a fata morgana on the desert horizon
to catch a falling knife
a future murk
an opacity
so dense
void
0
What I’m Reading:
Amandeep Gill, the United Nations special envoy for digital and emerging technologies, warns against a “slow death” in which “we slip, step by step, into a space where we lose our human agency, we lose human creativity, and the joy we derive from some of our human interactions”.
— Flora Graham / “What the people steering AI really think” / Nature Briefing
I’m curious. How did you get here? According to my records you have a Pontiac station wagon with exterior wood panels on the doors, and yet you say God is in your kitchen filching the gas and feeding the mice. That’s not a very Pontiac sort of attitude. You seem more like a Plymouth Duster dude to me. What gives?
Um, how can I say this… I eat junk mail for second breakfast after feasting on broken communion wafers for first.
First?
First breakfast, that is, you should try it—fortified with savior nuggets at the processing plant. Intrinsic. Expensive. Totally formulated with cosmo dust.
A flash and a gash and the trash is ours …
Have you listened to Able Noise, circa 2024, and felt like wviscerating yourself?
Why no? Is it tasty and chock full of aleatoric detritus? Are there tempo changes? Dizzying repetitions rendering one nauseated?
You nauseous?
I mean nautical.
Another flash. The smell of tar presses down on them. They’re unable to take full breaths. They spasm.
A disembodied voice thunders:
… of white dwarves and fiery red giants!
I read that men who have trouble falling asleep have a twenty five percent chance of dying earlier.
I vow to never sleep again…
What I’m Reading:
Now you are cypher and palimpsest, collateral
damage, slippage of signifier and signified.
Syllables we’ve scrubbed from our vocabulary.
— Lance Larsen / “To My Daughter’s Dead Name”
The combined effect of rising inequality and economic stress, and the ubiquity of rich or seemingly rich people on the internet and society writ large, can result in people feeling poorer than they actually are, a concept called “money dysmorphia.”
— Janelle Nanos / “‘Still not satisfied:’ How the cycle of social media fuels middle-class discontent” / The Boston Globe
How terrible to entertain a lunatic!
To keep his earnestness from coming close!
— Witter Binner / “Madagascar [Opus 104]”
Of all the reasons Americans have been losing sleep recently – hunger, canceled flights, Democrats betraying them – the most ominous has to do with an institution usually absent from discussions about the fate of our democracy: the military. No need to be starry-eyed about US imperialism and what has long been criticized as an ever-expanding “national security state”; one can still appreciate that it is a good thing if generals do not take sides in politics – just ask anyone from the many countries around the world where they do. But a pattern is becoming clear: Donald Trump is purging the higher ranks based on his prejudices and demands for loyalty; the military is being turned into a partisan instrument and a political prop; more dangerous still, the president is instilling the logic of impunity that has come to characterize his entire approach to governance.
— Jan-Werner Müller / “Trump is turning the US military into a political prop” / The Guardian
When it was clear that my father
would not come back, my mother began
making lists: where to throw out
his clothes, where to get the pills,
the places his hands had been.
She substituted food for Virginia Slims
and at night tugged the phone off its hook.
— Matthew Gellman / “Snipe”
In Spanish America, in contrast, uti possidetis removed the imperative for genocide: the lines were fixed, and indigenous peoples—be they Mexico’s Maya, Chile’s Mapuche, or Gran Colombia’s Wayuu—could stay put. First peoples would continue to lose their lands, especially as export agriculture spread. And no matter what the new constitutions said, they would continue to be abused and misused, treated as second-class citizens. But, unlike in the United States, their dispossession, and their disappearance, wasn’t integral to territorial aggrandizement nor a requirement for the realization of national sovereignty.
— Greg Grandin / America, América: A New History of the New World
You are bombing the sea.
Did the fish declare
they’re Palestinian, too?
— Fady Joudah / “Concentric Circles”
But what we have isn’t peace. What we have is a continuing genocide, albeit one that has shifted gears and has—for now—moved into the slow lane. Rather than hundreds at a time, it is killing by twos and threes—an obscenity that has coalesced into a new normal. To quote a searing poem published last week by Fady Joudah: “After the genocide, the genocide.”
