Donald Trump is a deeply, deeply stupid man. History’s greatest dumbass. Trump amassed great wealth and power as an unhappy accident, the byproduct of an inherently corrupt nation designed to prop up his ilk at the expense of normal, cool people. He then used that wealth and power to brainwash our dimmest citizens into believing that he was a new messiah, with big strong ideas and even bigger, stronger pectoral muscles.
Source: Donald Trump is broke hahahaha [archive]
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00318 ◊ Playboy ◊ Sierra Golden
Playboy
Pete’s grandfather spent 43 days
lost at sea. Found dead, he held
his cock and a photo of Meemaw.
Now, Meemaw won’t let go of Pete’s
wrist as he ducks out the door, headed
for the market where nobody minds
if he cops a feel of the peaches.
Later, the hairdresser at Curl Up ’n Dye
fondles his ear lobes, his jaw line,
and some girl on local news escapes
her flaming house because Bobo
the dog dialed 911 with his nose.
The footage shows her rubbing
his jowls as if they might alchemize.
She sobs, We sleep together every night,
and with each shot Pete wishes
he were the dog licking her toes,
twisting belly up to be rubbed.
He carries these women with him,
their tongues and cheeks, small
humps of shoulders and knees.
So what? His head rattles with lust.
He’s got nothing, and he’s asking,
Don’t we all burn to be touched?
—Sierra Golden
—found in The Slow Art (2018)
from David Berman’s book, The Portable February
You cannot shame this technology into disuse any more. That only works if quality is something the people with money care about. The problem with the continuing erosion of the games industry, the dehumanisation of game workers and the brutal treatment of outsourced work, is that many roles in the games industry are already treated as if they were automated. You are appealing to the better nature of money men who do not have one
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00317 ◊ Leap Year Day ◊ Maxine Chernoff
Leap Year Day
The palcolithic heart might burst
with news of slowness, news of feathers.
All the softness listed in the register
you keep: day of finite crashing.
Who’s to say the deafness that you wore
was needed by the Grecks? Depression
sounded like a whole note sewn with
lilac thread. I wanted to assure you
that the small biology of kissing
would not last until the last pebble dried
and a flag wobbled and a list faded and a map
was drawn and a green planet drifted
under your lens. The elbowed dawn lifted,
and you said nothing of the storm that flashed
off-shore, as if to mean, forgotten winter
without signs. You will not fade.
I believe your wholeness as it rests its future
on our lengthening half-lit letters.
—Maxine Chernoff
—found in Leap Year Day: New & Selected Poems (1990)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00056 ¶ And Three Hundred and Sixty-six in Leap Year ¶ Ogden Nash
And Three Hundred and Sixty-six in Leap Year
Some people shave before bathing
And about people who bathe before shaving they are scathing,
While those who bathe before shaving,
Well, they imply that those who shave before bathing are misbehaving.
Suppose you shave before bathing, well the advantage is that you don’t
have to make a special job of washing the lather off afterwards, it
just floats off with the rest of your accumulations in the tub,But the disadvantage is that before bathing your skin is hard and dry
and your beard confronts the razor like a grizzly bear defending its
cub.Well then, suppose you bathe before shaving, well the advantage is that
after bathing your skin is soft and moist, and your beard positively
begs for the blade.But the disadvantage is that to get the lather off you have to wash your
face all over again at the basin almost immediately after washing
it in the tub, which is a duplication of effort that leaves me spotless
but dismayed.The referee reports, gentlemen, that Fate has loaded the dice,
Since your only choice is between walking around all day with a sore
chin or washing your face twice,So I will now go and get a shave from a smug man in crisp white coat,
And I will disrupt his smugness by asking him about his private life, does
he bathe before shaving or shave before bathing, and then I will die
either of laughing or of a clean cut throat.
—Ogden Nash
—found in Good Intentions (1937)
Richard Lewis, Comedian and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Actor, Dies at 76 [archive]
This saddens me even more than I expected despite, weirdly, having just misread a headline a few weeks ago that made me think he had died then. RIP, Mr. Lewis. You gave me a lot of laughs.
There’s a thin line between concerns about mental fitness and speculation based on appearance (and birth date). The latter side is just ageism, something a disappointing number of folks are engaging in. Biden has done a pretty good job and his “gaffes” have been inconsequential.
Finished reading: Rogue Protocol: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells 📚
Finished reading: Artificial Condition by Martha Wells 📚
📃
Daily(ish) poem → 00316 ◊ [To be alive: not just the carcass] ◊ Gregory Orr
[To be alive: not just the carcass]
To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That’s crudely put, but…
If we’re not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?
—Gregory Orr
—found in Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved (2012)
📃
Daily(ish) poem → 00315 ◊ Call & Response ◊ Penelope Pelizzon
Call & Response
A nervous dog will snap at wind
that snarls outdoors as snows descend
till only walking pacifies
the wolf awoken in the hound.
We trudge the path we’ve memorized,
our coats first nipped, then gnashed at by
fangs within the sharpened cold,
grown sharper as the daylight dies.
Ice rusts the hinges of the oaks.
Like owls, they screech at us below
& we, forgetting what we are,
flinch beneath that killing blow.
But soon we’re swallowed in the roar
streams of rush-hour traffic pour.
Pink neon from the Eastbrook Mall
(our northern lights) erases stars
we know still seethe, invisible,
each night we feel their anxious pull
deep inside the animal
asleep inside each animal.
—Penelope Pelizzon
—found in Zócalo Public Square (September 30, 2016)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00055 ¶ from Burmese Days ¶ George Orwell
…he had learned to live inwardly, secretly, in books and secret thoughts that could not be uttered. Even his talks with the doctor were a kind of talking to himself; for the doctor, good man, understood little of what was said to him. But it is a corrupting thing to live one’s real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.
—George Orwell
—found in Burmese Days (1934)
Eating Pizza Hut Meat Lover’s(tm or something I’m sure) pizza. Terrible pizza zhuzhed way up by nostalgia.
The Nex Benedict murder is heartbreaking. Where does that kind of cruelty come from? How can people who’ve endured childhood abuse and bullying sometimes turn cruel and sometimes not on what is practically a fundamental level?
The current situation with Matt Mullenweg doesn’t sit well because of what I think is a communication problem, not an ethical one )and the way he is being treated).
Chronic depression creates a feedback loop of a litmus test: who misses you when you withdraw completely from everything you can?
As I grow older it feels more and more like scale is simply the enemy of most good things.
When I was young I dreaded taking the only vehicles I could afford to the shop; now I dread going to the doctor for this earthly vehicle in much the same way.
Finished reading: All Conditions Red by Martha Wells 📚