Have You Forgotten What We Were Like Then When We Were Still First Rate

Only two tablets now, both living, every other finished journal of my life I had not yet destroyed now disappeared, pages ripped from covers and fed into Iron Mountain locked shredding bins, I couldn't get them back if I wanted, and here's the thing: not one twinge of seller's regret. The living are dead as soon as last line filled, I've their replacements already though only one past half. I still make these



and don't see or want that stopping though I can now start *their* imminent shredding starting with, fine metaphor abounding, the weakest, most disposable, I mean, what the fuck am I going to do with boxes of these, shred NOW! before I'm shipped to my new permanent *AND* temporary home in El Salvador than make my survivors have to throw them out (and be forced to look at them), vital reminder:





Been a few years since posted that, it makes me uncynically happy, few things do these days. Going to Michigan Monday to visit our daughter and son-in-law is another, as always there are no plans to post and no plans to not post. I've long been told to avoid eye contact with white men in asshole pick-up trucks and white women in Jeeps driving batshit crazy, word yo, hoping for no cracker-encounters, but... hey! did I play this Lambchop song here recently, doesn't matter, I guarantee Lambchop will be played in the car to Michigan, around Michigan, then home to Maryland

Do you know there are people who don't get what's going on and why?
Ferengitriskelionocracy							< thought of that night before last
"It’s really strange how Trump figured out that Executive Orders are basically “longer tweets that drive giant media attention” and the media hasn’t figured it’s being played each time they report on these as if it’s Moses coming down the Mount with stone tablets"
⬆	Counterpoint - yes the media has, and it slavishly loves it						⬆
no longer effectuates agency priorities
"Preserve this video of street-boy demeanor Trump Regime arrogance. It can be interpreted as an indeed creative declaration of war on Denmark/Greenland"
Snatching people off the street because of their opinion in Magamerica
ICE Makes Another Student Disappear
Snatching people off the street because they are union organizers
"the funniest part of this era is that they’re disappearing people and plenty of folks are like “this is almost the end of democracy” like you need to collect all the McDonalds Monopoly pieces for it to count"
Another student disappeared by *CE, this time at the University of Alabama
"This is how the Gestapo will come for you, wearing hoodies and casually ganging up on a lone woman in the street"
Georgia Woman Arrested After Disposing of Miscarriage
Eff be eye be Hitlordsay opcays
Is today's monologue > a rhetorical question? >	How the fuck did hitlordsay not occur to me until (citizens are being snatched off the street, yo) yesterday?
Reminder: one primary purpose of snatching people off the street in the open when phones are recording is to create a honeypot for the Gestapo of people who scream in anger as much if not more than feeding the ravenous magaturds the fofa they crave							⬆
"From vandalizing Teslas = terrorism to talking about Teslas = terrorism"
Israel is the template for Trump and Europe’s war on freedom
"It's hard to overstate how much contemporary evangelicalism has broken the brains of American conservatives, an ideology that allows you be ontologically righteous with no actual demands on you so long as you are a considered "a good Christian""
The Shooting of Gaza’s Children
"There’s something so uniquely American about the first major scandal of this administration being the improper process in which people were discussing the war crimes they were committing and not the war crimes themselves"
Democrats Rage Over Yemen Strike Leak, But Not at the Strike Itself
"Both Obama and Biden bombed Yemen (and helped Prince Bone-Saw bomb it), slaughtering masses of innocent people. So why would the Democrats be upset about the bombing and slaughtering itself?"
Selling war where it counts, in DC metros and buses
Which US puppet will lead Lebanon's financial reconstruction?
Deconstructing the new American oligarchy
Trump is tearing it all down—and weirdly, that might be the best shot we’ve had in decades
⬆	"The real scandal isn’t that Trump is wrecking the government. It’s that these institutions were already rotting from within—and Democrats like Schumer and Gillibrand were pretending it worked while defending the status quo behind the scenes. You’ve got Ruben Gallego out in Arizona holding $5,000-a-plate fundraisers while Bernie and AOC are packing arenas in the same state. No more hiding. No more pretending. The masks are off. Now we know who’s fighting for people—and who’s just trying to manage our decline"						⬆
⬆	There is not going to be an election in 2028						⬆
MOTHERFUCKING DEMOCRATS ARE THE ENEMY!
⬆	"I cannot overstate how significant this is - while the national media is focused on the D.C. drama, a group of Democrats off the radar in a tiny state just radically shifted more power to the planet's largest corporations via world-changing legislation"						⬇
The Existential Threat of Ultra-Billionaires
"I keep saying this but the reason members of congress want to stay in office until they die is they can't buy that kind of elder care anywhere else, even if they are rich"
You, dear civil servants, are the canaries in the coal mine
"posting "these aren't very bright guys and things got out of hand" again isn't really doing much besides underlining how humiliating it is to lose every battle to clumsy idiots"
Democrats attempted programmatic post-neoliberalism inside a party that neoliberalism had hollowed out
Neoliberalism and Its Hegemonic Crisis
The difference between Democrats and their base and Republicans and their base
Bernie and AOC sheepdog for the Democrats
WHY THE WEASEL TESTICLES?
William T. Vollmann's Battle to Publish an American Epic
On Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s prescient novel *American Abductions*
One year from yesterday will be Frank O'Hara's centennial
Robert Ashley born 85 years ago today, much more music HERE

