Today I was invited to participate in an event at the Park Avenue Armory where artists and writers read manifestos, either ones they had written or those written by others. Here’s what I wrote and read:

As the great Madeline Kahn once sang:

I am tired

Tired of waking every day to the thrashing and bellowing of the massive unsatisfied beasts that presume to rule us.

Tired of the unimaginative, repetitive horrors that they race to inflict on the only home they have ever known.

Tired of their lusts that will not allow them to be tender. Tired of their appetite for oblivion.

Tired of these men (and isn’t it always men?) who can’t get through the day without the feeling that they have punched somebody, anybody.

Tired of my own flinching, Tired of the threats to those I know and love. Tired of the technology that I use to remind myself of all of the suffering I have failed to alleviate.

I have had the luxury to conceive and construct my self, to have a certain kind of selfhood because I was born into a particular moment in a particular empire. As that empire convulses and dies, I am here before you wondering what to do with that luxury.

Every empire ends up the same; as a heap of ruins. As a subsidence. None has lasted and none will. The towers fall, the statues crack, the mirrors haze over , the names are garbled and cease to be heard.


When you are my age most things look like they are behind you, because most of your life is undeniably behind you. I am sixty-six, and I will not live another sixty-seven years.  I am winding down. I hope I live to see these creeps buried deep, but it’s uncertain.

So what do I want in the time I have left?

I want to leave this place better than I found it. I don’t think I can do that by haraunging you. I can tell you that I am grateful for your presence here in this room with me. And hopeful that for today I can hold that presence lightly and with care.

In a time obsessed with memory and debilitating industries profiting off of the price of digital memory, Under a regime headed by a babbling demented tyrant desperate to be remembered even as his own ability to remember slips away, I am happy to be forgotten.

In time of repressive identification and definition, i would love for all of us to be unrecognized, indefinable, beautifully blurred. Melding into some new thing.

I want to be a worm and make loam, I want to be a stream and erode their banal monuments.

I want to be a drizzle and speed their rust.

I want to be soft and dirty like a mud pie, molded by loving hands.

I want us to find community in our mingling, to rest together. To make the bed for what will grow next. To be part of the home for the surviors.

I want to feel their feet as they stride over me into the future.