BLCKDGRD

The Sedate One Is This Month's Skittish One

Not reactivating My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game beyond elevating Lampchop, who may already have a permanent seat, who remembers? from one of the permanent rotating members to an irrevocable permanent seat, Lambchop, the only drug that eases my bouts of dark despair at my dearth of hope for my daughter's life in the clusterfucked world I leave her (and I find myself wishing often for an…

Who Am I To Try To Cheer Up the Self-Indulgent Universe

My compulsive response to the deadest Blog Days of Summer ever, exponentially deader than the deadest ever before (I'd like to take credit for here's decline but it's deader and getting deader everywhere), is of course to post an exceptionally self-indulgent autoblogographical bleggalgaze on a Friday, the deadest day of the week every week, and as many angry apocalyptic doomlinks I could collect…

The Color of Stepped on Gum Is the Color of Our Times

I contemplated not honoring all four birthdays of the Great Run of BLCKDGRD Holy Days that I have every year (minus a forgetful oops or two) for more than two decades here and the prior iterations of this current shitty blog and then decided to for more than just the sake of Fuck It, which sake I'll keep mum . I may read the copy of Melville's *Redburn* I found in a Michigan used books store last…

When charmed by the beauty of that viper, did it never occur to you to change personalities with him? to feel what it was to be a snake? to glide unsuspected in grass? to sting, to kill at a touch; your whole beautiful body one iridescent scabbard of death?, or: Born 207 Years Ago

Born 207 years ago today. From Moby Dick : Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all…

The Light Began To Bleed Began To Breathe Began To Speak, or: 68 Today

Side 2, "The Ninth Wave", of *Hounds of Love,* my most listened-to side of music when albums had sides ever, gives me chills to this day, I tested. More Kate here .

It was always my intention, and my conceit, to use up, in the town's construction, every toy I possessed: my electronic train, of course, the Lincoln Logs, old kindergarten blocks—their deeply incised letters always a problem—the Erector set, every lead soldier that would stand (broken ones were sent to the hospital), my impressive array of cars, motorcycles, tanks, and trucks—some with trailers, some transporting gas, some tows, some dumps—and my squadrons of planes, my fleet of ships, my big and little guns, an undersized group of parachute people (looking as if one should always imagine them high in the sky, hanging from threads), my silversided submarines, along with assorted RR signs, poles bearing flags, prefab houses with faces pasted in their windows, small boxes of a dozen variously useful kinds, strips of blue cloth for streams and rivers, and glass jars for town water towers, or, in a pinch, jails, or: Born 102 Years Ago Today

William Gass born 102 years ago today This is the traditional William Gass birthday post: from The Tunnel : The other large carton unpacked in the same way - box into box - but the feeling it gave me was the opposite of that suggested by the endless nest of Russians dollies it otherwise resembled, for what I was opening was a den of spaces which now covered the floor near my feet. It was plain…

It Remains for Us to Come to Terms With Our Commonality and In So Doing Deprive Time of Further Hostages

HOTEL LAUTREAMONT John Ashbery 1. Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society working as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork. The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it. We see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well.” Working as a team, they didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork. The horns of…

And Yet, Knowing That It Would Always Ever Afterwards Be This Way Caused the Eyes to Faint, the Ears to Ignore Warnings

The big run of late-July major BLCKDGRD Holy Days starts tomorrow so here today (a hint of one of the birthdays below the Mojave 3 song), earlier in the week than the recent weekly screams have been of late. I received no notice whether the domain name was renewed or not but since I'm still here and no one has claimed the name as yet I'll assume it didn't renew and hope no one steals it from me.…

Like a Streetlamp in a Forest When I'm Lost

I am 9/10ths of the way through Henry James' *The Ambassadors* and will finish it tomorrow if I don't today so the burden of honoring a promise to living and dead former English professors and current and past friends will be honored, and get this, I will read another, though James' misuse of pronouns (any *she* referred to is not necessary the one I was taught it should be - I can only think this…

hear the click of the cartridge as it slides into its chamber

Explosive diarrhea is not the name of my next band. Since Hispanic migrant farm workers will be blamed for planting the microscopic parasite on the lettuce it only makes sense to pre-blame Taco Bell for the outbreak poisoning patriotic magamericans. I have never in my life eaten at Taco Bell and (assumed it didn't need a parasite to induce explosive diarrhea) was never going to regardless the…

Ana Ng and I Are Getting Old and We Still Haven't Walked in the Glow of Each Other's Majestic Presence

This year's edition of the traditional post, odometer honest: Sixty-six today, this guy . When we met in 5th grade fifty-six years ago neither of us predicted the weirdest year of our lives would be 2026. Always this: thirty-three years ago Landru was the first human not L or me or a doctor/nurse to hold C That's Magnetic Fields *Andrew in Drag,* someone, between last July 13th and today, bitched…

Thirty-Eight

The Cyclone Fence of Buts Surrounds the Soccer Field of What If

Deadest Blog Days of Summer, the days surrounding July 4th, so I am compelled to post (and to post ahead of this coming Thursday when I post one of two posts a year not tagged My Complicity) to see if this can be the least read post of the calendar year (which can't be determined until I post over Thanksgiving Weekend in November, the closest competition). Also too, this *has* to be typed today: I…

And the Thing Is, It Stays Still Before Speaking Of

I was sixteen, two months from seventeen, for the Bicentennial. That August, at the Montgomery County Maryland Fair, I bought this Jimmy Carter for President poster I either lost it or tossed to my great regret now. Republicans viciously called him a communist and but he beat Gerald Ford anyway if only because of Ford's pardon of Nixon, who the face-mullet called Vance the other day said was…

wings bring the disk of their sun for around your neck

The shittiest people in the world hate Zohran Mamdani and their second Mamdani meltdown will make the first seem only a hissy fit, Jeff types as he sits in the rental at the northern tip of Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula, steady hard rain erasing my plans to return to Camp Greilick Disc Golf Course to play a third and fourth round at what is one of the best if not the best course I've ever played,…

Although they know about it and it literally doesn't exist, no, stay up and go to sleep, unless it falls on the right side of the brain positioned for so many forgeries, moon nugget...

