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
“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
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
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
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
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
“Mama? What’s a welkin? Is that like a pickle?”
“No, dear. It’s the vault of the sky. The firmament, you know?”
“Is that like something permanent, Ma?
“No… It’s Satan! Satan! Satan! Satan!”
The clouds part and harp music ensues. Celestial bodies retreat to the edges, and the terminal point of the universe is revealed.
It’s merely tinsel with a corrugated cardboard backing holding this all up…
… and the choirmaster is a washed up combed-over carnival barker who loves tanning beds and all the best words. He has the best words… and all the chicks dig him, or so he says.
Ain’t we lucky to be living in the here and now?
… and now back to our episode:
“But, Mama, you made the Shake ‘n Bake without letting me help you!”
“Aw, go to bed already, you pain in the ass!”
And here are some scenes from next week’s episode…
“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.”
— Allen Ginsberg
Sunlight sharp as nails
Through the hospital window
Reveals a black barb
“Humans have to realize they’re not individuals, but individual parts of the same organism, with responsibility to each other.”
— Genesis P. Orridge
An irritating squirrel says
To an umbrella made of stone:
“You are a conflation of an Absurdist dialectic.
You are an impossible form.”
The umbrella sprouts a stratocumulus cloud on its ferrule and floats away.
The squirrel, inspired, writes a sonnet, follows that with an ode, then a sestina.
“Write from your heart and don’t be afraid to write shitty pages. You can’t change something from nothing. Get it down on paper first, no matter what it looks like.”
—Syd Field
an istsfor manity short film created from flash-cuts from more than a dozen istsfor manity short films made between 2016-2018.
“Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.”
―
thee istsfor manity reader 