thee istsfor manity reader

(diagram courtesy of the carl sagan institute)

… of white dwarves and fiery red giants

I read that men who have trouble falling asleep have a twenty five percent chance of dying earlier.  I vow to never sleep again… 

Then the memory drops in again:

Violence flares out of the peripheries, where it resides at all times, in the small apartment.  Rage roils in the bathroom nearby.  There is the familiar screaming followed by a dull thud, and then the sound of what I take to be my mother ricocheting off the bathroom wall and falling into the tub.  Finally, an otherworldly caterwaul.

I will be the color pink soon enough…

The bedroom walls inhale, gibbous and red; and with every exhalation they groan a white dwarf drab.  I’ve learned the Sun is a forgery — a shrill simulacrum.

I’m in the midst of eating 40 chocolate bars — the contents of two boxes of chocolate bar bricks from the fourth grade school chocolate sale — in an altered state of consciousness.  I’m unable to sate the lower brain impulse that compels me.  I’m not hungry, far from it, I just need to keep eating to feel better somehow.  And the book that has changed my life is propped up in front of my small black and white TV, in stark relief, imbued with a cathode green nimbus.  Yesterday, I dispensed with the notion God.  I was shocked into a sense of mortality and existential void that hadn’t existed before.

I step out of my room to see the aftermath:  I see my father hiding a revolver under their bedroom mattress.  I call for my mother, but she locks the bathroom door.

I feel irradiated as if the air is scrubbing the skin off of my body.  The fibers of shag carpet reach out and lock my feet in place as the hydrogen burns around our contracting family core.

I’ve learned from the Time-Life Book of the Universe that 5 billion years from now the sun will swell in to a fiery giant and engulf most of the solar system.  The earth will be third in line for immolation.  Everything will cease to exist.  It’ll be the end of my parents, my grandmother and uncle, and everything else I care about: baseball, the Miami Dolphins, and Arlene and the Farrah Fawcett poster she gave me for Christmas exchange.

What kind of God is that?  There can’t be a God that perverse, to create us and then inexplicably destroy everything we know.  That’s insane…

… god is nothing…

The beatings, often uncontrolled and brutal, have grown in frequency, lately, as my parents’ marriage burns to its inexorable and violent end.  The welts on my arms pulse in purple and black from the belt buckle end of my father’s belt.  

The scope of it all confounds me.  It seems as the sun is exploding now in our hallway, and I am consumed.  I’m reduced to a primordial gas and float into my shriveling room.

I’m at the foot of the bed, reaching beyond the shoebox where Hank Aaron stands forever frozen, smiling, in his batting stance and somewhere near are the Oakland A’s sitting on a bleacher above the 1972 World Series Champions banner  —  and three-quarters of the league lays buried in flattened stacks under the remaining 10 chocolate bar bricks that weigh the equivalent of a one ton meteorite on the 30 empty chocolate bar wrappers.  I eat 3 more chocolate bar bricks to the point  of sickened exhaustion.  My mother’s sobbing, down the hall, punctuates every bite I take.

I spend half an hour or so daily staring at the same two pages in The Book. I’m obsessed with the four monochromatic diagrams at the bottom of pages 103 and 104.

The first diagram depicts the earth’s position in the solar system.  The second illustrates the increased activity and swelling of the sun — solar flares extending outward millions of miles.  The third diagram reveals the earth and most of the planets consumed by the expanding sun as it flares into a red giant.

The fourth reveals a dead solar system, only a dense white dwarf remains…

someone is bound to celebrate this hegemonic tragedy… why not us?

let’s give thanks for love that misses its mark.  this is one of my films (above)… and this:

is my hero, giving thanks the way we should give thanks this thanksgiving…

(please do not watch the above if you are easy to offend)

happy turkey!

(continued from 11/25/19)

31 pieces of the auto-sedition quilt

(xxvi – xxvii)

On the last day of the month, on the news:

Miners discover a baby 700 feet below ground with a Sun Ra tattoo on its back.  No one inspects it to note its sex — had they checked they would have found that it was the baby who fell to earth.  Truly sexless.  There was a skronk of improvisational horns and syncopated percussion and rapid fire snares.  One miner pictured himself mating with the hydra and producing this child.  The foreman miner imagined this being his and Medusa’s love child.  While yet another thought it his own immaculate conception.  

But the baby was a blatherskite — its senseless volubility, a logorrhea without words, shaking the earth to its core.  There was one full minute of confusion while a horn sounded, and the miners ran pell mell leaving the child to its own devices — which were very specific and well-calibrated devices: Geiger counters and magnetometers dating back to 1973.  

