Morning's minions

 

12 October 2022

Small blue balsa wood plane, lacking wings. Root knot resembling knitted face. Photographs to write of, not about. About face, about roots, about a shaggy gray dog behind a screen door, one shoe lying at an angle outside. Chair armrest resembles the circle a leaf makes, like weed whacker string. Dental floss for grass. Silence as luxury, as cell. Run down the hall screaming and others will hate you. The Sandy Hook father sobs quietly at “past and future damages.” Grief stacked on anger stacked on sadism stacked on a camera’s lens. Can you pull anger out from between grief and sadism, and so win the game? My twitter friend in Kyiv drinks her coffee, and I mine. It’s humid here, no immediate evil to lance. Just accumulated boils against which we pay our mortgage. She hated Job for having suffered so at the hands of God. I mean, she hated the book. That’s a different story, flung open like the basement of a mushroom, accordion without sound. One of my friends has no internal map, another a chronic neck. Mother-in-law needs second new knee. We don’t think of pain as allegory, but as its opposite number. Too immediate for allegory, like affect preceding emotion or pain suffering. Suffering turns like a soap circle into story, but there’s no redeeming it at the door. Tickets are cheap, but pull the family card and you get in free. A family crawls out of their destroyed home in the Ukraine; an announcer tells us they’re being pulled to safety. We balk at the substitution of heroism for stubbornness, of community for individual ordeal. She says she will vote, now that she knows the consequences to her. Men no longer go to college, and women don’t like them ill-equipped. The most dangerous man, he heard, is the white one who lives in his mother’s basement. He has a finger for porn and violence, but cannot talk to others. Yes, I am a robot, so don’t give me your puzzles. Formalism on demand requires an isbn of nine numbers and a price tag. These are interlocking forms: mother and missing dad; dark basement; screen glow; palimpsest of sex and murder. To crawl out of that rubble requires more than a degree. We’ve self-ruined, but only see it in the others. On our way to lunch we saw a man dressed in black, his hair black, his skin nearly so, twisted on a sidewalk in Kailua, the richest part of O`ahu. Everybody here is white, my white friend says from the back seat. Up Kahekili, on the path beside the pet cemetery, a man hops and skips and pushes his fists in the air. Imagined violence is better than none.