Go to the 32:45 mark (autocorrect capitalized that Mark, gospel truth) to watch this shitty blog's Official Bleggalgazing Anthem, May 31st this shitty blog's Bleggalgazing Day for reasons I forget and reasons I remember but don't type this time, two days late this year because I no longer adhere to this shitty blog's rites as religiously as once, and this one now posted primarily for its Anthem and three related Theme Songs
The gleggalbaze: this project has evolved into aiding me process and cope and protest and document the world our sociopath shitlord owners brazenly and hastily, like time is running out, are openly attempting to impose on us, so it's therapeutic, yes, but more importantly I still enjoy making these poems. Also too:
And while bot-hits now outnumber people hits by a factor of tens of thousands a day (so there's no point my quitting the blog for fear of AI bots ripping me off or shitlords' ubiquitous surveillance of my treason), THANK YOU YOU WHO VISIT, there is still a community of sorts here in Dead, Blegsylvania, and very thank you to yinz that reach out with emails, comments, words, art, Kindness
Go to the 32:50 mark of the below for what is still, though I haven't been able to post it recently because Worldwide Pants blocked it for copyright, the fuckers, one of the most posted videos in this shitty blog's history, and which, on Chris Elliott's 64th birthday, remains the official BLCKDGRD Bleggalgazing Day Theme Song One (Two and Three below as well as.....)
I'll spare me bleggalgazing more and you reading it beyond I still feel compelled to BLCKDGRD, fuck me. Also Two:
Also Three:
Also too, this shitty blog's Theme Song One since day one, a few of yinz can vouch
Chris Elliott 62 today, the above,* along with the Sparks and Roky Erickson below, bleggalgazing anthems, this blog's bleggalgazing day* *most often posted video here by factor of dozens *...
Strangest year yet: while just as compelled to spout as always I don't compulsively spout by clock like once (yesterday's post proving me a liar, but....)
If I've not allowed unmoored I've aloud more, happiest bleggalgaze yet, this blog's Theme Song One
Bleggalgaze Anthem One, of course, today Blogroll Amnesty Day, thank you Jon Swift who did me many Acts of Kind, some of you still here found me by Jon fifteen years or more ago, I know I've let traditions and gags lag of late (it occurs I probably didn't note last December's Zappadan (assuming Zappadan still exists)), if you are Kinding me but me not you please let me know, if you know of something you'd think I'd dig please let me know, this is wear (sic) I burn my jeffpeat, thank you, Bleggalgaze Anthem Two:
Slowest week of the Blegsylvanian year I type this week every year but wasn't going to this year though it's also the bleggalgaziest because it's the slowest, but then I just watched The Sparks Brothers which spent five minutes celebrating one of this shitty blog's two Bleggalgazing Anthems
People can vouch. If you like Sparks you'll love them after seeing the documentary, if you love Sparks like me you'll adore Sparks after seeing the documentary.
O, hey! I have two tickets to see Sparks at Lincoln Theater on U Street on March 23, 2022 on the condition the world not destroyed by then! 2nd ticket gleefully claimed, happy laugh
I'm stupid for Sparks. Remember the guy who youtubed himself reading his poems that I posted here? Ran into him on campus and he turned and ran away, I had sent him Joyelle McSweeney's Toxicon & Arachne which he said he admired (I sent him some of my poems at his request which he praised then hinted to help me get published in small mags but I said no), and then I sent him Johannes Göransson's (McSweeney's husband) The Sugar Book, he emailed me as soon as he received it, called it an example of the disgusting disturbing trend in modern poetry (without elaborating further) and cut off all communication with me, not responding to my O, say more email, not sending another youtube of his poetry, now running from me when he saw me on campus, today in bleggalgazing (and fine metaphors abounding)
Haven't link mined since the last post and no grid today though do see this and this and this. The compulsion to post remains but the compulsion to post at regular intervals now feels like a job and fuck that. The recurrent complaint regarding the increasing duhiness of reiterating the accelerating pace towards and sheer volume of our impending death by duh depresses yes but doesn't shut me up mostly, this the slowest week of the Blegsylvanian year notwithstanding
I'm sideways too, reading Murnane again reminds me how his fascination with personal lodestar events and images is my fascination with personal lodestar events and images, when I knew I would write about the Sparks documentary past weekend I remembered the Silliman poem below so I'd have the title of the post but also remembered the last line of the poem which triggers my worse constant nightmare, the Humane Society tv ad I saw fifty years ago where a guy in a pick-up drives to a dead end, gets out of the truck with his dog, throws a tennis ball into the woods and when the dog races after it the guy gets in his truck and drives off, the dog comes back to where the truck was parked, the dog drops the ball, his tail stops wagging, there is not a single day I don't think of this and not a single dog I meet that I don't think of this and every time I think of this I'm thrown completely sideways, all my dark started then
YOU, PART 1
Ron Silliman
Hard dreams. The moment at which you recognize that your own death lies
in wait somewhere within your body. A lone ship defines the horizon. The
rain is not safe to drink.
