Citizens, consumers, users, cyborgs, and zombies

States have citizens, markets have consumers, platforms have users, world-makers have cyborgs, and dystopias have zombies. To have and to hold, for better or worse, with greater and lesser degrees of conceptual felicity. A person - an agent who acts or is acted upon - can be or become all such things and pass across the apparently clean lines of demarcation that differentiate their groupings. This is not all a person can be or become.

Ir is not for us to determine whether the thwack of an open-handed slap that one administers to the face with one’s hand - wake up, snap out of it, focus - is sufficient to still the grave and gravid thoughts that come when autumn is knocking at the doorstep. Endless summers are fictive realms of sun-kissed skin and white space calendars, and the task of the insomniac is to act as though the Finitude of the present - this exhausted and exhausting moment - exists in and has exited from its own realm, adjacent to but not encompassed within the endlessness.

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Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd

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I have not yet turned my back on impractical pursuits and the primacy of process over outcome.  But it seems more important to try to focus on getting just the right amount milk in the bowl so it is proportionate to the volume of cereal.  (Imagine every bowl of cereal consumed in this life set out in a room, staged six feet apart from another in a grid.)

Our moods do not believe in one another, and it is hard to tell whether that is a feature of moods or a personal shortcoming.  Outside it is the kind of August rainstorm that traumatizes pets and shears odd weak or rotten limbs from the biggest trees.  Inside - in this room at least- the ghosts are silently pirouetting, with the occasional jete’. Inside - in this body at least - the diastolic and systolic are following the lead of the shambolic.

I and I, the man explained.

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Which would you have, wise madness or foolish sanity?

It comes back to that old line from Ecclesiastes about how he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. On the other hand there is the one that goes like:

“If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.”

Every so often, I remember that there was a purpose behind that idea of developing critical thinking and growing into the space it creates, which is not always comfortable and often affirmatively discomfiting. And that purpose wasn’t to charge someone money for a service. Or to be the equivalent of an intellectual mechanic.

also:

I think of things like the subjugation of women, drone warfare, neoliberal capitalism, Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, racism, police brutality, mass incarceration, massive wealth disparity, corporate sovereignty, the weapons industry, the fossil fuel industry, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, population explosion, factory farming, and the destruction of wilderness as opportunist infections.

- from ahnoni, the creative independent interview

I was in rural Japan at a workshop on data collection, surveys, and research and the quite charismatic host was attempting to address the idea of whether it was compromising to do interesting work on behalf of large corporations. And he made a persuasive case that of course it is but that is no reason not to use it as a launching pad to do equally interesting work that might leverage a social good. Maybe this is an apologetics in form but in its delivery it was not in anyway blinkered or sooth-said.

Cui Bono? I would assume everybody who is anybody and everybody who wants to be somebody. Be a nobody, though, a traveler of gravel roads and a liver of a life that speaks sui generis, and you might just end up somewhere new. That is its own kind of apologetics - the self-enobling notion of go it alone.

Post hoc, primo rex

Would you feel more copacetic if this was all just a study of advertising, narcissism, Ben Lerner novels, chronic fatigue syndrome, and the semiotics of leopard print throw pillows? Maybe you booked the wrong sleeping car on the train that starts at John Hopkins with the double Ds, Paul and Jacques, and ends in the eerie rectitude of nihilism that was the trench coat mafia? Scuzzy townies across the land do what they want to who they want to do it to, and Craig Finn takes note. Except this time there is a saxophone player on each song and a pious Dadaist chant coming from the speakers of the Muzak in the gender neutral bathroom.

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Do I contradict myself? Very well. Picture the man in the suit staring in the mirror of an investment bank’s opulent bathroom, basking in what a woman he fucks but does not like calls his aura, but with blood streaming out of one nostril onto a Ferragamo tie (paisley, in aquamarine and turquoise and cream) and a heart rate of which coupled-up humping rabbits would be jealous. A frozen moment, yes? Or am I just seizing on that decade-spanning trope as a fictive dodge? because maybe even false confessional narratives of the mid-born triumphalist hitting bottom end up sounding nothing like the high-born being snuffed out by fate. As though Michael Fried’s theatricality and Michael Jackson’s aching falsetto did not eventually teach the same lesson, if on different ends of the existential spectrum.

