image: Schokraie E, Warnken U, Hotz-Wagenblatt A, Grohme MA, Hengherr S, et al. / 2012 / (CC BY 2.5).
tardigrade tautology tautogram
tenacious tardigrade tad tired time traveler tradition trader tame task taker terra tanka talker tautology traumatizer truncate tomorrow’s today
tin the tender titanic tranquil tawdry twit tonight tweeting tempests torn transient teacher tissues temporary tremens to tremelo tankers tied to tentacles tantamount to tight tendrils toss this—
tender extremophile!
What I’m Reading:
“I’m from the old school, I believe in working and living in isolation; crowds weaken your intent and your originality … When you’re hanging with writers you’re not hearing or seeing anything but that. Or maybe my nature is just to grub it out alone. I feel good without anybody around.”
please include your inhumanity along with the jackpot you are plateful to bring
we are still in need of wads to bake (or bring from a point etc.) a battery of constabularies
inhibition plateaus the jack-in-the-box novelist who dollies his firebombs
and footmarks his follies the vagaries of vagabonds & sliced break-ins
yellow-beaked docile a barbarian squirrel sends cookies & targets
What I’m Reading:
“… he retired to dreams to find the smell And luster of spring, its radiant flare, its call, Bright music, when soft voices die, the sex Of trees sprouting timidly in sleep’s swell.”
— Amittai F. Aviram / “An Injured Man with Bradford Pears in March”
“Some people believe that if they were to join the climate movement now, they would be among the last. But that is very far from true. In fact, if you do decide to take action now, you would still be a pioneer.”
— Greta Thunberg / The Climate Book
“The waves roared. I stood alone in the darkness. Light does not illuminate. It only looks for things to illuminate. And I had never been found by the light. I would always be in darkness—“
— Yu Miri / Tokyo Ueno Station
“On the one hand, capitalism has generated immense wealth, significantly raised living standards and generally made life more comfortable and secure to varying degrees for most of those living in capitalist countries. On the other hand, it has exacted an excruciating toll in human toil and treasure. It has wrought immense suffering, systematic oppression and exploitation, and debilitating social alienation. Capitalism rewards, indeed depends upon, selfish, aggressive behavior. It values profits over people, promotes material values over spiritual values, dispenses power without social responsibility, and treats people as commodities to be discarded.”
— Obery M. Hendricks, Jr. / “The Uncompromising Anti-Capitalism of Martin Luther King Jr.”
“They say they miss the soup their grandmother used to make, the sleepiness after eating it, the magic. When I ask what’s home for them, they say home is a fist that dreams.”
— Ae Hee Lee / “A Study through Homes”
“we hear your last words: america if you see me as your enemy you have no friends.”
— Haki R. Madhubuti / “Gwendolyn Brooks: America in the Wintertime”
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr. / Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
“Light, I salute thee with wounded nerves.”
— Jean Garrigue / “Jazz Bit”
What I’m Listening To:
“Aselestine Where are you? The drugs don’t do What you said they do”
“Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, each of which wiped out something like three quarters of the planet’s species. Scientists warn that we are now sliding towards another, the Sixth Extinction. This event has the distinction of being the first to be caused by a biological agent—us. Will we act in time to prevent it?”
— Elizabeth Kolbert / “Civilization and Exticntion” / The Climate Book
I forgot to tell you! The hairy (back hair) guy we saw the other day, on Perkins St., is howling man!
I saw him yesterday, shirtless and in shorts again, in 36 degree weather during my bike ride.
He was doing a variation of his howl (much lower) and rubbing his hands over his forehead and eyes (like Curly from 3 Stooges—I swear!) and everybody stopped at the intersection of Perkins and Jamaicaway were staring, mouths agape, at him. Traffic locked.
Poor Howling Man cracked. (world was too much with him)
What I’m Reading:
“… I’m tired, so I lie down. The earth spins for me and the dead continue their orbiting. It gives me strength to remember there is no such thing as an immovable object.”
image: captain john g. bourke / scatalogic rites of all nations / 1891 / in public domain.
7 Seconds So Salubrious
1. This writer’s weevils are roosting in the endive.
2. Debug your respirator if you have not.
3. Retrieve your half-brother & samovar from the half-note sanatorium.
4. The Englishman’s welt & the enema sampler will clear out your endowment of weight & indictment of rosebuds.
5. There is a weird energy in this world.
6. Endorse nothing but your nightmares.
7. Consider “the huge unknown wave that is already rolling toward us.”
image: levi walter yaggy / “nature in descending regions” / from geographical portfolio / 1893 / in public domain.
What I’m Reading:
“… if you live another thirty years and are still enjoying it, or most of it – if anyone will be enjoying, or indeed living, considering the huge unknown wave that is already rolling toward us – I expect you will look at a picture of yourself as you are today, supposing your personal effects have survived flood, fire, famine, plague, insurrection, invasion, or whatever – and you will say, ‘How young I was then!’”
The snow falls like ash From a nuclear winter— Sorrow songs sung true.
There are some good days, When voices of exile bray: The start is the end. The mournful rumble we hear Widens a crack in our souls.
Our voices froze in the night— Sound iced in our throats— A pall of smothered silence.
What I’m Reading:
“There is no ‘safe’. At any moment the fragile thread by which we dangle may break, and we may plummet into the unknown. ‘Safe’, the word, ought to be outlawed. It gives people false ideas.”
A new year brings the promise of more longanimity and asceticism. Nothing is as safe she expects in the age of vulnerability and shame.
She liked it more when every emotional situation didn’t need a “name” where you could “hold” it in its “safe space.”
There is no room for nostalgia, but she has no use for these “isms” either.
She wants to crawl into a garbage can large enough to hold her and live out the rest of her days like that lady in Beckett’s Happy Days — remember, she has no room for nostalgia.
But there are bills to pay and some sort of food preparations to be made if she wants to continue on living in this hovel.
And there is the crow.
Always that crow! She inherited it from someone she cared about deeply once, but she can’t remember quite who.
The crow is tethered to the radiator and has to be fed often. And if the food isn’t placed just so, on time, the cawing is insufferable.
No room for nostalgia, but she longs for the halcyon days of pandemic when she knew what to expect — even if it was the worst.
This new post-apocalypse state of being is a bit dull. And this noisome, pediculous crow leaves much to be desired.
What I’m Reading:
“Power, when threatened, pulls an invisible narrative from the clouds that only others in power and afraid can see.”
thee istsfor manity reader 