thee istsfor manity reader

Grim Silence, failure.

What I’m Reading:

“If there is to be a livable and shared future on our planet, it will be a future offline.”

— Jonathan Crary / “The Digital Age is Destroying Us”

State Religion

We want a new state religion—without the state or the religion, just an extra dose of the thoughtless passion.

When I arrive at the bottom of this page there will be thunder and earth-shuddering vibration—all the way down to hell in jackhammer headphones.

Concentrate your troops in my vitrines—the clodhopping Russians are coming and they’re unbathed—the lissome Chinese are fractionizing and there are days full of post-Colombian exchanges in cider houses. Bureaucracy comes significantly later—when you read a damned book for a change. There’s a perfunctory and nutritionless American meal to eat.

You decide to desecrate the Great American Songbook by playing piano scrolls backward through a revolving cylinder in a thrift store music box. The cylinder is missing its steel teeth and comb but we both hum loudly and out of tune. You say you want to hear some of the great stories behind the songs while playing a prepared piano.

I say I’d rather hear it with a prerecorded jazz trio accompaniment—the kind you used to hear at a Sunday brunch featuring watery eggs and cigarette butts in half-consumed mimosas. And if we’re lucky we may get a dissertation on megadroughts from the waiter who holds a PhD in Hegemonic Drip Studies.

This, we decide, is a forgettable meal. This, we decide, is a grand start to a state religion.

What I’m Listening To:

“I love my country stupid and cruel
Red, white, and blue…
All you have to do is sing in the choir
Kill yourself every once in a while…”

— Wilco / “Cruel Country”

Sleep Deprivation Intermediate Vector

Dear Pizarro,

I’m sitting down to write at 4am for the first time in three months (thereabouts) and I’m not considering flea infested furs. If you’ll deliver a plane load of cholera infected passengers to my town in the far off reaches of the South Pacific, and if you’ll also supply a molecular biologist … well, I’ll make mine a parasitic sore that doesn’t make me intimate with sheep. Our animal friends are constantly bombarding me with microbes—and I don’t want any microbes. Why can’t you understand that? I don’t want cat scratch fever either, and I certainly don’t wish to swim in a floating floret pattern like Hernando de Soto and his murder of aquatic crows with laughing sickness—or kuru—if you’d like to be precise. There’s nothing funny here. But when I think about the Picardy sweats my knees buckle and I get the runs. So take your spirochetes and email me from the last calving ice shelf. I’ll hold the pathogens until the morning. Please delouse me thrice daily and we’ll get along like hot Myxomatosis on the spread.

Feverishly yours,
X.

WTF?

“Climate change is not a financial risk that we need to worry about. Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years?”

— Stuart Kirk / HSBC Asset Management

Soft Beds

The shallow coast has migrated to higher elevations
We live in the time of burning landscapes
Rainforests to savannas in two easy days
The grand ice shelves in five easy pieces
We’re on finite time and nothing unspools
Like priorities heavily influenced by neglect
You speak in deeper tones when you’re shallow
It’s a conscious choice to avoid detection
Like providing soft beds for corpses

What I’m Reading:

“All measures of conservation, as well as all technologies meant to wean us from fossil fuels, are worth pursuing in the same way that doing something is always more than doing nothing.”

— Hope Jahren / The Story of More

Anoles (redux)

We made snares from long grasses,
We caught one in ten; then
We prodded a bite and
We wore them as earrings.

I pinched their their necks for dewlaps —
Their red-ringed and speckled yellow arcs.
You, transfixed, favored not color but
Their harrassed concitations.

Was it the yelp of surprise
At the first bite?
Or was it watching them wriggle by their tails, defying gravity
A St. Anthony or St. Vitus?

We heard their tails grew back, but
We lacked the patience;
We prayed to see
Our dismemberments regenerate.

What I’m Listening To:

“What if birds aren’t singing they’re screaming”

— Aldous Harding / “What if Birds…”