“Space Is The Place” played on a continuous loop for 114 hours, until the fissure that split the earth sent the stereo console and the baby flying off into the murk.

***

Post-mortem:

There is no story — only peonage and pauperism.  But there is a moral here.  

I once dreamt I was eleven and elevated onto the precipice of a tall building.  I was asked to carefully look over the edge at the street, 62 floors below.  Why I was asked to do this and not just thrown over beats me, because whomever was asking touched me ever so gently, just tenderly enough for me to lose my balance when I was looking over the edge.  

Why’d you ask me to look, I thought, as I passed the 48th floor.  What were all the histrionics about?  Just do what you gotta do and push.  But now what I had to do was find a way out of smashing my skull open on the street below.  I quickly angled my body to the right, but that only caused me to tumble head over feet past the 26th floor — oh, jeez, control yourself because you ain’t got that much time or space left, boy.  

This was all so surreal, as if I fell into that Frida Kahlo painting on the same subject — you know the one, you’ve seen it: The Suicide of Dorothy Hale —  except there’s not even the slightest hint of cerulean or cumuli in the sky — above, it’s all a leaden gray mass smeared with charcoal gray corrugations.  

I flap and flap again, and lo, I flutter up a few feet and arrest the fall briefly.  I’m surprised, and then I’m falling again, down by the 5th floor.  Flap flap flap.  Hey, this works.  Flap flap flap flap flap flap flap, and I smash through The Plymouth Assurance and Annuity, LLP., office window on the 9th floor.  Glass, typing paper, an upended typewriter and phone all discombobulated on the floor.  I landed on top of this pile.  The lady that was at the desk is now on her back spread eagle beyond me and the pile of her work.  The boss man peaks his head out of his office and says: “Ms. Haversham, please clean up that mess, and show our guest to the claims forms and pray, tell us the moral to this.” 

“Is there one?”

  Just then cheering is heard from the street below.  It started to snow for the first time this year.

***

(“Hey?!  There are four pieces of the auto-sedition quilt missing!”

“Ay, I’an sorry con ‘escuse me.”

That’s it for this one.

The End.)

(continued from 11/24/19)

31 pieces of the auto-sedition quilt

(xxii — xxv)

Cool handbills posted in Maria’s neighborhood say: 

Every first Thursday Jesus Drinks Free: free Soul, R n B, Country, and Gospel starting at 8pm at the Jeannie Johnson Pub and Grill, 144 South Street, Jamaica Plain.

Another says:

“Baby Born with Sun Ra Tattoo…”

Bubbling brain cells at the bar, the corner pub without right angles or corners, and she’s back in flesh, back in flesh and you can’t tell her what to do.  No, you can’t tell her what to do.  Well, fuck you!  

I’m not waxing nostalgic for punk, post-punk, new wave, or no wave; I’m seething with abstemiousness, rankled by random name generators and somewhere beyond broadcasting at 7am with breaks every hour on the hour and half.  

There is nothing I desire but a desire that eats the heart down to its left ventricle, and then hatches out a clutch of stink bugs in synchronicity in a swale near a swag at the foot of a spur.  I’m not writing this for nothing.  I’m serious here.  I’m the writer here.

***

Maria says posthaste when she means post-punk.  It has something to do with the wiring in her head.  

I have a box full of letters, and she has a box full of coca leaves from her trip to Peru.  She bought them from a Quechua woman wearing a bowler hat in Cuzco.  Her alpaca stood a few feet away saddled with a dozen large plastic garbage bags filled with coca leaves.  I should know, I  saw the vacation photos.  Maria chews the leaves with a propulsion that seems superhuman, as if her mandible might detach and break out of its hinges and tear through her face.  

She can’t stop chewing the leaves.  I make tea out of them.  She adds them to dishes which she invariably doesn’t eat because her appetite is suppressed from all the coca leaves she chews.  

I’m a just a writer that had a pocket full of wrens this morning.  They were spry then.  Now they’re a clump of feathers — limp bodies — a dead pocket o’ blues, with the divine exception of the aggregate lump of parasites that abandoned the birds when they went cold.  Now, I tell Maria, “with this pocketful of cavorting beasties, I thee wed, and honor and cherish and vow to infest thee with said beasties (of a cavorting nature) and then nurse in sickness after you contract a rare blood borne illness from said beasties.”  

She says this thing between us will never work.  “Let’s forget this all altogether and just fuck,” she says.

“Wha—”

“Put on that Dead Kennedy’s record and let’s get to it,” she says.

“Which one,” I say, “Plastic Surgery Disasters or Fresh Fruit for Rotting — ”

“The one that starts with ‘Kill the Poor!”

