I punctured the left rear tire on the road from Boston to Buffalo … When the tire tech at Tanguy’s Tire Emporium tried to plug the hole all manner of cavorting beasties escaped from that dark tube: elephantine glass eels, striped paramecium jaggerheads, speckled leather fromooshikns — they swirled up like a drunken twister and sucked the tech up into its vortex.
There were no more soft monsters left in the universe.
I walked the rest of the way here — to this netherworld, and frankly and crankily — I’m too tired to write.
What awaits tomorrow?
What I’m Reading:
“When I think of America, my body / aches / for something more protective than / skin. Skin is only skin deep.”
A savant mushroom with a seedy past in Africa discovers that its worst fears have come true.
An artisanal clutch of gourmands are out to ambush — deracinate, tear and shred. There are ambuscades forming at the usual fringe mush casinos.
The Order of the Medieval Tamarinds of Chivalry, Tamarins and Rookeries are on high alert.
Two chimeras claim their birthright on a magical bluff—advertisers stumble over each other to sign lucrative sponsorship deals.
You rummage through neighborhoods of kipper prints keen to be deposed.
The first-perversion is an introspection — an accusation of a man’s lifetime in exchange for neutrality.
A successful yachtsman is asked to help solve a locked-rosary rush of the stage — nannies and ninnies need not apply. Although Ned had previously applied for the position of Autocue Presenter and was now baffled.
I arrive at a courtyard with glass eels and aubergines — all are nonplussed and embroiled in pedantic sophistries.
My father’s grating voice keeps counterpoint to mother’s grating of ptarmigan (for the ptarmigan parmigiana).
Busybody pollsters allude to les accents aigus and oleander glower, while vicious workmen heeled in sod transcribe “Hotel California” to Morse Code via ASL.
This is an invocation to prove the innocence of a convicted Shiitake.
During the courtroom sidebar the Asterisk Committee undertakes an undercount of footnotes and bibliographical references.
A mutant blancmange eats a buckeye, then an eclair, an English schoolboy, a darkened alcove, and a memorial to brocaded sofas.
A king’s unfounded jerkin destroys his fanfare and kipper rigging. We are disgusted with meritocracy and resort to meretriciousness for a 10¥ note.
We found deterrents in the aphrodisiacs and asphodels in the aphorisms.
Objections overruled — no one says a word.
What I’m Reading:
“Up the street, two apes argued. “You don’t affirm me anymore!” shouted the girl. “You don’t affirm me anymore!” shouted the boy. Their taxi arrived and took them home to their capsuled fear.”
eyeless—something— something lost in the map fold a place, a name, some critical information marred
there—a blue despair a move forever blemished
a life map unusual piquant in its obscurity
What I’m Reading:
“… like many long-distance walkers he was a depressive, pursued from a young age by what he referred to as ‘the Horrors’. Walking became a means of out-striding his sadness.”
— Robert MacFarlane / The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
The smoke trees blared their summer green. There was deliberation in her fibrillation. Her heart fluttered like an insensate butterfly—heliotropic, yet abjured to the sun. The world is my pistil, she said—a fluttering cavorting beastie—a moment of proboscis licking nectar drinking. She was forever cofounded by synecdoche and metonymy; and what was metric or metronomic. To the regular clatter of unceasing chatter, the voices in her head crescendoed into a din of metal machine music—and in a mere 23 hours she was home in the northern city again, apparently having brought the southern clime with her. Days of 90-degree weather gerrymandered her senses into discrete ultra-heterodox salamander shapes. Her olfactory was a red eft. Her haptic a hell-bender. No one was offended and no one complained. She would get to the decompression over the coming days. For now there was only exhaustion and an empty psychic tank to refill—and an unstable budgie to contend with.
What I’m Reading:
“Like many men who have weathered female rejection, the man in Apartment C12 believes that women have more power than anyone else on the planet. When evidence suggests that this can’t be true, he gets angry. It is an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument.”
“But the faster we travel, the more intensely we feel our lack of relationship with the land we traverse.”
— Robert Moor / On Trails: An Exploration
“Walking on a path is an adventure. No step is ever the same as another. One never knows what might be waiting around the next bend. The terrain varies, the ground cover varies, and the body must exert itself in a number of ways. As exercise, walking on paths is the best. I’ve heard stories about people who have walked their way out of spinal prolapses and depression after doctors and psychologists have tried for years to help them.”
— Torbjørn Ekelund / In Praise of Paths
“It occurs to me that we live in an era of extinction, and perhaps what will also be extinguished—for some of us, the brave ones, which I don’t think I am—will be our sense of self, the ego, the false and comfortable dreams we’ve constructed of ourselves.”
— Deborah Willis / “How Writing About Climate Change Can Become a Form of Escapism”
“For now in every exuberant joy there is heard an undertone of terror, or else a wistful lament over an irrecoverable loss. It is as though…nature were bemoaning the fact of her fragmentation, her decomposition into separate individuals.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche / The Birth of Tragedy
“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.”
— Flannery O’Connor / Mystery and Manners
“In tears are sorrow. In tears are grief, in tears are anger. In tears are rage. In tears swallowed are cancer, hypertension, respiratory ailments. In tears swallowed is dis-ease. In tears shed is sometimes no relief on the other side.”
— Elizabeth Alexander / The Trayvon Generation
“Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”
— Cormac McCarthy / Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in The West
What I’m Listening To:
“Where’s the best place to sit if this all goes wrong? Maybe the middle Maybe the back Well, what if I can’t get out?”
“But having braked all the way to the floor of the valley it dawned on us the slope we’d have to climb and it was night, you on the back of my bike… …so you said let’s go home, but look the hill we came down is as steep as the hill ahead of us”
A thick orange sky— Particles falling like ash. The wrath of Vulcan unhinged— Scours and scourges the country. We—the gods of destruction.
What I’m Reading:
“… this particulate matter, 20 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, can be particularly harmful to our lungs and is being carried down into the state along with the smoke from the Canadian wildfires.”
— Dr. Jeremy Weinberger, Tufts Medical Center / The Boston Globe
There’s the day forming from the dark Great gray plumes of vapor rising No horizon line / no distinction Between sea and sky A punch-drunk compass Two fathoms deep Nowhere to go Gray / dismal / lost Unyielding •
What I’m Reading:
“In the end, we are all existential pathfinders: We select among the paths life affords, and then, when those paths no longer work for us, we edit them and innovate as necessary. The tricky part is that while we are editing our trails, our trails are also editing us.”
thee istsfor manity reader 