You learn that the earth is bombarded with 160 tons of sunlight every year and that your body is made up primarily of atoms that came from stars that exploded billions of years ago.
You try to crash the gate at the White House to get this information to the President, but they throw you to the ground, put a knee in your back, and read you your rights.
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Grammer Lesson
Dot dot dot slash exclamation point
Colon comma cancer of the exclamation point
Parentheses nothing in between but dot dot dot
Semi colon dot dot exclamation point comma what the fuck question mark
Subjunctive comma conjunctive comma split infinitive dangling participle
Period
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I wrote a piece about Martians turning everyone green and sent it to OpEd News and they fired it back with the word “shit” highlighted in red. They were considering publishing it but wanted shit out of there. Their reasoning was that readers will be offended, not by the idea of being turned green by Martians, but by the word shit.
***
“There is some shit I will not eat,” said Big Olaf in an e.e. cummings poem.
Once cummings tried to help his friend Joe Gould who was a mad genius and slept in doorways in Greenwich Village. His obsession was writing the Oral History of the Times, which consisted of scribbling down whatever he heard people say as he wandered the streets. His very existence flew in the face of the force that censors shit.
cummings tried to get Joe admitted into an elite literary circle so that Joe’s writing might reap a modicum of recognition and Joe might receive enough financial blowback to be able to afford to rent a room.
***
Joe showed up on time for his evaluation, and the interview was going well until the panel asked him to recite one of his poems. Joe’s eyes lit up.
“Gull!” said Joe. Then he began flapping his arms wildly and making gull sounds until eventually they stopped him.
“Thank you Joe,” the head of the panel said. “You’ll be hearing from us.”
He never did.
Real art shits wherever it pleases and never eats it.
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TAKES ON DEALING WITH THE WORLD
There’s hardly any legitimate way to deal with this world other than doing massive drugs or finding God somewhere beyond the reach of your laptop.
By all rights they should have killed me or broken me a good many years ago but they didn’t and I wander around this strange future like a lost time traveler, incensed by kinetic memory and knocking things over.
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So few tools to work with, a gallon of $4 gas and a length of twine, three snapdragons and some flypaper, Robert’s Rules of Order, Order & Chaos Chez Hans Reichel, a will that won’t quit like an old car running on rims, a will poorly written so that the wrong people reap the goods, spontaneity floating in the gas like an embryo, spare change, a phone number on the back of your hand, a hankering, a hunch, a horrid green premonition, instructions written backwards on a mirror in coke, Colombia’s love child, white lady with the dark lines.
Pater noster somewhere up in the clouds, all the women you’ve loved for an Augenblick, a screaming pool full of children on a hot day.
Explanations be damned, what’s to understand, everyone lies to you.
Let the interrogations begin.
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Every year sharks kill five human beings. Elephants and tigers kill 100, executions take out 2,400, illegal drugs claim 22,000, highway carnage 1,200,000, and starvation reaps eight million.
Statistical fact: pop machines kill more people than sharks. But even though I’d still rather be in the water with a pop machine than a shark, I don’t want to put their fins in my soup.
I saw a documentary on a marine biologist who’s been in love with sharks since he was a boy. There he is in his wet suit and face mask, swimming around in a swarm of hammerheads off the Galapagos Islands. At first they stayed clear of him, because sharks have two more senses than we do, and one of those senses was interpreting his rapidly pounding heartbeat as a sign of aggression; but once he calmed down, they came in for a closer look, and before long he’s got his arm around a shark and is stroking its side. The shark seems to have a smile on its face.
Sharks have been around longer than some continents. They are central to the ecological balance of the ocean, which is where we get most of our oxygen. But now, thanks to long-line fishing and the business with the fins, they’re on the verge of extinction–you’re not cool until you’ve had a bowl of shark-fin soup.
Back in the Seventies, Peter Benchley, a speech writer for Lyndon Johnson, among other things, wanted to write a factual book about sharks. He did his research and then had a business lunch with a publisher in New York to discuss the idea. “Write a novel,” the publisher said. “Have this killer shark the size of a whale go on a rampage, rip people apart, capsize boats, terrorize an entire beach-front community. Call it Jaws or something. We’ll make a bundle.” And Benchley did it.
Another myth about sharks is that eating them stimulates virility.
The most advanced species on earth is willing to destroy the planet just to get its rocks off.
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