Skyward Like a Lark Saying Fuck to the Whole Brood

So, this will be the last of these for a while here, I think:

• For multiple reasons, some logistical, yes, my studio has been repurposed for teleworking, but mostly I'm so sideways
• - being jailed in my house for 24 hours it takes for a foot of snow to be plowed spins me sideways - 
• the idea of months jailed in house and the thought of the world that will be once I am paroled, I need think and write and type now to process, not splurt, hope this changes
• Tablets open, not very busy. I'm 75 pages from end of current journal tablet and don't have its successor bought yet, I'll order in time that the package can sit on stoop in three day quarantine before opening 
• I've ink enough for years if I use the colors I don't like before ordering more of the colors I like
• As for here 
• - three minutes ago I type this sentence I saw a tweet that Republicans will blame the Democrats' impeachment of Trump for the thousands of death and the end of existence we knew before the plague - 
• I'm too vain and need to maintain contact to quit but I don't know if it's healthy for me to daily document the clusterfuck, though I did today 
• This isn't to say I won't and isn't to say I will, I suspect it will be more normal product than not and not as much or just as much depending on how much I escape from my house

        

• I do know the terms of my teleworking and they blow, and I have it better than Earthgirl who's been told she needs to schedule and Zoom with all 400+ students she sees as an art teacher each week each week starting this week, that's six minutes per student if all she does for her 40 hours is Zoom with students (whose classroom teachers and other specialist teachers need Zoom with too)
• Plague, emergencies, fine metaphors abounding
• Policing and the English language
• On shitlords
• Our shitlords enforcers
• Life During Wartime
• The New Yorker turns on professional Democrats....
• Time to pen and kill poachers and hunters
• Do nothing 
• On John Prine, who I like when I hear but don't put on myself, who is reportedly near death, I know some of you do put him on, often
• I do not know the terms of my imprisonment - I can go to the grocery store, pharmacy, doctors and vet (though my vet comes to us, I wonder); I can deliver items to my father if necessary; I can go for walks but don't know if we can drive to hikes, and don't know if we can go on drives, just the two of us, me gassing the car in my blue rubber gloves...
• I am stupid for Destroyer, have an apocalypse song

THE JAILBIRD

Maurice Riordan

I’ve this gut feeling that inside somewhere,

perched, so to speak, in the innermost wood

of my body or brain, on mute since childhood

a bird-creature lurks in its cramped lair

for when the wood’s consumed, as in a fire,

though also consumed as drinks are or food

(over months or could be years ingesting crude

chemicals, making the sly one ever slyer).

But then crackle ’n pop, it’s all gone for good.

And good riddance, since freed from its bonds

the avian now preens its wings and absconds

from the scene below (that’s me, in my last throes)

skyward like a lark saying fuck to the whole brood

and piping forth some blithe hymn as she goes.

"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers

• I got Doctor Sevrin ears
• Earthgirl made us masks last night
• Reminder mostly to me: be Kind to those whose apostasies are just now starting to catch up to yours, when someone says Maybe you weren't nuts all along, say thank you

• They have been waiting for this
• Viral Inequality
• Circuits of capital
• Cascading Disasters!
• The industrial and neoliberal origins of Covid-19, part whatever
• Communovirus 
• When America's shitlords have lost Foreign Affairs.... 
• Shock Doctrine
• Dreck's in the mail
• The five techniques of science denial
• Probably futile, but why I did not ask for a company laptop
• Maggie's weekly links
• The things that we could not afford to remember in the vernacular
• Ed's Armageddon Lit Bracket
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links
• The last novel. On Coetzee, who I haven't read since Disgrace and always admired more than loved, which seems to be what many say
• Rest in Peace, Krzysztof Penderecki

["HOPE" IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS]

Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

She Makes a Double Life

You probably *do* have 2,740 seconds for the above right now, Robert Ashley born ninety years ago today.

LOTS more HERE! and @ ubuweb's generous Ashley page

Three Write-Ups and I/m Goes to Lockdown

This is true: I've daydreamed a room with four walls a floor a ceiling six by six by six with light bulbs spaced five by five each wall, the ceiling, the floor, with a 150 light bulbs sunning 150 self-portraits, this works if ink's wet, watercolors' wet, paper's wet, wet work, I'm not investigating the costs and logistics of installation, fine metaphors abound

• The ideology of inequality
• Triangle ruler, it's love
• A warning from history about simultaneous disasters
• H/T and thanks to Charlie for this list of pandemic care resources
• A friend tells me her husband (is spook-sssh) told her every world class hacker wants to win the Crash America's Power Grid During a Pandemic Game so buy food you don't need refrigerate and especially food you don't need cook to eat just in case, says there is mighty profit to winner though legendary status is what all hackers seek, and profit
• War Capitalism
• *This* motherfucking Democrat: on Schumer
• The War on Death
• The vowels of another language
• In exchange for your chump change check you will lose your Social Security in 2021 
• If you don't think our shitlords aren't delighted Trump's your lightening rod I've got some tissues I've sneezed on for sale.
• An argument that Trump's usefulness to our shitlords is running out
• Consequences
• The plots against America
• Planet sent me this toolkit to help w plague anxiety 
• On Lance Olsen
• Thanks for Kind words of late 
• Songs for Insane Times

ONE BIG SELF

C.D. Wright

Count heads. Count the men's. Count the women's. There are five

main counts in the cell or work area. 4:45 first morning count. Inmate

must stand for the count. The count takes as long as it takes. Control

Center knows how many should be in what area. No one moves from area

A to area B without Control knowing. If i/m is stuck out for the count i/m

receives a write-up. Three write-ups, and i/m goes to lockdown. Once

                                 in lockdown, you will relinquish your things:

