i fully retract the 'bastard' from that last post. and every other less than kind thing i've ever said or thought about you. i love you and i can't imagine the world's continued existence without your presence in it somewhere.
the worst was supposed to be over. i remember the day you were diagnosed. i remember the cold shock of those words as if it were yesterday, the feeling that i couldn't breathe, that i'd forgotten how to speak. you did all the talking and you asked me to be strong for you. what kind of a role reversal is that? and when we hung up, and i started to cry, and when i threw up, when i broke out in hives, when i almost crashed my car... i was convinced that it couldn't be real, that there'd been a mistake and we would be laughing in relief the next day. i mean, you'd turned 23 three days earlier. the universe can't really be that unkind.
but it wasn't a mistake, and the universe really is just that cruelly indifferent. so you were sick. but the understanding was, and is, and should be, that you were going to get better. that you'd convalesce, and you'd beat it, and all the plans we were making would be carried out beginning next summer. we're gonna go on a road trip to louisiana, and you're going to take me camping for the first time. we're gonna drive up the west coast and look for the aurora borealis. we're gonna go back to isla vista and commandeer a random couch, and we're gonna sit in the dark and talk the way we used to do in college, when we were drunk and together and happy more often than not. we'd known each other for three weeks before we decided that we're going to get married when we're old, remember? we're gonna get married and be grouchy old curmudgeons together, and sit on our porch and grouse and reminisce.
and then you got better, and the cruelly indifferent universe was full of light again, and the only thing between us and our reunion was my cold, because after all, you'd just beat cancer, you're understandably delicate. and once my cold was done, i would be down at your hospital or at your house once a week, and i'd read to you, and we'd watch movies, and talk all the time and count the minutes until we could be back in the world having adventures.
and now, my cold is gone, and soon you might be as well. and i don't know if i can deal with that. it's one thing to come to terms with death in a personal sense. tell me that i'll die two days from now, and i could handle that, and i could die laughing the way i plan to. but i've never thought about others dying, i've never had to or wanted to think about someone i love dying. i can't wrap my mind around the fact that however much you want to live, however much i want you to live- and i want that with all my being, every cell in my body needs you to be alive in order to function and be happy- it might not matter and you'll die, and what does that mean? it means i'll never hold you again, never kiss you again, that i'll never hear your voice again or smell your smell again. it means the world will be missing one of its better assetts, one pillar of compassion and positivity. it means that our plans will never come to fruition, that all the things i never told you won't get said, all the things we could have been, you could have been, will never be, and what does that mean? what does it mean and what does it mean? it doesn't make sense, it can't be.
but dan says that it very well can be, and i'm not sure it's getting through to me. you can't die. i can't live if you die. i can't deal with "one or two weeks at most" and "i'll let you know if we get to visit one last time." one last time? what is that supposed to mean, because you can't go anywhere, not ANYWHERE. we have things to do, people to be. i love you. i've loved you probably since the day i met you. even when i hated you, i loved you. i can't imagine a future without you. i can't imagine putting you in the ground, leaving you alone. i can't do it. i won't do it. this is not how this story ends.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
the breathtaking dawn of a new era
Also known as "peace out, unemployment!" And how good am I, that I totally called it? I gave the same sincere answers to essentially the same questions for the same position, provided the same references, wore the same outfit- my Official Interview outfit, in which I am cute but professional and asexual- but this time, got the job. All because this time, my interviewer was male. What kinda bullshit is that, ladies? Let's quit holding each other down.
Well, crazy sexist self-hate aside, I am super excited about this new development. It will be good for a number of reasons:
The one down note in all of this excitement, which resonated even through the past, unusually awesome weekend about which I'm sure to write later, is the conspicuous lack of communication from J. It should pretty much be illegal, when you are in the hospital recovering from cancer, to turn your cell phone off for an extended period of time, especially when you are fortunate to have a friend so understanding as I am/can be. Which is to say that not-calling someone for weeks/months at a time, when death is a looming possibility ( significantly moreso than is normal, anyway) for you, causes suffering and worrying the likes of which you will never know. To further break it down, I don't need a goddamned 40 minute dissertation twice a damn day, but it sure would be nice to know that you are actually alive, and that would only take about 2 minutes every couple of days, and I just don't think that that is asking a lot. Bastard.
