My webelo patriot junk mail darling Parrot of the fifth rank to the stars Starling to the abbots You joojoofrain hook face of sepulchral talents Bring me the tongue of the macerated alienist Seize the talons of the day and scarify yourself Your arms are wasted on your lugubrious torso You splendiferous boniato eater Tarot card your carotene to oblivion You voted for the orange tyrant You scooched over your scorched scotch At the venerable private club for piratical hedgefundmen You fudgy the whale inhaler Take your cookie puss and place it in your nether regions Leave me be in this time of immeasurable Inky soot sooth Be the star that plays sitar Be the raging supernova gone dark Leave me be with the vapors And my vampiric airs
II. (remixed dada fu)
The lugubrious you of me club the alienist you The Orange of stars vapors piratical cookie of scotch time hook your tongue starling inhaler soot take the venerable private wasted over you sepulchral me Whale dark scooched patriot talons joojoofrain voted scorched the bring on me Eater macerated my talents at arms for cards Darling sooth face webelo carotene to you splendiferous mail torso gone sitar And abbots seize your you in it Boniato the parrot vampiric For be airs inky the raging Hedgefundmen fudgy your leave your tarot your immeasurable are and my Day nether puss yourself the junk The oblivion the tyrant star To scarify regions supernova
What I’m Reading:
Doctors get free passes to my museum in return for there labatomies on me I am not afraid to work—I would love to fly a dirigible Nor am I afraid to be a colector of lamps— provided everyone help me.
There are no signs or border crossing guards at the edge of the Goldilocks Zone. If we cross over, no alarms will go off. Depending on where you live, you may cross over sooner than others. But unless we take dramatic action now, we may all discover what it’s like to live outside the zone. The human race-which built the pyramids and the iPhone, wrote epic love poems and invented rock ‘n roll, worshipped ancient gods and now deifies Hollywood stars—will exist in a world beyond the world it grew up in, beyond the place where our hearts were shaped and our genes were forged. We will be, in the deepest sense, on our own.
Heat will be the engine of this transformation.
— Jeff Goodell / The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
I kiss your mouth while vomitting. Death must be an exquisite thing.
— Francis Picabia / “Chimney Sperm”
We have known for more than a century about the climate consequences of burning fossil fuels. And it wasn’t just the scientists who knew. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson was warned, as have been many presidents after him. By 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil) not only knew that decades of burning fossil fuels would heat up the atmosphere, but developed in-house climate models that projected those changes with remarkable accuracy. Despite that knowledge, we have not only continued burning fossil fuels, we have continued burning them with reckless abandon. In a sense, you could say we have built a heat-fueled rocketship that is taking us, for better or worse, on a trip beyond the Goldilocks Zone.
— Jeff Goodell / The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
Suddenly this defeat. This rain. The blues gone gray and yellow a terrible amber.
— Jack Gilbert / “Rain”
If the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated anything, it was how quickly and easily people were able to normalize the deaths of others, especially if they were old, sick, or otherwise living on the margins. There were a thousand deaths a day from Covid in the US alone. There were headlines and speeches and heroic doctors and nurses. And if you lost a friend or loved one, you felt the tragedy of it all. But after the initial shock and fear of Covid, the deaths became a part of everyday life. Just as the 43,000 deaths a year in the US in auto accidents no longer trigger public outcry. Or the nine million deaths globally from air pollution each year. Or starvation in Yemen and Haiti. Or casualties of distant wars. It just becomes part of the world we live in.
And so it may be, I fear, with the suffering and deaths from extreme heat. It will become part of what it means to live in the twenty-first century, something we accept and don’t think too much about in our everyday lives.
— Jeff Goodell / The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
Beneath the pavement, older pavement. Beneath that, ruins. You can’t even afford the cover charge to this utopia.
— Joseph Harrington / “The Archeaology of Knowledge”
I’ve met others who believe that our neurological machinery is simply maladapted to the problems of modern life, especially in rich democracies like the US, where partisanship and political dysfunction reign and banning books is discussed with far more urgency than banning fossil fuels or educating people about the dangers of extreme heat. Hurricanes are wiping out cities on the Gulf Coast with ever more muscle, crops are failing, delivery drivers are dropping dead on the job on hot summer days and yet Matthew McConaughey is still doing TV ads for gas-guzzling SUVs. As one social critic puts it: “We are confronted simultaneously with our vulnerability to catastrophe and our profound unseriousness in the face of it. It’s as if the fires are starting to spread through Rome and all we can do is argue about the fiddling.”
