I heard a Colombian river was full of cocaine hippos. I heard we’ve passed 7 of the 9 thresholds that make earth habitable for human life. I heard hard times are coming. I heard we can lose ourselves in augmented reality instead. I heard the clunking of skulls into a multi-tiered pyramid. I heard the cuckoo’s call before the theft of the thrush’s eggs. I heard your footfalls as you left. Your heels like hammers clacking into the haze
You know me. She knows me. And both of you know I’m incapable of washing the mangoes just for the sake of it. So let’s not play nuclear family melodrama tropes — there will be no keyboard swells or violin stingers. This isn’t a repeat of Gilligan’s Island sixty years later. This is my life. These are your lives in bas relief. Smell the charred steak wafting from the kitchen. Touch the congealed clarified butter. Don’t you hear the clacking of that forever-fucked-up ceiling fan in the Florida room? Let’s not have this be a cliff hanger or I’ll just proceed to hang myself inna closet at the Scottish Inn. This is pure dimwittery and spastic fuckwaddery. Let’s stop this now.
II.
And lightning crashed about a quarter mile away in the Boone’s backyard … someone said: thing thing thing …
III.
I just got a voicemail from Freesia Scandalmonger she was calling about the work reservoir. I am at work, and when I tried to call back I got the fry detector.
I called you and a lemming and a methodology answered just now. If they can still come today Freedom Scalp is there waiting. If they want to schoolmate something for tomorrow please have them call the salesgirl or the clergy.
You may have “closed” this work station organ rescue for your badger, but this —now a 2 yes-man-old—rescue was just simply ignored.
The work was never done.
No one contacted us about the rescue.
The work is still outstanding.
No one has been brought up for ordination to honor the organ-grinder.
What about love?
IV.
Someone said to her: “Are your avocados in the oven?”
To which she said: “Excuse me. Do I know you?”
“You are very angry, aren’t you?”
“Again, do I know you, sir?”
He moved about her in a drunken semi-circle and professed:
“I am a visionary, missy. I see things you can’t imagine. Hexagons. Bike routes to heaven. Heathen paths to perdition and desolation.”
He adjusted the rope he wore as a belt and riled himself up for a jeremiad, but she turned and walked away.
Clarity would wait another day. Another day of southern charm in a southern city.
V.
This is as clear as a cross-oceanic Saharan dust storm—which are becoming regular fixtures of this anthropogenic age …
Mind your jumpers.
What I’m Reading:
Another fascist prick here in the States, riding the migrant crisis to power? Everyone knew these things would happen, smart people had been predicting them for years, and yet the world—or at least the assholes running it — seemed uninterested in stopping them.
December rush, eh? Rebarbative bedfellows, yes? Assuage the babblative, no?
You’ve got another December rush going and no guardian of the journal yet—you… you… you see… you see men hovering outside your window 15 & 1/2 storeys up—what phantasms these? What dour inflections of second sight? What third-eye astigamtismus, those shimmering Fata Morganas? Weren’t the visitations supposed to happen Christmas Eve? It’s three weeks before Christmas, man! Be damned masts! Confound the mast climbers! Rock the rock pigeons in their hidebound pinnacles! At the end of the year I see a procession of all the dead things seen throughout the year. What queasiness this? How quizzical. How illogically logical that this would appear before me on the day of the supernovae—on the day of multitude earthquakes—and dozens of volcano borborygmus…(or is it my stomach?) Be off visions—be off, you hovering homunculi, before I pincer you with forefinger and thumb—you pin-tailed wren (assassins). Vape elsewhere into the winds. Count the year’s conquests in slower measures, and hushed(!) tones, by the edge of tsunami quay—and take long steps toward the end of that miniature pier. Your eye sockets full of garter and indigo snakes compel me toward viper thoughts. This door prize of papercuts bores me in the standard modes. Note the batch and quantity—mark the name and model! Inspector 13 was here, and he hung from his neck a single use noose—17 centimeters from the ground, and he drowned in 9.5 centimeters of water. Take your excellence wherever you can find it…
Yours sincerely,
The Gibbous Red Star
image: p. remer
What I’m Reading:
Post-meaning weaponizes our sense of bewilderment in the bare face of it and neuters criticism by denuding the language that we criticize in. How can you show that something is racist, or stupid, or dangerous, or genocidal when nothing means anything?
