Blockbuster Crossroads, Summer ’23

| Steve

Barbie or Oppenheimer: which wolf will you feed? The death drive or joie de vivre?

I can’t fairly judge Oppenheimer because I haven’t seen it, but I’ve made my singular choice for the summer blockbuster season. Barbie look squarely at the finality of death (no joke!) in order to affirm life, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it considers death more intimately than ‘Oppenheimer.’

Both titular figures am become death. Oppenheimer irrevocably expanded the human species’ capacity for mass murder by orders of magnitude. Barbie chooses to be human and defer, here and now, to mortality’s own hidden schedule. In so doing, her movie celebrates and multiplies the joys of our world. It is an improbable outpouring of grace on a global scale. It comes at the cost of the millions of tons of plastic garbage it also serves to create, but if it’s a choice between the two, I’d prefer Barbie’s fallout to nuclear winter.

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Letter to Thomas, in memoriam of our main homies and Elack and that one old lady Pilot

| Steve

I arrived at Night Drawer drawing club three or so weeks ago—five minutes after Olive broke up with me on the phone and a few days into my prostate gone tender and painful and making my feet tingle and terrifying, yet another forced search for new housing heavy on my mind—to find the prompt that evening was “Smiling through it all.”

I was not in shock, or else something was alive and engaged and warm and plainly not traumatized inside of it, undiminished. The early passage of equanimity was no less honest than the stabbing heart-and-crotch pain a couple mornings after and the quieter lovelorn-and-perineal malaise two weeks hence.

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Courage Under Cuteness: “irena: Book One: Wartime Ghetto”

| Steve

“Irena” is a graphic novel series dramatizing events in the life of Irena Sendlerowa, a Polish social worker who saved 2,500 children from the Nazi-occupied Warsaw ghetto. The story is distinctly moving as a graphic novel, and I want to share a few things I appreciated about Morvan, Evard, Trefouel, and Walter’s articulation of it in the comics medium.

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Mobius Dong: The Ben Kunesh Story

| Steve

I went to a racetrack in Centralia on business recently and read part of Moby Dick during the proceedings. I take no pride in keeping my nose down toward something other than a phone in the bleachers, and harbor some shame for being wary of all the people in attendance at something that is definitely not my sort of thing (except for the demolition derby at the end. I love demolition derbies. They are not worth their cost in fossil fuels, but they are otherwise broad and dumb and hilarious in the right ways).

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Rick Tanaka’s Fish Mother, out now

| Steve

Just got a complimentary copy of Fish Mother by Rick Tanaka in the mail today, a book of 300 reflections edited by yours truly. This is no ordinary book. Or maybe it is? Truth in advertising from the YDHWM web store: “This is a book with words, the words from the book go into your head and turn into ideas.”

Buy your copy at https://ydhwm.bigcartel.com/product/fishmother

In digestion

| Steve

I am a blessed in-digestion,
Turd in the making his way through the
Fiery furnace of acid gnashing and the million little lashings of cilia’s mindless, savoring interdiction
and you there reading this are too
with me

And yes the flames did touch them
and did verily singe every hair on their heads,
did blister and rupture their skin into glowing black mica, crumbling
the beginnings and ends of the earth
will be there with you always,
from the first to the third and last degree

Catrl Art Derlete

| Steve

I go round and round your round you’re rounds on round
A soft planet to be plant in
Beyond deserving is the sliding along gravel of laughter
I inhale
A planet, and our pale skin people have come around
To see, after blindness, once again:
A planet is to depend and attend to
The dark earth under your eyes
Is shoreline mud to sink digitigrade landings in
Your hunger mine to feed
Your back mine to scratch is yours,
A rudimentary language
Unlike your fine articulations in limbs and fingers
Inscrutable signs telling me
Yours a mind to mine

There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke.
You are a life,
And I twine around its exclusivity
Dirty, strange, and whole-some
My confusion of alternating
coffee breath and brushed mint,
Cool skin and self-scooping cat box smells
And Aarnold Schwarzenegger surfing on
Its automated trawler
To the shared tune of a Crane,
A pug’s aspirations dragged along in gurgles 
And screams, peals
Like the shackles of a bra unsnapped,
Like a trou unbuckled is a release
And a shiver
Like you look at an animal and love

You’re a good joke;
You’re such a good joke!
Such a generous absurdity,
We and this world,
Weighted bidirectionally 
As masses meeting
And as purposes, the ley lines
Shooting straight uncertainties around 
Pliant, resistant circumferences