The house in Munith Michigan's wifi blows, my daughter tells me everyone's wifi blows in rural Michigan unless the homeowner purchases super-expensive satellite wifi, below a bog in Waterloo Recreation Area, a section that bans hunting, we hiked it yesterday before my daughter delivered us our bright orange vests last night at dinner, this, still gorgeous, is a copy of the photo uploaded to my phone on twitter, the wifi will not download the photo sent from my phone to email, no photo captures real time image, this doesn't capture the real time photo image
Besides the Waterloo Recreation Area another plus of Michigan: weed is way cheaper and way better in Michigan, some of you are in for very good giftmas presents, at more than half the cost of what lesser weed would cost in DC, Wonka Bar 13 for all of you! Song from yesterday's drive to store and then to Portage Lake Disc Golf Course and then back to the house
My complicity and privilege not used to shitty wifi, and I love you but I'm not sitting in the Jackson Panera with the unmasked for the free wifi, these may be your last links until next week, plan to not read here accordingly if linkage is your purpose here
Trump flags and signs everywhere, half 2020, half 2024, and on Interstate 94 recurring billboards saying Making Taliban Stronger Since 2021 with photoshop of Biden in Islamic turban
Above offered as reminder that covid can be both the public health danger it's considered *and* that shitlords are exploiting it for totalitarian reasons and that the latter is scarier than the former
Stores here about 30/70 masked, or at least the weed store, I was fully masked (and in my Guided by Voices baseball hat), I risked my life for your giftmas present
We have our orange vests now, we heard no gun shots yesterday which I mentioned to the two locals I played a round with at the Portage Lake Disc Golf Course and they told me of course not, it's bow-hunting season, I won't hear what kills me until a zzzt a second before the arrow hits me, what little political talk we had agreed upon the cynical uselessness of motherfucking Democrats, neither seemed a Trump flag-flyer, both resigned to shit never getting better
Another song on drive, I meh-plussed the album at first but I'm dropping the meh, it may never be love but it's growing on me
FIELD OF SKULLS
Mary Karr
Stare hard enough at the fabric of night,
and if you're predisposed to dark—let’s say
the window you’ve picked is a black
postage stamp you spend hours at,
sleepless, drinking gin after the I Love
Lucy reruns have gone off—stare
like your eyes have force, and behind
any night’s taut scrim will come the forms
you expect pressing from the other side.
For you: a field of skulls, angled jaws
and eye-sockets, a zillion scooped-out crania.
They’re plain once you think to look.
You know such fields exist, for criminals
roam your very block, and even history lists
monsters like Adolf and Uncle Joe
who stalk the earth’s orb, plus minor baby-eaters
unidentified, probably in your very midst. Perhaps
that disgruntled mail clerk from your job
has already scratched your name on a bullet—that’s him
rustling in the azaleas. You caress the thought,
for it proves there’s no better spot for you
than here, your square-yard of chintz sofa, hearing
the bad news piped steady from your head. The night
is black. You stare and furious stare,
confident there are no gods out there. In this way,
you’re blind to your own eye’s intricate machine
and to the light it sees by, to the luck of birth and all
Tomorrow we Kensington to Frederick to Hancock to Breezewood to Toledo to Ann Arbor to Grass Lake to Munith to the same AirBNB four miles from the house three of the crackers who plotted to kidnap and kill the Michigan governor live, it's peak fall there (and will be peak fall on Pennsylvania Turnpike over and through the Laurel Highlands), if I have to go to Michigan to see my daughter I'm giving myself two springs and two falls
Planet buying us neon orange hats and vests today, every trail on public land in Michigan is open for hunting, hikers get shot all the time, hunters not held responsible, hikers accept the risk, I'll let you know if I'm shot but only if I survive
TO TELL OF BODIES CHANGED
Jana Prikryl
Having desired little
more than the
arrival of the little more
that arrives,
outside our window a cypress
of model proportions.
Its patience seems to widen
the nights we sleep in Rome.
Warm flags draw a tortoise,
it scrapes too near.
Our friends hurry over when they hear,
exclaiming over its mute
resolute
distinctness and helpless slow efforts to flee.
Density pours into swallows and shadows:
spilled with abandon each morning,
begins then the slow work
of receding.
The joints announce their new allegiances.
Metaphors swarm the surfaces of things.
Night broken into, it's the sub rosa
singling out
I ought to have expected
from Fra Angelico's small panel
among others,
the souped-up full-spectrum wings
combined with a mood of reverent submission
in both figures
warning of experience
yet to come.
Starting now she'll reason with herself
deliberately
(imagine bulbs expecting stars
for effort!), aware of being always overheard,
subject to unprecedented measures
of integrity, like an author.
