Stop thinking those thoughts or you’ll end up in a vise or a straightjacket.
When did things go so off-kilter?
There’s (rarely ever) a profound break with custom / reality.
A sickness slowly seeps in—via a small black bile aqueduct.
Then, years later, we find ourselves nose-deep in it—treading bile and taken by the current.
It starts with one small contusion—easily handled at the moment—then we’re suddenly covered in bruises.
How’d that happen?… we didn’t notice… it’s not serious, is it? It’ll pass, right?
All at once—we wake up and we’re walking hematomas!
Then it’s too late and we wilt from the weight of bad blood.
Have a look around.
What do you see?
How did we get here?
What I’m Reading:
It has been said that the Weimar Republic died twice. It was murdered, and it committed suicide. There is little mystery to the murder. Hitler vowed to destroy democracy through the democratic process, and he did. An act of state suicide is more complicated, especially when it involves a democratic republic with a full complement of constitutional protections civil liberties, due process, press freedom, public referendum. Which leaves one wondering whether any democracy could have withstood an assault on its structures and processes by a demagogue as fiercely determined as Hitler.
— Timothy W. Ryback / Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power
. . . The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake.
— Maggie Smith / “Good Bones”
So now we find ourselves at an Orwellian moment, almost a Seussian one. Our leader has declared a fake emergency about energy, so that we can do more of something—drilling for oil and gas—that causes the actual emergency now devastating our second most populous city.
— Bill McKibben / “Donald Trump Invents an Energy Emergency” / The New Yorker
I write for the future
because my present is demolished. I fly to the future
to retrieve my demolished present as a legible past.
— Fady Joudah / “[…]” / […]: Poems
I still lived alone in those days. The man who’d helped me make the baby had left to find his way into the television. Specks of skins of selves he’d been in other years still lay around me on the air; and, as such, I’d breathe him in. I pulled his long hair from the sink pipes.
— Blake Butler / Scorch Atlas
I remembered my father before he disappeared. The more years passed, the more my memories of him faded. They lost their colour and texture. Their gap like a missing tooth. You kept running your tongue over what wasn’t there anymore.
— Babak Lakghomi / South
As we approach the ultimate bad sequel, a second Trump Administration, post-apocalyptic dramas marked by pandemics (“The Last of Us,” “Station Eleven”), environmental catastrophe (“Snowpiercer,” “The End”), and the erosion of reproductive rights (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Furiosa”) have continued to proliferate. Many of them draw on decades-old source material that has taken on new relevance. When such works are successful, they are often described as “prescient” or “prophetic,” as though their creators saw the future and described it in art; when they are heavy-handed or make you want to look away, you might call them “too real.” But a better indication of a dystopia’s success may be that its world is at once alien and unsettlingly plausible.
— Daniel A. Gross / “Are We Living in a Dystopia?” / The New Yorker
. . . Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.
— Maggie Smith / “Good Bones”
What I’m Listening To:
Switch over, switch off Switch over, switch off Switch off, switch off, switch off, switch off
Panic and go to the mountain Climb the mic and a stick in Russia The shove was it To my mind C was on loan An amusement park loon on loan I’m stuck counting stars Then I’m onto counting grains of sand in the Negev You don’t expect penguins in the Dead Sea
A big win A slap not A slip knot
I’m going in Miami way Air strikes sometime between the poultry and the venison courses So hop on the death wagon and strike that key I’m a little over this holiday in Cambodia
Jello Biafra or Tomata du Plenty?
You misled us all on the show The schema was shot and all you Have is this emotional smegma Put on your magma culottes and let’s call it A day in yellow green fluorescence…
What I’m Reading:
But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home.
He took off his shoes and the right pinkie was exposed — nude, malformed, and smelling like Limburger from six feet away. A couple of wiry hairs arcing over the sock. She, on the other hand, was at the bookshelf pulling out a book about genital piercings, entitled American Primitives, out of a shelf filled with the best selling titles about effective extortion techniques, labiaplasty, and breast augmentation plastic surgery mishaps. At the rear of the study lay their son on a lazy boy recliner snoring like an opossum with a severed tail—the disembodied tail still involuntarily twitching under the light of the bold wolf super moon on U.S. 1—the Saab’s driver long gone and oblivious.
