1.
In the debacle of thunderheads and shingles fluttering like tarred pages torn from the Book of Pleas, Don the Fondler clutched the cold acidic vows he made on the road before the last fall of crab apples, collapsed and bruised like small withered faces. There they’d stay, depressingly purple and sunken-cheeked, until the foxtail and pigeon grass smothered them like so much news. News of needless public servants, caged children, intentional deprivation, swamped bunkbeds and subways, the ruin of graffitied bridges, a language lost when its last fluent speaker took a vow of silence, and the rise of an uncivilized generation waging a guerilla war on semiotics, gravity, memory, and insomnia. On the misnamed maps and mutilated districts, no destination rewards the traveler, no detour spins the clock forward, roundabouts never exit, and cul-de-sacs ensnare the forward-thinking in a jingoistic gulf. Take sides now before Venus descends. It’s not so late as it seems nor as early as rumored. But in the crenellated desire for fresh coffee and dull gossip, don’t be surprised if the roof collapses and rats lounge in the basement. This, some surmise, is how—as spite and static are dictated out of the east—this is how modernity ends.
b.
Declared a heathen. Likely a heretic. Definitely a hypocrite, a tin-plated narcissist, an infantile ranter. A distempered emperor. The kind that invokes a conflagration and distills the neighbors’ nest eggs into bovine statuary. The kind that smirks at the tops of all the bowed and nodding heads mumbling into their laps as if somewhere down there was the answer to their woes and temptations. Of course, they might be on to something. But it wouldn’t be the first time that some charlatan managed to pull the rug out from under the impossibly devout and left them suspended for five-hundred years before they grudgingly admit that their dizziness isn’t the result of the rest of the universe swirling around them. Or that gravity isn’t just another name for (insert your preferred deity here) or that what they mistook for some holy levitation was really inspired by a load of hot air before it sagged and sputtered like a deflated ego and their backsides collided with the sanctuary’s wet flagstones.
💣💣💣.
Violations politely arranged and allegedly self-inflicted.
The root cause, they point out, is the guilty party. Or vice versa.
Blame is the virtual road to virtue, the pretext of chapter 3 in The Oligarch’s Handbook.
The one rebuked, gagged, detained, dressed down, fired, and/or expelled for ignoring, flouting, criticizing, or deliberately breaking the rule or law or mandate or threat or order or demand or directive or decree, no matter how illogical, unnecessary, discriminatory, arbitrary, biased, racist, cruel, inane, self-serving, outdated, idiotic, misogynistic, unfair, destructive, or immoral it or its inevitable consequences are, have been, or will be.
That’s the one blamed.
iv.
We still cannot convince ourselves of heroism, even in this exhibition of shock. It shouldn’t take much. A pinch of catastrophe to entice us to the mouth of a dark alley or all the excused felonies that tempt us to sear our own fingertips, wait quietly as the constable regales us with his uncle’s recipes for bear repellant or forces us into the backseat and cuffs our sweaty palms behind our backs while he considers various means of invasion. But really, we should take a more direct route, one that at least lacks that sniff of despair, the sort that preoccupied Munch and dragged Kafka into his shell. Then, when the mob storms the courthouse and bagboys wearing aprons and black eyeliner pry up manhole covers and jimmy the post office door, it’s time for brass knuckles and public outrage and overt rejections of bullying abstractions. The gravid moment is upon us, the awakened engagement when daylight meets nightsticks and greased cuffs sizzle in a burning Tesla. Take the first step and the last breath. Let fly the splintered cries and weathered fists, and barrel through the past, mortared and welded but riddled with faults and simpering gestures. Of course, that’s just one approach, one jab imagined during a blackout brought on by a long night guzzling from a thermos of lukewarm contention.
