Magpie thoughts: Thunder asunder — Divides the heart.
Polly squawking. I have witnessed this before. It sounds absurd.
A crow Laocoön — Warn me not — Don’t wish to know what this way comes.
Sparrow filch A higher logic. Flits away at looming dark.
What I’m Reading:
The pace of recent climate change is stunningly, bewilderingly fast. Most previous ages of the planet lived out healthy geological lifespans and died of natural causes. That is not what is happening now. The world is not supposed to warm this quickly, to change this suddenly. It never has, at least not since humans (or anything like humans) have existed. It feels wrong. It is wrong. This is not loss but violence.
— Kate Marvel / Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet
— You, humans, are like preyed upon schools of fish — Hoping for safety in numbers. Let that sink in.
What I’m Reading:
Currently, about 831 million people live at or below the level of extreme poverty across the globe. According to the World Bank, that’s $3 per day when adjusted for currency and cost of living.
In fact, if every billionaire were left with only a billion dollars to their name, the rest of their seized wealth would be enough to cover the amount UN experts believe is needed to end world extreme poverty for the next 196 years.
— Simon Speakman Cordall / “What if…. we abolished billionaires?” / Al Jazeera
into you into the darkness into this memory hole where is your year in review the vestige of the atom loosed then fretting a sense of alienation annihilation abomination abnegation and ferreting the soundtrack of childhood standing waiting for the avalanche of cruelty lost my copy of making art during fascism my butt call to my dead father answered my doomsday clock runs backward i can name that tune in 2 notes mondays are interminable everyday is monday the sky a hole into me
What I’m Reading:
VI
Icicles filled the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause.
— Wallace Stevens / “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
This terrorizing and demonizing pretends to be in service of recreating a white America that never existed. The US when white supremacists like Trump were young was whiter, but this was never a white country. In 1776, the 13 colonies that became the United States included a significant percentage of Black and Indigenous people (some southern states were a third or more Black). When the US annexed Texas in 1844 and then in 1848 took Mexico’s whole northern half, a Spanish-speaking population was already settled across parts of what’s now the south-west and California. The first African Muslim in what is now the United States came in a Spanish expedition almost a century before the Mayflower brought its fanatical Puritans to the shores of Massachusetts in 1620.
— Rebecca Solnit / “Trump wants to recreate a white America that never existed“ / The Guardian
it is a serious thing
just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world.
— Mary Oliver / “Invitation”
Whew.
Damn. This America.
This raucous, malfunctioning, precocious, thuggish, absurdly tender, enviable, poisonous, utterly mercurial snitch of a nation. This bumptious, blustering, broken experiment. This circle of arms, haven for guns and greed, this cult of celebrity, this shelter and sanctuary, this bait for demons and demagogues. This place we call-home.
Like it or not, we’re surrounded by our country. It hasn’t been easy to watch its many wounds rise to the surface for anyone to see.
— Patricia Smith / “Series Editor’s Preface” / True Mistakes
A hot pocket in every Chernobyl, a pig in every inbox. I’m announcing early that I’m running for the top spot. I’m building a beautiful mall.
— Harryette Mullen / “Spam for President”
Every industrial, high-GDP country in the last decades of the last century took steps to restructure their economies in response to inflation, unemployment, rising energy prices, and global competition. Yet no other wealthy nation did so as gleefully as did the United States. It’s leaders facilicated deindustrialization and the outsourcing of decent-paying jobs; deregulated finance and other industries; pushed for the elimination of small farms and the massive upscaling of agribusiness; gave up their ability to discipline and tax corporations; and revised laws to allow first Walmart’s and then Amazon’s destruction of Main Street. No other comparable nation, not even Thatcher’s, presided over such an enormous redistribution of wealth upward, creating a superclass of billionaires immune to democratic control. None so happily let its political class and institutions fall captive to money, while at the same time gutting the institutions—welfare, unions, housing, farm communities, hospitals, mental health care, the media—that might have softened the blow.
— Greg Grandin / America, América: A New History of the New World
Climate change is making plastic pollution worse, says a new study: heat and extreme weather accelerate the breakdown of plastic into tiny particles, while storms and floods stir up old garbage from landfills and melting releases microplastics from ice. As the resulting material mixes with our air, water and soil, toxic hitchhikers such as pesticides are carried with it. Meanwhile, the ceaseless production of new plastic generates billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions — creating a vicious cycle. The solution: make less new plastic, get a grip on waste and clean up what’s already out there. “The biggest achievement and greatest hope for success would be to establish an international, legally binding global plastics treaty…”
— Flora Graham / “Climate change and plastic is a vicious cycle” / Nature Briefing
The persecution of huge numbers of brown people and even the mass deportations will not create the white country of far-right fantasy. Los Angeles, for example is an almost 50% Latino city, and despite the ICE and border patrol outrages, arrests, imprisonments and deportations, it remains so. The city’s very name is Spanish, a reminder of who was here first. All the hatred, all the persecution, seems like the panic of racists pretending they can stop the future of this country no longer being majority white through sheer cruelty.