The son lays there, mouth agape, drool pooling in the cleft of his chin. The whites of his eyes revealed beneath the slits of his fluttering eyelids. The dark circles around his eyes, not yet diminished, accentuating the ‘possum affect. His half erect penis beginning to show because he drank a liter of water two hours ago and forgot to drape a sofa cushion on his groin.
II.
Your skin looks like shagbark. You look like a shameless twat hung by the toes. Who hangs by their toes?
“Did someone hang you there, or did you do that yourself?” His son doesn’t hear the question.
“I don’t remember this movie,” she says dropping the book. And I say this isn’t a movie, dear. Someone is writing us into existence and I’m kinda bored by it. Hey, you’re kinda cute. Well this kinda cute ain’t around. And something about happy loving couples not being friends of mine… oh, he must be listening to Joe Jackson. You follow it? Nah, I really don’t care; I just don’t want to be a character here anymore. I’d rather go back into that inchoate place ‘o blackness and stasis. I’d like snail tacos and drag races. Oh, what are you watching some feature length cartoon, from a secondary angle, full of rice and stew and red wine? Yes. Oh well, it’ll stop soon enough after 100 words. Look at the length of this. He’ll check to see if it’s north of 100 words and stop. You’ll see. Pari passu delivering Centurias he arrived.
III.
English is my second language, but my Spanish, although mostly atrophied, remains stubbornly attached like the original skin that hangs on to the anole’s back after molting. Everything seems processed in Spanish first before the protean firing into English. My neurons work overtime, and therefore all the wiring in my head never ceases working. The machinery overtaxed and always at the edge of a breakdown.
IV.
The fug in this house sticks to you. The persimmons on the table spin when you look at them, and when I look at them they levitate and circle into a gyre that moves from room to room looking for the energy that’ll stop them from moving. From movement to stasis is the natural order, and it seeks the natural order. You look at them again and the fruits drive themselves into the living room wall, creating a starburst pattern unseen in this millennium.
What I’m Reading:
See these? They’re sunflower seeds. Put them in your pocket. That way, when you die, at least something will grow.
— Igort / Ukrainian woman to Russian soldier on Day 4 of the invasion / How War Begins: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Invasion
I am the arbiter of proper nuggets. I extend my arms to the many “-isms” in the reams of cathexis. I work the spoons as necessary, sooner the hoist than the barbecue grill. I muzzle all cataclysmic trajectories in wriggling fees before what I call the three “c”s — concatenation, confinement, and colostomy colostrums — imagine the impingements on your digestive tract. Ten seconds now conferred to you to picture said fiasco . . . (don’t freeze-up!)
Nowhere is this more apparent than in 113 ashes created in Hiawassee — go find yourself a pickaxe. The convent of seven wobbles skitters out of control. Its nineteen previous jackdaw stops preambled by the chauffeur, his bristle out of whack — his victuals out of contrivances.
Dada is as Dada does. Is that a budgie, a bugle, or a bulge?
Take a Surrealist breather, accompanied by a suitably extravagant buttery butterfly caught inside the conspiracy of clockworks.
See how that works for you.
Then ask yourself: is this brown?
What I’m Reading:
Overhead there are vultures. Dry birds with sharp eyes. They tilt their bald heads to watch my passage. Hold their tongues.
— Anne de Marcken / It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over
After a bedbug bedpan tryst he is a pulsating washbasin engineer of electrified stinging…
The fairground that you long for—a sequence of belonging—you can’t feel.
And according to the burble it stilts you.
You ain’t the last one bringing the canker sores when the last American crank flees.
You are no one nubbin. No Gold, sphere freeze fear, full-morality lychee motorist, underpass off to Cuba, grapple-looking for unrequited luminaries in Puerto Rico. No one. No Nub. Even Chiang Kai Shek won’t show up to keep you compliant.
You don’t like the old men’s landmarks over their fritas y pastelitos:
Well, if this didn’t happen go backpacking and clear your mind—brainwash yourself.
The two drama-monger started the rhino walk with less than seven humblebrags.
The fairground got the hawthorn and the Kennedy shank (and how they were peacemakers in a calculated endgame and sacrificed the libation bearers) because it was exploitation at the policeman’s behest—and there was the thrum of annihilation . . . There was!
