a quarry where the teenagers keep dying
your bibliomancy forecast for the week of 17 march 25/we're so brak
the eight of swords, and a paragraph from Fernando Flores’ Brother Bronte:
A golden wink of sunshine pierced the sky like a bullet through cardboard, revealing a hint of something like dawn climbing her throne over Three Rivers. Hunched over, fatigued, and depressed, Neftalí approached Angélica Street. She walked as if carrying the immense weight of every abandoned building in Three Rivers on her back. She could not articulate this weariness beyond the words “shadow,” “street,” “car,” “cat,” as she encountered them, and when accumulated mucus throbbed in her nasal cavities, she blew her nose inside the long sleeves of her garment. Still, she found the strength to stand on a cinder block, and used a rat tail file from her bag to scratch in the accent on both sides of the street sign, so they now read ANGÉLICA—the way her mother spelled it.
the aleatory
The joke is that words are the frailest of all possible materials. Without the animations of the human voice—in a text message, for example—they turn hateful readily. They are not like metal or clay. Their tones are rudimentary and masklike. And everybody uses them them up, so they become grimy and touched-out like pennies.
The joke is that a few words put together will make their own soup. They will make you aware that you are demonically possessed, and you always have been, make the hairs on your neck rise, make you taste the lemon and feel the velvety insides of the raw potato. A text is a patterned system of frailties like a spider’s web. A spider’s web can’t catch everything. But it catches enough. There are no thoughts without words, for better and worse.
the forecast
Get real. Tuck your T-shirt into your underwear.
writing prompt
Stare at the most worn-out word you know until the letters start to look like a village of some kind—maybe the dot on the “i” is a captive sun, or the “u” is a quarry where teenagers keep dying. Write the story of the last person to be banished from the town.
a chune
“I Can Feel the Fire” by Ron Wood
Boy, the chunes have really been piling up since the last time we did one of these. I’ve been excited to share this one for a minute now. In some ways it felt sort of perverse for J and I to develop a love of this song after our house burned down. Every time we listened to it while cooking dinner or whatever, I would get this giddy sort of what the fuck laugh at the top of my lungs. Because in this case, being able to feel the fire is a good thing. Meaning, I can feel the love, I can feel the intensity. I can feel you by my side. The rock organ on this makes me think it would be really good for a cross-country drive where you need to get over something and get okay with being part of humanity again. There is some dispute as to whether Bowie is on backing vocals, but Mick Jagger is unavoidable.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe*
Brother Bronte by Fernando Flores, by way of North Figueroa Bookshop
I’ve Got My Own Album To Do by Ron Wood
dear diary, it happened again, I got hooked on reading the mountain communities Facebook page(s). I had good reasons—we got about 18 inches of snow on Thursday and Friday, which always creates a lot of havoc and when are the plows coming through and is the road closed at Waterman Canyon and where are the chain checkpoints. Comically, none of which I need to know because my preferred method of dealing with big snowfalls is to not drive at all until the roads are clear. (This may sound like cowardice, but I come by it honestly—I have had some of the most terrifying moments of my life trying to drive on this mountain in heavy snowfall.) But I stay informed, I tell J that another semi jackknifed on a curve and another tour bus is threatening to slide right off the mountain and people are bitching about the elote merchants again. It is what Buddhists call the second arrow: bitching about bitching. It feels itchy and great and terrible. I went cold turkey again.
* My tremendous gratitude for the gifted copy of the beloved small spells deck, and for all the gifted decks that have found their way to me. I love them all, but for some reason, this one really does sing next to the books, and I am so grateful to be able to begin this series again, a little over a year after it started. Also, my tremendous gratitude to you for reading. I really like talking into this particular tin can, knowing that you’re on the other end of the line. <3