You’re the reason the weather is so erratic.

When will it be consistently warm? I don’t know, do you deserve for it to be consistently warm? What have you done so far this year that would make the weather be like, “You know what, I want to be consistently warm for you”? Probably nothing, right? You suck so bad. Here’s the deal: It is not going to be consistently warm until you work on your fuckin’ attitude and stop being such a worthless sack. You want it to be consistently warm? Shape the fuck up. Okay, now that we’ve solved that one here’s something from the new Floating Points project. Enjoy.

★★★★★ The cloudy, pleasant day in the forecast, set aside for taking the children on an outdoor excursion, was cloudier and less pleasant in aspect than billed—until, just when it was a good time to head out, rain started. On the radar, though, and in fact, it was a only glancing blow. Soon enough the five-year-old was stalking the low wall around the plantings outside, trying to stomp on tiny ants as he waited for his brother to follow him downstairs. Leaves almost hid the caution tape tangled in the treetops. Along the crosstown street, the sidewalk beds were thick with tulips and with pansies in matching rich yellow. Inside the Park, the flowers had come up on their own. A bride perched on the edge of the Bethesda Fountain, attended by a reflector-wielding photography crew and her groom in a silvery dress coat. A red-eared slider, round and thick, swam just visible in the cloudy water of the lake, then rose to the surface to grab a waterlogged chunk of bread. From a rowboat, there were more turtles to be seen all along the shore, doing what would have been sunning had there been any sun shining. Instead there was the cool even light through the clouds, easy for rowing. The creaking of the oarlocks mingled with amplified erhu music from a bench on land, and a scent of flowers spread over the water. A rowboat-load of Europeans tried to bother a big turtle up on a rock and nearly capsized from the effort. Now and then the wind raised little waves gave the boat a shove. The child who had suggested going boating complained that it was taking too long, while the one who had been reluctant rode along enjoying it. In the dim pillared underground gallery leading away from the lake and the fountain, a sparrow perched on an overhead light fixture, holding a stalk of grass in its beak, as if it were building an illuminated nest. Then it disappeared through a hole in the ornate ceiling tiles. The later afternoon cleared and brightened till it was as nice to look at as the midday had been nice to be out in.

The earth will NOT be destroyed by an asteroid tomorrow.

NASA is confident the world will not be destroyed by a large asteroid that will pass Earth on Wednesday. The asteroid is expected to be 1.1 million miles away, or about 4.6 times the distance from Earth to the moon.

Large asteroid to whiz by Earth Wednesday

If Balk has taught me anything, it’s that everything is getting worse all the time—asteroid timing included.

Ira Glass and Anaheed Alani have filed for divorce

Haha just kidding, that headline was a joke about doing podcasts about people’s private (?) lives, and whether or not it is ethical but also maybe entertaining. Remember the episode about their dog? Snaps to the Post for that wacky lede though!

Ira Glass files for divorce from wife of 16 years

By Merle

Before we got to Oakland My Mom kept saying “Merle, this is your first trip to a city but you’re going to be fine and you’re going to have such a good time!” (Before I met My Mom I had a dad but he was really old and we didn’t go anywhere.)

I thought My Mom was kind of overselling it because I always feel exactly the same. If you have ever seen a picture of me you can see this. But as soon as I jumped out of My Mom’s car I saw that someone, or perhaps many people, had in obvious anticipation of my arrival left pieces of squashed hamburgers inside wrappers all over the street. I have of course licked scraps out of a hamburger wrapper before but I can count those times on one paw. Here, on one patch of sidewalk, there were at least three times as many squashed hamburgers inside wrappers as I have seen in my entire life.

The weird thing was that My Mom went to Oakland at the last minute so I don’t know how all the people there knew that I was coming and also that I like hamburgers inside wrappers and they should leave them out for me. The other weird thing is that every time I went to eat one of the hamburgers My Mom was like “No Merle! No!” and it was like “Why did you drive me to this place where so many people have so obviously left out squashed hamburgers for me to eat and then tell me not to eat them?” Also, who else but My Mom could have told all these people I was coming and what to do in anticipation of my arrival?

