Tuesday, November 1, 2022

The Remnant Industry of a Dying Town's Itself

The three paintings from before the trip to Michigan still have not dried and I don't know the ink will ever dry enough to put on the flat bed of the scanner at work. I didn't type in digital tablet once in Michigan and still have not since home. Most of what I write about in analog tablet the clusterfuck, sentences like this: 

My doubts about the story were (a) how does a gigamillionaire with a cracker price on her head not pay for a security system that would prevent such an attack and (b) that a political party with a desperate need to motivate its base a week before the midterms refuses to kaboom the attack, settling for milquetoast oh mys and (c) I don't think like a cracker so my first thought wasn't Must be a gay thing but (d) once I thought about what the cracker reaction would be I knew it would be a gay thing

and this:

One-third of the country now bibled that Paul Pelosi got into a drunken fight with his a gay lover prostitute regardless the cracker attacker confessed
Elections a week from today. A week from tomorrow not a single Republican will concede defeat (not that many Republicans will be defeated), I write in analog tablet about motherfucking Democrats but am deliberately refraining from, by my standards, motherfucking Democrats you. No I'm not quitting twaater yet though what happens if charged to use I wonder what I'd do, I saw a twaater colleague announce he'd joined an alternative whose name I've forgot. Yes, I've reduced bitching about helmetball at you too. Dug out my chalk and crayons yesterday at the same time I dropped fart as the description in my head for what I'm doing anything anywhere any time, tis shit, digital and analog, I'm in the indulge my clusterfucked obsessions versus pretending I can repress them stage. Robert Pollard born 65 years ago yesterday, this is the greatest 59 second song in human history, fight me





Bible as verb, to bible, been bibled, I'm bibling you
About those brutal loses in your 401K
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
The Nightwatchman's Bludgeon: Fascism at 100
Welcome to the world of the polycrisis
American shitlords will nuke the world before surrendering primacy
Old news: the rest of the world hates America
"I am not a good communist"Who di'n''e?
What happens when you put ideologues in charge of universities?
The most important vote Marylanders will make this year! YES! YES! YES!
Pro golf and polite crackers v Trump crackers
Symmetry rules life on EarthCymru!
Avedon Carol's occasional links
The complexities of eastern Slavic
Maggie's weeklyFRESH HELLThis Michigan trip's weed = Durban Poison, Superboof! and Hans Solo Burger from the awesome Winewood
Progressive Maryland recommends
{ feuilleton }'s weeklyClosing Wisconsin




THE TRUTH ABOUT SMALL TOWNS

David Baker

1. THE TRUTH ABOUT SMALL TOWNS

It never stops raining. The water tower’s tarnished   
as cutlery left damp in the widower’s hutch.

If you walk slow (but don’t stop), you’re not from nearby.   
All you can eat for a buck at the diner is

cream gravy on sourdough, blood sausage, and coffee.   
Never lie. The preacher before this one dropped bombs

in the war and walked with a limp at parade time.   
Until it burned, the old depot was a disco.

A café. A card shoppe. A parts place for combines.   
Randy + Rhonda shows up each spring on the bridge.

If you walk fast you did it. Nothing’s more lonesome   
than money. (Who says shoppe?) It never rains.


2. GRAVEYARD

Heat in the short field and dust scuffed up, glare   
off the guard-tower glass where the three pickets   
lean on their guns. The score is one to one.   
Everybody’s nervous but the inmates,
who joke around—they jostle, they hassle   
the team of boys in trouble and their dads.   
It’s all in sport. The warden is the ump.
The flat bleachers are dotted with guards; no
one can recall the last time they got one   
over the wall. The cons play hard, then lose.   
And the warden springs for drinks all around—
something he calls graveyard, which is five kinds   
of soda pop poured over ice into
each one’s cup, until the cup overflows.


3. COUNCIL MEETING

The latest uproar: to allow Wendy’s
to build another fast-food burger shack
on two acres of wetlands near Raccoon Creek,   
or to permit the conservationist

well-to-do citizenry to keep their green   
space and thus assure long, unsullied views   
from their redwood decks, picture windows,   
and backyards chemically rich as golf greens.

The paper’s rife with spats, accusations,   
pieties both ways. Wendy’s promises   
flowers, jobs. The citizens want this, too,   
but want it five miles away where people

don’t care about egrets, willows, good views.   
Oh, it’s going to be a long night: call   
out for pizza, somebody brew some tea.   
Then we’ll all stand up for what we believe.


4. CHARMING

The remnant industry of a dying town’s itself.
Faux charm, flaked paint, innuendo in a nasal twang.   
Now the hardware store’s got how-to kits to make   
mushrooms out of plywood for the yard,

and the corner grocery’s specialty this week
is mango chutney, good with rabbit, duck, or spread   
for breakfast on a whole-wheat bagel fresh
each morning at the small patisserie across

the way from the red hotel. Which reminds me.   
Legend has it that the five chipped divots   
in the hotel wall—local lime and mortar—
are what remains of the town’s last bad man.

His fiery death’s renowned, but don’t look now   
Someone with a camera’s drawing down on you.

1 comment:

  1. 1/the word polycrisis reminds me of the recently named "word of the year" - according to a washpost story - permacrisis - yesterday was my niece's 26th birthday and i wrote to her Today's cartoon on the editorial page of the Financial Times has the prototypical English couple standing in their living room with a woman visitor - the lady of the house is explaining, "He's hoping the permacrisis won't last forever." My best guess is that it's going to change, but I doubt it will go away completely. Stuff happens, and it's necessary to respond to it as best one can. Enjoy the good parts.

    2/polycrisis also reminds me of the song "It's All Too Much"

    2.5/ the wikipedia article on said song has a sidebar quoting george harrison:

    [A]lthough it has a down side, I see my acid experience more as a blessing because it saved me many years of indifference. It was the awakening and the realisation that the important thing in life is to ask: "Who am I?", "Where am I going?" and "Where have I come from?"

    2.7/To that list of the three questions facing self-aware sentient beings i would only add, what's for lunch?







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