ANIMALS

Frank O'Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

I Am Unable to Understand the Forms of My Vanity

While fume-laughing and laugh-fuming yesterday at crackers blaming the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse on Baltimore's n****r mayor I got the wonderful news that Joe Lieberman now dead dead dead, what a shitsmear this jowly motherfucker was. Not in the competition for Lead Actor in My Apostasies Feeding My I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats. movie (the Clintons second and third, Obama gets the Oscar), Lieberman the clear leader for Best Supporting Asshole and perennial contender for Who Would I Hit in the Head with a Garden Shovel If I Only Get One Swing. My hate is visceral and true: Roast in Piss, you walking but now fallen turd





My ecstasy at Lieberman's DEATH! DEATH! DEATH! bolstered by news that local DC shitlord Wizard Capital and Virginia's probably genuinely cracker but definitely performative cracker governor give up trying to spend Virginia tax-payer money for a new arena which no one who lives near where it would have been wanted, gave up! (crackers complaining about the n****r state senator from Portsmouth who blocked it), but the rush of joy at the combined news dissipated by this morning, the clusterfuck proceeds apace - Larry David, responsible for the atrocity called Seinfeld, I'm told, who, I'm told, is a cranky anti-social white guy, has disappointed his cranky cracker white guy fans by bad-mouthing President Diaper, calling him a baby, a sociopath, so whatever show Larry David now has, if he has one, banned from all big-screens anchored to the wall between two antlered dear heads in wainscotted cracker rec rooms, while tonight, at Madison Square Garden, the Clintons and Obama gather with the shitlords charged with funding Motherfucking Professional Democrats to raise millions for Joe Biden who, remember this? most people don't, it's so yesterday, is genociding Palestinians. Taking my medicine = Robert Ashley born 94 years ago today