— Saree Makdisi / “After the Genocide, the Genocide” / n+1
What I’m Listening To:
Tied to the wheel, nailed to the ground
Put to the sword, fed to the hounds
All carved up, break them down
(Shake to the ground, shake to the ground)
(Shake to the ground, shake to the ground)
(A season in Hell
A season in Hell)
— These New Puritans / “A Season in Hell”
It is she who lost her hydrogen and must fetishize herself in denial. She has an uneasy remand with her lunchbox: objection, objection! The most remarkable assertion is the dialectic of finger traps, wholly without precedent.
Wholly holy in the warp and woof of latter day unrhymed couplets.
Her prominent mother’s tensions are depicted as completely natural. The ministerial portfolio constantly hovers around her resentment. She commands an imminent dissolve and eminent crosscut, though she prefers the term lap dissolve.
She feels no remorse for the 400 earthquakes plotted around Mt. St. Helens recently.
Nothing saintly there. Not remotely.
She wants to riot in the snow. She wants to dollop a bristle benchmark of freshly ground … round or peanut butter?
The grapefruit navigators are mustered. Snowblowers are scrambled. Then one full minute of delusion leads to a break with policy, an unremitting appeal to unreason, and personal harm.
What I’m Reading:
It’s difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have spent two years seeing what shrapnel does to a child’s body. It is difficult to think in celebratory terms when I know that my tax money is doing this. And it is difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have been watching people snatched off the streets by masked agents of the state for daring to suggest that Palestinians might be human beings. I am nonetheless deeply grateful to the writers who have spoken out, and there are many in this room.
— Omar El Akkad / 2025 National Book Award acceptance speech
A luminous train exposed to the emptiness flickers. Images repeated in a flicker film. A flickering image worth repeating. And repeating. A superstructure altogether fleeting and returning in fractions of a second. Indefatigable. Insistent. A plodding workhorse.
See here, you — step back!
400, maybe 500, sparrows flicker. Flit like cult oddities. Praise their flitting. Raise the standards. See there. The standards flicker. The sparrows flicker. The train flickers. The world flickers. Precarious. We are made of stronger stuff… are we made of stronger stuff?
We flicker.
Among the discarded tins. Inside these burnt forests. Surrounded by deserts. Bounded by water. Contaminated.
We flicker.
Forget the horror.
Flicker.
What I’m Reading:
Energy from the sun and wind is suddenly the cheapest power on the planet and growing faster than any energy source in history—if we can keep accelerating the pace, we have a chance.
— Bill McKibben / Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization
dear citizen—
uncover your dusty radios
you are two billfolds shy and your locutions are broken
in the froth of the bulldozer black and yellow cysts, and marshmallow wheat sideswipes remain
there’s too much red in the blue sky
your wheels will be removed from the moors through the use of radiogram bullets on your broken locutions
resort to your dystopia; or, if you don’t, you will soon have your lodge broken and be removed
your voice may be paroled to the furthest bullfight ringlet except briefly during mopping season
voice-over paroxysms include: frustration of the bullfinch; wheeler-dealer siege of the daffodil; two binges short of bilge then, the two views without perspective will have their frames broken and be removed
these are :
moving forward:
every violent binge must have a persuasion clearly displayed
we need reinforcement stilts, otherwise, we have no way to reach the pacifiers
thank you for your attention
What I’m Reading:
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
— Wallace Stevens / “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
I’ve got the blues: rhythm & write, political fuckery & objectionable calcification of the non-ossifiable and the non-frangible—that, in turns is un-mistakable in the homeostatic running of a life. No. No strife, nothing classifiable as such in any event—permutational. It’s the truth, it’s factual, everything is fractionated as long as the sirens doppler their way out of my life. No longer the subject of my consciousness, this infection non-fictional as it is. I’ll gas and bloat, as I need inflection points to function correctly. Let me ease into dysfunction disaffection and dislocation by dissociation — tra la la.