— Jeff Goodell / The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
What I’m Listening To:
They wanted to know why I did what I did Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world
The incantation was one of pathos, of moving b-movietude: Lana Turner was in it—The Big Cube. Something waiting for me on “saved recordings” — something in nanoseconds that included bum trips, flashbacks, and psychedelic ass—something of moving backwards—lighthouses roiling for the death of a beachboy (no, not any of those Beach Boys despite its 1969 vintage). Not only were we moving in grapples, but we would now have to shed our small bags of flowers for our hair, smaller than any rota of our previous San Francisco trips.
We’d never seen anything quite like it, my soursop shake (though I liked the name batido de guanabana better) reminded her of a green horny plane rom Havana.
She said: In the intervening yodels I learned much from thee umbrella of apostrophes.
I said she should watch Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie for a trip more sour than this and a hegemony writ large.
Railroad flats, she said, shotgun shacks.
At no point during our forty footsteps did we level a medicament any further than 10 or 12 footsteps—despite our “big cubedness.”
I was stumped.
She seemed a bullfinch reader now, something reminiscent of a reminder of limitless lies from the late psychedelic period—and we hadn’t even opened our Proust yet!
I, alternately, was baffled in a Baffin Island state of mind, wasted like an emaciated polar bear malfunctioning on wastrel seal soup.
We stared into space, mouths agape, drool slowfalling from the corners of our mouths.
I dare you to look into The Big Cube third eye. I dare you to try.
What I’m Reading:
A toenail clipping floating in a toilet bowl like a crescent moon reflected in water,
beauty is quiet and self-conscious.
A character in a novel sits on the toilet.
Sometimes for forever.
Speaking of which, where does the shit of a billion people go?
b-movie cycle: iv. Chuck and Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People)redux
Chuck Heston was in my head again.
I fell asleep last night thinking I need a new muse. I’ll be damned if Chuck Heston didn’t show up for self-appointed rounds through my REM sleep. Yeah, Chuck Heston must be my new muse. But he wasn’t alone, no. Here came Chuck Heston and Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People).
Here they came down this dimly lit hypnagogic hall o’ hallucinatory goodness. Chuck “god-damned dirty apes” Heston says, “We’re ready to roll. C’mon, Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People)!”
So we’re driving downtown on a typical Saturday overnight. The fares are clicking over regular. Busy night, full moon. We just saw a guy taking a dump at the entrance to Duane Reade.
“What’s the new assistant manager going to do when she opens up the store tomorrow morning?” I say. “She’ll run her heel through the shit and nearly fall — save that she holds on to the door handle. Then that smell hits her and she adds her puke to the mess at her feet. Her new heels ruined, she fears. What kind of way to start the day is that, huh, Chuck?”
He’s busy tightening Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) red neck bandana in the back seat.
“Chuck, her heel arch is clogged with a runny shit meatball,” I say. “The knotted florets on her shoes are now spattered with last night’s calzone bile. Chuck? Chuck?”
He’s wild-eyed. He rolls down the window. He screams into the wind — to the darkened alleyways: “You maniacs. You blew it up. God damn you. God damn you all to hell!”
My own command performance in the back of the cab. Wow. He catches my eye in the rear view, spittle-mouthed and bleary-eyed, he says: “You take umbrage at my Rosetta Stone? Who do you think you are? Mr. Goodstuff? There are no more $3 whores in this town.”
“True that, Chuck. So very true,” I say, and offer him some Peppermint Chiclets.
He declines and says, “I’ve been home all the time.”
Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) barks at a group of Argentinians grilling steaks on the corner of MacDougal and Houston. They’re all decked out in cerulean blue and white striped jerseys, and chanting “AR-GEN-TI-NA, AR-GEN-TI-NA.” They invite us over for steaks by a 50-foot high bank of television screens all tuned to the 1978 World Cup.
A flash and we’re standing on the sidewalk with plates full of rice rolled up like strips of sod on gauze — each individual grain is inserted in to the gauze.
“How do we eat this, Chuck?”
“It’s a roulade of rice and gauze,” he says.
