I'm faced today with three pieces of information I'm unable to process. I hope the condition is temporary.

Two of the things my brain is working on are related to articles that my friend Matcha clipped from two separate newspapers and presented to me. The incidents reported are unrelated, but bolster my certainty that we are all long past hope. We all being humanity; not exactly a novel idea, but one of my core beliefs nonetheless. More on these two articles is forthcoming, and oh, you think you don't care, but you will care, you will care and like it!

The third thing I'm having trouble with is the idea that my computer--my home computer, the one I care about and haul around with me--is sick. I don't want to dwell on it, but let's just say that a consultation of the Tarot revealed ominous signs on the subject.

I am glad that over the course of the weekend, I got a copy of a little book titled A Book of Surrealist Games. The word Games in the title might lead one to believe that the text describes entertaining levity that our surrealistic forefathers enjoyed, but one would be wrong, wrong, wrong. Those Surrealists were a bleak lot, which is of course half their appeal. They were always going on about sex and death and excrement as artistic medium, with their anti-clerical rants and absurd proverbs. "Cold meat makes no fire," say, or "A corset in July is worth a horde of rats." Actually, I agree with both those statements, but that is neither here nor there.

In the book are instructions for making a Dadaist poem. First, you find an article of the length you wish to make your poem. Then, cut out each of the words, put the words in a bag, and draw them out one by one. Whatever order they emerge is the order they go into your poem.

I used this technique on one of the articles Matcha brought me, cutting out each word and then drawing them out one by one. I didn't use all the words, because the act of drawing them out of the bag grew tiresome, but here is my poem:

69-year-old animal.

trespassing, encounter covered
assaulting Los Angeles animal
oats. and Huntington
sexually and horses and beach
covered in fantasy La Purisima
Steven
released

It makes as much sense to me as the incident described in the article.

And as I said, more on that later. (Or words to that effect.)

Star of the day. . .Benjamin P�ret