Relevance was not his strong suit. Assonance was a mildly strong point. And dissonance was his power alley. So he detuned his lyre and randomly plucked strings. He tuned his dulcimer to F sharp and struck it with claw hammers which were more appropriate for sheet rock installation. He retrieved his banjo from a dusty corner in the basement and pulled on the strings hard enough to feel them loosen. He opened a can of stale tennis balls and threw them at the banjo head and strings. He then found his ukulele in the closet and tore out the E and C strings and went mad strumming at the speed of Johnny Ramone on the G and A strings. He even shouted, “gabba, gabba, hey” once for nostalgia sake. In the office he took his electric guitar off its stand, plugged it in, and maximized the fuzz box and with drumsticks he did a ratamacue on the fretboard until there was a maelstrom of skronk filling the room. After a minute of this, his heart racing and the incipient pangs of a migraine squeezing the sides of his neocortex, he raised the guitar over his head and smashed his acoustic guitar to splinters in its stand — and then started on the walls. In this manner his 3/2 with 2 car became a massive heap of refuse. He was proud to take out his home before the weather got the best of him. “Hurricane that! Fire that! Flood that! Tornado that! Glacier melt that! Sea level rise that! Earthquake that! Virus that! Gas explosion that! Take that! I’m in control, Mofo!
What I’m Reading:
AI seems likely to enable much better propaganda and surveillance, both major tools in the autocrat’s toolkit.
Three things: I’ve never been to a funeral, a man is his own prophet in the morning, a door
floats above an endless horizon. But I have walked through hospice halls, I have stood at the edge of a cliff.
— Brent Ameneyro / “As the Fog Starts Burning Away”
What to do with this information? I confess, I do not know. I confess that when the pareidolia was not frightening it was, often, beautiful, in a darkling kind of way, reconfiguring time and space, cause and effect. This information I know what to do with even less.
— Emily LaBarge / Dog Days
The Yangtze River in China lost its nerve and wanted vengeance.
Elsewhere a desert caught fire. We got a plastic green turtle and named it Sir
Desmond Tutu. A snake entered our house through the drain
and like any good son, I ran and hid under the bed.
Google became a thing. Viagra became a thing.
— Gbenga Adesina / “The People’s History of 1998”
The Artificial State is less a state than a dream of being without one, the dream of the severing of humans not only from the natural world but also from one another, every umbilical cord cut. An extreme form of this dream is the actual plan of a very small number of staggeringly powerful twenty-first-century merchant princes, Silicon Valley billionaires who, seeking escape from the prison of their own bodies, intend to have their consciousnesses uploaded onto computers when they die, an idea that, like much of what they want, comes from a story published nearly a century ago in a science fiction magazine for boys. The Artificial State they envision for everyone else, and have begun to build, is a future in which humans are ruled, and many replaced, by machines owned by corporations owned by themselves. This future, too, comes from science fiction. It involves both the desertion of liberal democracy and the destruction of the natural world. The very planet, once a home to be tended, is to become instead a warehouse, its surface covered in data centers powering artificial brains.
— Jill Lepore / The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
I dream myself into moss wings and legs strong as mora
but in the morning I am clay again, I am milk and dough and unhealed wound…
— Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné / “Mother Dreamwalker”
The United States has 4,400 directional miles of bike lanes, offering safety for anyone serious enough to risk it. The push for bike lanes began in the 1960s and grew in the ensuing decades. Theoretically, the lanes offer a carbon-neutral alternative to driving a car. If one chooses to bike instead of drive, it’s one fewer toxin-spewing death trap creating pollution and traffic congestion on the motorways. That sounds like a boon for the world, so naturally, the Trump administration wants to do away with it.
Condemning “DEI bike lanes”, the Trump administration has made a point of freezing or canceling related grants, referring to alternative transit options as unworkable in the United States, and suggesting removing the lanes that already exist.
— Dave Schilling / “Why is the Trump administration calling bike lanes ‘DEI’?” / The Guardian
I have never died and never will.
Every time I split I say goodbye to my eternal self.
