You Are Made of What Drugs Are Made Of

Once upon a time every post had a Fleabus photo
Bumping this over there again
Putting a chrome sheet into wordpress is roulette though the more I monkey with the format on sheets the chances I get lucky in wordpress, one of the daft reasons I still pay for a wordpress account nobody reads
The system that drives our world
The alibababot in Frankfurt has apprised my potential worth and/or my potential danger and has deemed me not worth monitoring, I am simultaneously relieved and insulted
The pandemic and our broken social contract
☝	by shitlord desire and design						☝
I did use L instead of Earthgirl in the last post and I may use C instead of Planet going forward (working on a poem about why (and related shit)) but I can't use I for my son-in-law
I can hardly I him I I should have said
Mass formation deflation
Five new additions to the blegroll, check them out
I vouch for six of ten of these albums
I mean, it even *looks* like wordle
Reading anxiety, everybody's got it
Callahan and Oldham interview on their wonderful new album
One exhibition in a side-room of the Grand Museum
⬇	Been overdosing on Akron/Family, how the ruck had I never posted one of their songs before?						⬇

HOW TO WRITE

Anne Waldman

Perhaps I’m kidding myself about
the life I lead

Sometimes I feel I’m dying
like a lot of things I see around me

Then I turn on the TV and understand
that everything must still be moving

Music, for example, and I rush outside
around the corner to a concert

It’s so easy

Everything accessible from where I
happen to live at the moment

Things like rock concerts not too many trees on 2nd Avenue

Once, on the Sixth Avenue bus
I got a sudden sensation
I had been alive before

That I was a man at some other time
Traveling

You would think this strange if you were a woman

If I were a man right now I’d be getting out of the draft
but I think I’d want to be a poet too

Which simply means alive, awake and digging everything

Even that which makes me sick and want to die

I don’t really, you know

I just don’t want to be conscious sometimes
because when you’re conscious in the ordinary way
you have to think about yourself a lot

Dull thoughts like what am I doing?

Uptown in a large crowd I want to sit down and cry
because everything is simple and complicated
all at once

Everyone has this feeling

Even people downtown

It is very basic to the way we are
which is why I can say “we”

A lot of drugs can change you if you want
because you too are made of what drugs are made of

In fact you are just a bundle of drugs
when you come right down to it

I don’t want to go into it
but you’ll see what I mean when you catch on

That’s not meant to sound snotty
I’m open to whatever comes along

This is the feeling I get before I take a plane

Then everything’s the same afterward anyway

All into one space and here I am again
alive still, same worries on my mind

The thing is don’t worry!
You are doing what you have to what you can

You hear from your friends
They let you know what’s happening in California, Iowa
Vermont and other places about the globe

They take you out of your little room
just like the newspapers or the news
or the man you live with

and put you in a much larger room
one in which you are in constant motion around the clock

A Game Devised to Avoid Profound Spiritual Questions

Back to normal isn't enough
If Martin Luther King were alive today
A live thought experiment on MLK Day
Copaganda: thread			The ruling class won't go on their own
How to make shitlords easy already laundered money by betting on helmetball
How to prepare for climate change's shittiest effects
A dangerously reckless idiot pisshead
Last days of the covidian cult?
Reminder: both could be true, that covid is a serious threat to public health and that our shitlords disaster capitalize it and the latter is worse than the former especially now that shitlords have told their barkers and enforcers the covid freakout well is dry, let the peasants die
Cracker insists those who smelt it dealt it
The denial style in American politics
The highly skilled are the enemies of your existence
Maggie's weekly links					New old flag
Avedon Carol's occasional links
2022 January 21
On human-horse cooperation: a neurobiological miracle
We will never escape clintonstink
The doomed quest to taxonimize human emotions
Janua		{ feuilleton }'s weekend links
New TINDERSTICKS!
The Man in the Eyeball Mask
Lessons from Louise Glück

PARABLE OF THE HOSTAGES

Louise Glück

The Greeks are sitting on the beach

wondering what to do when the war ends. No one

wants to go home, back

to that bony island; everyone wants a little more

of what there is in Troy, more

life on the edge, that sense of every day as being

packed with surprises. But how to explain this

to the ones at home to whom

fighting a war is a plausible

excuse for absence, whereas

exploring one’s capacity for diversion

is not. Well, this can be faced

later; these

are men of action, ready to leave

insight to the women and children.

Thinking things over in the hot sun, pleased

by a new strength in their forearms, which seem

more golden than they did at home, some

begin to miss their families a little,

to miss their wives, to want to see

if the war has aged them. And a few grow

slightly uneasy: what if war

is just a male version of dressing up,

a game devised to avoid

profound spiritual questions? Ah,

but it wasn’t only the war. The world had begun

calling them, an opera beginning with the war’s

loud chords and ending with the floating aria of the sirens.