Yeah? Ok, I say. “Gauze and all.” So I toss one to Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People). He chomps it down.
The wall of screens go black and the Voice of America, interspersed with static, booms from the speakers.
A smiling woman with a name tag the reads: ANA appears with an acoustic guitar. Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) barks at her, foaming with ill intent and a bad savor in his mouth. Ana produces a steak from the sound hole on the guitar and quiets Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People).
Another lady appears who looks like Patti Smith with blonde frosted bangs and ends. Her face is covered with heavy white pancake, but her name tag reads: SWAGGY. She’s carrying an electric guitar.
An argument ensues between Swaggy and Ana about who is the better multi-instrumentalist. Punches are thrown and the Argentinians get involved. Chuck drags Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) away on a leash.
I attempt to sort this all out. A steak is at stake.
What I’m Listening To:
Too slow to compete, they sent you away to the glue factory Saved by a handicapped boy, now that everyone knows that boy was me
The Romans are meeting at the Forum — more like the Colosseum — deciding the fate of the legions off at war; and somehow, I, a hero, am embroiled in the decision. But I find myself hiding in a clothes closet off to the side of the meeting. I have an oblique view of the stands where people are assembled hashing these issues out. I should be visible to some of the people at this convocation, but they can’t see me — and just in case they can, I move to a deeper hiding place among the many frocks in dry cleaning plastic bags.
And again, there’s this palpable feeling of the presence of Charlton Heston but no sight of him. Then it’s dark, and I’m in the catacombs and holding cells below the Colosseum. There are cells with bars, and some skeletal remains in theses cells propped up in poses. I’m looking out from behind the bars onto a ramp, and out of the gloaming comes Charlton Heston.
Charlie, friggin’, Heston!
Somehow, even though this is an early role for me I tell him he’d be surprised at what my favorite film of his was when I was five years old.
He instantly says, “Planet of the Apes.”
“Absolutely,” I say. “It’s a madhouse! A madhouse!”
I challenge him to guess what my second favorite film of his was — to which he says, “Omega Man.”
Man! How does he do it!? How does he know?
He holds an open palm to my face and then up to the sky and says, “from my cold dead hands, Mr President. From my cold dead hands.”
I think, but don’t dare say, Wha’? Huh?! Then I go through the calculations… he said that during Clinton, right? Wasn’t he already dead by Obama? Whatever.
It doesn’t much matter. We’re fast friends now and heading to a combination bar and full service gas station atop the Los Angeles Colosseum, but it really seems to be the press box at the Daytona Race Track. Heston asks me about Soylent Green, and I tell him I didn’t see that until I was an adult 30 years later.
He says, “Ah! It was people you know? The green crackers… people!”
“Sure, whatever,” I say.
We’re getting familiar and there’s a hubbub behind the bar. Everyone around the square bar is clapping and cheering the muscular bleached blonde bartender who’s wearing a classic gas station attendant’s shirt — with the sleeves cut off and ripped jean shorts — he’s getting his trapezius muscles massaged by a waiter, and they’re both wearing Oakland Raiders caps backwards.
Charlton looks over to me and says, “everyone is an actor in LA.” He points at the TV and says, “every time one of the commercials or TV shows they appear play people take a moment to recognize them.” Another cheer and clapping is heard from the adjoining rooms as other staff memebers are seen on the dozens of televisions throughout the bar / gas station.
A couple of guys wearing cageless football helmets, modified to look like motorcycle helmets, are causing a ruckus at the edge of the bar and punches are thrown.
Heston says “let’s get out of here,” and we walk through the window and hover 80 feet in the air over the racetrack. In a flash we’re in the pits, but it’s really an old time gas station and Heston has disappeared — but the guys who were just causing the scene at the bar are in a car backing up, coming at me slowly.
I step out of the way on the passenger side and tap lightly on the trunk. It’s one of the troublemakers, in the cheap plastic helmet made to look intimidating, flexing his fist open and closed. They exit the car with ill intent. The smell of motor oil and cigarettes wafts out of the car.
We’re crunching on small beads of tempered glass as we make our way toward the rear of the car — it now appears as a hatchback made of thin, pliable tin. It’s broken and missing a section.
“Look at what you did,” the driver says in a menacing tone. I tell him I didn’t do that. “I lightly tapped the trunk. This wasn’t like this before. This car wasn’t even a hatchback!”
