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.”
Strange—she thought—that such a pleasant breeze off the bay should be laden with such uncomfortable humidity. The humidity was all enveloping. She especially disliked the hot sebaceous feeling she had where the sweat beaded below her eyes.
Ugh! She said to the passing manta ray beneath the boardwalk. This is uncomfortable.
The ray stopped and waved the tips of it’s dorsals at her and said—Are you kidding me? Wait until July or August!
The Eighth Ring of Hell, lady! THEE EIGHTH FRIGGIN’ RING!
She no longer saw things as they were—or as she thought they should appear. She only saw the shadows of things—the palm tree: it’s fronds an effulgence radiating out of its top, but she saw only the shadow it cast on the street. She could not see the tree itself. That fire hydrant bisecting the crack of the sidewalk—only the shadow. The awning, the dog and it’s owner, the bicycle—only the shadows cast by the street lamps.
She missed her sea urchin lover and tidal pool in Maine. The north seemed more forgiving—but soon that would be just as hot and humid.
She was moving inexorably—along with everyone else—farther into the anthropogenic extinction event.
She resolved to try again and again here in the south.
One must imagine her happy in the midst of that drowning spit of land.
“Sometimes, you are twenty when you stumble upon an open doorway. Sometimes, you are thirty. Sometimes you are forty, fifty, or sixty. I remembered this when I felt like giving up, when I thought I’d pack all my notebooks and stories into plastic bags and put them away, when I thought I would resign them to the recycling bin.”
Her wanderlust got the best of her again, and again—she was off.
This time in search of her grand existential payoff in the lands of the south—the north had only yielded infrared oceans, tidal pools, and sea urchins for lovers. She knew there must be more to the south.
Off! Florida bound she went. And the first night she thought she finally found her raison d’etre.
There! Midway there, in North Carolina, her Golden Fleece.
A treasure wrapped for her own protection.
Life finally had substance!
“The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accordance with nature, in her manner of operation.”
thee istsfor manity reader 