This is just between the two of us, rooster boy. You rotter. You were special to me from the very beginning. There’s a sort of acid-feel that plunges through your esophagus, pumped up out of your stomach like magma burbling to the back of your throat. In my opinion this is first class propaganda — the sort of invective that spews from true believers or the seriously unbalanced. Akin to a grenade going off in your head. Do you realize your maladies now? We’re talking about your stomach and your head. You are unwell, man. Next time? There will not be a next time. Don’t be a fool, man. Get your head correct.
Leave this planet.
What I’m Reading:
No one can say when the unwinding began— when the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way. Like any great change, the unwinding began at countless times, in countless ways—and at some moment the country, always the same country, crossed a line of history and became irretrievably different.
If you were born around 1960 or afterward, you have spent your adult life in the vertigo of that unwinding. You watched structures that had been in place before your birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible landscape . . .
— George Packer / The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
(Cue music…)
“… Are you such a dreamer
To put the world to rights?
I’ll stay home forever
Where two and two always makes a five
I’ll lay down the tracks
Sandbag and hide
January has April showers
And two and two always makes a five
It’s the devil’s way now
There is no way out
You can scream and you can shout
It is too late now because
You have not been paying attention, paying attention
Paying attention, paying attention
You have not been paying attention, paying attention
Paying attention, paying attention
You have not been paying attention, paying attention
Paying attention, paying attention
You have not been paying attention, paying attention
Paying attention, paying attention
I try to sing along, but I get it all wrong
‘Cause I’m not, ’cause I’m not
I swat ’em like flies, but like flies, the bugs keep coming back
Not, but I’m not
All hail to the thief, all hail to the thief
But I’m not, but I’m not
But I’m not, but I’m not
Don’t question my authority or put me in a box
‘Cause I’m not, ’cause I’m not
Oh, go and tell the king that the sky is falling in
But it’s not, but it’s not, but it’s not
Maybe not, maybe not…”
— Radiohead / “2 + 2 = 5”
What I’m Reading:
— Mario Vargas Llosa / “The Art of Fiction No. 120” / The Paris Review
So this tiny endeavor that started as a writing lark — really as an assignment for a Creativity Lab class — went feral, all those years ago, and turned six years old today!
And herewith begins its seventh year. And so I’ll take the cheap opportunity to pander to the kiddies with the 6-7 vibe…
So a with pang of crusty nostalgia, below, you’ll find the first thee istsfor manity reader post from November 17, 2019. As opposed to a fine aging wine it merely seems to age gracelessly, balding and toothless, (and solipsistically) attuned only to its own insanity.
I thank you for stopping by and reading here and there on occasion, and partaking in the absurdity that is the human condition in the waning days of the Anthropocene.
May we meet here in another 6-7 years — please pantomime juggling here (for the kids!)
Peace and good health to you.
Thanks again,
Istsfor Manity / thee istsfor manity reader
(J.I. Alvarez)
November 17, 2025
I couldn’t play the guitar. And I didn’t want to go about looking for drumsticks, and plastic tubs to overturn to drum. I didn’t have enough of my own poetry to read — so I came up with the idea to grab my boom box and speak some words over The Clash’s “Mensforth Hill” on the corner of N.E. 3rd Street and Biscayne Blvd. Midway through my spoken word someone dropped a $5 bill in my upturned cap at my feet saying, “thanks, you just made my day — Sandinista is my favorite Clash record.” This, unfortunately, was the only thing I had memorized that day — thee asynchronous voice over from my first film:
“This is now. The last war on drugs was a war on fructification. It was fruit batty, it was fatty bruit. I fructified on the crucifix cross and I crossed my own path when I got there. I got there when the darkness overtook me and I wrote a novel without writing a novel word. I chose something golden that sunk my Atocha. I fructified in Dar Es Salaam. I drive without opening my eyes on left turns. I sleep inside a mosquito infested tent. I tent on an assemblage of extracted teeth, and pull nothing but the difficult out of a magician’s top hat while the rabbit munches grass, oblivious, in the hallway. I pass summer away with the spring in your step failing me. I winter in the fog of your soulless fall. I scarify my soul in the humorless sun of a long night in a clean well lighted place — which is actually a bullet ridden cafe in Lesotho during a monsoon month of dust and quiet whippoorwills. I prune leafy trees leafless. I’m hot with fleas fleecing your sister’s sake. You said, “I got mine and you’ll be fine.” I said, “summer is your sister’s fate in her schizophrenic haze and her strength is the weakness in her occipital lobe.” You say my comedy was sublimely written, like it was written in Sumerian script in a Mandarin world. I said, “ it’s analog to a lime habit.” To which you plead, “let’s go to a limehouse,” moving your fingers in such a way that the air warps in pink swirls around your head and lights alternate in yellow and blue hues in your open mouth. The words you create signify tranches of truncheons and luncheons on the grass in half-naked Roman reclines. A bottle of wine stoppered ordering the sky and a jaunty basket opened to the prying June moon. Jejune. Then you produce wildebeests and hyenas from your bloomer pockets — pantaloons full of cavorting beasties. I produce a floral array of helium filled hydrangeas from my waistcoat pocket while a Berlin zeppelin flies drunken circles above us. The man from Madagascar stands and announces the sinking of the Diego Garcia Islands. I sing the song of hegemony of the albatross over other pelagic birds that abdicated when the penguins became kings of the universe…”
No one stopped to listen, most people kept walking (maybe annoyed by the distorted Clash song squelching from my speakers) then it occurred to me — they may not like my stuff, but if I pick up my hat and hold it out while scanning radio stations John Cage-style I’m bound to attract someone’s attention who enjoys what I’m playing. And I hit a veritable vein — a boon. A goldmine. I made three more dollars over the next five hours ($8 total!) the most money I’d had in two weeks by just happening to fall on someone’s favorite song or group playing on the radio, and therefore brightening their day just a tad bit in the fleeting screed that is our existence. About half hour in to my experiment I happened upon the college radio station playing “The Great Curve” by the Talking Heads and a woman in a black leather jacket that resembled Joan Jet dropped a dollar in my cap and said, “the best line David Byrne ever wrote: ‘the world moves on a woman’s hips.’ Thanks!” I got another dollar sometime around 3 o’clock when I started shuffling my feet to keep the blood flowing through my cramping legs while I happened upon the oldies station and “Mr. Bojangles” by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was playing and the man must have thought I was trying to do “the old soft shoe” and dropped 30 cents in the hat. Over the next couple of hours I increased my haul, and I had my summer job laid out before me. Fuck busking I thought. A smile, a fresh set of batteries, and some movement and I’d be rolling in dough.
And then it got good to me and in future days I started playing my favorite long instrumentals from my cassette collection and made up stories on the spot. I made a sign that read: “Extemporaneous stories extemporized just for YOU!” At your prompt. At your suggestion. Here were a few of my favorites from that first week before it all went sour. Someone would give me a prompt, for example: a portly gentleman in a black beret said, “make a story up about my CPA, Irving Katz;” a student carrying a copy of Naked Lunch said, “make a new story up about William S. Burroughs’s Eyeball Kid;” and a woman suggested I make a story up about a Cuban archivist named Clodomira. I enjoyed making up these stories to instrumentals by Throbbing Gristle, The Velvet Underground and Thelonious Monk :
He hovered out to cloudland in search of the end of the rope that would pull him through the morning. Up through wisps of cirrus, and further up through fat strato-cumulus — but no sign of the end of rope at the tail of an impossibly long length that receded deep into the sky’s bowels — where the cerulean gave way to indigo, violet and eventually blackness.
The countryside below was pleasant and undisturbed. Rolling hills pockmarked with bails of rolled up straw. A spearhead of geese briefly passed below him trumpeting surprise at his elevation.
Yes, in this fashion he learned that gravity had another end for him. The rope did not materialize, and in that one brief moment before he plummeted he wished he could stay up here forever…
Abruptly he thought of the placenta that trailed him out of his mother’s womb and how he missed its warm and comforting presence. He had never thought of the placenta he and his mother shared, but now for some reason he missed it with a gnawing in his gut.
He wished he could have the placenta installed somewhere in his home. Maybe floating in a vat of thick translucent fluid in a glass tank as if it were a new Damien Hirst installation.