We went into My Mom’s friend’s house. She has two dogs. They are very thin, like dogs made out of elbows, covered with fur. I think maybe I am more like a child’s bench covered with fur. One of the dogs was serene and graceful and maybe 1/3 Merle and the other one was jumpy and plucky and maybe only 1/7 Merle. I was confused by how thin they were. Then I saw that My Mom’s friend leaves food out for them all day and they just walk up to it and eat a little bit of it and then walk away and maybe like one billion hours later they walk back and eat some more. They were so weird. My Mom and her friend went out and I lay down on the floor and it was like being anywhere and I forgot that we had gone anywhere.

The next day My Mom and her friend were drinking coffee outside and My Mom had me on a leash but she wasn’t holding it. A small dog ran by very fast. I can’t tell you the number of small dogs I have seen zoom past me in my life which I have regarded with only the most casual of glances. But this dog really captured my interest for reasons I will be more than happy to unpack. One, I do not believe that it had a Mom, and although I like My Mom, I observed in this animal an unrestricted capacity for free living I felt compelled to get close to. Second, the moment I began running after this dog down this big, straight, empty street, through a tunnel of buildings, I observed with no little wonder that the street went on that way forever and ever, with only the sky at the end of it, the whole thing offering up to me a cinematic perfection I had heretofore never experienced.

The dog ran faster and faster, but I kept gaining on it, my old legs, even my arthritic back right one, suddenly and miraculously suffused with youthful vigor. I saw that the bigger and in my estimation more mature of My Mom’s friend’s dogs had joined me. Though we had been ignoring each other the entire weekend, we were in this instant the closest of comrades. She seemed to propel herself forward by sailing through the air, while I did so by tearing at the earth, yet our progress was equal, and I swore I could hear her heart pumping within the confines of her pale, silken chest. I don’t remember how it all ended, all of a sudden My Mom was there and she was guiding me by the leash and huffing and puffing herself and telling me that I was bad.

Later than day, My Mom drove down a one-way street called Telegraph Avenue the wrong way and then she had to just turn around and go the other way really fast and it was embarrassing because I was sitting up and people could see me and I hoped they knew that My Mom was bad and not me. I was only sitting up because Santana was on and I love Santana. There was a whole long show about Santana and they played only Santana a lot and this guy who sounded like he was tired except that his big chance to talk about Santana for a very long time was finally here so he was determined not to fall asleep. That much Santana all at once has never happened to me before.

In the end, I would like to say that since Oakland is a place where you can lick hamburgers out of wrappers no other dogs want, listen to Santana for a long time, and sometimes also feel like you’re in a movie where you transcend your perceived limitations, I understand why it is so crowded.

After Teddy Roosevelt

It is the critic who counts; the man who sits on his ass to point out how the strong man stumbles, and how someone who did his best, and ended up doing alright, actually fucked up completely. The credit does not belong to the man who is actually in the arena, but the man whose keyboard is clogged with mold from typing harsh words into comment sections; who strives valiantly to keep up with the deeds of others so his attacks on their inadequacy remain topical and relevant, because since there is no effort without error and shortcoming, it is best to do nothing at all; who gets unfriended, but shares and comments on posts from popular pages to acquire new adds; who gets blocked, but creates new accounts; who stands at an angle pissing into the corner urinal, looking back over his shoulder at those with their heads held high and dicks all the way out, regardless of their size; who knows the higher the achievement, the greater the enthusiasm of tearing it down; the great devotion to finding as many people to hurt and ways to hurt them as there are people who try to do good and ways they try to do it; who spends himself shitting on a worthy cause; who at the best knows only the triumph of pointing out flaws, since all but he possess them; and who at the worst, when he fails, at least fails while doing nothing, so his own failures cannot be exposed; so that his place shall always be with those cold and timid souls who, standing for nothing but words, know the permanent victory of hating, and the permanent defeat of never doing anything.

