The ******* of embezzled glory staunchly defend their counterfeit stature by defalcating the public trust of industrious societies governed internally by compunction and sabotaged externally by the tempests of acerbic fate met with inclement aleatory convergence. To supply a society with ingenuity without being complaisant or officious with unctuous pleas to the overlords we must fashion a new vogue that taps the bustle of giants and aggrandizes the margins to oversee their own creative destinies with scaffolded arrangements of titanic promise and justifiable fluidity to conquer the blinkered dogmatism of a dissolute chastity to inveterate apocryphal tenets of factitious but unmerited perspectives. Democracy crumbles when the convenience of sensationalism supplants the resolve of those that fossick hidden wealth and promulgate validity instead of undergirding pomp with precarious prevarications of duplicitous omission guarded gingerly by the gatekeepers of a ****** sanity that whitewashes the discussion with invented hobgoblins and purblind catharsis. To defeat simplicity and enshrine byzantine elegance as the paragon for voguish commentary rather than abide by a bowdlerized decorum for appeasing simpletons with divisive balkanization through identity politics we can overcome the impediments to human progress that are engineered to persist because of the inertia of the listless and the stubbornness of doctrinaire politicization and invent vivacity and festivity anew. We need to divorce ourselves from pedestrian quibbles of hero-worship that endanger the vitality of the common discourse because of fastidious pedantic disempowerment that ravages us with debased dreams by underscoring nuisances and tolerable nightmares that emasculate the virulence of the liberated individual and subvert his ambitions to contend with a picaresque world of limitless promise and self-motivated internal wealth.
      The bane of modernity is how chary the world becomes because of fractured histories intersecting with controversial destinies and the antidote to that poisonous self-defeating self-censorship is the audacity of brazen challenges to expurgation through assiduous resourcefulness and delicate diplomacy in wrangling controversies with outspoken courage rather than whispered resentment. Temerity waged in inclement circumstance is justified and curiosity stoked by lambent flames of fulgurant individualism should be fortified to the extent necessary to conquer the feckless spoilsports of unctuous puritanism and institutional obedience. The quacksalvers that blather about inconsequence strand the imagination in a desiccated desert that is ostracized from the palettes of the artistic whim to wield efflorescence rather than squander life in pursuit of perfunctory lucre or tenuous solidarity around banal idealism promised by social justice warriors that forget the biggest war being waged on humanity is on the ingenuity of the common discourse and the liberty to opine about real issues rather than saccharine conventions of emasculation through linguistic imprisonment and epicurean slavery to fashimites who relish the buzzword but never the enlightened audience that scoffs at feeble attempts at cultural commentary like Childish Gambino’s “This is America” music video. This particular artifact is a demonstration of how childishly fickle the plebeian mentality really is, stitching together a bricolage of violence to engineer controversy and serenading it with the most banal music imaginable and exhorting people to herald it as a high artform while inundating the world with unimaginative comic book movies and Star Wars rip-offs because of the lucrative business of formulaic replication. “This is America” should be regarded as a parody of itself because of how hackneyed its design is and how cacophonous it sounds and mocks its audience with lowbrow tactics of adding tinsel to trash and marketing it as the glory of tatterdemalions rather than the refinement of true cinematic achievements that have been relegated because Warhol’s Campbells-Soup-consumerism trumps true belletrist in the public view.
        Cultural watersheds punctuate our history with salient achievements in experimentation, but the formulaic profiteering of buzzword sensationalism and yellow journalism and the ostentatious glorification of promiscuous boasting and fancy cars tantalize the mice to continue playing slot machines rather than penning a novel or doing something promethean. The world scoffs at Trump but ignores the bigger institutional caveats that endanger us much more than a pragmatic albeit unconventional pontificator who is complicit in constructing a false narrative to enslave mindless people to fret about eminence rather than delight themselves in the consequential nuances of established refinement that used to serenade the world with flourish and spectacle. The world kowtows to the crusade against flavor-of-the-week enemies of the liberal-conservative syncretism because it has been conditioned to believe that synthesis is the only logical solution for the polarized worldviews of churlish people that become parvenus not on their merits but on their marketable pitfalls and their public foibles. Peccadillos are more important to people than virtues and this makes society morally bankrupt if we loiter around Astroturf causes that have been infiltrated by corporatism and venal debauchery and acquiesce as disempowered gossip hounds that hunt in packs to find jest in aberration rather than achievement in self-created narratives that defy the stupid purblind boorishness of the mainstream media and its haughty liberalism or the persnickety condemnation of priggish conservative moralities that had an expiration date 50 years ago. Who the **** cares about transgender-touting-gender-fluidity quidnuncs and the snooty obsession with lurid personal endeavors of reputable people that made minor ****** transgressions in a world policed by wide-eyed feminazis that seek to ransack men of their vital virulence to spotlight their unjustifiable oppression. Women are oppressed but the carnal nature of their calumniation and their vindictive powers of persuasion are deployed with such vehement vigilance and such distaste for the majority that the world relegates itself to quibbles of celebrities rather than substantive issues. There is a systemic feminization of society occurring that seeks to demarcate despotic uxorious pleasantries as an incarceration of vocal dissent against supercilious women and their tamed men that slavishly grovel in repudiation of anything prickly.  