(Seems like the time for this Marge Piercy poem.)

the low road

“The Low Road”
Marge Piercy (1980)

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fundraising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again and they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.

“only sick music makes money these days”

Amen Dunes, “I Know Myself,” from 2014’s Love. Music for fall storms in open country.

and finally

(Did you know Piercy wrote the first cyberpunk science fiction scene? In Woman on the Edge of Time, in 1976. It’s the sequence set in the future dystopia Connie Ramos contacts from the mental institution in the 1970s.)

Identity theft, Louboutins, tax refund fraud, a Nigerian luxury car scheme and more: a/k/a “Benny O. Prince”

Destroyer

Between 2000 and 2014, world clothing production doubled

Sense of Promise

The meditative pleasure of Intralox ARB conveyor belt demos: sortation systems, palletizing infeed, depalletizing

DEEP THOUGHT CYCLE: free-associating, multi-hour bike ride video diaries. Because why not

“Direct detection of a single photon by humans”

A mathematical fanzine from 1968–1980

Hail of crystal skulls shattered the greenhouse to slivers in the winter moon

(Thanks for reading, as ever.)