When I tire I sleep on a patch of rocks where our library once stood. Early the next day I walk back to the complex — to my cell smelling of urine and fear. I love my little hole.
In this parallel world which I inhabit only the objects that become the subject of my consciousness truly exist, everything else is a ghostly simulacrum that plays on unseen film screens in theaters I don’t attend. And that I wouldn’t attend had I the capacity…
And I am a capacious man, even in these lean times.
What I’m Reading:
She opened her mouth as if her throat were a bird ready to leave her. I thought she was going to sing for the dead, because she said she always saw them.
It’s a ragged sort of heat. The call of the west again.
Then a discomfiting sort of rain. It’s my first day out of the house in nearly three weeks. Just 2 days ago I was fetal, on the bed, unable to sweat the thoughts away.
I found a litter of puppies feeding in the corner of the living room, and dry shit streaked on the bathroom towel. The Christmas tree is canted and some of the balls have unfurled their string covers revealing the styrofoam balls beneath. I remember the last year they had glass ornaments the piles of colored glass shards spread about the living room and the multiple band aids on my cousin’s feet. Those styrofoam balls must be 25 years old now. But it was the smell that was truly distinctive, a mix of sour broiling turkey mixed with wet dog fur, overfull litter box, and Lysol.
Someone’s cut and paste — forlorn and left out in the desert — cries out for purpose. There is no liability. There is no curse.
I considered the crow a baleful thing; it darkened my day instantly like a light speed sarcoma. My day, my year, my life was shot in that cut and paste. And in that instant I wrote this, and never wrote again.
What I’m Reading:
The time has come for sages, mystics, and prophets to cede to an AI. In this way, history marches on.
Listen. This is modern times all over the world Go sit under a tree.
— Lorenzo Thomas / “Displacement”
Somehow, the entire human race seemed momentarily united in a single entrancing dream—the hope that the next generation they would bequeath to Mother Earth would be whole, healthy, sane, capable of making amends for the rape they had inflicted in olden days.
— John Brunner / Stand On Zanzibar
There’s many things perching in the sky. Oh many things perching. But no pepper birds. They don’t come.
— Paulé Bártón / “The Bowl Seller”
Many more of me would yet be born, but I didn’t have much longer to live. Goodbye, I repeated silently to the many of me I’d never meet, then carefully brushed away the dusting of snow that had started to settle on my garment.
— Hiromi Kawakami / “Narcissi” / Under the Eye of the Big Bird
He is remembering a place he has never come back from trying to learn of whatever finally became of him Hurrying across the paper his pen makes the sound of evening pushing through grass
— Fredric Matteson / “In Jackson’s Study (A Year After He Has Gone)”
You can’t blame the people who can’t hear the warnings; you have to blame the ones who can, and who ignore them.
— John Brunner / The Sheep Look Up
And a day goes by, and the snipers, and the market itself has no salt: so I said: No worries, the merchants have plenty of sadness.
— Nasser Rabah / “Untitled”
What I’m Listening To:
I got high I thought I saw an angel But he was just a ghost He was making wooden posts out of my family What if birds aren’t singing they’re screaming What if birds aren’t singing they’re screaming
Proficient in “metaphoricals,” but lacking in “metonymicals,” it was decided he had some finesse for the “synecdochicals.” It mattered to no one on the staff that they were bastardizing the terms in this official report they were collating, but someone had to get rid of that little bastard language “prefigurator”—no matter how many neologisms they cranked out.
“Norms was norms,” and this non-normative fellow could not stand—would not stand—in the department!
So they devised a plan to spike his broccoli sprouts with psilocybin bits (that would fix him for good!) before he presented at the symposium.
So much for his disquisition on Thee Synergies of the Literary Fruits of Charles Bukowski and Judy Grahn: Thee Literary Love Story. It was destined for doom, his presentation, because of his “turgidity” and “floridness”—and his altered state of consciousness.
But the talk was especially memorable as he waxed aphasic (Wernicke’s) occasionally spouting something about chocolate covered grahams, ladybugs, Blind Lemon Jefferson, cherry blossoms, and a case of plantar fasciitis. There was bafflement among the attendees—worried looks—but once he summed it up by saying:
“Baby Gongas are fierce … harrumph … hooray!”
To the departmental staff’s dismay there ensued a thunderous 10-minute long standing ovation.
The moral here is … wash and watch! your broccoli sprouts—and Baby Gongas always win the day!
That’s the philosophy of my life.
What I’m Reading:
Reading should feel a little subversive… because it is! To sit around and read a novel in the year 2025 is an act of resistance — you’re swimming against the current of the entire contemporary shitstream.
Come inside and see gnats and gadflies swarming about the heads of philosophers! Come, you, now! Come and see annoyance and obstructions to happiness! Come inside and watch a man tear down his little blocks mere moments after constructing them. Come see devices of personal torture: paradigms, rationalizations, constructs, obfuscations and simulacra sure to depress and confound! Come one, come all; it’s free!
And she says:
Hey, I’m standing here speaking. I’m pontificating on life and how to live it according to the gospels of my cretinous retinue, here… but all you do is whirl a dervish and speak in tongues. What I’m saying is important here. I’m trying to add value to his life. If you do what I say life will be good and you will want to live it. So now listen:
It’s important to keep it going, even if it means inserting a place holder to expand upon later. That is what this is, this little excursion to distraction.
It is a vilipend of sorts!
I have in that past denigrated all of this, but now it’s a worthy act — worthy of being placed here.
Don’t play with your balls in public. You come off a low class and unkempt fool. I don’t care that you’re a doctor or a fireman with syphilis!
