The Dictator Says
The dictator says: St. Ignatius used a cilice; hold your breath and expand, let go… and I do. He places live wires on my testicles and says: Go!
She’s gesticulating wildly and walking waterboard eyes toward me. She has violent intent, the dictator says.
I unclench my jaw, drop the bite stick, and drift away from my honeymoon croon.
I’m the balloon man over Captiva — a reductive William S. Burroughs doppelgänger. (S. for Seward, did ya’ know?)
Did you consult Burroughs’s spirit? Did you step inside the dream machine? What you sought was not forthcoming in the haze of your hallucinations. What you thought was worthy — a trip with Benway down the Amazonas, rusty metal shank in hand and a stream of clear snot running onto your lips — was instead, a dead end. A cul de sac like a new channel carved out by the overflowing river that deposited you in a billabong in the middle of the vast jungle: lost and still obscured. So now move on. Reach for that fraying vine overhead and pull yourself out before you’re sucked in by the quick mud. Dusk is approaching and something is stirring in the bush.
I am the oily fellow who travels by foot and occasionally bicycle. I have rhinestones for eyes and spangles for hair. Would you please walk along this road with me. I’ve left the barrens and seek conviviality; and you seem full of congeniality and a merry schpilkas. Won’t you be my peripatetic neighbor? Let’s just keep going — so unctuous.
Go here, then go there. Just go go go and keep going. Grit through the pain.
Just keep going.
What I’m Reading:
That is no reason to breathe easy. What we know is that, if he thinks he might lose, the president is opposed to free and fair elections. He is opposed to the idea of electoral accountability. He rejects the fundamental republican principles of self-government and popular sovereignty. If he could act unimpeded, he would make the United States a Potemkin democracy.
This election cycle may be over, but as a threat to our freedom to govern ourselves, Trump still looms.
— Jamelle Bouie / “Trump Has Been Thumped. That Doesn’t Make Him Any Less Dangerous.” / The New Tork Times