The one with the helmet says, “you did it, man!” and they pin me to the rear of the car. The glass below our feet is gone and I say, “see here, there’s no glass. This hatchback was already in this condition.”
Then I’m in my darkened apartment. But instead of being on the 16th floor in Boston. It’s on the 60th floor of a condo building at a crossroads in mid-Manhattan — something like a combination of Times Square, FDR drive somewhere near the UN, an open air version of Grand Central Station, and Columbus Circle all at once.
All the lights in the city are out, and it’s my duty to turn them on before my partner gets home with Charlton Heston. I’m feeling my way down the hall in the dark toward the fuse box to trip the switch, but I hear the refrigerator start to hum, and some light streams from the open refrigerator door.
I hear my partner at the door, and she gets to me just as I’m pulling the switch. We hear a earth shaking noise outside.
She says, “was that a car accident?”
“It didn’t sound like cars,” I say. “It sounded like a detonation of something large. I don’t know what it was,” I say.
We run to the balcony windows. Darkness. Then it dawns on me: “hey, where the hell is Charlton Heston?”
What I’m Listening To:
On the screen the city crumbled So realistic, but yet another film By the master of realism, Mr. Irwin Allen No lesser men than Lorne Greene And Mr. George Kennedy Risked their lives to save the lives of strangers Their selflessness was moving Chuck Heston was in the movie too But he was just a ham
If you can’t afford the entire Soylent block— Git’ yerself’ a bag o’ Soylent Crumbs.
Soon as I get up the nerve, Soon as I slip this green ether,
Ima’ goona’ git’ scooped up— Like so much flotsam or microplastics
Circa, 2022. We’re 40 million strong— In ‘dis ‘burg o’ softball-helemeted jackboots.
Chaos—oh the humanity of it— As far as the eye can cloud…
Just remember that crunchy green block— Soylent Green—Is People!
And it’s my turn, Any moment now…
To get processed.
image: Soylent Green / MGM Studios, 1973
What I’m Reading:
Arendt also warned that while the totalitarian regimes of her time would invariably fall, the contexts and thinking that permitted them might well linger into the future, taking on new forms in response to new circumstances, certainly, but building on a political and cultural rot that had taken hold sometime earlier . . . many of the elements Arendt first identified with totalitarianism thinking have crept back into our political culture.
— Lyndsey Stonebridge / We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience
surrounded by idiosyncrasy / a wreck that is a stab 64000 miles wide / im the piglet of she fleck / i retired at meditation + titrated in antiseptic / remember ankh is the name of the object / remember ankh is identified with sanctuary / maybe they werent all runners / maybe they were simply perfectionists in lifes confection / or something simply subjected to being continually seen / identify / now youre flashing red / you dead / a plan hatched by projectionists at churchmans cinema with no animosity intended / your first kiss in the balcony seats / pertaining to maintaining a conversation in mastiff with the projectionist / watching celluloid frames get stuck in the gate + watching the film burn / my way or the silver hallide crystals way / streaming out of the film into the ether / circles of confusion / more confused than ever / fused to the will of the incoming strongman / fused to the tyrant combover / he was kurious oranj / kurious oranj / they were positively deranged / pained and intense man / there are no plasticines or other wrecks / honeymoon in this small mojave destiny tract / a sparkler contact / a free love impact / collateral attaches in blue royalty-eavesdropper stew / librettos erased + runners encased in velveteen latches / the final scene / an eavesdropper is eavesdropper / it is all there is + it is surrounded by a ripple of idiosyncrasy / plasticines exist as limbs in the slap stations / the eavesdropper is the only known wreck in expense / all is lost / not lost / lost / not lost / lost
What I’m Reading:
Almond-mouth, I cannot enter the procession. It’s true I’ve imagined the face of God, yes, I procured God’s eleven tongues and spat on them a coagulated sea. The liveliness, the liveliness of this day assails me.
This madness bequeathed to us in a series of mysterious lives. Peace in our mediation. Relish in our narrows. Psychotropic bug ramifications and redemptions in mandible masking. Tenderest of mercies to you inundated in secondments of bark straps—our series of contradictions sinking. We flounce apart.
You say: Have you chips? Did you Continue the fare linkman? Did you Extend the narrow another geographer?
I reply in telepathic somnambulism.
Chorales do what corals once did before massive die-offs.
