The dull luster of deadly nightshade
The slightly sweet dark berries
The tart taste that belied their sly effect
Oblivious to the truth-in-advertising mandates
Plausible disguise, fruit as attractive nuisances

So then, the anatomy of a medical puzzle
Elements of the differential diagnosis
No recent exposures that would account for the symptoms
The long walks were the only change in the routine
The dilated pupils were the sign that eventually aroused suspicion

Teasing it out with expressions of interest
It's great that you're improving your fitness
But that harvested reward near the end of the trail
Is a culinary deception, call it a toxic strain

Toxic Strain, a playlist

A soundtrack to this note (spotify version)

• Deadly Nightshade by Brand X
• Deadly Nightshade by Wormtooth
• Deadly Combination by Nneka
• Deadly Nightshade by Ashlee Standish

File under: health, plant, medicine, poison, life, mystery, poetry, toli

Writing log: June 13, 2023

Messengers of the night
Bearing temporary disguises
Identities adopted then promptly discarded
Earnest, these caretakers of the land

Spirits calling, speaking softly
Souls seduced, hosts respond with tributes
Then, charms displayed, totems conveyed
Expectant as histories are recited and renewed

Knowledge unveiled - no libation needed
Cures freely shared without sacrifice
Healing through mere conversation
Welcome them, the spirits at your side

The comfort of visitors to lean on during ordeals
Connective tissue, their convenient embrace
Listen carefully, savor the gifts they dispense
Acknowledging, before they return into the night

Spirits, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Spirits up Above by Jose James
• Spirit in the Dark by Aretha Franklin
• Spirit by Cleo Sol
• Spirits in the Material World by The Police
• Spirits up Above by Osibisa
• Blue Spirits by Freddie Hubbard
• Spirit by Al Jarreau
• Kindred Spirits by Horace Silver
• Spirits by Gil Scott Heron

File under: ghosts, sensory, culture, observation, perception, poetry, toli

Writing log: June 12, 2023

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
The president is actually doing the same thing in the third to last panel.

Today's News:

The chief linguist of the Usher tribe undoubtedly had the gift of gab
He stretched the truth so felicitously that one quite forgot that he was a cad
A smiling rogue with an unalloyed propensity to take the occasional bribe
The enforcement of decorum and propriety thus fell on the chief scribe

This last, on such matters, would often turn a blind eye
After all, who had the time to count all the stars in the sky
In the big picture, the planets were what really mattered
A little deception in the business of state hardly counted

So when Ananse came forward with his latest proposal, accompanied by the chief linguist
The scribe had an inkling that there would be some kind of devious twist
But the rulers, by definition, had a right to partake, this much was obvious
For indeed, the technical phrase was of wider application: acceptable loss

This meant that scrutiny of the transaction was, of necessity, purely perfunctory
For the only issue at hand was the kind of compensation, preferably monetary
Although, those newfangled instruments cooked up by the financiers were rather bold
These alchemists now proffered tokens and emblems instead of the customary gold

Meanwhile the scribe signaled the terms and conditions for his backend payment
After all, what use was the exercise of power without some personal enrichment
He was old fashioned and preferred dealing with something tangible
A mine, black gold, a race horse rather than this crypto business: non-fungible

Hard earned lessons had taught him to steer clear of obvious bubbles
Lest one be caught holding worthless tickets that were non-refundable
Cash was king, he stressed to his comperes the importance of liquidity
When the chips were down, leverage was the currency of iniquity

And so he paid no mind to the bluster of Ananse and the chief linguist
Realizing that after he'd been paid, he could always issue a cease and desist
Skimming the take was avowedly the basis of a grifter's conceit
But a game can be rigged in many ways in the symphony of deceit

The whole world was in upheaval, many had plainly lost their bearing
Those quaint appeals for social living were, truth be told, quite endearing
But there was no room at the high table, those at the top had to be hard nosed
To emphasize to the majority that the great leveling had now been foreclosed

All the talk of justice and equality was laudable but amounted to cheap talk
Those in the know well understood that when push came to shove, they could balk
Soul insurance was all well and good, but the rules were different for those at the top
You couldn't expect that the conqueror would share the spoils with the have nots