Well, crazy sexist self-hate aside, I am super excited about this new development. It will be good for a number of reasons:
- It's a job! Four months of resume-spamming, vaseline-smiling interviews over and done with, about fucking time.
- It's more than just some shitty job, it's a job I really wanted, which'll be excellent experience once I embark on my proper career path.
- I've never done anything like it before, which means it's a challenge, which means it's exciting.
The one down note in all of this excitement, which resonated even through the past, unusually awesome weekend about which I'm sure to write later, is the conspicuous lack of communication from J. It should pretty much be illegal, when you are in the hospital recovering from cancer, to turn your cell phone off for an extended period of time, especially when you are fortunate to have a friend so understanding as I am/can be. Which is to say that not-calling someone for weeks/months at a time, when death is a looming possibility ( significantly moreso than is normal, anyway) for you, causes suffering and worrying the likes of which you will never know. To further break it down, I don't need a goddamned 40 minute dissertation twice a damn day, but it sure would be nice to know that you are actually alive, and that would only take about 2 minutes every couple of days, and I just don't think that that is asking a lot. Bastard.
Friday, October 24, 2008
we'll always have a.i.m.
In this sad age of convenience and mass-production, it's really refreshing to come across a real master craftsman. I tingle down to my bones when I stumble across one of these rare beasts, running a great cafe or bakery or restaurant. I once tingled in a bicycle repair shop, when the owner, who was grafting a new tire onto my bike, told me that he'd owned the shop and been in the same spot for 30 years. He was leathery of skin, and his hands were like six times the size of mine, rough, dirty under the fingernails, and I manfully resisted the urge to give him a teary-eyed hug before I left. I mean, you don't see stuff like that anymore, do you? People who love to do something, and work at it for decades, and are masters of that craft, and still keep doing it for the pleasure that is in it? I feel like a doddering old fool when I realize how sentimental these feelings are, but I am neither old nor doddering, though crazy might not be an imprecise adjective. It's not as though I can remember a golden age where mom and pop ran diners and drugstores and ye olde ice cream shoppes, being too young by about thirty years, but damned if I don't long for those days as if I did.
Even on that ridiculous Food Network show, 'Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives', where Guy Fieri drives across the country and eats himself into an early massive coronary, he always stumbles across people from all walks of life who, finding themselves to be dissatisfied accountants, bankers, lawyers, Hell's Angels, etc., upped and decided to spend their days slaving behind a greasy counter, serving up dishes their mothers used to make- and find themselves satisfied and fulfilled, and bringing communities together by virtue of their passionately perfected green chile pork stew, or whatever. I think it's really great, really inspirational. When I was a kid, I always aspired to a grandiose future, to the kind of high-profile achievements that would really make an impact on the world and grant me some small measure of immortality (not that I was deluded, pretentious or Goth enough to think of it in those terms), and while I can't say that the dream is totally dead, I can just as well imagine myself opening a bakery somewhere down the line, and serving up delicious cupcakes and interacting cheerfully with a small community of regulars, and being totally fulfilled. Who's to say I couldn't be a baker/novelist/master gardener/whatever?
Another part of this longing for things that I've never known is this nagging urge to pull a Thoreau and seclude myself in a far-off forest somewhere, and live by myself, off the land, with the land. The sterility of city life rubs up against my brain like chicken wire- certainly not the cleanliness of it, not here in L.A., buddy, but the separation from nature. From nature like I've never really known, having grown up in L.A. My shangri-la is a small town full of poets and writers and painters and bakers and master chefs, secluded somewhere in a vast tract of wilderness, hidden by thousand year old trees, totally self-sufficient. Which is not to say that I'm some rugged, l.l. bean-wearing nature girl, because I can just about shatter glass when a spider finds its way into my bathroom, but being so far removed from spiders and dirt and rivers and stuff really does take a psychological toll on a person, be he aware of it or no.