Men historically have oppressed women but the solution to this quandary isn’t a reverse discrimination where the minority concern is spotlighted as a majoritarian issue that overshadows the disproportionate nature of our society where nominal accreditation is afforded in a non-meritocratic way to absolve people of their carnality and demote the vigorous defense of human liberty as secondary to compromise solutions that appease more people than they offend but simultaneously result in suboptimal conditions that reward arbitrarily coachable people while jettisoning anyone witty enough to be capable of insubordination of a hedonistic epicurean world obsessed with appearance and ravaged by the decadence of formulaic profiteering at the expense of originality and true promethean art that is herculean enough to defy hackneyed tropes and siphon the best elements from a piecemeal world variegated with complexity but stifled by fomented hatred.
The solutions to these problems is to create a watchdog group of artistic critics who become eminent and ubiquitously heard enough to offer creative consultation to the artistic endeavors that we consume and the music that is curated for fastidious ears that crave euphonic originality rather than the banality of easily dovetailed bass-heavy cookie-cutter garbage and the gaudy tactics of talentless rappers whose swagger derives from  the intersection of opportunism and the divestiture of an industry that rewards gloated supercilious epicureanism and meretricious marketability. Am I the only one jaded by second-rate superhero movies that infest the cinemas that borrow from Michael Bay while thrusting pulse-pounding but narratively bankrupt movies down the throats of consumers that might prize the cinematic originality of the heyday of filmmaking? Is it always high art to invent controversy that is witless or half-witted just because it will create buzz? Shouldn’t we condemn the laziness of society in acquiescing to the penury of the modern cultural narrative which belabors the dead horses of racism and sexism ad nauseum? Shouldn’t we fight the war of against inequity through legislation rather than hibernating about scandalous eminence and testy malfeasance?
          Liberty should be championed above all else and we are turning our backs on the future unless we muster the resolve to diminish the sway of the common narrative and aim our spotlight at consequential endeavors rather than the tropes of prosaic and pedestrian bastardization of art and culture. We need to fight artistic laziness which has ravaged our culture and castigate the tactics of wannabee celebrities that use lurid tactics to attract an audience by bedizening themselves with Pyrrhic ostentations and rampant fakery to create more melodrama in a world that needs to be less histrionic. YouTube celebrities swarm us as they get high on ******* and lean-- at our expense-- and vandalize property and convincing nine-year-old’s like Lil Tay to flex her money like it is infinitely renewable in a finite world where all our attention is wasted on artless artifice of less talented people that know how to engineer a ruckus by strutting themselves beyond all decency and selling out to a corporatist nightmare of enslaved convenience. We need to be more vocal about the dissolution of artistic merit and the formulaic repetition of successful formulas that jade us and make us yawn about another retread of a previously successful idea that is milked to the point of cruelty.                                                         ­                       
       Let’s change the narrative and focus on creating true art rather than reacting to the meretricious tinsel of the vogue consensus which is so impotent in its ability to rivet audiences because it has become so notoriously lazy. Fight laziness in art, dismiss your news feeds, be resourceful, seek true happiness rather than find yourself hoodwinked and duped by the idea that Trump is the most important issue or getting caught in thought loops and brooding about sexism and inequality. Let us strive to be egalitarian but within limits that would also appease hominists rather than just the hypertrophy of the leftist narrative that seeks to cage us with the doublespeak of complaisant conformity.  Reject the unctuous charlatans that pretend priggishness when their banausic purpose is barbaric but beguiling to be a lullaby for laggards. We need to fight for the future of civilization rather than hobnob with convenience and loiter around decrying false perpetrators rather than systemic injustices that could otherwise be rectified if enough people fought for it. We can invent a future that is a great festivity serenaded by cultivated artistic refinement and forget about the trifles that divide us. United in ambition and fueled by ingenuity we can defeat artistic laziness and be resourceful with how we decide what is newsworthy. Spurred by the argosy of proactive motivation we can change the world in a substantial way by deciphering the subtext that governs the world. The subtext is everything!