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[sharp cut] “no gods no masters,” in black ink on oh so many torsos. We aren’t promised tomorrow anymore than we are promised a full moon. I heard the one about the last priest dies asphyxiated by being strung up by the last capitalist’s disemboweled entrails, and I heard the gasp too. Then what? Do humans even have entrails? Does it take a radical to verify or is it just biology?

Would you be copacetic with some real talk about self-help, self-care, self-actualizarion, and the shedding of the self’s skin as an overcoming to, rather than a succumbing to, the baby-stepped half-assed but still virulent gesture toward self-annihilation? I think maybe when we talk about the virtue of vulnerability maybe what we mean (and risk) is a shallow form of voyeurism. Call that a trenchant confession or buoyant form of social commentary.

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It is rare to be in the midst of a metastatic mode, of painful transition and productive growth, each one extending and calling into being the other. Yes yes yes I am in that midst and it is bringing this year of our lord 2020 to a fine point.

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Amy, plural

Enlightened ones may live everywhere among us, looking like functional failures.


I was sitting in a chair reading Amy Hempel’s a full service shelter, exploding on the inside as I came to its final statement. I finished my coffee and went to the kitchen.

I put on on Aimee Mann’s Mental Illness and listened to the first 3 songs over and over again, eleven times total, 33 listens, waiting for the clotting to finally take hold.

Every so often I am reminded of how a work (a text as we used to insist on saying) can shake me free, kick me loose, wield a stark and unruly autonomy over whatever pattern of coherence I thought I was rutted in, like a needle on a spinning record abruptly skittering from its track and the party stops so cleanly that it becomes clear that what we presumed to be a party is entirely and utterly something else.

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He was preoccupied with inventing the uncanny


That we might decide to have our say, to expel the passive virtue of unspoken acceptance from its place of priority, and instead speak our minds. Our vapid desultory minds, already colonized by the givers of received opinions, bathed  in mimeographed sentiment and crepuscular glory.  A slurry of metaphoric dung beetles and animatronic earworms had crawled up noses and down alimentary canals, digging in and making mischief the entire time we were having our say and having it speak us into being.

Do I protest too much?  Surely I do.  In all the hearse houses in the world, she had to walk into mine, amidst the bawdy self-satisfied speeches and the gullet-shaking peroration, it was not unlike what the devout would describe as being struck down and held fast by a bolt of faith from the heavens.  Not unlike it all, from their perspective, those devout who would happily offer themselves to the devourer.  And the entire time, the one that she came to see was banging away, anvil in hand, making sure we could remember things that had not happened and vouchsafe that disconnect, right quick.  

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Letter to fallen idols, or that imperious look

Peter Doig is one of the best painters. I need to write him another letter and will soon. His is the type of making that pulls and pushes at discovery, where the thing that is discovered does not so much map onto the thing made as to exist adjacent to it, but not in its shadow. Of the world but not in it. Dreams and floaters and the shimmering pointillism of cluster headaches and migraines with aura. All types of aura with the Doig paintings.

His work makes figuration endlessly interesting to me - the way a work that is recognizably based on some model (whether a photo or a mnemonic image) can have clarity in the sign-signifier way of correspondence and still vibrate with alternative meanings and slippage.

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My life is a joke and I am my own straight man

It is possible that the water that was subject of the statement that all is connected is not the water that is the subject of the statement i am drowning. Go ask Alice.

This is not Alice.

This is not Alice.

Smack in the middle of an unraveled life, it becomes hard to identify the latest end from the earliest beginning. Not quite sure whether this frazzled end right here, at my finger tips, is snarled up like a too-long-in-place braid or just its own natural undone end state.

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Lilacs out of the dead land

Tracking Mr. Hass has spun me right round running down anchor points tethered to the corner of each quarter section, surveying and taking the measure of his regard for what he says plainly about how having breakdowns rebuilds us.