There on the beach, discussing the various

timetables for getting home, no one believed

it could take ten years to get back to Ithaca;

no one foresaw that decade of insoluble dilemmas—oh unanswerable

affliction of the human heart: how to divide

the world’s beauty into acceptable

and unacceptable loves! On the shores of Troy,

how could the Greeks know

they were hostages already: who once

delays the journey is

already enthralled; how could they know

that of their small number

some would be held forever by the dreams of pleasure,

some by sleep, some by music?

One Concerned Person Pointed Out That My Whole Economy Was Wrong; Yes, I Said, But I Have Nothing Else to Sell

Beefheart born 81 years ago today
LOTS OF BEEFHEART HERE						Though I can't fix or replace broken links, emmeffing crackers won't let me
Anxiety day dark, I've a sore on gums I daydream it's cancer
tonight the night my life ends on the drive home
I must be asymptomatic, between my job and my wife's one of us has given it to the other or will soon
I've not been botcrawled like I'm being from Frankfurt Germany for the past four days in months, each ping a different IP but all alibaba, Death to the Either/Or allows me to be both proudly vain and vainly weirded
Which means I still look at the shitty blogs stats so fuck me
Did you see how fast Democrats pivoted from blame Trump for plague to blame you for plague, you can google it? a coworker did not find funny today
Books of Jacob, I'm literally halfway as I type this, I don't want to read it every day but am unable to read anything else, I understand the themes if not the allusions and references and that must be what's compelling me but since Death to the Either/Or I must confess I feel compelled to finish because (a) as an object to physically hold and read it's a perfect book and (b) time invested and (c) the promises offered and (b) time invested, which marks the first time since I allowed myself to abandon novels without writing a fucking paragraph about it to feel guilty about quitting a novel, so (d) something gad and something bood is happening even if (e) for long stretches it doesn't feel like it and (f) I (a)(b)(c)(d)(e)(f)ed myself
Shitlords buy whiskey while starving your children
while you watch m**********g helmetball
Turduckens all the way down
How to commit fraud!
Fresh Hell				Blaming victims
Snapshots of the apocalypse
How not to sell out				There's a reason all posts here but two per year tagged My Complicity
Frownland one of this shitty blog's Theme Songs, I don't remember which number and I forget some of the others, and Beefheart a member of the Circle of Rotating Bands/Musicians for the two of five not permanently assigned chairs in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, I couldn't name all the others under threat of cracker authoritarianism, anxiety day dark, fuck me

FOR EMILY WILSON

A.R. Ammons

Such a long time as the wave idling gathers

lofts and presses forward into the curvature

of the height before one realizes that the

tension completes itself with a fall through air,

disorganization the prelude to the meandering

of another gather and hurl, the necessary:

ah, what can one make to absorb the astonishment:

you should have seen me the merchant at market

this morning: the people ogled me with severe

goggles: maids, buying in manners and measures

beyond themselves, stared into my goods and

then grew horror-eyed: wives still as distant

from day as a carrot from dinner took the

misconnection sagely, a usual patience:

peashells, I said, long silky peashells: cobs,

I said, long cobs: husks and shucks, I said:

one concerned person pointed out that my whole

economy was wrong; yes, I said, but I have

nothing else to sell: and I said to her, won't

you appreciate the silky beds where seeds

have lain: she had not come to that: and

how about this residence all the grains have

left: won't you buy it and think about it:

not for dinner, she said: rinds, I cried,

rinds and peelings: there was some interest

in those, as for a marmalade, but no one willing,

finally, to do the preparations: absurd, one

woman shouted, and then I grew serious: can you

do with that: but she was off before we fully

met: you should have seen me the merchant at

market this morning: will bankruptcy make a

go of it: will the leavings be left only: the

wave turns over and does not rise again, that wave.

Nothing But Psychodrama and Disillusionment

Morton Feldman born 96 years ago today, yes I knew and didn't Bowie last week, yes I know and there will be at least one Beefheart song here three days from now unless there isn't
Sarek is home, we broke him out of prison, which means Sarek may be reading about Sarek for the first time, Sarek, this is an honorific name and done only with love and respect for you. Ask SeatSix to explain the allusion
This is true		But it is the best metaphor for most things clusterfuck
A final visit with Michael Nesmith
Hilltop so wants to be in an Ivy and will never be an Ivy no matter how much it acts in shady complicity with the Ivies, but laugh, I bet you digital pints the fucks that rule Hilltop more giddy by the headline than worried about fucking legal liability of their laughably lame laundry liability
⟰	Comical trolling of Elite America						⟰
Pynchon: In the Crater's Vicinity
But crackers want to burn books!
Climate change and insects
Shitlords and Project Vivian
Shitlords and Outer Space
On not hating the body
Ed posted a Tom Clark poem so I thought about Tom and it made me happy
Visit Doom & Gloom daily for your ears and head
Tom a good friend from a digital distance, we shared obsessions, I think we'd have been friends in real life
NEW DESTROYER!
New Rosie Thomas too! (covering Bjork)
New Spoon (who I should love more than I do) too!
Earthgirl's bday too today, send her a bump in whatever your preferred digital way