AI did not put us on this pathway—the emancipation of language from meaning has long been the pursuit of hucksters and salesmen and is the long-term project of far-right politicians—but through its hyperproduction of content and its flattening of language to a two-dimensional surface it is certainly accelerating our journey down it; if you wanted to invent a machine that would create the conditions for fascism to take root, you would invent ChatGPT.
— Matt Greene / “On the Rise of ChatGPT and the Industrialization of the Post-Meaning World” / Lithub
It said 6-12 hours. It’s been 8 plus hours and nothing. Nothing. Not hard or soft. Not wet or dry. Nothing. The jazz player hates the blues picker. The punk puckers up for a fight with the funkster. The classical player prods the pop artist with a sharpened cello bow. Bow down. Bow down and bend yourself over. We want to see you prostrate. We’d like to pilfer and perforate your soul. What is that droning I hear. Why is that detuned. Why is that sound treated. Why the warp. Why the skronk. Bring back the white noise. Bring down the sky.
II.
There’s usually a preferred profligacy of pathogens on the screen. Now there is nothing. Note the white screen. Note the night light. Nigh. Note the evil high on that ridge to the west. Note the puppetry of the bored gods. A lower case lot if I ever saw a sorry lot. Restore my fingers. Crumple up that Venn diagram.
III.
You ain’t seeing what I’m seeing on the horizon of this new year.
I ain’t saying what I’m seeing on the horizon of the new year.
I ain’t writing about what I’m seeing on the horizon of the new year.
I ain’t skewing the horizon line of the new year.
I ain’t setting to skew the horizon line of the new year.
But eventually I’ll tell you, and then I’ll write about it, and then you… you will… you will skew the horizon line of the new year.
Horizons are meant to be horizontal as long as you look at the horizon in a particular way.
I ain’t looking at it in that particular way.
What I’m Reading:
It’s not just about going for the money; it’s about finding use for the money in a world where art, literature, design, and even the material things in life that may bring you joy have been so thoroughly corrupted by concessions that you need to be able to shed your sense of self like skin to find joy in it all.
— Matthew Byrd / “How Pluribus Reimagines 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers for a Generation With Nothing Left to Sell Out” / Reactor
The hope is our prayers will make Him nicer, but It don’t look likely, and to make it worse An Act of God is anything at all That lets the insurance people off the hook.
— Howard Nemerov / “Acts of God”
Logging and mining are destroying swathes of the Congo rainforest, with the result that African forests went from being a carbon sink to a carbon source in 2010 to 2017
— Alec Luhn / “Africa’s forests are now emitting more CO2 than they absorb” / New Scientist
in 1948 the UN general assembly passes a resolution they say any palestinian refugees who
want to return to their homes should be permitted to do so. they also mention money they
say that compensation must be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for
the loss of or damage to property. my great grandmother zahra owns one hundred dunams
of land in jish in palestine and on it: groves of olive trees. her sons flee but she stays with the
beauty and waits for her sons to come back.
— Hasib Hourani / “1. what warrants a war? (compilation)”
The worst climate disruptions will happen beyond U.S. borders, but they will put pressure on American society nonetheless. Migration to the southern border, perhaps the most powerful current in American politics today, is already being driven partly by ecological collapses in Central American farm economies. International monitors expect these pressures to grow over the next several years. If the country’s policy today is at all indicative, detention camps for immigrants will proliferate, often in climate dead zones, and the southern border will become even more militarized.
This would not be an America where the founding ideals hold much sway. The movement of people might even set states against one another. Tensions in receiving zones will—without strong, growing economies—create more opportunities for demagoguery. In dead zones, the dearth of public services and the fading imprimatur of the state will naturally erode local participatory democracy.
