I wish I could give all I’m longing to give / I wish I could live like I’m longing to live.
When the chorus comes in on John Legend & The Roots’ cover, promise me you’ll throw your head back a little as you dance.
my fists kept trembling with these salty wounds / my stolen gold inside the emperor’s tomb.
dear future me,
this is past you. this is past you’s taking a page from someone long ago who kindly suggested that this weblog could be more personal, an idea that’s nagged you constantly since.
i thought i’d write and remind you that, on 2011 june 3rd, you sat in the dark and listened to an amazing song by an amazing band while you atomized each piece of your psyche, each of which atom coincidentally appears to be some sort of salty liquid that extrudes from your weird, oversized, oily head.
rip it out, deep from the ground / so nothing grows back in its place
enough about me (masterful deflection). how are you doing? are you happily married with a family, which you realized you wanted more than anything at around the same time you realized how impossible that seemed? are you in a larger apartment? the one i’m in right now has lumpy walls, slanted floors, and little bugs that flock to the misshapen bedroom lamp. i guess the little bugs are just trying to fly to the only source of light they have at 0400. hard to criticize that.
don’t keep it alive when it touches the air / let it die cold in the summer day
hi future me. past you was going to post this as a series of insomniac twitter posts, but since past you is starting his work soon, he should probably start filtering the things he says. past you isn’t doing very well. past you sees decades and decades of ambiguity ahead of him, and it terrifies him, and he thinks about it every night and sometimes he puts a sniffy song on in the dark and listens to it for hours on end, which he realizes he can do without drugs now. past you is pretty sure he’s successfully getting off on his own emotions.
when we fall far away / oh, when their bony children will cause seasons to change
past you here again. i’m talking to all my old friends 76% less frequently now, now that i’m out of the university-shaped toilet bowl i threw three years of life into. i wrote a script to calculate that number every day. i can do stuff like that now that nobody wants anything from me, least of all me. i walked three miles today to buy a pair of shorts because it was something to do.
c: no the servers are neither here nor visible / me: i’ll buy you some servers / me: you can give them names / me: watch them grow old / me: and die / me: because that’s what happens to the things you love / me: they die / me: and they turn into dust and shit
past you is going to listen to mr. blue sky until he feels better, until he’s blinked all the salt away.
past you is writing in lowercase a lot recently.
being sincere,
is something new.
I wanna be a rebel.
David Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, on rebelling against postmodernism:
Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.
♥
take me with you, i promise to keep quiet
Sometimes your head has to be angled just right to catch the flash.
Someone should try and correspond these posts, their quality, their length, their moods with my last.fm listening history, but the internet would probably chase me out of town with torches and pitchforks should they ever learn the true extent of my theft and vacuity. This is all to say: I have a last.fm account.
You have hold the camera out at arm length to capture yourself, but you’ll have to find the button first.
I’ll carry you with me. You and I have known each other for decades, through all the pseudonyms and lies. We keep each other honest and true, though you are much much shorter than I, and — I hope it is not out of place for me to say — much heavier. Lest I balloon and float away into the sky, you’ll tug at the seams of my jeans and remind me where I belong. I belong down here with you among six billion other couples like us. When I swipe into the subway, I’ll dutifully boost you above the turnstile. When I open this door, I’ll linger a few seconds, holding it for you. And that’s the word I was looking for, all those years ago: linger. Linger.
Pictures of you and I being happy are filed next to the pictures of you being happy.
I can get used to it, I can be the thing written down and described patiently to me. This specification that you handed to me weeks and weeks ago, printed in carefully handwriting — save for the artful loop on the h’s and l’s now and then — is doable, I agree. Here I am, now: bare, shorn, awake. I am as malleable as I made myself, I am what this needs me to be. And I stand before you, saggy-chested and flabby-bellied, with my eyes closed and my soul hollow.
Look at this old movie of me, careening down the mountain in roller blades and tripping and falling. Look at the part, frames 5000 something to 5100 something, where I fall and twirl and hit the ground.
And here I am again before you, eyes dried and shut, arms splayed out and vitruvian. I read the specification again last night and I found no faults in it, save for a few comma splices and repeated words. I know it by heart, I know it like I know the maps of the city’s undergrounds or the prices of restaurant foods, at least now before we commence with Forgetting.
And look at this photo album of me, waving hi to you from that Peruvian jungle we thought we’d never find. Here I am again, holding this old man against me as he tries to sell me jungle flowers, do such a thing even exist.