FOR TOURISTS

“Hey, Jim. You’re a poet. It’s National Poetry Month. What do we need to know?” — Literary Louie

This is the grand total of my poetic output this month so far:

WE’RE OUT OF LEMON PLEDGE

Feelings are capitalist bullshit

It’s not the worst poem I’ve ever written. Not by a long shot. That would probably be the poem about how God was the person inside the Coke machine that wouldn’t accept my wrinkled dollar. I kind of like that poem. I don’t know if “We’re Out of Lemon Pledge” is totally done. But I’m not the best judge of my own poems. I just kind of write them. I don’t make them win Bollingen Prizes.

Chances are your typical run-of-the-mill novel can be optioned into an HBO series. Remember Swamplandia? Or The Corrections? Clearly the novel they ought to be making into a TV show with nudity and swearing is that Watership Down. Swearing, screwing British bunnies? I smell Emmys. Poetry has no chance to break into the mainstream this way. There isn’t going to be an HBO movie based on The Collected Poems of Sparrow. I’m not sure that there even is a Collected Poems of Sparrow. But there should be. And you ought to watch it.

National Poetry Month is kind of a fundraising scheme that Poetic Not-For-Profits came up with to meme-ify our genre. So like every book of poetry has to come out in April. Because that’s the only time people will review poetry books. Because we’ve taken our cloistered art form and fenced it in to 30 days. Have you written a book of Irish History? It’s going to come out right before St. Patrick’s Day. With a green cover. And a lot of shamrocks. No matter what the damn thing is about. Irish We’ve made the most ignored, least profitable way to write more easily ignored. It’s like putting mimes in a submarine and sending them to the bottom of the ocean. Bye bye, mimes. Good luck getting The Bends.

American poetry is humming along. This Trump thing is kind of taking up a lot of the air. Which doesn’t make for great poetry. But does make poets feel useful and slightly empowered in a world that has given them the one-fingered salute. I’ve been reading Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf, which has just come out from Edge Books. Although they are mostly poems collected from The Aughts, they fit neatly into the Trump Age. Maybe a little too neatly. It’s a little scary. It is nice to once again encounter old friends like “Pizza Kitty” by Rodney Koeneke, “I Love Men” by Nada Gordon or “Chicks Dig War” by Drew Gardner. Their effect seems amplified under the current clouds of selfie culture and our swirling layers of fake news. But Gary Sullivan’s “That a Hamster Could Be President“ ”stands as maybe the starkest, creepiest connection to the Tale of the Comrade Orange.

The best thing you could do for poetry in April is buy a bunch of poetry books and then put them aside for a while. Poets do all kinds of readings and tours and dancing monkey routines in April and then are left with just their tap shoes in the corner the rest of the year, contemplating the great belly button in our pants. Pick up one of our books in the summer, say for example Elaine Kahn’s Women in Public. Don’t box those poems in to April. It’s too crowded in that zoo, the monkeys are throwing poo at each other just to keep from going completely crazy.

We might just be the most delicate of all the snowflakes, we poets. We are earnestly writing in ways that aren’t earnest about the things we’re earnestly concerned about. Humor us, it’s a wild pretzel we live on. And I’m not speaking ill of those little oyster crackers. They can be a bit chalky. Manufacturers go for oyster shape over tasty cracker flavor. But whatever gets you through the night. Some people enjoy Manhattan Clam Chowder. This world is a bananas place to have to operate.

In April they make celebrities read our poems and collect money that ends up going into more fundraising until we’re fundraising to keep up with the fundraising. But, on behalf of all poets in America and abroad, we just want you to read poems occasionally outside of a wedding or a funeral or a National Poetry Month. Don’t make poetry something you’d just never approach. Like those LaCroix waters. I’ve heard they’re tasty. Give one a whirl once in a while. If you’re a radio producer, do a story about a poet in September. If you review poetry books, write about them in December, when people are buying presents for each other. And none of those Best Books Lists, those are crap. I don’t want my poems to be on some list. I want my poems to be your list. Tourists are fine for poetry. But we need townies, too.

Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City, NJ and works at a bookstore.

There’s no ticket back.

You ever do that thing where you’re laying awake late at night, thinking about where your life went wrong, and you let yourself imagine how it would be different if you were able to go back in time and change just one moment? And then, for the next few weeks, you sort of fantasize about altering that event? Like, it lingers in the back of your brain, all your possible pasts and all your potential presents? What would your moment be? For me, if I were actually able to do it — and let’s stipulate up front that I know that you can’t go back in time, that we are who we are and every second that has brought us up to now is irreversible and that dreaming of a different life is just a waste of time, but that when things are especially bleak there is probably a safety-valve effect, something that allows you to let off a little bit of pressure so that you can resume being crushed by the burden of your horrible existence a little while longer — I would go back to the moment where my dad met my mom and somehow distract him so that they never made contact in the first place. How about you? Tell us in the comments or on social media!

Gonna be nice and sunny today! Here’s something ambient by Christopher Willits, from his new one out next month. Enjoy!

★★★★ In the hot, direct sun, the difference between the white of the notebook page and the whiter white of the church bulletin was nearly the difference between a tan blazer and a new white shirt. The breeze was as pushy as the heat, shoving and tugging at loosened clothing. A man wore two pieces of a light gray three-piece suit, carrying the jacket slung over an arm. “Needle Park,” a woman said into her phone, on her way toward 72nd Street. “I don’t know what it’s called now.” A darkening tendency in the clouds became a real darkness, and a little rain came down. Rain clicked against the windows and then clear strengthening sun shone, in a matter of moments. One table of people drinking wine on the roofdeck held its place, while the next table packed and fled. Sun and rain kept cutting in and out, till new gusts and showers finally drove the holdouts away. The rain was aglow with the light coming up from downtown. Soon the sky was clear again; fresh, drowsiness-inducing air came in the windows. The rigging ropes still dangling outside the window were thick with shadow and color, enriched by the late light. It seemed like a resolution, but at night again came the sound of rain slapping on the building and wind groaning under the door.

A listicle without commentary

36. Spun around in industrial washing machine

35. Dropped into frozen lake in underpants

34. Chopped to bits by Weed-Whacker

33. Heart attack (erotic)

32. Pushed off bridge into waterfall

31. Eaten alive by John Goodman

30. Tommy gun explodes in hands

29. Redwood tree falls on him just as he is about to kill John Turturro

28. Slips on banana peel and falls down elevator shaft

27. Drives old-timey car into fireworks factory

26. Impaled upon Rotisserie stick and slow-cooked over open flame

25. Devoured (off-camera) by titular bear

24. Plummets over cliff in Model T

23. Albert Finney cuts brakes on recumbent bicycle

22. Trampled by stampede of mysterious deer

21. Body fed through 1920s mail-sorting machine

20. Executed in forest to soundtrack of traditional Scottish folk opera

19. Bordello conflagration

18. Eviscerated by thousands of army ants

17. Shot by cuckolded man wearing eyepatch

16. Heart attack (steakhouse)

15. Dance floor collapse at juke joint

14. Tied to train tracks by Jennifer Jason Leigh

13. Pushed out of hot air balloon

12. Stabbed by door-to-door Bible salesman

11. Jump rope strangulation

10. Decapitated in toy store (1957)

9. Drowned in baptismal font by Josh Brolin

8. Ill-fated confrontation with vengeful stenographer

7. Abandoned by lover after stepping in bear trap during quest for Mexican treasure

6. Mishap at honkytonk

5. Double-crossed by Evangelical hitman

4. Landmine explosion (Enid, Oklahoma)

3. Tied to top of Toyota Tercel and repeatedly run through car wash

2. Old age, surrounded by loved ones

1. Forced to swallow military grenade by Tim Blake Nelson

Jason O. Gilbert is a humor writer in Brooklyn, NY with this Twitter account.