im taking a shower and everybody keeps opening the door every time they open the door the water pressure drops
im taking this shower everybody opens the door the water pressure drops
i scream at everybody to stop opening the door the water pressure
drops
i dont know who everybody is
What I’m Reading:
Nothing was where it was supposed to be or even where it was twenty minutes ago, one of the only times I’ve understood what nature was trying to say to me.
— Sasha Debevec-McKenney / “I Went Out to See All The Downed Trees”
a red circle a red circle interlaced with a yellow square a red circle interlaced with a yellow square and interlaced with a blue triangle interlaced with the yellow square
picture freedom see
What I’m Reading:
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t, an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space. I begin again with the smallest numbers.
winter darkness on short day spleen light the candles in the gloaming ring the cider press with dead lilies throttle your fully illuminated deaths festoon with snacks + libation
i come to you pixilated of course off-course to see you off to a new year o happy day
What I’m Reading:
… A day will come when my body will no longer open like a suitcase to take myself on a journey where I’ll dream of never being found, where I’ll dream of never finding what I’ve lost.
I am a postmodern matador of my heterodoxy, sequenced by a semiconductor, self-referential, lady apparatchik thereof: a relativist, and at once a minimalist without a single “bad hairpiece day” in the last 30 minutes.
Here’s where I’m going with this: parlourmaid concordances at the Hourglass Beaker in back-alley Miami after the Cuban revolution (writ very small).
I was teamstering for the Debate Masochist Society. I was angling for freebies from the olive drab carbohydrate VIPs. Sorta’ like the first time Jimmy Carter visited Massachusetts—not much happened, all was natural and unpretentious, and very polite. Pleasant, say.
So I get to directing the limo drops—a Davis Jr. here, a Sinatra there, so I suppose platform appliances were important to us, and all hairspray combovers were suspect.
I was a real aggressor, 35, and ten pistol-whippings old. Pathologists need not apply.
D. was such an ideology that even some hammer and sickle purveyors with full headlamps and hairpieces shaved back their hairpiece sides to be more like the militia. Beehive banalities became trendy for money.
I feared conjunctions were missing, ligatures were frayed, and disjunctions ruled. Nothing was as linear as it should be.
This would be a difficult case.
Beehive banalities are utilitarian. They make a good geographical marmalade. Usually shiny, pataphysical, and often enjoy wearing dirndls. There is usually a cruet festooned onto something somewhere, and it’s difficult to discern a particular perversion or thistle if one is trying to work out polarity. I usually wean there.
Soemone invariably interjects with: See there, he/she is next to that banal beehive near the frost… or, you see that banal beehive there, that’s where you turn to the Nordic legation and find the battens there. They’re at least two feet tall. Two feet tall. On top of a head!
Then, there was a free jazz style skronk Mao Zedong sing along. You, with your Little Red Bookmark eloping with the railwayman.
I, insisting on Oral Care! Oral Care! over the intercom. I pictured Carmen Miranda Sichuan sockets in bilious cross country forced marches. Some screwy shit like that.
No one I knew wanted to look like him, and much less sprout the “pouffy sideswipes” he wore. But that’s exactly the halfpenny undergarment Raul Castro owed him. He drew a blabbermouth sidestep—without concentrates or work farm discretion. A faux pas.
This was going real free style now. Mao took the faun antiquarian look, while we oppressed ourselves further in the midst of our oppression. That was a good look!
We were mascot-named the Blood of Dracula Committee for Defense of the Revolution. Because … why not!
We apparatused three five-year plans for wildcat pea soups from around the world. We worked those goatherd capitalists hard. Some follies were performed and all were easily amused. I was happy to oblige. None of this bothered me because I knew I’d be the headmistress of The Institute of Counterrevolutionary Defilement.
We’d yet to produce another like Stalin or Fidel, though we mastered our molds of Papa Doc, Nixon and Pinochet.
We were batting 1.000. Turn on the presses!
