thee istsfor manity reader

Sometimes Unfinished Music (redux)

Sometimes I am asked to clarify my position
and
I say I’m equidistant to roil and root.

Sometimes I am asked to qualify what I mean
and
I say this hand is love and this hand is hate.

Sometimes I wonder what all of this means
and
I say to myself: I didn’t ask to be put on this ride but I’m going to have to ride it out.

Sometimes I rail
and
Sometimes I sleep through it all

Sometimes I think in English
and
Sometimes I think in Spanish

and …

In this way I moved ever so much closer to where I thought I needed to be. What I needed to do to regain some balance in my life.

I turned on my tuneage.

I listened to John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Unfinished Music Series Volumes 1-3, all three records put me in the mood to do something drastic.

Especially after reading about the making of the records — now that I was weighed down with the knowledge that the heartbeats I kept hearing throughout the latter two records were the heartbeats of their dead baby.

By the time I came to the song “John & Yoko” on Unfinished Music 3, with the repeated and incessant cries of “John,” “Yoko,” and the heaving palpitations of the dead baby’s heart I started throwing books in the fireplace. I couldn’t take it.

I left the apartment and went to O’Hara’s — the Irish pub down the street on the corner of South Miami Ave and 26th Street — it was half empty and dark just the way I enjoyed it. I chose the end most stool by the rarely used back entrance, certain that I’d get some writing done.

No one would want to sit near a television with a screen saver on it, all the action was near the front where the University of Miami football game was blaring.

I ordered the Reuben Egg Rolls — not exactly the first dish one thinks of when one is thinking about Irish pub food.

That is how I got to this very point.

What I’m Reading:

A series of signs said
help was there, but not for me.

— Elisa Gabbert / “The Bridge”

One Direction Home

Out of the netherworld, through an oppressively humid haze, I materialize at a shore front — the city behind me a stony sentinel, silent and shimmering, in the vapor. I turn from the city and there, where the lake meets a path line, stands a weatherworn green bicycle with drop handlebars.

I intuit that this is my way back home to Boston. The mushroom hiss haze fades away as the sun zeppelins its own path out of the clouds. There is only one direction home and it unspools out to the northwest and I intuit, again, that it will turn sharply east and I’ll be home again.

Just pump the pedals — grind away through the hottest days in recorded human history — and all will be well.

Well. Well. Well.

It’s good to be home again.

What I’m Reading:

It’s only fair that the person who gets left behind gets to tell the story.

— Debbie Urbanski / Portalmania: Stories

What I’m Reading:

I was on my bike, trying to grow back into something
I had grown out of, like a hermit crab rewound.

— Hedgie Choi / “In My Natural Habitat”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

I was having a moment,
so I went home
and covered myself in princess stickers.

— Matt Broaddus / “Emotional Rescue”

“The message we keep hearing is that the nuclear risk is over, that that’s an old risk from the cold war,” says physicist Daniel Holz, who is one of the stewards of the iconic ‘Doomsday Clock’. “But when you talk to experts, you get the opposite message — that actually the nuclear risk is very high, and it’s increasing.” Nuclear deterrence is no longer a two-player game. And there are new risk factors: online misinformation and disinformation can influence leaders or voters in nuclear-armed nations, and artificial intelligence brings uncertainty to military decision-making. The result is a risky new nuclear age.

— Flora Graham / “Don’t get complacent about nuclear war” / Nature Briefing

What part of your life’s record is skipping?
What wound is on repeat?
Have you done everything you can
to break out of that groove?

— Andrea Gibson / “How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best”

. . .a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me—more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears. I can remember, really quite distinctly, looking a sheet of paper square in the eyes when I was seven or eight years old and thinking, ‘This is where I belong. This is it.’

— E. B. White / Letters of E. B. White

Here’s the thing: fission does not begin when a father holds a scan
speckled with the gleam of small explosions. It’s a delicate process—
the body expiring, the intricate design of it: cells chugging on their suicide vesicles
without argument, blood vessels giving up their elasticities,
or telomeres untwining in perfect obedience to the secret Latin of rot.

— Feranmi Ariyo / “Fission”

When we wake from the dream-laden phase of sleep, the brain boots up step by step. The first brain regions to rouse are those associated with executive function and decision-making, located at the front of the head. A wave of wakefulness then spreads to the back, ending with an area associated with vision. This precise understanding of how the brain transitions from slumber to alertness could help to manage sleep inertia — the grogginess that many people feel when hitting the snooze button.

— Flora Graham / “How the Brain Wakes Up” / Nature Briefing

I had a dream once,
perhaps it was a dream,
that the crab was my ignorance of God.
But who am I to believe in dreams?

— Anne Sexton / “The Poet of Ignorance”

What I’m Listening To:

I can’t hit a violin without it breaking

Can’t smash a piano without it shaking

— Mhaol / “Snare”

What I’m Reading:

The Administration—Stephen Miller and others—are already calling on other red states to do the same. The federal government would give these states money, in part, to open these facilities. And the money is largely coming from FEMA’s budget. We’re seeing flash floods all across the country, including the devastation in Texas. But FEMA has basically been gutted in its capacity to deal with those sorts of things, and instead money from FEMA is being used to help stand up these facilities.

— Erin Neil / “The Shame of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’” / The New Yorker Daily

What I’m Reading:

The health of the troops depends so much upon keeping themselves clean that too much pains cannot be taken for that purpose… As every kind of Sloveness or Inattention will be severely punished — The Officer of the Day is to be carefull in Examining the Mens Appartments to see if they are kept clean and in good Order…

— Lt. Col. Marinus Willett / Fort Stanwix Garrison Orders, March 20th, 1778

What I’m Reading:

There are days
When the voiceless end up
Speaking under the weight of contempt
As we know, no worse torture exists

— Abdourahman A. Waberi / “A Touch of Salt on My Confession”

What I’m Reading:

Next he was sitting in on a congressional
Hearing on whether to classify pancakes
As cake. A conservative senator warned of
A slippery slope. What next? he said,
Icing on biscuits?

— Ishmael Reed / “The Diabetic Dreams of Cake”

What I’m Reading:

Death is not an emergency but the body limping against
its own walls as it realizes freedom.

— Feranmi Ariyo / “Fission”

What I’m Reading:

Scientists said “heat domes” and related atmospheric events behind extreme weather around the world had almost tripled in strength and duration since the 1950s, as tens of millions of people sweltered in “dangerous heat” in parts of the US and Europe.

— Attracta Mooney & Steven Bernard / “Temperatures reach dangerous highs as ‘heat domes’ hit Europe and US” / Financial Times