I dislike technological isolation- haha, she writes in her blog, alone, at one in the morning- and I dislike the imposed sterility of relationships carried out over the internet, the phone, occasionally the postal service. I'll take the phone over instant messenger any time, but phone talk doesn't begin to compare to 2-in-the-morning-electric-blanket-on-the-couch-in-the-yard talk, not by half. I'm a little afraid of people who smell not at all like people but instead like perfume inserts in glossy magazines. On a semi-related note, I had short ribs for breakfast this morning, and it was glorious, and I felt down to my cell nuclei how closely related I, in my humanity, am to a tibetan rat terrier, which creature also loves to and cannot help but occasionally gnaw a juicy bone.
When I think of bones, I also think of dancing, and of fire, and of chocolate, which makes me think of blood, and black dirt, and sex, which makes me think of oranges, and frangipani, and salt-encrusted pebbles on a black shore. None of which makes less valuable the soapy smell of a freshly washed someone and the dingy warmth of an aparment kitchen on a cold night by a tame shoreline, or the sanctity of chaste kisses and old charlie brown holiday specials. All of which is to say what? That people should be able to spend time alone, and spend time together, and spend time in nature, and that everyone should find one thing to be devoted to, even if it's just cupcakes or bike tires or plain old nostalgic ramblings, and that these are traditions very much worth preserving. In my ever so humble opinion, that is.
Even on that ridiculous Food Network show, 'Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives', where Guy Fieri drives across the country and eats himself into an early massive coronary, he always stumbles across people from all walks of life who, finding themselves to be dissatisfied accountants, bankers, lawyers, Hell's Angels, etc., upped and decided to spend their days slaving behind a greasy counter, serving up dishes their mothers used to make- and find themselves satisfied and fulfilled, and bringing communities together by virtue of their passionately perfected green chile pork stew, or whatever. I think it's really great, really inspirational. When I was a kid, I always aspired to a grandiose future, to the kind of high-profile achievements that would really make an impact on the world and grant me some small measure of immortality (not that I was deluded, pretentious or Goth enough to think of it in those terms), and while I can't say that the dream is totally dead, I can just as well imagine myself opening a bakery somewhere down the line, and serving up delicious cupcakes and interacting cheerfully with a small community of regulars, and being totally fulfilled. Who's to say I couldn't be a baker/novelist/master gardener/whatever?
Another part of this longing for things that I've never known is this nagging urge to pull a Thoreau and seclude myself in a far-off forest somewhere, and live by myself, off the land, with the land. The sterility of city life rubs up against my brain like chicken wire- certainly not the cleanliness of it, not here in L.A., buddy, but the separation from nature. From nature like I've never really known, having grown up in L.A. My shangri-la is a small town full of poets and writers and painters and bakers and master chefs, secluded somewhere in a vast tract of wilderness, hidden by thousand year old trees, totally self-sufficient. Which is not to say that I'm some rugged, l.l. bean-wearing nature girl, because I can just about shatter glass when a spider finds its way into my bathroom, but being so far removed from spiders and dirt and rivers and stuff really does take a psychological toll on a person, be he aware of it or no.
I dislike technological isolation- haha, she writes in her blog, alone, at one in the morning- and I dislike the imposed sterility of relationships carried out over the internet, the phone, occasionally the postal service. I'll take the phone over instant messenger any time, but phone talk doesn't begin to compare to 2-in-the-morning-electric-blanket-on-the-couch-in-the-yard talk, not by half. I'm a little afraid of people who smell not at all like people but instead like perfume inserts in glossy magazines. On a semi-related note, I had short ribs for breakfast this morning, and it was glorious, and I felt down to my cell nuclei how closely related I, in my humanity, am to a tibetan rat terrier, which creature also loves to and cannot help but occasionally gnaw a juicy bone.