***

Near the end of the month Maria tells me:

I’m not your cheap factotum.  I’m a sex engineer, and I service you in a highly skilled manner.  Don’t speak to me of trashy whores and floozies.  And furthermore this is not a flophouse.  It’s a proper Limehouse, and only the most discriminating junkies crash and score here.  So readjust.  And reacquaint yourself with me and where you are.  This is not a place that panders to dilettantes.  This is a fine house of the illest repute.  Check yourself.  Leave your privilege at the door, swoon, and adore me, and bask in my agency.  The music will start shortly.  The young boys will be here to wash you at six.  The heroin will arrive in fifteen minutes.  Enjoy your cisgendered stay.  It won’t be long.

She meant I wasn’t long for the place.  She played The Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” on repeat for the better part of the day.

***

On the penultimate day of the month:

Love.  It can’t help but bloom.

***

(continued tomorrow)

(continued from 11/23/19)

31 pieces of the auto-sedition quilt

(xvii — xxi)

On 19 January 2020 Maria wrote in her journal:

It’s been six days since I fell through the crack.  I’m spiraling down depression way again.  The crack has been widening and if I don’t do something about it — San Andreas be thy name — you unholy fucking fissure!  This is a familiar landscape, I’m never too far from my stepping through it, into it, farther and farther down — canyon-like — now in a skirl of whorling minimalist notes, repeated and repeated until I am tranced-out and lost.  

Having lost six days now I ask myself: what’s next?  Which way do I move?  What direction?  How do I get out of this, and here I am writing again.  Is it fair enough to start like this again?  The only option really.  How did I get here again?  How do I avoid ending up here again?  I don’t think I can adequately answer the latter, but the first question must be asked always because it presupposes awareness of the situation.  And here is where I usually make the pivot, because a pivot is required.  The only other option isn’t really an option.  Is it?  No.  

So here I’ll start again, and content myself with starting again.  This is an acceptable… No, it’s a good step forward.  It had to begin somewhere.  Why not right here?

***

The next day, the 20th, she wrote:

I exist in meaningless patter, in the trifling titter of expense and abuse.  I persist in this dominant issue of breaking a standard that I once pretended to.  I perform unlimited horrors on my own discernment and troubled world view.  I will disengage from timbre and search for a tone so acute it pilfers life itself.  This signifies nothing within nothing.  

But Thoreau said:  “Write while the heat is in you.  The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.”  And that’s why I persist with this thumb tapping.  To use what little heat warms these fingers attached to a tepid body sitting on a cold toilet.

***

21 January 2020

The tincture of blood, an anodyne for the misery of the loveless.  How does one evaluate the loneliness she feels with her pain?  How does one put a price on relief? 

***

The last week of the month started dismally.

The boy, nouveau riche and Booker-Prized now, went through freshman year tossing humblebrags until the day he didn’t anymore.  That was during spring break, which that year just happened to coincide with Mardi Gras — and in those rare years when they coincided Loyola University became a madhouse, despite its Jesuit veneer.  It was in that hothouse-madhouse that the boy — his name (why deprive?) was Maurice — came upon Derrick.  

Derrick did not suffer humblebrags in his New Orleans — especially when the humblebrag was dismissing his mother’s insistence that he accept a Porsche 911 instead of the Porsche Cayenne that he drove about campus with ABC, The Fixx, or Haircut 100 blaring from the Blaukpunt radio in the car.  Derrick hated 1980’s synth-new wave — the worst epoch for music! —  he claimed in a drunken stupor once.  Derrick befriended the friendless boy Maurice that day, a smile and a raised thumb worked its magic.

***

Subhuman, Subhuman…

The boy Maurice was surprised by the abrasive quality of the music he heard before he opened his eyes.  To what?  What was this place?  Why was he tied up?  The first half minute sounded like a squall of detuned guitars strummed wildly.  He was told the lead singer was named Genesis P. Orridge, the band called Throbbing Gristle.  Derrick was screaming along to the song:  “subhuman… subhuman… drinking dirty water… you’re a disease…” and so much else the boy Maurice didn’t understand.  Couldn’t.

Then the music shifted as if it fell off a precipice.  The singer modulated to a lower register at a fraction of the volume he was singing before.  Derrick went silent.  It scared the boy Maurice.  Then a ball attached to leather mask was foisted over his mouth and face, and all went dark for the boy Maurice.  It never became light again.

***

(continued tomorrow)

(continued from 11/22/19)

31 pieces of the auto-sedition quilt

(xiii — xvi)

“I’m from the northern part of the state, and we don’t see this kind of nonsense up there.  It’s just not done this way where I’m from.” 