And again we are back, and I stand before you, arms tired and legs aching. Look at all my imperfections, mold them away, shape me into the image of who it wants me to be, tell me what to do and feel, I can get used to it, I won’t burn these videos and pictures, I can get used to it, just stay by me, OK?, I can get used to it.
And you are not alone.
But I’m still angry at the events that took place and I’m still angry with these two heroes of mine who killed these two heroes of mine. I’m still angry for having my house burglarized. Wallace’s death brought for me a fresh version of the dread I was already experiencing after Rick’s suicide, this knowledge that life will never be like it was, it will be weirder and darker and happy at times and always always always more sad. I know now that everything Wallace wrote will be different for me than it was before. Even memories of his funniest writing include memories of the sorrow and desperation packed in there. My struggle when I do reach back into Wallace’s words will be to see beyond the shovel to the gut I felt when I heard he had died.
John Moe on David Foster Wallace’s suicide; David Wallace wrote Infinite Jest, a finite book that I finished two days ago in only the most literal sense of the word, finished.
So there’s this guy.
So there’s this guy.
Let me start over.
So there’s this guy with shockingly nice teeth.
Like, really nice. Unbeliveably nice. Extraordinarily handsome. Teeth, that is.
Quite the charmer.
And there’s this gal.
Let me start over.
And there’s this gal with shockingly gorgeous bangs.
I hear she plays the bass guitar.
And this guy, this guy Adam, is really into her. I mean, really really into her. Like, he’d shoot the moon for her, which is, like, 13 points if he doesn’t make it.
And this girl, this girl Eve, knows about it, vaguely. Snake and Rabbit were talking about it earlier, but they shoot the shit all the time, so Eve doesn’t pay attention to them or their shit.
Eve met Adam ever since he transferred into the God’s 4 PM class on how to jog, the same period the one she’s taking because the other period conflicted with her 2 PM class on periods.
Adam’s known Eve ever since Garden Orientation Day, but he’d never, like, tell her that, that’d be totally creepster.
He doesn’t know what to do with himself.
Oh, they’re absolutely friendly around each other. They have this, you know, sort of connection. They can shoot the shit for an hour or two, no problem. Even if the conversation gets quiet, it’s a comfortable sort of quiet, you know.
It’s a pretty rare thing to find, all the more reason to not mess around in it by doing a dumb thing like asking her out.
But still he doesn’t know what to do with himself.
He’s never met anybody quite like her: bipedal, thumbed, mammalian, and cute. He’s pretty sure they’re compatible.
Eve had some casual thing with Unicorn, and some serious thing with Tortoise, but she’s not the kind to get hung up on anything, or anything. She’s done that thing where she’s sat down by herself for a few minutes and seriously appraised Adam as Dating Material but, you know, it’s not the sort of thing where she’d make the first move, that’d be totally creepster. Plus wasn’t Adam going out with Koala earlier? Koala’s nothing like Eve.
Eve doesn’t like Koala much, but she doesn’t remember if that’s, like, an opinion she had before she knew Adam or after, pretty sure it doesn’t make a difference either way though. Koala’s always kinda emo, Eve’s put off by that.
What’s Eve’s eye color again? Is it hazel? Adam thinks to himself during jogging class. I wonder if that’s something I should even know. Should I look at her eyes, she’s right behind me? Adam looks at the ground instead and thinks. I mean, as a friend, I should probably know her eye color, in case it comes in handy. Right. Right. Adam chances a look behind him, but she’s farther behind than he thinks so he has to squint, but now it’s kinda obvious he’s staring at her jogging behind him and she notices and smiles at him, so he has to smile back, which he does as he jogs into a tree and lands smack on his butt.
Eve represses a snort and runs over to him, who has dazedly collapsed on the ground with twigs in his head in a way she realizes is, like, casually handsome and gosh-darn earthy.
Hey, are you all right? she says, extending a hand to him.
Yeah, he says. Nothing permanently damaged except my ego.
They smile at each other, it’s totally serene.
Hey! Eve says. An apple!
Cows to milk.
I don’t know this young woman’s dad, but he doesn’t seem like a very good one. I’ll provide some anecdotal reference of my own, but I wouldn’t be surprised that many of us would feel better about their father than this asshole.
