This is what I see as I screech this joyride. I take a photo because I prefer Icelandic volcanic fissures to insurrectionist presidents or atmospheric rivers with their attendant storm water floods.
I’ve copy and pasted manifold eons there and here to improve the deadbeat dad memories that flood back at inopportune moments.
Once I migrate the last 14 moonlights I remember, the visitations will commence—mostly in Spanish. I’ll hit the “return” key multiple times and achieve cursory appreciation from vignette to mutation. Then hit “archive.”
That’s it!
Jingle for sedatives at your own risk.
Fill every winter solstice with short affirmations about the shortest day of the year.
Mark the shortest day with long monologues full of lengthy obloquies and interminable microfictions.
In this way mark the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning, and the middle of the muddle.
(This meaningless and meandering short point of meretriciousness … meh!)
What I’m Reading:
I try not to dispense imperatives. All my advice contradicts itself.
— Elizabeth McCracken / A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction
Why do I care so much if time and space disappear when the world has come undone? Will there be borders and countries again in the future? Today, here, right now, the days don’t matter. Or the months. They disappear like sand between my fingers, without a trace.
— Agustina Bazterrica / The Unworthy
There is no such thing as new pain, only the same pain recycled a hundred ways.
— Mai Der Vang / “Beast You Are Who Calls to the Beast I Am” / Primordial
Mocking a woman for doing her job isn’t honesty. It isn’t candor. It isn’t toughness. It’s smallness.
It’s the behavior of a man who cannot face a question without trying to diminish the person asking it. And when grown adults laugh at that, it says less about her and far more about what we as a country are becoming . . . Democracy depends on people willing to ask uncomfortable questions. But calling a woman “piggy” isn’t holding the press accountable. It’s the oldest trick in the autocrat’s handbook: Humiliate the critic so you don’t have to answer the criticism.
What troubles me most isn’t just the insult itself. It’s the applause for it – the way some cheer cruelty if it comes wrapped in their team’s colors. The way grown men laugh at a woman being demeaned.
The way people confuse bullying with strength.
Leadership requires restraint. It requires self-discipline, respect and the ability to face scrutiny without collapsing into name-calling . . . When the president of the United States talks like this, it gives the country permission to talk like this. It corrodes our civic life. It teaches our kids that mockery is a substitute for argument. It encourages the belief that the way to win is to shame someone into silence.
— Ray Watford / “The worst part of Trump’s ‘piggy’ comment wasn’t the insult” / USA Today
The nostalgia that permeates so much of today’s right and no small part of today’s left is no accident. We have lost the faith in the future that once powered our optimism. We fight instead over what we have, or what we had.
— Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson / Abundance
In the 1930s, the best of the Americas converged. Now, the worst, despite efforts by good people on both sides of the border to hold off the eclipse. If the Conquest inaugurated the “slow creation of humanity,” we, America, América, seem to be living through its dismantling.
— Greg Grandin / America, América: A New History of the New World
“Our whole generation is crazy . . . “
— Maureen F. McHugh / “Special Economics” / After the Apocalypse
What I’m Listening To:
Yes, I can tell That you can’t be what you pretend The caterpillar hood won’t cover the head of you Know you should be home in bed
Gustatory. Gestation. Genuflection. Generative. Gainsay. Can you guess, which, if any, of the terms above doubles as a po’ boy, a grinder, and a nuclear submarine? If you answered: “Birds on ice,” you win nothing but my heart. I’ve come to the point where points are pointless. Where well-thought out thesis statements are too hegemonic, where writing the well-constructed story is too formulaic, and where proper pacing, narrative arc, and “stakes”—stakes! for goodness sakes—stakes! Who talks that way about art? What are the stakes? What’s at stake for this character? When did art become a parimutuel endeavor? This has all become painting by numbers. Who is best at coloring inside the lines. Why is this ok? Why does this make sense? Why the rush to the normative-homogeneous? Why does everything a human do become subsumed to the capital imperative? Where’s the profit to be made? How do we monetize this? How do we get the most eyes on our ads? Let’s use this work of art as a conduit for our festooning advertising around it. Please. Stop.
What I’m Reading:
Yes, I want free shit too, but see, my feet hurt too bad for looting.
Magpie thoughts: Thunder asunder — Divides the heart.
Polly squawking. I have witnessed this before. It sounds absurd.
A crow Laocoön — Warn me not — Don’t wish to know what this way comes.
Sparrow filch A higher logic. Flits away at looming dark.
What I’m Reading:
The pace of recent climate change is stunningly, bewilderingly fast. Most previous ages of the planet lived out healthy geological lifespans and died of natural causes. That is not what is happening now. The world is not supposed to warm this quickly, to change this suddenly. It never has, at least not since humans (or anything like humans) have existed. It feels wrong. It is wrong. This is not loss but violence.