Milton Sosquade, the boy’s father, removed his hand from inside the cow’s rectum, and turned to look at Alan Tenter. “Well, Alan,” Milton said removing his arm’s length glove cover, “you do what you like to your cows, and I’ll treat mine my way.”

“My friend, your notion of what is correct is sheer madness,” Alan said.  “You can’t go rummaging up in your cow’s intestines and pull out appetizers for the evening.  You can’t feed us that.  We don’t do that upstate, mid-state, or downstate.  Friend, it’s just not done.”  Alan took off his glasses and placed them in their clip-on case and clipped the case into his left breast pocket and raised his fists.  Milton picked up a cow chip and tossed it at Alan’s face.  The chip grazed Alan’s chin and careened off his ear.

“Listen, bub,” Milton said, “what I do in my seraglio is my business.  These girls here love me, especially this one,” he said pointing at the guernsey he’d just inseminated with his stuff of life.  “I am god. Here in the southern highlands of the state:  I.  Am.  God.”

***

Milton’s wife, Lucrecia, had her eyes checked and the man told her she had mycobacterium leprae of the retina.  She said her eyes started feeling “flammable” sometime in the past month and she wanted to have her left eye removed and replaced with a ball bearing painted with an iris and pupil.  The doctor said, once replaced, the eye had to be patched during the day, and then manipulated and slanted into her nose in the evenings, for 30 to 45 days.  He told her she would see wonders after the convalescence.  Her eyesight would improve, and she’d woo an army of suitors with her new look.  

She told him she was newly married.  

It was avant-garde now, sure, but it would soon become the trend and eventually everyone would be clamoring for this look.  He granted her that her vision would suffer initially, but with time her sense of smell and hearing would improve.

“It sounds a bit extreme, Dr. Sobrenada,” Lucrecia said, never taking her eye off herself in the consult office mirror.  “Is it reversible, Doctor?”

“Hell no, it’s not reversible!” he said.  He sat behind his desk and threw a paper clip at the eye chart.  “Who ever heard of replacing an eye with a ball bearing and then putting the eye back in at a later time?  Are you insane, woman?”  He pounded his desk with an open hand.  

“You’re an Ojonaut!  An astronaut of the eye.  The first and the foremost.  You make me envious of the path you are about to blaze.  Come here and be my bride.”

“I’m married,” she said.

She decided that in his dotage he’d not only become genius, but more attractive to her.  The loose skin on his arms, his wattle shaking like badly set jello, his drooping earlobes — he made her think prurient thoughts.  

“Milton the cuckold,” she whispered.  

She felt as if she were ovulating, for the first time in fifteen years — some sebaceous moisture in that place below.  

She said, “yes.”

***

The twelfth day of the month was Copperhead Wednesday.  Serpentine was the look we were going for.  Beatific upper register notes is what Maria was reaching for:  “Ta da la ta da la dao,”  was what she sang to a supper club of adoring mengeese eyeing a pair of lady rattlesnakes.  Midnight.  Thursday morning.  Applause.  Thunderous.  

Savorous twistings of moonglow hairs into chignons and much dispensing with shoes and underthings.  There was nothing like a cobra line dance to make it libertine-free and parsimonious-lite.  

I, the author, heard someone order a chocolate stout.  “Not served here,” was the reply.  Vehement — something akin to buzzards on parade: wing-wide, convection current surfing, loafers — something free, not imagined, not paid for, not patented and surely made to disappoint.

Asseverations to “live fully and create in the midst of the desert” notwithstanding,  Maria went home alone.

***

On the thirteenth day Maria wrote this poem:

Mauve and meager tendrils of the morning

Roaming in your eyes and in your suitcase,

Something supple this way washes

Over my consciousness and yours,

Atavistic and Paleolithic.

What if a nocturnal sprint across the sky caused panic?

What price peregrinations and pantomime?

What does the pilgrim do for succor?

Where the lightning divides the sky in jagged shards

You check the reliquaries for theft.

The evidence provides no solace, only a lack thereof.

This excresence, an abscess of a rising sun maugre

Rain and intermittent meteor showers render

Media towers mute.

Inoperable  inoffensive  inconclusive  incendiary.

Try to frame this feeling and hang it on

Yourself, as you hang yourself  — 

On this tendril of your family tree —

On another morning of meager maudlin mauve.

She titled it Writing 39, and copied it into her notes application on her phone; her thumbs unhinged pistons, stabbing furiously at gorilla glass.  

