going to waste.
— Tanya Talaga / The Knowing: How the Oppression of Indigenous Peoples Continues to Echo Today — A Native American History and Canadian Memoir of Intergenerational Trauma
Through the pale receiver we discussed like things: ambition, roaches, red blood cells. Then a change came backward. She accused me of leaving myself in another room, when that sound reached me within that room a white shape legislated itself. Chimes chimed.
— Leslie Sainz / “[There are forces that twist the tops of us like pliers.]”
They say that people who have experienced traumatic events are kept awake by cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone, which will not stop releasing from the adrenal glands, the triangle-shaped organs above the kidneys, even though the trauma is technically over. The body remains poised in alarm. Adrenaline, another major stress hormone, is also often abnormally high. I do not know this until many years later, nor that trauma can actually change the shape, size, and function of parts of your brain, those that regulate emotions, memory, affect, sensation. I think, instead, I am convinced, instead, that my brain is stuck in some deranged loop, like a CD skipping, being played on repeat for hours. My brain is broken, short-circuited, hotwired, not mine.
— Emily LaBarge / Dog Days
It’s never our finest hour in America but right now, most things at the ledges of my life are like the sad shuffling at the edge of an LP. This one time, I forgot to pick up the tonearm & heard polyvinyl lamentations until Thursday when I finally realized the sounds were from my speakers & not one of my own haunted creation.
— Adrian Matejka / “Record Player”
Cycling can make you smarter by boosting brain functions and improving cognitive abilities. It stimulates the release of neurotransmitters and hormones that enhance mood and mental well-being. Cycling white matter in the brain, improves memory and reasoning, and contributes to overall mental fitness.
Going for a bicycle ride is one of the best all-round examples of exercise you’ll get. I’ll bet you feel the instant gratification once your pedals start turning and your heart rate increases. And your increased efforts are rewarded instantly. Don’t you get a buzz from being out of breath?
What you might not realise is what’s going on inside your head as you clock up the miles. While you’re busy getting fitter . . . you’re charging your mind, as well as your body. Didn’t think your brain would be getting a workout too?
— Kevin Glenton / “Does Cycling Make You Smarter?” / discerningcyclist.com
Sometimes still like light I catch the mermaids’ singing
swimming back to me, a certain strain on the air.
They sing for the hell of it. The pure, fresh hell.
— Jameson Fitzpatrick / “Refrain”
What I’m Listening To:
Well, the beat goes on Louder than a moustache on a face Would anybody miss the human race? I didn’t think so
I would have laughed, but it was war time yet again: more air strikes crumbling schools, more drone opportunities & misplaced homilies. You got to be kidding me.
several dozen residents in 16mm flesh pray tell of inexhaustible human folly
from crossbows and smokes to choral singers and amateur potters
hive terminology in a six- example drawing-room
youve got british east india co. tea ive got ill-fitting small pox blankets
the flesh is a synecdoche of puritan america
all cudgel and capitalist malice without explicit commentary or voiceover
an endlessly hilarious tribute to self-deception and craven will
a particular geographic conceit and manifest delusion
What I’m Reading:
We need some pines to assuage the darkness when it blankets the mind, we need a silvery stream that banks as smoothly as a plane’s wing, and a worn bed of needles to pad the rumble that fills the mind, and a blur or two of a wild thing that sees and is not seen.
Summer of smoke and crunchy lungs, Be gone with you.
Summer of heat domes and headstones, Scat, go away.
Summer of ICE at the windshield and door, Shoot your own damn foot.
Summer of tornadic sweep + blowdown destruction, Shift and strafe away the fossil fuel malefactors.
Summer of needless and unjust wars, Turn on those who wage you.
Summer of thoughtless cruelty, Make the cruelest hide in airport food carts.
Summer of electrified gloves, Summer of pain.
What I’m Reading:
It’s been said that the climate crisis will be things that you see on a screen, until they’re at your front door.
Even if you’re not one of the millions facing wildfires and floods, you’re certainly feeling the sting of big oil on your wallet and livelihood as the cost of living rises.
A myriad of woes are tied to the climate crisis. Despite the headlines, and because of them, now isn’t the time for despair; it’s time for action.
In the montage I ascend from the dashboard— depart on the window dressed of spaniels— and like the nude descending the staircase
I’m aggrieved.
For I know not where the primordial matter in the skin sack I’m in intends to go.
My watchword is wrecker—I’m a kickback president of threats.
There is a poet in my pocket that only manages: humbug! amidst the glossolalia.
I have an earwig in a sachet that transmits opioid messages of dis-illusion.
I am not my vertigo—I intone in my inclination.
I’m the slacker that darkens as I upend—the king of stalemate bequests!
There are eddies in the rivulets that course thru my coagulated blood.
I am a godson among the startled—and humming a turd-tune I know . . .
Violin-leaves tar at the wings— Dew-drug sinners eat garnet stopgaps— There be rodent chocolates in the chinaberry cabinet—and three clear tools of destruction.
(I intend to use)
Come. Appease.
image: p. remer
What I’m Reading:
Because Indigenous Peoples did not live in societies that the colonizers understood, we were considered not civilized enough to govern ourselves. “It is on the British race, whether in Great Britain, or in the United States, or in the Colonies, or wherever it may be, that rest the highest hopes of those who try to penetrate the dark future, or who seek to raise and better the patient masses of mankind,” Britain’s Lord Rosebery told an Australian audience in 1883.
— Tanya Talaga / The Knowing: How the Oppression of Indigenous Peoples Continues to Echo Today – A Native American History and Canadian Memoir of Intergenerational Trauma
thee istsfor manity reader 