In Grozny, in Bihac, the idea of history shudders with each new explosion.
The rose lies unattended, wild thorns at the edge of a mass grave. Between
classes, over strong coffee, young men argue the value of a pronoun.
When this you see, remember. Note in a bottle bobs in a cartoon sea. The
radio operator’s name is Sparks.
Hand outlined in paint on a brick wall. Storm turns playground into a
swamp. Finally we spot the wood duck on the middle lake.
The dashboard of my car like the keyboard of a piano. Toy animals anywhere.
Sun swells in the morning sky.
Man with three pens clipped to the neck of his sweatshirt shuffles from one
table to the next, seeking distance from the cold January air out the coffee
house door, tall Styrofoam cup in one hand, Of Grammatology in the other.
Outside, a dog is tied to any empty bench, bike chained to the No Parking
We started, segment by segment, the Waterloo-Pinckney Trail. Yesterday we found ourselves on Sackrider Hill before I knew it the highest point on the 36 mile trail.
Only one car we can only out and back, we've hiked twenty miles so far covering the first ten miles of the trail but since we'd never done it either way it's twenty miles of new hike. Narrow and windy and up and down by bogs and ponds and through constant loud birdsong, sweet so far.
The house on Coon Hill Road (people can vouch that's the name of the road) clearly centered in Trumpland, it's good for me to experience a week outside of the America I live and work in.
The acres we bought in flatter Washtenaw County (the W-P Trail's eastern terminus in Washtenaw), the house (and the sections of the W-P we've hiked) in Jackson County, the Washtenaw/Jackson line the border, I'm told, between Blue and Red Michigan, gets redder the farther west on I-94 you go
OUR CATSITTER JUST TEXTED PHOTO OF NAPOLEON TAKEN JUST NOW (AS WELL AS MOMCAT AND FLEABUS AND STANLEY AND ROSIE AND OLIVE AND OZZIE, THE CAT FROM NEXT DOOR WHO WANTS TO LIVE WITH US)
I've seen dozens of cats this trip, all outdoor rampant, well-fed and happy, four of them playing in the yard of a house with a giant Trump 2020 Fuck Your Feelings giant sign
the second of three times with a grandmother and grandfather and grandchildren in the yard playing with the cats
▲'s most posted video on this blog by a factor of X. ▲'s the BLCKDGRD Bleggalgazing Anthem, has been since Day One, people can vouch, yesterday High BLCKDGRD Bleggalgazing Day, traditionally the most annoying least read post of the year, fine metaphors abound
Chris Elliott born 61 years ago yesterday, since his last birthday I've seen him as Roland Schitt, Mutt's father
Despite the plague my year between Elliott's 60th and 61st *way* better than my year between Elliott's 59th and 60th
Last BLCKDGRD Bleggalgazing day I retired the usage of "Egoslavia" and "Egoslavian" but said I'd keep the image on the blogroll but removed it a few months back
Last BLCKDGRD Bleggalgazing Day I was painting self-portraits using only primary colors and still writing with fountain pens in tablets, now neither
I stopped painting when I stopped composing in tablets, and when I started writing poems again via typing I discovered - not discovered, finally acknowledged - nothing ruins the experience of accomplishment for me more than transcribing my handwriting into type which confirmed what I knew but thought a moral weakness: second drafts, even if superior to first, ruin the first, better to abandon than rewrite (I can also type faster than I can write so can keep up with my head better with my fingers tapping than a pen scritching paper so I lose less of the one draft)
Between Chris Elliott's 60th and 61st birthdays I quit tablets and ink to compose on a keyboard I've had two poems published and been asked to submit more by three places that turned the ones I sent them down (I also started trading poems with a poetry professor I know who enthusiastically liked mine but then I sent him some of Johannes Goransson's poems which he despised, I haven't heard from him since, FMA)