She was spiraling again, unhappy to have written the worst poem in this worst of all possible worlds.  Pangloss had nothing on Martin.  Fuck ‘em both anyway, she wrote.

***

(continued tomorrow)

(continued from 11/21/19)

31 pieces of the auto-sedition quilt

(ix — xii)

On day three of the new year Maria found herself near Holguin, Cuba.  The campesinos in the fields seemed appropriate for the campestral scene she was painting, but the kestrel nailed to a cross atop the hummock, by the tobacco drying bohio, seemed out of place — as did the half dozen crosses with albatross and oversized birds of paradise that topped every mogote in the background stretching back to the horizon line.  Maria was painting, and collating this scene together in her memory, and as she worked she thought she might paint this large scale to use it as a background in her next film.  All she needed now was a real chicken and a G.I. Joe or a Big Jim action figure and she could shoot the scene that Garcilazo related to her about their farm in Cuba before the revolution.  He once told Maria how their mother, Lucrecia, had covered him in oil and chicken feed when he was five years old and had the chickens peck the feed off his body, especially around his groin.  She reapplied the feed numerous times.  His penis was disfigured after that.  El cuerpo es sucio.

“The body was dirty,” their mother said.

***

The next day there were carcasses all about the fields.  The only crop that did not seem completely ruined was the corn on the southeast corner of the farm, there was still about a third of that field standing.  Everything else, the yuca, the strawberries, the sugarcane, and oddly the mango trees were devastated — a total loss.  What he didn’t understand was, where had all this multitude of cows, chickens, pigs, and pavo reales come from.  There were no livestock farms nearby, not for miles — sure a few people had horses and chickens, but not these.  These were all white, angelically white, not a mark on them — no blood, mud, or any other blemish was visible on these carcasses.  They were clearly not alive, they didn’t move when he nudged them with his boot, or prod them with the hoe.  There were no visible wounds, or fluids oozing from any orifices — no ichor — these animals seemed to be in perfect shape and impeccably white.  He felt certain they were not diseased.  He wanted to flense a piece from a pig’s rump and rub it all over his torso.  An ablution.  He saw a man do this with gold dust in a movie once.  Pig fat would have to suffice.

***

Many years later in Miami, during the book tour of one of the President’s spurned mistresses, Garcilazo surprised the mistress/writer by exposing his gnarled leprous-looking penis at her.  It was an overly large appendage which was much thinner at the base than at the head where it was engorged and bruised and pockmarked with all manner of growths, skin tags, and flaky mottled bulbs along a bruised quadrant at the head.  

At this vespertine hour the writer/mistress momentarily thought it was her overtired mind playing tricks on her after an unusually difficult week of pole dancing and then signing books.  She must be seeing things.  But no, Garcilazo had a wide grin on, and started grinding his pelvis in a counter clockwise motion, and chanting repeatedly: “get up on this! oo, baby, baby, oo, baby, baby! get up on this…”  but try as he might, the dangling member was so large and heavy that it merely swung pendulously between his legs and slapped into his thighs, and he didn’t know all the lyrics to the Salt-N-Pepa song.

Before the writer/mistress could see him Garcilazo was tackled into a stand of swamp rose mallow hibiscus by the mistress/writer’s bodyguard.

“Ah, look!” the writer/mistress said to the public relations assistant, near the base of the stairs, when she realized the hibiscus bush with flowers resembling the color of her dress was fulminating with two pairs of legs flailing about the top like twitching rabbit ears.  Her right foot,  the hairline crack on the shoe’s heel fatally compromised, slid out from under her and she fell heavy upon her ass, and shattered her coccyx.  She missed her pole dance that evening, and for the remainder of her shortened book tour.

***

Today, on the ninth day of the new year, in 1963 — the year I was born —  the Mona Lisa was exhibited in the United States for millions of Americans who visited the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. and The Met in New York City.

I don’t remember that time in 1963, as my parents conceived in the fall of 1962.  I’m certain that I’d lost my tail by then, and had sprouted spindly legs; and like any half-baked fetus, I had developed fingers and toes, but my brain wasn’t much to speak of.  I suspect that’s still the case now.   Anyway, my parents spent most of that year making preparations to leave Cuba.  I like to imagine that I was conceived in Havana during the Cuban missile crisis, but I wasn’t as my parents were already in Miami at that time.  But it is certain that I was conceived during that time of apocalyptic crisis in Miami, the time frame fits.  

In any case what does fit is that my father’s sperm on that day must have been in an unusual state:  a political emigre on the verge of being incinerated by his home country on ground zero of his new country.  

