There is no point In doing anything, There is no resisting The monstrous god Who devours His own children.
— Fernando Pessoa / “Ode I”
Cars are, without exaggeration, one of the most significant and negative environmental, political, social, and cultural forces in the history of humanity … Instead of unbounded freedom and rugged self-reliance the never-ending proliferation of automobiles has delivered a host of costs and burdens. Among them are the demolition of our neighborhoods, towns, and cities to make way for expensive car infrastructure like freeways.
— Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon & Aaron Naparstek / Life After Cars
My disorder stacks to the sky. Those whom I loved were attached to the sky by an elastic. I turned my head … they weren’t there.
— Jean Cocteau / “The Red Packet”
Oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess energy in the Earth system, which is primarily caused by burning fossil fuels, such as oil, coal, and gas. That imbalance hit a record 23 zettajoules last year, more than double the average of the previous two decades.
As a result, the oceans are warming at an accelerating rate. In 2020, the amount of heat being added to the oceans was equivalent to about five Hiroshima bombs per second. Last year, it was closer to 11 Hiroshima explosions per second. The UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, has warned “Earth is being pushed beyond its limits.”
— Jonathan Watts / “On the Longest Day of the Year, Ocean Surface Temperatures Hit a Record High” / Mother Jones
Where there is violence there is always a trace of an echo buried deep deep down
— Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme / Until we became fire and fire
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
We don’t know anything You don’t know anything I don’t know anything about love But we are nothing (Whoa-oh-oh) You are nothing I am nothing without love
— The Magnetic Fields / “The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure”
My blood has become ink. It was necessary to stop this revulsion at all costs. I am poisoned down to my bones. I sang in the dark and now that song frightens me.
Today I broke my vow of silence when I broke the glass in case of emergency. I croaked in a muttering fashion most embarrassing, “Ra… rah… run. Run! There’s a moth infestation.” We had moths. We were underground in our hermetically sealed glass boxes, and here we were with an infestation of moths. How was this possible? Had we not paid our alms, and made our ablutions in the appropriate manner? Had we not made cretinous burnt offerings—I was always against this affectation—pungent and breath-taking like good little pawns. For our troubles, for our conceits to our deity … we get moths! Was it worth breaking 137 days of silence over? Documents were signed, codicils initialed, an ascetic’s vow taken. The pomp. The sacrifice. Moths! What does this mean?
What I’m Reading:
My enemy keeps a bowl of anemones on my bedside table and this cruelty has killed my will to perform even the duties of an invalid
the strangest, most riveting fists found purchase at my temple a familiar scenario
a rough patch— a dispatch—
aggression unmoored this land is not mine / not yours it belongs to all / to none
so take your right cross & elbow shuck listen as i convert it to poetry for the empathically challenged suck on hardscrabble knuckles tattooed
“H A T E”
a brusque burlesque of mutual disdain convened long before the season of fake fascist spray-ons
all these deft scraps of ignorance a cutting shorthand of petty grievances dyspeptic interlocutions & prickly retractions unretracted unredacted — i remember last year was so hot
this will be hotter
this year will demarcate — forthwith — the honeymoon croon from hell
the detonation nation
plug your ears it’s coming
What I’m Reading:
Our lives are spinning out from world to world; the shapes of things are shifting in the wind. What do we know beyond the rapture and the dread?
i googled white nationalism— flashes of congealed bacon
you play the tragic heroine toothy femme fatale
dont judge my painting until i finish my ropa vieja
dont cut your hair before tinting it blue
i fix you a tongue on rye my marbles gather dust
we wait for slide guitar solos on an unmoored pontoon bridge
in darkness your voice has the timbre of rime
the choice you say—love love
is love
What I’m Reading:
. . . the world is always ending for each of us and if one begins to withdraw from the possibilities of experience, then no one would take any of the risks involved with love.
When I consider the curious habits of man, I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.
— Ezra Pound / “Meditatio”
A record-breaking heat wave is baking Europe, hot on the heels of unprecedented temperatures in May. “Heatwaves are here to stay, until we turn the tap off to global emissions,” says Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. “They’re more frequent, they’re more intense and they’re lasting longer.” Europe is heating up twice as fast as the global average, and scientists are trying to understand the complex factors that will determine whether this year’s sweltering heat should be considered ‘the new normal’.
— Flora Graham / “Does Europe have a new climate?” / Nature Briefing
Days are dams. Each week posts a sign above the water. This week: Goodbye. Last week: The Possible. I close the dam of The Possible, open the dam of Goodbye.
— Lily Brown / “Venus Transit”
Trust in science has collapsed — right? The evidence says that it’s not necessarily so. From a global perspective, public trust in science and scientists is high. Trust has dropped in certain groups, notably among Republican-leaning people in the United States. And research in the United Kingdom shows that the proportion of people who have “a lot” of trust in science tends to be lower among politically right-leaning groups than those on the left. In many countries, people are also increasingly questioning definitive evidence on divisive issues such as vaccines, partly because scientific information is being drowned out online.
— Flora Graham / “Trust in science: what’s really happening?” / Nature Briefing
Poverty is violence. We know the look of dead things behind pinned drapes and how to make history in one day.
— Silvia Bonilla / “Bone Harp”
Blatant lobbying, not for the sake of our country, but for the fossil fuel industry, in which almost all the ultrarich – including, in all likelihood, the proprietors of these newspapers – are heavily invested. These people are not and never will be your friends.
— George Monbiot / Bluesky post
Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
— Wisława Szymborska / “Nothing Twice”
What I’m Listening To:
If nothing means anything And I’m just a little big nerd Floating in the ether (Ether) Crying in the bathtub Metaphorically speaking, of course I’m lost, we We lost our minds, our marbles
thee istsfor manity reader 