I use to think about dying when I was a kid, and then watching people to see if they noticed, what they would say, and then I would pop back in from another door, and say that wasn't me, I didn't die. I just wanted to watch them watching me being dead and hear them talk about me, but they probably would not say what they were really thinking. They would be irritated I thought, finding out I was faking dead, and ignore me. I thought about wishing I could start over from scratch, but I'd still be me, or what's the point, but you can't really start over again unless you're alive, and then it's really not starting over, it's just trying to be some one.

Mostly it is very hard realising about another one that that one is not thinking, is not thinking when it would seem that thing is a thing they would naturally be doing.

Gertrude Stein

The Making of Americans

I thought of Ken while reading the above, about the time I got very angry when it seemed Ken was not thinking, about Obama's land grab, and about the genocide in Gaza. Ken was adamant, and every thing he said was propaganda in place of thinking. The thing I think now is we live in the same world and the world is utterly different for each of us. I feel sad more than angry now, about that. 

It's a very strange thing to think of existence, and then to think of oneself as having existed, thinking the body is all of our existence. It's impossible to imagine when one feels oneself as a passenger in the body that is so familiar and also ever so strange, to no longer exist in the way we know of existence. I think Gertrude Stein is in my thinking now and therefore in these words.

 

 It makes me a little unhappy that everything is a little funny. It makes me a little unhappy that many things are funny and pecu;liar and strange to me. It makes me a little unhappy that everything and every one is sometime a little queer to me. It makes me a little unhappy that every one seems sometime almost a little crazy. It does make me  every one a little unhappy that every one sometime is a queer one to me. It does make me somtime a little uncertain, it does sometimes make me very uncertain about everything and always then it is perplexing what is certain what is not certain, who is a queer one, what is a funny thing for some one to be wanting or not wanting or doing or not doing or thinking or not thinking or believing or not believing.

Gertrude Stein

The Making of Americans, page 531-532

 If you have no certainty about anything at least you can be certain you have no certainty to defend.

 Jesus Christ on a stick, Pete Hegseth is dumber than Trump. He's completely insane and deranged. We've had to put up with a lot of imperial numbskulls, but this takes the cake. We should be outraged.

 I want to know sometime all about sentimental feeling. I want to know sometime all the different kinds of ways people have it in them to be certain of anything.

Gertrude Stein

The Making of Americans

The costs of imperialism and Zionism are coming home.

All of us who said empowering an apartheid state to do genocide would embolden it to commit further crimes that will eventually drag the whole world down were right. But we were called antisemites and criminalized for this foresight.

Nate Bear

 

You see it. Then you don’t. A drone in the sky. A missile beneath its wing. It is a picture of an inevitable collapse. No negotiations, no warnings, just the chilling, mechanical logic of destruction. Every time a silhouette like this appears, a world beneath it is about to be violently unmade. This is the last portrait of a place before it became a memory.

This image is a portrait of suspended animation, the terrifying, heavy silence that always precedes the sound of a dream dying. In the fraction of a second that this photo exists, there is still a world beneath it. There are families gathered for lunch, children arguing over a game, neighbors exchanging gossip. A whole, complex ecosystem of ordinary life, completely unaware that its clock has run down.

We write these words, and we share these pictures, so that when that certainty crashes down, the people beneath that grey sky are not erased by the dust that covers them. They are not just statistics; they are the worlds that silhouette ended.

Dona Abu Sitta

 The u.s. is out of tomahawks.

Trump's jawboning.
 

 

Between the rains I rode to the library and got Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, Lyn Hejinian's Lola the Interpreter and Albertine Clarke's The Body Builders. I told my good librarian about the documentary Librarians and said I appreciate you all the more. When I got back I learned how to shut down the local alarm, and that it may be a long while, as the underground line keeps flooding and they won't fix it because it's ancient technology. I listened to an interview on Palestine '36 and the Turbulence podcast, then a song, The Ground Above by Beth Orton, and Solos II by Anton Toorell. Today I'll pass the halfway point in the making of Americans. Holy gleaning. I had the feeling Trump would in fact be the Final Trump but honestly I don't know what in literal hell that means. The world will go on even without the world'[s greatest superpower, no doubt.

 The worst criminals are not in prison, they're building the prison we are all in.

 John the plumber said the alarm was something to do with the elevators and the phone company and it's still working to not be alarmed by the alarm it's just part of the character of the building and I thought yeah it's part of the character of the built world as we know it but I didn't say that to John the plumber though I feel like he would agree on some plumb level at least.

 Love it or leave it you got no choice. When the landlord says you, when he says we, he means I, he says We shall not be moved, I will be here for 99 years, after I'm dead I'll be here to haunt you, my tower with eyes will be watching you, he says we shall overcome, he says this is home. He means you shall be moved, if you ain't got the cash money, I shall overcome you, this is my home, I mean my real estate, baby, it's not your park anymore. I was thinking of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, the movie, not the book of course. This is another version of The Overlook Hotel, built on a watery graveyard of the latter day empire. 