How I managed to be the best swimmer that day I don’t know — the 200 million or so others must have been real cranks, deplorables, and mutards if what you see here before you is the best of that lot.  Oy!  What a lot in life.

***

(continued tomorrow)

(continued from 11/20/19)

31 pieces of the auto-sedition quilt

(v – viii)

On the last day of 2019 he told me:

“It was sometime in October of 1940, when Mom was a five-month-old fetus, that she developed the egg that would one day be me.  There were nearly 7 million other potential “mes” or “something-like-mes”  that might have been formed, and you were there too — not ready yet, but there; but it was me — I was the egg, amongst that flocculence of eggs that was destined for her full moon visitations.

The other half of me wouldn’t spring to life until twenty-two Octobers later, right in the heat of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  In that case I was one of 200 million sperm made on that day alone!  Think of it, maybe one in the quintillion sperm Dad produced in the seventeen years, or so, by the time he was 29, and thinking doomsday thoughts that October 26th in 1962.

I imagine Dad and Mom standing out on the Malecón at the edge of the sea looking out beyond the harbor that third week in October.  They are transfixed by the roiling stratocumulus over the Florida Straits thinking they are standing at ground zero.  That egg and that sperm are oscillating wildly, they can barely contain themselves within their cell walls — too much of this enzyme is being subsumed!  Too much of that protein is being produced!  I once read that sperm counts sky rocket during times of stress or excitement.  I imagine that the possibility of annihilation, in that welter of sudden death, rendered that sperm fatalistic — that egg vitriolic.  Both somehow malformed.  That poor egg.  That frazzled sperm.

And now, you see before you the result: this lacking human that is slightly anemic.  It was not a good union.  You know it.  They had no conception at that moment what they would do to each other.  What they would do to us.  I want to scream at them there: Stop! don’t do it.  It’ll only cause heartache and pain.

You see, I’ve always felt I’m falling through, or moving backwards in, life.  But in this scab of a world now, no one cares about creation myths anymore, and so I won’t bother you further.  I’ll see you next month.  Go home now, and mind the guards on the way out.  Happy New Year.”

***

Such is the manner of a new year.  Hooray 2020!  Harrumph… and fuck off?

Awake in a daze.  So much to look forward to at once, then you must deconstruct the tarnation año into 365 pieces, and concern yourself with just this one piece here — today — and on each succeeding day, just that one piece there.  One day at a time… sweet Jesus.  (Jesus built my hotrod, and he was a strict deconstructionist, but don’t dare call him a nihilist.)  The first day of the year is usually colder than most other days.  The earnestness is often overdone, the force of resolutions seem reasonable, even in the most overzealous cases.  

The pages of the calendar, journal, etc., are barren and full of such wondrous possibility.  Despair dissipates a bit, exiled to the peripheries for a while.  In most cases you haven’t fucked up yet, you haven’t had enough time to fuck anything up.  The emails taper-off a bit; momentarily, the requests for donations have all but disappeared.  

But soon they begin again with best wishes for the upcoming struggle.  The boulder you burden with seems momentarily lighter, easier to push.  Now concentrate.  The pitch increases quickly and you don’t want to lose the handle on your rock.   The tipping point.  And then the cyber-panhandling goes full bore: the museum, the rails-to-trails, people for the ethical treatment of cells in mitosis, save the aging acid freaks, join The Daily Stormer.  Everybody wants.  It’s back with a bang!   

Oh, you’re bound to fuck up.

***

The Boy, Day Two, 2020: 

The highlights of the writin’ and farmin’ workshops was not only the frequent washing of my undercarriage in the restroom, but also the info about staying away from gonorrhea and sexing the farm animals —  and most importantly the learning of ploughing techniques as per the ancient boustrophedon; but I actually knew this from my home schoolin’ because it’s the way I learnt to write, you see.  That’s why I’se called the daffiest writer in Gramalchukin County.  People, they come from miles around, to hear my writin’s.  I’ma accomplished is what she says.  A near genius writer type that would get published without afterthought from the most learned people there is.  

And the undercarriage is in excellent shape, I can tell you that for myself.  The gonorrhea is something I don’t know much about.  I don’t have any painful squirtin’s or such.  And my mind is something fierce, so I can’t really expand upon that too much.  But I will expand on what’s called a keynote.  The amazin’ purdy writer lady said:

You have a lot of people who aren’t good at writing yet telling you what to change about the way that you’re writing … It’s a lot of mediocrity feeding on itself. So you better be radical, and you better hate everyone.  Not that I did personally, but that I had to if I was going to protect the thing in me that I knew I wanted to grow.

I never caught her name, someone said Odessa.  But I ain’t so sure.

