“I had no thought of the persecution I was drawing down on myself for thus attacking so venerable an institution. I was always courageous in saying what I saw to be true, for the simple reason that I never dreamed of opposition. What seemed to me to be right I thought must be equally plain to all other rational beings. Hence I had no dread of denunciation. I was only surprised when I encountered it, and no number of experiences have, as yet, taught me to fear public opinion. What I said on divorce [law] thirty-seven years ago seems quite in line with what many say now. The trouble was not in what I said, but that I said it too soon, and before the people were ready to hear it. It may be, however, that I helped them to get ready; who knows?” — Elizabeth Cady Stanton
2.1
Of squirrels, in a park, in a burb, far inland from the sea, and their common mystery. I have never seen a squirrel drink anything. They’re mammals, they must. Leaping from a brown branch to a roof, finding in the shaded gutter a finger cookie of water collected abut two obstructing leaves, bugs and flecks digested all, each indigenous metaphor. Microscopic bugs in their millions dormant in crisp Spring weather activated upon digestion by the furnace of warm blood. There to cause much harm to the species, trading their reproduction for the killing of the host, and then their own ctrl-C, ending their program. They can’t die never having lived. Do not say bacteria have life. Save it for the higher organisms, those that do not much most the many. Shoot them in a sexy film if you want our interest. When they can order two trembling drinks with someone who is hard to talk to, and have that lead to the unlikeliest of reproductions, then they will have exceeded their lot, becoming the bushy-tailed anthropomorph that earns our consideration.
Sexual congress with you is a muting of orgasmic parts, nothing goes, your desires drop like the hairs from your head. To have known you is to birth vicious children, that’s a fact. Your children were everything you were. To make those copies, molding such willfully ignorant automatons — what legacy, your foul copies. Well done. Rehabilitation never worked — you used it on them like a tour, showing you things, distracting you, but you couldn’t wait to get back home to your own barbed bed.
Meanwhile I evolved myself. Who’s baby are you? I know, you’ll never know until you gets a hangnail, of self-awareness on the inside, til it catches on something in you and hurts. Then you’ll notice. Then what they been sayin might imbibe some gravity. Them conventions unignorable. Spillin out your cupboard so. Yessir, only when you become aware of yourself will your tame life improve. You’re a skittish pup to your addiction, full obedience.
And why you think that they agreed, the drink people? Found I the starting shot? By no means, sir! Should I have made it begin? I’d as soon enter the factory like the comrades. Who made this life? Not I sir, not I. The person who gets too much love takes the excess and perverts it. Society itself runs on malformed chicanery. Knowing this got me a free upgrade.
Know this like the tears of our abuelas. Mine does not have wrinkles, she has slots. They require moisturizing. The arm of her slot machine is Costa Rican rum. I watch her eyes spin around in her head, man. When they land on double cherries she hops up to dance. Played some hootchie kootchie, said she would not get help but i’faith I name the guy who did it, it’s tattooed on my collarbone, read the name then you take it from there, brick-lay the pieces, and house my fucking finesse.
2.2
Very many times I have gone over this. Many times you have not gotten it. Many times you claimed you got it, then did not put it into practice, that is, the only conclusion. The partner session coincided with us taking abuelita to the riverboat. Sure I’m cool. Times were different then. I wanted them to stay the same much longer than they did. <– This is on the humans’ epitaph, less than a hundred years.
Male and female, age 18. He took hours citing thinkers deficient in the evident to rule on one faux pas. Men dump their foibles on him still. He is no more than their toilet, charitably. Possibly two again, she said, upon the occasion of her divorce, having been asked how many lovers she’d now keep. She walked into a realtor’s with the name of her preferred street and said, Show me the blood-curdling prices. The couple went hungry when she loved him, enough to where some hair fell out. Her under-eyes were coal. Her knees began to creak. Not now.
The jilted party is intoxicated in the present. What is left for them but to mount the clamoring bunk machine and spew their wounds on blogs and forums? Each complaint is slapstick in an ego tantrum. Their shattered home is fastened to their crotch and thrust into every hope they coax into their bed. To be stirred so vastly is a kind of glamour. Most find themselves disposable, that which they never thought they’d be. Walking away from something is walking to something new; more likely it’s depression. One cannot love without great focus on the other. A side effect comes at the end, one sees that they’ve grown narrow. The circle of strife is shuttered without vista, recalling constantly when everything once chimed. And the present moment makes a puncture sound.
