.

It will have been the land of 10,000 bit tongues,
Tattooed more colors than is even possible
With life deescalated to a street address war
More quickly than the paradigm Post will ever report,
.
The land of eating your own throw-up
Behind barbed wires of invisible hate,
Each day devoted to finding a secret,
Finding a way around
Reality,
Around moth-like buzzings to the light
Around each other.
.
The eyes cast down
In accordance with the rain.

How foolish my conversation with the sun is,
Now,
That it should be emulating my movements,
Showing me, just by suggestions,
What I did 17 February’s ago
Apparently so steadfast but which
Had seemed so commonplace and hopeless
As I was staring at the gravel knowing
Only dusty straightaways.

* No EVEN MORE idiotic opinions were harmed in the writing of this blog post. They just weren’t mentioned at all.

..

“The system is fu**ed.”
This is something I hear with a lot of Bernie Sanders supporters. Just the other night, I was in a bar discussing politics with this guy who’d professed being in favor of Sanders, and he kept saying things like “Things have to change.” I asked him why, and he told me to look at things from a historical perspective. I asked him what point in history, and he goes, Rome. It’s like, what? That has to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. First of all, Rome isn’t even a point in time, it’s a place. Second of all, he’s attempting to make sense of our current political “quandary” (by the way most Americans do want Obama back, including me) by incorporating the most obtuse, LITERALLY ancient reference anyone could think of. I understand that Sanders ran on essentially a platform of legalizing marijuana, and I do believe this is a good idea. I also happen to feel that Mr. Sanders desperately needs to SMOKE some marijuana, seeing as he was like easily the most mental individual I’ve ever beheld in my life. Anyway, presupposing that it is a good idea to legalize marijuana, the proper thing for that dude in the bar to say would have been “We really need to legalize marijuana,” not “everything has to change,” especially seeing as we are right on the heels of a revolutionary health care plan’s institution about which I have not heard a single complaint. What’s more, it was initiated by a black dude. It’s ideal melting-pot American progress. Oh, our system is fu**ed? Well, then, it shouldn’t be any problem getting all these immigrants to leave, should it? Has it ever occurred to people that PEOPLE BLOW OUT OF A PIG’S A**HOLE? I mean Donald Trump didn’t elect him-fu**ing-self, last time I checked.

..

“A high prevalence of rape cases increases the significance of one isolated instance of rape.”
And now for everybody’s favorite class, which apparently nobody has taken… high school economics! You see kids, when something is everywhere, all the time, like, let’s say, “iron,” it’s not a precious metal, but rather something cheap as dirt you can use to make sailing ships, etc. Similarly, if an EVENT is everywhere, and it takes place all the time, then it’s time not address one isolated occurrence of said event, but rather the overall, cultural reasons why this is happening. Is it REALLY so unlikely that it has to do with pop music like Lil’ John and Taio Cruz that could make John Quincy Adams sneeze?

..

“A teacher having sex with a student is like.. the WORST THING EVER!”
Ya know, I’m not even sure how they punish these things, but I know they must, ‘cause I hear about it from like way across the country, and the teacher who got caught is usually pretty in stitches. This poor female teacher was like in tears about getting in trouble for it… I dunno if people understand this concept or not, but you can’t actually RAPE a guy in conventional sex, if you’re a girl. There are biological functionalities preventing that from happening. Guess what, folks: sex isn’t going anywhere for a while, it might as well grab a Snickers, and the only way we could formulate it to where everybody chooses a PERFECT mate of their exact age would be like some futuristic Brave New World thing. And I don’t think any of us want that. Don’t answer that, by the way.

..

“All minorities are not only the same, but they’re actually also the exact same people, with the same social security numbers and everything.”
This is almost too stupid to even believe: The New Yorker, a magazine which once upon a time I respected, published this blurb by this D.C.-area teacher. The blurb not only purported Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a main topic, but even FEATURED A PICTURE or Ellison, right at the top of the piece. Then, the story proceeded to be all about the teacher’s immigrant, Hispanic students. The writer had even claimed growing up to have never thought about immigration at all, and for anyone unfamiliar, the idea of being an illegal immigrant is to actually BE invisible, to hide from the cops, whereas black people are in the exact opposite situation — they were shipped here against their will, and now face a situation of difficulty in affirming their identity against a vacuous, apathetic backdrop, or so I assume. By the way I have a stalwart pet peeve of this sort of gratuitous flaunting of stock Ralph Ellison’s photo. I don’t believe an author should be judged by his or her appearance; it’s what’s on the page that counts, and the real sad part happens to be that Invisible Man is easily the best book ever. Or, it was.

