Yael Haskel
2024: 100 thousand praises
100 Ideas to Save the World
Memory plungers, to unclog what’s stuck.
A wine that tastes the way you feel.
Fake scars to wear when you can’t find the words.
An objectivity meter.
A literal moral compass to point you in the right direction.
Incense that smells like your childhood home.
A personality emory board, to sand down your rougher bits.
Insult repellent.
A sponge to press into your skin and absorb the pain.
Venn diagrams that compare the way you see yourself and the way the others see you.
Car horns that say “I’m sorry” instead of “Beep beep.”
Faith-infused communion wafers.
Umbrellas for brainstorms.
Unlearning classes.
Transparency dials to control when you’re seen.
A type of laser that only women can operate.
Replacement people (sold at funeral homes)
A trampoline to stash at rock bottom.
Drain snakes for your shame spirals.
Installable gas and brake pedals for the imagination.
Consent-oriented mistletoe.
A device that lets you know when you are doing something for the last time.
Pen pals who send pens back and forth in the mail.
Robots that handle the practical aspects of being in love.
A human-alien exchange program.
Boats that trail on the backs of planes.
A fainting couch that faints when it doesn’t like the sitter.
A calibrator that tracks how you feel about a person and how they feel about you in real time.
A worldwide tournament of big-toe wars.
Sheep that count themselves.
Miniature suns to hang in our living rooms.
Angels for hire.
Guns that come covered in blood when you buy them.
A collar that beeps when you’re breaking a rule.
Cake pans shaped like people you hate, so you can bake cakes of their heads and cannibalize
The ability to burrow into a person and leave your imprint there.
A pee-in, as protest.
Alarm clocks that remind you that time is a construct.
A format between uppercase and lowercase, for your more tepid thoughts.
A union for the homeless.
Flowerbeds: when flowers get droopy, they can rest for a bit, then come back up.
Personality stain remover.
A procedure that turns humans inside out.
Rejection letters that brighten your day.
An app that creates still life paintings of your dreams.
A shadow you can make friends with and take out to dinner.
Prayers to dissolve under the tongue.
Adopting a highway and taking it home.
Tiny Titans.
Ten-pronged toe stilts.
The Hand of God – a source of physical push for when you need to make the leap.
A roll of wrapping paper that never ends.
Glow-in-the-dark Kleenex, for night crying.
Tablets you can swallow before bed and pre-determine your dreams.
Wistfulness mist.
Life-sized erasers for rewriting history.
Pamphlets that advertise leaflets.
Leaflets that advertise pamphlets.
A guy you can hire to meet you with flowers and tears when your plane lands.
Asteroid slingshots.
Vases that shatter when the tension in a room gets too high.
A sieve that lets you sort through the lies.
Womb simulators, for when you wish you could climb back in.
25-ply toilet paper, for...those days.
A water purifier for tear drops.
Reverse domestication.
Emotional metabolism boosters.
Eulogies for dead bugs
.Vacuums that make music.
Real-life “Command-M,” to minimize things.
Glasses for seeing invisible labor.
Self-driving cars that take you wherever they want to go.
Antibiotics for computer viruses.
Adopt-A-Dinosaur: pay for skeleton maintenance and get photos from the museum on holidays.
Sourdough finisher.
A drug that gives you the release of a sneeze.
Spackle that seals up cracks in relationships.
Tearaway snowsuits.
An “in/out sign” for the forehead, to let others know when you’re present.
Fonts with emotional value.
Intravenous dynamite, for sparking ideas.
Carbon dating that can tell how old a fossil feels.
Under-eye sponges, for tears.
Conversation roadmaps.
A fire extinguisher for old flames.
Lube that makes accepting feedback easier.
Edible pages – journal and chew away the evidence.
Stalactite teeth.
Zoos where animals can observe people.
In utero piercing, for goth babies.
Pens that change color with your mood.
Pillows that sing lullabies.
A time machine contingent on ethics.
Graffiti inside museums.
Toxic waste facilities for disposing of trauma.
Treetop hotels for migrating geese.
A cannon for canons.
A paper moon, thin and true.
100,000 ideas more / the strength to speak the praise that sings the tune without the words / if necessity is the mother of invention then I will argue that the seed we necessitate is more love, more love / a happiness and freedom that we do not need to guard so fiercely because the fabric of it lives in our skin, our skin, yes, and more yes, and, more love
Yael Haskel
2023: Imbolc
The way it folds out on the page, yes, and the virgules I ate for dinner. Take your foot off the pedals, yes, both of them. Chew fast and swallow silence. Disconnect from desire, detach the hose from the side faucet and let it run with the other snakes. It’s Wednesday-Thursday and I have half a mind to burn the place down, but I could never pull that off with just half a mind. We fancy ourselves de-constructionists, -ism by -ism, when really we are only eating gluten-free croissants.
Noun: Corpus callosum (origin, Latin, “tough body”), the thick nerve tract of commissural fibers that connects the left and right cerebral hemispheres. The biological virgule of executive function.
They did these experiments in the 60s, they were always doing experiments in the 60s. Corpus callosotomies for the epileptic – sever the halves of the brain like a spoon to the tongue and split the mind along the faultline. Some people were fine, some people are always fine. But others got different, got doubled, developed dual simultaneous consciousnesses that philosophers jizzed all over.
And the conviction is such: it turns out that you can crack a crack. You can carve a synapse in a synapse, a valley in a valley, peer into the void with no fear of God or fractals and you will find there is always more void inside. Is it not your nightmare too that emptiness is asymptotic? The giddy hunger, the gasping chasm, the self-inflating third intestine, glissando.
Together and together and together, a petty pace that binds our hands. It’s the holiday between holidays, the party we’re not having, and if you haven’t yet prayed to the groundhog, oh! Start now.