I've reached the age of needing grandpa strings for my glasses. I can't read anything within my arms' reach while wearing my glasses so I can go hours without wearing them, and if I took them off then moved from where I started reading it often takes me five blind minutes to find them. This getting old shit. Fine metaphors abound. Here's my right eye
Reading is physically harder now that my left eye can barely see through glaucoma's fog: three weeks from today it will have knives jabbed into it to try and dissipate some of the fog then stop fog's counterattack (plus eyedoc will yoink-out the old windshield and install a new one). Insurance will cover all but the deductible says eyedoc's office manager. Takes ten minutes and I'll feel zero nada no pain, says eyedoc. We'll, um, see.
But I read fine, as in I can pick up a book and see and read the text in it, engage with it. I'm reading well, as in I'm enjoying reading and retaining and thinking about what I've just read. The issue, after six decades of reading: I can't finish a novel. I set a pace that matches my interest and enjoy processing what I've read and am eager to pick it up again when I next have a minute's chance, and then I'll end a chapter or turn a page and of a sudden, SCREECH! I not only don't want to read the book in that moment, I don't to read it, viscerally, since: as I type this sentence I can't imagine me finishing any of the novels. Fine metaphors abound. Here's my left eye
It doesn't seem connected to any particular catalyst or spastic reaction to that particular day's most clussterfuckic obscenity, though no doubt Cumulative Clusterfuckic Trauma accounts for part, and that's the true clusterfuckic obscenity. And it's not just reading: I mentioned here before how certain musicians and bands that once got constant playtime in my ears and head I viscerally don't want to listen to in my ears and, especially, in my head right now. Two poets (not Ashbery, though I say something catty about *Breezeway* at the bottom of the grid below). One restaurant. A certain road in Michigan (Waterloo-Munith), the fuck did that road do to me. My home disc golf course, the one with the sign on 22 that says it is sponsored by me and Seat Six. But every novel the current ongoing eternity. I was 7/8ths through loving Faulkner's *The Hamlet* yesterday when SCREECH! BURN! Fine metaphors abound. Terry Hall would have been 67 today, this is one of my dozen favorite songs ever, still!
A friend and mentor for years has urged Denis Johnson's *Tree of Smoke* upon me, someone had returned it to the Library, it was on a cart today, I grabbed it, by the second page some asshole, possibly if not presumably the main character, an American soldier in a Vietnamese jungle, shoots a monkey for the fuck of it and starts watching it die, and SCREECH! BANG! I ain't reading this fucking novel
"Confiscate 99.8% of Andreesen’s net worth for the public good, wait 20 minutes, and then tell him his memory of ever having more than $4 million is false"
It is difficult to seperate the tapestry from the room or loom which takes precedence over it. For it must always be frontal yet to one side.
It insists on this picture of "history" in the making, because there is no way out of the punishment it proposes: sight blinded by sunlight. The seeing taken in with what is seen in an explosion of sudden awareness of its formal splendor.
The eyesight, seen as inner, registers over the impact of itself receiving phenomena, and in so doing draws an outline, or a blueprint, of what was just there: dead on the line.
If it has the form of a blanket, that is because we are eager, all the same, to be wound in it: This must be the good of not experiencing it.
But in some other life, which the blanket depicts anyway, the citizens hold sweet commerce with one another and pinch the fruit unpestered, as they will, and words go crying after themselves, leaving the dream upended in a puddle somewhere as though "dead" were just another adjective.
I won't apologize for my constant dooming though I concede it is relentless and accusatory at you and medicinal and poisonous to me, an essential component of my mithridatism; it is as necessary to me as it is a self-defeating lifesaving self-perpetuating motion loop. I would need to truly want it to stop before I could truly try to stop and I can't want it to stop when I think everything will ever and always get worse in the shitlordocene Obligatory and over-used gag: when my daughter is my age it will be 2059 (the year of my centenary), the Earth will still be here (I won't), will the world? Doomy too if not doomier than me, she trys to not wallow in it like me, I envy her attempts, they are as genuine as mine wouldn't be. I do understand my wallowing is a choice that I tell myself is a moral imperative. Call it boomer guilt, call it parental concern, call it self-indulgent attention sluttery, call it getting old and foreseeing my physical future (some oldsters here may remember long ago when I regularaly likened my lifespan to America's timeline to Slothrop's missiles - still true). Forgive me, the doom will continue until it won't and it won't ever won't, we're still in doom, see inklings of doomier, have no idea how doomiest it's gonna get, only know that it will. Hear, this makes me happy though it doesn't give me hope
Respectfully, eat shit. Those kids were expelled, arrested, and targeted relentlessly by their school administrations with the specific goal of preventing further protest. Eighteen year old kids were held down and maced by campus security, hit point blank with tear gas canisters by riot cops"
"The Orientalism is so strong with these smug chodes that they really believed Iran would just roll over and surrender. Assholes and idiots running the joint"
I'm disturbed I'm not more disturbed by my descent (or ascent) into the non-verbal, it's speeding up, both my descent (or ascent) and my being disturbed I'm not more disturbed. Life in a world without kayfabe where kayfabe is constantly broadcast, winkless, constantly understood as breaking itself, it makes me write horrible sentences like the first two in this paragraph. Here, let me put it this way:
This is a blog which exists to talk to itself, to me, and is worth no more than any vanity project, including art created in lieu of verbalizing the thought. I'm disturbed I'm not more disturbed by my dwindling interest in monologues here while quickly acknowledging that this joint still vitally assists me processing life in a dangerous and weirdass world without kayfabe where kayfabe is constantly broadcast, winkless, and constantly understood as breaking itself in the act of reestablishing itself, hence the sanity-salving side-effects of the grids, the (other people's) poems, the music, but barking as if there is kayfabe that needs breaking? Getting if not gotten old. What I mean to say is
This the eleventh attempt at a monologue for this post, since I no longer write in my paper tablets, since I no longer type in my digital tablet, since I only type here and delete the proceeding draft when starting the next, what existed in the first ten attempts are archived in my increasingly non-verbal brain and may or not appear on this page in the future in their original form and may arise not from memory but as new thoughts, a good (or bad) thing: I'm disturbed I'm not more disturbed by such content for disorder and chaos. Here, last and bottom third of the self-portrait posted as alternative monologue to this post's typed monologue, you didn't go look at it when I posted a link to it in the last post
People I work with at both GW and American (especially) tell me trustworthy bosses up their chain of command are advising they look where to jump before the imminent push is delivered
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