— Richard Grossman / “Amoeba”
What I’m Listening To:
When I figure out where I’m goin’ It’ll be too late to change The course of where I think I’m goin’ Sometimes life can be so strange All forgotten will be this
im a dream creep having bug dinner / making errant presentations in the round / converting pathological crab kids in love to arthritic husks / i tease a sickle / a cudgel / all show of course / i aint no aggro-chaperone hypnotist / overnight lows will drop to antiquarian simmer / please wear protective eyewear+sling your colostomy bag over your shoulder for quick escape / im having bullet pie / as everyone these days insists on carrying guns / i insist on forearms / have a quiver full of them / they get me thru the lean times / im a maladjusted tassel in a 1960’s burlesque / please dont touch the asterisks
the sickness doyenne suggests: mindfulness based stress reduction+meditation / bittersweet nightshades / bathing in great excremental deposits / thanks / ill pass / ill start the purgatotrial convolutions instead / the yellow-green resonances like gnashing teeth
im changing my insoles+increasing my fiber intake / im sorta hooked on imported guano / so maybe the occasional quaff / ill find a tendinitis sweetheart who spits monosyllabic love-tee-dums in basque / become a long-rapier foreman / hedge fund my way thru thee anthropocene / every dream creep for themselves
What I’m Reading:
That New World featured, too, a series of tragedies: an atomic arms race, changes to the earth’s climate, and, everywhere in the industrialized world, pollution, deforestation, and the eradication of wildlife species and habitats. “It is only within the moment of time represented by the twentieth century that one species — man — has acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world,” Rachel Carson wrote in 1962, “and it is only within the past twenty-five years that this power has achieved such magnitude that it endangers the whole earth and its life.”
During the Great Acceleration, at the dawn of the age of data, humanity glimpsed not only the possibility of the resurrection of the human as a machine but the possibility of humanity as a menace to the planet itself.
— Jill Lepore / The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
Insouciant pill pusher — writer of scrips intended to send me to oblivion, to live thee life of the lotus eaters. Dr. Closer — shutter of the epistemic valve — he wants me to live the limpid life of the unsullied brain. Lamb-shackled.
You translucent Mesmer of enthrallment… limn the cathode nimbus…
Then there was talk between my cousin J. and my friend D., and me about the film I’d recently seen at a nightclub. J. was talking to a masculine woman, and I wanted to ask him about the lesbians in the film — with whom he was familiar.
J. jumped between me and D. — and J. tried to grab my crotch a number of times. I had to push him away.
You see I almost missed the train, but I managed to wave the engineer down by a series of complicated mirrors mounted on the cars. She stopped and I got in, only to find a bunch of young men from a military academy, which I intuited were students from Greenland — they were crowding the train.
I saw D. and sat next to him, and he told me how stoned he was, and all about the genetically modified strain he’d been smoking.
Then J. found us — D. and I were walking down a side street and we saw the shambles of a recording studio with all manner of murals on the ruined walls.
“Look it’s Muscle Shoals studio. How historic! This is where James Taylor recorded that classic album,” D. said.
“Nah, I don’t think so,” I said. “You might be thinking about Johnnie Taylor. I don’t think James Taylor recorded here.”
J. was throwing rocks at the few remaining walls— pristine white bricks with murals of steam locomotives on them.
“Anyway, we’re not in Alabama,” I said. “We seem to be in Greenland.”
“Ah, fuck, shut up!” J. said. “You’re all incongruity and anachronism spilling into other recurrent dream sequences. Or wait, was this all the same pandemic dream?”
The pungent smell of sulphur overtook us as the crusted ground gave out beneath us.
What I’m Reading:
Liberal democratic states make citizens; the Artificial State makes trolls.
— Jill Lepore / The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
The alpaca tycoon • modulus repaired Takes onto the hills • savage in sharpness Critical focal acuity deglazed • warping On shadows like soft monsters unloosed In the monochrome desert
Avert your eyes as what you see is illusory Circles of confusion sloughing silver Hallides this way and that • unmoored crystals Like planets in a rhumba line bound For the event horizon
Bound to your pinned vision Bound to your matted pelt
What I’m Reading:
We say in the grand scheme of things as if there were one. We say that’s not how
thee istsfor manity reader 