( via / via )

"By the end of his life, Bourdain was deeply aware of the damage tourism could do to places. I wonder whether he was equally aware of the damage mythology can do to people."

"By suffering willingly what we cannot avoid, we secure ourselves from vain and immoderate disquiet; we preserve for better purposes that strength which would be unprofitably wasted in wild efforts of desperation, and maintain that circumspection which may enable us to seize every support and improve every alleviation. This calmness will be more easily obtained, as the attention is more powerfully withdrawn from the contemplation of unmingled unabated evil, and diverted to those accidental benefits which prudence may confer on every state." —Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, no. 150

"But though Silicon Valley is increasingly finding common ground with Nazi political theology, Nazi aesthetics has few partisans among the practical-minded oligarchs in their boxy corporate campuses."

returning since the lockdown to my own pinched shelves
   then less with fluttery encroachment
a pastel blaze outside or churn of sad machines
   loud returning since the lockdown

violate ancestral tombs with glist'ning spades
   stone gestures the jungle claims
dusty Accord with broken window, suitcase trunk
   a line on a story might be told

green shade i glide beneath & clearer now discern
   written in pencil on cardboard boxes

Semblance of Velocity.