good morning america
life rx 5 aug 24
the three of cups, and a sentence from Jackie Wang’s Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: “The internet crashes. That's why I am able to write this instead of restlessly sifting through information.”
the aleatory
Congratulations, soldier, for surviving the war. The world was not built on the idea of your continuing existence but, rather, your likely end. And now—congratulations—you must live in it again.
The face was lifted away from reality like the dried skin on latex paint. (Don’t throw it away, there is money in surfaces.)
The oaks have outgrown the horizon up here. In the mountains, someone is using counterfeit currency again. Whoever they are, they have the skill to make a bill that is not immediately detected as false, but not the sense to spend the fakes someplace aside from the Valero in Running Springs. God bless. That’s the type of shit I love. Glue in your tooth that keeps falling out, put on your blue eyeshadow. Good morning, America.
For the longest time, it made me mad when someone said, “Oh, that’s the human condition” in response to anything. For one, I think it’s shitty to say something so dismissive to anyone’s complaint. (It is much more fun for all involved to take up their cause with an extremity that they would never dare adopt. Call their co-worker a bitch. Offer to slash her tires. We all need someone on our side, for godssakes. (Now that is the human condition.)
In the house where I grew up, there was a small painting on dark brown bark paper with Samuel Walter Foss’s poem “The House By the Side of the Road” (“let me live in a house by the side of the road/ and be a friend to man”) with a sky painted the spooky tempura blue of illuminated manuscripts and a gold leaf drop letter. It was hung just to the left of the door, so that you looked at it while looking out at the road. Because, in fact, I did grow up in a house by the side of the road, so the poem seemed like a reminder or instruction—something to steel yourself with before you went out there “where the races of men go by.” We also had a blue mailbox, exactly like the Taj Mahal song “Move Up to the Country, Paint My Mailbox Blue.” Maybe this began my conviction that the world in actuality was continuous with the world in songs, the world that you see through the strange windows made by words.
But anyway. The human condition is ridiculousness. But it’s pretty easy to recognize—it’s a very sweet ridiculousness. It’s a counterfeit bill, a try, a failing. If you can’t love frailty, you’re not that good at loving things.
the assignment
Become a connousier of somebody’s bullshit.
writing prompt
Put on your blue eyeshadow. Get up early, make a thermos of coffee, and get out there. Write a poem called “Good Morning America.”
a chune
“Take a Giant Step” by Taj Majal
Another cry-maker. Taj Mahal is in my heart. I grew up listening to him. It’s the sound of scruffy overgrown woods and bare feet on the concrete porch slab and onions frying somewhere. I was tempted to pick “Move Up to the Country, Paint My Mailbox Blue” because I mentioned it above or “The Cuckoo” because it’s my favorite, but I can’t think of a better song about loving human frailty than this one. I admit, I actually didn’t know this was a Carole King song covered more popularly by the Monkees until this very minute. The Taj Mahal version was all I knew, and it sounds so lived in and gentle that it doesn’t come across as someone else’s composition. Gentle is key. It’s really a song about one person coaxing another out of the habitual coldheartedness that everybody feels after they’ve been hurt. When the Monkees sing it, it sounds like they aren’t even paying attention to the words. When Taj Mahal sings it, you know that he knows how much a heart wants to close like a fist.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun by Jackie Wang
“Take a Giant Step” by Taj Mahal
dear diary, I really want to make a sweatshirt or something that says GOOD MORNING AMERICA in some kind of font that makes it clear you should put on your blue eyeshadow and fill up your coffee thermos and go out there and get into it. For reasons I cannot fathom, I have always 1) wanted to make T-shirts 2) never made T-shirts. It’s one of those internal riddles that I can’t quite make sense of. Maybe the time is getting closer because I felt compelled to tell you about it. I’m trying these days to do what my heart tells me. My real heart, not the one that I made out of paste and soap in second grade. XS