Pants We Call Chaos

• Siegfried has been this shitty blog's and my digital avatar since Blog Day One. Bernie Koppel, Siegfried on Get Smart (and Ann Marie's neighbor Jerry Bauman in That Girl and, unfortunately if more famously, Doc on Love Boat), was born 80 years ago today, his birthday noted every year here. Every eight or nine months I think for a few minutes of changing the avatar, not on the blog, I'm Dan Snyder about the logo on the blog, but perhaps at Twitter or on any of the other blogs I start when I feel like I'm writing cowardly here then abandon when I stop writing cowardly here, but fuck that too.
• Surveillance and blackmail.
• Revolutions happen on Wednesdays.
• Ten rules for recording cops and authority figures.
• A love letter to the NSA agent who is monitoring his online activity.
• Reading Salon makes you a threat.
• The observer, the stone, the stone, the observer, the stone the observer, the observer the stone, the stone the observe the stone, the observer the stone the observer, infinity.
• Sorry for the now deleted oops post of last night, I hadn't blogfarted like that in months, I fully admit I'm a slut but not that much. Great Galaxie 500 song though.
• Don't eat fast food chains for better reasons than your health. Though don't eat fast food chains also for your health.
• More autobiography: Willy Bayne and wife rented a house on Bartonsville Road, we used to park at that parking area on Reels Mill Road in the photo in this story to hike down along Bush Creek to its mouth on the Monocacy to bass fish and party.
• Badiou and Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Moby-Cock, or: The Term Paper.
• On listening to Barber's Adagio for Strings after seeing the first firefly of the summer.
• Jim's latest playlist.
• Chaos is the new calm.
• My sad captains.
• The final morbidity of the interior embezzler.
• This fucking blog, this fucking me.

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD MAN (THE FOUNDRY)

Marvin Bell

1. About the Dead Man and the Foundry

The dead man hath founded the dead man's foundry.
He acted in the past perfect, he funded it with clean dirt, pure water
     and the spotless air.
Then he was melted, he was molded, he was poured and shook out.
He was ground and sanded, he was machined to a sweet tolerance.
The dead man took pains to stay alive, this was how.
It was the undersong of the self, the subtext, the no-man's-land's calling.
For the dead man was subterranean to start.
He was the tuber in the sun, the worm warming, the root that stays put.
The dead man became again what he was, he germinated.
It was the foundry of the sun, the foundry of the earth's core, the foundry
     of the electric light and the dry cell.
It was the retrofit energy that did it, the assemblage after dispersion,
     the kick in the pants we call chaos.
We are the children of a hothouse, among orchids that grow in lava.

2. More About the Dead Man and the Foundry

The foundry of the dead man pops and smolders with re-creation.
It is recreated in the titanic and the miniature, every detail.
Within the dead man, the same fire burns.
The same furnace, the same raw materials that made flesh.
The same red water, the same liquid sinew cooling.
The dead man's foundry has made weapons and ploughshares, and
     those who use them.
The foundry and the forge, the shapes imprisoned in the molten streams
     of rough matter, these are precursors of the human, too.
The steam escaping from a wounded body is the foundry.
The heat of exhalation, the blush of desire, the red sun under the skin—
     they are the foundry.
And the high temperature of the ill, and the heat of the first foundry reassembling
     at its source.
If you believe in the reformation of energy, then you believe as well in the
     dead man.
He is heating up, and what is emotion?