“The beginnings of Dada were not art but disgust,” said Tristan Tzara in 1918.
A woman was visibly upset in aisle six because they’re out of antibacterial hand-wipes. “But when will there be more?” I’m still thinking about the look in her eyes.
A consultant from Brussels asked everyone to draw the shape of their lives on a Post-It note. I made a scribble and people began approaching me as if I’d scrawled a cry for help.
Ash Wednesday and people walk the streets with smudged crosses on their foreheads. A beautiful ritual, ancient and haunted.
Instructional videos at the train station teach me how to behave in 2020. If there’s gunfire, take cover. Silence your cellphone.
Meanwhile the television says things like “jawbone damage may occur” and “America’s most trusted home surveillance system.”
She scrolls through websites that sell protective face masks while I half-watch a conspiratorial documentary about our hyper-mediated world.
The machine says tens of millions of people will flood into Las Vegas as well as Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, and Houston.
Billboards along Interstate 90 tell me that God owes us nothing, love is an action verb, and the key to forgiveness was hung on the cross.
A man studies yesterday’s horoscopes on the train. He carefully highlights a line that says today is the day to take action.
Debate night in America. We tune in because we need to know: Who can withstand the punishment of live television?
I remember sitting in a cathedral on a snowy February morning and watching an elderly couple hold hands.
Sharks have a transparent membrane that allows them to see despite the blood and carnage that fills the water when it attacks.
The 45th parallel is the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole, and you can feel the geography shift when you see all that big pine and cold water.
Why are so many visions of the future cast in cool tones? Blues and greys, whites and silvers.
A vaguely human-shaped slab of bronze staggers into a ferocious wind, its body on fire, determined to walk.
The first gods must have been born while we slept.
Nearly every advertisement on the subway trumpets the virtue of having your favorite meals, outfits, entertainments, mattresses, and toothbrushes delivered straight to your door.
Waking up this morning, the world doesn’t feel much different from the illogic of sleep.
The only noise tonight is the highway and it sounds like the sea.
