thee istsfor manity reader

New Land

A bit shoddy this place!

It has become an astounding melodramatic mediocrity — made all the more disappointing by what it claims to aspire to be.

How much are you asking for it?

But it’s a half-baked soap opera! It’s an intellectual wilderness state ringed by an imbecilic dystopian society. It’s full of unsympathetic characters.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve wished those stooges a slow disembowelment by wolves, or that they be felled by tornadic detritus, swept away in the wake of a hurricane, or be incinerated in one of the dumpster fires of they’re always starting.

Goose-step Market Dystopia.

This smells of that earthy failure — like they’ve already rigged a dying system…

Nah, you can keep it.

Oy, for the new land of the Huns!

Oy!

“But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

— George Orwell / 1984

“People ask me sometimes… ‘When will there be enough women on the court?’ And my answer is: ‘When there are nine.’”

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Storm’s-a-Coming

Where are the kids? Where’s the dog?

It drives my blood pressure up. I need a tunic and a tuna sandwich — make it Fuji tuna with cranberries and apples, and make the tunic combed Egyptian cotton. Stroft! I want it.

The asseverations of assonance and then the concomitant detonation of dissonance ensues — what do I do?

Well, the therapist tells me that I am not my thoughts, and then she plies me with psychopharmacological magic…

wo! wo! wo! it’s magic! never believing that’s so…

so jejune, so mon dieu, la merde… que mierda… shit…

… entropic. so sophic — that’s what this is, Charlie Tuna, it’s natural that you’re writing this because that voice telling you this is in your head and jamming up your ears…

Ah! Emergency! Emergency!

Call the Tonton Macoute. Call Col. Hogan. The Merry Pranksters. The shit is dripping off the fan blades at this point in time. I think it’s too late to bake a cake to leave out in the rain. There’s been a god damned typhoon storming outside for three days — and now you want to go-a-baking with Richard Harris? You call that singing?

Burl Ives! Blue Tail Fly / Jimmy Crack Corn! That’s singing!

(this ain’t no blackface minstrelsy, mofo!)

Later, Jimmy cracks the needle and the corn is jammed in his mainline. And Sister Ray is naked, slathered in high fructose syrup, wondering where the good time went at 11:42 in the morning outside the CVS.

It’s almost lunch, damn it — she says to Levi, the Conch Fritter Man, who is in a dank heap blocking the automatic doors with a conch shell attached to his member.

Ooh, what a good time this is…

Storm’s-a-coming!

So keep your children near and your pets on a very short leash.

“The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk.”

— William Styron / Darkness Visible

Epistemic Valve

Insouciant pill pusher — writer of scrips intended to send me to oblivion, to live the life of the lotus eaters. Dr. Closer, shutter of the epistemic valve — he wants me to live the limpid life of the unsullied brain. Lamb-shackled. You translucent Mesmer of enthrallment…

Then there was talk between my cousin R, and my friend D., and me about the film I recently saw at a nightclub. R. was talking to a masculine woman, and I wanted to ask him about the lesbians in the film — with whom he was familiar.

R. jumped between me and D. — and R. tried to grab my crotch a number of times. I had to push him away.

You see I almost missed the train, but I managed to wave the engineer down by a series of complicated mirrors mounted on the cars. She stopped and I got in, only to find a bunch of young men from a military academy, which I intuited were students from Greenland — they were crowding the train.

I saw D. and sat next to him, and he told me how stoned he was, and all about the genetically modified strain he’d been smoking.

Then R., found us — D. and I were walking down a side street and we saw the shambles of a recording studio with all manner of murals on the ruined walls.

“Look it’s Muscle Shoals studio. How historic! This is where James Taylor recorded that classic album,” D. said.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” I said. “You might be thinking about Johnnie Taylor. I don’t think James Taylor recorded here.”

R. was throwing rocks at the few remaining walls— pristine white bricks with murals of steam locomotives on them.

“Anyway, we’re not in Alabama,” I said. “We seem to be in Greenland.”

“Ah, fuck, shut up!” R. said. “You’re all incongruity and anachronism spilling into other recurrent dream sequences. Or wait, was this all the same pandemic dream?”

The pungent smell of sulphur overtook us as the crusted ground gave out beneath us.

“The rest of us have been suddenly confronted with the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do with it… There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do.”

— Zadie Smith / “Something To Do”

Sour

Something in the magic of the sour blueberries and yogurt made the start of the day feel somewhat violet — or should I say blue. No. Go ahead and say blew. The day blew before it really got started. She, standing there, with a mouthful of bitterness the sun being smothered by the haze of factory smoke and wildfires. There was something more acrid than usual in the air, like a sweetness that cloyed at the edge of sludge, something sickly in the burning. The sharpness in her mouth brought her back to the moment she was inhabiting — a smudged pink sunrise beyond the billowing, and the nascent thought that something was dead and rotting just beyond the perimeter fence. She swallowed the bitterness with one gulp and let out a long exhalation. Instead of feeling lighter she was leaden and off to face whatever was out there waiting.

