Animales! Asquerosos! Asesinos!

Critiques of the most general sort state that the country is depressed.

Our bright, competent ones nearly swoon over the idea of a country before the counter-culture, before the appropriation that almost ruined us. It was a war. Everyone seems to say. There is a particular interest in those moments of the early sixties, so our writerly television shows seem to argue. Before we would even think to claim that television would have no part in the revolution.

Hillary Clinton rises in the polls, while anecdotes emerge of her reading the Methodist theologian Carl Olgafi, a man who gave all to the new Left before it was simply a style to defend.

Many of the philosophy books I regard here in Claremont have been systematically marked. The title page of many books features a similar system of notation: accent marks on the relevant words of the title, along with smaller slashes that would be like quotation marks misplaced below the relevant spaces of the name, as if to include in clear penciled script the full name and the time of death. Henri /// Louis Bergson, 1859-1941.

I left the house later than usual on this Monday. The weather here is gray, which makes the whole town swell in bloated prison tones. No city wears its gloom like los angeles. Sullen trash frames the boulevard dullness of something gone completely wrong. Dwarf hedges and casket plywood cover the plumbing that emerges from the dank, catpiss soaked earth. In the night, an owl pursued its low notes of reed and organ. Another animal screeches in some mode of touching, which causes the dog to awaken in consternation, a sybaritic breeching recalled from some unneutered consciousness. I watch as she sorts the blackness beyond the biled streetlight, her prim diaphragm contracting in the symmetry of a taste for mucus, pheromone, and all those things that reveal what cannot be opened without movement. In the evening, teenage chemistry will have come to the block to leave desperate, puerile writings on the wall outside. Some father will have moved a purple sofa onto the sidewalk nearly beneath the graffiti. In such moments time collapses under the sign of a mediocrity that the youths will try to violence with their scowling features and their blighted obscene voices. The Sunday father is told to take the couch to the trash, and now sufficiently drunk, he moves the loveseat down the street, just past the building with all the gringo punta. What wild, embarrassed thoughts he must have, for who the fuck is really going to say anything. Punta. Vagrants will come to take the cushions, and leave the carcass of the couch to rot on the sidewalk. The writers will pass by like rapists to seize the opportunity of something exposed: meca, uek, aimeo. These boys have no taste for blood or bureaucracy, which is why they paint in fast food designs. They will write their resistance to the fate of the father, who is never allowed to snort methamphetamine off a marble notepad filled with practice in the lighter light of the park to lose nine hours of the night in the animal perfection of transcendent purpose.