thee istsfor manity reader

Annus Mirabilis

There are blocks everyday, people die everyday, there’s gothic organ music swelling and ebbing in the ether. There is someone muttering “bummer” nearby and the smell of acrid pot wafting in in a eddy of wind that is warm and irrationally blowing from the right. There are ochres and yellows on the walls and an overall orange mood to the large room. You are seated at a long white rectangular table light filters from a window to the right, unseen. And someone else repeating: “people die everyday, die everyday.” There is something important here, but you can’t decipher it, not yet, but you feel you will. It’s comfortably warm here and a woman is moving about beyond your sight line with pleasant food on a white tray; you sense it but you can’t see her. This is an inviting place, you feel comfortable here, but you can’t reconcile why it’s a bummer and why someone continues to repeat: people die everyday, die everyday…

“You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.”

— Neil Gaiman

Charles River Murk

He composed a text to her, intending to say: “I’m going to be a strong arm robber,” but the auto correct produced: “I want to be s throng arm robber.”

She responded: “U mean a strong arm ribber?” She had turned off her autocorrect months ago, confident in her speed and accuracy.

He responded: “no a string arm ribber.” His fused thumb again unable to hit the mark.

She threw her phone in the river from the Mass Avenue Bridge. She’d always wanted to see something she’d thrown disappear in the Charles River murk. 

A few yards later, she dove into the river… never to be seen again.

“And there are times when the only feeling I have is one of mad revolt.”
— Albert Camus, The Plague

Flarfish 15: orogeny llamativo

(Spanglish version)

polyphase deformation, fold tectonics, schistosity

o frutos llamativos que por su belleza presentaran alto

potencial ornamental

displacements in the inner orogenic domains associated

with uplift of retroarc

una previa glaciación del tipo alpino, la que con grado de conservación

which comprises stabilization of oldest crust in the Archean,

late Proterozoic joining of first El resultado más llamativo es el

adelgazamiento de la corteza (28 – 30 km) que pertenece

esa artesanía hecha a mano, de colores what were the driving

forces casos serán reportados aquí Batalla de gallos en San Juan

“… each day was for us a Day of the Dead.”

— Albert Camus, The Plague

Humans Are Dumb Asses

Petunia has a dream where she hides in her sister’s basement while her sister conducts a clandestine revolutionary meeting upstairs in the newly remodeled kitchen. Che Guevara and the Symbionese Liberation Army are in attendance. Hot chocolate and churros are served promptly at 7:16 p.m.

(… but this is a solecism in the dream world…)

(… this is an incorrect unspooling of a dream…)

Dreams should be high on the paranoiac-critical scale, full of soft monsters in the shape of the President’s gal bladder, or the Sri Lankan Finance Minister’s peritonium, or the Zimbabwean Foreign Minister’s show pony — and all of these elements should be whirling about in a pink funnel cloud while calliopean music echoes from the tinny corners of the Bolivian altiplano, while the moon melts like gruyere and streaks down the ash gray sky — all while satellites line up in formation in the exosphere and spell out “Fuck This! We’re Leaving Our Geostationary Orbits — You Humans are Dumb Asses” — then they head for the assured destruction of the Kuiper Belt. It is only then that a sniper shoots out the lights at that department store that specializes in silver lamé tube tops covered in melted chocolate…

Now that has the makings of the start of a dream.

“… evening dress was a sure charm against the plague.”

— Albert Camus, The Plague

Death in Spring

The sheets of virus stop

Quiet strafes the air

Hubei or Lombardy

New York or New Orleans

The daffodils trumpet

Death in Spring

Death in Spring

See those naked bodies

Death in Spring

“The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.”

— Albert Camus, The Plague

Tough Times

“I saw it with my own eyes” and “true fact” were her favorite pleonasms, and now I miss hearing them. There’s a hoot owl beyond this fringe of hickory trees that constantly sings these redundancies to me in the hollow of the night, and when I hear them it straightens my spine with a shock of electric current. I don’t like that one bit. I miss her, and I’m gonna’ shoot that hoot owl… but for now I’m really having a tough time making ammunition at home. I’m having a hard time getting completely outfitted for this apocalypse. I didn’t know if I was supposed to do everything from home, as we’re under orders to stay in place — which I really don’t enjoy because I’m a man with transit issues anyway. I can only walk as far as my peg leg will get me. But the longer I hold off the greater chance I have of eating a marmot. Auspicious. That’ll be for another day…

