It’s a weird Wisconsin summer, and I’m treading lightly under its irresolute gaze, chomping on my bottom lip as I wade through a tide of undefined gradients, oily Men ‘O War, expressionist shards, crooked tessellations, callow cries for justice. My enthusiasm for coaxing inspiration out of prepubescent Picassos is heliotropic; it’s my spine that’s sagging, anticipating this heavy season’s violent gravity. It should be hotter. My knees should be screaming. These exploding tangles of matter, universes trapped in 90-pound bundles, should be knocking me off my feet. Idle, my skin is sighing in tune with captive wonderment’s adolescent hiss.

It’s 5:06 PM. My feet sink into an empty room, overrun with abandoned totems, ancient ruins of a recently vanished civilization. I know my reprieve from this most recent cataclysm’s tinnitus is a deeper, dampening noise. A “psychic” noise that “gets me” without asking too many questions, like:

“If you could be any animal, what would you be?”

“Fuck, a Giant Sloth. I’m going home now.”

Today, my reprieve is anything but settling, yet far from iconoclasm’s satisfying obliteration. This NOISE isn’t blowing apart my morning’s splinters; it’s slowly pushing them in. Its steady drone isn’t steading my turbulent exodus from my own warm cocoon; it’s casting a black shadow on my hesitant first steps, rendering my muddy footprints useless as a way back into solitude. At least I have my hands.

Every summer, as a time filler and as a selfish excuse for diffusing impressionistic glitch into a room bound by vibrant, historicized realism, I play a few cuts from Replica, itself an artifact devoid of its original meaning, instructing: “paint this.” A greyscale sunrise, a pool of refracting glass, a tablet of otherworldly glyphs confirm that this “latticework of sibilants, laminals, clicks, implosives, ejectives, fricatives, pulmonics” is ultimately intuitive.

Storms from now, this as-of-yet developed snapshot will be my year without summer, its specificities, its rotten fruit forgotten and buried, decaying under collapsed laughs and scoffs. It’s 7:39 PM and it’s still raining, but today, a reluctant golem asked me:

“If you lived in Ancient Egypt, how long would you survive?”

I replied, channeling seventh grade Kandinsky:

As long as I can see that sliver of sunlight peeking out over a world blackened by uncertainty, feel its slithering warmth, hear its crackling hallelujah, I’m sure Pharaoh won’t get me down.