People ask me, just who are these shitlords you won't shut the fuck up about, read about this guy
People ask me, just who are these shitlords you won't shut the fuck up about, read about this guy
Shitlords want Trump, episode infinity
Toward an Intellectual History of Genocide in Gaza
Israeli propagandist behind Hamas ‘mass rape’ narrative exposed as grifter, fraud
Imagine If Russia Or China Did The Things Israel Is Doing In Gaza
Deterrence by strategy?					Job of consent
Fine metaphors abound: Kamala Harris Accidentally Claps to Song Protesting Her Visit
12 Things He Learned from René Girard
"The elite layer of US media is just an upper-class cronyism network"
Companies Spent Decades Hiding Health Risks Tied to Gas Stoves
Today in Motherfucking Democrats
⇧	Adding, "Israel is not nearly as sloppily barbaric as we are" isn't the win this fuckstick thinks it is						⇧
Biden’s budget fuels war machine: 68% for military and police
Today in Motherfucking Democrats
Today in Motherfucking Democrats
⇧	Biden Cozies Up to the World’s Worst Dictator						⇧
The Lessons Of Jesus (Or “Why Conservatives Hate Francis”)
Global Warming Is Slowing the Earth’s Rotation
The Project Censored Newsletter- March 2024
What is it like to be manic?
Style As Survival: On Writing After Death
Rest in Peace, Richard Serra, Moco, Nova, and DC friends, you can see three giant Serra installations at Glenstone off Glen Road in Travilah (also too: Serra's verbs)
RIP Richard Serra				RIP Richard Serra
Anyone who does not choose Neil Young/Sonic Youth is a dope. Anyone who chooses Sting should be shot in both kneecaps and left to bleed to death
Yesterday Frank O’Hara’s (Real) Birthday — But Not the Day He Thought Was His Birthday [again]
On the Threshold: on Wayne Koestenbaum
In Conversation with Kate Pierson of The B-52’s and Pylon’s Vanessa Briscoe Hay
Gastr del Sol Announce First Album in 26 Years!

TO THE HARBORMASTER

Frank O'Hara

I wanted to be sure to reach you;

though my ship was on the way it got caught   

in some moorings. I am always tying up   

and then deciding to depart. In storms and   

at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide   

around my fathomless arms, I am unable   

to understand the forms of my vanity   

or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder   

in my hand and the sun sinking. To   

you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage   

of my will. The terrible channels where   

the wind drives me against the brown lips   

of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet   

I trust the sanity of my vessel; and   

if it sinks, it may well be in answer   

to the reasoning of the eternal voices,

the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

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

You Are a Euthanasia Beyond My Miasma

Jess, in a bag last night, older by three years than fifteen year old (we think) Fleabus, shrinking, screeching, dying, bag-bound, 2019's fine shitty metaphors abounding the finest shittiest metaphors abounding ever, as are 2019's shitty self-portraits

• Necessary anger: The mistake the left always, always makes is to believe that given possession of all the facts, people will behave rationally and in their own self-interest... But the reality is that while Corbyn and Labour won all the arguments, they still lost the election. Because at the end of the day, enough people were fed up with being asked to be reasonable and decent and tolerant and to trust that a better society was possible. Enough people didn’t actually want to live in a country where immigrants and people of color and Jews and Muslims and gays and lesbians are equal to them, because in their secret hearts they don’t want to be told that those people are their equals.
• Europe and the class divide
• Biosphere collapse
• Trump forever
• Impeachment = Trump forever
• Our sociopath overlords
• Crumbling America
• TFIC = The fuckers in charge
• This is how a society dies
• Exhaust all poison
• Who reads this stuff anyway?
• Whenever fine shitty metaphors abound send me sideways a Robert Ashley piece starts in my head, some of my self-medicating is/was dangerous, some of my self-medicating actually helps