My pops sacrificed pretty much all of himself to raise our family (nine kids). He was downright selfless about it in all his moments of attending swim-meets or coaching soccer, seeing choir concerts and math bees, selling candy with the Boy Scouts, paying for who-ever’s speeding ticket or insurance, helping out when we fucked up rather than telling us how stupid we are, helping anyone move from apartment to apartment, or when there wasn’t money for rent or food or healthcare. Pretty much anything for his children, with reasonable, well understood limits.
We’re all (my siblings) doing our best growing up, we’ve all moved out and its just him and Mom now. Its all taken a toll on him. He’ll fall asleep at 10:45 watching ‘The Wire’ with her, and wake up early in the morning around 4:30 or 4:35, not knowing what to do. He has completed all his chores. What to do at that time in the morning. No cows to milk or babies to soothe or drunken children to pick up from the police. No news papers to deliver. Less responsibility as a father.
He’ll never be rich, never drive a beamer, never make a name for himself. Maybe he’s a loser or something, but he is one of the kindest human beings I’ve met in my time and I’d pray a thousand fucking rosaries for this young woman to have a father who understands that investing time and money into your family pays in returns that are not countable in any form of currency. And I don’t even own a rosary anymore.
localhuman on MetaFilter.
To the girl crying on the stairs outside my dorm last night at 1 AM.
i was walking along the sidewalk parallel to my dorm — my dorm on my left, you in the front, sleeping grass on the right, moon above, you get the picture — when i saw/heard you. you were leaning against the rails, going up and down steps four and five. a streetlight at the bottom. i remember it casting your shadow long behind you; i remember your profile in clear relief. i remember your crying into your hands, not facing away from busybodies like me.
in grief there must be stages. there’s the grief that quietly sneaks up on you not unlike the feeling of wet egg yolk running down the chest’s insides, and it takes a while to place the feeling, which is something more than loss, anger, or sadness, which is something of a novel combination of all three.
there’s the one that wells in some deep act-iii-of-zelda stomach temple-pool that slyly paws at the strings puppeteering the lower lip and that, if you let it, pours out all at once and leaves the body gasping and impotent, like the worst orgasm in the world, like a withdrawing alcoholic grasping blindly at Kleenex and door locks instead of Jameson and a gun.
and and and there’s the one that claws at the body and renders it senseless until the choices you make are, from a very long and safe distance away, funny, but there’s no orgasm-as-relief here to be found among the barren struggle to let out a fluid faster than its pressure will let you so you are At Capacity and it strangles you, here’s how: it has delicate little ropes that find their way across your neck like ten little boa constrictors; they know where to press and contract to make you fidget from steps four and five at 1 AM in the morning, too dumbfounded — to even choose a place away from the world and the light — by whatever uncontrolled chemical cocktail our physiology has stuck you with.
phone in a hand attached to some formal-attire dress that seemed beautiful and hilarious against the three-degree weather around you, i made some stupid, wrong assumptions about you. i assumed you were going through a Relationship Thing. i assumed you were in grief level three, something i have only witnessed a few times in my life, something i have never experienced.
and i did not know what to do. these thoughts of sympathy, of intense identification and outpouring of metaphorical golden bonds of sharing and caring and hugging — crap to you, i’m sure — all come later. in that moment i stopped at the bottom of the steps, at an intersection where i would normally turn left and head into a great gleaming lit-up overpriced grocery store, and stared at you. i took a few steps toward you and a few steps back. how was i to console you? how was i, at the threshold of sobriety and wisdom, to help you? surely what you needed then was a best friend, or a mother, or a counselor. surely what you needed was not a human reaching out to you to ask if you were ok, how silly that would be to give up nothing but a few seconds to reach out to people who need it the most, how silly it would be to work up the courage to talk to you, how silly it would be the extend the most rudimentary of all human connection, “are you OK are you OK are you OK?”, which is shorthand for “you are not alone you are not alone you are not alone?.!—”
it has taken me a long time to realize that i cannot know what goes on in the cranial cavities and crevices of people, that i cannot fundamentally change people to be in the image i have of them, that people are not Platonic ideals or Jungian archetypes. and it will take longer still for me to be OK, to be OK with that.
and finally i left and walked to the grocery store and felt inexplicable shame and and and and guilt and and and and inhuman. and, god, i bought you a bar of dark chocolate — because surely that’s what you like because that’s what i like, because surely that makes sense — and when i walked back you were gone — because surely people stay in the place they are decomposing around, because surely there are second chances for people like me who say no and overthink and dawdle and equivocate. and and and and, god, i just left the chocolate there, hoping you’d come back — of course that makes sense.
you were wearing uncomfortably high heels.
i dreamt about you.
in the breeze, your hair blew in a way that seemed all right and more tragic, all at once.
and i’m sorry.
and i hope you feel better, un-alone, un-not-OK in a god-awful place.
sincerely,
hao.