ANOTHER EXOTIC INTRODUCTION

Tom Clark

Nothing but psychodrama
and disillusionment
in the canyons of the wealthy

Still there's a swell surprise
up Gibraltar Road a ways
where the red-yellow spectra
of the rising sun to the left (east)
swim up above the marine layer
starting down around Ventura County
and all Montecito's
hazed terrarial shadows erupt at once

The resultant story
of wild peach liqueur
spilled on dirty pillows

I Think I Practice the Religion of Blinking Too Much

My first job was delivering the Washington Post every morning, I had the Oakton-Woodland-Rolling perimeter, include Tulip and Hutton north of Woodland

second job at Mario’s Pizza on Summit across from elementary school I went to first grade (and met Willy Bayne, who, out of courtesy to you, I don’t remind you of the running down the cat in his green dodge dart on Ten Mile Creek Road everytime we hike Ten Mile Creek Trail which we do at least once a month, it’s the best trail in Moco)

third job was Asbury Methodist Home, an old folks harvesting factory in Gaithersburg that since has grown twenty-fold, four excellent and distinct eighteen-hole disc-golf courses could be built on the campus

I worked six weeks in the Sorry, you’re-soon-to-be-dead building as a janitor

Of course the physical distress of the patients horribly disturbing at times and yes what you imagine a janitor in a Sorry, you’re-soon-to-be-dead building often mops up this janitor mopped up but what was worse were the looks on the face of those aware enough to know what happened, the mortification, the humiliation, the despair they couldn’t will themselves to death

I quit to take a job at Arnolds Diner on Redland Road across from where now sits the big red Teachers Credit Union for hours Thursday and Friday nights and Saturdays until six for two dollars less an hour and am who I am typing this poem tonight because I did

The means exist to yoink Sarek out as soon as can be discovered, navigated, then implemented both at a get out of now but what about next level

SeatSix showed up tonight with dinner and the front desk refused entry and would and/or could not say why, though the place is three pestilential floors of contaminated human aerosol projectiles

I work at a mid-sized university and watch undergraduates flount masking rules and never felt worry, full-vaxxed and boosted and properly masked me

1/100th of the worry I get in that three-floored petrie dish

I have no idea if Sarek's been swabbed, I assume he has but who knows

No one asked me for my vaxdox, my temp was 97.2 like it always is, I checked a box on the screen vouching for my vaxdox, I understand, help has enough with the dying without fighting the dyings’ un-vaxxed visits

I forget the order much less have a complete inventory in my head of jobs 4 through my current job, there were dozens, Roys Place of course on Diamond, we all worked there, a landscaping place that ran out of a room in the Holiday Hotel on Walnut Hill where now a storage facility squats, a place on Oakmont on the railroad tracks that made windows and door frames, that job in the short few weeks taught me enough about crackers to not been wrong about them since, Crown Books of course where I met Hamster and then Earthgirl, a photomat in a strip mall in Annapolis when Earthgirl and I lived in Deale

Willy Bayne got me a job at Highs, I made it to second key night manager, without that job I would not got the Crown job and Planet wouldn't exist

Cookie Factory and Alpine Pantry in Lakeforest Mall

The only job I ever quit *not* because fuck this and fuck you the Sorry, you're-soon-to-be-dead building job, I've felt complicit ever since

A Tale of Two Authoritarians
The deep structure of Democratic crisis
Capitalism's perpetual pandemic
Plague fueled by neoliberal austerity
The rotten culture of the rich
Our shitlords' lieutenants
Postcard from Aruba
Fresh Hell				Year's dead
LOW-SKILLED, EASILY REPLACEABLE EMPLOYEES MUST RETURN TO WORK IMMEDIATELY, OTHERWISE OUR SOCIETY WILL COLLAPSE
Globus Hystericus
Avedon Carol's occasional links
Maggie's weekly links
{ feuilleton }'s weekend links
Lots of Fossil Aerosol Mining Project at bandcamp

ODE TO BROWSING THE WEB

Marcus Wicker

Two spiky-haired Russian cats hit kick flips

on a vert ramp. The camera pans to another

pocket of  the room where six kids rocking holey

T-shirts etch aerosol lines on warehouse walls

in words I cannot comprehend. All of this

happening in a time no older than your last

heartbeat. I’ve been told the internet is

an unholy place — an endless intangible

stumbling ground of false deities

dogma and loneliness, sad as a pile of shit

in a world without flies. My loneliness exists

in every afterthought. Yesterday, I watched

a neighbor braid intricate waves of cornrows

into her son’s tiny head and could have lived

in her focus-wrinkled brow for a living. Today

I think I practice the religion of  blinking too much.

Today, I know no neighbor’s name and won’t

know if  I like it or not. O holy streaming screen

of counterculture punks, linger my lit mind

on landing strips — through fog, rain, hail — 

without care for time or density. O world

wide web, o viral video, o god of excrement

thought. Befriend me. Be fucking infectious.

Move my eyes from one sight to the next.