“Short fiction is a special, very different discipline, often requiring at least as much skill and effort as novel-writing. And while it’s relatively easy to get away with a certain amount of bagginess and loose plotting when you’re writing a novel, those things become quickly and mercilessly apparent if you’re writing a short story.”
— Joanne Harris

1,362,863 Dreams

I look aristocratic in my dalmatic, fringed with ermine and mink. I affect an Emperor Ming sort of mustache. I am merciless and I am soulless. Then Don Cornelius asks me to do the word scramble that spells out Parliament Funkadelic, but I run out of time because I can’t find the “C” to make “Fuck a delicate Parlmin.” I am hopeless at this game. I am kicked out of the studio onto the windy streets of the inert city.

The violet sky is suffused with a borealis green at the horizon line, and where the dark lake should be I find instead a crumpled piece of black construction paper. “But how did they get it to be so big?” I say. And as the words leave my mouth they are sucked into a vortex that drains up into a hole in the sky. And a hot dog vendor says to me, “that’s where the wheel in the sky kept on turning.” To which I respond, ” I hate Journey and I hate that the reference has snuck into this dream; although at this point I’m not sure that this won’t degenerate into a nightmare.”

“Nightmare? You ain’t seen a nightmare until you’ve had to vend hot dogs in exactly 1,362,863 dreams. That’s a fucking nightmare, bud! I have a PhD in Medieval Culture and this is what I’m stuck with. Fuck off!”

I’m now at 846 North Broad, and I hear the Seafood City jingle. A disheveled woman is standing next to me pulling on her nipples through her nightgown repeating: “Tchoupitoulas, Tchoupitoulas, Tchoupitoulas…”

A 6 foot tall crawfish walking on its tail comes up to me and says,”You must give me head.” The wind picks up and it hails. The pellets stike me in the head and ears. My ears fall off with the hail and transform into two crawfish which scurry away into a sunny yellow mouse hole in the floorboards.

And up swells “Mr. Blue Sky” by ELO as they erupt out of the mouse hole on a riser in mid-song. There is one full minute of elation. Fade out.

“You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts.”
— Nikki Giovanni

Speak! Call for a Restart

The cerulean welkin rang in the plenary session of geraniums (about to feast on saltimboca) to session as the ether-tinged clouds parted. Dutch masters buggered their tulip clippings before the opening of the futures market, overseen by officers taking hedges on restart dates. And I’m a Supreme Court registered attorney, and I don’t understand any of this. The floors are being swept by gardeners on ice skates. Jelly hangs from the ceilings and splatters in irregular patterns on the floor. Marimba music pumps through the speakers imbedded in the walls at appropriate “social distancing” distances while someone plays Martin Denny tunes at 78 r.p.m. from a distant office… and all the court hearings have been cancelled. “Use email if you want to file a writ of abstemious corpus, corpus delicti, or corpus callosum in flagrante delicto,” screeches an EBS message on my smartphone. “Don’t fret and don’t dance to ‘Mr. Bojangles’ (the Sammy Davis Jr. cover version) and take care to financially covet your neighbor’s wife’s bank statements. Please call your conduit jurisdictions and don’t kill your trustees. This has been an emergency broadcast system test. Please disregard if you’re feeling queasy.”

And please go away March 2020… please go away 2020… I call for a restart!

“Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.”
— William Zinsser

Pandemic Laments

My depression is deeper

than yours.

My existentialism is darker.

You have Kierkegaard.

I have Sartre.

My nihilism is bleakest.

I can’t imagine Sisyphus happy.

“I, quite unexceptionally, distrust the publishing marketplace as saying anything about a person’s capacity to produce useful work; meritocracy is as cruel an ideology in these places as any.”

— Jos Charles

flarfish 2: three green plastic soldiers out front

between four types of plastic army men, distinguished by 
References; 5 external links… of two resources to build
comrades, he carries a pair of G-1 plastic quart canteens,
“green plastic army men” concept… although only three
armored knights 27 (3 sets of 9) plus horses, 54 mm
executions were carried out in front of the assembled
figurines… similar to the popular toys that many children
… Thorpe said they were made out of old oil drums
8.5 x 6 in., 2 x 14 x 11 in., 3 x 6 x 10 in.
Toy soldiers… 4.3 out of 5 stars… Soldiers Plastic Toy 2
Lot Army Men 1 Green Vintage 1 Brown.

“You want to be a writer? A writer is someone who writes every day — so start writing.”
— Shonda Rhimes