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.”
— Robert Moor / On Trails: An Exploration
the morality of it doesn’t enter in to any of this
we can hold two mutually contradictory ideas
in mind at the same time
fritillary
herbaceous
& compromised as a corpus callosum
that no longer holds
a mind together
cross-wired and twisted beyond reproach
a mother shakes her baby ‘til it passes
out
by proxy
in the flesh
or via smite of gilgamesh
we may as well drown
in the euphrates
tomorrow or 5000 years ago
we all make our way into shadows
What I’m Listening To:
“The wires in the stream
From rubble to my dream
I worry in my sleep”
— Squid / “Swing (In A Dream)”
i cavil and caw
i eat yams in a yashmak
you cough wrath unmasked
you backhand a cedilla
the diacritical—we
What I’m Reading:
“Sometimes, when I catch myself emptying a bucket of my own shit, butchering a deer, shifting manure in the pissing rain, or doing any of the thousand other small things which make up my life—things that, at other times, would have seemed hare-brained, unethical, absurd—a feeling of ‘how the hell did I get here?’ comes over me. This was never part of the programme. Like everyone, I had dreams of success and the good life, but somewhere along the track, a place I can’t quite put my finger on, the definition of those words began to change, and my life with it.”
— Mark Boyle / Long Way Home: Tales from a life without technology
“The first cop that handcuffed me / [was my father] / left me bound / till my fingers blued.”
— Torrin A. Greathouse / “On Confinement”
“What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”
— Henry David Thoreau / “Walking”
“Reflecting here, I think I understand something more of why Henry journaled, and why there is so much good writing in it, so little lazy writing, so many elaborate metaphors and full sentences. Writing is willing permanence.”
— Ben Shattuck / Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau
“Draw an imaginary map.
Put a goal mark on the map where you want to go.
Go walking on an actual street according to your map.
If there is no street where it should be according to the map, make one by putting the obstacles aside.
When you reach the goal, ask the name of the city and give flowers to the first person you meet.
The map must be followed exactly, or the event has to be dropped all together.
Ask your friends to write maps.
Give your friends maps.”
— Yoko Ono / Map Piece
“… In 2021, full-time, year-round working women typically earned 84 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts … CAP analysis also shows that if the gender wage gap continues to shrink at the rate it has between the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963 and 2021, median full-time, year-round working women will not achieve pay parity with men until 2056… Women and their families cannot afford another 30 years of suffering the negative economic consequences of the wage gap, and even this rate of progress is not necessarily guaranteed—particularly without any structural change.”
— Rose Khattar & Sara Estep / “What To Know About the Gender Wage Gap as the Equal Pay Act Turns 60” / Center For American Progress
“I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didnt. I dont blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion about me that he does.”
— Cormac McCarthy / No Country for Old Men
“When human beings look at other human beings in their midst and instead of seeing other human beings see a threat, see something monstrous, or don’t see at all, our very humanity is at stake.”
— Elizabeth Alexander / The Trayvon Generation
What I’m Listening To:
“I wonder where I am
I wonder if the water is swallowing the land
I wonder if an image is realer than the thing”
— Swans / “The Parasite”
What I’m Reading:
“Today I often said forest to myself. Truth itself wanders through the forests.”
— Werner Herzog / Of Walking In Ice
What I’m Reading:
“… human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future … Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable. That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics.”
— The Dark Mountain Manifesto
What I’m Reading:
“Traveling alone, you get to be whoever you want. I don’t mean lie. I mean you get to be a blank slate. You can’t leave behind your skin color, or your height, or the handsomeness or homeliness of your face. But you can leave your story behind. If you’ve broken hearts, the new place doesn’t know. If you’ve lost trust in people and yourself, the new place doesn’t know.”
— Jedediah Jenkins / To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
yesterday i spied
many dead animaloids—
whirred by at some speed
‘bout 14 miles fast—
i hope to see less today…
a rash of squirrels—
white bone and feather blue jay
its blue crest intact
a spattering of chipmunk—
smelled, saw, two flat skunks—
a pigeon who’d felt better—
as i ran away again
on this fine summer solstice
What I’m Listening To:
“Drowning here in Summer’s Cauldron
Under mats of flower lava
Please don’t pull me out
This is how I would want to go”
— XTC / “Summer’s Cauldron”
suggestion through paint
a gesture becomes statement
splash of blue on red
What I’m Reading:
“Don’t evaluate a short ride in physiological terms. Easy pedaling is good thinking time.“
— Grant Petersen / Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike
thee istsfor manity reader 