He lives with ephemeral creatures beneath his feet and stanchions around his bed.
A case study in diverting his elbow’s loose skin and the stubbing of his tender footing.
In the darkness outside sycamores make wide arm imprecations and water themselves with wines of every variety.
His ambition is drained in a scruff of the neck twist—a meager remembrance of his days spent in a robe.
His teeth are chattering. Tomorrow he starts his apprenticeship as a bellows fellow at the smithy.
“Fou!” says the Past, inserting its finger in god knows what—¿El lapiz de Extremadura?
He slogs, knee deep, in hummingbird angles, all-stiff and blur-fast. Before him shine the bones of the pitiable Condors of Lima.
Is he comforted by this knowledge—that the afflatus was hard won—speaking in tongues while wearing the cloaks of invincibility? Or did he don the cloaks of imbecility?
In any case, his body is taught with a dab of holy pedantry.
***
She, on the other hand, hears a clacking coming from the road. She feels the steering wheel shudder to the sound of the clacking. Is there a compromised tire up front? What is making that sound? She feels the steering lock and she drifts to the shoulder.
The car’s thermometer reads 115 degrees. The empty road heat shimmers in the distance—an ocean opens in the desert.
This is not something she can afford to do—leave the safety of the car and expose herself to the environment or to potential marauders in wait.
She intuits Inuit umiaks on a Fata Morgana in the heat shimmer ocean before her—all this in invisible increments of …
***
And you say: “Stanchions? Cloaks? Condors of Lima? Wha?! Are you insane?”
What I’m Reading:
. . . If we are so wise, why are we so self-destructive? We are at one and the same time both the smartest and the stupidest animals on earth. We are so smart that we can produce nuclear missiles and superintelligent algorithms. And we are so stupid that we go ahead producing these things even though we’re not sure we can control them and failing to do so could destroy us. Why do we do it? Does something in our nature compel us to go down the path of self destruction?
— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
A vibrant tuning fork in hand— This is normally a prime time for burrowing a hole in your heart.
You tell me to videograph your heartache. You claim that this crowded urban area saps your optimism and your love for your fellow human. Someone’s banging on the door, yelling: get out, get out. You will slowly reopen your heart and repair the gaps, and hope for the best. It’s still not easy to be asymptomatic. Over the next couple of weeks before October love forlorn, love clinically enervated, will disappear permanently.
Fuel for the broken heart. Food for stormy weather.
What I’m Reading:
But being with an addict was the most alone I would ever feel.
a star’s fleeting arc across the night a bright and obscene refulgence a cold relief buried in that errant ecliptic it shapes itself as the sky congeals around it
goes on to better things does not go on at all now gone
consumptive reductive absent
What I’m Reading:
Violence against nature always goes hand in hand with violence against people.
Rather, the secret of our success is that we are talented at using information to connect lots of individuals. Unfortunately, this ability often goes hand in hand with believing in lies, errors, and fantasies. This is why even technologically advanced societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have been prone to hold delusional ideas, without their delusions necessarily weakening them. Indeed, the mass delusions of Nazi and Stalinist ideologies about things like race and class actually helped them make tens of millions of people march together in lockstep.
— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
When the prison door bangs shut behind your back— that’s when you think about freedom.
— Tomica Bajsić / “When You Hit Yourself with an Axe While Chopping Wood”
For someone openly campaigning to get a Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump has been going about it in an unusual way. Early last month, the President proclaimed in a press conference that the Department of Defense would thereafter be known as the Department of War. At the same briefing, the presumed new Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, promised that the armed forces will deliver “maximum lethality” that won’t be “politically correct.” That was a few days after Trump had ordered the torpedoing of a small boat headed out of Venezuela, which he claimed was piloted by “narco-terrorists,” killing all eleven people on board, rather than, for instance, having it stopped and inspected. After some military-law experts worried online that this seemed uncomfortably close to a war crime, Vice-President J. D. Vance posted, “Don’t give a shit.”
— Benjamin Wallace-Wells / “Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the ‘War from Within’ “ / The New Yorker
I just remembered, remembered freedom was life’s great lie,
remembered body is another word for cage, remembered
night knew my name before I ever had reason to fear.
