That's old, I had cause to think of it. First time I've typed in digital tablet since May 23. I wrote in analog tablet every day since May 23. Here's creepy: between May 23 and June 7 Evernote added a new feature, AI Cleanup. I don't have a hot take on AI and sense I'm not freaked out enough yet and I'm OK with that, I'm fat from the freak out buffet I already wolf down daily. I think it probably a blessing I don't have the scifi gene. I'm a third into Lord Jim and a fourth into Idiot and can't remember the next day what I read the day before, I've never needed bookmarks more than now, I could read the same chapter four days in a row, unaware then dimly aware then you dumbfuck aware. AI. Some day I won't need to tell you three times we are being reprogrammed, we'll talk about something else waiting our turn to be fresh meat ground in an abattoir
As I type this New Yorkers advised to not go outside and if they must wear a mask because of Canadian wildfires' smoke, in DC it's the brightest foggy day I've ever seen. Polar icepacks are melting. Did you know that the day I typed this the heat index in parts of Puerto Rico was 125 degrees fahrenheit? Remember how once upon by June 1st yards twinkled with fireflies? Where I live as I type this is six inches short of rain for the year, a friend and colleague who's a rabid gardener and brings me her just-off-the-vine tomatoes I eat, juice running down my chin, like apples, tells me local apple crops two weeks to shittier quality and six weeks to failure without multiple days of saturating rain. The bad El Niño predicted for this Summer hasn't started yet and is predicted to be worse in 2024. Enjoy this Summer. If you make it to next Summer next Summer is gonna suck. Reminder: AI funded by shitlords who never want to talk to much less encounter in any fashion any fucking not-dead-yet peasant again
Two above new PJ Harvey songs off an album out in August. Been thinking about musicians and bands and authors and poets I once liked, loved, revered. Who aged first, me or he/she/they/them? Who broke it off most, that most important +.0001st of every relationship? Exhibit One: Talking Heads. Is it me tiring of the music, another I don't ever need to hear any Beatles songs EVER AGAIN except George's *Northern Song* (and even that not so much now) and *All Too Much* or learning (or more accurately confirming what I suspected) that Bryne an ick human? Anyway, I've always, still do, and hope to always love PJ Harvey though why she drops off my radar now and then solely my what the fuck was I talking about, the two songs above new, and two earlier Polly Jean below and yowza. Maybe I should type in digital table more, maybe I shouldn't, and copy/pasting from evernote to blooger every fart the fucking hassle I deserve
Unlike dogs, our feline friends are barely different from their wild ancestors
The expected dismissal and derision was strongest in my tesla timeline not from professional Democrats, a few bothered, but from professional philosophers with academic scaffolding and wrap-up PhD thesis soon-to-be-adjunct faculty wage slaves, as I should have bet you infinite digital pints it'd be
Four decades ago a new Peter Gabriel album would be cause for celebration but then he put out So and I said goodbye (the current bald man face-mullet doesn't effect the music but please)
"Close Readings” of New York School Poets — Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch (and Much More)
*
Miriam Bird Greenberg
Whole towns like • horses turnt loose in the bardo of •
Maybe me and my ennui with me and ennui with me versus the clusterfuck, but it seems to me we tribal anger addicts are being fed less mwork since the limp season finale of Debt Ceiling Doomsday. Summer, yes, and the last summer before next summer which will suck, psyops-wise, I vouch only for me. Here's the latest on my left eye
Even top shitlord psyop idiot savants (and the coding idiot savants that deposit in your eager ear our shitlord psyop idiot savants' daily doses) need vacations too (and not depositing daily doses a daily dose unto itself, yo), why not vacation in June 2023, they'll be busy June 2024. Summer 2024, you think you are being reprogrammed now, wait till next summer, I am telling you three times next summer is gonna suck. Here's the latest on my right eye
Yes, I've been lazy, you haven't noticed but the blogrolls need weeding and the dead or just slumbering need dug out of active rolls and buried in dead rolls, I'll get to it or not, this is both an appealing and frightening development in my damn. Meanwhile, directly below: my review (and current state of my head, I'm happy, it's fantastic and appalling) of the new Pere Ubu album, the funnest, brightest, ubuiest Pere Ubu album since 2013's *Lady from Shanghai,* go bandcamp it now
L found five must paint sites in Allegeny and Garrett Counties for her week-long plein air competition: the overlook top of Town Hill on Scenic 40 near Flintstone, an abandoned silk factory in Lonaconing, an abandoned paper mill in Luke, along the Savage River near Avinton and, because I made a wrong turn and accidentally turned around there, at the ridge line of Big Savage Mountain, windmills, giant, up close.
