L asked me to go to Saturday's No Kings! rally on Rockville Pike at the Strathmore campus so we walked the loop from our house. It was bigger, more festive and boisterous, than last October's. Multiple signs begged god to slump Trump over now as if Trump is the sole cause of the clusterfuck rather than a uniquely skilled and frighteningly effective shitlord weapon doing exactly what shitlords want, as if Trump dying will trigger a paradigm-shifting clusterfuck reset. An acquaintance (the mother of a kid my daughter went to high school with) from Garrett Park wondered why the ruling elite permit Trump the latitude to wreck the world, I... said nothing, I'm nuts, don't you know. Once home put on the album below this sentence and started working on the grid below this song
Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?
Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how
the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of
these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.
Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.
However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life,
nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures.
No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the
greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know
there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people
do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the
least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they
continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.
My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are
indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no
one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it
has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I
cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow
eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious.
On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am
needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so
great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.
Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven.
Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)
St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is
like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve
tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always
springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting
forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to
keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the
filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines.
I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in
that department, that greenhouse.
Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!
It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you,
beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one
reads because the plot is over.
“Fanny Brown is run
away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx,
& hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a
little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I
wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.
I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest
suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you
don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to.
It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail
downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.
I was reading in the staff lounge yesterday post-lunch afternoon, one not-my-department colleague present, quiet, over there on his phone, when his same-department colleague, the loudest yappiest complainingest person in the building (yinz have all known, know, and will know a new one or dozen more in what remaining time we have left) commenced kvetching. Today's waah: the AI-created, AI-driven, supposedly mandatory AI training sessions that I've refused to do (with my boss' full awareness) and have garnered no grief
To be fair, both colleagues have elementary school-age children, and the focus of their yapping centered entirely, as it should, on their kids, so their bitching necessarily for their sanity's sake assumed the shitlord sociopaths using AI to help collapse world order so they can immiserate us for profit before eradicating us as rodents are not using AI to immiserate us for profit before eradicating us as rodents. Not enough people are freaking the fuck out, a key function of our shitlord sociopaths' constant relentless reprogramming of our heads. Believe it or not, I kept my mouth shut. Believe it or not, there's new Guided By Voices
Adrian mentioned his son's eighth birthday past Sunday, when his son is my age it will be 2084, the Earth will be here, what world? August 28, 2084 I will be 125. Nick Lowe turned 77 yesterday
My two colleagues also talked about our current nightmare ending and a restoration of democratic normalcy and I did not say the shitlords and their demonic proxies (see link below, eg) have not amassed this power to give it back, they will destroy the world before relinquishing power
"At this point the Democratic gerontocracy can only be viewed for what it is: the modern day Spoils System. Any bullshit about radical change or providing the best effort for maximal effect falls in place of people who simply want to keep a job until they die at their desk"
I've reached the age of needing grandpa strings for my glasses. I can't read anything within my arms' reach while wearing my glasses so I can go hours without wearing them, and if I took them off then moved from where I started reading it often takes me five blind minutes to find them. This getting old shit. Fine metaphors abound. Here's my right eye
Reading is physically harder now that my left eye can barely see through glaucoma's fog: three weeks from today it will have knives jabbed into it to try and dissipate some of the fog then stop fog's counterattack (plus eyedoc will yoink-out the old windshield and install a new one). Insurance will cover all but the deductible says eyedoc's office manager. Takes ten minutes and I'll feel zero nada no pain, says eyedoc. We'll, um, see.
But I read fine, as in I can pick up a book and see and read the text in it, engage with it. I'm reading well, as in I'm enjoying reading and retaining and thinking about what I've just read. The issue, after six decades of reading: I can't finish a novel. I set a pace that matches my interest and enjoy processing what I've read and am eager to pick it up again when I next have a minute's chance, and then I'll end a chapter or turn a page and of a sudden, SCREECH! I not only don't want to read the book in that moment, I don't to read it, viscerally, since: as I type this sentence I can't imagine me finishing any of the novels. Fine metaphors abound. Here's my left eye
It doesn't seem connected to any particular catalyst or spastic reaction to that particular day's most clussterfuckic obscenity, though no doubt Cumulative Clusterfuckic Trauma accounts for part, and that's the true clusterfuckic obscenity. And it's not just reading: I mentioned here before how certain musicians and bands that once got constant playtime in my ears and head I viscerally don't want to listen to in my ears and, especially, in my head right now. Two poets (not Ashbery, though I say something catty about *Breezeway* at the bottom of the grid below). One restaurant. A certain road in Michigan (Waterloo-Munith), the fuck did that road do to me. My home disc golf course, the one with the sign on 22 that says it is sponsored by me and Seat Six. But every novel the current ongoing eternity. I was 7/8ths through loving Faulkner's *The Hamlet* yesterday when SCREECH! BURN! Fine metaphors abound. Terry Hall would have been 67 today, this is one of my dozen favorite songs ever, still!
A friend and mentor for years has urged Denis Johnson's *Tree of Smoke* upon me, someone had returned it to the Library, it was on a cart today, I grabbed it, by the second page some asshole, possibly if not presumably the main character, an American soldier in a Vietnamese jungle, shoots a monkey for the fuck of it and starts watching it die, and SCREECH! BANG! I ain't reading this fucking novel
"Confiscate 99.8% of Andreesen’s net worth for the public good, wait 20 minutes, and then tell him his memory of ever having more than $4 million is false"
It is difficult to seperate the tapestry from the room or loom which takes precedence over it. For it must always be frontal yet to one side.
It insists on this picture of "history" in the making, because there is no way out of the punishment it proposes: sight blinded by sunlight. The seeing taken in with what is seen in an explosion of sudden awareness of its formal splendor.
The eyesight, seen as inner, registers over the impact of itself receiving phenomena, and in so doing draws an outline, or a blueprint, of what was just there: dead on the line.
If it has the form of a blanket, that is because we are eager, all the same, to be wound in it: This must be the good of not experiencing it.
But in some other life, which the blanket depicts anyway, the citizens hold sweet commerce with one another and pinch the fruit unpestered, as they will, and words go crying after themselves, leaving the dream upended in a puddle somewhere as though "dead" were just another adjective.