The wilderness is the blank space
Where the minds can roam free
A canvas for us to paint our imagination
Happy minds devoid of any anxiety
Fresh breath of life in the empty space
Where do we take refuge if destroyed?
Wilderness is the bank space to treasure
Explore and find all the answers
For the unimaginative they have no relevance
Among the wilderness we embrace life

I was at a party the other day
I don't usually go to parties
I don't like crowds
I don't like gatherings
I don't like, new people.
But I'm here as a favour to a friend,
And so I stand in this hovel
That looks like the dodgy part of *****
Or the ganglands of Gomorrah,
Pathetically clutching my long empty beer bottle
And breathing in air that's more smoke than oxygen.
Desperately hoping
That if I pretend to be drunk enough
I wont have to meet anybody new.

But as luck would often have it
As luck and I do not get on
My friend beckons me from a darkened corner
Surrounded by people I don't know.
She's confident, enigmatic and wants me to come over.
And because I owe her a favour I cant say no
And so I trudge towards her with all the enthusiasm
Of an arthritic Labrador, dragging my hind legs
Across the sweat stained carpet
Bracing myself for someone new.

And as I place one foot in front of the other
I can practically see the outline of the gallows.
And I notice that the walls really are an especially ugly colour
And that boy surely isn't old enough to be drinking without permission from his mother.
And someone please tell those guys not to put the owners dog in the oven.
And I wonder if I should break up those limb tangled lovers
Because I hear that that one, who's dating that one, gave that one chlamydia
and suddenly the air is too thick
And too hot
But my feet will not stop.
Because I owe my friend a favour.
But this hideous carpet might as well be an ocean
Because believe me, I'm drowning, adrift.
This feels like I've left my stomach
Somewhere four feet behind me
And I've always been so used to listening to my gut.

This is not fear, this is anxiety
The two are so easily confused, but
Unfortunately by now I know the difference
More intimately than many people do.
Fear is a cold steel
Sharp knife, with smooth un-serrated edges
That drives into your chest or your head or your belly
And it takes what it wants from you, and then is wrenched back out
And its painful, but its usually there for a reason.
Fear can be conquered
Don't laugh I've seen it
Fear grapples with the human spirit in the eyes of every
Soldier still fighting
No matter what the battlefield.
Be it desert or office or kitchen or playground.

But anxiety is fears younger cousin
and it is a wire sponge against your chest
Like the ones they use on cleaning dishes.
And it grates at you until you're raw
And scrubs at every inch of skin
There's hardly a moment when you're not itchingly pink
Until it feels as though your ribs are utterly exposed
And every eye is fixed on what you hide within.
But that's not the worst thing about it.
That's not what drives you every second, mad.
I can handle the razor winged moths that make a home in my stomach
The worst, is the irrational nature of this relative of fear.

I should not be afraid to open my mouth
To be seen, and immediately judged
Even though I know in reality
The most important people won't reckon me
On the first impression, first look, first word.
But I still am
I am scared, and that is terrifying.
And I know that this might just pass
It could be teenage angst
My lack of self confidence holding me back.
But whatever it is.
Right now, it is Everest.
So don't you dare tell me just to get over it.

But as I sidle up beside my best friend, I know she doesn't understand
And I hope she never does.
One, Two, Three.
Three people who are new,
Three epinephrine shots of irrational anxiety pumping through my blood.
And she smiles so encouragingly,
All yellow and marmoset eager.
And I take one, two, three deep breaths of smoky air,
And let my mind play marionette to the corners of my mouth,
Tugging them into a smile that's somewhat believable.
And the first word that tumbles out of my mouth is a hideously unimaginative,
“Hey.”
But they don't seem to mind.

