It’s precisely because motility is important to the sperm that it listens to futures reports. The price of pork bellies is of paramount importance to fertilization… and the Fibonacci 50!
Sing and dance for Magellanic skies are bearing down on every sperm, and everyone still swimming is despairing of exploding plastic coils — they’re refractory and they’re concupiscent, elegant and resplendent all at once — even the twisty-tailed stragglers are trying.
The potential is righteous with me…
… and you, and a dog named Boo.
A girl like you. A girl named Goo, that thinks and predates the partridges, the pear trees, and the sonic tableaux.
Think of the tree and its allowance — its unfurling spectacular in its singular come-uppance — spectacular and oracular!
Leave the headlands to the Powderheads and the powder to the Jacobites. Once upon a guillotine I saw the news, the graphic elements, the chyron and the pews — and we raged for the angels. We sang: “Kill Your Television Now.”
I am suddenly quiescent (and senescent) and the market has squatted on the pantifiers.
Do crotchless pants catch fire? Try the chaps, they’re in the next section over.
And I got to know, and I got to know, and I got to know…
… which swimmer makes it to the egg.
“I shall always be depressed, but what comforts me is the realization that I can now accept this dark side as the commanding side of my personality. In accepting it, I will make it work for me.”
cluelessness was her aspiration
omission was her inclination
forgetfulness was her destination
tra la la, she said
cluelessness was his indignation
commission was his situation
punctiliousness was his inspiration
tra la la, he said
it seemed to work without resignation
what a revelation
tra la la
“I believe that, more than anything else, this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.”
— Ann Patchett / The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life
“!Clase de bamba, clase de bamba!” is what the bird says every time I move.
It squawks too — if I don’t move — but clase de bamba is on repeat for the last 15 minutes. It’s a hot, dingy little office overstuffed with papers and old phone books — the White Pages. The White Pages! — dating back to 1959.
And hundreds of pictures of Fidel Castro strewn about in every pose imaginable: fulminating spittle in mid-diatribe at a lectern, smoking a cigar with García Marquez, hugging Allende, saluting troops with Pinochet, glad-handing a sugar cane field hand. Then there’s Fidel in a baseball uniform. Fidel and his brother Raul. Fidel and Che. Fidel, Raul and Che. Fidel and Kruschev. And my favorite, Fidel and Nixon smiling camera right.
It’s just endless, hundreds of pictures, and every one of them has a rifle sight painted in lipstick over Fidel’s face.
Seriously, lipstick. The open tube on the desk is Revlon Kiss Me Coral. Says so on the red dot on the tube.
The air conditioning unit is laboring something fierce, rattling in the window frame. And that fucking bird is going on about clase de bamba.
Skip tracing is a special way to meet humanity — its kindnesses, empathy, and its beautiful places. Especially the lovely places where this humanitarian lives and works. This Riggleman.
He’s a souse. It’s clear from the two dozen gin empties in the corner. The ashtray hasn’t been emptied since 1978. God damned clase de bamba must be his favorite thing to listen to. I couldn’t sit here all day with this mangy parrot going on and on.
I’m talking about the pre-millennium neuroses and the pumpkin-psychotropic blues.
It reminds me of Florida this sickly place. It’s hot, full of love bugs — sparing on the brotherly love — and it smells of piss and cigarettes.
Riggleman’s a fast one though. Always seems to be a half-a-step beyond the long arm. Betcha’ he’s shuffled off to Florida — the state shaped like a gun and an impotent penis all at once. The dangler at the bottom end of the good ‘ol U.S. of A.
Now there’s a picture.
This is Fall at 4:40 p.m. on 11/07/20. Jamaica Plain, MA. (1/4)
“In a way, it’s an act of authorial control to withhold information, but I also see it as an utter evasion of authorial responsibility. I just sort of hand the system over to the reader and say, I don’t know what this means, but I’m out of here. Sure, I have my own feelings about what I am interested in investigating emotionally. But, in the end, my intention doesn’t matter.”