When I think of bones, I also think of dancing, and of fire, and of chocolate, which makes me think of blood, and black dirt, and sex, which makes me think of oranges, and frangipani, and salt-encrusted pebbles on a black shore. None of which makes less valuable the soapy smell of a freshly washed someone and the dingy warmth of an aparment kitchen on a cold night by a tame shoreline, or the sanctity of chaste kisses and old charlie brown holiday specials. All of which is to say what? That people should be able to spend time alone, and spend time together, and spend time in nature, and that everyone should find one thing to be devoted to, even if it's just cupcakes or bike tires or plain old nostalgic ramblings, and that these are traditions very much worth preserving. In my ever so humble opinion, that is.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive...
hard as that may be sometimes. And now, a list:
Things That Cause My Reptile Mind To Take Over:
And for a wild departure from the established tone:
Things I Miss So Much It's Like Physical Pain Sometimes:
Things That Cause My Reptile Mind To Take Over:
- grown women who refer to themselves as 'girls'- and act the part as well. Worse, when this horrid backwards cutesiness is rewarded equally with success and condescension.
- knowing that my interviewer tomorrow will be male, and that this fact makes it slightly more likely than otherwise that I will get this job. What's that about, anyway?
- anti-intellectualism in people smart enough to know/do better.
- the hideous complexity of romantic inter-personal relationships.
- the focus on romantic inter-personal relationships within my age group.
And for a wild departure from the established tone:
Things I Miss So Much It's Like Physical Pain Sometimes:
- three a.m. deep down soul talk.
- eduardo and the no-pants dance.
- all-day breakfast and movies Sundays.
- the zany, spontaneous, and frequent adventures that resulted from an extended group of friends all living with a three block radius of each other.
- certain fleeting certainties.
Friday, October 10, 2008
doomsday hysteria!
The main difference, as far as I can tell, between adulthood and adolescence is this: if you're 16 and having a bad day, it's 100% the worst day ever and if you're not contemplating suicide from moment to moment, it's only because, sob, you're so strong and misunderstood and if you kill yourself, you won't ever be able to revenge yourself upon the persons or things causing you to have such a terrible, terrible day. If you're say, 23 and having a bad day, the reaction is more like this: did I get enough sleep last night? oh my god, when was the last time i ate something?... when was the last time i had an orgasm? how much whiskey did i actually consume last night? Or along those lines anyway.
Which is not to say that it's impossible to be angsty at 23, or that the reasons for angst aren't weightier, if anything. Being twentysomething is like being a goddamned leper, minus the whole "my limbs are falling off! this is an actual medical condition!"-justification. It's just that, by now, most of us have achieved some distance from that self-centered, paranoid, apocalyptic tendency that most teenagers exhibit early on and right through the very end. Hopefully. I was a veritable Hamlet myself, though more outwardly cheerful and less crazy, and I'd accepted my self-diagnosed bipolar disorder until I was about 17 and realized that if I was bipolar, so was everyone I knew. Which didn't make it easier, the next time something totally fell apart, to step back and calm down and understand that the largest part of the problem was actually my own reaction, which in turn was due to hormones, chemicals, lack of sleep, and the general batshit insanity that is being a teenager in this crazy world. But now, aha, sweet sweet clarity is (mostly) mine.
A darker day than yesterday I've not had in many months. Which is in itself odd, since for most of those past months, I've been just as unemployed and annoyed as I was yesterday. I mean, unemployment aside, there are plenty of good reasons to wander around miserable and scowling. The general state of things, for one. This horrendous late summer we're having in L.A., the plight of the polar bears, the Ugandan children, and Iceland's banks- further: the fact of Palin's existence and ubiquity. The point being that there is no shortage of reasons to feel angsty and apocalyptic in this day and age. The other point being, so what the hell was particularly wrong with yesterday? If I were still a wee lass of seventeen or nineteen (nineteen being far worse by virtue of at that point being in college and all that that entails), the day's misery would have resulted in intense journal-writing, letter-writing, calling the bestie and crying for an hour or so, or else in a good three hour block of chain smoking after having downed half a bottle of whiskey. Which of course would have resulted in today being as atrocious a day as yesterday.
