The Road to Hell is Paved With Silicone

In my house there's only one thing made of silicone. 

The tree.

Further evidence that an anti-civilization position is not a choice.  It is just an attentiveness to what our world is, its baffling self-baring of the heights of alienation and yes, you just can't make this shit up but yes, this shit still is made and that's where we're hung, tongues out, cruxed between that make and made.  And so we don't choose to hate it, all we to do is turn ourselves up slightly, aim the eyes slightly above street level, or we put ourselves down, an ear to the street, and there we catch a bare rumble, a murmur from that dumb forest of silicone which has no birds in it, which has no roots but weighs all the same, and their needles do not fall, and their branches never droop yet their proximity to a cozy roaring fire will soften the polymers barely, open its substance a bit to let the polysiloxanes breathe, its backbone whispering ⋯-Si-O-Si-O-Si-O-⋯ out into the rooms of the living.

And how one cannot want to let flourish its total, utter decomposition is utterly beyond us.

Listening to J. Stalin in the negative city

I have seen a few things in my life, and I have taken photos - inconstantly - of a few of those things.  Few have heretofore made me as happy as this.

I'm starting a series of "dispatches" from Naples.  They will not be Roman Letters 2: The Lachrymose South, in large part because they are not to a series of ones, single letters, singular friends and comrades. But insofar as my life is a void of structure, these will perhaps produce a fleeting illusion of continuity across it, if only - likely only - for me.

They are titled Listening to J. Stalin in the negative city.  Henceforth LTJSITNC.

J. Stalin is a rapper from West Oakland.  (So named because, "he was short like me, but he was always smashin' on everybody.") "The negative city" is one of terms used to describe the immense Neapolitan sottosuolo, the underground.  Not the underground as in "the metro," but the sprawling web of Greek and Roman ruins, cisterns, tunnels, roads, evacuated markets, empty grain containers, walls, and junk heaps that lie beneath - and mirror - the world built above it.  A good 60% of this lived, teeming, leaning city stands on top of this other one. 

The other day, when I was down in this other one, breathing air that is neither older nor newer, neither stale nor fresh, looking at Nike Air footprints in beige dirt, I was listening to J. Stalin.  It made some degree of sense.