thee istsfor manity reader

“Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth.”

— Jaron Lanier

offences (P•A•D Blackout 925)

Struthious can be
a tendency
like
lying down and flattening
a misconception
fully visible the
ostrich
seeking a word turned back to

Fifteenth-century scientists
describe a pair of bones
between the
structures connected to
each
19th century
placenta
to be heard
in 1837
offences against good
decorum all

DID YOU KNOW?
traces to meaning and
“home” In
the eyes of the law can also be
a car People may
have several but only one official
purpose

If you are lucky enough to
find the group of
sandbanks that
geographers
use
it isn’t surprising
for that kind of language

“I think we’re creative all day long. We have to have an appointment to have that work out on the page. Because the creative part of us gets tired of waiting, or just gets tired.”

— Mary Oliver

Things I Heard Today

It dries up my mouth, it sucks all the moisture out of it. Kinship is killship, like a fisherman’s black boot, teachers and critics all dance the poot.

Celebrate the bullet. If you’re not ska, you’re dead. It’s a different version of the same cavil. Did you ever see Hopper in Apocalypse Now? ¡Que come mierderia!

What you got? Oppositional defiant disorder? Well, bless this President, he’s looking out for us.

Due to disagreements a group of men sway public opinion and gain office operating with intimate friends.

Deliquescent means what? Did you know osmium is the heaviest element?

This is Betty Creamer for the chapter thirteen attorney. I don’t know if they did claim it in their tax returns or not. Woop,woop, wooooeeeeaahh! Anyone who deals with abused and traumatized kids… is that empty? Sexual abuse speeds up their biological clock and secretes sex hormones.

James recommends the latest influencers. We’ve filed a plan, your honor. No study had ever followed mollusks in these conditions. A bodily fluid spill kit? We laughed as we watched the dog try in vain.

The rampaging sans-culottes wrecked churches. Thank you for your order. Lacking friends in elementary school makes a crucial difference. Fevers, fevers and pustules!

It’s a complex and rocky time when friends can suddenly turn on one another. Standby power is wasted electricity. Allow the actuator to air dry completely. There’s neither intelligence or support from family and peers.

“One little blog post is nothing on its own, but publish a thousand blog posts over a decade, and it turns into your life’s work.”

— Austin Kleon / AustinKleon.com

Crabwise and Operose

It’s not that I operate under the impression that my vision is oppression; and it’s not that I enjoy the song that goes “buffalo and bison, bison and buffalo / canonball and rifle, rifle and canonball…” — because I do enjoy that song. But your lachrymose moods and your teary discharges leave me feeling glum and dissociative, dissociative and glum.

So I approach you crabwise and operose, operose and crabwise…

And all I can add, as the singer sang, “that’s the way the thunder rumbles… that’s the way the bee bumbles… bumbles.”

So our relation has come to its inevitable violent end. You have pelted me with rocks and garbage for the last time. You will no longer imperiously rail at me that you are “the queen of bad moods,” or “bluer than blue, in your black converse.”

I now have this overweening desire to play Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance,” while replaying a loop of the 30 second scene from The Exorcist where Regan abuses and bloodies her demoniac self with a crucifix, 180’s her head and says, “Do you know what she did? Your cunting daughter?”

But in your pedantic manner you insist the line is “canting daughter, canting daughter!”

You add in that lovely manner of yours, “you imbecile! I have a PhD in Comparative Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing. Canting. Canting as in affectedly pious or righteous; alternately, to talk hypocritically and sanctimoniously about something. Canting!”

Then you hiss at me like a hackle-high cat.

And you wonder why I’m leaving as an attenuated truncated lower case word person?

I’m broken. You’re broken. This country is irretrievably broken.

I’m off to Canada to find me a buffalo wrangler.

“Hug me, mother of noise.
Find me a hiding place.
I am afraid of my voice.
I do not like my face.”

— Anne Stevenson / “Television”

after the storm

animals were rescued
three weeks later
desperate townspeople
ate them
container ships lost
across the hemisphere
forlorn people victims
of hunger
nothing else
possible
no
one
redeemed

“I was going to buy a copy of The Power Of Positive Thinking, and then I thought, ‘What the hell good would that do?’”

—Ronnie Shakes

Anagnorisis

Hello, this is your captain. We’re coming to you from the equitime point of the flight with some bad news. No. It’s very bad news…

All day cooped up in here. This is the most time I’ve ever spent with this copilot, trapped in this compartment, and I ain’t calling it a cockpit, no sir… although, gab nub it, I just did there. No more.

There’s a lot of tension in here between us. The navigator is out. I took care of him. But it is this gash nab copilot that has got my goat.

Ok, well, it’s god. He’s my copilot and I’ve had enough of him.

Enough of the famine, disease, and gnarled planet; enough of petty dictators, hypersonic nuclear weapons, child sexual abuse, racism, hegemony, political malpractice, and corporate greed.

Nah, the news isn’t good here from these tight quarters — and I’m sending god off like D.B. Cooper, without the parachute or the money.

While he gave me a chance at privilege — and boy did I enjoy it, and make the market capital best of my chances — I just never understood why he shafted the 4 billion others.

That’s just not right. And now we’ve just lost about another million in less than a year to some serious batshit bug…

I apologize for my language, ladies and gentlemen. I beg your pardon.

Now if the flight crew will please clear the aisles, everyone buckle up your belts — as you can hear from that “ding” the fasten seat belt signs are on.

The flight crew will please secure the galley and this god-awful compartment exit — and it’s veritably god-awful if you know what I mean by this dead weight I’m piloting up here.

You will note that the masks will drop in front of you when I open the fuselage door — as the cabin becomes depressurized.

No worries. Don’t bother with the masks. It’ll be quicker that way.

This helpless gut bucket will be making a very quick 33,000 foot descent into the Pacific and the rest of us will sleep with the angels after we greet the fish.

Will you look at that gorgeous sunset?

That is all…

“I have felt the wind of the wing of madness.”

— Charles Baudelaire / Intimate Journals

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”