The only thing that’s rustic in their private lives is ticks. Even were they laid and fêted, it would be to them a somber day. Essentially they live ensconced in helmets. Clouds are e’er forbidding, air is never fresh. She traveled to a far off land she’d seen in a movie. She landed late and hailed a cab, which could’ve been an end. Someone on a motorbike rode her to the mountain range. He hauled her up the flatiron pass up to the lookout peak, and there he pushed her off. She fell to where the lilac boughs nestled her sleepy form. Petals were her neck support and her negligée. Her fleecy somber lover followed her and hovered in the glade. They sought a brusque immaculence, one where time enchants again. They found it too, in the guise of distressed fauna. Two flea bears by the lake imitated the lovemaking vividly. The animals’ condition made the couple conscious of their own. They took a ramp back to the top and played the scene again. Anything repeated becomes better done.
2.3
At least we don’t hold the heads of Micronesians underwater with our own two hands. Avoiding action is a strong basis for ethics. This broadcast sympathy to all forgotten peoples. They will learn of our good vibes from their new ‘fugee camp — American Samoa.
Shade as agent of relief in the coming hundred years is laughable. Its temp’ratures will be more than we can bear. Zygotes are the only ones with rights to be untrodden, and we protect poorly even them. Send all expectant teen moms to Kiribati and marvel at how quick America directs the Army Corps of Engineers to go there and protect the island chain.
Get the biggest kooky priest to baptize every islander en masse and count the hours til America reduces climate change. As it is, we don’t let the untrodden do squat. We have to trod upon them first. It’s only fair, here’s the hoops we’ve made, and here’s how you jump thru them. Make your children try. They will get it quicker.
Soft! Life now idly hovering, the stasis of complacency, result of satisfaction.
2.4
There occurred that which perhaps collapsed the futures that the teen couple could choose. Which objects have memories? Umbrellas in Hong Kong. Now millions there are walking in the rain rather than keeping themselves dry with simple nylon on a handle. Where writing’s crushed and broadcasting is censored, symbols glow with greater power than they had before.
Sadly cognitive dissonance is a boffo long term strategy for keeping us alive. Evolution got us here with strong instincts and drives. But it forces those things on us in the modern world when they’re useless and of harm. The call that’s sounded thru the ages now echoes in the pages. I am with those sages (so my ego demands). The ignorant enrages. His neighbors are in cages cause they have to bring in wages. Unify. Demand economic security for all. It can be done under Western democratic capital. Then after everyone is clothed, fed, and sheltered for their lives, go back to your divisions, like when a zygote is a person.
Those with the call to wander saved their stuff in friends’ and families’ cellars, those reeling from a breakup put their things in storage, those selling off someone’s estate kept a couple souvenirs, those first inclined to donate saved not a thing at all, while A. Moore sacrificed his treasures to the flames, propelling them to live in idea space.
Lies the teen couple told each other worked like termites in the walls of the space that is created where two people have joined, the idea space made of their thoughts, feelings, and memories; feed and water it or the place becomes a crypt. It moves out of combining back to solipsistic minds, who tend to it until they see the place no more the same — another room inside one mind just like all the rest. It can be rejuvenated if the parties meet — a friendly coffee and a few remembers when. This has a big benefit, it makes the two feel young. So much of reminiscing is to feel young again. That’s often all it is for the party who had left.
I have heard that it was true love for him. She was the true love of eleven hundred unrequited men, so large was her being. Better for all if breasts were floating in the air for comfort, food, and jollies.
2.5
The strongest force in the universe — perceived reality. If you want to deeply wound a handyman, tell him you can accommodate his schedule and be home anytime. Man they despise that. Who does this guy think he is, having freedom? He thinks he’s better than me because he works from home? Fuck him. I’m gonna half-ass like I’ve not half-assed before.
The miracle is when the handyman completes the job with never having lied — the ordered parts come in on time, he shows up when he said, he does the job without shortcuts and without busting something new. There’s another miracle if he can act without prejudgment, doing just as good a job for clients who don’t remind him of his family as he does for those that do. A tell is if they’re fellas of few words. Ascetics living far from human touch can treat us all the same. A handyman who shows up blabbing from the start is betraying hostile nervousness. Even those who lie all day can’t tamp down their deceit. It shows as logorrhea.