The point! What is the point? The ultimate point is this: when an offhand comment brought me to tears of rage, did I drink, did I brood, did I imagine the world ending in a fiery collision with a comet? Ok, so I did brood. For about ten minutes, before I realized I was being moronic, and how come? As far as I can tell, it was due to a combination of interview-exhaustion, lack of sleep, and low blood sugar due to a lack of appetite due to a cold (which in its first days was itself enough of a reason for some amateur-level brooding). And while I'll curse the heavens for as long as I live for the fact of my animal nature's chemical dependency, I'm also really really glad that I can step back from myself and realize that while, yes things are shitty and some degree of consternation is justified, the "end of the world" is just as easily the result of sleep deprivation as anything else.
And speaking of so-called markers of maturity, I recall reading somewhere once that the day you're officially an adult is the day you can't walk past a sink full of dirty dishes without either stopping to reverse this condition or walking on and feeling guilty all day long. Silly. Total bunk! I know plenty of lovely people who are functioning adults in every sense of the word, who love to live in pigsties. In my case? One hundred percent the truth. And though I think astrology is total bunk as well, I must admit that in the case of dishes, I wonder if it isn't the Virgo in me making its anal-retentive self known.
What else? I've gone from being the world's worst insomniac to having an intense and passionate love affair with my bed. In high school, I ran on about five or six hours of sleep a night, and managed even to function in society and all- well, as much as any teenager can. In college, god, you'd think someone had cursed me to die in my sleep at any given time. I was pro at being awake for three days in a row, and functional to boot, though of course by the third day I'd be seeing music and talking to the imaginary pet that lived in my poor addled head, or whatever. Right up until senior year, I was the inadvertant witness to more sunrises than most people will ever see in a lifetime. I've even narrowed down the precise sensation produced by watching your second sunrise in forty-eight hours: it's like someone's sifting sand down through the back of your head. Lots of sand. Heavy, heavy sand. Anyway, that explains most of the angst I felt back in those days, I expect.
Now, at the ripe old age of 23, if I sleep less than eight hours, I'm pretty much a monster. I feel ugly and slow, I'm quick to anger or sadness if I don't sleep enough. I function well enough, which is a good thing, considering that I love to be awake til late at night and most jobs begin in the early hours of the day. I just feel like shit, and whether I realize or not that it's due to lack of sleep, it mainly... is. What's this damned fascination with my own sleep habits, anyway? Not with sleep habits, really, but with the markers of my own aging. The markers along the line of my own mortality... blah blah. For the most part, I'm just glad that I'm far enough around the bend to debunk the occasional apocalypse, for my own peace and sanity. Knock on wood, in any case.
Which is not to say that it's impossible to be angsty at 23, or that the reasons for angst aren't weightier, if anything. Being twentysomething is like being a goddamned leper, minus the whole "my limbs are falling off! this is an actual medical condition!"-justification. It's just that, by now, most of us have achieved some distance from that self-centered, paranoid, apocalyptic tendency that most teenagers exhibit early on and right through the very end. Hopefully. I was a veritable Hamlet myself, though more outwardly cheerful and less crazy, and I'd accepted my self-diagnosed bipolar disorder until I was about 17 and realized that if I was bipolar, so was everyone I knew. Which didn't make it easier, the next time something totally fell apart, to step back and calm down and understand that the largest part of the problem was actually my own reaction, which in turn was due to hormones, chemicals, lack of sleep, and the general batshit insanity that is being a teenager in this crazy world. But now, aha, sweet sweet clarity is (mostly) mine.
A darker day than yesterday I've not had in many months. Which is in itself odd, since for most of those past months, I've been just as unemployed and annoyed as I was yesterday. I mean, unemployment aside, there are plenty of good reasons to wander around miserable and scowling. The general state of things, for one. This horrendous late summer we're having in L.A., the plight of the polar bears, the Ugandan children, and Iceland's banks- further: the fact of Palin's existence and ubiquity. The point being that there is no shortage of reasons to feel angsty and apocalyptic in this day and age. The other point being, so what the hell was particularly wrong with yesterday? If I were still a wee lass of seventeen or nineteen (nineteen being far worse by virtue of at that point being in college and all that that entails), the day's misery would have resulted in intense journal-writing, letter-writing, calling the bestie and crying for an hour or so, or else in a good three hour block of chain smoking after having downed half a bottle of whiskey. Which of course would have resulted in today being as atrocious a day as yesterday.