..

“Vinyl records always sound better than CD’s.”
Let me preface this please by saying that I once heard Neil Young and Stephen Stills’ “Long May You Run” at my mom’s crib on vinyl and it was darn near a life-changing experience. But this was an analog recording. Many modern albums were made digitally, such as Beck’s Odelay courtesty of the Dust Brothers, and then go for like $23 on gyp-joint sites like Vinyl Me, Please. Plus, if you complain about hearing digital music, don’t you think you’re kinda just an a**hole? I’m just sayin’. I mean, some countries have like dysentary and hepatitis epidemics to worry about. That’s all.

..

The show Portlandia
This show makes multiple sclerosis look funny. It’s like wow, you know, usually when you take a premise of a town where only like EVERYBODY AND THEIR COCKER FU**ING SPANIEL wants to move to, throw in high-budget production of attractive, dancing women in sweaters and some aesthetically erudite (notice the ironic word choice there) cast, the result would be something remotely desirable. Or… WATCHABLE. But then, we don’t live in a fair world, we live a real world, like Jimmy Carter said. Which, granted, is why we have hipsters in the first place.

..

“White people can’t like rap music.”
I hate to pull your hems and flip your wigs, righteous Brothers of the Sun, but black people invented rock and roll and jazz, too. One of the more easily spotted logical fallacies out there, no doubt. Not saying black people have an easy plight in this country, or that they don’t deserve full credit for their artistic contributions, but still, it is a logical fallacy.

May the sun cradle your hopes
And exhilarate your pores,
And may you never
Have a care
In the world.
.
I have
Shown
You the ditch I dig,
The mines I probe,
And the chasm I keep,
And
.
Somehow
Within you
All the electric lights
Have fed you
And bled themselves
With true colors,
.
I see your smile in a photo
And I turn my hand up to the sky,
Electrical clouds waving
Like faces formed from chemical fragments
In night rays.

That’s something that’s hard for everyone —
To quell the absolute expungement of energy
In favor of something
That would actually make sense
If you were to look at the larger scope of the world,
The globe,
The blues,
The greens,
The million waiting eyes
Watching on YOU,
As the axes fly on the TV screen.

Oh,
There
Must be something more you’re seeing.
.
That’s
Why you stare
An extra three seconds
With moonlight, lampshade eyes,
.
Before we
Go do
What I had suggested anyway,
With shaky hands before the closing of one more terrarium.
.
Oh,
There
Must be something more
.
You’re seeing, which is why
I never see you,
You’re hiding
Behind the
Moon’s new phase
With brandished artillery
Pointed at the insides of my eyeballs
To allot frozen meaning down onto individual astrologies
Standing naked on the dunes.

So much wisdom was balled up in the eye roll of the father as he beheld the day.
“Well,” he said. “I guess we gotta go do laundry today.”
They were in America, the land of “tryin’ to get this day over with.”
The kid hung close to his father, mimicking all of his movements, all of his facial expressions. Intermittently, the dad would twitter at the radio angrily, discontent with all of the fluff, the typical capitalistic fanfare, that was coming out of it.
The kid noticed the big hole in the ground.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I dunno.”
A silence ensued.
“Yeah,” continued the father. “I always wondered about that too. I’ll look it up when we’re at Courtesy.”
Courtesy was the name of the laundromat.
The dad started to get nervous a little bit, and started to get the shakes. Plus, he was thinking of Tracy a little bit, this brunette who worked at courtesy. He was a little low on funds, otherwise he’d go pick up a couple of donuts, and a couple of pint cartons of milk, for him and the kid. Luckily, the kid wasn’t saying anything about being hungry or anything. After laundry, it would be back home, where they’d turn on the TV, probably to the news, and witness all the bombings and drudgery going on all across the world. Then, in three days, the kid went back to school. Thank God for that, thought the dad. I’ll be damned if I know what to do with him.
One thing was for sure: fighting was good. All of the virtue furnished in America at this time was more or less directly derivative of military achievements. The other hemisphere of values involved marijuana, and given the slowness of things, the novelty appeal of the fact that the drug had so recently been illegal had yet to wear off. Caring about stuff, or not caring about stuff, were the essential formats of the human mind. On, or off. And look cool, doing either one, and honey, if you’re on, it’s sure hard to look cool.
The dad could sense Tracy smiling at him, but his hands were fidgety down at the change machine, and he avoided her glance. Plus, Christ, he thought, I’m married. But my hands are still shaking, he thought. God must not care about marriage.
The kid was playing this game where he tried to actually run up the wall, sort of like Spider-Man might do. He’d noticed that his dad’s hands were shaking, but he didn’t want his dad to know that he’d noticed. He was just running up the wall, dragging down the heavens, demanding their attention.
Suddenly they heard some clamor from over in the corner. It was coming from some bald dude, and he was issuing an aggressive directive at some old dude.
“Hey, knock it off, motherfucker!”
Some people around him noticed, and all of a sudden their dispositions were cheery. This was a newsworthy event, they thought to themselves. Perhaps even later, they thought, the incident will end in a murder, and channel 10 will show up with cameras. Then they can tell their grandchildren this story of today, that they witnessed, not just any news, but THE news, firsthand, and they didn’t even have to turn on the television. It just fell into their lap, like— like— something they wouldn’t even know the sight of, if it bit them in the god damned face.
Proceeding, Tracy had to go over to the two men and break them up, threatening to call the cops. Outside, some snow started to fall on the gray day. The kid liked snow, and he started peering out at it, as the dad tried to figure out how to afford some donuts, ‘cause he knew it wasn’t long before the kid got hungry. Christ, he thought, what if things would have turned out differently. Like if maybe they lived out in California, or something, or Arizona. He’d heard there was less unemployment out there. But there was no snow out there, and here he was, sitting by his well-behaved kid who got hypnotized just looking at snow, and looking over, he saw Tracy smiling at him, running a hand through her hair. He gazed brusquely back at her and then looked down. Eggshells over the giant hole at the side of the road.