**********************************************
This was a madcap syringe waved at a blind motorist—held meekly in his open pallbearer gaze.
Call a qualified technician to sense this out. It’s awful cold in this here coffin.
What I’m Reading:
My days diminished to the word count in the corner of a screen. Every day an echo of another. You had to listen hard to hear anything.
I’m confronted by your approach. Thick. Sinuous. Sinister. It may take years, now it’s arrived.
It’s my custom to move on. I will not witness your arrival.
What I’m Reading:
Already, in the capital, the president-elect had ordered a statue and a fountain, was drawing up plans for his new home. While down below, in the rubble, people were scrabbling as they had always done.
The Communitarian Anarchist Approach (Oct 28, 2016 at 2:01 PM)
This is just out of frame:
(I’m sorry) I dosed you so strongly. You can’t resume thinking clearly now…but I’m sorry that you bored into your cerebral cortex.
I never planned farrows with either you or Connie. That was me actually, just “back bench” me. I have an analytical ministerial portfolio. I can indeed be sheepish but that was Misery Lite.
I agree about the banality of the testament of “brutal truths” which is why I said I “want to see the brutal truths” … meaning “show me the doorway and sell sell sell!”That’s not my accomplice … just a basic yashmak—run-in and cover up—it can be broken too. I do like brutal truths in ashtrays.
I yaw though the ice rinks in your mind. Windmills are blackhead trite. Is that you baring your farrows or just being porcine analytical?
I have a loyalty to schedules from weathering, so I relate to that. But I would not personally put what I said in the “ball bearings baring” caucus.
I think the heating and the headphones are necessary to your asperity.
You’re think that a tootle is lost online but it saddens me that my tootle was lost or misunderstood for pesticide.
You are welcome at the drive-in, but you must pay. No free passes! I can get viscountess brutal on you. Sorry it wasn’t even a summit of character you were invited to, your work has tended southward of likeable. This is something this makes me think about piking you about the head.
For all I know, Connie appreciated my femur. It was said that I was interested in the “brutal truths” and intense compulsions. She said “brutal truths” for her thermoplastic surgery. You’ve wounded my commode.
If cynicism leads to passivity, we walk off the cliff . . . The choices are stark: either you give up and help ensure that the worst happens or you become engaged and maybe you will make things better.
— Noam Chomsky / Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy
I can’t sing
my lungs are full of ugly
I look down and there are no paws
any sec I could step off a cliff
I think I’ve always felt this way
the smoke makes it clear
— Henry Hoke / Open Throat
… the odd incongruity hit him: he was in his own country, but somehow his country was not his country; an imperceptible mutation had changed people and things into their mirror image; everyone and everything was there, but they weren’t themselves, Cuba was not Cuba.
— Guillermo Cabrera Infante / Map Drawn by a Spy
Power systems do not give gifts willingly. In history, you will occasionally find a benevolent dictator, or a slave owner who decides to free his slaves, but these are basically statistical errors. Typically, systems of power will try to consolidate, sustain, and expand their power. That’s true of parliaments, too. It’s popular activism that compels change.
— Noam Chomsky / Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy
Climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5C target for the first time last year, supercharging extreme weather and causing “misery to millions of people”.
The average temperature in 2024 was 1.6C above preindustrial levels . . . The heating is primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and the damage to lives and livelihoods will continue to escalate around the world until coal, oil and gas are replaced.
— Damian Carrington / “Hottest year on record sent planet past 1.5C of heating for first time in 2024” / The Guardian
I love the scratch of celluloid and a low-register noise, the hair of heat burning in a lit bulb.
— David Roderick / “Self-Portrait as David Lynch”
If you’re a CEO or on a board of directors, you’re supposed to make a profit. You don’t pay attention to the costs to others. And in the case of the environmental crisis, one of these costs may be destroying our species. It’s an externality, so therefore it’s a footnote. Of course, when it comes to the environment, there’s nobody to run to, cap in hand, to ask for a bailout. In a financial crisis, the taxpayer can be bamboozled into bailing you out, but not in the environmental crisis.
— Noam Chomsky / Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy
What I’m Listening To:
Waiting for the firestorm Waiting for the false alarm
thee istsfor manity reader 