I Like This Planet

It’s been amusing to watch the young crows with their parents trying to teach them how to crack a peanut shell open to get at the nuggets inside the young crow mimics the parents holds the peanut with a claw and pecks but doesn’t understand the principle behind the pecking and gives up and goes to a parent and opens its beak and pleads for a peanut. I like this planet I like it fine it’s got birds galore and clouds and lakes and quadrupeds and clams but I think it’s time to go while the going is good all I need to do is build a spaceship find an exoplanet & take off I think I’ll take some tinfoil & rubber bands & make an engine a big shiny assembly of predicates & mules. As you might surmise I’m feeling mournful for the erosions of literary culture people in used bookstores late at night what happened to that. I see a robot colossus running an empire of rogue eyeballs zombies walking down sidewalks fixated on a handheld device and think holy shit humans are going extinct. The newspaper comes in a plastic sleeve which keeps it dry in the rain & the words have such irascible energy you can tease a meaning out of anything even a newspaper article it’s amazing a few of those still exist given the hostile environment the pandemic the arguments over vaccination & masks & social distancing why would you even want to masturbate in front of women much less actually do it I don’t know what to make of that it’s just too wrapped up in self-loathing & domination & whole lot of other weird shit above my paygrade such are the bells of the jester in these bizarre times comedy will one day burst out of its precarious shell and ride the range again. What strange strange times I’m freaking out after that last heat wave the Colorado river is going dry Lake Mead & Lake Powell are way below the shore line the hydroelectric generating capacity at Hoover Dam is down by 23 percent if drought conditions continue in the Colorado River basin what will happen is inevitable it will begin with air bubbles on a turbine formed when low water levels in Lake Mead create pressure differentials in the water flowing into the generators as the bubbles collapse and explode they will scour the generators until the entire generating unit begins to buck and vibrate the blades will become pocked and pitted and the whole thing will need to be shutdown leaving 29 million people in the dark. Sometimes I lighten my mood thinking on Micky Rourke as poet Charles Bukowski or the fabulous Baron Munchausen all I’ve ever wanted to be in life is a daring fantasist in a powdered wig. So here I am. Translating this moroseness into something benevolent Winston Churchill’s parrot still living at 118 years or is it more logs in a fireplace popping snapping crackling while Steve Winwood sings “Can’t Find My Home” though it’s obvious by the stone fireplace he did.