The grids started in December. I like them. I think they make the blog easier to read and better to look at, if you don't but are still here thank you, if you're indifferent but still here thank you, if you do and are still here thank you
As I type this sentence at 20:15 EDT May 31 2021 this blog (that is, this iteration of BLCKDGRD) has had 1998059 unique views, so thank you
If you are Kinding me but me not you please let me know, and please let me know if there's anyone in Blegsylvania, not just from our stringtown, you think I would like and benefit from reading, hearing, knowing, and not only digitally, please let me know
This Holy BLCKDGRD Bleggalgazing Day I'll not pretend I want to abandon my goddamn free blogging platform and admit it won't happen because I don't want or need the disappointment of rebranding necessary to move to another platform just as shitty as this one though packaged as less of an invasive surveillance tool as this one with the end result I'm just as spied on by the same motherfuckers but read less by all of you
I continue to maintain there's a reason all but two posts a year here are tagged My Complicity and assert this is and will be this shitty blog's THEME SONG ONE! now and forever, fuck me
I had to reboot the new modem for the first time and blinking orange light turned Jesus has risen white, but now my laptop is sworn to a fuck named Jeff and can't log on to the wifi at work, wifi's allegiance to Jeff, Jeff Xfinity aka Jeff Comcast real name Jeff Finemetaphorsabound
and we have an address, it came with our property tax bill, either Lima Township numbers its property numbers in increments of four or we'll have to walk across someone's property to get to the other part of ours
My North Face heavy duty right sling, I think of it as left since I only see it from behind the backpack, ripped 4/5ths off, saw it before the 1/5th broke and backpack flung I need a new laptop. Weeded essentials and nice-to-haves from garbage out of broken North Face's guts, transferred organs to grey-red Timbuk2, not a backpack backpack but a laptop backpack that can double as a briefcase, it's great those five unique minutes every four years when I don't want a backpack backpack because my backpack backpack I had to put to sleep. I've beem resorting the same baseball cards fifty-five years
I found my lost collected Weldon Kees searching what organs I'd left last time I abandoned Timbuk2 because while a great laptop backpack it doesn't even pretend to be a backpack backpack, I found my beloved and thought lost (I did look for it, I did!) then tweeted out a photo of the book then tweeted out his short poem *Turtle*
I get the new Ishiguro next week, I guarantee I'll fail it and will be unable to tell with anywhere near certainty how much of it will be my fault and how much the novel's. His last novel, Buried Giant, read when I always had a novel working, mehhed me, I pretend to have a novel always working now but in truth I fail every novel I start. My eyes, my head, my concentration, my damn, I'm old yes but there's more. Calls into question my current wonderfully bountiful poem readings, my eyes, my head, my concentration, my damn, my performance of myself for myself. And now something to look forward to in these days of not looking forward to anything fills me with dread because I don't trust nothing to look forward to that I will sabotage by filled grids like this one.... I want to be slayed right know I'll be slayed wrong
Bleggalgaze: grid forever until not, if I lost the cloud, medumbmotherfucker ...
When the coal
Gave out, we began
Burning the books, one by one;
First the set
Of Bulwer-Lytton
And then the Walter Scott.
They gave a lot of warmth.
Toward the end, in
February, flames
Consumed the Greek
Tragedians and Baudelaire,
Proust, Robert Burton
And the Po-Chu-i. Ice
Thickened on the sills.
More for the sake of the cat,
We said, than for ourselves,
Who huddled, shivering,
Against the stove
All winter long.