Also

each emblem of the past’s voice carries out past the last trough of a new ascending wave in which he embalms present sense without verging to the vulgar tongue,

and there is a flat but homespun accent to the truth that we lost in great haste, this brazen hurry against which our rough-hewn ruins are shorn of that pedantic metallic sheen.

but wait

until that next wave’s apex breaks and wipes out a plea written in the sand, as unlikely and inevitable as a ploughshare turning earth over dead stalks and wresting green buds from three helpings of morning light.

All so that

we may stand dazed in the cerulean stillness of almost-dawn, right-sized and equidistant from what matters, pining after California, but pegged here to the prairie, turning another page of twentieth century pleasures and waiting for the birdsong to fade.

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A bag of large questions

Gratitude spilling over the side of an exposed heart like a crashing wave and then receding being replaced by the next one. Then grief. Then gratitude.
That soothing sussurating blend of motion-action and pattern, and then its mirror image of terror.
Poets in the time of tumultuous revolution used to locate the sublime in nature - in craggy peaks and epic landscapes.
To say that the habitat of the sublime has been reduced to screens is probably too much a value judgment. And one behind which I stand, fully weighted.

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And yet:

once we admit that there is room for newness – that there are vastly more conceivable possibilities then realized outcomes – we must confront the fact that there is no special logic behind the world we inhabit, no particular justification for why things are the way they are. Any number of arbitrarily small perturbations along the way could’ve made the world as we know it turned out very differently… We are forced to admit the world as we know it is the result of a long string of chance outcomes.“

P. Romer

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Not everybody can be the protagonist in pump up the volume . . . Not even Christian Slater can

Mic check on Mr Robot, as it was the original pirate radio hack that had all the rebellious telephase initiates bursting up against a wall that would eventually be proven to be permeable. I recognize that this is digital artifact is not a fount of optimism - it has a separate function - and that recognition is emblazoned with its own neurotic twitch. Because soothsaying has its separate function too.

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Not being able to help not being able to help oneself is on like page 176 of the new DSM, which I sit on at meals the better to commandeer the horizon.

But yes, bleak times. And ever bleaker by the hour. To be respected and respectable seems uncouth, in the way that not showering for days and emitting that sweet-aged tang of saturated booziness is a sign of degradation, spiritual and otherwise.

“The food is so bad - and in such small portions.” That rich send up of the cant well being gives solace. Believe it or not. And not in the same way as Delillo’s Lenny Bruce, screaming into the microphone: “We are all going to die

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What first occasioned this digressive loop of non sequiturs was a synopsis from the good man Clancy Martin, he of the padded walls and the staggering insight into lying and self-abuse:

The worry in The Idiot is that there are all really only two authentic ways of existing, being in love and killing yourself. Also: if those are the only real ways of being, what does it mean if you can actually choose either of them?

How now brown cow. In most other contexts we would need to decide whether to indulge in this indulgence and choose to accept it as having philosophic heft or choose to take treat it as enacted bad faith, stated on its own self negating and self-recommending terms.

To call this unfulfilled choice a paradox misses the point, in the same way that calling out for more pirate radio misses the epoch. We shan’t and therefor we don’t, and because we don’t, we can.

Ah yes, the renewed reign of the one-eyed man

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POETRY NOW

Poetry stinks with ten thousand poets
pissing in the same overflowing bowl.
We must go it alone, swimming at night
down the River of No Return.
At dawn we’ll see unknown animals
on the bank, and unknown women, some
without faces. We’re now sure that we
have both leprosy and gangrene, outcasts.

Jim Harrison

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Back when I used to ride wounded horses, and so much of what seemed like aspiration I would not want to pursue because of fear that it would elude me or I would fall or fail or sputter out into normalcy. I lived in a small house next to a creek, which was the house’s water supply. Shower: yes. Drink from the tap: invite giardia so no. I read a lot of Harrison out on a little bridge that spanned the creek and led to the pasture from which I could see the Pintlars. I miss those mountains. I do not miss that feeling of wanting, at least once a day, to crawl out of my skin and out of time, unreconciled.

