Calaveras 2020 (“No Country for Codgers” edition)

Some hoped it would be the ballot.
Others feared it could be the bullet.
But, one morning, they found him there
Midst-Twittling: “Witch hunt! Very unfai…”
Donald John, dead on the toilet.

Cheshire Joe, always the gent.
Did it surprise you how he went?
Two scoops of vanilla
But the cone was the killer
So, choking, to the hereafter, he was sent.

So little depends on Pale Mike:
Apologist for whateveryoulike.
Never actually alive, can he die?
This manure-wheelbarrow bedecked by a fly,
So closed the lid on them both, buried alike.
(Nevermore.)

The calavera (skull) is a typical Mexican satirical poetic mode. It may have originated as early as the 1500s, but grew in popularity in the late 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The calavera poem is traditionally associated with Day of the Dead, but it became a journalistic genre during the regime of Portfirio Diaz. (Fliers that circulated during those times included angry verses against the dictator Diaz and his cabinet members.) Throughout Mexico, calaveras were also dedicated to working class people, always with a tone sarcasm and humor at the inevitability of death. (Time to write a calavera or two about some folks you know!)

related: camote, calacas, calabazas

otros: medium, universal

Werner, Hanksville

Werner, Hanksville from Vimeo.

By now, we have forgotten what we thought we came for

But here, in the high desert, what we find is a boneyard, of sorts
A museum of curiosities. A wunderkammern, so to speak.

Articulated and frozen in arc-welded postures
Lovingly, painstakingly static.
Who has made all this?
Lo and behold, here, just as in our own, fleshy menagerie,
We find God, as it were, away on business
Having left us with the proverbial watch on the heath.

In her place, quasi-religious aphorisms
Ranging from word salads of self-actualization slogans, to scriptural runes, mystical cosmovisions
And laminated against the ravages of weather and time
They dangle, as though to say
“this is the thing, implacably silent
but this is what it would speak to you
were it on a cosmic book tour
or propped up in front of a cannabis dispensary.”

All these Devonian lizards, crocodilians, avian reptiles, coelacanths
Some of our first vertebrate ancestors.

Across the street, their descendants now, we congregate
Sunburned and squinting
At Stan’s Burger Shack
We unrack hoses and refill the tanks
Of extended-cab pickup trucks
Harnessed to these are the pleasure boats, glittering with pearlescent finishes
Like that of bowling balls, or flame decals in mother-of-toiletseat resin inlay.

Standing in the afternoon daylight, pump running
With the very essence of ancient forests and sea beds
Distilled and decanted over millions of years
We pause in these fumes of petroculture oblivion.

Hose still running, the dials counting up, and higher up
We order, for the road, a pistachio malted milkshake.

But, something whispers, not entirely forgotten:
These grimacing specters of primer and rust
Reclaimed wreckage and the detritus of our road-world.
This road that now calls us onward to some place
We don’t know, we have never seen.

One out of Three

. . . You are suffering from one of the most common afflictions of the human race: the need to communicate with your fellow man. Since attaining the power of speech, man has found nothing as agreeable as a friend who will listen with interest as he talks about his sorrows and joys. Not even love can equal this feeling. There are those who are content with one friend. For others, a thousand are not enough. You belong to the latter group, and this simple fact is the origin of your sorrow and my profession.

…And so—obviously—the inevitable moment has arrived: You became physically incapable of keeping your wide circle of acquaintances up-to-date. That moment is also my moment. For a modest monthly fee, I can offer you the perfect solution. If you accept—and I can assure you that you will because you have no other choice—you can forget forever your incessant traveling, your baggy trousers, the dust, your beard, the tedious phone messages. In short, I am prepared to offer you a first-rate specialized radio broadcast. …It would probably be excessive to enumerate in detail the advantages of my system, but I would like to outline some of them for you.

1. A soothing effect on your nervous system is guaranteed from the first day.

2. Discretion is guaranteed. Although your voice will be heard by any individual who owns a radio, I consider it highly unlikely that persons not your friends would wish to continue a confidence whose background they do not know. In this way, we can reject any possibility of morbid curiosity.