— Alison C. Rollins / “Springtime Again”
American white supremacists have tried to justify their position by appealing to various hallowed texts, most notably the U.S. Constitution and the Bible. The U.S. Constitution originally legitimized racial segregation and the supremacy of the white race, reserving full civil rights for white people and allowing the enslavement of Black people. The Bible not only sanctified slavery in the Ten Commandments and numerous other passages but also placed a curse on the offspring of Ham-the alleged forefather of Africans-saying that “the lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers” (Genesis 9:25).
— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
The rubric of our history is synonymous with loss. But haven’t we built such beautiful homes on the hillside coming down. Empires of one-one brick and pillar post. Empires of galvanise and dirt.
— Anthony Joseph / “Empires”
Information is the glue that holds networks together, and when people are fed bad information, they are likely to make bad decisions, no matter how wise and kind they personally are. For tens of thousands of years, Sapiens built and maintained large networks by inventing and spreading fictions, fantasies, and mass delusions-about gods, about enchanted broomsticks, about Al, and about a great many other things. While each individual human is typically interested in knowing the truth about themselves and the world, large networks bind members and create order by relying on fictions and fantasies. That’s how we got, for example, to Nazism and Stalinism. These were exceptionally powerful networks, held together by exceptionally deluded ideas. As George Orwell famously put it, ignorance is strength.
— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
What I’m Listening To:
Like Saint Joan Doing a cool jerk Oh, I want you Like a kanga roo Ooh
We’re the largest exporter of young martyrs. They travel with confidence and exotic lawyers, falling into maggot defences, and jaunty tweeds in cooler weather. All so sanguine. Are you afraid?
A single empire in its crosshairs — colonial possessions and all else thanks to their regrets and embarkations on cancelled television series.
Touch yourself not … I’m kidding, touch yourself all you please, and go ahead place your hand on the hot burners and watch your skin slough off.
Elsewhere, readers sing concatenations of the mining of rare earths and rejoining the arms race. Two right arms for your left, please. Either you colonize yourself or settle for an enema.
Wit and worth are absent, and inspections are rare. Do you sniff the familiar trope of boy loses girl?
Social commentary need not apply. Violence will. Let’s chart the protagonist’s intellectual and moral emotion and touch nothing. Fall back or spring forward. See if anyone cares.
You randy chatwit, nitwit, godwit water wading sand flea. See if I care.
Go ahead and snift your brandy and enforce your immigration law writ large. Wade into proofing wool and gather your navel gaze.
Now you’re smart enough to be an American Prez.
What I’m Reading:
Since the world is ending, why not let the children touch the paintings?
Mutagens remain in the environment. The disaster follows a now familiar course. During the early stages of the emergency clean-up a bestial man cried:
I sing in praise of older gutbuckets. I pledge to be benefic and soporific at court gatherings. I will pray 23 times daily and take no more than 5 morning constitutionals. I will no longer place myself in front of others (as naturally my space is above all others).
I will play my left handed guitar twice each morning and I will remain ghastly and pale in the afternoon cloud light. Later, by the night light, I will blow my right handed harmonica.
Play! Go, daddy, go!
If someone, anyone, calls me a child of the universe — I will go apeshit and devalue their municipal bonds and charge remainder pay to the government coiffers in buffet time.
Such is the nature of my sardonic tonic.
It blasts a hole in my imperium. Someone say, Amen, and shut up! Because that is what I’m about to do.
What I’m Reading:
The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood.
— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
This fridge arrives with a toothache, and the dialectical fright squad was chop-licking with overwet prosody. It is poor form to be rich and our canines are oversharpened while our molars have ground down to battlefield dust.
The government of alchemists — seeking admixtures of lucre-baiting consciousness — without tongue, without signifiers, within a sangfroid winning way are lost in a ruthless world dominated by amateur dentists.
These burial lands are infested with cicadas charging oppressive rents — their gestures the shadow language of cargo cults and trepanators.
Is that a hole in your head, she says.
We are fractured and without shelter. All exhortations are moot, but with a side of mediocre marmalade. Huckleberry.
Accept this gilt logorrhea as a guilty pleasure averted. We’re a surly lot full of liquid loquacity misplaced. This is irreconcilable, but it is nonetheless. Nonetheless.
thee istsfor manity reader 