thee istsfor manity reader

The Pivot Point

I’m not really hungry just now… she wrote longhand, the first time in weeks, in her journal.

And she thought that odd because she’d been ravenous all throughout her illness, and hadn’t written a thing, but now she felt a shift. She didn’t necessarily like what she intuited lay ahead, but on her life unspooled. A shrunken head, lifeless and truncated, appeared before her again. It floated and shimmered — a self-contained Fata Morgana, hovering above the ottoman in a slow pulsating light. The heavy odor of ammonia filled the room.

“I am the shrunken head,” she said, “and the shrunken head is me.” 

She tried to suppress a cough but it scratched its way up her throat, and in a paroxysm she expelled a smaller shrunken head — golf ball sized — which rolled end over end down the marble hallway and eddied below a gilded full length mirror. 

The sound of a theremin swelled from beyond the living room and a small red spot of light framed the smaller shrunken head.

This would be her pivot point in life. The one moment by which she would measure the rest of her life. There would be her life after this shrunken head moment, and all the other inconsequential living she’d done up until this singular moment.

A ululation came from the smaller shrunken head —  at first like a sweet distant trill, as if she were looking for scarlet tanagers in a clearing at the edge of dark woods — but the sound became shrill as it grew louder. And the bird broke out of a thicket and headed for her, with every flap it transfigured itself: first flap, from scarlet tanager to a pileated woodpecker, with its second flap it became a crow, and with its third flap (making up the distance to her with great speed) it became a red shouldered hawk, and as the shrill ululation began to sound like a fire alarm the bird transmogrified into a turkey vulture lancing at her eyes with its talons. 

In this manner she awoke to the original, larger, shrunken head hovering above her bathed in a golden light. She swatted at it, but it was just beyond her range. She let out a meek, “fuck you,” and placed the pillow over her face. 

“Today you’ll find and bring me the most beautiful starfish in the world,” the shrunken head said.  “I demand it of you. Go!” 

After her long illness, it’s what she felt compelled to do…

“What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

It’s a tie: Never surrender (Ken Kesey), and when dragged under, kick. Kick the fuck out of it. They’re not expecting us (Kathy Acker). They seem related to me.”
— Lidia Yuknavitch

Pscittacisms

Ambigram, anagram,
Bring me sate
Destitute, prostitute,
Slap my bald pate.
Epigraph, paragraph
Please do as I bid
Ostracism, psittacism
Here I whither…

Wanna’ cracker?

“Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy”
— Jack Kerouac

138 Pieces

I wrote this yesterday under the influence of twin tornadoes

While hiding under the bed with my grandmother and dog

I planned a funeral as mattresses, pans and medicines strafed the air

I saw my brother’s arm impaled on a jagged rafter

The grey-green sky draped like humid laundry above

I heard telephone poles snap in succession like cannon fire

Fred, from next door, called for Annie as he flew by among the shingles and sharp detritus

A dishwasher smashed into my one remaining bedroom wall

Splintered it in 138 pieces, and disappeared into that toothy vortex…

“… history proved that epidemics have a way of recrudescing when least expected.”
— Albert Camus, The Plague

Inveigles

Wind whistling insanities through the crack in the door.
High pitched inveigles to step off the balcony 16 floors
above his parents, lounging by the pool,

and crushing them to tarnation.

It looked easy a few moments ago, and the pull of it became
so tangible
that he forced himself back inside.

Writing is not like dancing or modeling; it’s not something where — if you missed it by age 19 — you’re finished. It’s never too late. Your writing will only get better as you get older and wiser. If you write something beautiful and important, and the right person somehow discovers it, they will clear room for you on the bookshelves of the world — at any age. At least try.
— Elizabeth Gilbert

Stop Thinking Right to Left

Dear Jesse—

You of the cryophilic heart… You fill me with inertia.

Jesse, stop writing backwards! Stop thinking from right to left. You prepared the statues and raised the cupolas, and now the patina congeals on your soul, and your  effervescence is now effluvium. Mucho mistrust. It’s all over.

Paregoric?! It’s tincture of opium, you idiot. What have you done? Jesse, what have you done to me?

How do I manage to stay underground? Are you going to help me? I can’t arrange it. How do I get to Papua, New Guinea from here? I can’t do this alone.

This is my life. Is this your cozen to me?!

Oren.

“Art hurts. Art urges voyages—and it is easier to stay at home.”
— Gwendolyn Brooks

Aeonian or Aeolian?

She mistook her aeonian harp for her aeolian harp. She mistook her bemusement for amusement. Her confoundment for profoundment and her conclusion for inclusion. Nothing seemed to be what it needed to be and her mind kept elapsing and prolapsing into a crater like protrusion into the black hole nimbus that what her brain. From now on nothing would be what it should or sound like its meaning; rather things would be tinged in a greenish patina and sound like retinal shrieks of retinues and concubine purrs. Nothing like what she was accustomed to. She would have to reeducate herself in the ways of wares and the forms of norms. Much would be ochre now, because there was no sense in being saffron about it. At least that’s what the older boys meant, or what she thought they meant, when they claimed she was immature. Now was the time for ripening. The moment was upon her. Now is the only thing that’s real. And Cramps be damned!

“The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense, whereas reality never makes sense.”

— Aldous Huxley

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