091718 i can’t there is no day there is no day when i actually get to sleep in the summer sits like a murdered lion on my bedroom floor; memories of days of waking up blurry eyed and stumbling to the inspired keyboard to pour out noble absurdities now it’s STUPIDNOISESTUPIDNOISESTUPIDNOISE and my neck hurts from bad sleeping because i tried to be like honore de ball sack and eat caffeine all afternoon and the result is i slept maybe 20 minutes out of every hour, can’t remember shit about my dreams, and straight up don’t want to do this anymore. saturday is capoeira, sunday is post office, weekdays is school and millie wakes up so FUCKING EARLY it makes me want to shoot myself in the tit when walking (where) back from that bug infested path (where) on the other side (of what) of the construction (when) the other day, i nudged libby and said look, and there on the ground was a miniature playing card, bigger than the burger king ones but about a third or a quarter the size of a normal one, and it was lying face up and it was the 8 of swords. her question was why would you want a miniature playing card, my question was what was the eight of swords, i can’t remember, and now it sits on my desk, another mute reminder of things that used to seem significant but now just seem like generic pieces of paper, depressing in their normalcy. another piece of paperwork that expects you to do or think or provide or account for something. expects you to stand and deliver but all you’re delivering is another cardboard box of chinese plastic and printed circuits to another mother fucker who’s going to be dead in a few years and then we’ll have this pile of junk that no one needs and so we’ll add it to the toxic mountains of trash we’ve already generated while pretending to be mortal, pretending we have something to live or die for. the nut job right wing conspiracy theorists are broken clocks; they’re right two times a day; it doesn’t matter if the chem trails aren’t actually chemicals, because we all act as though we’ve been sprayed with pacifying poisons even if we haven’t. The chem trails are actually just con trails but they might as well be entrails, because as far as we’re concerned the placebo effect is all we need. we sit around here waiting for the return of feudalism so we can get back to the business of clawing our way out of the mud and getting enlightened again. the united states used to be a country of farmers and scientists, pushing the bounds of what it meant to be civilized, cooperative, a little bit wild yes, but poetic. now we’re a country of kids whose greatest aspiration is to get blowjobs from other kids and million dollar plastic mansions because they won the popularity lottery on youtube. You can’t have a personality but you have to be a personality. Act like a jackass. Revive a meme. Act like you’re in on a joke that nobody’s actually in on; all our cultural forces are memetic self-referential fake irony now. So you think you can dance? nobody cares unless you can do the dance of getting likes and views and bringing in those ad dollars. Advertise something you don’t even know about. Do the bidding of your lords and masters in the information game. You are the product? Nope, not anymore. You are the advertisement. There is no product. Meanwhile, every sunday I get into a raptraddly blue and white toboggan and roll it around rural oconomowoc. O co no mo woc. An indian name for a bunch of pasty middle aged white people squinting suspiciously at skies full of the locusts of waning potency. 778 dairy farms in Wisconsin have shut down since whenever that article said. Small farms can’t compete with giant consolidated ones. There’s still just as many cows. It’s no wonder people are so mean, but I still wish they weren’t. You don’t get anywhere by being nice, I guess. Who needs a sensitive artist when there’s a war to be fought, if only we could find where we put it. It’s somewhere in this pile of discarded consumer electronics and polyester underwear and broken coffeemakers and styrofoam and plastic soda bottle caps and busted tail lights. Hey yo cop, pull me over. Write me a ticket and put my name on it so I’ll know I exist. Come here and lean in my window and ask me to prove something. I’m lonely.