 The shame of America. He says you are America but you say America is a shame. America is no land for you and me. America is the land of land lords and America would be the evil lord of Earth and that is a shame as the land lords destroy it. America is an abstraction of the Earth. America is an ill-designed set of specious illuminated words, with lightning crackling all around a beacon for the crash and the death of birds.

 The fire alarm rang last night and I let it go I said I'm not going to call again and then some one turned it off. The lightning was wild. Several cars were parked alongside the Obamachron with their lights on. Some one said the news said a woman disappeared by the Obamachron but I never hear anything more. I saw the remains of a meal at the end of the alley, and some one said there was a woman laying there and some one asked if she was ok and she didn't say anything. Some one called and they came and took her somewhere. This sounds like a story but it doesn't end. The fire alarm is ringing now and again as the sun rises and the wind cries like ghosts enveloping birds.

america (by habit). this is a haunted building. 

 

"Land Day" (March 30th) stands as one of the most prominent milestones in contemporary Palestinian history. It is not merely a commemoration of reclaiming land, but a profound symbol of resistance and steadfastness (Sumud).

What occurred during the 1948 Nakba is being echoed today in the Gaza Strip through a war of genocide. We find that the "wound is one" and the colonial methodology is repeating itself, albeit with unprecedented technological and destructive intensity.

The Parallels of Displacement

Donya Abu Sitta 

Land Day: A Legacy of Resistance and a Modern Nakba

 

Loving repeating is one way of being. This is now a description of such being. Loving repeating is always in children. Loving repeating is in a way earth feeling. Some children have loving repeating for little things and story-telling, some have it as a more bottom being.

Gertrude Stein

The Making of Americans

Every one is always repeating the whole of them. 

Gertrude Stein 

The Making of Americans

I told Jay I'm gleaning The Making of Americans. He told me gleaning Gertrude Stein is an accomplishment. I told Jay I was getting discouraged about The Making of Americans, and then I realized, I am in fact a gleaner. I'm an american gleaner of tomes!

 We made a new arrangement from the old. We have a new arrangement now.

 America is a problem for the world, but I love The Making of Americans. 

 Sometimes it takes many years of knowing some one before the repeating in that one comes to be a clear history of such a one. Natures sometimes are so mixed up in some one that steady repeating in them is mixed up with changing.

Gertrude Stein

The Making of Americans

 Colonial post-fascism is characterized by three processes that Du Bois wrote about. First, colonial post-fascism involves a bifurcation between colonial violence and peace, such that Western powers in the inter and postwar period could make commitments to world peace without interrogating the actions of their empires. Second, colonial post-fascism involves the process by which empires developed their imperial practices to rebuild from the effects of the war against fascism. Finally, colonial post-fascism involves the U.S. empire increasing its militarization, which developed in the fight against fascism, to secure colonial power under the rhetoric of maintaining world peace.

Ali Meghji

 When i hear the coyotes yipping at night I like to think of them exploring the artificial landscape of the Obamachron. I can see them moving stealthily through the surveilled zone of control. 

 Iran is using the arrogance and stupidity of the U.S. and Israel strategically. Iran has the plan.

 I listen to a lifetime of noise and song. I'm left here in my own self with a ringing in my ears. Everything I ever heard is here with me. Some day I may not be able to see the world anymore, and I'll still have ghostly images in my head, like visual echoes of the lost and found world, and an astral ringing in my ears.

The skies over the US troops are likely to be filled with deadly drones. Those kids will be sacrificed for nothing but a mad act of futile empire.

 

 The graveyard of empire is expanding. I feel better about it now. I'm gleaning the making of americans. I feel better about it now. It may not last. I simplified the arrangement of flowers in the kitchen, composting the dead ones. I feel better about it now. When I went up to see the chron I thought of a worker saying in his head maybe emerging from a hazy dream, What if I go to work in the land grab this morning only to find there's nothing there? I'm sorry it's there, but I feel grateful for documenting it every single day, and I feel better about it now. 

Always from the beginning there was to me all living as repeating. This is now a description of my feeling. As I was saying listening to repeating is often irritating, always repeating is all of living, everything in a being is always repeating, more and more listening to repeating gives to me completed understanding. 

Gertrude Stein

The Making of Americans

 

Every one then has in their living repeating, repeating of every kind of thing in them, repeating of the kind of impatient feeling they have in them, of the anxious feeling almost every one has more or less always in them.

There is then a whole to living, mostly everybody has for this an anxious feeling, some have have not any such anxious feeling to the whole of them, many have the anxious feeling in every minute of their living, every minute is a whole to them with an anxious feeling which each minute ends them.

Gertrude Stein

The Making of Americans