Deadest Blog Days of Summer, the days surrounding July 4th, so I am compelled to post (and to post ahead of this coming Thursday when I post one of two posts a year not tagged My Complicity) to see if this can be the least read post of the calendar year (which can't be determined until I post over Thanksgiving Weekend in November, the closest competition). Also too, this *has* to be typed today: I hope Belgium beats the USMNT 10 to fucking 0 tonight
Did anyone think Dump wouldn't taint the World Cup? I sat in the conference room on the top floor of the library I work in that overlooks the Potomac above Key Bridge last Saturday afternoon and for fifteen minutes watched Dump's vanity show of military flyovers that squandered tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars and thought to myself, how strange he hasn't caused a sensationally embarrassing scandal at the World Cup as yet, et viola, the Dumpiest, most United States of Assholes fine metaphors abounding scandal. Ten to fucking Nothing tonight, please please please my Lord Diablo Etcheverry
One of those is me in a good mood, the other me in a bad mood, I don't know which is which. Pochettino must know the hell that awaits Balogun (a birthright citizen (who's playing for the USMNT solely because he stood no chance of making his preferred England squad), did Dump know?) in every European stadium he plays in and in the European football press the rest of his career if Balogun plays tonight regardless whether Belgium wins 10-0, please Lord Diablo Etcheverry, and imagine how much worse it will be if he scores the determining goal. Imagine Pochettino doing the honorable thing and benching Balogun the entire game and Belgium wins 10-0, please Lord Diablo Etcheverry, and Dump's shitfit, laugh. Not holding my breath on Pochettino doing the honorable thing, mind, would like to be wrong (I bet Balogun won't start but will be brought in as a second half sub when the USMNT is already down 7-0, Lord Diablo Etcheverry willing). Lord Diablo, I was X-bingeing yesterday, the world's a mess it's in my kiss
Had my one-week post-surgery exam yesterday morning and eyedoc is highly pleased and deeply impressed with his work on my eye and reassures me this nagging paper-cut stinging in the eye's corner closest to my nose will pass in a week or so though I keep telling him it gets worse each day, it's normal, don't you know, fine metaphors abound. I can resume normal physical activity to hike with L last night and tonight and disc Rockburn or Woodsboro Saturday and Ditto or Emmitsburg or Rockburn or Woodsboro or someplace new on Sunday. According to eyedoc my left eye was 20-190 before surgery, 20-30 post-surgery. The clusterfuck looks the same to me sighted as it did blind. Here's my repaired left eye, still an old used car with +200K miles and bald tires
When will Drump anoint himself American Pope (and steal the church's money), he already thinks his words infallible even when two of his consecutive sentences directly contradict each other, that's one of his idiot savant powers. The above left eye is the last hexjeff for a while, maybe, perhaps, I hope so, no promises, I'm out of acrylic ink, out of gouache, out of watercolor blocks, time for a break. Deliberate timing - was hoping that eye-op would make reading easier, less squinty, less headachey, nope, grandpa glasses and grandpa strings for me, but I'm old, eyedoc insists. Might work, eye-op, not total blindness, but re: reading more, probably not
Pete Shelley was born 71 years ago, my favorite Pete Shelley song below the grid, but in 1981 Maha Whateverthefuckherlastnamewas fired me from the Highs that is now a Ledos on Muncaster Mill Road in Derwood for playing this "catamate" (sic) song when she walked in to get something out of her office during my Friday 4pm to midnight shift
Why You Need Stock Up on Food & Consumer Goods This Week
From Molotov cocktails to data center shutdowns, the AI backlash is turning revolutionary
Yes, the sewage spill fucked-up beloved Potomac, but it's emmeffing Shitlord data-centers in Nova (and if they get their way Maryland) that's gonna kill it
How organizations and leaders laundered clips from an Islamophobic propagandist, deliberately distorted Piker's words, and erased context to manufacture a case against him
To speak freely, I could never land on anything worth talking about but from the moment they shut me up, I’ve been full of things to say. It’s not that the mind is tricking itself but that the mind itself is a trick played on silence by the body. You might imagine a cool black pond
completely devoid of moonlight, no stand of white pine framing it and an absence of the little ripples that pleat a pond’s still surface. As for me, I can’t do it. I start stumbling only a few strokes in, incapable of imagining what isn’t there without planting it there by mistake.
If this is a crime, at least its wake is victimless, but even I can see it differs by degrees, and when speech is added to the mix, what isn’t might be addressed as if it were, then all the sailors tuning in at sea end up clinging to what they hear as fact, when it’s actually in error,
or worse, misleading by design. Still, I find it strange that the pond was never intended to be an object of the mind’s perceptual activity but a metaphor for the silence the body disturbs, although the more I give it thought, the more it slides into the mind itself, silently and still
abiding in the body, neither adding to nor taking away, until the body wants something it can’t quite reach, or needs what evanesces to stay, and as its inner distance widens, deepens, I paddle across dark water to the pond’s inky center, where wave by wave a new reality is speaking.
