Malignant Normality and the Busted Heart Machine

It’s not enough to call bullshit on the cankers and callouses, rough hewn from clustered extinctions and wet atrocities. Arrows pierce completely through fish with fat lips and hold them fast, swimming in place, to the bottom of the barrel.

The belief lingers that causal determinism is but one option on the menu. So we must ask: What passes for considerate declension in the enjoyment of life for those of us who used to wonder whether umbrellas were sufficient armor against acid rain and the pushed launch button of intemperate statesmen? Every onslaught on what used to pass for the homunculus comes from these whacked people who used to pass for the Preterite. What presently musters up as rock-ribbed conviction in the idea that the best government is that which governs least no longer gains purchase on the fixed firmament of collective consciousness.

Work is the creed that remains. The weird, having gone to finishing school, no longer deign to nix the elaborate fiction that all will be well in the end. Zero sum games take primacy. Style runs rough over uncertainty, mundanity and banality duel at dawn. The distaff mob stands blinkered and mashed in the face of metaphysical theft prevention. We visit violence on Parnassus and reap every solitary strand of grain, insisting in ravenous stupefaction that next year’s harvest is looking pretty damn good. Logic stands defeated in the lethargy of the rendering plant, with its undead mute beasts finally given free rein to gallop as only ghosts can.

The map is not the territory, the menu is not the meal, the child is not father of the man, and the sucking chest wound is not the mandarin’s cauterizing encounter with torched dreams.

A change is gonna come. We will make munitions from the flickering shadows at the back of the cavernous theaters where light and photo realism induce each other, kicking and screaming and fully dilated, into existence. Cain will be called Ishmael, and the dead salesman will be buried with deep seated survival anxieties thrust upon him like a bad rash. Mourners will mill around, eating cubed cheese and coughing from the burning effigies, wondering aloud when it came to pass that mediocrity became lethal.

Will remain relevant for as long as people still die

What we were (how it started)

Organized around a creed, which purported to stand in for absence of a national character. Americanization was the unique non fungible virtue. No one could claim to have much of a history, so even the most senior denizens would still cop to being part of the asylum. Choosing exile, of some sort.

Walter Benjamin at the Local Dairy Queen ——) Everyone seems to have a bad memoir in them.

Ode to the end of an era that could not spell ignominy


The person with a paint can in hand who decided to share with the world

MY LIBRARIAN WAS A BITCH.



All the Tumblr accounts lit ablaze at the thought that if they loved the Last Psychiatrist so hard, it was written for them, and they were convinced momentarily that they were not afflicted, but the conviction lacked courage, lapsed into confusion, and ashes and more ashes heaped and heaped.

This is It or Super Bowl commercials, I know not from where the Bud Heavy love came in the 00s. I’d like to say the hipster was not so bad but I try not to lie, for my serenity’s sake.

Goa is a state of mind where hippie scrums and polyester plenitude procreate

Desire is the name of the game that gets played in the land of the absolute given, where for every if x, then not y someone on the corner is shouting about how A = B does not derive A = A.

Desire is fumbling in the backseat of a car for the eyelets of a bra that holds breasts that fed babies and using just one hand left ringless and two lives which felt senseless.

Desire is being unable to stave off clicking refresh on the Roth account that a near-term future self will milk dry before a long-term future self gives up the ghost.

Camus as husband, Vonnegut as lover ——).(——- Against condescending to our younger profligate whoring selves

in the great modernist project that has not ended - where to be disoriented and rent asunder is to have gone back to where home once was - we were once told that some writers are husbands and some were lovers. Later we learned of other amorphous categories that reworked the categorical so it was neither box nor a sieve but a 3d printer of identity run on open source code that did not contain, but amassed. But that “later” is for another day.

Camus we were told treated his fiction as scaffolding for his ideas, and his “ideas essays” were alleged to be somehow less than the sum of their cognitive parts. We were told wrong things, then as now.

But - we are coming to a sharper point, even if it not sharp enough (yet) to make a clean cut - what of Vonnegut and his yellow fingers, pecking away, hunting and finding? What of his Midwestern groundedness and his Midwestern suicidal tendencies? His terse witticism and the goofy earnestness of his plenary bleakness?