— Rumaan Alam / ThePaisReview.org, “Something to Hold On To: An Interview with Rumaan Alam”
Nothing in the darkness. First thought best thought was moot. His brain went mute, all circuits switched. Long stretches of imperfect dendrites. Long stretches of boredom and damnation. Then a spark. Detonation. Clean developments. Cold synapses. Withered axons.
Sounds from outside the darkness: the missing foundations and the people who made unholy noise. Every time he developed a word another appeared wanting to take its place. Darkness darker than the extant black seeped in.
She clapped the clap of the heartless, and thought it better to go to sleep. Either / or propositions appeared to light up the darkness and dimmed. It was light and dark again every few seconds. Then it was dark forever.
The dark mocked them. They craved the silence just before words were spoken. They craved silence.
There was a tinkling before the great silence.
“Gtting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.”
— Joyce Carol Oates / Interview with Robert Compton, Dallas Morning News
I fell asleep last night thinking I need a new muse. I’ll be damned if Chuck Heston didn’t show up for self-appointed rounds through my REM sleep. Yeah, Chuck Heston must be my new muse. But he wasn’t alone, no. Here came Chuck Heston and Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People).
Here they came down this dimly lit hypnagogic hall o’ hallucinatory goodness. Chuck “god-damned dirty apes” Heston says, “We’re ready to roll. C’mon, Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People)!”
So we’re driving downtown on a typical Saturday overnight. The fares are clicking over regular. Busy night, full moon. We just saw a guy taking a dump at the entrance to Duane Reade.
“What’s the new assistant manager going to do when she opens up the store tomorrow morning?” I say. “She’ll run her heel through the shit and nearly fall — save that she holds on to the door handle. Then that smell hits her and she adds her puke to the mess at her feet. Her new heels ruined, she fears. What kind of way to start the day is that, huh, Chuck?”
He’s busy tightening Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) red neck bandana in the back seat.
“Chuck, her heel arch is clogged with a runny shit meatball,” I say. “The knotted florets on her shoes are now spattered with last night’s calzone bile. Chuck? Chuck?”
He’s wild-eyed. He rolls down the window. He screams into the wind — to the darkened alleyways: “You maniacs. You blew it up. God damn you. God damn you all to hell!”
My own command performance in the back of the cab. Wow. He catches my eye in the rear view, spittle-mouthed and bleary-eyed, he says: “You take umbrage at my Rosetta Stone? Who do you think you are? Mr. Goodstuff? There are no more $3 whores in this town.”
“True that, Chuck. So very true,” I say, and offer him some Peppermint Chiclets.
He declines and says, “I’ve been home all the time.”
Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) barks at a group of Argentinians grilling steaks on the corner of MacDougal and Houston. They’re all decked out in cerulean blue and white striped jerseys, and chanting “AR-GEN-TI-NA, AR-GEN-TI-NA.” They invite us over for steaks by a 50-foot high bank of television screens all tuned to the 1978 World Cup.
A flash and we’re standing on the sidewalk with plates full of rice rolled up like strips of sod on gauze — each individual grain is inserted in to the gauze.
“How do we eat this, Chuck?”
“It’s a roulade of rice and gauze,” he says.
Yeah? Ok, I say. “Gauze and all.” So I toss one to Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People). He chomps it down.
The wall of screens go black and the Voice of America, interspersed with static, booms from the speakers.
A smiling woman with a name tag the reads: ANA appears with an acoustic guitar. Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) barks at her, foaming with ill intent and a bad savor in his mouth. Ana produces a steak from the sound hole on the guitar and quiets Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People).
Another lady appears who looks like Patti Smith with blonde frosted bangs and ends. Her face is covered with heavy white pancake, but her name tag reads: SWAGGY. She’s carrying an electric guitar.
An argument ensues between Swaggy and Ana about who is the better multi-instrumentalist. Punches are thrown and the Argentinians get involved. Chuck drags Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) away on a leash.
I attempt to sort this all out. A steak is at stake.
“The question is, how do you want to exist in the world, and how are you going to do the work?”
“Ever since Trump was elected, we have been living through things that we would find overplayed and unbelievable in fiction and film and they keep on coming…”
— Rebecca Solnit / “Chrome-Plated Pistols and Pink Polos: The Face of Elite Panic in the USA”
thee istsfor manity reader 