3. Many of your friends (who now listen unwillingly to the personal version) would take an active interest in the broadcast if you merely mentioned their names, either openly or indirectly.

4. All of your acquaintances would be informed at the same time of the same facts, thereby avoiding jealousy and subsequent recriminations, since only their carelessness, or a chance malfunction of their radios, would place them at a disadvantage with respect to any of the others. To eliminate this depressing possibility, each broadcast begins with a brief synopsis of what was narrated previously.

5. Whenever you think it appropriate, the story can be made more interesting and varied, and more entertaining, with illustrative excerpts from operatic arias (I will not insist on the sentimental richness of Italian opera) and selections from the great masters. The proper musical background is an absolute necessity, and an extra record collection containing the most astonishing sounds produced by man or nature is at the disposal of every subscriber.

6. The narrator does not see the listener’s face, thus bypassing all kinds of inhibitions for him as well as for those who hear him.

7. Since the program is aired once a day for fifteen minutes, the confidential narrator has an additional twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes to prepare his text and definitely avoid annoying contradictions and involuntary lapses of memory.

8. If your story is successful and a significant number of spontaneous listeners join your friends and acquaintances, it will not be difficult to find a sponsor, thus adding to the benefits I have already indicated a solid financial profit which, as it grows, would open the possibility of absorbing the entire twenty-four-hour day and turning a simple fifteen-minute broadcast into an ongoing, uninterrupted program. To be perfectly frank, this has not yet occurred, but it could with a man of your talent.

Mine is a message of hope. Have faith. For now, concentrate on this: The world is full of people like you. Tune your radio to 1373 kilocycles on the 720-meter band. At any hour of the day or night, winter or summer, rain or shine, you will hear the most diverse, surprising voices filed with a melancholy serenity.

Augusto Monterroso 1959

Obras completes (y otros cuentos) / Complete Works (and Other Stories), translated by Edith Grossman

lichen facts:

Sundry highland visitors—from through-hiking Cub Scouts to day-tripping Oktoberfest a cappella choirs—have referred to lichen as alpine coral reefs, as tide pools, high and dry. Sing it!

Lichen are mildly psychoactive. You have always been welcome to lick them. But you would have to scrape up and smoke or eat 3.5 hectares for a noticeable effect. Much better to stare directly into them, read them gently like braille, or to lie down on a rock covered with a thin pad of lichen and try this by osmosis.

Lichen are extremophiles, ones that probably colonized our rocky shores by way of meteors from other star systems.

Oh, but why does it have to be like that. Do they always have to be aliens? Who are we to burden these gentle creatures with our postchristian, postsecular cosmic loneliness and existential, spiritual bankruptcy?

How can you behold a lichen and not believe in God?

How can you behold a lichen and still need your belief in God?

How can you behold a lichen and not see a god? A face of God? Imagine why God would create anything but lichens in her own image?

You are correct; the above are not facts. Here’s a fact: Lichens don’t give a shit about you.

Oh, don’t worry, it’s not that, not about you, indifference. They just don’t excrete waste, about anything or anyone. But, yeah, especially not about you.

Lichens will not give your ass sex appeal.

Wait, I was thinking of Lycra. My mistake. Actually, lichens just may. If you decide to try this out, I hope you’ll let me know how it goes. I’d say your odds are good, though.

Lichens’ freckles and cones, once understood to be—and, in antiquity, worshipped as—male and female genitalia (respectively), are actually eyes and ears (respectively).

It was not Sun Tzu nor dogs pissing on stone walls from whom we originally learned the craft of claiming others’ territories, but from the lichens.

Before Altamira, Chauvet, or Lascaux. Before tattoos, Banksy, banks, your mom, your great grandmother, acne, Jackson Pollock, or Accutane. There were lichens. P.S.—After them too, there are lichens, will be lichens.

Lichens are invertebrates. Have no bones. Bite rocks. Grip mountains and crush them to dust. To dirt. You’re welcome. And that’s a rock fact.