With the Face to the Rear, in the Direction Behind
The last day of April, showers and all. A clammy rain that’s less than refreshing. Water wrung from a mildewed sponge.
The fog slips the city into a dress made of gauze. Wildlife plops itself onto lawns.
Bunnies, bunnies everywhere! Like big plump hopping loaves of bread.
Like children we crave people to examine our wounds. Like Christ we show our wounds reluctantly to doubters.
How to restore the balance of the four humors? How to choose a life and not just settle for one?
Every morning I wake up and the first person I see says, “Hi, I’m the internet, here to shorten your memory.”
Moloch demands his daily flesh. I mean the surveillance capitalism complex.
How tired am I of this plaguey empire! But it was like this when we got here.
Chittering squirrels hide nuts with alacrity, the faster to forget where they put them, perhaps.
How do the robins know when to come back?
Everyone talks about progress; no one talks about retrenchment.
Downwardly mobile—any of us could be.
Jeremiah was tasked to prophesy the destruction of a kingdom, but everyone hates that.
Denial is a popular first response to a plague.
The laws of nature could care less whether we believe in them or not.
To pronounce that things will work out as the older generation dies off is a pernicious psychosis. The widespread idea of passive advancement is just something to repeat in a lazy way.
Don’t get me wrong—I, too, long to believe that everything is governed by some kind of invisible, all-pervading intelligence.
Wash your hands, wash your hearts.
What does Nessun dorma even mean? Let no one sleep. At the end of the day, sleep slurps me up.
I used to fantasize that if I lost my job, then I’d open up a roller rink. My new career change fantasy is a religious mystic. Dorothy Day style. Passion and conviction and maddening contradiction living totally outside the conventions of society. To be flypaper for freaks and to love them all equally.
Why is it so hard to do something heroic straightforwardly? Stealing a hoard of diamonds from the wealthy and redistributing them? A simple morality, no ambiguity.
Would that the 21st Century so far were a tweet, one that we could delete forever.
The world was already sick to begin with. A corporate fantasia. A money-blasted hellscape. A near dystopia unto death where Orlando is routinely less warm than Antarctica.
It’s bad, okay, but die another day, why don’t you? (I said that to myself.)
In Norway, they personified the plague as a hag, a bent old woman clad in a black hood, carrying a broom and a rake. If she used the broom, all souls in the area were doomed, but if she used the rake, some might escape through the teeth.
Labor of love, labor of lunacy. In chaos might we find a new future?
The surgical removal of evil from the corpus of the world
What do you think Malcolm X meant by “by any means necessary”?
All we need is drastic action coupled with strong will. And maybe a miraculous event, unforeseen.
We must do more than idly talk. We must become a flock of smaller birds attacking a hawk.