West Augusta be beautiful. Cumberland is shriekingly ghost town gorgeous. Freaking goth gorgeous. Effing Depression gorgeous. The house L will stay in, amazing, we could buy two and a half of them there selling our Cape Cod here, lordy. Sunday's blaze, Long Pond Trail, Green Ridge State Forest:
No report from the breakfast lounge of the Frostburg Quality Inn, I'd forgot how much I hate staying in hotels, we Maine and Michigan in houses, today in my complicity. Besides the orange blazed trail, we hiked trails blazed sky blue, blue blue, white, and red. I fill with as much spiritual wonder over tree blazes as I do over road route signage, old-timers here can vouch. Hey, I seem to be able to write again but all I want to write about is my painting, so no surprise that I paint blazes, I just typed the abridged version why
Fifty years have passed since I started living in these dark towns I was telling you about. Well, not much has changed. I still can't figure out how to get from the post office to the swings in the park. Apple trees blossom in the cold, not from conviction, and my hair is the color of dandelion fluff.
Suppose this poem were about you - would you put in the things I've carefully left out: descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily people behave toward each other? Naw, that's all in some book it seems. For you I've saved the descriptions of chicken sandwiches, and the glass eye that stares at me in amazement from the bronze mantel, and will never be appeased.
Monday past I wondered what will kill me first: nuclear incineration, death by cracker, death by cop/military (who is just a cracker in an official uniform (as compared to vigilante crackers cosplaying as cops in camo)), death by a schizophrenic's AR-15, or death by natural (and human-aided) disaster, and again reminded myself it's me who makes myself sideways, as kneejerk and spastic as when I sing out loud the famous "But you blew my mind" line everytime I hear Roxy's *In Every Dreamhome, A Heartache:* my devout faith in metaphors based solely on my owning the single worst singing voice in human history, L can vouch I both sing the line and that my voice horrifies
We drive to Allegheny and Garrett counties tomorrow. the two most western counties of Augusta, the cracker counties that want to secede from Maryland, whose economic driver are the multiple Maryland state prisons filled with inmates from Baltimore City and Baltimore County (inner suburbs), northern Anne Arundel and Prince Georges and Montgomery (east of Georgia Avenue and south of Randolph Road), the feeder counties *not* joining Augusta. L is one of 30 people out of 2500 that applied for big plein air event based in Cumberland that got invited, she's thrilled.We will be driving through Westernport and Luke, Oakland and Accident and Friendsville and Frostburg and Grantsville and Cumberland - Cumberland is freaking beautiful. We're taking the long weekend to scout out where and what she wants to paint and hike new trails. There may be a report (with photos) of what we saw posted from the breakfast lounge of a mid-range hotel for the first time in a long while
After Monday's what-will-kill-me meditation I bought concentric metal cookee cutters so I can paint circles from inside as well as outside, best anti-sideways plan since he last until the next needed sniper nest, so yes, no links today and yes, my ferris wheel's gondola almost topping where boys' just-dropping balls squeal delicious uh-oh, wait, this is odd, there's a new Guided by Voices song?
CANTATA
Jack Spicer
Ridiculous How the space between three violins Can threaten all of our poetry. We bunch together like Cub Scouts at a picnic. There is a high scream. Rain threatens. That moment of terror. Strange how all our beliefs Disappear.
That's my right eye. My congressman in Maryland, who cosplays as a progressive, yesterday tweeted out, playing his role in this shitlord kabuki, in support of Biden invoking the 14th Amendment to defeat maga efforts to gut social programs via extorting concessions from Biden re: debt ceiling, and I retweeted, adding, "primary Biden or shut the fuck up, poseur," which advice I'm sure he'll take and declare tomorrow just after voting to send another trillion dollars to war profiteers via Laundromat Ukraine (which he digs - to be fair, all Maryland elected officials, by coincidence and consequence of location, never turn a military dime down).
I was being sarcastic, of course: there would be not change at the top if Raskin was potus. and Raskin's is too far up the colon of the Democratic Party's ladder match (he wants to be Speaker, it's the deal he made with MFDMHQ (who will never make him Speaker), bet you a digital pint he doesn't run for Cardin's senate seat) to be anything but a House shitlord tick. This is my left eye
Step 1 is learning that minds are very hackable, and are being hacked constantly at mass scale.
If only someone had been yodeling constantly and annoyingly for seemingly decades that he was telling you three times we are being reprogrammed
Media And Politicians Throw So Much Bullshit At Us That It Is Difficult To See Through It
"After two-plus years of “Joe Biden” — well, our country is bypassing the banana republic stage of dissolution and depravity and steaming quickly into a Hieronymus Bosch dystopia of financial, social, psychological and moral ruin. Every official utterance is a lie. Everything’s broken or breaking. And seemingly, on-purpose. The nagging question, of course, is on whose purposes?"