“there’s a harmonica tattooed on my collarbone
I can feel death’s mouth on it lips wiry & hot”

— Eduardo C. Corral / “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel”

Blockhead

Relevance was not his strong suit. Assonance was a mildly strong point. And dissonance was his power alley. So he detuned his lyre and randomly plucked strings. He tuned his dulcimer to F sharp and struck it with claw hammers which were more appropriate for sheet rock installation. He retrieved his banjo from a dusty corner in the basement and pulled on the strings hard enough to feel them loosen. He opened a can of stale tennis balls and threw them at the banjo head and strings. He then found his ukulele in the closet and tore out the E and C strings and went mad strumming at the speed of Johnny Ramone on the G and A strings. He even shouted, “gabba, gabba, hey” once for nostalgia sake. In the office he took his electric guitar off its stand, plugged it in, and maximized the fuzz box and with drumsticks he did a ratamacue on the fretboard until there was a maelstrom of skronk filling the room. After a minute of this, his heart racing and the incipient pangs of a migraine squeezing the sides of his neocortex, he raised the guitar over his head and smashed his acoustic guitar to splinters in its stand — and then started on the walls. In this manner his 3/2 with 2 car became a massive heap of refuse. He was proud to take out his home before the weather got the best of him. “Hurricane that! Fire that! Flood that! Tornado that! Glacier melt that! Sea level rise that! Earthquake that! Virus that! Gas explosion that! Take that! I’m in control, Mofo!

“He said the shadows of missiles growing larger on the sidewalk looked like god playing an air piano above us.”

— Ocean Vuong / “Immigrant Haibun”

Port of Call: Topeka, Kansas

X: You purport to a port of call called Topeka, Kansas. Does the Navy have a port of call in Topeka? The navy has a port in a landlocked city, good sir?

Z: What about the Kansas River?

X: Ocean faring ships, my good man!

Z: It’s the cereal of villainy, man. Electronic reminders coming in on radio waves and strange pings from deep space. And if they tell me there’s a port of call in Topeka, Kansas, that’s what I want to sign up for. Why the long face, sir?

X: Because you’re clearly a mad man, and we’re not the navy, and we don’t want madmen driving our cabs or interacting with our customers.

Z: Is it fair to deprive a fare of my enthusiasm?

X: We don’t call our customers fares. And please leave.

Z: Does a leaf leave in the fall? Does a leaf levy a reliquary in antiquary times — and pinion the fruit of piñon trees in the track of alarm? Pray tell.

X: Will you leave. Get out of this office now, or I’m calling the cops.

Z: Oh the cops! Always the clap trap of the mines. The sanctuary breakers and iconoclasts. May the remnants of saints never hear what you utter in gutter times of want and despair. You are a sanctimonious pontificator of flatulence, sir. Dark auguries hang from dead trees.

Good day to you, sir!

“The world has always been chaotic. Life is unpredictable…there is no form. And making forms gives you solidity. I think that’s why people paint paintings and take photographs and write music and tell stories that have beginnings, middles and ends, even when…the middle is at the beginning, and the beginning is at the end.”

— Stephen Sondheim

Sacrilege

Sacrilege, I say. You say, poppycock. I say we go for ice cream on a pear tree, and the partridges be damned.

I have the eyeless in guaguanco player piano boll weevils in exploding plastic shades. I have a plastic covered couch and a handheld cassette player.

I have gutted all my visceral fish and lived a livestock week in panoply and cornucopia. I have called upon Mr. Pharmacist to make my life more bittersweet. He only succeeds at distant quasar sounds.

Oh please be here because I am and I don’t really want to go there where you’re not.

I have well trod ways of going off the rails. I have multifoliate multivariances and polyvalencies of texts. I have Brakhage films to screen and John Cage bubblegum to chew.

And thus I have chosen.

“As the jingle has it:

‘Brothers my first obligation
Is to tell you outright:
We’re in a tough situation
With no hope in sight’

Friends, a wholehearted admission
And a wholehearted UNLESS!”

— Bertolt Brecht / “The Truth Unites”

Wee Hour Verbiage

Chilly Black shoots similac intravenously in the wee hours. Wee Willie Winky wanders wavering and quavering in wastrel wigwams of wanton whimsy. Chuck Zuck plucks clucking ducks out of the muck. Wither Zither moves hither and thither.

Sangfroid in Pentaculous and I flow in the unyielding current, and I fill these spaces with these marks because I’ve committed to do this but right now I do not wish to do this, and this is what the result is…

“Imagine, when we call a strike and everyone refuses to work until we redistribute the wealth of the world.”

— Chuck Palahniuk / Fight Club

Goodly Bunkum

— That’s ungoodly bunkum, sir.

— Huh?

— Yes. That’s a good way of making no sense.

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.”

— Ernest Hemingway