“A sharp cough recoils to peel the corn: Save me the husk of myself?”
— Lewis Meyers / “Going to Chicago”
“We have, in effect, turned September into July. That’s not hyperbole, that’s just data. And in so doing, September smashed through the 1.5 degree Celsius warming mark that the world set as a target in Paris just eight years ago. We’ve been talking about it ever since, and now we’re there.”
— Bill McKibben / “The Rays of the Sun” / Substack newsletter
“you work with words, which unlike the wallet, is not a material you touch, but you wonder if in reordering them you might disrupt what is presupposed, if you might work something other than emptiness from their grooves. you’ve only failed at this. you are not yet a skilled enough practitioner of failure, and so you keep reordering them, to see what casts a shadow.”
— Chaun Webster / “[by way of entry you sit with an object]”
“Women have been under-represented in the workplace for at least the past two centuries and continue to earn, on average, 13% less than men — an injustice as well as a puzzling ‘market inefficiency’.”
— Philip Ball / “Why women earn less than men: Nobel for economic historian who probed pay gap” / Nature
“I tried to become American, but America is toxic. I tried to become Mexican, but México is toxic. My work: to do more than reproduce the toxic stories I inherited and learned.”
— José Olivarez / “Ars Poetica”
“… same-sex sexual behavior evolved when mammals started living in social groups. Although the behavior does not produce offspring to carry on the animals’ genes, it could offer other evolutionary advantages, such as smoothing over conflicts, the researchers proposed.”
— Carl Zimmer / “Same-Sex Behavior Evolved in Many Mammals to Reduce Conflict, Study Suggests” / The New York Times
“It is hard, in the era of the AR-15, to fear a vampire.”
— Alexander Chee / “When Horror Is the Truth-teller”
What I’m Listening To:
“Last night I dreamt that we lasted all the way ’til spring But now the fields are full of red and blue with nothing in between You can lead water to the daffodils But you can’t make them drink”
“The 3,000-mile route, which links together paved trails, dirt and gravel paths, and sections of roadway, is the nation’s longest greenway … Only about 100 people have completed the entire route by bike, as well as three walkers and a runner. Some finish the route over many months or years—or in one fell swoop…”
— Erica Zazo / “Thru-Biking the East Coast Greenway: A Community-Centered Adventure”
some of us know each other some not i am anticipating hope i am installing vanity i am resented but will sinks the floor is being removed i apologize noise smells art questions i will house my mode of expression i found ghosts delusional wishful thinking
What I’m Reading:
“But of course men, particularly the godly ones, have little common sense.”
“… even among her own, too, there were bad men, for there had been gentlemen the girls all whispered to stay away from and soldiers with a red gleam of the devil to them and mercenaries who killed as easy as sleeping, and it would be one of these who would be sent after her…”
Rudy can’t fail, but he also can’t answer for the dream he dropped into my head.
After complications, and scenes upon scenes, it unravels. I make my way in to a motel room. Now, mind you, this is a round — or is chock full of recurrences — an ouroboros of sorts. I can’t tell the tail end from the head in this rem maelstrom.
I’m in a small plywood anteroom there’s a faded pink carpet worn bare. Someone next to me is holding a silver serving bowl of couscous custard clatter furtively looking about, not wanting to be seen.
Sticky spots and stains pockmark the plywood. Lots of slatted windows. Who has jalousie windows anymore? Why is childhood Florida popping in my occipital lobe at 2am?
In a second the anteroom is transformed. We’re in front of a squat olive-brown building out by some deserted fairground. The room has landed in the middle of a rocky unpaved traffic circle.
The person next to me disappears and I’m left holding the couscous custard clatter — not platter(!) I intuit this is a clatter; it’s the most germane thing in this pestilent life, this clatter.
I’m on a swivel chair and the anteroom is now composed of hundreds of wooden branches — there are large gaps between the branches, and the room is completely open behind me. No fourth wall. I turn and I’m facing a parking lot. I notice there are people inside the parked cars staring at me. Oh!