ANY LIT

Harryette Mullen

You are a ukulele beyond my microphone

You are a Yukon beyond my Micronesia

You are a union beyond my meiosis

You are a unicycle beyond my migration

You are a universe beyond my mitochondria

You are a Eucharist beyond my Miles Davis

You are a euphony beyond my myocardiogram

You are a unicorn beyond my Minotaur

You are a eureka beyond my maitai

You are a Yuletide beyond my minesweeper

You are a euphemism beyond my myna bird

You are a unit beyond my mileage

You are a Yugoslavia beyond my mind’s eye

You are a yoo-hoo beyond my minor key

You are a Euripides beyond my mime troupe

You are a Utah beyond my microcosm

You are a Uranus beyond my Miami

You are a youth beyond my mylar

You are a euphoria beyond my myalgia

You are a Ukranian beyond my Maimonides

You are a Euclid beyond my miter box

You are a Univac beyond my minus sign

You are a Eurydice beyond my maestro

You are a eugenics beyond my Mayan

You are a U-boat beyond my mind control

You are a euthanasia beyond my miasma

You are a urethra beyond my Mysore

You are a Euterpe beyond my Mighty Sparrow

You are a ubiquity beyond my minority

You are a eunuch beyond my migraine

You are a Eurodollar beyond my miserliness

You are a urinal beyond my Midol

You are a uselessness beyond my myopia

inked with the skulls of everyone you've ever loved

• Bigger than dime, quarter-sized, I'm told the blue will noxzema bottle bluer as it heals
• Hurt exactly like I thought it would, that is the pain - not bad, not fun - felt like I thought this pain would feel, and is over the second the needle stops
• We both think there will be more in our futures
• I'm thinking of getting BLCKDGRD in an arc across my shoulders like the last name on a baseball uniform, I said
• the one who didn't get a tattoo groaned no
• the one who got a tattoo too knew I kid
• both of the letters not me in above can vouch
• Please note the Fleabus hair already on skin
• Robert Ashley, MSADI5G, born 89 years ago today

TATTOO

Nick Laird

You do know, right,
that between the no-

longer & the still-
to-come

you are being continually
tattooed, inked

with the skulls of
everyone

you’ve ever loved—the you
& the you

& the you & the you—you don’t
sit in a chair, thumb

through a binder, pick a
design, it simply

happens each time you
bring your fingers to your face

to inhale him back into you . . .
tiny skulls, some of us are

covered. You, love, could

simply tattoo an open
door, light

pouring in from somewhere
outside, you

could make your body a door
so it appears you

(let her fill you) are made
of light.

He Was a Visitor, or: Born Eighty-Eight Years Ago Today

                           

• Robert Ashley. LOTS MORE.
• Managing the Amazon Rain Forest before Europeans.
• displacement / company it kept
• A far more civil than me though close to my take on the Gun Marches.
• Popovich mouths off!
• I am telling you three times humans will be the death of our species, soon.
• Ashley's Ubuweb page.
• Joan Murray?
• Among many other important things.
• Frances on Indigenous States, Native theater in the US. This too!
• Tuition limit and dying universities.
• Alternatives to facebook/twitter?
• Beloved Potomac River healthier!
• Paul the Pig puts away his toys. Stop eating meat.
• The Vehicle and the Tenor.

         




ARE LOYAL

Alice Notley

Okay part of it’s

here. See it,

           

I want you to see my brother, dead smiling

in a red short-sleeved shirt,

You look so much better

I got through.

  How does time work for you?

             

I can see where — when — I felt bad.

Goes past. I’m not in it any more

But this change hasn’t happened in time — a kind of

before and after but no ... continuum.

You look brilliant! I

never let you down — he says — did I?

It wasn’t possible,          Why not?

Sisters and brothers are loyal,

   

we are the primal particles.

I saw how we connected to make a shape

in the eyes of the beholder who chose it: But we

are not that. What I see is free to change its outline.

My story: the shadow of one. Why did I

shrink into a story? It’s easier to talk

as a person, but why? I guess we decided to, talking.

Coyote throws the stars up into the sky.

    

Born Eighty-Seven Years Ago Yesterday

 
I didn't forget. Lots more HERE.

Ubuweb's Ashley page.

Opaque Cyber-Surveillance

Left to right, Rosie, Stanley, Olive, two nights ago. I am never more surveilled then when I'm on front stoop paying attention to MomCat and/or Napoleon. Except here, twitter, email, cell phone, etc. Come get me, Copper.

I received three hundred pings and four spam comments last night, here's one:

jowdjbrown has left a new comment on your post "I'm a Locksmith, and I'm a Locksmith":

This is a good post. This post gives truly quality information. I’m definitely going to look into it. Really very useful tips are provided here. Thank you so much. Keep up the good works http://www.locksmithlasvegas4u.com/

when someone and/or someone's bot in Indonesia (working for a Las Vegas locksmith?) latched onto that post with this video, the best joke ever:







But look at the comments at that post: I know what happened to Randall - according to Prunella, who works with him, he unplugged the digital and then went Angry White Trump. The fuck?