The point! What is the point? The ultimate point is this: when an offhand comment brought me to tears of rage, did I drink, did I brood, did I imagine the world ending in a fiery collision with a comet? Ok, so I did brood. For about ten minutes, before I realized I was being moronic, and how come? As far as I can tell, it was due to a combination of interview-exhaustion, lack of sleep, and low blood sugar due to a lack of appetite due to a cold (which in its first days was itself enough of a reason for some amateur-level brooding). And while I'll curse the heavens for as long as I live for the fact of my animal nature's chemical dependency, I'm also really really glad that I can step back from myself and realize that while, yes things are shitty and some degree of consternation is justified, the "end of the world" is just as easily the result of sleep deprivation as anything else.
And speaking of so-called markers of maturity, I recall reading somewhere once that the day you're officially an adult is the day you can't walk past a sink full of dirty dishes without either stopping to reverse this condition or walking on and feeling guilty all day long. Silly. Total bunk! I know plenty of lovely people who are functioning adults in every sense of the word, who love to live in pigsties. In my case? One hundred percent the truth. And though I think astrology is total bunk as well, I must admit that in the case of dishes, I wonder if it isn't the Virgo in me making its anal-retentive self known.
What else? I've gone from being the world's worst insomniac to having an intense and passionate love affair with my bed. In high school, I ran on about five or six hours of sleep a night, and managed even to function in society and all- well, as much as any teenager can. In college, god, you'd think someone had cursed me to die in my sleep at any given time. I was pro at being awake for three days in a row, and functional to boot, though of course by the third day I'd be seeing music and talking to the imaginary pet that lived in my poor addled head, or whatever. Right up until senior year, I was the inadvertant witness to more sunrises than most people will ever see in a lifetime. I've even narrowed down the precise sensation produced by watching your second sunrise in forty-eight hours: it's like someone's sifting sand down through the back of your head. Lots of sand. Heavy, heavy sand. Anyway, that explains most of the angst I felt back in those days, I expect.
Now, at the ripe old age of 23, if I sleep less than eight hours, I'm pretty much a monster. I feel ugly and slow, I'm quick to anger or sadness if I don't sleep enough. I function well enough, which is a good thing, considering that I love to be awake til late at night and most jobs begin in the early hours of the day. I just feel like shit, and whether I realize or not that it's due to lack of sleep, it mainly... is. What's this damned fascination with my own sleep habits, anyway? Not with sleep habits, really, but with the markers of my own aging. The markers along the line of my own mortality... blah blah. For the most part, I'm just glad that I'm far enough around the bend to debunk the occasional apocalypse, for my own peace and sanity. Knock on wood, in any case.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought
For as long as I can remember, since I emerged from the coccoon of childhood and into the brave new world of being a real person and establishing myself with myself/with the world, I've had a pretty good sense for the absurd. Life is, in every way that matters, absurd. If you can't laugh at the ridiculous, it becomes insulting, it becomes painful and a chore, and you become one of those deeply unpleasant, uptight people for whom nothing is funny. The type of person that should be banned from society, basically.
Anyway, all of that is to say that I know that life is ridiculous, that things tend to work out in precisely the opposite fashion than what a reasonable person would expect, and that if I can't laugh at it it's because I'm a bore who takes shit far too personally for my own mental health. But goddamn if the world isn't testing my sense of the absurd to the very limits lately.