Now I'm told that Fred and Ethel nee Lucy and Babalu have bonded with the foster mom and respond to Spider (Fred and Babalu) and Nugget (Lucy and Ethel) and that Nugget is actually a boy Spider and Nugget it is until it's not. That's Nugget above. We haven't informed Olive yet that Spider and Nugget will be her new roommates in September much less her new roommates are both boys. She's already…

I got a call from the White House, from the President himself, asking me if I’d do him a personal favor. I like the President, so I said, “Sure, Mr. President, anything you like.” He said, “Just act like nothing’s going on. Act normal. That would mean the world to me. Can you do that, Leon?” “Why, sure, Mr. President, you’ve got it. Normal, that’s how I’m going to act. I won’t let on, even if I’m tortured,” I said, immediately regretting that “tortured” bit

BIG NEWS! In the private democracy I live in I have been outvoted, per usual, 2 to 1, and Lucy and Babalu will be Fred and Ethel, the sillyass reason is unimportant (I didn't ask so don't know what it is, I eat the ( wine I drink the bread ) vote results and will honor the vote and not claim it rigged, nor crash a fucking unwatchable NBA game and then fall asleep as I'm booed). Too, turns out…

Watching the Colonoscopy Video Projected at My Feet Tunneling Squeamishly Through the Pale Yellow Ripples of Intestine

Go to the 32:45 mark (autocorrect capitalized that Mark, gospel truth) to watch this shitty blog's Official Bleggalgazing Anthem, May 31st this shitty blog's Bleggalgazing Day for reasons I forget and reasons I remember but don't type this time, two days late this year because I no longer adhere to this shitty blog's rites as religiously as once, and this one now posted primarily for its Anthem…

In All My Years As a Pedestrian Serving Juice To Guests, It Never Occurred To Me Thoughtfully To Imagine How a Radish Feels. She Merely Arrived

Barring the unexpected, two new folk moving into our house end of August (they are only five weeks old now), both children of ferals in York, Pennsylvania, rescued by a friend of L's, a crazier cat-person than even us (though we have more garden statuary), I'll soon be able to walk into my house and yell, Lucy, I'm home Our next door neighbor is luckily (if you're me) or unluckily (if you're L)…

Of right Of wrong Of up Of down Of who Of how Of when Of one Of then Of if Of in Of out Of feel Of friend Of it Of now, or: Born 100 Years Ago Today

SELF-PORTRAIT Robert Creeley He wants to be a brutal old man, an aggressive old man, as dull, as brutal as the emptiness around him. He doesn't want compromise, nor ever to be nice to anyone. Just mean, and final in his brutal, his total, rejection of it all. He tried the sweet, the gentle, the "oh, let's hold hands together" and it was awful, dull, brutally inconsequential. Now he'll stand on his…

using the Black Sea as a mirror when everyone knows the Black Sea is a terrible mirror, like God is a terrible simile for me but like God with his mirror, I use it

Whether deliberately orchestrated or by deliberate negligence blooger, the program and product, is sinking into suck at the same accelerating pace as every effing thing else. Besides the preview-post not updating after I edit the post before publishing (happening now) the most notable farts are the increasing number of sites on the blogrolls whose feeds won't update (though blooger insists the…

There Is Every Reason to Rejoice With Those Self-styled Prophets of Commercial Disaster, Those Harbingers of Gloom Over the Imminent Lateness of the Denouement That, Advancing Slowly, Never Arrives

My daughter and I saw solo Destroyer past Friday night at The Blind Pig in downtown Ann Arbor (I dig Ann Arbor). Bejar came on promptly at nine (following a truly awful opening act whose name I forget if in fact I ever registered it), finished his set at ten, played two songs for encore, off the stage by 10:10. Was acoustic, setlist included songs from across his career, and did include my single…

*You* Hide, They Seek, or: Born Eighty-Nine Years Ago Today

The traditional BLCKDGRD Bigass Holy Day Pynchon's Birthday post, he is 89 today: I wouldn't be me without his novels, especially Gravity's Rainbow , Mason & Dixon , and double especially Against the Day . Here, pages 606-608 Bantam mass market 1974 edition Gravity's Rainbow , Pynchon's main theme: But, if I'm riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it... or if I passed it today…

Filled to the Brim With Excess Idolatry

Hey! Good news! Showed up in my email box yesterday morning. The above's the email in it's entirety, when I click the PRE-SAVE UPCOMING MUSIC NOW it links to spotify and youtube and other shitty vendors I don't use, no link to bandcamp, and there's nothing at bandcamp yet though all previous studio albums plus more are there so presumably, hopefully, the UPCOMING MUSIC will be there next week…

Phosphor Alert Badges Reinforce the Eye of Last-Touch Gladness

The gnat in the eye sensation and the intense aversion to bright sunlight that drove me crazy for two weeks after the eye operation, Jeff jinxes, seems gone. The peripheral vision already lost is gone but what's left of sight sharper, and my depth perception is much improved, especially in the woods and on the disc golf course. Has not improved my putting, though throwing the Alpaca with more spin…