***

The author, here:  

Allow me to interject for a moment.  As the writer I’m fully aware of where the quote originates, and I’m happy to cite it:

— Levy, Ariel.  2018.  ‘Ottessa Moshfegh’s Otherworldly Fiction’.  The New Yorker.  July 9 & 16.

Tedious. I know.  It’s probably mis-cited, style-wise that is, I looked it up quickly.  I’ve broken a wall of sorts here and while I have your attention, I’d like to point out that the earth is not only warming, but it’s also cracking apart.  Did you see that New York Times article in December of 2018 that virtually screamed in 30-something-point type:  The Earth’s Shell Has Cracked, and We’re Drifting on the Pieces… enjoy your remaining dry time.  We all, all of us — no one gets away — will also be dead shortly.  And on we go…

***

(continued tomorrow)

31 pieces of the auto-sedition quilt

(i – iv)

These were the first words Garcilazo spoke when Maria finished drilling the hole in his head: 

This is plundergraphia.  This is Flarf.  This is Newlipo.  This borders on Google-sculpting.  Remove me from myself and then take yourself out of my body.  You’ve been inhabiting my body far too long.  I need an exorcism…  You… you are a trapeze artist with a fear of heights and sick with vertiginous desires, and I require nothing of you — but I want you at my disposal.  I will dispose of you when I tire, but I’ve tried too often to depose you without first taking your deposition as it relates to your position in this disquisition; and yet I never inquire as to your disposition on my position…

Maria repositioned herself on the recumbent couch  — really more of a settee — cradling the bloody hand drill in a wad of Bounty.  And Garcilazo continued:

… reconnoitering of your superstitions and lack of interstitial indecision.  I’ll decide and you’ll suppose that I’ll undertake a reconnaissance of the imposition of superstition of the implications involved with trepanation.  Then I’ll help you trepan yourself, after which you will trepan me again.

“That’s a no.  Not today.  Not ever.,” Maria said.

***

“Trepanation is the process of removing a disc of bone from the skull.  While generally regarded today as a barbaric operation exemplifying the benighted state of medical practice in medieval Europe, to its few adherents trepanation has actually solved one of the basic dichotomies of human existence: the split between mind and body.  While evidence of trepanation can be dated back to 3000 B.C., its advocacy as a direct psychological shortcut to serenity is a little-discussed tangent of the psychedelic movement of the 1960’s.

The first contemporary European to drill a hole in his head for the purpose of becoming “permanently high” is Dr. Bart Hughes of the Netherlands.  After three years of research into what he has termed “brainbloodvolume” and its effects on the mind.  Dr. Hughes administered his own self-trepanation on January 6, 1965… 

A stubborn literal-mindedness has yielded a novel if largely overlooked theory: that the third eye of ancient mystical lore is an actual hole in the human cranium.”

— Stuart Swezey,  Amok Journal,  1995.

***

The following Saturday at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a few days before Garcilazo was hospitalized, this:

“I’ve never seen anything as atrocious as this.  How is this art?”  He seemed to be pleading with Maria to leave.

“Well, why isn’t it art?” she said, “the artist has created this as a work of art.  Why do you think it’s not art?”

He turned to Maria and looked at her somberly.  “Do you consider this — a great white shark in a clear tank of formaldehyde a work of art?  And who is this Damien Hirst fuck, anyway?”  He shifted his jacket onto his right forearm holding it as if he were an expectant waiter.  His judgment would be swift and permanent.  Predicated on her opinion, their relationship would either whither or move on, that’s what she intuited by his demeanor.  She found his earnestness disconcerting.  There was something petty and pernicious about the twist on his face.  

According to his affect she was the biddable one.  He, somehow, would make some pronouncement here and she’d either be out with the trash or still his sister.  Nausea seeped in.

***

By the end of the week Garcilazo was malingering.  He had a well known tendency to simulate symptoms when month end work was due.  He’d be out of the office most of the day injecting himself with Krokodril — actually taken in this light, he was malingering in honest fashion but he was bringing it on himself.  The symptoms did end up being real but he was causing his own sickness, and only at the end of each month.  Did he do this to himself away from the office?  No one ever found out.  But over time he turned an off color, as if his skin was striated with loam and it started to slough off at the edges of his shirt cuffs.  And in the full course of time, one day when Mr. Semplice went in to see him, all he found was a mound of skin on Garcilazo’s seat.  Had he turned into this?  Or was this his parting gift?  No one at the office ever knew.