There's the matter of American politics, of course. Here we are, a month to the Most Important Election Ever!!!, and the vast majority of Americans are either a) indifferent/bored of the whole spectacle, or b) seriously contemplating, if not dead set on, voting Republican. And if you fit into neither of those camps, you're probably glued to a computer screen twenty-four hours a day, shitting your pants every other minute in, alternately, excitement/mortification. So where does that leave me? I freely admit- and think this is a sign of health- that I can't wait for the damned circus to roll out of town, but that's mostly because I've come to, despite my rather smug disdain for politics in general, be one of those sad bastards who sits around online all day, shitting my pants- 99% of the time in mortification, which is a small comfort. I just can't take anymore of this fucking stupidity. I mean, I attended college in Santa Barbara, and thought that the depths of human stupidity were exhausted in my mind, that they could no longer dizzy me, surprise me, stimulate my gag reflex. I was wrong. I remember reading, around the time of the last election, about a new syndrome going round. Something about "outrage exhaust," where one is so constantly bombarded by atrocities and stupidities that the reaction to these becomes dulled and your righteous anger can't be bothered to manifest itself anymore. That's a line that has been unequivically crossed.
The list does not end there, naturally. There's still the perennial favorite, of course, that endless source of vexation that is so pervasive, so damned inescapable, that I wonder if it isn't a torment from hell itself. I'm talking about rap music, of course. Not the Platonic ideal of rap music, true, but exarcerbated by it's ubiquity: commercial rap music. "Music" featuring Akon, or Lil' John- "music" that is essentially NONSENSE WORDS REPEATED TO AN ANYEURISM-INDUCING SYNTHESIZED RHYTHM. My god people. I mean, I know that the vast majority of you are simpletons, well-meaning but essentially tapeworms, the complacent packaging for ambitious genetic material, but holy crap, do you realize what you're doing?! You are bopping along to or repeating (frequently, too loudly) NONSENSE on the order of fucking BABY TALK (if babies were mysogynistic, ignorant pigs) produced by liquor-addled morons with hard-ons who are becoming filthy stinking rich on the basis of your willfull ignorance and bad taste. You are handing them money- and respect, and power- without them having to earn it by hard work or manifesting appreciable talent, and what they're providing you with in return is, not to mince words, the DEATH of your goddamned SOUL.
Man it felt good to write that down. Is it ridiculous to flip out equally over politics and shitty rap music? Yes! Are politics and rap music two fundamentally absurd notions? YES. And if I have to hear, "lolly lolly lolly, let me see you pop that body (?)" all the way through one more time, someone is going to die the sort of gruesome death that will guarantee my name in lights for a long time to come.
Something else that has recently crawled under my skin and begun to feed, loudly, on the proteins that make up my muscles, etc., is the mind-boggling fact that not one, not two, but three people with whom I was/am friends with are now engaged to be married. One of them, one of the two was-friends, will be married next month. Not only is this girl completely insane and immature and homely, but she might well be the last person in the world whom I'd thought would get married- EVER. Oh, and, she's 23. And while I am aware of the fact that childhood does end at some point and people get on with adulthood in the more tangible sense of the word before anything else, I am also aware that we no longer live in the year 1953, and that women who are unmarried past 25 are no longer fed to the bears as a matter of social policy. I mean, wow. I'm worried that either it reflects poorly on me that I think marriage at 23 is- what's the word again?- ABSURD, or that the world is an even more hopelessly ridiculous place than previously assumed. The other couple consists of two 23 year olds, and the last couple jointly turned 25 this year. And none of the aforementioned reactions to all this absurdity begins to accurately depict the confusion surrounding this last engagement specifically, since the groom and I are sort of in love with each other, and the bride is this terribly pedestrian creature who enjoys the less-than pedestrian musical offerings of Jessica Simpson (and all the terrible things implied thereby).
A list of other (less offensive?) absurdities:
Anyway, all of that is to say that I know that life is ridiculous, that things tend to work out in precisely the opposite fashion than what a reasonable person would expect, and that if I can't laugh at it it's because I'm a bore who takes shit far too personally for my own mental health. But goddamn if the world isn't testing my sense of the absurd to the very limits lately.
