guilty bystanders we? bystanders guilty we! we guilty bystanders.
What I’m Reading:
“’Now,’ he said, ‘I’ll by God show them how ugly the Ugly American can be.’ And he breaks out all the ugliest pictures in the image bank and puts it out on the subliminal so one crisis piles up after the other right on schedule.”
Something in the magic of the sour blueberries and yogurt made the start of the day feel somewhat violet—or should I say blue. No. Go ahead and say blew. The day blew before it really got started. She, standing there, with a mouthful of bitterness the sun being smothered by the haze of factory smoke and wildfires. There was something more acrid than usual in the air, like a sweetness that cloyed at the edge of sludge, something sickly in the burning. The sharpness in her mouth brought her back to the moment she was inhabiting — a smudged pink sunrise beyond the billowing, and the nascent thought that something was dead and rotting just beyond the perimeter fence. She swallowed the bitterness with one gulp and let out a long exhalation. Instead of feeling lighter she was leaden and off to face whatever was out there waiting.
What I’m Reading:
“When your image is dead you become virus and must obey virus orders.”
Teenager proxy finds the way in—into the circle of grace—plants the seeds of dissension.
Chances are it won’t be us.
Teenager strange face finds a rat covered in grim ichor—wants to spread the triumph of the will over all bully boys—heads for the resevoir.
Turn quickly for the safety of that shoal.
Teenager hooktooth finds the dentist’s scalers arrayed before him—pockets them—slips out the back door.
Predators must be sated.
Teenager piston-thumbs spiral-eyed at the first-person shooter simulacrum—too good for simulation—ferrets out the family arsenal. Gym bags: 1, 2, 3. Off and away in the family wagon.
This is the movement of fear.
What I’m Reading:
“Nothing would be as we hoped it would be, here in the first draft of existence. People were finally beginning to catch on. Our rage made perfect sense.”
The things that were deleterious to her health were the things she enjoyed most in life. She found her life an endless set of binary “yes or no’s”—multivariate options always at the “0” or “1” click or the “on-off” surge—so that her neural pathways were rutted at all the same intersections. Well-worn and smooth were her decisions—overwhelming were her proclivities. She lived in an endless feedback loop, constantly depressing the dopamine/serotonin levers for exultation/equanimity as required. But these chemicals, foods, people, and experiences were no longer keeping her buoyant in a dying world.
One night, in the blue redeeming light of a hitherto unknown messiah, she realized she was trapped in the closed circuit—endlessly lapping. So she wrote a note:
June 8, 2050
I am 66-years old. Today is the day I decided to become a suicide tourist. Switzerland is one of the few places left in the world where there are a handful of trees left and it is still remarkably affordable to “off” yourself—or rather have someone administer a fatal soporific—while you watch the muddy eddies of Lake Geneva. I won one of the last Poweball lotteries in the Northern American Republic in 2048, and am able to afford the check point crossings and one of the last international flights east to Europe. Western approaches are prohibited by the New Sino-Asiatic Empire, and for the mere price of $2.8 million I can afford to spend the last dregs of my winnings watching the last bit of organic potable water dry into a puddle of mud while listening to the cries of the starving masses on the other side of the ramparts. Nothing has grown in the dead equatorial regions of the world for the last dozen years, and after the space programs all crashed and burned after the Jericho Trojan in ‘46, it’s all gone to hell in a handblender. Just on the secure ride here I saw hordes of hungry “old worlders” feeding on a dozen African migrants drawn and quartered at communal troughs—something designed by the New Ordination, don’t you know—still an ingeniously evil lot, they.
All the ice disappeared in ‘48, earlier than projected… anyway, in this all too brown and sweltering world… what hasn’t flooded has parched…
The simple pleasure of having classic Sigur Ros piped straight into my ears as I munch on a bacon maple doughnut (my last request—it cost a cool $66,000 to procure the ingredients and have it made at the QuietusCentre) is the last thing I’ll taste and remember I am told. Although, how do they really know?