But whatever happened to anne? I still have readers in Ontario, but not the town she once pinged me from. Are you still here, anne? Damn.








ON THE PERIPHERIES OF THE IMPERIUM

Lawrence Joseph

Eye of the hurricane the Battery, the Hudson

breached, millions of gallons of it

north on West Street filling Brooklyn–Battery

Tunnel, overflowing into the World Trade Center site,

East River, six-to-eight-foot wall of water on South,

Front, Water, John, Fulton, Pearl,

Brooklyn Bridge’s woven cables lifted delicately

in hurricane sky.

ii

Perhaps I make too much of it, that time,

Eldon Axle, brake plates dipped

in some sort of liquid to protect them from

dust, dirt, metal chips the grinding caused —

that time, night shift, press-machine shop

on Outer Drive, rolls of stainless steel put in,

fixed up, because the work you do is around fire

your cuticles burn if the mask’s not on right.

iii

When the mind is clear, to hear the sound

of a voice, of voices, shifts in the attitude

of syllables pronounced. When the mind

is clear, to see a Sunday, in August, Shrine

of Our Lady of Consolation, Carey, Ohio,

at a holy water font, a mother washes

her six-year-old’s fingers crushed in an accident

so that they’ll heal.

iv

So what percentage of Weasel Boy’s DNA

do you think is pure weasel? Tooth-twisted,

Yeats’s weasels, in “Nineteen Hundred

and Nineteen,” fighting in a hole.

v

Conflated, the finance vectors, opaque

cyber-surveillance, supranational cartels,

in the corporate state’s political-economic singularity

the greatest number of children

in United States history are, now, incarcerated,

having been sentenced by law.

vi

A comic dimension to it, on this F train

to One Hundred Sixty-Ninth Street

in Queens? He doesn’t want to disturb you,

but, see, he was stabbed in the face

with an ice pick, he lost his left eye — 

lid pried open with thumb and forefinger — 

here, look, he’ll show you — 

a white-and-pink-colored iris.

Except in the Wake, the Wake of

That dull headache I'd for years evaporated on vacation, is back again. The overhead florescent lights above the cubes - stretched over feet so no one cube has it's own florescent light to use or turn off so all lights always stay on - such shitty light, worthy of the ignored facilities tickets we put it when one burns out. Two of my colleagues bought and brought in glow lights; supposedly they counteract the overhead lights (and colleagues and bosses and stress at home). Neither bothers turning them on anymore. I miss waking up at 4:55 to watch, stretching, the sunrise over Bernard Mountain and Seal Pond, the loons tooting, getting up to make coffee once sun crested Bernard and the red left the clouds. Bookkeeper gave me a genuine smile at first hello but an hour later heard me talking and my colleagues laughing so now she hates me again. Give me a million dollars, help me quit this fucking job.









ON THE MORN OF

C.D. Wright

The body would shut its eyes like blinds
letting the nearly even lines of light
steal away from its sheets,
straight gold hair astreaming there;
it would close like a glass door, an ear, arms

To be folded without crossing:
it would seal its lips on the forest
and let the teeth impress themselves in the skin
of its fruit, feast upon the marl
of the other body like a wilderness. To wit:

Its whistling world would not be harmed.

Let the record show the body
has never made such plaintive claims before
except in the wake, the wake of.

cold cheating fairness

[It bears repeating: this dark earliness]

PJOEPF OF VRIECYH

It bears repeating: this dark earliness

absorbent as a washcloth

cheats, I'm not sure how

Overcast so no canvas

for leaf-stomach silhouettes

tan bark profiles Birds

hurtle by black as boulders

Bugs' songs stop, my unrobed

legs cold It's trying to decide

to write in twilight

turn on light and blind

dark It cheats, the dark,

metronomic as moon

with cold cheating

fairness

Born Eighty-Six Years Ago Today

Click tag for lots more.

Born Eighty-Five Years Ago Today

Click tag for lots more. Yes, I did the first anniversary of his death earlier this month, I'll only do his birthday from now on per my sillyass bleggal rules, (which I will spare you this post).

