A reverential moment passed unheeded— Post-diluvian effluvium— Forced to move aphantasic Wire weevil wonder wye Tilak-covered blind third eye
She rages wild at seeing A world bereft of meaning Muddle-mucking in the south Trapped so near the grinder’s mouth Wire weevil wonder wye
Why?
“just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes i’ll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them”
She woke up dumber in the new southern town than she had been in her northern home the last time she fell asleep. The intellectual disparity over those few sleepless days was astounding, many folks would later say:
“How could someone become so stupid in six short days?”
Six days filled with the lurking of one imaginary great white shark that followed her around the world. The hallucinatory sequence ended in clear tropical waters. Even though she had no son, she ran out from the safety of the white sand beach into the clear, luminous, water (a water whose color was so entrancing it had no name, merely a color code number: #22BED9 — on that code everyone could agree).
In she went after the son she didn’t have only to find herself at the bottom of an enormous darkening aquarium filled with rock outcroppings, and many great white sharks lying inert on the sand. All of them waiting for the monstrous shark that appeared from the left and swam between her and the shore — now inexplicably a half mile away …
She awoke when she heard a voice lamenting the late hour: “5:45 in the god-damned morning!” Then something about “bagels… and crowds.” But the voice belonged to her father—now dead five years, so this could not be.
She felt unalterably stupid — imbecilic — like the Stooge that couldn’t even make it past the first cattle call of tryouts for the “Curly Joe” spot that needed filling sometime in the late 1950’s.
“My goodness, I’m a fucking dolt!” She said to the popcorn on the ceiling.
She picked up her phone, went into the bathroom and composed this note on the Werdsmith app while sitting on the cold toilet:
“Happy so and so… madness so and so… I’ve drawn and quartered the last day of my old life. First, I set it in stocks and forced it to reflect on its insistence on the passage of time. I denounced it as a heretic and forced it to abjure from the heights of the glorious strappado. I singed it a bit on the pyre. I rolled it on the rack. I pilloried it, used the cudgel, prodded its eyes with a red hissing poker, beat it with the bastinado, used the Spanish boot, and finally pulled and impaled its tongue until nothing remained if it.
This will be my annus mirabilis (she had no idea what this meant anymore, but she wrote it automatically): the one by which I’ll measure the rest of my life. The pivot point. There is my life before today, and my life after — this should mean something to me.”
“People, die everyday…” There is gothic organ music swelling and ebbing in the ether. There is someone muttering “bummer” in the next room. The smell of acrid pot is wafting in on a warm eddy of air blowing under the hotel room door. There are ochres and yellows on the walls and an overall orange mood to the room. Next door someone is repeating: “people, die everyday, die everyday…” There is something important here, but I can’t decipher it — not yet — but I will.
It’s comfortably warm now and a woman is moving about, beyond my line of sight, by the bed, with pleasant food on a white tray. I sense it but I can’t see her. This is an inviting place, I feel comfortable here. But I don’t understand why it’s a “bummer” and why someone continues to repeat: “people, die everyday, die everyday…”
“Mother apron smeared with blood and flour. Mother flower. Mother Florida, the wet bone.”
The southern city was full of all manner of curvilinear impediments and drop-offs. It led to a vertiginous sensation she abhorred—it seemed as if the angry sky and sea wished to become one turbid space. She saw cloud arms descending from a fanged sky—the world was tooth and mettle and the kidney bingo would not wait. She heard the northern city beckoning her back—but it would have to wait. Wait. Weight.
“A ‘mistake’ is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.”
There’s something of the sybarite about her. She plays the lute too loud and with reckless abandon — popping strings here and there and singing haltingly about fucking.
About what?
Yeah, and she eats too many moon pies in one sitting and washes them down with half a dozen milkshakes.
My god, woman! Even the Village People thought twice about doing the shake.
This is appalling and I’m whining in a Terry Thomas sort of way: I say, old chap…
You have such a limited vocabulary, and no head for figures.
May I call you Pepi?
At half past four in the afternoon? Rather!
You have a passion for rotters —
I’m jealous.
Take thy clyster pipe, syringe, and love me!
You’re being very sentimental. I will. Off we go!
“All the virtues—loyalty, patriotism, courage, honesty, faith, compassion, you name it—are just social constructs, patches to cover the naked barbarism that is at our core…”
Get away hog man get back to hog land hog man dead end
“I remember writing a poem about killing my parents and reading it to my mother. She was not very happy but she always encouraged me nonetheless. I was 12.”
What is this? I’m dizzy and there seems to be a slight scrim like muslingauze between me and everything else. Look at the sun—it’s like the fog of lithium … a weariness settles over me… my outlook is decidedly more pessimistic and I need to catch up on my sleep in order to remain anywhere near some sort of balance.
She says: who i b today? who i b?
The spin keeps rolling in. Yes, frightful really, the oceans and deserts appearing in the same place.
“There is no wrong way to mourn we’re drinking the same water as the dinosaurs.”
“If the world is torn to pieces, I want to see what story I can find in fragmentation. I have taken to making collages. I want to see whether a different narrative might arise … When everything feels like it’s coming apart, the art of assemblage feels like a worthy pastime.”
— Terry Tempest Williams / Erosion: Essays of Undoing
It is recorded in some musty tome that in 1456 Pope Callixtus III excommunicated the comet to end all comets. A heathen astral rock glowing white-hot as it streaked across the sky. The stars are signifiers. The popes are pontificators.
This is an interlude apropos of nothing.
“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.”
She realized, once in the southern city a few days, she could be mindful of enjoying a moment or two—as fleeting as they were—before the drowned world.
On occasion she experienced something of the transience of beauty—or she amended, the beauty of transience. And in this piecemeal manner she orchestrated a less fitful hour or two.
But upon mindlessly enjoying the transience of beauty (or the beauty of transience) she’d be shocked out of her reverie.
And she continued on in this way on this day—the acculturated middle day of the week (just who decided this was midweek? just who decided to start the week on the day it started?) in this manner she spiraled off in another ruminative coil toward the shapes without form and darkness without substance.
Then she heard a disembodied voice ask: anhedonia, anyone?
“How is it possible to still be startled / As I am by the oblong silhouette of the coiling Index finger of a pending death.”
thee istsfor manity reader 