I know I've thought this and am sure I've written and/or typed it but typing it now: there are no second chances painting so there's no editing, no fixing, no anguishing over what was done, no dicking with done shit, just moving forward, abandon sooner than later. The five lines above: how I heard that in my head times the edits already by counting to ten, I can't make it less shitty by editing but I *could* fuck it up more and lessen the rush of completion, I know this disqualifies me as a poet down to the level I am not an artist but I've known this since I edited my first poem in 1971
My left eye. Told yesterday by Eyedoc Jr he wants to yoink out my cataracts this Fall, says otherwise any RX for glasses will grow obsolete within a year after filling, he wants to spare me the cost of new glasses each year, fine metaphors abound
Too, 16 years since my obamapostasy viz motherfucking professional Democrats, I'm deeply embarrassed and ashamed to find myself angry at my congressman from MD-8, Jamie Raskin, a still-enslaved shitlord kapo who performatively prances as a cracker-ridiculing populist progressive Democrat, who not only supports the Zionist genocide of Palestinians (while receiving generous AIPAC donations) but voted yesterday to ban IcToktay, if asked he no doubt would say he did so to prevent the corpse of Mao from reading my texts to my daughter about her new puppy. National security, see? My right eye (both bigger here)
National security? Shitlords' frenzied you're hearing/seeing unauthorized content that breaks shitlord kayfabe, look at the on-demand bipartisanship of congress to limit the sources you use to inform your thoughts and life, borg implants (you think I'm just making a shitty Next Gen allusion, this IS in the works, I guaranfuckentee) will have eager bipartisan support. The deeper the broken kayfabe the more irreparable the kayfabe, the more determined are shitlords to insist you eat their kayfabe, so, fascism, so: fucking duh I needed to puke
"Young voters, black voters, Arab and Muslim voters are fleeing the Democratic Party at a critical electoral juncture because of our anti-Palestinian policies. To win them back, our plan is to ban their favorite website."
"They are clinging to Israel, not because they have a genuine belief Israel is a force for good, not because they believe in religious Zionism, not even because they believe it is a necessary colonialist project in the Middle East, but because it has been for decades their totem, the very badge of political respectability, the membership card for the political country club. Israel is now toxic to the public and the entire history of ethnic cleansing, massacre and long genocide on which the very existence of Israel is based, is now laid bare. The political class are now in a panic, and lashing out everywhere. Police powers to limit free assembly were already hugely increased just last year by the Public Order Act 2023, where any demonstration which is noisy or causes inconvenience can be banned. Now we have calls from the responsible ministers for pro-Palestinian demonstrations to be banned because they offend their sensibilities in a way they are finding difficult to define"
Latest novel I've failed: *Huckleberry Finn,* was attempting a reread ahead of Percival Everett's *James* release next month. Other novels I've failed in 2024: McElroy's *Hind's Kidnap,* de la Pava's *Lost Empress,* a reread of Barth's *Sot-weed Factor,* Levin's *Mount Chicago,* Katz's new translation of Fyodor's *Brothers Karamazov,* and at least three others I can't remember and can't be bothered to go find. Today's headshot, gouache and acrylic ink
My eyes suck but are not the problem. I haven't watched a movie or television show in at least a decade not out of some performative moral protest but because they bore the fuck out of me and I'd rather listen to music and read poetry and novels instead and, as Life in the Clusterfuckocene saturates, overwhelms, and dominates my head, I now read three pages of a novel cognitively then ten more pages obliviously before awakening from the clusterfuck's miasma to realize I retain nothing of those ten pages and discover I have no desire to read further. It's not boredom, it's not disinterest, it's, I've told you this three times (I can't imagine rereading Vollmann's *Dying Grass,* quite possibly my favorite novel ever, where that telling you three time gag is from) I am being reprogrammed by clusterfuckaires and not only do I not resist, I'm a solipsistically greedy addict, it's kinda dark in here
"You have to vote for the Democrats; they’re the only thing preventing fascism"
"Neoliberal warmonger tries to take a poem and frame it as a mental illness to dunk on the left."
"Rachel Maddow is a perfect example of the liberal "upright sodomite" imperial lesbian. She spent her entire career ignoring Israel/Palestine. Now it's her shining moment: pushing genocide entirely out of the conversation in the name of *saving democracy.*"
"Western leaders are experiencing two stunning events: defeat in Ukraine, genocide in Palestine. The first is humiliating, the other shameful. Yet, they feel no humiliation or shame"
Once a poignant catalyst was lodged in the Y of a tree No, not a poignant catalyst - the poignancy of the catalyst, like the catalyzing of the poignancy, came later A bee landed on a fallen peach A beloved man struck a table with the flat of his hand A sailor reached terra incognito without water and found it overrun with sheep Why?