— Rebecca Solnit / “Trump wants to recreate a white America that never existed“ / The Guardian
What I’m Listening To:
Why does the past hurt me so? (Why does the past hurt me so?) The world is laughing at me I am such a disaster (Every day, I’m a shell) A shell fallen down and dead Curled, like a heavy downy baby goose
— Dry Cleaning / “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit”
struggling to make payment • make equipment • make sense • make cents • eat wire • raise a cavil • return library books • go to my silent place • but rarely do i crocodile these topics with as much gravitas possible • write Every-Nurse Dusts • sit • write thee non-linear film script • film (patiently) the accumulating dread • the melting cap • the rising seas • the filth • the moldering • the fear on passersby faces • the lack of a redemptive arc •
II.
she waits at a seaside brothel • he beggars penance • causal • transactional • who cautions cowardice • we do • we are • enter the steersman without rudder • exit the horse without bridle • this is a test of the emergency broadcast system • this is not • the augurs of mid-december weigh us down • we are sinking • she of torn socks • he of abundant penury • we stare in thrall as palliatives fail • all reluctance and vulnerability • laden with the accretion of bleak moments • oh look • a flurry of posts • a slurry of social brain rot • oh look•
What I’m Reading:
On July 3, before victory, Governor William O. Bradley of Kentucky worried that the war would turn Americans into an aggressive and war-waging people.” He predicted that “the acquisition of one piece of territory begets a desire for another, and in the end an effort to take by force that which justly belongs to others will lead to the loss of all we have.”
— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
I heard a Colombian river was full of cocaine hippos. I heard we’ve passed 7 of the 9 thresholds that make earth habitable for human life. I heard hard times are coming. I heard we can lose ourselves in augmented reality instead. I heard the clunking of skulls into a multi-tiered pyramid. I heard the cuckoo’s call before the theft of the thrush’s eggs. I heard your footfalls as you left. Your heels like hammers clacking into the haze
You know me. She knows me. And both of you know I’m incapable of washing the mangoes just for the sake of it. So let’s not play nuclear family melodrama tropes — there will be no keyboard swells or violin stingers. This isn’t a repeat of Gilligan’s Island sixty years later. This is my life. These are your lives in bas relief. Smell the charred steak wafting from the kitchen. Touch the congealed clarified butter. Don’t you hear the clacking of that forever-fucked-up ceiling fan in the Florida room? Let’s not have this be a cliff hanger or I’ll just proceed to hang myself inna closet at the Scottish Inn. This is pure dimwittery and spastic fuckwaddery. Let’s stop this now.
II.
And lightning crashed about a quarter mile away in the Boone’s backyard … someone said: thing thing thing …
III.
I just got a voicemail from Freesia Scandalmonger she was calling about the work reservoir. I am at work, and when I tried to call back I got the fry detector.
I called you and a lemming and a methodology answered just now. If they can still come today Freedom Scalp is there waiting. If they want to schoolmate something for tomorrow please have them call the salesgirl or the clergy.
You may have “closed” this work station organ rescue for your badger, but this —now a 2 yes-man-old—rescue was just simply ignored.
The work was never done.
No one contacted us about the rescue.
The work is still outstanding.
No one has been brought up for ordination to honor the organ-grinder.
What about love?
IV.
Someone said to her: “Are your avocados in the oven?”
To which she said: “Excuse me. Do I know you?”
“You are very angry, aren’t you?”
“Again, do I know you, sir?”
He moved about her in a drunken semi-circle and professed:
“I am a visionary, missy. I see things you can’t imagine. Hexagons. Bike routes to heaven. Heathen paths to perdition and desolation.”
He adjusted the rope he wore as a belt and riled himself up for a jeremiad, but she turned and walked away.
Clarity would wait another day. Another day of southern charm in a southern city.
V.
This is as clear as a cross-oceanic Saharan dust storm—which are becoming regular fixtures of this anthropogenic age …
Mind your jumpers.
What I’m Reading:
Another fascist prick here in the States, riding the migrant crisis to power? Everyone knew these things would happen, smart people had been predicting them for years, and yet the world—or at least the assholes running it — seemed uninterested in stopping them.
thee istsfor manity reader 