Ta-da da-da, Ta-da da-da … We’re making the world safe for capitalism!
image: p. remer
What I’m Reading:
Dear Donald, Thanks for including us in your deranged Christmas message. Being Canadian means free health care and limiting access to assault weapons. In your 51st state our kids would get shot at in school and CEOs would be shot for denying health care. So no. Now piss off. Your northern neighbour
— Charlie Angus, Member of Parliament, to Donald Trump / Bluesky post, 12/25/2024
Yellow rain. Biological warfare. The Hmong. Erasure of a people’s history, negation of trauma. Shadows and truth.
First came the wars that led to other wars that led to the Secret War that became a proxy war in 1960s Laos, led by the Central Intelligence Agency. The white foreigner arrived bearing guns and bombs to lead his surrogate cause, to quell communism and use Hmong men to do his work of war. In breach of Laos’ neutral state and a deepening of secrets.
— Mai Der Vang / Yellow Rain
Nearly half the world’s countries endured at least two months of high-risk temperatures. Even in the least affected places, such as the UK, US and Australia, the carbon pollution from fossil fuel burning has led to an extra three weeks of elevated temperatures.
— Damian Carrington / “Climate crisis exposed people to extra six weeks of dangerous heat in 2024” / The Guardian
never forget you are a breathing accident of chance ample with reverberations of the impossible
— Maria Popova / An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days
Yellow rain came in the midst of exodus, poison landed on the Hmong in the middle of escape. Specks descending from aircraft overhead, falling onto trees, into water, and onto skin. Specks of a mysterious substance ranging in color: red, black, white, green, and yellow above all. Specks of illness and death.
— Mai Der Vang / Yellow Rain
Every war is a dirty war. Nothing epic, no glory: only misery.
— Igort / How War Begins: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Invasion
The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.
— Anne de Marcken / It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over
… Here is the talk: biological weapon, yellow spots,
apiary blame, for decades to wane and cold filed. Believe me as a
torch of this wandering that I have been digging within the origins of
redaction. Believe where I am sending you. I have been shoveling upside
down.
— Mai Der Vang / “Guide for Channeling” / Yellow Rain
What I’m Listening To:
Bigger slump and bigger wars And a smaller recovery Huger slump and greater wars And a shallower recovery Don’t worry, be happy Things will get better naturally Don’t worry, shut up, sit down Go with it and be happy Dum-dum-dum-de-dum-dum-de-da-de-da-de-dum-dum-dum-ah-ah
…sturgeon have been on earth for millions of years in the chill caspian sea…
but i’m looking for redemption in the butt end of comet hale-bopp
emaciated glue-eyed to the telescope diopter sharp-eyed for a peek of e.t. come to take me home to a higher source where star trek is 24 hours a day & star wars is now
…sturgeon are losing their scales coming apart at the seams spewing viscera this way and that…
i choose apple sauce phenobarbital & vodka a couple of teaspoons a couple of swigs a couple of new black nikes
sorry about the sturgeon, su see you at the supernova, tom
i’m going beyond the event horizon sucked into a black vortex of stars streaking cold to the next world
into the void into nothing
What I’m Reading:
The poets awoke The poets awoke one morning The poets awoke one morning to find The poets awoke one morning to find that all their words had left them Fleeing into the blackness of night that had no end
1. You are playing mechanized baseball: a ball bearing is pitched out of a hole, and the bat is a pinball flipper — and fwap! The ball bearing falls into one of a series of holes marked “single, double, triple, home run, and out.” There are vastly more outs than hits. Then you move on to submarine warfare: small plastic ships float out near the horizon line as you look through your periscope: you estimate position, hit the fire button on the handle, and BOOM! Down goes das boot!
2. You are the night’s confabulation. You don a Richard Burton affectation and on occasion you break out into song and dance, Al Jolson style, viz., a good Jewish boy doing blackface or something minstrel-like. Not to worry, you’ve run this through the department of psychological sanitation, and nothing that you do or say will offend, chagrin, or impinge upon a healthy state of mind. No, in fact, you shall be put through the “so called” ringer, and as a point of further fact you are wearing an Arab strap, and it will assist you in hitting certain notes with a certain meaning. No! No cause for alarm. This is all family friendly, PG rated, and sanitized for your protection. The buzzword to listen for: gentrification, collateral damage, enhanced interrogations, debt ceiling limits… the list is long, but you know them well. So without further ado…
3. You are Claudia’s kid — conceived at that apartment she and Terry lived in above the Garden of Eden Diner in Hoboken. Yeah, remember they were doing roadie work for Yo La Tengo that year, they even opened a couple of shows for them using the name of their first band, Rasputin’s Swim.
