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| fig.32.081) Satellite's gone way up to Mars... |
There's never enough liquor at the AA meetings and they let the coffee get cold and the diabetics are always nicking the cupcakes before she gets in. These are the things that are linked to our hearts, she knows that she isn't an ancient one. She's cold and tired almost always but her red hair still cares a lot. The trash is high outside in the wet spaces between the brick buildings on our street. It waits patiently, it's abiding time like a thick whittled marker that shows the deftness of our inhumanity to one another, one grain of sand at a time as we hope and wonder at it all. Someone was shot near there, a flower that's now passed in a puddle between the walls of two garages painted with thick milled butterflies and maybe balloons or hopeless rainbows. They bled out there like people who have been shot down too young to be anything will bleed soon enough in many more ubiquitous corners of our rug. "Love trumps hate," she says. It's on the T-shirt she's wearing above her skin and she knows that legislation would make both more manageable in a world that seems to be burning down in a shallow puddle of piss underneath a hot smelling viaduct.
So she bought us a cake and then filled it with dust. Now there's a goon squad of hooliganism in the front room where Cleveland is wearing a lamp on its head. Down the hall near the old brick tomb, where a drunken squad of dark hatted syllabus readers is daring all, there's climbing to be done. All night long it's up the ladders then down them again and they're shoving all the stars deep into their pockets, away they go. She bought them a cake to keep under the table but it's still on the dresser in the den. Detroit is toiling in the bathroom that Indiana just walked in. She thinks that the knife got lost in the seam of the couch along with the bullets, the candles, and all of the cards that have hearts on them. Milwaukee's in the kitchen leaving its lunch in a pail by the lunch that Chicago just stepped in. The duck in the pantry is evil but it's giving itself to god. It says, "Quack" which is just a stand in for, Flint's a scum sucking toad. The fascination of Columbus and Dayton are like eyes in the back of her head.
She says, she says, "We've been considering this since we saw it yesterday and now we're a little envious. A year or so before this, our dad passed and then the family house burned to the ground. Along with the house went all of the curiosities of our parents complicated life together as well as much of what remained of our own early life. Our grandparents raised their family there inside of that house too. Now the only memories of consequence that remain there can be sifted from a heap of ash measured by the length of one's finger tip to their elbow. Since then it's become radically clear to us that the only history that remains to us is that which we have yet to conspire and stumble blindly through together. It's an unformed history whose remains are yet to become. It's objects haven't been made so as o be transformed into the smoke and ash that makes many of the unpleasant reminders of who we were together also transform or disappear entirely. Right now we're brown and grey and old with our own liberal and widowed tongues. Our glue has no value to it. Yet onward it goes, towards the odd light of habit and a finger of flame."
This are the bits that we borrowed last year before the storm-The word "utopia" is derived from a Greek term that literally means "nowhere." It is an imaginary place where government, laws and other conditions are perfect. In Ideology and Utopia Karl Mannheim argues that the application of the term ideology ought to be broadened. He traces the history of the term from what he calls a "particular" view. This view sees ideology as a more deliberate obscuring of facts. Making it easy to agree that this world is a lot of work, where Bjork thinks of Utopia as having three parts. The discovery of the island, the living there day to day, and then, more prosaically, how humans survive difficult times. Signed, JWL
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