A guy wakes up in the morning with a head full of garbage. It's the kind of thing you notice right away, like a headache but deeper-rooted, a terrible awareness before he's even opened his eyes. Confirmed by news radio, painfully amplified over breakfast, a sense that try as may he can't eat another bite. Now the paper too, the words swimming in front of him without sense or meaning.
He's freaked but he doesn't say anything to his wife or his kids about it, he just tries to fake his way through. He gets out to his car and thinks maybe now, but the radio attacks him, billboards, people, even the way they walk and look like a kind of affront. It's bad but he forces himself through the motions, parking, onto the train and in, he and everybody else looking down or straight ahead, a sullen cortege for people who die every day, bored by it. Only it's really like he's possessed, the guy has to force every step. Even the corner coffee he buys every day tastes like shit. He should have asked for more sugar but even that...
He comes to in the hospital with a dull feeling in his chest and his wife standing over him and a team of doctors, everybody in scrubs, everybody wearing masks. "I'm afraid there's nothing else to be done," the doctor tells her. Then a quick shot, and a lot of being gone, and when he wakes up he feels a world better, like a new man.
Every day there are meals, and TV, and a little bit of weather through the window. He likes the commercials best. At first he wonders when they'll let him go home. After a few days he gets used to it, falling with his new family into something like happiness.
1.26.2011
1.23.2011
imagined community and its discontents
Bummer way to listen to sports scores listen for the home teams that lose now picture the kids brought to see their firstest games indoctrinated sad into loss in a more personal way a kid's primer on deeper more real loss in preparation for best case later in life when said loss becomes more inevitable, something to let flow around you with a kind of resignation.
Bummer way to watch the news instead of nodding in solemn judgment or fear at the shame that thieves murderers etc have brought upon themselves rather empathize with the moment they were forced too late to recognize where their own mistaken judgment had led them, to instant forever loss to rot in jail or lose their families or real communities to spend a good part of time ostracized, cast out to either never find forgiveness or have to fight every year for many to find some smidgeon of it.
Escape hatch out of bummerville a perception of the beauty of the play of chance at times bouncing right, love conveyed and echoed back of the joy of growth out of winter's tearing down of the fat kid escaping from his dad's arms running down the stands and out to the court grabbing the basketball from the referee's hands and throwing it from mid-court and against all logic but really with the perfect logic of that moment the ball sinks in a perfect arc, nothing but net.
That next morning the jail doors open and the prisoners go free, lightened by their second chance they radiate peace and understanding then by example we all go free politics and history are cast aside disease goes vanquished religion is recognized for the quasi-helpful approximation that it is and everybody gets together that very night for the world's absolute best grade A number one potluck.
Bummer way to watch the news instead of nodding in solemn judgment or fear at the shame that thieves murderers etc have brought upon themselves rather empathize with the moment they were forced too late to recognize where their own mistaken judgment had led them, to instant forever loss to rot in jail or lose their families or real communities to spend a good part of time ostracized, cast out to either never find forgiveness or have to fight every year for many to find some smidgeon of it.
Escape hatch out of bummerville a perception of the beauty of the play of chance at times bouncing right, love conveyed and echoed back of the joy of growth out of winter's tearing down of the fat kid escaping from his dad's arms running down the stands and out to the court grabbing the basketball from the referee's hands and throwing it from mid-court and against all logic but really with the perfect logic of that moment the ball sinks in a perfect arc, nothing but net.
That next morning the jail doors open and the prisoners go free, lightened by their second chance they radiate peace and understanding then by example we all go free politics and history are cast aside disease goes vanquished religion is recognized for the quasi-helpful approximation that it is and everybody gets together that very night for the world's absolute best grade A number one potluck.
1.21.2011
everything is obfuscated
It's not a particularly deep realization but it's wide-reaching, the degree to which as a culture and as individuals we continue to perfect the eternal non-present.
You could argue that what I should say is the multiply-or-diluted present but the net effect is a desensitization, not just to violence, in the foil packaging of a hamburger as opposed to killing the cow yourself, in drone planes that kill by remote control like in some really really advanced and demented video game. Not just to information, with ten browser windows open ten best internet friends and nothing fully parsed but much gleaned at instant summary distance. But to joy as well, in digitizing our photographs, our correspondence, a bulk of our human connection, and so on and therefore holding these things at an easily parsable, easily forgettable and never impactful distance.
So we've become a place of daydream revolutions, revolutions conceived as marketing campaigns or cute little clubs built on 1917 daydreams, lives and loves and fantasy football and once in a while the deluxe and illustrious mechanism breaks down to let real physics intrude, some kid takes a real helmet to helmet hit and ends up knocked immobile, frozen on the field, trying to move something to show he still can, and they bring in the golf cart, and if you concentrate really hard, you can will yourself to pretend it's a golf course, and the kid's just taking a nap on the way to the next hole.