We are waiting
Now
Waiting for the revolution
Which will be retaliatory and bloody
After so many lain slain
Within garish neon lights and street signs
Inundating our mountain valleys and our
Nervous city streets —
We hate,
Because to
Lower ourselves
To a reality of those streets,
We know,
Is non-literary gristle making.

This is just an observation, for anybody concerned: there is some obvious sexism going on in the United States against women, and the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the presidential election is an indication of this. And I don’t even necessarily mean a sexism on the part of the people who voted against her — it’s also evident at the media level, the insuperable hype machine churning out those “e-mail conspiracy” stories, again and again. That was the result of, what, one death of an ambassador? How hard could that be to set up? Even if the initial cause of this hoax against Hillary wasn’t exactly “sexist” in DNA, but rather exacted against her for her being the primary competitor to conglomerate legions which would have wanted Trump in office, the fact of its being able to materialize with such velocity indicates a lack of societal bulwarks PROTECTING women from such scandals. We had a female cop in Oklahoma slay an African American in a criminal altercation, and instantly get prosecuted, whereas the assailants of Alton Sterling had their case “investigated,” male, and have still not had charges brought. The Hillary Clinton vie for presidency would have been the perfect platform for feminists to step out and support the politician’s efforts; yet, we barely saw any zest or zeal for having a woman leader. The reason? Women already rule, in the United States, within the deep, stirring realms of dating and romance, and this provides them with more than enough satisfaction already.
All the time, we hear about feminism. We hear the diatribes of angry females around the nation, claiming that “It’s a man’s world,” claiming how men make more money, and have all the control. Yet, I do not remember one single feminist organization coming out to support Hillary Clinton in the past few years. Part of this, I believe, is a fear on the part of feminists before the idea of a loss of their own hegemonic victimization. As we know, the goal of any activist is to work his or her way out of a job, and joblessness is obviously a scary thing.
But even amidst the moderately liberal women voters in America, those not necessarily given to mounting sanctions against men, but who do believe in big government and safe, legal abortion as leftists should, there was not an overwhelming quarry of the ENERGY to unite. Could it have been fear of being persecuted for said actions by the male governing machine? Probably. And to an extent that’s understandable, or at very least off limits for me as a man to discuss. There is also just the social chasm encompassed by the very act of being different, of creating a CULTURE of maternalistic rule in a nation (which by the way is already in effect in Ghana) — the tentativeness to step out and say something apart from the crushing norm, whatever it may be. One thing seems clear: women already hold an intrinsic power in realms such as dating, so there’s possibly some MERCY being enacted on their part by their allotting men at least the bulk of the power in politics, not to mention some desire on the part of sexist judges to retaliate against the natural primal advantage mentioned earlier.

The sense of urgency on the part of others to make life seem good, and lively, and to express the self with intricate and morally commendable methods, befell the psyche of a five year old girl, in a modern age, as if she were extending her ankles so as better to feel the summer breeze. It’s always there.