Or maybe on a dark biomorphic pedestal as if it were a Louise Bourgoise piece. Then he settled on the vision of having a film loop of the placenta projected onto a white orb in Tony Ousler style. Yes, that would do. He took out a pad from his desk and did a photorealistic drawing of the placenta, a la early Chuck Close. He then drew the film loop projection environment as Ousler might.
He was pleased. He now harbored feelings for the placenta that he once felt for his wife.
In her place, in that space vacated by her memory, hovered the placenta. Beatific.
He couldn’t stop looking at images of placentas on the web. Fresh. Day old. Desiccated. Dog, cow, elephant, all types of placentas. He could not control himself. He locked his office door. He unzipped his pants.
Later, he called his mother and asked about the whereabouts of the now 37 year old placenta. His mother pleaded with him to get professional help. She told him never to call back.
His vision flashed. He was transported into another office, in another time, in the not so distant past.
It was the time of his childhood. He could feel it. It was this office. His office thirty years ago. Many of the buildings outside the window were the same, but the sixty story tower that now anchored the city, and other skyscrapers, were missing. The cars below were long and rectangular, of a mid-1970’s appearance.
And just as quickly he was back in his office. It was 2006. His computer monitor displayed the New York Times story about Saddam Hussein’s execution date being set, and the Decemberists’ “Crane Wife” was playing on iTunes.
He was panting.
The voice of Spice, the synthetic marijuana, told him to go and surrender himself to the firefighters down the street.
Then it was the voice of God echoing through the hallway. The fern transmogrified into a green anole that bit its own tail in half. The smaller tip began to speak in Aramaic, not that he knew Aramaic, but somehow he intuited it was Aramaic.
The tail said I have a gun. I will kill you if you don’t turn yourself over to the firemen across the street. Go now, man. Go! Go, before I smite you. Go and repent.
The tail writhed and grew in to a gherkin that glowed in the blue redeeming light of Jesus. He vomited the Bengali lentils and brown rice he had at lunch. He felt lighter, better now.
He was compelled to pee in the ficus bonsai on the coffee table, despite the perfectly clean bathroom down the hall. It was Dolores’s day to clean on Wednesday, and it had been freshly cleaned this morning.
He walked across the street to the firehouse and kneeled before the firefighters. He begged forgiveness and eternal fealty to all things firefighter related. The firefighters were surprised in the midst of a late lunch after a gnarly five alarm wildcat at noon.
“The hand of God compels me,” he cried. “Please!”
As the chief came sliding down the pole, Eusebio thought he saw the son of God descending from the heavens…
She wanted to stab her writing hand, but instead she focused on the portrait of Fidel Castro on the wall. She was long accustomed to falling into a meditative state by staring at Fidel’s philtrum. It was oddly naked, as if exposed in flagrante, by two quickly drawn curtains of wiry black hairs.
She had reworked the sentences for the eighth time. She was finding it increasingly arduous to make the connection between Epicurus, Batista’s foreign policy toward post-war Europe, and any of the 4,000 species of lice she was familiar with — especially the pubic louse. Her favorite.
She couldn’t reconcile the Epicurean school that thought by avoiding politics, gadflys, and avoiding involvement with gods or an afterlife, and by involving oneself with trusted friends and a life of simplicity one would achieve the calmness and simplicity of ataraxia.
She was desirous of the Stoics ataraxia now. It was, afterall, the key element in achieveing apatheia — a state of calmness and imperturbability — in the pursuit of virtue.
She wrote that Batista was a slovenly glutton and diverted US foreign aid to his coffers. She wrote about the pubic louse epidemic of 1975, and how it reached epidemic levels in Angola. The Cuban troops could barely sight their targets for the incessant scratching of their huevos.
“Coño, que metraca,” they were often heard crying, instantly giving up their positions to the South African mercenaries in the early days of the Angolan expedition. They were easily picked off. The State’s resources were diverted to deal with the pubic lice plague of 1975. It was either that or forgo the doctrines of Comrade Che Guevara’s early incursions into the Congo and Africa, writ large.