To which I say:
I’m on my mindful way. I’m becoming confident and content again, and quickly aware of my mindless behavior. I’m trying to stay “good” to myself without making myself recoil in new age horror. It’s a start. It’s good.
To which the carny barker says:
Paducah is roiling now, and I’m thoroughly enervated.
Then she says to me:
Kentucky? What do we do now? Maybe have some quiche? Call the doctor? Shoot a speedball? I’m feeling icky. Fuck this!
I say to the carny:
Amicus opacus, I’ll call you!
I wander as lonely as you do, but you are anathema to my peeps. You block my peeps from the sun. You are my sunshine. You make me happy when I’m suicidal, please don’t take my sunshine to Manitoba on the back of a 1975 El Camino.
(The carny is nonplussed)
And I say to her:
Our salad days were filled with bitter herbs and intractable roots, not so much a salad as a buffet of weeds. Intractable and indelicate things in our mouths.
Every mouthful a swig of rot and offal. Awful offal. The bawds of euphony were happily entrenched in the cupboards and the cups were on a two week vacation at a Trump resort. I’m mystified by this all and quite malnourished.
The carny barks:
Let me tell you about the anthropocene age—
She barks back:
I challenge you to look chalky and wan. We’ll wage a hunger strike in absentia. We’ll lay waste to a tofurkey loaf while no one is watching said tofurkey in the phylactery factory lunch room. Snivel and drivel, you! We’ve got you by the short hairs!
She says to me:
Quit your salivatin’ you sententious whippersnapper. You palavering jerk-o’! You have this whigmaleerie in your head… of pixies and unicorns… let me tell you the 900-foot Jesus statue—
The carny barks:
The Christ the Redeemer statue in Sao—
She wheels at him:
Shut the fuck up, Einstein!
Then at me:
That statue is going to take a dump — a loose stool dump, down the side of the sugarloaf.
The carny barks at the midway:
Ladies and gentlemen, we have just passed 800 kidney stones this month! Please refrain from smoking inside the exhibition halls and you’ll be fine… and the Cubans and Jews won’t be hurt.
It’s a sham and a crying shame this consumption. Generally, we try to avoid topics like this, but I just had to speak up. I just had to fill the air with words. Although there is really no accounting for taste, or any parallels here, I do see a parallelogram making its way up to the dais now, and maybe it will explain what is happening…
Hey you, please avoid the quadrilaterals, they’re tawdry and nouveau riche. Thank you!
A sonorous voice over says:
Someway to fill the blankness. Someway to pass the blackness. This thing is that thing.
I say:
Yeah!
(All outstanding suggestions were ignored)
What I’m Reading:
“I don’t know. They’re children. They look like children.”
“Listen, we’re busy people. We have real crimes to deal with. Actual atrocities, you understand. We cannot come out to the island every time another country’s refugees flee and drown. It’s not our problem.”
I was gas huffing one afternoon, by the train tracks near the smelter, trying to shotgun iso nitrite through my paint gun and boom — whoosh! — it hit me.
It was a wrap, and on came a visual rap of distortions through time — shit I hadn’t remembered in forever, cascading — distortion to static.
Momentarily I was up on a Brady Bunch screen: Momma, Poppa, Uncle Justus, Chelsea and Me — the other four were faceless homonculii, who despite lacking features had silver metallic paint smeared all over the bottom of their faces. Well, we had a Brady Bunch, anyway, in garish dayglo…
… and there were leeches, cherry blossoms, attenuated frequencies, and a throbbing tulip.
Avoid the brown Kool Aid.
A letter never sent.
An ideal copy.
What I’m Reading:
… the moment when you are on a swing as high and as far back as you can make it go and everything even your heart pauses before you lean back and kick your legs forward.
… and in another precinct someone latches on to the idea of redemption — but in this rainy neighborhood, and specifically in this newly repointed brick building, a man (we’ll never learn his name) has confessed to his wife that he was seeing her estranged sister. It was he (nameless, but archetypal) who was most responsible for the estrangement — via streams of innuendo, and then the punctiliousness of his criticism.
It doesn’t matter that it’ll stop raining soon or that the savory smell of pot roast wafts up from the apartment below — no. Peace will be broken at 9:37 tonight, when they revisit the same recriminations for the third time. Her name we know. Rachel.
His short entitled fuse results in two shots to her head; and after ten minutes of considering his impulsiveness, he’ll call Rachel’s sister and blame her for what has befallen them.
As the rain tapers off and the L rumbles out of Wrigleyville station, precisely at 10 p.m., he’ll mutter, “there, there’s your white male privilege,” while squeezing his crotch, certain that his god given inalienable right is intact.
He plans his road trip west, well-armed, in the glow of his destiny manifest.
What I’m Reading:
I smelled the corpses on my fingers when I took my smoke break, pressed against a warm brick wall facing the smooth white headless mannequins in thousand-dollar shift dresses
Use this taro chip as your viaticum, the priest says.
Where am I?
In a priest driven ambulance, he says.
Good luck, the one in the passenger seat says.
What are you going to do about the primary explosion? the nurse administering my I.V. asks.
Play it as it lays, another says.
No, you did not leave anything on in the kitchen, yet another says.
So I told them: I put on my tight disco pants, and applied plenty of hairspray. I think there were invaders at the gates. I wrote as fast as I could before midnight. Then I turned into a malevolent parsnip with pomegranate tendencies. I didn’t parry her sari because she asked me nicely not to. Remember that. So I repeated it often through the night to myself. I reminded myself to use my inside voice inside my head. I didn’t have to be so loud. And I made a point of not speaking my internal monologues in front of strangers again.
thee istsfor manity reader 