Ludicrous, this notion that one should temper one's insatiable appetites
A contradiction, to expect giving up privileges one had won by all rights
The elites were plainly heroes, who would dare cast them as villains?
Class solidarity was paramount, lest everyone end up in prison

And so the chief scribe made to apply his opinion with the authoritative stamp
Pricked the seal of approval on the decision, he then wiped his bloodied thumb
Everything was in good order, he proclaimed after receiving his convenience fee
The deal was settled with some schnapps and palm wine under the baobab tree

If global narrative collapse had engendered this free-for-all
Those at the reins of power would prove they had the wherewithal
The objective of the shell games they'd embarked on was no big mystery
Looting, to recapture the bulk of the world's riches and get it all for free

All for free, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• I'm going for mine by Keith Sweat
• Dealing by Eric Roberson and Lalah Hathaway
• I gotta get mine yo by Chubb Rock
• How I deal by Dwele
• Gotta get mine by Born Jamaicans
• A strange arrangement by Meyer Hawthorne
• The rules don't apply to you by Ellis Hall
• Practical Arrangement by Kurt Elling & Branford Marsallis
• Gotta get mine by MC Breed

See previously: Free-For-All

File under: humour, satire, culture, observation, folktale, Ananse, storytelling, whimsy, myth, coronavirus, pandemic, Social Living, Things Fall Apart, Observers are worried, Buyer's Remorse, hatchet job, covidious, poetry, toli

Writing log: October 1, 2023

The toxic strain was the innovation
Murder, they say, is a matter of imagination

Against the conqueror, it is said that poetry can be a weapon
Something quite potent that might trigger prompt retaliation

For in the throes of reactionary passions
These men in khaki oft favored assassinations

The tawdriness of the violence that becomes the thin skinned
The culture of silence they impose in pursuit of blood and sin

After the takeover, it was a matter of consolidation
Silence is golden, the poet embodied the opposition

In those early days of the coup, it was just another atrocity
Later, they would be more exotic and turn to dropping bodies

Pushing people out of helicopters over the Pacific ocean
In this case, the resort was to unnatural bacteria, botulism

The toxicologist's report would outline the matter, the dry minutia
The unlikelihood of natural occurrence of this strain of bacteria

Where the Bulgarians, contra Trotsky, used the poisoned tip of an umbrella
This toxic strain was plausible deniability for the likes of Kissinger

We only have interests, such are the wages of Pax Americana
To paraphrase: it was our son-of-bitch that poisoned Neruda


...

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

— The Kissinger Doctrine (New York Times June 27, 1970)

...

"If he had a toxic strain, how would it have gotten there?” said Charles Brenner, a forensic investigator from California who helped complete the report. “That is more a matter of imagination, and not science."

— Was Pablo Neruda Murdered? (New York Times, February 15, 2023)

Forensics, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Poison by Bell Biv Devoe
• Murderer by Barrington Levy
• New York is Killing Me by Gil Scot Heron
• Cold Blooded by Rick James
• Evidence by Ark Blakey and Thelonious Monk
• Cold, Cold Heart by Dinah Washingon
• Evidence by Soullive
• Murderer by Buju Banton
• Evidence by Thelonious Monk
• It's Going Wrong by Chocolate Genius

File under: USA, Chile, coup, violence, murder, blood, sin, politics, rogues, politics, Great Game, crime, dictator, culture, observation, policy, hatchet job, Observers are worried, poetry, toli

Writing log: June 8, 2023

The municipality opened a trench on my street in March, and by the following morning the trench had acquired a faculty. Three men, none of them younger than seventy, stood at its rim in the position the whole continent recognizes: feet apart, chin lifted, hands clasped behind the back like a diploma. They had not been invited. They had not, as far as I could establish, met before; yet they arranged themselves at regulation intervals, as though the correct distance between inspectors were codified somewhere, and they began, without a word passing among them, to supervise.

Everything about the posture rewards study. The clasped hands come first: they are the uniform, and also the oath. Hands held behind the back declare that their owner will not be lifting anything, passing anything, or assisting in any capacity; that he is present in a strictly judicial role. The lean is calibrated to the exact degree that separates interest from involvement. And the face performs the real work: a long, slow scan of the excavation, a pause at the point of error, and then the smallest possible shake of the head, directed at no one, entered into no record, and yet somehow legally binding.

