September 13, 2022: How are you doing my dear,
Fine at some things and fucking up the rest. I went to the grocery store where given the choice between arugula, spinach, and dandelion greens I picked dandelions, which I consider the second most punishing. I stopped working on the project having to do with communicating with my dead great grandpa through his memoir when Russia invaded Ukraine because I started to worry that I should know more about the region's history than I can glean from the record of the unreliable narrator I am related to. So I have Stalingrad and Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman to get through (thank you Claudia) and Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge. I know it's not totally cool to portray Eastern Europe as haunted or magical but also I can't help that I happen to be able to teleport myself there through the remembered scents of my dead great grandpa. I have been thinking about his apartment in Chelsea that I never visited because I wasn't alive yet and even if I had been alive I may not have visited. I would like to be of a place even though all of them are fucked. I would like to be better at replying to my emails. If my dead great grandpa sent me an email from the Pripet Marshes in 1900 or from jail in Moscow in 1905 I think he would have said that everyone stank and he was a little bit bored and acting out. I wonder if he ever read anything more interesting than the Torah and, I'm sorry, Pushkin. Do I have to add it to the list don't tell me I don't want to. I wonder if I get my trouble with carrying out a correspondence with the living from him.
August 7, 2022
When a bird is willing to be near a human we think he is naive, because we know we could hurt him. It is not so great to know this about your relations with others. If the bird chooses or allows a nearness, maybe we should accept that as sophistication. The bird takes a risk in spite of what we all know.
April 26, 2022: Episode
After a period of isolation
I became a carpet cleaner
it was necessary to move forward
I held the tip of my tongue
between thumb and forefinger
I fished it out of the garbage
he took down yesterday
nothing I say being that bad
these solvents taste good
I should soften it with a hammer
so it's lovely enough for you
during which i made myself upset
there are insects in this carpet
in other words it is a harbor
in other words loving enough
to be said.
Context is anything
A filthy harbor.
A concerned and anxious newscaster
lit himself on fire on television tonight
the episode performed well
and his slump continued.
