Forests burn into their clearings. A sense of dread. It has something to do with the flags of the age. There are huge weapons, poison gases, insecticides to injure us. Who’s holding them?
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
— Abraham Lincoln / First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861
fist of this tyrant kingdom: my city of industry, my city of atom bomb, my city of warheads, of plutonium kept clandestine, of slow killings accomplished to more efficiently kill, of truths & metals forced underground
— Marissa Davis / “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dead Fish”
We are all, you see, toys of the life-force. It made you numerically strong, but mentally undeveloped; it made us mentally strong, but physically weak: now it has set us at one another, to see what will happen. A cruel sport, perhaps, from both our points of view, but a very, very old one. Cruelty is as old as life itself. There is some improvement: humour and compassion are the most important of human inventions; but they are not very firmly established yet, though promising well.’
— John Windham / The Midwich Cuckoos
Sometimes I think we weigh down the people we love most when we’re trying to learn to carry ourselves.
— Brianna Madia / Nowhere for Very Long
The CDC was a gem to the world . . . That standing is gone. So much expertise is gone. People who wanted to go into public health don’t see a future. The debate that we’re all having is, will the CDC ever recover, not how long it will take. I don’t know that it can ever recover to what it was.
— Wendy Armstrong, vice president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America / “Crisis within CDC is spilling into real world, experts say” / STAT
Oh never let them come to steal our dreams, never let them entwine us in our bed. Let us hold on to the shadows to see if, from our own obscurity, we emerge and grope along the walls, lie in wait for the light, to capture it, till, once and for all time, it becomes our own, the sun of every day.
— Pablo Neruda / “Emerging”
Exposure to air pollution could increase the risk of developing Lewy body dementia(LBD), a term that includes Parkinson’s disease with dementia. An analysis of data from 56 million people suggests there is a clear link between long-term exposure to PM2.5 — particles smaller than 2.5 micrometres in diameter — and the development of LBD. These pollutants don’t necessarily induce the dementia, but “accelerates the development” in people who are already genetically predisposed to it, says clinician–neuroscientist Hui Chen.
fist of this tyrant kingdom: my city of industry, my city of atom bomb, my city of warheads, of plutonium kept clandestine, of slow killings accomplished to more efficiently kill, of truths & metals forced underground
— Marissa Davis / “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dead Fish”
If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does…
— John Windham / The Midwich Cuckoos
What I’m Listening To:
I wanna feel everything I wanna listen to the idiot sing Until I can’t feel anything ‘Cause rock ‘n’ roll is dead But the dead don’t die The dead don’t die The dead don’t die The dead don’t die The dead don’t die Whooo!
of the heated thermals — rising lifting in the swell headed south like geese unspooled unlooosed upon a slough of icebergs
how tall is a dark sky city?
searchlights illuminate the falling snow no auroras just cracks in the ice cracks in the ice cracks in the ice — cracks
3am a flat hissing noise a strange hiatus as giant wind turbines slow
then stop a breakdown in reciprocity
you suspected it when you saw the foothills you were certain when you saw the distant mountain ridges
light gray upon white hard to distinguish sea from sky — there it is a margin no bigger no longer than what it reminds us of it doesnt surprise us what we are what we’ve become
we are not beautiful objects of contemplation
this is all like a dusty sun bleached diorama we contain nothing but shadows — and our shadows are long
What I’m Reading:
Sometimes misadventures are the best adventures. Sometimes a tent is a room of one’s own. And sometimes you don’t know what to do but you do the best you can.
The twelfth day of the month was Copperhead Monday. 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. Tuesday 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.
What I’m Reading:
… the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a pre-fascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of tubes all showing the same bright colored shadows …
A negative feedback loop. Petroglyphs and door flips. Petrichor — a savage feedback loop — a savage republic. Put out the fire.
Frying in its own fat. Permafrost melting. The warming leading to fire. Fire and friars with intention — without compunction — never knowing regret.
All portent from here. The dark briars thick with illness.
Without agency — a magnificent disaster — falling and implicated. Smothering never staying. Praying without saying a thing. Prattling.
Sneak a chunk up your pant leg — white hot and abrupt. A life of impunity ends abruptly on a moonless dirt road. This country is vast and vacuous.
What I’m Reading:
Even now, as this vile age comes to a shuddering, bathetic end, we are so polite. We continue to buy things. We write letters. We argue about protocol. We say this or that can’t happen, or won’t. They couldn’t possibly. But it can, and they will.
— Carmen Maria Machado / Introduction to new edition of I Who Have Never Known Men
thee istsfor manity reader 