***

(continued tomorrow)

sometimes little bull fights:

I recently received this transmission via email.  I don’t know who sent it.  It came from The Ether Foundation.  And while I’ve never heard of the foundation or know of anyone who knows said foundation, the e-missive had such a force of purpose behind it, that I immediately followed these instructions:

On Nov 13, 2019, at 12:54 PM, PUNCHY WUNCH <punchywunch@theetherfoundation.net> wrote:

Hey You!

Sorry not to see you today.  Hope the venereal disease is shining like crazy where you are. 

Here‘s the work for next time.  You need to do this.  You have no options or recourse:

1) take a small image and make it large 

2) take a large image and make it small

3) interpret what you did in a different medium 

4) go to a website building site and play with the tools. See what they prompt you to do.  Take pictures of what you do. Delete the site if you like but keep images from your efforts. 

5) write  for 5 minutes three times this week using prompts to help you free write. Prompts we came up with: cleanup in Aisle 5; window washing; where do balloons go? Where do socks go?; how did I get there from here? 

Have a swollen neck week!  Here’s to your mumps!!

THEE ETHER FOUNDATION

So here is my work.  My assignment from beyond.  I hope to find comfort and solace (maybe even succor)  in these humble assignments done.

1) take a small image and make it large:

2) take a large image and make it small

3) interpret what you did in a different medium 

4) go to a website building site and play with the tools. See what they prompt you to do.  Take pictures of what you do. Delete the site if you like but keep images from your efforts.

See here, Punchy Wunch!  You’re looking at it.

5) write  for 5 minutes three times this week using prompts to help you free write. Prompts we came up with: cleanup in Aisle 5; window washing; where do balloons go? Where do socks go?; how did I get there from here?

I.  How did I get there from here?

“Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.”

— David Markson / Vanishing Point

II.  Cleanup in Aisle 5:

I remember on the first day of school he said:  “… carousing will not be tolerated.  We are a Jesuit school and you are upstanding young gentlemen, and you will act as such.  The pride of a country in exile rests upon you.  You are being watched, and you will not embarrass us while we are here in the United States.” 

And I said: “I was born here.  I’m an American, and I’m not going back to Cuba.  I’ve never been there.  I want nothing with the miserable island.  Or the miserable old people who talk talk talk and do nothing.  Buy a boat.  Call it Granpa.  Fill it with 50-some odd people, and lousy guns, and start a counterrevolution.  Why don’t you shut up and do something.  I’m not a Cuban.” 

III.  Where do balloons go?

Sex dwarf… Gnathonic dwarves luring disco dollies to a life of vice.  Sex dwarf.  Gnathonic dwarves…

“Politically incorrect and pompous!  Say fawning little people or some such.”

“I don’t love you anymore.  You always accuse me of being improper, coarse, politically incorrect, a whore.”

“Well, you are a whore. The biggest whore that ever lived.  Look at your whorish make up: that runny mascara, those grotesque lips painted like a Pity Party clown…”

“Hey, look who’s being politically incorrect now.  Pity Party clown?  Really?  That’s disturbing.  Don’t you dare call me a clown.  Pitiable?  Yes.  But clown?  No.  Do you really have to bottom feed.”

“Madam, I’ll have you know I’ve fed on the best bottoms in the world.  The idea for 2 Girls 1 Cup was mine.  All mine.  I spawned a subculture.  The uber-sub genre.  I am the king of the despicable.  The emperor of grotesqueries.  The baron of bizarre.  I am trans-species extraordinaire… but I am merely a man.  Made of the same organic stuff as you; as the rest of them.  And you, dear tart, will rue the day you spoke to me that manner.  You, dear slovenly woman, are a harrowing harlot.  A mere trinket of Tristesa.  And I will beg you to leave me alone.”

“Well, I never.”  She produced a taser from her purse.  “See this, you fuck?”  She aimed it squarely at his groin.

He took a step closer to her.

“You’re a defiler.  A debaser.”

He mocked her.  “Ooh, you’re a deee-file-her.  A deee-bay-sir!” and he thrust his groin out at her.  “Ooh, don’t tase me, bro,” he said, arms akimbo.  “Don’t tase me, ‘ho!…”

***

The deus ex machina does not exist, dear reader.  From here you must devise your own denouement for these two characters who are in search of a fourth reel.

And now the film is trapped in the gate and is blistering.  Melting.

Now I’ll have to call the projectionist at home, and pay him overtime, because I have cellulose triacetate all over the xenon arc bulb.  God damn it!

Do you know how much this is going to cost me — to fix this projector?

Oy!  I should have gone digital when I had the chance.

God damn cheap films.

And you… YOU!  All of you!  What are you looking at?  What are you doing here?

And take that balloon out of your ass!