By the second day they had opinions. "Too much water in that concrete," one of them observed, to the horizon. The horizon did not dispute it. Another disagreed about the depth of the gravel bed, and the disagreement was conducted entirely in eyebrow, over the heads of the men actually digging, who had learned long ago that the tribunal assembled above them could be neither answered nor appealed.

The Italians, who catalogue the human comedy the way botanists catalogue orchids, have the word for these men: umarell. It is Bolognese dialect for "little man," carried into national fame by the writer Danilo Masotti around 2005 and since admitted into the dictionaries, which is the procedure by which a joke becomes an institution. Bologna sells umarell figurines now; one town has named a small square for its watchers; and construction firms in several countries have begun cutting round windows into their site hoardings at the average height of a seventy-four-year-old, having grasped that the watching will occur regardless and might as well be comfortable. There are reports, which I choose to believe, of a seaside municipality placing its umarells on a token stipend, thereby making official what was always the case: they were on duty.

It would be easy to file all this under nostalgia, old men missing their working lives, haunting the nearest scaffolding the way ghosts are said to haunt the houses they were happiest in. The theory collapses on contact with the evidence. Observe an umarell for an hour and you will detect no longing whatsoever to climb down into the trench. He has spent forty years in trenches, actual or bureaucratic; he has been supervised his entire life by foremen, managers, and inspectors of inspectors; and now, at last, the economy has released him into the senior role. Supervision is not his substitute for a career. It is the promotion the career was for.

His expertise, moreover, is genuine, which is what makes him unbearable and indispensable in equal measure. A man who laid pipe for four decades can hear wrong sand. He can look at a fresh weld the way a violinist looks at a student's bow arm. The foreman on my street, a large and initially sarcastic person, was heard by the entire neighborhood on the fourth day asking the tallest of the three inspectors whether the old water main ran under the linden or beside it, because the maps disagreed, and the man with his hands behind his back had been present, as a young digger, in 1978, when the main went in. The trench found the pipe precisely where he said it would be. The nod he permitted himself afterward would have looked immodest on a general.

Honesty requires the admission all the same: most of what the inspectors contribute is nothing, and the nothing is the contribution. Work that is watched becomes, in some small degree, performance, and performance carries standards that mere labor shrugs off. The diggers on my street dug slightly straighter for their audience. They cursed with more artistry and less venom. A wet spring morning that might have justified an early retreat to the van somehow did not justify it in front of the faculty. An economist would call this an externality. The rest of us can call it what the village always called it: behaving, because somebody's grandfather is looking.

Beneath the comedy, and at the risk of pressing a suit onto a pleasure, the umarell is the last full believer in a proposition the rest of us have quietly abandoned: that public works are public. The road is being dug with his taxes, in his street, for his water. Every other citizen experiences the trench as an inconvenience lying between two private errands. He alone attends it as an owner attends his own affairs, which is what he is. Attention, in his hands, becomes a civic instrument: unpaid, unrequested, occasionally infuriating, and incorruptible, since a man wants nothing from the world while his hands are clasped behind his back. Municipal accountability has been theorized by some very fine institutions. On my street it was practiced by three pensioners and a thermos.

Retirement, as our societies have arranged it, is the day a man is informed that his attention is no longer required anywhere. The pension arrives, the calendar empties, the telephone goes quiet in the middle of the week. The inspectors have simply declined the verdict. Nobody requires their attention, so they have assigned it themselves, the way a judge left without cases might walk down to the port and begin acquitting ships. It is idleness of the highest order, activity wearing every ornament of purpose while pursuing none, and I have examined it from several angles and can find nothing in it to correct.

The trench on my street was filled at the end of April. Asphalt went over it, black and tidy, and the diggers packed their van and drove off to open a hole somewhere luckier. The faculty dispersed the same afternoon, without ceremony, satisfied with a job well done, the job having been the watching. Only the tallest of them lingered. He stood over the fresh patch for a long moment, hands where they belonged, and studied it with the expression of a man reading a promissory note. The patch will sink a little by winter; a corner of it will crack. He knows this the way he knew about the linden.

He will be there.