I turn toward the building and through the branches I see people on picnic benches staring too. They spot my couscous custard clatter. Oh no!
The next moment I’m in a brown 1983 diesel Cadillac Seville (specific enough?) backing out of the traffic circle, but there is some difficulty: cars too close, other cars not allowing me to back up — where the fuck is my couscous custard clatter? Shit. No!
I’m reeling when an AT thru hiker appears and waves me down for a resupply ride in to town. I tell her I know she is a prior thru hiker she has the look of an experienced AT trekker. She is reluctant to admit that she is a former thru hiker, that she’s done this before, and finished the trail.
I know, I’ve done it before, I say, multiple times. She seems thankful and gives me a card to follow her online hiking journal, and says, get started early and you’ll be back here before I move on — or something to that effect. And she adds something about the Trail Days Festival this year, and how much the trail has changed in Pennsylvania.
Visual dissonance. Repeat.
It all seems to begin again without my couscous custard clatter. The dream merges into two other recurring dreams from the pandemic year:
1. about being out on snow skiing slopes, then driving through hilly Swiss country to get to Barcelona for a mixed grill featuring salivary glands… and…
2. the grassy knoll / icy knoll dream set near a baseball state championship featuring a Cuban professional team v. a central Florida little league team…
Neither of those dreams feature a couscous custard clatter. It’s done with a jolt at 4:30 am. The friggin’ ubangi bangi car drives by earlier than usual.
Where is that damnation couscous custard clatter?!
What I’m Reading:
“My parents moved from Jalisco, México to Chicago in 1987. They were dislocated from México by capitalism, and they arrived in Chicago just in time to be dislocated by capitalism. Question: is migration possible if there is no ‘other’ land to arrive in.”
“Information is interpreted through the prejudice of those who read it or hear it. So there are no definitive, finite versions of information.”
— Genesis P-Orridge / Binary: A Memoir
“Humanity has ‘opened the gates to hell’ by allowing the climate crisis to worsen, the secretary general of the United Nations has warned at a climate summit of leaders that saw angry denunciations of the fossil fuel industry but was undercut by the absence of many of the biggest carbon-emitting countries.”
— Oliver Milman / “Humanity has ‘opened gates to hell’ by letting climate crisis worsen, UN secretary warns” / The Guardian
“We could afford new t-shirts, daring ones, with rude slogans, but it seems a waste: we’ve got too many already. Also they’d gang up on us, they’d creep around on the floor, they’d tangle our ankles, then we’d fall down the stairs.”
— Margaret Atwood / “Winter Vacations”
“Employees in the US who worked from home all the time were predicted to reduce their emissions by 54%, compared with workers in an office”
— Patrick Barkham / “People who work from home all the time ‘cut emissions by 54%’ against those in office” / The Guardian
“All my life I have been trying to improve my German. At last my German is better —but now I am old and ill and don’t have long to live. Soon I will be dead, with better German.”
— Lydia Davis / “Improving My German”
“Early analyses show global warmth surged far above previous records in September — even further than what scientists said seemed like astonishing increases in July and August … The planet’s average temperature shattered the previous September record by more than half a degree Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit), which is the largest monthly margin ever observed.”
— Scott Dance / “September shattered global heat record—and by a record margin” / The Washington Post
“Up against my own lifetime I wish for fog, early morning. Instead, unpredictable years keep emptying.”
— Khadijah Queen / “Season of Grief”
What I’m Listening To:
“Lying on the floor I don’t want to carry on Except I can’t even cease to exist And that’s the worst”
footprint lattice fading fast shrapnel scraping clouds of gas and dust moving luminous and warm
gird yourself for ultimatums apostles of the railroad flats
never seen anything like it close yer eyes sleep
go to sleep
What I’m Reading:
“The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.”
thee istsfor manity reader 