I was reading in the staff lounge yesterday post-lunch afternoon, one not-my-department colleague present, quiet, over there on his phone, when his same-department colleague, the loudest yappiest complainingest person in the building (yinz have all known, know, and will know a new one or dozen more in what remaining time we have left) commenced kvetching. Today's waah: the AI-created, AI-driven, supposedly mandatory AI training sessions that I've refused to do (with my boss' full awareness) and have garnered no grief
To be fair, both colleagues have elementary school-age children, and the focus of their yapping centered entirely, as it should, on their kids, so their bitching necessarily for their sanity's sake assumed the shitlord sociopaths using AI to help collapse world order so they can immiserate us for profit before eradicating us as rodents are not using AI to immiserate us for profit before eradicating us as rodents. Not enough people are freaking the fuck out, a key function of our shitlord sociopaths' constant relentless reprogramming of our heads. Believe it or not, I kept my mouth shut. Believe it or not, there's new Guided By Voices
Adrian mentioned his son's eighth birthday past Sunday, when his son is my age it will be 2084, the Earth will be here, what world? August 28, 2084 I will be 125. Nick Lowe turned 77 yesterday
My two colleagues also talked about our current nightmare ending and a restoration of democratic normalcy and I did not say the shitlords and their demonic proxies (see link below, eg) have not amassed this power to give it back, they will destroy the world before relinquishing power
"At this point the Democratic gerontocracy can only be viewed for what it is: the modern day Spoils System. Any bullshit about radical change or providing the best effort for maximal effect falls in place of people who simply want to keep a job until they die at their desk"
I've reached the age of needing grandpa strings for my glasses. I can't read anything within my arms' reach while wearing my glasses so I can go hours without wearing them, and if I took them off then moved from where I started reading it often takes me five blind minutes to find them. This getting old shit. Fine metaphors abound. Here's my right eye
Reading is physically harder now that my left eye can barely see through glaucoma's fog: three weeks from today it will have knives jabbed into it to try and dissipate some of the fog then stop fog's counterattack (plus eyedoc will yoink-out the old windshield and install a new one). Insurance will cover all but the deductible says eyedoc's office manager. Takes ten minutes and I'll feel zero nada no pain, says eyedoc. We'll, um, see.
But I read fine, as in I can pick up a book and see and read the text in it, engage with it. I'm reading well, as in I'm enjoying reading and retaining and thinking about what I've just read. The issue, after six decades of reading: I can't finish a novel. I set a pace that matches my interest and enjoy processing what I've read and am eager to pick it up again when I next have a minute's chance, and then I'll end a chapter or turn a page and of a sudden, SCREECH! I not only don't want to read the book in that moment, I don't to read it, viscerally, since: as I type this sentence I can't imagine me finishing any of the novels. Fine metaphors abound. Here's my left eye
It doesn't seem connected to any particular catalyst or spastic reaction to that particular day's most clussterfuckic obscenity, though no doubt Cumulative Clusterfuckic Trauma accounts for part, and that's the true clusterfuckic obscenity. And it's not just reading: I mentioned here before how certain musicians and bands that once got constant playtime in my ears and head I viscerally don't want to listen to in my ears and, especially, in my head right now. Two poets (not Ashbery, though I say something catty about *Breezeway* at the bottom of the grid below). One restaurant. A certain road in Michigan (Waterloo-Munith), the fuck did that road do to me. My home disc golf course, the one with the sign on 22 that says it is sponsored by me and Seat Six. But every novel the current ongoing eternity. I was 7/8ths through loving Faulkner's *The Hamlet* yesterday when SCREECH! BURN! Fine metaphors abound. Terry Hall would have been 67 today, this is one of my dozen favorite songs ever, still!
A friend and mentor for years has urged Denis Johnson's *Tree of Smoke* upon me, someone had returned it to the Library, it was on a cart today, I grabbed it, by the second page some asshole, possibly if not presumably the main character, an American soldier in a Vietnamese jungle, shoots a monkey for the fuck of it and starts watching it die, and SCREECH! BANG! I ain't reading this fucking novel
"Confiscate 99.8% of Andreesen’s net worth for the public good, wait 20 minutes, and then tell him his memory of ever having more than $4 million is false"
It is difficult to seperate the tapestry from the room or loom which takes precedence over it. For it must always be frontal yet to one side.
It insists on this picture of "history" in the making, because there is no way out of the punishment it proposes: sight blinded by sunlight. The seeing taken in with what is seen in an explosion of sudden awareness of its formal splendor.
The eyesight, seen as inner, registers over the impact of itself receiving phenomena, and in so doing draws an outline, or a blueprint, of what was just there: dead on the line.
If it has the form of a blanket, that is because we are eager, all the same, to be wound in it: This must be the good of not experiencing it.
But in some other life, which the blanket depicts anyway, the citizens hold sweet commerce with one another and pinch the fruit unpestered, as they will, and words go crying after themselves, leaving the dream upended in a puddle somewhere as though "dead" were just another adjective.
