S: Very quiet here today but a huge fly in my office that I just spent 20 minutes chasing and it’s still here.
A: Don’t use a broom. I broke a window in Georgia that way, once upon a time.
S: It flew out but then back again. It’s been flying all around the office now. Hopefully it’ll go out the door when it opens again. I don’t want to have to kill it because it’s huge.
B: Extra protein for lunch if you trap it!
S: Yum! 🪰
S: It’s my dream / B: I can’t!
What I’m Listening To:
“Did it hurt when you fell from the highest peak in hell? I didn’t write a letter, but just know I wished you well”
Something should be written here that retains some resonance for the reader. Something to make them feel better before going on with their day. Maybe something scintillating that will lead to a ruminating pause or two as the day evolves. Something they might repeat to another person, who in turn would repeate it to someone else who would also repeat it and in turn form a chain that would wend its way across the world and sit nicely with most who heard it, and cause others to reflect deeply on its evocation.
Instead what will be written here is . . .
NO TO HATE NO TO INEQUITY NO TO WAR NO TO RACISM NO TO PATRIARCHY NO TO HEGEMONY NO TO FASCISTS NO TO OLIGARCHY
YES TO YOU YES TO UNDERSTANDING YES TO AN OPEN HEART & OPEN MIND YES TO PEACE
What I’m Reading:
“Still, if you spend a great deal of your time writing stories or making art, it’s worth considering what it means to you, personally, to do this creative work amid the cataclysms and crises we continually face.”
“Astronaut-Bouncing looks jive-phony, unless, of course, you think of the moon as a snare drum”
— Thomas Sayers Ellis / “Polo Goes to the Moon”
“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented society’ to a ‘person-oriented society!’ When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism,and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
— Martin Luther King Jr. / “Beyond Vietnam,” (1967)
“Night is coming, shouldering a sack of misdeeds that glow in the dark.”
—Ai / “Father and Son”
“For me the scariest thing about the last forty years, even more than the rising temperature, was the ascension of the libertarian idea that the individual matters far more than the society an individual inhabits.”
— Bill McKibben / The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon
“I have taken to photographing my every moment in an attempt to locate the place where I lost myself.”
— Cynthia Cruz / “Phosphorescence”
“Because if we are to have any hope of making the kind of civilizational leap required of this fateful decade, we will need to start believing, once again, that humanity is not hopelessly selfish and greedy—the image ceaselessly sold to us by everything from reality shows to neoclassical economics.”
— Naomi Klein / That Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
“Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.”
— Robert Reich / The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
What I’m Listening To:
“If there’s one thing you can say about mankind There’s nothing kind about man You can drive out nature with a pitch fork But it always comes roaring back again”
The Physiotherapist Below (Found Note thru N+7 Generator)
The young woodlouses were thrilled today with all their new apparel.
My cleavage looked like a deprivation straddle.
I had to bring everything in today because my apostrophe echoed the famous factotum where the manger complained to the racket about his housemother being too small, and each tingle he complained, the racket added another anodyne.
Once the anodynes were removed, the manger was thrilled with his large housemother.
That’s how I felt today.
The few remaining jaffas I took to Bordellos, so everything was appreciated.
How lucky I am to live in such a generous compass!
See the physiotherapist below.
It looked like a depressive stowaway.
What I’m Reading:
“And we live in an age where everything is so distorted that I don’t want anyone overdosing on Ambien because they read my book.”
—Ottessa Moshfegh in conversation with Carmen Maria Machado / The Guardian
Suppurating wounds sprout Like wildflowers. We persist— Purposefully ignorant, inured, Anesthetized, self-aggrandized. We, founders of wastelands— Never heeding a lesson, ever Unappreciative, and masters Of all we destroy. We fester.
II.
Think. Feel. Love. Change. Act.
What I’m Reading:
“If I act and work and write as though a more just future will exist, perhaps I’ll be one step closer to believing in it.”
This is a graphic representation of the changes in global temperature based on “tens of thousands” of measurements taken between 1850 and 2018 (left to right).
“Geoengineering: The realistic assumption that it’d be easier to cast trillions of tiny mirrors into the atmosphere than to get people to stop driving SUVs.”
— Zach Weinersmith / Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness
“A cow with a mouth at both ends chews hell going and coming.”
— Ai / “Guadalajara Cemetery”
“Organic Chemistry: A means by which to make undergraduates cry using only carbon bonds.”
— Zach Weinersmith / Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness
“I recommend sitting down anywhere, looking around, and then staring into the middle distance for a while.”
— Dana Margolin / The Creative Independent interview
“I have studied what we have done to the planet and I object. I object to the exploitation of, and the lack of respect for, human laborers. I object to the frantic commercialization of the many realms of daily life, I object to the desecration of what is beautiful, to the celebration of what is venal, and to the ethical obtuseness of the king’s adoring enablers. I object to society’s complacency … I would ask you not to give in to the temptation to despair, not to retreat into cynicism or settle into disaffection…”
— Barry Lopez / Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
“I loved Leonard Cohen more like a daughter loves a father, though. His music tempered my insanity with a brighter kind of madness. He grounded my heart at a time when I was worried I would jump out the window.”
— Ottessa Moshfegh / “A Brighter Kind of Madness: On Leonard Cohen”
“Every time we check, God appears to be playing dice.”
— Zach Weinersmith / Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness
“… And what of the stanzas we never sing, the third that mentions ‘no refuge could save the hireling and the slave’? Perhaps, the truth is, every song of this country has an unsung third stanza, something brutal snaking underneath us as we blindly sing the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands hoping our team wins.”
— Ada Limón / “A New National Anthem”
What I’m Listening To:
“I would like to salute The ashes of American flags And all the fallen leaves Filling up shopping bags”