All of this could create even better conditions than those today for the kind of transactional authoritarian government that Trump is trying to establish. Xenophobia and racism are already pillars of this movement, and they would be strengthened by mass migration. State and local leaders affected by disasters might supplicate themselves to the president in order to receive the patronage of disaster aid. A hurricane or megafire during election season might be a convenient excuse for federal intervention.
The emerging Trump doctrine views empathy as a weakness and public welfare as a usurpation of the natural hierarchy. His authoritarianism is perfectly suited to an era of climate strife.
— Vann R. Newkirk II / “What Climate Change Will Do To America By Mid-Century” / The Atlantic
All is omen. The light is marrow of shadow: the insects will die in the dawn tapers.
— Antonio Gamoneda / “Burn the Losses”
You make us fear each other, fear you, and so we send our own people out, and the world gets poisoned by our hate and our fear.
—Hugh Howey / Dust
Who can survive an apocalypse And live? I made the roadkill a god But I’m not allowed to speak for god So I wait.
— Brian Gyamfi / “The Thing Dead on the Road”
What I’m Listening To:
it’s cold outside and my hands are dry skin is cracked and i realize that i hate the sound of guitars a thousand grudging young millionaires forcing silence sucking sound forced into this conversation
Several days of tempest, Drifting to the north on unanswered orisons, The datura oriented at the sun’s appearance. Partial to impuissant seasons, Speakers shorten their imprecations — Ancients their divagations. There I painted you As a spot on the dimming sun.
What I’m Reading:
where can we put all this fire? there is more fire than warmth there are more walls than doors
will you teach me the language of walls?
— Anna Malihon / “[I’ve wanted to ask for a long time…]”
Something like a true depressive’s day. Cold, cloudy, dark by 4pm. An elaborate torpor that caffeine won’t derail. Eating meals with your fingers. Eating cookies. Wear your pajamas all day. Walk 840 steps by 8:30pm … that’s the equivalent of one circuit around the apartment. Calls not made. Calls not answered. The maples denuded and bending in the wind outside. The mopes. The doom scrolls. The writing relegated to this you see before you. What gives? Shake this. (Shake this not).
II.
Scrounge not. Plod not. Spend the day and night in bed. Lower the blinds. Keep the sun at bay tomorrow. Press play. Press repeat. Turn down the volume. Read a book backward & upside-down. Close said book. Close (unsaid) eyes. Tomorrow. Cleanse. Fold. Manipulate. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow …
III.
She made an unusual, exciting discovery—rosary narrations with warbling wooers at the center of earplug spaces—messages in the marmalades, esoteric concatenations, erotic liberations, scratched phonographs. Her observational arched eyebrow and nuanced approach to clam ranching led to further explorations with molting morphs, sunken oars, and sedative promiscuities. Her life was now plunger ready. She continued drafting, something was bound to make sense to her piquant sensibility someday. And that day was December 3, 2025 — the day of the coded codex.
What I’m Reading:
It was worse than having a sinking feeling; I was a sinking feeling, an unplayable adagio for strings; internal distances expanded and collapsed when I breathed. It was like failing to have awoken at the right point in a nightmare; now you had to live in it, make yourself at home.
She delivered a dead man aboard pretending he was drunk. Otherwise, she delivered groceries ordered through an app. Though it must be said that she sometimes delivered blows to the head. The unsuspecting victims then became the next batch of sailors to be delivered up for impressment. She didn’t do any of the processing herself—she merely dropped off the victims, and on occasion delivered arithmetic books to various regional libraries.
One day she struck an unsuspecting Calculus book (like it was 1812) and sent a number of differential and multivariable maths skittering across the highway. She knew an opportunity when she struck one.
Upon exiting her impressment mobile she herself was struck, in the most integral of manners, by an errant British man-o’-war—three hundred miles off course from a breadfruit processing plant. It goes to show that calculus and impressment aren’t complementary.
You may now return to your regularly scheduled life. . .
thee istsfor manity reader 