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.
Plactivist—a disembodied word. Decontextualized. One word in bas-relief, that I heard her say, in a slurry of words not directed at me.
Plactivist—decoupled and set adrift from its word cloud. It blazed like a meteorite across the my cerebral cortex and burned up somewhere in my temporal lobe.
Plactivist—I pictured a curved sickle scaler. A shadow with giant scalers for hands floating at my dim peripheries. Only the glint of the oversized probes resolved at the edges of sight.
My head in a vise as “Ode to Joy” — Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor (opus something or other) the fourth movement (you know)—blared. The chorale full-throated. Exultant.
(And in a split screen I saw myself and Alex, the Droog—all “vised-up” too, his eyes splayed open by pincers and locked—hey, wait how did I end up in a Kubrick film? No. No matter.)
Jump cut: The plactivist filled my line of vision. Surely, a shadow, most opaque—a maw of darkness behind … is that a head mirror? What serious doctor wears a head mirror?
No. This was a plactivist. It wore a plague mask filled with cardamom, cinnamon, and durian fruit, which slid about the beak-end of the mask in counterpoint to the faraway calls to: Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead.
The plactivist scaled the depth of its shadow center—darkening, deepening, its own anti-matter. It’s own anti-being—black ice incarnate.
How does one weigh one’s soul? How does one quantify one’s shadow—or the intentions of our shadows as they try to flee the pin of our feet?
And then the space lightened. Not limbo—not a clockwork—or an inner circle of hell.
I heard her say plactivist — as in “play and activist, dummy!” But no solace settled, by now my soul was in need of repair.
Then I spied my soul—occupied—as it throttled its own shadow
What I’m Reading:
The typical Cuban machismo has attained alarming proportions in Miami. I did not want to stay too long in that place, which was like a caricature of Cuba, the worst of Cuba: the eternal gossip, the chicanery, the envy.
1. Wild dogs, squirrels, feral hogs, and bear were constant staples of our cook pots. We used them to supplement our two pounds allotment of rice each month.
2. “I brought everything but that. I deny the existence of that. I would bring anything but that thing,” she said.
3. So if you’ve got a family of four you’re spending $1000, just on entrance fees.
4. “Maquis– Resistance groups. Maquis ( World War II), predominantly rural French guerrilla groups… The network of rural bases operated by the Communist Party of Kampuchea prior to the Cambodian Civil War…”
5. Luna moths were another treat I learned to eat, with its wings removed and roasted over an open fire it made for the perfect bite.
6. I imagine all this through the mind of a sick, desocialized, and dissociative woman, who lost her family. Her children taken by the state. Her husband accidentally decapitated at work. Her only remaining family burned to death in a wildfire.
7. When we came upon the carcass of a moose we thought it a godsend. And we all ate the better pieces that had not been scavenged or turned to rot. It was after that day that we eventually all became sick and most of our party perished.
8. Just as he was dying, I set a mangy dog to disemboweling him, so the last thing he felt and saw were the teeth of a ravenous cur at his intestines.
9. We staggered along, one wet day after another, we learned to control our hunger. We had to keep moving to make our monthly rice pick-ups. We barely had time for concerted hunting. If we came upon something we quickly killed it and slogged along.
10. She, in time, became untethered and violent. She fantasized of fixing his larynx in some way so he couldn’t scream any more. Perhaps tie him up and deprive him of food and water until he wasted away, sharp and angular, into a bony effigy.
11. We made a desperate attempt to make the food cache before it was removed by the enemy. We succumbed slowly, one or two of us a day. At the end of two weeks only Cruz and I were left alive, but we were in a very bad way and then you found us near death at the banks of the river.
12. The newly moved-in family next door with an over abundance of everything doesn’t sit right with her. The neighbor child was overly loud, had ADHD, and couldn’t control himself.
13. The tall man, dressed in black, sitting in the first row, removed his mask and said, “So this is how a loving god looks over his children?”
What I’m Reading:
It’s so early, I am still in last night. All of life honks. The streets steam. Gin changes to coffee and I think of you less…
— Alex Dimitriov / “Everything Always” / The New Yorker
Self-replicating cosmic forces, yeasts, molds. The sky is a terminal blue. Ontology, espistemology, phenomenology, Teletubbies. Getting naked in front of another person for the first time. Coral reefs bleaching. Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Francis Bacon, Samuel Alito. A stopgap gesture to appease.
People die everyday: $ .39 / each.
What I’m Reading:
I know we are in a post-racial society, but I suspect there are still a few impediments. We are also now in the feminist utopia. So fifty-nine cents on the dollar should go just as far as a dollar on the dollar, right?
— Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone / Consequences of Capitalism
That Wasn’t a Microdose (Fissure Kitty, Faun, & I)
No, I tuned arpeggios at 6 and 16. Fissure Kitty at a neighbor’s glance—under the shake-up of a manic-depressive trend—laden with oppressive fudge, in August heavyweight. I initiated it. My fissure sunbather fuzz, with fanfare drums—from Miami to Kankakee—to backfire applause and Janus-faced adulation. Faun joined us then on an anachronism-fueled jag. We didn’t make a record until we tarred 48 Housefeathers in Idioteque, Arizona. I witnessed Faun’s beauty—an undergarment so severe—it was a triumph. A homily to downy wool. A “hello” at Arrowhead—followed by another record. Produced by the very weightlifter convicted for ordering 40 Chomp Bards about in a wanton manner. I took Fissure Kitty and Faun for an early morning jaunt in search of Beatles-subcontract-hairstyles. The barbers motored with clippers called Mr. Potpourri, Ms. Headlamp, and Mrs. Dingleberry. Another jaunt. The peace broken. I didn’t understand why Faun and Fissure Kitty fought so intensely and frequently to the syncopation of the weightlifter’s discharges. We broke up the band. We separately formed the BeetleGees, The Third Dinghy, and Neil Dichotomy. None of us separately ever as artful or popular as we had been together on The Budgie Enema of His Benefactress LP. Some call for a reunion. Some are nonplussed. Most never knew or ever cared.
What I’m Reading:
Suppose the stars are just our grief reflected back to us, proof that grief sometimes forgets its source, that it can find dead things no matter how distant. Everyone arrives one day and asks, is this it? And the stars answer back with more stars.
She woke up desirous of having acute control of mise en scène. She wanted to become a film director / cinematographer, and to live a future of more linearity and clarity. That night she explained her new found vision to her parents at the dinner table (glazed ham and haricots verts with herb butter).
Her mother said no, her fate was already sealed, and it was fatal. Her father added that she would come to her senses, and that it would rain intermittently tomorrow.
She arose, hovered over her parents, and said: call me Ozymandius . . . behold, and look upon me . . . She let out a little roar and poured the gravy over the table. She waved her hands, then laid hands on her parent’s heads and screamed: voila! Her parent’s heads disappeared, but their bodies quivered in an apoplectic dance.
She joined them, and they danced through the night.
What I’m Reading:
The total heat-trapping potential of the atmosphere is now 51.5 percent higher than in 1990, when United Nations scientists first warned the world was on track for catastrophic climate change.
— World Meteorological Organization / “Greenhouse gas concentrations surge again to new record in 2023” / Press Release
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