No debating the morality of vegetarianism or pointing out the relevance of Africans’ exotic cosmology to pale Midwestern Scandinavians. Don’t fall for the contradictions swelling Sunday morning sermons or concede the barbarities implied in Monday’s radio news and the markets out of Chicago and New York. Just accept the pitchfork and what you know about the pagan derivation of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. If while living under a canopy of lies and half-truths, one borrows from the amnesiac neighbor a torque wrench, a fistful of spaghetti, a paisley tablecloth, and the P volume from his set of World Book Encyclopedias (see pillory, poach, plight, plunder, plutocracy), one might be inspired to make a list of all the Ukrainian writers whose work one has failed to read in translation, not to mention in the original (whether or not they were written during a bombardment). No need to alphabetize since logarithmic aromas or insatiable rhythms are satisfactory criteria for categorizing and ranking poems though a radically different approach is likely required for traffic citations, expired visas, death certificates, and assembly instructions for overdue rebellions. And it’s not that the car won’t start. It probably will, but we’d likely have to push it with the door open, hop in while it rolls down the slope toward the river, and pop the clutch. Of course, we’ve nowhere else to go. It’s just that the prospect of an unmarked road, perpetually descending grades, and intersections free of cameras and rights of way and traffic lights is nearly as appealing as a draped casket and abbreviated euphemisms (e.g., DOA). I’ve no reason to hedge. The grass needs cutting, and Sunday’s sermon will likely be a rerun, so I’ll just fill the tub with shredded eviction notices, voter registrations, credit reports, and jury summonses. For a baptism. No, a dowsing. Maybe a scalding. Or a bath.
Yeah, that’s it. That’s what we’re all taking.
A bath.
🖐️ + 1.
Despair is the abandoned child of hope, and should some starlight relegated to the obscure fringes of imaginary numbers take her in, expect the gradual collapse of the life expectancy of clouded sulphurs and elderly half-time janitors. Sure, you can wish upon a starling murmuring about flightless relatives or upon glazed dishware. It’s a mostly free world, give or take a tyrant or two. And given their obsession with photokinesis and teenage girls’ secretly graphed arcs and parabolas, I’ll expect a suggestive dinner of crayfish steamed in the backyard. Disrobe them of their tiny red armor and tap your toes to the beating coming from upstairs. There’s no need to explain the scar on his ear since it’s been there for several seasons and at least one lunar eclipse, or was it from a midnight mooning behind the backstop crawling with last year’s ivy and grape vines? I really expected more though I’d been warned about that bald spare tire. It’s my own fault—the blistered lip and cold sores, the bad reception during every thunderstorm, the bread abandoned behind the molded cheese stewing in the back of the refrigerator. Like the scraped elbow that heals so gradually it’s neglected, I’d forgotten the words and the melody long ago, and even the memory of forgetting slipped imperceptibly away like clouds drifting behind the eaves. Maybe it doesn’t matter despite the finial of fixed hair, the sneering laughter and vengeful crudity, the celebratory flatulence and gratuitous theft, and the infatuation with designed coercion, justifiable famine, and industrial slaughter.
🖐️ + 1 + ½.
But it actually does.
Matter.
7.
For all the hankering after a modicum of spite, I’ve elected to fill the eleventh hour with a frenzied game of Twister and a review of the effects of the Black Plague on church attendance. It’s the sort of distraction needed after a fortnight spent crocheting holsters, which will likely find themselves moth-eaten, faded of all color, and in boxes labeled “Censored: Offensive Yarns” and heaved from the window of an old Volvo and into a swamp outside some obscure Florida backwater.
ate.
She lived like a barren insurgent, railing with all the vagrants of the ghost town purged from the rolls of unmarried voters, all the tenants of condemned houses, the untreated fatalities, the differently desired, and most of those shouldering bundles of counterfeit handbags and tattered pennants for defunct Mexican teams fixed with knotted twine and bound for slaughterhouses in the Midwest. She found their sources of anger and despair and called out all the deliberate methods of nixing people’s hopes, and, once found, she plotted her intrusion. Forget coping, she decided, or conceding. Screw accepting the status quo or kowtowing to those invasive viruses sucking the land dry, coercing every last buck from callused hands, inviting epidemics, conjuring crime waves, redacting that Epsteinian grifter, badgering the ground with pipes and posts, and riddling the sky with spotlights, snooping drones, talking heads, and sky-written prohibitions against asylum, empathy, anti-slogans, historical truth, disconcerting books, and contrarianism.
32 or nein, nein, nein.
Come spring, consider the stalks of white blossoms in the monte and the romancing doves on your carport’s corrugated roof. Watch the mockingbird with stems and grass jutting from the sides of its beak. Translate the yowling of those two tomcats facing off in the middle of the pot-holed street. Concede the deep shadows beneath the overpass, its necessary privacy, to the boy and girl kissing and clinging to one another. All is neither lost nor missing. Not when each small act of living rings with resistance.
1👁️.
But remember: living is more ends than means.
So, what is and will be necessary isn’t just living. It’s just living. That is, living justly.
We all know that, of course. Or should. And still, here we are.