While a substance of landscape, mineral,
leaches into blood vessels
quietly steadily, meaning in this case
nothing is damaged;
extravagance of umbrella pines
propping their fingers under the bonus horizons
of the hills, redundancies
boosting the city's resemblance to itself.
A painter once squared himself against a difficult question
and said no one could just create
a landscape,
but isn't it true
that expectation builds a neighborhood
and there is nowhere else that you can live.
It was possession, turns out, by a force whose intention
I disc-golfed Monday past with Dr Z at Seneca Creek State Park in Gaithersburg Maryland, my home course (in the town I grew up in), above Hole 12, pin in D (21 of the 27 holes in longest possible pin), I sponsor a hole along with SeatSix
Was wonderful, beautiful, a blast, I love disc, love love, love, first time at Seneca since before the plague, not because of the plague but because all I've wanted to do is hike with Earthgirl, all I want to do is hike with Earthgirl first. 21 was in C.
When I got there I had no deet to poison my legs, dying by deet better than dying by lyme, my Subaru a piece of shit, all my deet in Earthgirl's car, I only drive my car to work and back usually, and Dr Z exhausted his last deet poisoning his legs, I picked six ticks off me there, one munching my inner right thigh last night, don't be jealous. I can hike with Earthgirl seventeen months in the remotest woods and get no ticks, two hours with Dr Z on my home disc golf course I get seven (and counting?) ticks?
Dr Z got married during the plague and his daughter asked asylum from rural Minnesota and her Kind dad granted sanctuary during the plague, yay for Dr Z! his disc much improved since last we threw; he throws an Innova Wraith, one of four humans still throwing an Innova Wraith but the only one voluntarily, he throws the right height to get the S-curve and hits fairways, and he rocs his ups better but best still putts Fuck It and I love him for it cause missing low is lame
Dr Z asked me about my Subaru as in Should I Buy A Subaru? and NO! don't do it, I only mention because on drive home from my home course the automatic transmission warning flashed as did the tire and brake and air bag warnings and warnings I've never seen on a dashboard, the Subaru service check-in person reassured me it's just the automatic transmission that's the emergency, it's programmed to turn on every alert on the dashboard to get my attention, he soothingly and patiently explained, so I see the warnings so I've time to prepare to coast to a stop on the Beltway when my transmission clamps down and hope I'm lucky enough to make a soft-landing on a shoulder, though the oil light has been on for six months because the engine leaks oil, the transmission will cost $3K to fix, the engine leak, a direct result of a Subaru mandatory recall in which the engine had to be removed and was reinstalled fucked up will cost $12K to fix and fuck that, I am without a car, Today in My Privilege and Complicity! fuck me
Ticks aren't dumb and know where to eat and everything's a fart anyway. I carried a beast, leopard, roc of course, when in doubt throw a roc when not in doubt throw a roc, a wolf, putted w an aviar, not in my disc bag, that's on Mt Desert Island until next July and not by design, but in a daypack I used on Mt Desert Island when hiking with Earthgirl. The pitch-n-putts in Maine and Michigan, O Seneca Kick My Ass Forever, home course, on the very few throws my mechanics were OK I've lost those muscles and that muscle twitch, Seneca, I can't give the course extra feet, if I get the red basket on 13 in five in my lifetime I will deet my legs against ticks and never buy another Subaru, will let Seneca kick my Noodle Ass Arm Self again and not buy a Subaru again soon even though I circle-nined the hole last Monday
I skipped Lindsey Buckingham's birthday cascade last week because (a) the couple of songs off the new album I'd heard didn't melt me and (b) nothing tastes as good as I remember it tasting and (c) I'm not sure whether anything will ever taste as good as it did or nothing ever tasted as good as I thought it did, death to the either/or of course. But these three songs, especially the first two, feel sorta like the boom I remember or at least the boom I remember imagining I felt once
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STOIC
Jana Prikryl
I like ordinary days. Needing to be somewhere new
at ten a.m. bothers me. I like ordinary days.
Each juncture where I could miss a connection is trouble.
I like ordinary days. Out of the ordinary
days I live through many times. I like ordinary days.
You only live once and if that's true for you then you win.
I like ordinary days. Doing the usual thing I
can forget it's happening. I like ordinary days.
Living once is excellent and living less is better.
I like ordinary days. I like never having plans
and not seeing my friends. I like ordinary days.
I like my friends a lot when I'm free to think about them.
I like ordinary days. I like running into friends
in the course of my routine. I like ordinary days.
My friends should accompany me on ordinary days.
I like ordinary days. To be accompanied
would be nice once in a while. I like ordinary days.
When friends come by with no real plans I want to get away.
I like ordinary days. I want to be alone so
I can think about my friends. I like ordinary days.
On ordinary days I don't need to think about things.