Clodomira was having such difficulty with all this unruly data, and she found herself gripping her letter opener — her bayonet from the Bay of Pigs — tightly and hovering just below the base of the knuckle of her ring finger. She stopped herself when she imagined Fidel recoiling at the sight of her hand. She was to interview with him next week for the Directorate of the Citizens Brigade in Defense of the Revolution.
No, she decided. I’ll keep the hand at least through then…
What I’m Reading:
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
— Samuel Beckett / Worstward Ho!
Even in our darkest imaginations, no one could have conceived of Gaza’s streets littered with the decomposing bodies and skeletal remains of our loved ones; that stray dogs and cats would be filmed feasting on those bodies; that Israeli soldiers would confess to driving their tanks over hundreds of living and dead humans and crushing them into mush; that parents would scour the streets looking for hacked pieces of human flesh to put randomly in plastic bags and consider each 10–20 kilos a child; that thousands of kidnapped Palestinians in Israeli “torture camps” would be systematically and routinely beaten, raped, forced to perform sexual acts on each other, forced to drink from toilets, starved to near death, blindfolded and chained 24/7 in crowded cages whose air is filled with the “putrid stench” of “neglected wounds left to rot” and amputated limbs, that the perpetrators would document and brag about their atrocities every minute of the day; and that the world would watch all this live-streamed and yet allow it to continue unconstrained.
— Muhammad Shehada / A Short History of the Gaza Strip
39 HATE GROUPS ARE ACTIVE IN ARIZONA
AND 94 ACROSS THE COUNTRY USE THE WORD “PATRIOT”
OR SOME DERIVATIVE IN THEIR DENOMINATION
— Giancarlo Huapaya / [39] from “Ley de la Feria/Law of the Fair”
Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises. We haven’t understood the exact way we are now experiencing time.
— Valeria Luiselli / Lost Children Archives
the earth we are
burning gives
the blossoming
scent of oranges
I peel and eat over the sink.
The teacher is burning.
— Mary B. Moore / “The Teachings of Naranja”
There’s a direct link between the poverty Gates claims to care so much about and the wealth he fails to mention. In the US, homelessness is breaking records, and so is the share of assets owned by the top 0.1%. While this might not be Gates’s own business model, by holding down wages, racking up rents, busting trade unions and winning tax and spending cuts, the ultra-rich thrive on impoverishing other people.
— George Monbiot / “I wish we could ignore Bill Gates on the climate crisis. But he’s a billionaire, so we can’t” / The Guardian
Disasters don’t show up one at a time.
They arrive in legions like a starving hoard.
A poet said this then died.
For example, half my family died
and after I celebrated the end of that year
my father died.
— Asmaa Azaizeh / “Reflection”
How, then, is one to understand this total war? How far back into history does one need to go to judge these actions? Is it sufficient to look at the atrocities committed on October 7, 2023? What led to that fateful day unfolding? Does one need to go back to 2007, when Israel officially imposed its siege on Gaza? Or to Hamas’ violent takeover of Gaza right before that? What about the group winning a democratic election in 2006? Israel’s 2005 unilateral “disengagement” from Gaza? The second intifada? The 1993 Oslo “peace process?” Israel’s closure and separation policy in Gaza since 1991? The first intifada? The 1973 war? The 1967 war? The 1956 war? The 1948 Nakba? The 1947 partition plan? The 1917 Balfour Declaration? Or even further? And why does virtually every Palestinian have those dates memorized by heart? What terrible significance do they hold?
— Muhammad Shehada / A Short History of the Gaza Strip
What I’m Listening To:
Y nacerá un mono del huevo de una piedra
Y aunque seas inmortal
Hijo del sol, del cielo, la luna y la tierra
Tú jamás aprenderás
Aprenderá a andar, a trepar, y agradecerá
Nunca alcanzarás la paz
— Juana Molina / “desinhumano”
And a monkey will be born from the egg of a stone
And even if you are immortal
Son of the sun, the sky, the moon and the earth
You will never learn
You will learn to walk, to climb, and you will thank
You will never reach peace
— Juana Molina / “desinhumano”
thee istsfor manity reader 