Time is a mystery that can tip us upside down.

Time is a mystery that can tip us upside down.

Year too

In my minds eye I am on my way to Quemado and the Lightning Field. It is not to become habituated to the randomness of it, the “strike,” or to take on the idea of buoyant bravado head on. A cabin in the middle of a desert, which is also in the middle of an art work in the middle of the desert, an artwork that is and isn’t representative, a cabin that is and isn’t a refuge .

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This is the next volume. Onward and upward we go.

Slander the Culling

I suppose it also must be said that time has a different texture in the middle of the night.  I don’t always want to give up this intimacy with stolen moments, when there is no form of disturbance save whatever is percolating within.  Getting comfortable with whatever that is is part of what makes the unbearable effects almost bearable. But it is still three full stop fathoms away from stable and squared away.  Way down there in the depths.

diagnosing the instrument

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Most of the thinking that a therapist might find relevant to making a diagnosis i do in the dead of night.  It is not by choice, this arrangement I’ve made with my life.  Sometimes it starts with parenting, by which I mean escorting a wayward woken child back to bed and, hopefully, back to sleep. And then I settle into settling accounts, prognosticating, tending to anxiety and resentment and exploratory myth making.  But it also comes unbidden, emerging from a dream interrupted, or just an interior monologue rejoined in medias res as I come to.

Sometimes I am replaying conversations that actually happened, as they happened, or as they might have happened, had I a chance to edit and redirect them from whatever sordid conflict-escalating path I put them down.  Other times I am anticipating conversations that might happen and but soon, and obviously there is a fair bit of projecting about exchanges that don’t have even a puncher’s chance of breaking into the real or seizing on some jaunty picaresque scene from the past or from the vault of paths not taken. Examining the unlived life and dissembling the lived one.


It is not wise, this thinking in the dead of night.  Easy words to say, hard word to live by. It is useless, unproductive, and often untethered from what I would recognize in my normal waking hours as the normal cognitive patterns of a productive, tax-paying, responsible self.  That is a personage that I inhabit (sometimes thoughtlessly, sometimes uncomfortably, as though it were a form-fitting corset or worse straitjacket, being put to strictly utilitarian ends) and the inhabiting occurs at times other than when I am doing this thinking.  And it seems readily apparent that what is normal in the day is not what is normal here in these insomniac vignettes, that I am not normal in how often and how completely I succumb to and am bound over to them.  The idea that sleepless rumination highjacks what would otherwise be an unremarkable self, something in the middle of the curve, extending just to the mean and the medium of everyday life and no farther - that idea gains purchase at the same time as I give in to habit that self be highjacked.  I am uncertain which is more expressive of me, more - as we are all now wont to say - authentic.  

I no longer fret so much about what is real or about how the Real is an engine of subliminal viscosity.  I have become accustomed to the thought that we are what we do, and that one thing I do is sabotage a normal day by letting it begin with this, shortly after midnight or 1 am.  But like a dog worrying over a bone, I am.  And so this happens.  

The sun is new every day

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A leaky vessel, embedded in all

This spooky action where whirl

Is king not for a day but as 

A category inescapable

I beseech you and 

your alabaster skin

Flinty heart

Passive rectitude

could we just get on with

The redness of no longer loving

and the cool blue 

semblance of puckered anxiety

I do not lust after distance squared 

Slipped loose from that horizon 

Into which a passel of Barbarians 

ride on horses in movie after movie

That plays on after my head 

Runs into flickering gray abstract

of no longer feeling anything.

And somehow I find it hard to think

My children will understand that if

The hordes in the epic epics 

Do not move across the land

The land might just bite back.

As it has done and

Always will do.

Not winning is a given if the finite

Is both measuring stick and 

Soiled carrot

You find a rhyme for orange 

In a dream and suddenly it

Seems like your naked 

Ring finger is split-haired choice

Not spite-pickled destiny

Easier that way.  Better too.

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