Sometimes you feel like a target Sometimes the memories clamp like straight jacket confines Sometimes you have to visit family Sometimes it feels like home again Sometimes you’d rather be anywhere else in this bent and melting world Sometimes you have to leave again Sometimes, nearly always now, you prefer your new home Sometimes the old hometown is a millstone dragging you down to the bottom of Biscayne Bay And you’re happy to leave it again, and again, and again
And you’re on the road again.
What I’m Reading:
“I am not yet 40, and in my lifetime, climate change has gone from something that we thought would happen in the future to something happening now to something accelerating at such a surprising pace that it makes most of our feeble attempts to reckon with it outdated before they even get underway. This great acceleration has now reached all the way to Antarctica.”
—Elizabeth Rush / “What Antarctica’s Disintegration Asks of Us”
The prelate drafts an encyclical announcing that the werewolves and camellias will be delivered on Friday to all diocese in the mountainous regions. It encourages all Englishmen and yogis to traipse about nude and re-stage the highlights of the Inquisition.
The document goes on to explain that castanets, “fingertip cymbals” (for he has forgotten that they are called zills) and censers will be distributed liberally among the cairns about the ridge tops—“Help Yourselves,” he flourishes in his complicated calligraphy.
He insists that discussions of reincarnation will not be part of the programming. And furthermore, that “Virgins Need Not Apply.”
He’s buoyant with his ideas, they come to him in torrents. He surmises that it must be something about that moldy bread at breakfast. He continues with momentum:
“Recently 50,000 perforations were distributed throughout the bishopric. The adhesives which bound them were of an open-ended and mysterious nature—lacking in optimism and alternating and overlapping in swells of violin trills when touched or added to morning cereals. They are altogether too piquant and picaresque for our flock’s conservative constitutions—Please Avoid! Toecaps and personal backyard derricks will be distributed in their stead. A recurrence of tedium and inefficiency is all that is required and asked of you. OBEY!”
But a sort of boredom swamp bounded by alienation hammock islands spread out before him. Never has he been gripped by such a visceral ennui—as if it was bequeathed to him as a grand heirloom that he should wear around his neck.
And he does! He wears it around his neck.
And it is heavy, baby. A ‘heavy-o-sity’ he’s never experienced—or maybe once, when he missed the 1847 College of Cardinals’ sabbatical.
He considers the Ancient Mariner and the awful pestilential albatross crawling with monosyllabic bird mites (wa, wa, wa, wa, wa…they stridulated) around his neck, and the ‘heavy-o-sity’ becomes too much to bear.
He tears up the draft encyclical, inkwells his pen (he never liked the damn thing anyway) and laments, Why’d I ever take up writing? He descends to the cellar for a bottle of wine.
There is no remuneration in fermentation, but the bottom of a bottle is as good as any place in this world, he reasons.
And he adds: At the least I’m not in Florida, so I have that going for me. But there was something poetic about werewolves and camellias…
He’ll eventually come round to that.
What I’m Reading:
“The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve … something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness … The writer writes to serve that great cold elemental grace which knows us.”
— Joy Williams / “Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks”
She’s gonna’ tendril it straight … but she could tell it straighter, and tendril a strategy that is easy to understand.
Her words are usually turgid, garish and lurid—feel the wrath of her bombast. This may not be a particularly happy strategy, but again, at least it’s not some awful strategy for complacency.
It’s in the same general stylistic verity as her previous work, and the specter of hopelessness resounds of “over-dialed diatribe.” This is all set against the backdrop of natural events careening into breakdown—think the Permian Mass Extinction Event. (You get the drift!)
It may be akin to the strategy of a mango during the dog days of a muzzled mango-less summer. (But this has not been proven as of this writing.)
She touts the sunroof on her 2001 Mazda to anyone who will listen. She joyrides an excavator wearing ancient pantaloons.
She’s an avatar for perilous and acute dehydration.
She is an avid matinee moviemaker, and leads colloquia on film gate benedictions and kleig light embargos on overnight shoots. David Lynch is too mainstream, she says.