4. You are a case of the shakes, momma made the Shake ‘n Bake. I got the shakes, momma made the chicken fried steak. I got the shakes, momma made the whole world quake — she’s got the power you know. I got the shakes, momma said she’s going away.
5. You are the doxology of reflection in a darkened alcove. God is in the alcove. God is in the house. God is loose in there. Who let him in? Did you bait him with cerulean cookies and sugar clouds? Now God’s rummaging around. Uninvited. Unwanted. What dolts you both are.
6. You are biddable in the execrable moments before the prisoner is executed. You are Richard Burton bombast, Shakespearean affectation a notch too loud and an eyelash too wide. You are the murmuration of starlings lost in the roiling chaos in that instant before banking hard left. You are the suppurations of wounds that don’t heal three weeks out. You are the gesticulations of the man without legs as the detritus and shrapnel falls back to earth and settles on the rim of the new-formed crater. You are the child transfixed with the sky as she traces the arc of the parachute bomb’s parabola on its ecliptic. You are.
7. You are last day of November: when ladies of idle lament, and big men with boxy jackets in swimming trunks, big trunks, salute portmanteaus in the streets of Deauville. You sing, “break up to make up, that’s all we do, first you love me, then you hate me, that’s a game for fools.”
8. You are lust unbound. You just want to kiss her, “please just let me kiss you.” She wants to smash you. “I will let you smash me. Beat me with that truncheon, smash me with that truncheon.” Then she broke the spell and hissed: “disrepute!” You lodged a complaint via computer, the one on the street corner, then you had enough. You stopped.
9. You are tornado thoughts ten seconds after the weather warning has been issued.
10. You are the shrieking instrument panel on the jet spiraling earthbound.
What I’m Reading:
His father was a terrible, magnanimous being whom he ought to love first after God. Marcial felt that he was more God than God because his gifts were daily and tangible. But he preferred the God of heaven because he interfered with him less.
Well, it didn’t snow on Christmas, and certainly not in Maria’s home town by the sea.
Now, the only thing Maria wanted for Christmas was a plague doctor’s mask—with a bonafide beak protuberance for aromatics—and an ankle length black leather cloak, and the wide flat hat.
Oh, the places she could roam!
She looked under the tree and found a small box tagged with her name. She ripped the wrapping off and saw N-95 printed on the box.
Maybe next year, she said.
If there is a next year, said Mr. Munchems.
Mr. Munchems, you can be such a bore, she said to her rabbit.
Listen, Maria, you can’t always get what you want, Mr. Munchems said between nibbles of dandelion greens, but you take what you need, and pass the love along.
But Mr. Munchems, she said, in this world that seems so bereft of love and good will, what is there to take but bad vibes?
What year do you think this is kid, 1969? Bad vibes? Mr. Munchems said. You do what you can. You get ‘bad vibes’ and you turn them into … uh … uh, lemonade … yeah, lemonade!
Mr. Munchems, I think you’re nuts, Maria said. You’ve been eating to many mushrooms.
Listen, kid. Just try and make the world a little bit better place than you found it. Start here at home. Then your neighborhood. Then your hometown. Concentric circles, kid. Just circle out in ever-widening ‘good-vibe-osity!’
Maria was struck with a grand idea …
That night the family enjoyed a most good-humored meal—Rabbit Terrine.
A very merry to all, and to all a good bite!
What I’m Reading:
O Santa Claus can heaps behoove love cemetery Gypsy. Market of playing Beans’ Research, Baa Lethal tagsheep. Erp. “Kill my shabby Dog with careless BEANS. Or jellybeans Will complicate four research- Pilgrims in, lazier than the, GREEN Rebus of opium. Oh, daze!” Why shirts came RED
thee istsfor manity reader 