“Today, approximately 21 million women around the world obtain unsafe, illegal abortions each year, and complications from these unsafe procedures account for approximately 13% of all maternal deaths, nearly 50,000 annually.”
— American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists / “Facts are Important: Abortion is Healthcare”
Press play to watch my short film “blossoms like fetuses curled up on the floor, (2015)” (3:15)
THE DRIP, DRIP, DRIP IS NOW A TORRENTIAL FLOOD
Press play to watch my short film “found feet five, (2012)” (4:14)
What I’m Reading:
“Credit where due: the Supreme Court’s 6–3 ruling in West Virginia v. E.P.A. is the culmination of a five-decade effort to make sure that the federal government won’t threaten the business status quo. . . But beyond that it’s hard to see exactly what the point of demanding federal climate action is now; why march on the Capitol or the White House if the Supreme Court won’t let elected leaders act even if they want to?”
I want you to root the violence out of the system, but you delay and acquiesce — this is the heavy-o-sity of our case. There are no life preservers to pass out—only anvils and 50 lb. kettlebells—on this sinking ship. No one about to make the problem commensurate with the premise. I predicate all action on entropy and numbness. Dire warnings and sirens go unheeded . . . while a singular burnt, chainsaw segmented, sequoia lies on the blackened forest floor.
Your charge is lobbed. Disorderly conduct on the Junior Prom floor: enervated dates stare at other people dancing; others are blind sullen-staring into cellphone flashlights; some couples herd listless at the punch. A punch or two meted out — uncertain if they are in liquid form or at the knuckle end of a fist.
We’re in a fugue — too many discordant notes — a fug of fanciful boredom. Did you drop that dollar bill? Did you drop the tiny purple microdots? The yellow sunshine?
Have you ever felt like a fatherless waif in the presence of your father?
I’m in need of a case of blues, you say, because a mere carton won’t do.
I’m in need of a reset, I say, in need of a pass, in need of a decade’s worth of do-overs, in need of a full-out pardon!
You say: why proselytize for your lost cause?
I got nothing, I say . . . Sonic Youth is broken up, Morrissey’s a fascist now, and Mark E. Smith is dead. I have no desire to be effusive anymore. I’m changing my middle name to Ennui . . .
Furthermore, aren’t we too old to be at a prom?
What I’m Reading:
“As if my mind’s double-jointed Sometimes, I have wanted To bow my head & kiss My sad, stingy nipples.”
“I want for us to want to patch every heart and pave every road and destroy every system that has ever left us broken.”
— Jordan Jace / “I want”
“Democracy’s survival depends on what happens inside our skulls, where anything is possible. The destruction of a shared reality does more damage than economic decline or impeachable acts.”
— George Packer / Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
“‘No one look / And a canny fucking fill / Don’t lie to me!’ she sings in one moment. It doesn’t really make sense, but it’s not supposed to: Harding wants you to find your own logic. “I just want everyone to feel like a philosopher. You put on a record, and that record belongs to you,” she said in a recent Pitchfork interview.”
— Sophie Kemp / Aldous Harding’s Warm Chris album review, Pitchfork.com
“If we all paid attention to what is happening to the planet in the Anthropocene, we’d be running around with our heads on fire. Instead, we churn on in our lives, ordering stuff for next-day delivery when we could shop locally, driving to the grocery store only half a mile away instead of biking, and flipping the radio dial when another instance of extreme weather strikes, because we just can’t bear what another fire or hurricane portends. All the while, we’re nagged by conscience, which slowly drags our spirits down.”
— Lauren Groff / “Beach Bummer”
“Nostalgia is a pathological sickness. Photographed I am as quiet as an apple approaching the mouth. In the Pavilion of Din, my skull stays a silence.”
— Michael Dumanis / “Flag Day”
“We are not wired to make decisions about barely perceptible threats that gradually accelerate over time. We’re not so different from the proverbial frog that boils to death in a pot of slowly warming water.”
— Jeff Goddell / The Water Will Come
“Something has gone wrong with the last best hope of earth. Americans know it—the whole world knows it. Something has gone wrong out there too . . . No one is going to save us. We are our last best hope.”
— George Packer / Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
What I’m Listening To:
“Of all the ways to eat a cake This one surely takes the knife”
Allow the terror in— Consider it, live with it, Let it seep deep into your body And into your mind.
Then, and only then, Are you prepared to act.
What I’m Reading:
“And it’s too late to stop climate change from coming; it is already here, and increasingly brutal disasters are headed our way no matter what we do. But it’s not too late to avert the worst, and there is still time to change ourselves so that we are far less brutal to one another when those disasters strike.”
— Naomi Klein / This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
Pasted and made agent, once again, I earned the title of Chancroid of Elfador.
I understood public relations and quickly assembled a fleet to sail to Festicularis. Never had so many sumptuous furs been made execrable by hovering over them and evacuating our bowels upon them.
The Chancellor of Quas made an appearance by summons of habeas crapus. In our midst he exhibited a prowess for combat with crabs and lice, in a manner so expert, that we allowed him to search and clean our bodies.
This was a satisfied accomplishment — maybe even an occasion for pity. We were all destined for history in the outcast country. We would certainly overtake the heathen and Papist alike.
We had the flinders of the saints.
We had them by the short hairs.
What I’m Reading:
“There passed a weary time. Each throat Was parched, and glazed each eye. A weary time! a weary time!”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge / “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
thee istsfor manity reader 