This small talk we're making, that for me is colossal
Gradually settles the pinpricks of venom beneath my skin
Into something entirely more manageable.
And by the end of the night
Two of those three people are no longer somebody new.
And I feel as though I've made the progress of a few meters
In climbing my Everest.
But there's still miles and miles to go.  
But the thing to remember...
What I must remember,
No matter what mountain anxiety builds for you,
Be it Atlas or Snowdon,
Be it at a school, or an office or at home,
Every step that we make, on our own or pushed forward by friends
Is another meter or mile, on this arduous road
That will eventually lead to a summit, ten times more beautiful
Than the valley we just left below.

Conjunction:
a small class of words distinguished in many languages by their function as connectors between words, phrases, clauses, sentences

- the act of conjoining; combination; the state of being conjoined; union; association:

- a compound proposition that is true if and only if all of its component propositions are true.

- the coincidence of two or more heavenly bodies at the same celestial longitude.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I am in a relationship.

a colorless word
a word of no clarity
a good one? a bad one?
a professional deal,
or one that makes you squeal
with pleasure or despair

without context or content,
a description of a status,
not a state,
but a quid pro quo

I prefer
I am in a conjunction

well recall the day
our orbits
more than crossed,
but synchronized,
when two bodies
began to travel
upon the same longitude
one direction
in conjunction

t'was the day we coordinated
on our mobile phone,
co-configured our future,
our calendars

nowadays,
I answer her questions
while she is commencing to think,
when her foolishness prevails,
she questions, "did you remember to..."
my answer, a question returned,
connected, constant and conjunctive,
"and what's my name?"
an answer conveying constancy

relationship
oft the farthest place from logical,
but you know that,
say I am in a conjunction
and the logicians will celebrate
the end of your lonely celibacy,
well they understand the truth
inherent in and of and about
your compounded proposition

what unimaginative creatures we be,
dispensing with beauty for factuality,
but facts are easily misread,
your fact and my fact, relationship,
the exact same fact, conveys neither
an agreement as to what that means

are we unionized, associated, or conjoined
what is the quality of
our related ships?

so
Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,
amend my status please,
post me
as being in a state of:
a) conductivity b) connectivity c) concoctive

no, none of those
capture
what we have
captured,
so let create a new state,
a new world,
using a very old world word
post us as follows,
"Nat is in a conjunction"

A lot of people think they can write or paint or draw or sing or make movies or what-have-you, but having an artistic temperament doth not make one an artist.


Even the great writers of our time have tried and failed and failed some more. Vladimir Nabokov received a harsh rejection letter from Knopf upon submitting ******, which would later go on to sell fifty million copies. Sylvia Plath’s first rejection letter for The Bell Jar read, “There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.” Gertrude Stein received a cruel rejection letter that mocked her style. Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way earned him a sprawling rejection letter regarding the reasons he should simply give up writing all together. Tim Burton’s first illustrated book, The Giant Zlig, got the thumbs down from Walt Disney Productions, and even Jack Kerouac’s perennial On the Road received a particularly blunt rejection letter that simply read, “I don’t dig this one at all.”

So even if you’re an utterly fantastic writer who will be remembered for decades forthcoming, you’ll still most likely receive a large dollop of criticism, rejection, and perhaps even mockery before you get there. Having been through it all these great writers offer some writing tips without pulling punches. After all, if a publishing house is going to tear into your manuscript you might as well be prepared.

1. The first draft of everything is ****. -Ernest Hemingway
2. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ***. -David Ogilvy
3. If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. – Dorothy Parker
4. Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home. -Paul Theroux
5. I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide. — Harper Lee
6. You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. ― Jack London
7. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. — George Orwell
8. There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. ― W. Somerset Maugham
9. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time — or the tools — to write. Simple as that. – Stephen King
10. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. – Neil Gaiman
11. Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die. – Anne Enright
12. If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do. – William Zinsser
13. Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. – Kurt Vonnegut
14. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration. – Ernest Hemingway
15. Write drunk, edit sober. – Ernest Hemingway
16. Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, ****, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly. – Joshua Wolf Shenk
17. Substitute ‘****’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. – Mark Twain
18. Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that — but you are the only you. ― Neil Gaiman
19. Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. – Oscar Wilde
20. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ― Ray Bradbury
21. Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously. – Lev Grossman
image – christine zenino

"Where's the *** gone?"

