CALL 1-800-MYSTERY
leonard michaels, the sex clark five, and your bibliomancy forecast for the week of apr 27
the five of wands, and a paragraph from Leonard Michaels’ A Girl With a Monkey:
I had a friend named Chicky who drove his chopped, blocked, stripped, dual exhaust Ford convertible, while vomiting out the fly window, into a telephone pole. He survived, lit a match to see if the engine was all right, and it blew up in his face. I saw him in the hospital. Through his bandages he said that ever since high school he’d been trying to kill himself because his girlfriend wasn’t good-looking enough. He was crying and laughing while he pleaded with me to believe that he really had been trying to kill himself because his girlfriend wasn’t good-looking enough. I told him that I was going out with a certain girl and he told me that he had fucked her once but it didn’t matter because I could take her away and live somewhere else. He was a Sicilian kid with a face like Caravaggio’s angels of debauch. He’d been educated by priests and nuns. When his hair grew back and his face healed, his mind healed. He broke up with his girlfriend. He wasn’t nearly as narcissistic as other men I knew in the fifties.
the aleatory
Call 1-800-MYSTERY. They’re doing a funeral for the 20th century, only now is it truly perished. Allons y. The white riverboat in the black water. There used to be some kind of mythos around here. Some kind of organizing dream that touched wildly upon our faces. Or was that only among some druggy losers, a slim volume of poetry passed around the bar? The sort of light it was possible to drown in the morning after, which had the tides of progress in it. Rainbows of gasoline, Mr. Bones. A fragment of the mind living down by the railroad tracks. Singing through its tin teeth.
the forecast
Do a bad thing for a good reason.
writing prompt
If you’re the angel of debauch, find your light.
If you’re the Ford convertible, explode when someone is checking to see if you’re OK.
If you’re the ugly girlfriend, take a torch song with you whenever you leave the house.
If you’re Chicky, stop trying to kill yourself.
a chune
“Red Shift” by Sex Clark Five
I love potential. I love that all the songs are already inside the guitar when you buy it. I love that all the same songs are inside all the guitars, more or less. I love basic-ass chord progressions. They’re like cathedrals. There’s the container, and there’s the air inside it. The air inside will always be divine and watery and settled to a moment in a way that you can’t change or take with you. The container will always be stone or steel. Empty and ready are the same thing.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel howe
A Girl With a Monkey by Leonard Michaels
Strum & Drum! by Sex Clark Five
dear diary, the thing about baseball is it could technically go on forever. XS