thee istsfor manity reader

In Silver Lamé

Petunia has a dream where she hides in her sister’s basement while her sister conducts a clandestine revolutionary meeting upstairs in the newly remodeled kitchen. Che Guevara and the Symbionese Liberation Army are in attendance. Hot chocolate and churros are served promptly at 7:16 p.m.

(… but this is a solecism in the dream world…)

(… this is an incorrect unspooling of a dream…)

Dreams should be high on the paranoiac-critical scale, full of soft monsters in the shape of the President’s gal bladder, or the Sri Lankan Finance Minister’s peritoneum, or the Zimbabwean Foreign Minister’s show pony — and all of these elements should be whirling about in a pink funnel cloud while calliope-an music echoes from the tinny corners of the Bolivian altiplano, while the moon melts like gruyere and streaks down the ash gray sky. All while satellites line up in formation in the exosphere and spell out: Screw This! We’re Leaving Our Geostationary Orbits / You Humans are Dumb — then they head for the assured destruction of the Kuiper Belt. It is only then that a sniper shoots out the lights at that department store that specializes in silver lamé tube tops covered in melted chocolate…

Now that has the makings of the start of a dream.

What I’m Reading:

“A bike ride is better than yoga, or wine, or weed. It runs neck and neck with sex and coffee. It’s also, in my experience, an antidote for writer’s block. If you’re stuck, if you need to ungum the synapses and lift dust off the cerebral lobes, take a trip on two wheels and the words will begin tumbling out.”

— Jody Rosen / Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle

Mainlining Extinction

An overheated tragedy unspooling
in a slow motion, so obscene—
so perverse—in its deathly insistence,
and the players moving about
as if in a deep pool of molasses.
What gives? Why this suicidal main-
lining extinction by heat, drought,
famine, forced migration, acidification & flood?

(while the planet’s little wars start joining hands)

Who’s at the wheel of this floundering mammoth?
Who cares?

Hello! Is this on?
Hello!

What I’m Reading:

“These are the nameless who have brought the present into being, yet what she sees are faces the same as her own, faces that pass by as ever in this city as it breathes the ceaseless exhalations of night into day.”

— Paul Lynch / Prophet Song

Desperate

Things should be better
Desperately so—
We are running it into the ground
We should be better
Desperately so—
Yet we can’t help ourselves
How do we pivot?
How do we break this downward spiral?

A new year.
A new beginning?

Desperately needed
Desperately so—

Happy happy joy joy

What I’m Reading:

“Even if its extremes are ultimately eclipsed, as seems inevitable, 2023 will mark a point when humanity crossed into a new climate era — an age of ‘global boiling,’ as United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called it. The year included the hottest single day on record (July 6) and the hottest ever month (July), not to mention the hottest June, the hottest August, the hottest September, the hottest October, the hottest November, and probably the hottest December. It included a day, Nov. 17, when global temperatures, for the first time ever, reached 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial levels.

Discomfort, destruction, and death are the legacy of those records.”

— Chico Harlan / “The climate future arrived in 2023. It left scars across the planet” / The Washington Post

The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“When you have no future, you vote for the past.”

— Georgi Gospodinov / Time Shelter

“The idea of managing energy use and controlling greenhouse gas emissions was anathema to the neoliberal economists whose thinking dominated at this crucial juncture. Thus, no planning was done, no precautions were taken, and the only management that finally ensued was disaster management.”

— Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway / The Collapse Of Western Civilization: A View From The Future

“Darkness comes early
This time of year
Making it hard
To recognize familiar faces
In those of strangers.”

— Charles Simic / “Hide and Seek”

“… the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.”

— Paul Lynch / Prophet Song

“I expect someday a tiny
piece of paper that, unrolled, will read, ‘The End.’”

— Pat Wilson / “My Fortune”

“… but what was anomalous in 2023 soon became the new normal … A shadow of ignorance and denial had fallen over people who considered themselves children of the Enlightenment.”

— Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway / The Collapse Of Western Civilization: A View From The Future

“We are the world’s apocalypse. In that sense we are also our own apocalypse.”

— Georgi Gospodinov / Time Shelter

What I’m Listening To:

“Hell is just a signpost
When you take a certain path”

— Sleater-Kinney / “Hell”