Free Mature Themes by Andrew Durbin Page B

by shitty economics and ignored by the stewards of that decaying system took to the streets to smash windows, overturn cars, and set houses on fire. In the YouTube videos of these riots, many of the men are wearing tracksuits. The tracksuit evokes soccer players at the World Cup. It evokes NYU students who are too lazy to wear normal clothing when they walk down University Place to their ugly library on Washington Square South. Russian men can be seen wearing them while they beat up gay rights activists, who themselves are wearing tracksuits. The tracksuit is ageless and fits anyone for any moment. In this regard, the tracksuit is an image for an emancipatory politics that might emerge from the ecological wreckage of our moment as a flexible, evasive, even nonspecific opposition to the current economic configuration of “the world.” One size, more or less, fits all. Also, not. It’s a certain gay look I currently like. My friend really did look hot when I thought he was wearing a tracksuit. The tracksuit is versatile: its synthetic fabric is optimized for comfort and durability, meaning it can withstand varying weather conditions and climates. Wearing my own Adidas tracksuit and jogging through Central Park in the fall, beneath the changing leaves, I think about the autumnal blur canopied over me that I never really stop to parse. Leaves change via a complicated process I look up and can say happens because of the presence of chlorophyll in the leaves, a pigment held in an organelle called a chloroplast. When chlorophyll is abundant in the leaf’s cells, as it is during the growing season, its green color dominates and masks the colors of any other pigments that may be present. As daylight decreases and the days and nights cool, the veins that carry fluids into and out of the leaf are gradually closed off as a layer of special cork cells forms at the stem. As this cork layer develops, water and mineral intake into the leaf is reduced, slowly at first, and then more rapidly. It is during this time that the chlorophyll begins to decrease and the color begins to change. The leaf slowly lowers its green mask. I circle Central Park as the light shifts back and the evening takes on the sharp, clear air that carries the city light toward me, swamping the trees with the bright, urban night. I finish my run and stop at the edge of the park, near 59 th Street and Broadway. A man selling pretzels and wearing a tracksuit looks at me and shouts, “You need water?”

RE: “SMILE
ON A JET”
    1. PVG to SFO, Shanghaied to Old Gold Mountain; youtube tutorial, how to dye your faded bluejean sunsets to black (3 sages grimace/smile at the industrial dust cloud banding across the Pacific, radioactive isotopes of the visual-virtual’s uncontrollable fission). Amazing that Americans can obtain so much mass, approximate stuff of two or three people in Beijing. Meanwhile political prisoners have been harvested for organs, transhipment via former soviet republics into wealthy diabetics and career alcoholics: because nickelodeon’s green goo is people, appropriated lyrics of mourning (napalm girl, coal miner’s daughter).
    2. The fortune-cookie reads: “—Never mistake a killer for a koan.” Language lesson on the back: “Sociopathic: without any empathy. SEE: Henry Miller as a boy, deliberately farting at the funerary casket of another child, to express his contempt for both friendship and sorrow; SEE ALSO, Marquis de Sade, violently abusing a prostitute. Note: Critics tend to confuse sociopathy with a purported,”—absolute freedom of artistic/spiritual vision,” because they themselves fear empathy as the taint of influence and/or restricted, unreflective thinking. Above all else, the critic desires to appear sophisticated, savvy, and in on the joke. The pure sociopath desires to tell a joke that ends in the death of the entire world external to himself/herself. Lucky lottery