There's the matter of American politics, of course. Here we are, a month to the Most Important Election Ever!!!, and the vast majority of Americans are either a) indifferent/bored of the whole spectacle, or b) seriously contemplating, if not dead set on, voting Republican. And if you fit into neither of those camps, you're probably glued to a computer screen twenty-four hours a day, shitting your pants every other minute in, alternately, excitement/mortification. So where does that leave me? I freely admit- and think this is a sign of health- that I can't wait for the damned circus to roll out of town, but that's mostly because I've come to, despite my rather smug disdain for politics in general, be one of those sad bastards who sits around online all day, shitting my pants- 99% of the time in mortification, which is a small comfort. I just can't take anymore of this fucking stupidity. I mean, I attended college in Santa Barbara, and thought that the depths of human stupidity were exhausted in my mind, that they could no longer dizzy me, surprise me, stimulate my gag reflex. I was wrong. I remember reading, around the time of the last election, about a new syndrome going round. Something about "outrage exhaust," where one is so constantly bombarded by atrocities and stupidities that the reaction to these becomes dulled and your righteous anger can't be bothered to manifest itself anymore. That's a line that has been unequivically crossed.
The list does not end there, naturally. There's still the perennial favorite, of course, that endless source of vexation that is so pervasive, so damned inescapable, that I wonder if it isn't a torment from hell itself. I'm talking about rap music, of course. Not the Platonic ideal of rap music, true, but exarcerbated by it's ubiquity: commercial rap music. "Music" featuring Akon, or Lil' John- "music" that is essentially NONSENSE WORDS REPEATED TO AN ANYEURISM-INDUCING SYNTHESIZED RHYTHM. My god people. I mean, I know that the vast majority of you are simpletons, well-meaning but essentially tapeworms, the complacent packaging for ambitious genetic material, but holy crap, do you realize what you're doing?! You are bopping along to or repeating (frequently, too loudly) NONSENSE on the order of fucking BABY TALK (if babies were mysogynistic, ignorant pigs) produced by liquor-addled morons with hard-ons who are becoming filthy stinking rich on the basis of your willfull ignorance and bad taste. You are handing them money- and respect, and power- without them having to earn it by hard work or manifesting appreciable talent, and what they're providing you with in return is, not to mince words, the DEATH of your goddamned SOUL.
Man it felt good to write that down. Is it ridiculous to flip out equally over politics and shitty rap music? Yes! Are politics and rap music two fundamentally absurd notions? YES. And if I have to hear, "lolly lolly lolly, let me see you pop that body (?)" all the way through one more time, someone is going to die the sort of gruesome death that will guarantee my name in lights for a long time to come.
Something else that has recently crawled under my skin and begun to feed, loudly, on the proteins that make up my muscles, etc., is the mind-boggling fact that not one, not two, but three people with whom I was/am friends with are now engaged to be married. One of them, one of the two was-friends, will be married next month. Not only is this girl completely insane and immature and homely, but she might well be the last person in the world whom I'd thought would get married- EVER. Oh, and, she's 23. And while I am aware of the fact that childhood does end at some point and people get on with adulthood in the more tangible sense of the word before anything else, I am also aware that we no longer live in the year 1953, and that women who are unmarried past 25 are no longer fed to the bears as a matter of social policy. I mean, wow. I'm worried that either it reflects poorly on me that I think marriage at 23 is- what's the word again?- ABSURD, or that the world is an even more hopelessly ridiculous place than previously assumed. The other couple consists of two 23 year olds, and the last couple jointly turned 25 this year. And none of the aforementioned reactions to all this absurdity begins to accurately depict the confusion surrounding this last engagement specifically, since the groom and I are sort of in love with each other, and the bride is this terribly pedestrian creature who enjoys the less-than pedestrian musical offerings of Jessica Simpson (and all the terrible things implied thereby).
A list of other (less offensive?) absurdities:
- that not once, but twice, a bird has landed on my head as I walked down the street
- the existence of fat-free ranch/cheese/butter, and other such FAT-BASED commestibles
- that once you are educated to some extent, you see the society that educated you for the joke that it truly is?
- that truly subversive things are co-opted into the mainstream, albeit unwittingly, alongside cosmic trash
- that someday, politics and rap music will go into the void right next to shakespeare, miles davis, the haggia sophia, and the species homo sapiens
Say what?? Ah, life.
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