It is hilarious that David Foster Wallace referred to Sarah Palin as "the Shrub."

It’s not like this isn’t common knowledge. We have all heard this before again and again. Turn on the news and you will find it there, displayed before your eyes in high definition. This pseudo culture is paraded before your ears and retinas in a constant bombardment. It’s in the air all around us. How can one develop defenses against it? I consider it to be impossible. We are victims to the hegemony. We are controlled by our needs, when we should be the masters of our needs. Yet we lose our concentration and focus and let the raw terror of the situation take over. The “raw terror, “let those words sink in for a bit. Mull them over in your mind if you can. Let the full significance and weight of their impact settle inside of you. Can you, is this possible for you? Am I asking too much of you? Is this another obligation that you are unable to fulfill, just like all of the other obligations that you left dying on the killing floor so to speak?

All I know is that the numbness creeps up on you and takes you by surprise. You feel nothing and care about nothing. You have no recognizable soul or capacity for empathy with anyone else. You become a blind and brutal force that has no direction or destination. There is no internal apocalyptic struggle within your soul. The forces of good and evil no longer struggle within you, only evil exists inside your soul. The most important and difficult struggle has taken place inside of you and it is over, it is finished. You have hoisted up the white flag and surrendered. You were the Titanic struggling with the iceberg. This numbness becomes a proxy for freedom. The truth is that you are burying your head in the sand hoping to forget. You have become the fodderfor nothingness. The deep dark abyss swallows you whole, engulfed.

Chrismation

Chrismation is the name given in Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches, as well as in the Assyrian Church of the East initiation rites, to the sacrament or mystery more commonly known in the West as confirmation, although Italian normally uses cresima ("chrismation"), rather than confermazione ("confirmation").

The term chrismation is used because the recipient of the sacrament is anointed with chrism, which according to eastern Christian belief, the Apostles sanctified and introduced for all priests to use as a replacement for laying on of hands by the Apostles^[1] and consists of a "mixture of forty sweet-smelling substances and pure olive oil"^[2] sanctified by a bishop with some older chrism added in,^[3] in the belief that some trace of the initial chrism sanctified by the Apostles is contained therein.

Writing: just call me lucky #1

Writing: just call me lucky #1: A. nerve gas appetites as shouting angry ghosts seeping in with mustard and wine reaching for the white fool struggling with your fabl...

Roxy Painne and the medicine show - in progress

Roxy Painne and the medicine show - in progress

a mechanical tree in Kansas
dreams of  machine death
first there is rust
and then there is pressure

melting it down
to feed the birds
you thought it was a matter
of right and wrong

everybody is talking backwards
I stand on my head
and recire the declaration of independence
a man is checking my feet for wounds
he says he is a priest
but his breath smells like a pedophile

sick dogs
pick up the broken heads
hide them back into the gloom
we tie them up together
a shared infinity
as real as we can get it
it was a sold job
everyone said so
a solid world

we thought we were building America
we painted ourselves into the classical paintings
there we are in the treet scene, with the smoke
canon balls exploding
we are imigrants, fresh off the train
looking for god in the theaters and saloons