i traveled a river of concrete in a machine, you traveled an ocean of air in a machine, babies crying, inconsolably, you said i said, eustachean tubes aren’t meant for 30,000 feet.
i am not meant for this, neither are you, neither are they.
not the opposite of joy on Christmas eve but the false pursuit of it whatever is actually contrary to it even if we don’t know it when we see it. even if we refuse to know it when we see it.
if i allow myself to cry, he will see it on my face.
Luigi Mangione: I was going to use a bomb to kill the CEO but I didn’t want to harm anyone else
US Government: This is terrorism
Netanyahu: We are using unguided 2000 pound bombs in a densely populated civilian area to level entire apartment blocks
US Government: This is self-defence
Replicating anti anti-fascist and anti anti-zionist propaganda and gaslighting tactics, the political marketing class and sworn officials of the U.S. and New York State Governments cosplay as integrity police and justice arbiters, and attempt to manipulate both the rule of their false law and their false order to condemn, litigate and abolish the law of the streets and resistance movements for liberation and justice.
They will fail.
“What do you do? You wack the C.E.O. at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,”
passage written in a notebook attributed to alleged Anti-Terrorist, Luigi Mangione
a version of this essay was first published December 8, 2015
“Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, please put a penny in the old man's hat, if you haven't got a penny, then, a half-penny will do, if you haven't got a half-penny, then God bless you.”
I went to the nearest Dollar Store to buy old-fashioned, stringy, silver tinsel for our christmas tree.
All that glitters is not silver or gold, is never ever golden, whether you buy your pretty ornaments or wrapping paper for a buck – or two at Dollar Tree, Walmart, Target, Macy’s or Saks for $5, $10, $30 or $50. The only difference is the retailer’s profit margin — very rarely is there a difference in quality when it comes to seasonal items, disposable items and sundries.
The season of peace and beauty feels very false once you know and remember to never forget that all those beautiful ornaments and decorations adorning almost every American home, restaurant or holiday venue are made by women, children, or men in sweatshops who are breathing in lead dust, paint fumes, plastic glitter, chemicals and pigments often for less than $30 per 12-hour shift; all that beautiful crap then warehoused, shipped, stocked and sold by non-living-wage, multi-job workers in the U.S.
Yet, while I’m there roaming the aisles or in the long line to check-out, I feel an overwhelming sense of community with my fellow city dwellers — the shoppers, the store’s workers and with all the workers of the World — particularly those in Yiwu, Zhezhang, China who are mass-producing a vast majority of all of this shit.
silver tinsel, aka Icicles, ironically & hilariously, still made in the USA!
I also feel an overwhelming revulsion of the systems of ‘growth’ and development: capitalism, consumerism, and human and natural resource “management” which are uniquely undeniable in the fluorescent, depressive uniformity of the minimally staffed chaos found in a busy, urban dollar store,
mass extinction by chainsaw, net, bolt-gun or bomb they said, “96% of children in Gaza feel that death is imminent” in Sudan, the famine is massive, oh, this reaper, he is very discriminate in Congo, there’s mass enslavement for minerals, see the phone in her hand?! her hypocrisy?! she can’t claim to be innocent! the Pacific’s so hot, that it’s killed 4 million murres while the Indigenous still invoke “cultural rights” to baby seal furs
therefore,
God is either male — or, truer, the God who created everything, was the very first one extincted, as Nietzsche, and the german thinkers before him, all, belatedly said,
i am waiting for the bough to break — or, to be severed by proxy at my behest.
earlier this week on my daily walk-about, i noticed that a primary limb, the major artery, on a nearly 80’ tall and likely nearing 100 years-old, elm tree on the land i occupy, had cleaved and that the fracture was migrating down into the trunk — and dangerously so.
i don’t know the cause: if it was the abrupt shift in temperature to freezing here in southwest Michigan — or, if the tree was stressed from a standing-water-wet spring followed by a very dry summer, or if “it” is simply at the end of their life — all the elms here had unusually held onto an abundance of their prolific leaves until the fourth week of November.
no matter.
the matters:
the massive limb of the elm stretches high and precariously over the old barn, and depending on the wind direction, there’s a chance if it falls, it could clip the back of my house or take the whole tree down with it.
i await the tree surgery & removal crew. i am at their and the northerly and westerly gusts’ mercy.
in the meantime, i have also been wrestling with the possible choice of whether to have the crew amputate just the cleaved limbs — if the tree is in fact salvageable — or, to remove the entire tree at once instead of forestalling the inevitable.