thee istsfor manity reader

Last Dose

Nothing enervates like changing midstream, he said to the garage walls, but we adapt.

William Katz, in the slipstream of placenta trip time, started anew.

Katz was 103 miles into his new life—the New England life he envisioned—when he stepped out into the heat and the hate of this particular August morning. He’d be out of Florida by midafternoon—but first, his last cafecito cubano and flan in his foreseeable future. One last stop in his accursed birth city and goodbye Miami! forever.

But the well-trod adage goes: careful what you wish, ‘cause the three fanged rattle snake has no compunctions . . . (well, it’s a well known adage in some arid places of the mind) . . . anyway, Katz was hankering for one last dose of Cuban sweetness before getting on with this next part of his life—so auspicious it was.

He could see himself making eyes at Medusa on Mount Katahdin, sparring with the Cyclops on the shores of Casco Bay, battling Scylla and Charybdis between the Quoddy Narrows.

He shook his fist in the air— you Canucks will hear from me!

Then a crystalline moment of clarity . . . Conch Key really isn’t such a bad place for placenta trip time . . . maybe I’m overreacting . . . maybe my Penelope waits there . . . patience, old man . . .

Then he slammed the cafecito and flan, pulled his pants up to his sternum, and turned south again.

What I’m Reading:

Sooner or later pain becomes too great for fear and when the people’s fear has gone the regime will have to go.

— Paul Lynch / Prophet Song

hat topic

a hat is a hat
i pulled a rabbit out of her hat
to make a hat out of her rabbit
end user philistine

What I’m Reading:

More than half of the 2.6 million people living in Miami-Dade County could be displaced if sea levels rise by 40 inches . . . Miami could have around 80,000 properties flooding by mid-century, a multibillion-dollar risk, due to the combination of sinking land and rising seas, researchers say . . .

— Eliza Relman / “Miami shows how a new kind of gentrification is coming to US cities” / Business Insider

fresh plans

we are a family of 2-beef apostrophes in a drunk bullfinch
you can donate your earlier gloats
slop them drop them + run
we r stylin’ in spaceship america
contact ur local pollution dept.

come wallow in the excrescence
eddy glimmers for bubble stunts welcome
sliver them under my doorway
fresh walls available for firing squad wannabes

What I’m Reading:

When I look at myself I see a stranger.
So obsessed am I with feeling
That I sometimes lose my way when I step free
From all the sensations I receive.

— Álvaro de Campos / “Three Sonnets”

agitator cola

i love me an agitator cola—drank many thru the years—during the revolutions and convolutions of martial law and coups—upon the ferment fringes, the ferry boat frivolities, and mere highlighter battles with the brittle page—a brush with agent coils and deadbeat plenipotentiaries—many a casual contrainsurgency compote consumed—electroplated and anodized death from above—daisy-chained and strafed—a full life of fingermark detonations and finicky trigger fingers—oh, what a feeling, that subtle wisp of menace before the darkness—i’m the hand of the man who leads—the hand of the man u voted for, or supported on his rise—i’m ur hand by transitive property—aren’t we a peach?

What I’m Reading:

The end is coming. I picture a radical turning away from thought, argument, and image, not just an approaching darkness in which certain objects can still be felt, but a condition where they no longer exist at all, a darkness filled with fear, with imaginary monsters.

— Werner Herzog / Every Man for Himself and God Against All