Some Multibody Hid His Second Exoneural Projecto-Self in a Pocket of Subspace, Masking It Over with Molecules of Landscape-Sim

• Three more Ashley pieces.
• Rebumping In Memory of Robert Ashley.
• Rebumping Ashley's Ubuweb page.
• Rebumping Imperfect News but Art in All Directions.
• Kyle Gann remembers Ashley.

• Remember to give to WFMU during their marathon, widget over in left column. Do it for me.
• I'm reminded that during Big News Spasms - Ukraine in this instance - Blegsylvania, at least my Stringtown in Blegsylvania, slows up. It no longer surprises me - people go to their usual and favorite big sources to keep up with latest news/assimilate their tribe's common wisdom on the event. 
• How the internet is narrowing our minds: As our options have grown, so has the overwhelming dominance of a generic set of crowd-pleasing blockbusters. Mainstream culture, aided and abetted (or thwarted and warped) by the frenetic pace of the Internet, has fallen into a punishing pattern: a few books—the ones that win prizes, are heavily promoted, or feature at least one vampire—rake in all the media attention and readers. All others are flops. In the book economy, the middle class is dying. The idea of an eHarmony for books is similarly a way of narrowing choices in the face of an overwhelming field of options. Paradoxically, because personalization relies on shared categories, its results can flatten the real differences between individuals.
• Food links.
• Belward Farm!
• Delmore Schwartz, for those of you who do.
• Philip Roth, for those of you who do.
• Thanks to Hamster for the above and below links plus for finding me the Ashley vimeo page.
• Berio, for those of you who do.
• Alex Chilton, for those of you who do.
• UPDATE! Yes yes yes, I know it's Mark E Smith's birthday today, a The Fall cascade is already in the can, will be posted later this afternoon.

DOOZEY

Albert Goldbarth

"A bun in her oven? Geez Louise, isn't that
malarkey? Estelle? Miss Goody-Two-Shoes?"
      "I thought it was bunkum too,
when I heard it. Really: you coulda knocked me
for a loop. But Alice told me, and she's jake."
Alice: the provenance, the gatekeeper. So it wasn't all hooey.
It was the real goods. Aunt Ruby
hadn't shown up for her visit last month and,
well, Estelle was in a pickle, was between the proverbial
rock and its cousin the hard place, friendless,
paddleless up that famous defecatory creek and down
in the dumps, and while vernacular studies

isn't my speed, I love the way we used to talk.
We also used to say the autumn light is lambent
on the lake top, and the waves display a heraldic curl
as in halcyon days . . . and that was also a fine,
fine thing to say. Or that some multibody hid
his second exoneural projecto-self in a pocket of subspace,
masking it over with molecules of landscape-sim
. . . that's how they talk in sci-fi-ville, while over
in the empirical records of science, someone is saying
the reagent deliquesces although
in its previous state it underwent resorption. All
of the languages are appropriate to their purposes—are

fine. Jack Gilbert's poem in honor of wabi
—that's the Japanese word for, roughly,
finding a beauty in ruin that one can only
find in ruin—reminds us that to lack the word
for a concept is really to lack the concept.
Let the word occur, though, and then suddenly
in a fingersnap, in a trice, and like a bolt out of the blue,
I can see my friend for whom Estelle is an avatar
in stanza one, and the formerly unacknowledged
stores of dignity and perseverance
that carried her through the shame of the abortion
—her wabi—flower forth. One story goes
 

she fucked up big-time, Mick was a saint but
nooo, she had to get knocked up by an asshole
like Kenny. Another story: her mind is part dissociative, and
so requires positive reinforcement from multiple sources.
Actually they're the same story, only told in different languages.
Or actually because they're different languages, they're
different stories. In mine, she's just returned
from the doctor, and needs to tell Mick. She's sitting
surrounded by thousands of happy memories—the light
through the louvers is lambent—but we all know
how the story goes: life is jim-dandy, a peacheroo, then
words get spoken, and overnight the whole world goes kablooey.