We are three dénouements apart. Aqui no se salva nadie. And no one gets out for a song. But the same shoelace disqualification distinguishes us, and appeals to insensate gods. Petrified. Ossified at a charnel house. A marriage of sorts that binds us. We are mad with midden crises and defiled by our DNA.
We shed the stymie of the lighthouses. We are blind in flusters. The deterrents of madness overcome. Our accolades sheepfold.
What I’m Reading:
the cold bird tells the monocle: mouth got no lips I’ll kill myself but the cubist tells the cubist: i have invented the chief-of-scratch & I am his boss the boss tells the boss: boss
According to Flannery O’Connor, people without hope don’t write novels.
People without hope don’t write novels. I am writing a novel. Therefore I must have hope.
Does that work?
— Sigurd Nunez / The Vulnerables
A few things became clear to me then. The body itself has no use for hope. It hardens in grief to live beyond hope. And the only real use of narrative is to cheat that ancient urge inside us, pale animal with its face resembling the inside of our death masks, its long unheeded, persistent murmur clearing into a deafening verdict: Leave.
— Rohan Chhetri / “New Delhi in Winter”
You’re flawed, and the world you see corresponds to these flaws. Weaknesses define you, drive new and original strategies to cover them, and they make you who you are. You don’t exist without them. Correcting the errors — seeing perfectly and objectively — is neither desirable nor possible.
— Martin MacInnes / In Ascension
… Was this what Rome felt like
toward the end? When the colosseums filled with gladiators stirred the masses into a frenzy. How the people hungered for
food & freedom, but instead lost themselves in the carnal play of sacrifice—reliable warriors, safer to believe in than
Caesar.
— Yesenia Montilla / “As Capitalism Gasps for Breath I Watch the Knicks Game”
We contend with the myriad distractions flowing through the pocket-size screens we carry with us everywhere. By various estimates, a typical smartphone owner checks a device 150 times per day— every six minutes— and touches, swipes, or taps it more than 2,500 times . . . Polyconsciousness is what one researcher termed the resulting state of mind that divides attention between the physical world and the one our devices connect us to, undermining here-and-now interactions with actual people and things around us.
— Rob Walker / The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday
I pull a screw through my earlobe and collect two drops of blood in the ditch with all the grenade shells. Grenade, its shape so much like the fruit they named it after, pomegranate, from Latin pomum granatum (apple with many seeds), something I can harvest and pick from a tree— a comfortable taste in my mouth, and yes, fruit of the dead, or of fertility, depending on whose sustenance to listen to.
—Aria Aber / “I Wake Up Curled Up in a C.D. Wright Poem” / Hard Damage
Living through the onset of rapid global warming involves learning to roll with the punches. Increasingly, those are quite real and painful—this year saw, again, an accelerating toll of flood and drought. But, even for climate scientists sequestered in the lab, life increasingly seems like a series of bewildering blows.
— Bill McKibben / “Hotter and Hotter” / The New Yorker
What I’m Listening To:
Our band could be your life Real names’d be proof Me and Mike Watt, we played for years Punk rock changed our lives
I finished rubbing the last welt, and I’m currently out. Everything past morals went well until 2 nippers ago.
I’m ostensibly an eraser. I was bloating from ecstasy, and as the nippers wore on I started to have repeated incumbents of diarrhea over the covering of a few housemothers.
Later as I was sleeping I awoke with painful bloating and gather, and while having diarrhea, I started seating copiously, with nausea, and recognized another oncoming eraser. As I tried to lay in the flowerbed it seems I briefly passed out and came to failing-first in a port of wader and a strike of “chocolate syrup” on the flowerbed. I experienced another shorter eraser of vomitting and diarrhea.
Despite all this, I know I’m responsible for these erasers, for ecstasy, and the mindless threats: about a pit, a hallucination, and a chorus of idler crematoria. Twelve outlaws mimic a proviso and share it on social spaces. I consumed about 4,100 calories and 2 deans. I also blackjacked footprint poisoning. I was at work as I ate some 5 parvenu of vomitus.
I take the full retake for the incumbent, not only did I know a bigamist, I also did a similar thing during the last moratorium.
I still want to production. I realize that despite more “food noise” getting through due to habituation, I need to be more mindful and willful about overeating on this melon.
thee istsfor manity reader 