I suspect my neurons will fire a few more hundred times as I ebb into the implacable darkness and who knows what synergetic effects I may experience…
Perhaps mother’s Chanel No. 5 in my nose again, but she’s long gone and poses no danger to me now—oh how she poured those bottles down my filthy mouth. Maybe grandma’s flan as she shoved the spoonfuls in my mouth, cracking my right bicuspid as she screamed: “eat it bitch, the kids in Ethiopia have nothing! Didn’t you hear the song?”
Maybe I’ll taste one of dad’s White Castle burgers — the ones he brought home at 6am, when he returned from his overnight shift at the steelworks and fed me while I was still half asleep—and made believe I didn’t feel him fondling me as the smell of minced onions commingled with the stench of dried sweat and coal fires.
I don’t know if the doughnut was the best choice, but it was all my own and unmarred by the history of violence. Well, the violence I tasted with my… wait, this is… this is it… is this it?
What I’m Reading:
“That is exactly what literature is like. As we write, we know that there is something very important to be said about reality, that we have this something within reach, just there, so close, on the tip of our tongue, and that we mustn’t forget it. But always, without fail, we do.”
He hit the snow plow driver with a shovel. He cut the man’s brow deeply over his left eye.
A neighbor said:
“Incidents like this don’t usually occur in this neighborhood.”
Another said:
“With all the problems in this world—the war, the terrorism, the plague … why are we trying to kill each other over moving snow properly? Why can’t we all get along? This is not that type of neighborhood. This is the safest city in Massachusetts. Why don’t people think about what they’re doing?”
A third neighbor said:
“What I fear most is that there are two more storms on the way. It’ll only get worse before it improves. It’s really just a matter of time.”
What I’m Reading:
“Anyone could be an idiot or a jerk, separately, but the combination of ignorance and meanspiritedness—that was special.”
Let us go then, you and I… Like a patient… lobotomized with Trotsky’s ice-pick. Let us go, through certain half… dim back-alley Havana streets where “los gusanos” dare to meet—away from the teeth of the revolution. Let us count those that fled, let us count those that are dead, upon the tires and detritus taken by the gulf stream…
That was all she managed to write before she wrote: the hell with this and left her pen upon the sheet—atop the desk flecked with underwater light as the sun sickened and dropped to its nightly torpor. Here came the darkness and all she had was a useless page, a throbbing writing blister, and bare feet on the cool granito floor—dusty in patches, and littered with small particles that she couldn’t see but felt like tiny talus fields at the edge of her desk. The nightly ceremonial firing of the cannon from Morro Castle snapped her out of her stupor, and soon she would hear the drunken pelotons of tourists making their way through the street out front—with their old city cliches and their first world cavils.
There were many nights she wished she could have gone with her brother on the raft of tires and taken her chance on the vagaries of the Florida Straits—especially now—that his escapade had resulted in her eviction from so called privileged housing in the Old City. She, again, attempted to make her mother’s style of lemonade out of this harsh cask of lemons—so she reasoned that she would no longer be kept up nights by the drunken Europeans’ and Russians’ tone deaf renditions of the folk songs they heard every night on vacation—and that she’d no longer be subject to the leers, propositions, and manhandling by these “elites” that humanity kept flying into the island. Maybe her aunt’s place in Pinar del Rio would be a quiet and more productive place to translate Modernist poetry into Quechua…
What I’m Reading:
“The ice cubes were melting. The species were dying. The last of the fossil fuels were being burned up. A person collapsing in the street might be collapsing from any one of a hundred things. New things to die of were being added each day.”
I’m lost without a clear linear narrative upset by temporal disjunction and chagrined by jump-cut edits. I have no way of disengaging from this nightmare. I’d just like to fall asleep. I’m certain this is the devil’s work, and the devil doesn’t speak in lap dissolves or imminent fade outs.
What I’m Reading:
“I do not want films to show, as in existing documentary (the only direction film has taken to free itself from photographed drama) but to transform images so that they exist in relation to the film only as they flash onto the screen …exist in their own right, so to speak.”
thee istsfor manity reader 