pop songs and microplastic
life rx 16 sept 24
the page of swords, and a paragraph from Barry Hannah’s Airships:
“Meager breezes of human odor fell and rose on the stairs.
Once last week she took herself up the stairs of the left wing and opened a room and buried her face in a curtain saturated still with cigarette smoke. She got in the curtain. This time she did not weep. She just held on, getting what she could.”
the aleatory
You do know that anything could kill you, right? All the time? All those little zaps of mineral electricity in your brain, all those jets overhead, all the spiders (some of which must be poisonous), all those stops and swallows in the body, all the sun damage? Something is always wrong with the lettuce these days. Don’t get me started on seed oils, trauma, attachment styles, and anhedonia. Too much sugar in the tasty yum-yums. I knew, not joking, a very serious anti-sugar AA lady who called Giant Eagle “a fucking stash house!” with not a wink of irony. But OK, sure. If that’s the case, we live in the tilted plains of a pinball game. There’s eight lanes of sedated individuals trying to text someone sup while driving past the wreck of a semi-truck. Fragile geopolitical crusts, niceties. Radioactive half-lives. The Cold War never ended, it just retreated into proxies so attenuated and metaphorical that they have entered your own bloodstream, secretly, like pop music and microplastic.
I don’t say this to alarm you. Only to remind you that it really is pretty wild out here on the raw edge of time, where we all live. And we do—live. It hasn’t killed you yet. Anyhting can happen, and if you can hold that fact without numbing yourself or trying to out-think it, you can also remember that anything can happen.
the assignment
Don’t hold on to get what you can. Let go, and get what you can’t.
writing prompt
Look at everything around you and imagine that it has chosen to be here with you right now. Imagine your coffee table getting up at 5am, feeding its cat, and getting on a cross-town bus so it could be at your house in time to hold up your cup of coffee. Imagine your lamp is not just there, but has chosen to be there. Imagine that all these things could have said “nah, don’t feel like it today” and ditched on you, but didn’t. Imagine everything that you can see clocking in, agreeing to exist in your reality. Write from these new eyes.
a chune
“Them Changes” by Buddy Miles
I’m probably the only ex-teenage girl you’ve ever known who wanted to be one of the Blues Brothers. But I really did. There is something so chivalric and ideal—to me, anyway—about the soul man who is driving through the night to make it back to you. I wanted to be the woman who was waiting for the guy in the suit and wayfarers, but I also wanted to be the libertine who lived on the road. Maybe someday I’ll find an R&B band horn section that needs another trombone. I would be a good axe. I’m always on time, and I pick up figures fast. Anyway. I love how this song references “them changes” as if you would immediately know what they were. You know, those changes where you feel like committing crimes? Sounds familiar. I think I know the ones.
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
Airships by Barry Hannah
“Them Changes” by Buddy Miles
dear diary, the thing I always forget about the end of summer is that it comes right on time. It feels good to have the sun going down earlier. The darkness is interesting and illumined and awake. Contrast is beautiful. I have loved seeing low dark clouds in the mountains this week—love seeing gray sky and mist. I love whatever is coming. I really mean that, at least for right now. XS