I could not think of a more bizarre pairing culled from that genus of Don Juans whose works boil the blood of the intemperate young, are set down for two decades or more, and turn out, on being picked up for purposes of re-acquainting brace, to have sustained a destabilizing not-to-be-fucked-with brainworm for the fat, median-voter theory worshippers we’ve all become. Not in the realm of prosody, obv - not sculptors of polymorphous linguistic perversity, on the jagged ruins of which so much modernist righteousness productively shores itself - but just in the sense of mapping the coordinates of the raw meat on the floor.

Call it appreciation but don’t tie a ribbon on it. The way in which they (each so different as to risk embarrassment at invoking the yoke of a “they”) shamelessly exposed how putting a name to forces of fraudulence and penury and paradoxically rich banality could be a salve on, but not a cure for, some basic, dumb emptiness that befriends whatever you want to call whatever it is that is rattling around on the inside, still.



Non sequitur

A man was sitting in bed, reading a book about the moon falling apart, and then having its orbit-beholden pieces collide more and more and more, until enough of those pieces came cascading down into earths surface to change planetary atmosphere and make it uninhabitable for thousands of year.

A light, but gripping read.

there is no reason why any of this should hang together, He thought. At best this is a prolonged exercise in futility, he thought. That thought began to fester like an itchy yeast, a malevolent foreign host, and he wished instead of opening up the book, he would have taken a cold shower and lain down on a bed of nails.

He was not a poet or a rock star or a playwright or a sculptor or any kind of artist in love with misery or suffering or infused with “spirituality.”He was not the type to be lulled into a hobby like a docile corpulent toad.

It was a Tuesday night in October. He worked in geothermal energy markets.

Limonov’s Diary of a Loser was all the rage

All the mystics will tell you, truthfully, that there is no such thing as the past or the future and what we deem to be continuity of identity or “character is destiny” is actually in rare instance choice and more often, from moment to moment, slavish and crippling dependency to habit and acceptance of large-scale social cues.

The very self same mystics will admonish that intention and hyper awareness to the present is a species of liberation, a way to get free.

Their mystical books are obtainable via exchange of germy cash. And the biomes of their mystical guts sometimes go haywire, with predictable roiling and grimacing and incontinence and temporary but agonizing interruption of peristalsis following in the wake.

Rooted in time / stale life revolt

One sun, one earth, one more trip round, and the past lies a little but squares to the sound

of a truth two can share when the troubles abound

Be brief and be shifty where devils are found.

And the past does it better when the best can’t astound

One sun, one earth, this last dance around.

Wet dew on a bough that weeps as it roasts

Slander the future and silence the ghosts

One sun, one earth, one fiery time round.

I was listening to that part where he says no one reads primary sources, only secondary sources, because primary sources are merely text, whereas secondary sources are “knowledge”


The river would flood in the spring, and large carp would get caught in pools shrinking in the baked evaporating heat. We would shoot them with BB guns, spear them with sharpened sticks, try to bash them still with rocks tossed down from overhead. Repositories of unthinking feral movement, bloodletting action for no purpose other than avoiding being rooted in passive resignation with clean hands and clammy chastity.

Also: The moral arc of the universe tends towards more and more power getting ceded to corporate HR departments

Only so many odes to insomnia

Happiness writes white, and the engorged ego lays it down in purplish prose, like a picked-free tick bursted by the flame from a hastily scratched match.

I agree that all is not lost. Deep in the cavity of overdetermined mind space I sit, where imagined conversations and do over conversations and mortification forces feast, eyes closed but thoughts racing across an empty sparse big-skyed plain with no finish line in sight. If only darkness brought blankness, Without pills or any other dulling agent applies to the wound.

The mute pieties enshrined in every day things

Fowl (pheasant and ptarmigan), hanging hams, plump dead-eyed fish, and outside the open door, a small lamb bent like a supplicant to the grass.


There are days when I can revel in Alex Katz and Ada, when the surface of canvas and painterly craft of wet on wet suffices.


But other days, port in the storm days, Flemish is needed. Something to anchor, to nail down, as nails pierce the tendons and either break or bypass the small bones in the wrist to grab hold of the wood beneath.

A bad theory beats no theory, the constitutional scholars say, beating their tightly tuned drum. Mute pieties amplify mute agonies, the painters show by way of ostention, which is embodied meaning made regal in its pellucid silence, this exposition of the Host.