2.6
When the teens first became a couple, few of their mutual judgmenters gave them long. Both had been dating casual for years. There wasn’t much to indicate they’d commit to each other. Destiny is always claimed ex post facto. It’s a tireless kind of nudge that tries to turn expectations to reality. If subsequent events match one criterion, the hand of destiny’s invoked. It offers import in a scientifically lawful conscious absurdity. It meets the advance of constant, unwavering, undiluted change. Indeed it crashes into change’s front line, imparting meaning, corralling chaos. At times its phalanx turns back the advance. It has a victory. The will of humankind has stamped its mark upon the cosmos, delineating how things must be from now until all time. That is until the right flank of change charges it with seeming supernatural cavalry into its core, and the left flank’s reinforcement alters destiny for good. Really for good, this time, and what was destined finds it’s over, yet again, even should millennia have passed.
Oahan warriors jumped off the Pali mountain rather than obey the Big Island’s king. Seventy-four years after his death, a descendant of his court, not his family, gave the islands to some corporate fucks without a fight. To apologize, she wrote a lasting song.
Political assassination, school shootings, domestic terror, all that goes away when the inborn drive to do it does. It could be the end of war. The idea comes, how could we meddle with the human mind on such a deep level? What would be the unintended consequences of kneecapping this instinct? By the same token, we’ve been conducting an experiment for millennia of PTSDs rearing abused children. Physical and mental punishment builds adults with big probs. The broken male’s broken copies go about breaking things, including theirselves. Entire societies are founded on this, propagate it, live and die innumerable generations til someone wipes them out. This method is better exactly how, than removing human being’s ability to do it? Is it not ethically okay to make a group without this drive, sequester, and study them? Perhaps not. Then we shall march in step with chance and become entropy.
Just those old sweet charges of domestic terror for environmental protest keeps Georgia on my mind.
2.7
The brightest quiz show mind could never match the speed of thought achieved by any mediocrity’s snap judgment. The snap judgment alone has a magnitude more pep than the limits of rocketry. It can slay a continental ego. It can get things out of people that otherwise they’d never give. Stronger than nuke sub steel, it can prop up gross incompetence. Though most commonly deployed in the negative, it can be used positively as well. The right snap judgment at the right time can make someone more attractive go to bed with someone not, the type of longshot belief that gives succor, one of hundreds that we tell ourselves just to live another day.
People have a drive to push their limits. Our lifespan is so limited, our subconscious is continually forcing us to go past the limits we encounter, beit running, free diving, Kelvin temperatures, or past halfway when our blood would turn to steam, or memorizing the Upanishads, buzzing in with the correct answer, complex equations, digits of pi, fluency in a dozen languages, vast detailed cartography, or a million chess positions. Some things anyone can catch — a ball, a cold. But bind your hands behind your back and the next kick, the next foot pass, you’re gonna swallow. We motor to the boundaries of self and park there, getting out our phones to watch and see if someone else will be able to go farther than we have before. We never see the same man watching us, hostile nervously, as we drive up to the limit he just set.
Since the teen girl’s trauma, she thought in selective focus, a totalitarian construct in the human mind. Selective focus will stamp out someone’s path for them. It’ll raise the path in bronze relief and reinforce the edges in a wall of diamond carbon. It wants one’s sister, parents, and especially one’s kids. A continent is insufficient to sate selective focus. It wants all the people and all the natural resources. Planet Earth is not enough, it wants moons and asteroids and to harvest them to ash. Selective focus is Ginsberg’s Moloch. It has no place for the imaginative, which is to say every child in the world.
The trinkets that the teen young woman schlepped over the years had memories attached. She took those memories and housed them in the space between her and the teen young man, because that’s where the magic lives. But it was lumpy there, something that neither one could see. They’d be floored over stuff their buds would not think twice about. She thought of when she tried to breathe the air around collapsing couples. Respiration as a concept began feeling poisonous. Even touch, a handshake, a parting hug, caused an instant recoil as if it were burning. Consider Beckett’s disembodied mouths. Commonly they have much on their plate — feeding, launching egos, pleasuring. But in B. they’re down to only their most important task, conveying thought. We approach them in their oil jars like a shrine. What could these precious miracles, possessing this the rarest gift in a universe of one point five degrees Kelvin have to say? A scientific lead, a peerless truth, an answer that brings peace? No, a breathless slew of the minutia of complaints. That says something. It’s not how we misuse the gift, it’s what we have to offer.