Joe Biden airlifting food to the people he bombs. Shitlords have decided, Trump it will be, Democrats busting ass to get it done. Kidding, they like to lose, love the pay. Rest of the monologue, as always, transmitted via grid. A year ago this week, at the encouragement of my wife and daughter, I gathered a bunch of my square placemats to submit to a contest, thank the fucking lord I talked my self out of that shit
Full size HERE. There *has* changed though work still to do before it’s here. Manic sideways, me, my apologies, I’m desperate to find solutions I’m too lazy to seek
"Those driven to scan Joe Biden’s face for some sign of mercy, some sign of an end to bloodletting, find an eerily smooth hardness, broken only by a nervous little smirk when he blurts out Israeli lies about beheaded babies. Biden’s stubborn malice and cruelty to the Palestinians is just one of many gruesome riddles presented to us by Western politicians and journalists"
"The point of New York Times and CNN both using "chaotic" to describe a historic massacre of starving people swarming food is to reduce initial viral outrage by downplaying its intentional, inexcusable nature"
"Hard to fault the NYT here from following the logic of their own Israel coverage and deciding that the longterm smart, just and fair response was racially profiling their community and exerting massively disproportionate power on any dissent at the expense of most of what it purports to stand for."
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The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé
AIPAC uncorks $100 million war chest to sink progressive candidates
"One has to be impressed by the chutzpah of a political party that has “returning the consequentiality to sex” as a core policy goal, but is also nominating as their presidential candidate a serial philanderer and rapist who has sired children with multiple women"
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"There's something utterly bizarre about the Democratic Party's inability to campaign against something like this. They're never reluctant to use feminism as marketing, but are absolutely terrified of substantive feminist politics.
Surely a coincidence that yesterday, the day after Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy here in protest against the American genocide of Palestinians and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, and the day before today's Michigan primary in which a significant number of registered Democrats promise to vote for Uncommitted rather than Biden that Genojoe announced, over an ice cream cone, and much to the apparent surprise of his Israeli accomplices in genocide, that a cease-fire is imminent, maybe as soon as next Monday. I am, as always, sidewaysier today than yesterday but less than tomorrow
Which side of the above, top or bottom, is -.06% less-shitty so I can hold my nose, not vote for it either? Sideways and my whiteyelloworangepinkaddiction, who does sideways in whiteyelloworangepink? As for my Richard Dawson addiction:
Aaron Bushnell Burned Himself Alive To Make You Turn Your Eyes To Gaza
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"It says a lot about the American psyche that people can't even recognize a revolutionary act of resistance against an empire that's literally robbing us and butchering babies in our name"
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"The claim that US media would have covered a self-immolation differently if it had been undertaken in protest of one of the country’s adversaries is not hypothetical."
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The smearing of Bushnell has started, is escalating
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"The image of a cop pointing his gun at Aaron Bushnell as he burns to death is truly the most succinct encapsulation of the brutality he died protesting against. His agonized calls for Palestinian freedom should haunt every public official who’s enabled these atrocities."
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"I guarantee you, if someone lit themselves on fire to protest what's happening in Ukraine, it would be on the homepage of the New York Times and CNN right now. But because Aaron Bushnell stood against Israeli genocide, it gets no such coverage or praise"
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"US Airman Aaron Bushnell did not kill himself to protest some other country's war. The US Department of Defense has compelled the participation of Air Force members like Bushnell in Israel's Gaza genocide. Their orders to deploy to Israel read "mandatory"
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"Millions of people desperately trying to formulate the best zinger about self-immolation to try to go viral on a porn and online gambling app owned by a demented incel made rich by apartheid emeralds whose greatest dream is to live alone on Mars."
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I'm too cynical to think CNN did this for any other reason than to get in front of truth before absorbing condemnation for lies of omission ordered from the top, be interesting to see if MSNBC and NYT come to same business decision
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Extraordinary charges of bias emerge against NYTimes reporter Anat Schwartz
"Imagine a mirror image of the Anat Schwartz scandal"
The virtues of failure and humility in the face of the next-to-nothingness of human existence
"Nearly all novels remind us that the story of one person both is and is not the story of other people, each of whom is the main character of their own life"
The clown cannot escape gravity; it cannot be light. With its round paper-white baby face and enormously exaggerated facial features, the clown must appear to a child like a nightmarish caricature of the figure at which the child first smiled. The clown is at once both newborn and a ruin. Gesticulating like a flailing infant but too big to be one, it is then the epitome of a senile being - and under its preposterous baggy pants perhaps a diapered one. We begin as small clowns and end as repulsive overgrown ones - perhaps this is the truth which with the clown frightens us. The clown is a swollen prototypical human, its flopping inflated body a travesty of the rounded features of young creatures that we see as adorable, vulnerable, vivacious, which is to say "cute." It appears before us to taunt us for the inadequacy of our sentimentality, the limits of our generosity, and to deny us the narcissistic pleasure of nurturing tiny beings through which life has a future. This goofy, looming, unpredictable, garish, frantic, bouncy, nonsensical parody of the child has emerged from beyond the horizon of childish optimism; it is clear from its expression that it has come forth out of despair to reproduce its own failure. Like an adolescent, its feet are too big for it - as if it had yet to grow into them, but it never will. The only fate left to the clown is to accept its punishment, its humiliation, and then depart. We laugh awkwardly and perhaps to loudly, as we identify with the clown.