thee istsfor manity reader

What I’m Reading:

“You pass a lot of discarded trash as you walk.”

— Werner Herzog / Of Walking In Ice

Low Bar Calisthenics

I’ve set the new low bar, taking left turn after left turn. I’m walking circular—or in squares, I should say.

I should say I hope this makes sense (but know fully well it won’t). I should say these are the reasons to be cheerful—but I spout only maxims and aphorisms (all of them meaningless [truly so]).

I’m now thinking in brackets (within parentheses) with long tangential digressions outside of any transitive laws. I’m cooling in increments of Celsius in a Fahrenheit culture.

My chia seeds have become chia pets. I’m now a colander and I’ve lost the will to sieve.

Look it up and see for yourself.

What I’m Reading:

“History hangs inside me, like a dependent clause.”

— Fanny Choi / “Time-Sensitive”

Perdo’s Pox (redux)

Night falls—

A black feather,
A white hair,
A brittle bone,
A rasp for air—

The moon unmoored.

What I’m Reading:

“The wind worries the woods outside. This morning Night was drowned on cold gray waves.”

— Werner Herzog / Of Walking In Ice

change

denuded ideas in chopped
ready to go-mix sources
of wisdom set one
against the other:
change

u
try
so hard
but u can’t
u won’t but
u try again and again
u fail better again and again

What I’m Reading:

“A train stopped on the plain / Deaf stars sleep / in every puddle / And the water trembles”

— Vicente Huidobro / “Hours”

The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; / But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.”

— Wallace Stevens / “Of the Surafce of Things”

“Some time ago, I wrote an essay about napping outside how I would, for instance, see a carpet of moss in the forest or a cradle of rocks on a summit, and then feel inexplicably tired, lie down, and fall asleep quicker than I ever could in a bed. How, also, I’d awoken in a blizzard on a mountainside; another time in a graveyard with two men standing over me, asking if I was ‘practicing’; woke in a field with a mouse in my pocket eating the peanuts I carried. I felt a freedom to be in the wilderness that I know is not given to everyone.”

— Ben Shattuck / Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau

“The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.”

— Robinson Jeffers / “Rearmament”

“What is this secret power of trees that makes us so much healthier and happier? Why is it that we feel less stressed and have more energy just by walking in the forest?”

— Dr. Qing Li / Forest Bathing

“Perhaps walking is best imagined as an indicator species, ‘to use an ecologist’s term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble.”

— Rebecca Solnit / Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“I’m winding down. The daylight is winding down. / Only the night is / wound up tight. / And ticking with unpaused breath.”

— Charles Wright / “Time Is a Graceless Enemy, but Purls as It Comes and Goes”

“A week of black, amnesiac sleep followed my homecoming. Exactly what I wanted—to be obliterated by the insistent presence of the sea, as the sea had done to Cape Cod.”

— Ben Shattuck / Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau

What I’m Listening To:

“I got high I thought I saw an angel
But he was just a ghost
He was making wooden posts out of my family
What if birds aren’t singing they’re screaming”

— Aldous Harding / “What If Birds Aren’t Singing They’re Screaming”

Autocorrectionals

I was assigned a sanity rating at birth that does not compute. The birds don’t sing as much as they scream—a singer once sang that, and it was recorded—go and check. I’ve checked my packets, and all the seeds are missing, not even so much as a coating of seed dust. I ingested my ulterior motives and they are now the extra padding in my posterior. None of this has been pasteurized (or proof-read for that matter) and it’s been proven that dingoes occasionally will eat scabies. Hold on … something seems amiss with my autocorrect. Just keep holding there. I’ll be back.

What I’m Reading:

“The world I see looks to me like a game of children.
Strange performances and plays go on night and day.”

— Ghalib / “Some Exaggerations”

What I’m Reading:

“I’m waiting for the words / to catch up to my heart / which is / elliptical at the moment”

— Jason Bayani / “Someday, Again”

Run Away

There’s a need to say something—but what?

That I’ve run away from home again?

That I’m trying to figure out why Pablo Fanques Fair was such a scene?

That the scree and other debris that gets in my shoes is really comforting?

No.

I’ve run away from home on a fast ferry!

I’m picking off a dozen deer ticks before I get the Lyme bullseye rash.

I don’t want the Lyme. I don’t want the Covid.

I left my neighborhood for another neighborhood—pictures tomorrow.

Stay tuned—more news at 11.

What I’m Reading:

“I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.”

— Edward Abbey / Desert Solitaire