Musical genres we might, in retrospect, more appropriately “totally be” rather than punk rock.
- We are totally modern jazz.
- We are totally doo-wop.
- We are totally Gregorian chant.
- We are totally Wes Anderson soundtrack.
Why, in the third year of post-ship island, the waters around said island begin heating up, slightly altering nearby currents and creating a dazzling school of purple salmon that you can see if you climb halfway up the only tree on the island.
JJ is no longer sure atheism means anything. Surely his atheism is predicated on the conviction that anything not derived from methodological empiricism — a.k.a. science — cannot be asserted. Then surely he is a walking, talking contradiction. How are any of his other beliefs scientific? JJ believes that if you are kind and you work hard that amazing things will happen to you. JJ believes that if you look out for yourself and you work on loving yourself that other people will too. JJ believes that good prevails over evil. JJ believes in being fiercely loyal to his friends. But what science is there to back any of those ideas, and why act accordingly when all JJ is is hurt, and what does it matter anyway on this island of glass where JJ makes tiny wooden insects that roll up into a perfect sphere when touched and slither away when unseen, where he plunges his hands into the ocean to soothe the blisters, red as they’ll ever be.
Island of misfit.
(An excerpt from an unwritten longer piece about some people who invent an indifference machine and have to deal with the consequences of it, et cetera, you know, the usual.)
At the lurid tales of his friends’ hookups and sexy times, JJ smiles and says congratulations. He plays the part of the happy, unjealous friend well. He says the right things, sends the right emoticons. No hint of bitterness or frustration will make it through his well-practiced dog-and-pony show.
He goes on a jog sometimes, by the lake. He hopes one day to find a wooden boat for one person stuck on the side of the lake with its mast up. He climbs gingerly into the rickety makeshift vessel and pushes hard against the land, catching the Arabian wind, which smells of pepper and thyme and basil and chocolate. The aroma of distant lands.
He fingers the indifference toy in his pocket.
Eventually he makes his way out of the lake and into the sea, then the oceans. He sails for weeks and weeks, waiting for the waters to turn deeper and deeper shades of blue. He feeds breadcrumbs to the dolphins that swim alongside him, playfully bumping (the dolphins do) into his boat.
He gathers flotsam to make an equally rickety brass telescope. It’s on the fourth month of sailing that he sights an island with a solitary palm tree, where he touches down. He finds driftwood and constructs a second floor to the ship. He finds a discarded guitar in the waves, made blue by the water. Using the mucus and gristle of the pigs that roam the island, he adheres the guitar to the ship as a figurehead. He stocks the ship with provisions from the island, with potable water made from the giant evaporation system he set up on the south shore. He uses the tree’s syrup to varnish the ship, producing a deep oaken color. By the end the cruise ship towers far above him, stretching miles into the atmosphere, casting a dour shadow over the island and generally disrupting an entire ecosystem’s circadian rhythm.
On the last day of construction, JJ dons the captain’s outfit and puts in the captain’s pipe and wears the captain’s hat. Across the ship he breaks a bottle of champagne he fermented himself; he unties the rope, starts the boat, and sets the boat adrift. It quickly catches the wind, as it did all those years ago, and whizzes into the horizon. It makes a whoosh-whiz noise as it does so: whoosh-whiz, whoosh-whiz. The mast flaps a lot.
JJ sits on the island and watches it go. In his heart is some second-order approximation of pride. He leans back against the palm tree and blisteredly fingers the indifference toy in his pocket, which he does even though it is glowing red hot.
In the very bottom compartment of the basement of the ship is a tiny treasure’s chest with a rusted steel padlock. In it is a silvery substance with streaks of blood, as if squeezed from the most precious stone by hand. It’s an odd thing for a treasure’s chest to contain.
JJ sits back and closes his eyes. He hugs his knees to the chest and watches the sunset. The sand around him slowly turns to glass, as they seem to do, as they always have for centuries.
And centuries.