"I've got a jar of dirt!"

"So you are all going to fight them, and you are all going to fight them all on the account of him wanting to **** him?"

"Jack. Where's Elizabeth."
"She's safe, just like I promised. She's all set to marry Norrington, just like she promised. And you get to die for it just like you promised. So we're all men of our word, really... except for Elizabeth, who is, in fact, a woman."

"The lies I told you were not lies"
"You lied to me by telling me the truth?"
"Yes"
"That's good, can I use that?"

"You know when you are standing in a high place and suddenly have the urge to jump?
…I don't have it"

"And that was without even a single drop of ***."

"You have a cruel mind, Jack Sparrow."
"Cruel is a matter of perspective"

"You know, for all that pirates are clever clogs, we are an unimaginative lot when it comes to naming things."

"Aye, the original plan was to use nine pieces of eight to bind Calypso, but when the first court met the Brethren were, to a one, skint broke."
"So change the name!"
"To what? "Nine pieces of whatever we happened to have in our pockets at the time?" Oh yes, that's very piratey!"

My suitemate Sunny is from Nebraska. She’s 5’9,” and has cinnamon brown hair that’s half messy-bob, just long enough that she can twist it up with a pearl-studded comb, and half mohawk. She has the long, slanky elegance of someone who’s spent most of her 18 years outdoors.

She’s a cowgirl. There’s a well-worn sage-nova cowgirl hat hanging on her dorm wall and she has her own horse - a red-roan quarter-horse named Valentine - at home, of course. Her best friend growing up was a Sioux girl named Wachiwi who shared her love of barrel racing and lived on a nearby reservation.

Wachiwi was the first person Sunny came out to, at 10. Sunny was 13 when she came out to her family. “I like girls,” Sunny declared defiantly, out of the blue, one night after dinner, “not boys.” Her younger brother had snickered, her older brother rolled his head and said, “Oh, lord.” Her two little sisters seemed unconcerned. Her dad, after a moment’s thought, responded by asking her if she had taken the kitchen scraps out to the chickens yet.

Sunny grew up on a ranch and there was a rigid structure to her days. She would get up early and do ranch chores (muck out horse stalls, feed the chickens, gather eggs and set out hay) then study - but her first love was World of Warcraft.

Sunny was homeschooled and her stories of how that was accomplished are epic. For instance, they had three satellite internet services which she would have to switch between, throughout the day, like a gambler hoping to get lucky and every other Saturday they drove three hours to exchange books at the library. Whatever they did though, it worked. She’s unholy smart - like someone made a deal with the devil smart.

Sunny describes Nebraska as “basic, cliche and poor.”
“Wow,” Leong says, “you really paint a picture.”
“We all inhabited different worlds,” Sunny says, shruggingly, “Lisa’s from skyscraper clouds, Anais a palace, Leong a dystopian communist hellscape..”
“I wouldn’t say a palace,” I demur. “WHAT,” Leong screeches, throwing popcorn at Sunny.
“Stop!” Sunny says, raising both hands to ward-off further snack assaults.
“I just mean, if you were to go live in Nebraska - you’d have to go in on those terms - expecting something basic, unimaginative and poor, periodt.
“I couldn’t wait to excape.” she says, definitively, “I was thirsty.”

Everything about Sunny is deliberate, she looks you in the eye. Like a madwoman let out of the attic, she takes perverse joy in being fiercely blunt, raw and outspoken. She has a drive that can’t be mollified - she’s making her life over and you better not get in her way. The girl cracks me up - I could stand to be more like her.

Sunny’s joining my world this June for most of summer vacation. “Maybe you could show me Nebraska one day.” I say. “Maybe.. someday..” she says trailing off with a far off look, “but I wouldn’t do that to you, you’d go CrAzY in three days.”

“I’ll own that,” I say, wiping away fake tears.
.

My feeling word is adjective.
My mood number is one to ten.
My goal was met, and now I get
To wonder when I'm free again.
I guess I'm unimaginative.