— Kate Marvel / Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet
— You, humans, are like preyed upon schools of fish — Hoping for safety in numbers. Let that sink in.
What I’m Reading:
Currently, about 831 million people live at or below the level of extreme poverty across the globe. According to the World Bank, that’s $3 per day when adjusted for currency and cost of living.
In fact, if every billionaire were left with only a billion dollars to their name, the rest of their seized wealth would be enough to cover the amount UN experts believe is needed to end world extreme poverty for the next 196 years.
— Simon Speakman Cordall / “What if…. we abolished billionaires?” / Al Jazeera
into you into the darkness into this memory hole where is your year in review the vestige of the atom loosed then fretting a sense of alienation annihilation abomination abnegation and ferreting the soundtrack of childhood standing waiting for the avalanche of cruelty lost my copy of making art during fascism my butt call to my dead father answered my doomsday clock runs backward i can name that tune in 2 notes mondays are interminable everyday is monday the sky a hole into me
What I’m Reading:
VI
Icicles filled the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause.
— Wallace Stevens / “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
This terrorizing and demonizing pretends to be in service of recreating a white America that never existed. The US when white supremacists like Trump were young was whiter, but this was never a white country. In 1776, the 13 colonies that became the United States included a significant percentage of Black and Indigenous people (some southern states were a third or more Black). When the US annexed Texas in 1844 and then in 1848 took Mexico’s whole northern half, a Spanish-speaking population was already settled across parts of what’s now the south-west and California. The first African Muslim in what is now the United States came in a Spanish expedition almost a century before the Mayflower brought its fanatical Puritans to the shores of Massachusetts in 1620.
— Rebecca Solnit / “Trump wants to recreate a white America that never existed“ / The Guardian
it is a serious thing
just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world.
— Mary Oliver / “Invitation”
Whew.
Damn. This America.
This raucous, malfunctioning, precocious, thuggish, absurdly tender, enviable, poisonous, utterly mercurial snitch of a nation. This bumptious, blustering, broken experiment. This circle of arms, haven for guns and greed, this cult of celebrity, this shelter and sanctuary, this bait for demons and demagogues. This place we call-home.
Like it or not, we’re surrounded by our country. It hasn’t been easy to watch its many wounds rise to the surface for anyone to see.
— Patricia Smith / “Series Editor’s Preface” / True Mistakes
A hot pocket in every Chernobyl, a pig in every inbox. I’m announcing early that I’m running for the top spot. I’m building a beautiful mall.
— Harryette Mullen / “Spam for President”
Every industrial, high-GDP country in the last decades of the last century took steps to restructure their economies in response to inflation, unemployment, rising energy prices, and global competition. Yet no other wealthy nation did so as gleefully as did the United States. It’s leaders facilicated deindustrialization and the outsourcing of decent-paying jobs; deregulated finance and other industries; pushed for the elimination of small farms and the massive upscaling of agribusiness; gave up their ability to discipline and tax corporations; and revised laws to allow first Walmart’s and then Amazon’s destruction of Main Street. No other comparable nation, not even Thatcher’s, presided over such an enormous redistribution of wealth upward, creating a superclass of billionaires immune to democratic control. None so happily let its political class and institutions fall captive to money, while at the same time gutting the institutions—welfare, unions, housing, farm communities, hospitals, mental health care, the media—that might have softened the blow.
— Greg Grandin / America, América: A New History of the New World
Climate change is making plastic pollution worse, says a new study: heat and extreme weather accelerate the breakdown of plastic into tiny particles, while storms and floods stir up old garbage from landfills and melting releases microplastics from ice. As the resulting material mixes with our air, water and soil, toxic hitchhikers such as pesticides are carried with it. Meanwhile, the ceaseless production of new plastic generates billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions — creating a vicious cycle. The solution: make less new plastic, get a grip on waste and clean up what’s already out there. “The biggest achievement and greatest hope for success would be to establish an international, legally binding global plastics treaty…”
— Flora Graham / “Climate change and plastic is a vicious cycle” / Nature Briefing
The persecution of huge numbers of brown people and even the mass deportations will not create the white country of far-right fantasy. Los Angeles, for example is an almost 50% Latino city, and despite the ICE and border patrol outrages, arrests, imprisonments and deportations, it remains so. The city’s very name is Spanish, a reminder of who was here first. All the hatred, all the persecution, seems like the panic of racists pretending they can stop the future of this country no longer being majority white through sheer cruelty.
— Rebecca Solnit / “Trump wants to recreate a white America that never existed“ / The Guardian
What I’m Listening To:
Why does the past hurt me so? (Why does the past hurt me so?) The world is laughing at me I am such a disaster (Every day, I’m a shell) A shell fallen down and dead Curled, like a heavy downy baby goose
— Dry Cleaning / “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit”
thee istsfor manity reader 