​                         plastic soapdish, jar of vaseline, comb or hairpick, paperback

​                                 Upon return to your unit the inventory officer

                         will return your things:

​                                 soapdish, vaseline, comb, hairpick, paperback

​                                 Upon release you may have your possessions:

​                                 soapdish, vaseline, comb, pick, book

​                         Whereupon your True Happiness can begin

In the Mansion of Happiness:

Whoever possesses CRUELTY

Must be sent back to JUSTICE

Whoever gets into IDLENESS

Must come to POVERTY

Whoever becomes a SABBATHBREAKER

Must be taken to the Pillory and there remain until he loses 2 turns

Get That Dog Off the Street

• Previously posted flag as self-portrait with lamp, sideways
• Hiked a loop of Catoctin in the Frederick Watershed past Sunday, more people in the woods in one day than we saw in woods the last year
• I automatically did the Hi! Doggo as dogs approached but disappointed them by not touching them so their people needn't bathe them in hand sanitizer when they got home

• We're at The Intercept begging for savior Pence stage
• If Trump threatened our shitlords' shitloads wouldn't our shitlords dump Trump?
• Our shitlords *want* you sideways at Trump, want you sideways at motherfucking Democrats, not sideways at them
• Our shitlords are NOT going to give up their seventh yacht to save your valueless ass
• Plague Spring Journal 3
• What does it mean to transmit the idea of a virus? 
• I need to detox from seething, what that means for this blog for two months or longer of lockdown and all that follows I guess I'll find out

DEMOCRACY

Dorianne Laux

When you’re cold—November, the streets icy and everyone you pass

homeless, Goodwill coats and Hefty bags torn up to make ponchos—

someone is always at the pay phone, hunched over the receiver

spewing winter’s germs, swollen lipped, face chapped, making the last

tired connection of the day. You keep walking to keep the cold

at bay, too cold to wait for the bus, too depressing the thought

of entering that blue light, the chilled eyes watching you decide

which seat to take: the man with one leg, his crutches bumping

the smudged window glass, the woman with her purse clutched

to her breasts like a dead child, the boy, pimpled, morose, his head

shorn, a swastika carved into the stubble, staring you down.

So you walk into the cold you know: the wind, indifferent blade,

familiar, the gold leaves heaped along the gutters. You have

a home, a house with gas heat, a toilet that flushes. You have

a credit card, cash. You could take a taxi if one would show up.

You can feel it now: why people become Republicans: Get that dog

off the street. Remove that spit and graffiti. Arrest those people huddled

on the steps of the church. If it weren’t for them you could believe in god,

in freedom, the bus would appear and open its doors, the driver dressed

in his tan uniform, pants legs creased, dapper hat: Hello Miss, watch

your step now. But you’re not a Republican. You’re only tired, hungry,

you want out of the cold. So you give up, walk back, step into line behind

the grubby vet who hides a bag of wine under his pea coat, holds out

his grimy 85 cents, takes each step slow as he pleases, releases his coins

into the box and waits as they chink down the chute, stakes out a seat

in the back and eases his body into the stained vinyl to dream

as the chips of shrapnel in his knee warm up and his good leg

flops into the aisle. And you’ll doze off, too, in a while, next to the girl

who can’t sit still, who listens to her Walkman and taps her boots

to a rhythm you can’t hear, but you can see it—when she bops

her head and her hands do a jive in the air—you can feel it

as the bus rolls on, stopping at each red light in a long wheeze,

jerking and idling, rumbling up and lurching off again.

We Could Not Count All the Miscarriages

• My parents did not give *me* a dumpster fire with plague for *my* twenty-seventh birthday (see yesterday's post)
• I'm sideways, and the kayfabe breakage hasn't *even* started yet (though I guarantee our sociopath shitlords' greatest hired brains are focused more on reestablishing kayfabe after its breakage ends than mitigating the damage the breakage causes)
• (here's one idea put into an asshole's mouth)(also too)(also too)
• Another new flag

• I'm sideways, I know I always hector and hector more and more loudly and meaner when sideways, it's how I slough off bwrtz and I'm sideways now with bwrtz, the least I can try to do, mostly for me but also for you, is not lecture the hector, so I spare both you and me another recitation of Jeff's History of Apostasies even in this time of fine monstrous metaphors abounding in the great kayfabe breakage of 2020
• UPDATE! Funeral rites
• UPDATE! Disappearing Biden
• And yet, today in my county
• Precautionary tales
• The plague is US
• Age of Surveillance Capitalism, he types into his free google blogging platform
• Maggie's weekly links
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links
• A History of Solitude. A Biography of Loneliness
• Animal Collective's Merriwether Post released ten years ago, I listened the fuck out of this album when released but then it just disappeared from head I was disconcerted to discover when I heard a cut a few weeks ago
• I thought to post a song from it but after listening to several last night, no

THE COMING OF THE PLAGUE

Weldon Kees

September was when it began.
Locusts dying in the fields; our dogs
Silent, moving like shadows on the wall;
And strange worms crawling; flies of a kind
We had never seen before; huge vineyard moths;
Badgers and snakes, abandoning
Their holes in the fields; the fruit gone rotten;
Queer fungi sprouting; the woods
Covered with spiderwebs; black vapors
Rising from the earth - all these
And more, began that fall. Ravens flew around
The hospital in pairs. Where there was water,
We could hear the sound of beating clothes
All through the night. We could not count 
All the miscarriages, the quarrels, the jealousies.
And one day in a field I saw
A swarm of frogs, swollen and hideous,
Hundreds upon hundreds, sitting on each other,
Huddled together, silent, ominous,
And heard the sound of rushing wind.