She continues to have an acute aversion to poorly devised mise en scène, and the continued yaw of a cinematographer’s shaky handheld work.
She has a propensity for gala non-linearity and jump-cuts. She acknowledges that she must write with others in mind, and shoot straight if she wants to be seen.
During a recent intrusion she disowned her previous work and said she’d work for a fiver and wolfbane, and only then consider other possible expenses.
In short, as much as she would like others to enjoy her work, she’ll continue to make what inspires her in manuscript form, and then shoot, tendril, and chance assemble it for multiple fivers.
If others come along and watch—well, all the better.
What I’m Reading:
“Is this where I am supposed to apologize? Not only to the fish, but to the whole lake, land, not only for me but for the generations of plunder and vanish.”
“The cumulative effect of thousands of ethical actions can help to save and improve our world for future generations.”
— Jane Goodall & Douglas Abrams / The Book of Hope
“I am willing to walk away, willing to be on fire, to blaze to Blake, to sink into the moon’s aphorism and its garden of figures.”
— Peter Gizzi / “Song”
“Let’s stop sleepwalking towards the destruction of our planet by climate change. Today it is Pakistan. Tomorrow it could be your country.”
— António Guterres / U.N. Secretary-General, August 30, 2022
“The average life expectancy of Americans fell precipitously in 2020 and 2021, the sharpest two-year decline in nearly 100 years and a stark reminder of the toll exacted on the nation by the continuing coronavirus pandemic … In 2021, the average American could expect to live until the age of 76 … The figure represents a loss of almost three years since 2019, when Americans could expect to live, on average, nearly 79 years.”
— Roni Caryn Rabin / “U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Again in ‘Historic’ Setback” / The New York Times
“This virus is going to continue to throw 210-mile-an-hour curveballs at us, so get ready…It’s not done with us just yet.’’
— Michael Osterholm / “What we’ve learned about COVID-19” / The Boston Globe
“As usual, predators are wreaking havoc on the internet. Predators are the only people in town. If she had to summarize the plot of contemporary life, the mother would say: it’s about everyone punishing each other for things they didn’t do.”
— Tess Gunty / The Rabbit Hutch
“Hope is contagious. Your actions will inspire others.”
— Jane Goodall & Douglas Abrams / The Book of Hope
What I’m Listening To:
“They were planting seeds at night To grow a made-up paradise Where the truth was auto-tuned”
I took umbrage at the penumbra— The darkling darkening of my mood— Was it the partial eclipse of the moon? (Its waxing moony-moony face: jejune) Or was it a flaring sunspot’s craquelure of quietude?
Or was it the plague? Or the fascist wave? Or the tactless foot? Of the biomass soot?
Or was it the phallic gun-shaped state I’m in?
What I’m Reading:
“In the year 2022, three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 160 million Americans. Today, 45% of all new income goes to the top 1%, and CEOs of large corporations make a record-breaking 350 times what their workers earn.”
The hibiscus were impartial but patricide was the topic of conversation, not the usual coacktail party banter. A dragonfly drained a pistil daiquiri, while a croo of white ibis pecked at some takeaway boxes, and Lagartija Ron watched silently in blitzkrieg formation from the tree line.
I was on a two week jag to the past—in the shape of Florida—in the key of Spanglish. My ancestral forelocks were trapped in a cowlick, all mortise and tenon-like, as if we were on an all-inclusive at a Bahamas resort, specifically Eleuthera—but full of temperate zone tchotchkes and such.
It was an altogether vertiginous and humid afternoon. The wet bulb temperature was nearly 95° F—deadly, you see—so the impartial hibiscus were decidedly on a manatee fissure, fig banyan, sorta tip—and I was, like, sure! Aha! I second that!
But I really had no conception of where I was or what I was going on about. See, that’s the thing about Florida. . .
Don’t.
It didn’t work out for Ponce de Leon. It definitely went sour for Hernando de Soto. And now… well… just…
Don’t.
What I’m Reading:
“The hardest part is the songbirds and their fugue state, fug state, fuck it.”
thee istsfor manity reader 