Writing — by Damon Muma

Ignoring everything to focus on everything at the expense of everything.

All my thoughts start to taste the same. They all get a “but” slapped on on the way out.

Quotidian detritus was never going to capture the imagination. Social media needed some shit fights.

My intestines are basically an action movie right now.

The first snow of winter, or of autumn for whenever, brings a sharp chill that wraps cold fingers around my heart and stops me in my track. The wistfulness of cooling nights and yellowing trees gives way to a stark hush. Everyone is gone, inside with their fire and the sky is a curtained off white. We are now frozen before a drop, poised on an edge on the verge of crumbling out from under our feet.

I tell Tyler this. He laughs. It’s contentment, he says. There’s no danger in it. Just a pause, breathless, at the top, to gather the past and the future in close to you and then slide onward.

We agree that it’s something, but what it is is what either of us brings to it. I like his version, but it’s a little too pat.

Fiction was so different before I’d answered for myself the questions the characters have to ask. Looking out with curiosity instead of looking back with regret. How much of a different need does the theoretical fill now?

I’ve been working on a thought. It’s good. It might even be a dinner party sort of thought. I really think it’s ready, and I’d like to present it at a fancy professor brain dinner. If you know of any in the area, let me know. I’m not the sort that gets invited to those, but I’ll worm my way in if I can. I bet I can get in with a little wriggle and a little bit of help from you.

Just give it time. Well — It took him almost a year, but finally his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

I found a cahoot behind the shed.

I like that. That's a good idea. Our conversations. I don't have anything to say. Did you have anything — you said there was some juices? tell me about your juices.

Everything about this chair is the wrong height! An exasperated airline passenger declaimed. He fumbled with all of the controls and cursed the day he was born. Annoyed, his neighbour pulled out his cellphone, looked around with that suspicious look and pointedly switched off of airplane mode. The airplane immediately lost 14 gigajoules of altitude, spun out of control and went into a free fall. Then his chair was really the wrong height. And that’s why.

He spent the next 8 days learning how to tell the difference between the sounds of mating frogs and chirping crickets

I’m sorry. I just started a new medication that makes me want to punch all of you in the face.

Can the curtain of this stage be like your eyes when they are being opened up to a new understanding? Can it be an eyelid? Could it slide half shut during the dull, talky bits? Who is operating that curtain? And is he in a fight with the director?

In August they are going to move the decimal over by two stops on commercial flights. The kind of population control that stops extinctions. But before that date do you catch the trip you’ve always wanted to Madagascar?

What more can you do than guide your own ship across the choppy seas? We cannot convince the waves to be smaller, or block the gale from howling. No, but we can reach out and bring aboard those who flounder before they are lost. And bring them with us to the safe harbour we trust is just over the next horizon.

The nobility of suffering through hurt in silence.

I can ball this up and wrap it around me. We had a little chat about it. It’s fine.

I would be moved to see your huge oeuvre at the Louvres.
I just hope they don’t think it too crude.

Pulled over on the side of the road. Gas in the tank — of the car at least.

Car door slams.

Just need a couple in-2-3-4+out-2-3-4s to consider if where I’m going is really where I’m going. And really where I’m gonna still be going a couple hours — and a couple days — from now.

The sun is blasting and there’s a few little bird chirps on the side. Does that mean something?

I could walk straight into the cornfield and leave my car on the side of the road. Would that mean something?

I could pick up a dusty gravel rock off the shoulder and chew on it like a candy. Chew my fingertip till the nail comes off and slices up my tongue. Would that happen? Wanna try?

All sorts of things that seem like a better idea than the untamed ibex of an idea that I’m riding down this back-road on.

But when it really comes down to it — Sun is hot, air is garbage heavy. Car has AC.

Car door slams. Engine starts.

Swishes passed.
Hazard haps and stances.

It’s time to find out
How yolo do you gogo?

“AI ethics in practice“ course materials, it was discovered, were written by a large language model.

Generative AI is the manifestation of a culture’s collective unconscious. That’s what makes it so dangerous.

There’s too many things for your thing or another thing to really be very interesting to be worth the attention let alone worth the effort of creation. And so you do anyway? AI could have done it better, faster, cheaper.

AI:
Good, fast, cheap
You can only have three.
Just don’t look too close.
Good thing nobody has time to look close anymore.

What am I for?

Curiosity used to be a superpower. Now answers overthrong any question, falling onto any glint of a tip of a fruitful line of inquiry, and pummelling it into the ground. Roiling over and over; eddies casting you in circles and spatters. You will surely be lost. Curiosity is now a liability. Exactly the sort of thing you ought to leave home without.

What do I have to do to keep you interested?

A pair of leaf husks, who’ve given up all their color and softness. Now crispy and flaking like rust. Scrattling down the street in the low drone salmon smear of the street lights. Their dessicate edges scrape the asphalt; their gait like injury or reanimation. Zombie-like. Two lone sentries, scouts for the impending horde.

Synergy is a word you make up because you forgot to look outside and see how everything already works. Nature, while it survives, is balance; otherwise we’d be gone (our current project, apparently).

Synergy? Look outside. Brace to each yaw. The ripple of every weight creating a counterbalance. Evolving — not engineering. Evolving is turning inward. Revolving and coalescing into a whole. Finding and becoming what already works and will always work. Engineering is accelerating somewhere too fast to consider the implications.

Coreless wonder.
Artless blunder.
Drip toward the afterword.
Freeze the goosebumps where they stay.

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes you find a thing and it’s just what it is, not too much more.

Is what it is.

Rare these days innit? For a thing to be itself?

Easier, though. Less... slippery.

Sometimes do you read the name of a city and just have your brain stutter to a stop and open wide to try and let in the possibility of what it’d be like to have lived there? To have grown up in different streets and backyards. To recognize different stores and fields and buildings. To not realize that that certain assumptions and verbal ticks are grown out of that city. Every city or town, even the ones just an hour down the road is a vast fractal of possibility and experience.

Wet cling in the chill cut air. Dolorous tap dancing through the paper thin puddles, each one tinkle yelping at your boots. Just a little meep as you pass.

7/13ths of a block is the right amount of territory to stake claim; a set of sidewalk sections that seems manageable. Don’t go too far, just back and forth like a lolling wobble.

Welcome to threat level central.
All night every night on the emergentsea broadcast system.

Emergent Sea level check one check one check wunnnnnnn two three four.

The man of the bad ladies.

Featuring Global Worming.
Featuring Climate Pocket Change and the Global Worming.

This is a new one for you.
This is
splish / splishier / splishieriest

To lull you into a false sense of safety.

Sleep now. Relax. Relax. Relax.

Sleeeeeeep.

We had a focus group. They said we lacked it.

I gave my bad intentions a teddy bear named Winky.

I'm a heavy lid motherfucker going down to the backward store.