You could argue that what I should say is the multiply-or-diluted present but the net effect is a desensitization, not just to violence, in the foil packaging of a hamburger as opposed to killing the cow yourself, in drone planes that kill by remote control like in some really really advanced and demented video game. Not just to information, with ten browser windows open ten best internet friends and nothing fully parsed but much gleaned at instant summary distance. But to joy as well, in digitizing our photographs, our correspondence, a bulk of our human connection, and so on and therefore holding these things at an easily parsable, easily forgettable and never impactful distance.
So we've become a place of daydream revolutions, revolutions conceived as marketing campaigns or cute little clubs built on 1917 daydreams, lives and loves and fantasy football and once in a while the deluxe and illustrious mechanism breaks down to let real physics intrude, some kid takes a real helmet to helmet hit and ends up knocked immobile, frozen on the field, trying to move something to show he still can, and they bring in the golf cart, and if you concentrate really hard, you can will yourself to pretend it's a golf course, and the kid's just taking a nap on the way to the next hole.
1.20.2011
light and sweet
Would the best apocalypse for the New York metropolitan area be one of fire or ice, ocean or drought. In any case one would want Godspeed You Black Emperor flown in to provide the soundtrack; they could play what was left of the New Meadowlands, only halfway through a hundred Swoops would parachute in to start punching out any Giants fans in the audience. I was going to say to strafe the place, but even in an apocalyptic setting that seems a bit much. We need a gentler, more bipartisan discourse, an NFC East fan base united against more consistent talents.
The ideal, the gentle apocalypse would be slow building, so people would have a good chance to evacuate, so that only the landscape itself were laid to waste. It could be seen as a starting over, a rejuvenation, to open Manhattan and its new-found canals or lakes of fire to colonization by a new generation of artists and musicians, lured by cheap or nonexistent rent, excellent parking, and a reasonably empty environment for drug use. Brooklyn might survive intact and ascend to primacy, with Bedford as the new Wall Street, although development of the Atlantic Yards project should be halted indefinitely out of respect for the displaced.
Which scares you more, severe weather or faulty social institutions, a press with no moral authority or a government with no financial accountability, nuclear proliferation or bad, bad education.
Advantages to bunker: more reading time. Questions re>: wireless internet access, the culinary limits inherent to canned food, and how I'd ever beat these two at Scrabble consistently over the long-term.
The ideal, the gentle apocalypse would be slow building, so people would have a good chance to evacuate, so that only the landscape itself were laid to waste. It could be seen as a starting over, a rejuvenation, to open Manhattan and its new-found canals or lakes of fire to colonization by a new generation of artists and musicians, lured by cheap or nonexistent rent, excellent parking, and a reasonably empty environment for drug use. Brooklyn might survive intact and ascend to primacy, with Bedford as the new Wall Street, although development of the Atlantic Yards project should be halted indefinitely out of respect for the displaced.
Which scares you more, severe weather or faulty social institutions, a press with no moral authority or a government with no financial accountability, nuclear proliferation or bad, bad education.
Advantages to bunker: more reading time. Questions re>: wireless internet access, the culinary limits inherent to canned food, and how I'd ever beat these two at Scrabble consistently over the long-term.
1.19.2011
current events
voltage I mean like a 60 Hertz hum which you could eventually ignore caught up in other sound but which'll remind you it's there time to time in uncharacteristic moments of purported silence.
voltage I mean like an underlying indeterminacy quantum/otherwise but also its opposite in the sense that if you slow down you might sense general order underlying, a general state of hold together more than not despite the grim machinations of chance, cold. voltage I mean that's an easy thing to say if the lucky streak persists.
man I owe you a lot and lately I see more of you in me than I ever did. For a long time I carried only one image of you around; of someone whose resistors had snapped and electricity shot from your mouth in a screaming stream extincting scorched emotion for all in range, a kind of forceful melting to bleach memory of its joy, a kind of forever storm I still see freakishly parked to flood that fucked house.
but of late I have a different image. I see a kid I would never do that to and a kid you would never do that to the same, a chance for both of us to get it right, and there must have been a lot you got right then, if I could only remember.
voltage I mean like an underlying indeterminacy quantum/otherwise but also its opposite in the sense that if you slow down you might sense general order underlying, a general state of hold together more than not despite the grim machinations of chance, cold. voltage I mean that's an easy thing to say if the lucky streak persists.
man I owe you a lot and lately I see more of you in me than I ever did. For a long time I carried only one image of you around; of someone whose resistors had snapped and electricity shot from your mouth in a screaming stream extincting scorched emotion for all in range, a kind of forceful melting to bleach memory of its joy, a kind of forever storm I still see freakishly parked to flood that fucked house.
but of late I have a different image. I see a kid I would never do that to and a kid you would never do that to the same, a chance for both of us to get it right, and there must have been a lot you got right then, if I could only remember.
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