Post by Kaez on Jul 17, 2011 22:08:15 GMT -5
THE BABYLON GAMBIT
In the movies, when the great storm breaks, it's always sunshine left to break through the clouds. But I want to write a story where it's not sunshine that breaks through. Where the darkness opens up to stars. A story where some child looks up and says, "The storm left. The stars are out." And nobody can even be sure that the storm hadn't left days or weeks ago. That the stars hadn't been out the whole time, quiet, dark, looming. And that they were just waiting for someone to notice before they'd let day break again. Not that anyone would understand the symbolism. They'd chalk it up to science or something. But the sky was speaking to them. That's the kind of story. You know?
My mind doesn't really "set" on anything. It's either spontaneity or emptiness. Those are the only two settings. It's like the machine can either be switched off, or switched into a mode labeled 'Disco' in handwritten tape where everyone else gets queasy and a little concerned.
That was a weird simile but it works.
There are two types of people in this world: people who will leave here alive, and people who put food coloring on my dog.
hello(!) greetings and welcome
in this poem, words specifically chosen
for their [desirable] affect on your mind
will be carefully delivered to your body
through a cool, blue-colored liquid
step 1: remove your head completely
“I’ll kill all my neighbors and move to Saskatoon and never be heard from again.”
“Some say that I, being cleverer and wiser than humans, am a self-aware parody of humans, while others say I’m not. A third group of people choose to remain neutral on the subject, mumbling, “I don’t know” or “I can see how you think [one interpretation] but I can also see how people are able to think [another interpretation],” in a quiet monotone, often while staring vaguely into some abstract distance. A fourth group of people will say anything to shorten or end what they feel is a useless conversation, even, “I completely agree with you” while totally not at all agreeing with you.”
step 2: lie on your stomach for 5-10 minutes to prevent yourself from having a panic attack. imagine yourself happy and on a plum farm.
“Sometimes I just zone out and feel like I’m going to make some sort of spiritual connection with the universe. I burnt a smudge of sage and listened to neoshamanic music. Nothing. Nada. I have never had a spiritual moment and my best explanation for this is that they don’t exist and people lie. Or drugs. Drugs is also an explanation.”
you may notice a large, thick wire
protruding from your sternum
an inch above your metaphorical heart
and two inches below who you’re [supposed] to be
filled with a cool, blue-colored liquid
“I think about a beautiful feeling of pure hope. Like being awoken after a long winter and being filled with a universe-ful of energy. I have never and will never feel that way.”
“You may ask how I arrived at this conclusion. Well I will tell you.”
step 3: look at the clipart of two smiling flowers. notice that they are almost identical but the one on the left looks more sincerely happy and the one on the right looks like he is faking it. (The one on the right, he cheats on his bees with flies. He’s a floral deviant, but he keeps it all secret. He sometimes thinks about taking a hit of fertilizer, but it reminds him too much of his dad. The one on the left is a cultist. The New Church of the Celestial Germination (which is under surveillance by the Floral Department of Investigation). In a few weeks he’ll drink weed-killer amongst a hillside full of other flowers and kill himself. It’ll be called the greatest peacetime gardening disaster since the Great Rosebush Burning of ‘74.)
“Dying your hair red, are you? Think that will help? We’re all still going to die.”
step 4: lost in thought, when you come out of it, you realize you’ve been staring blankly at a stranger the whole time and you feel like an asshole.
“Her blowjobs would subsequently conclude, if at all, in a despair-inducingly form of vague, low-level orgasm that’s distinguishable from pre-cum only by an MRI, which caused me to feel like my penis was trying to eat itself or jump off a cliff or something.”
“... oh. Oh. You two. You two are fucking strange. Would you like some mushrooms? I have mushrooms.”
step 5: cram heartworm medicine into a dog treat; think about cramming a razorblade into the pineapple of someone you hate.
“They, much like the Wu-Tang Clan, are not to be fucked with.”
“A body best suited for stationary pursuits.”
step 6: maybe just let things go. maybe just be tolerant and easy-going and not worry so much. maybe ease yourself towards acceptance and quietude, towards... what, death? no, that doesn’t seem right. you’re supposed to resist death, i’m sure of it.
“The lime, having recently been declared the least erotic of all fruit, called this announcement, “just one of the thousands of faults of the modern human being, who doesn’t want to work to get anything and only cares about orgasming within a few minutes, who likes to complain for hours each day about the ‘meaninglessness’ of life, the fleeting nature of pleasure, the evils of capitalism and the bourgeoisie and gentrification, the likes and passions and accomplishments and lives of others.”
“Stole $7 out of the pocket of a child. Used it to buy ricecakes. Fuckin’ love me some ricecakes.”
we’re glad you are beginning to [understand](!)
though we would like to again stress
to please try to keep your thoughts
to a bare minimum in order to receive
the full extent of [benefits] from this poem
“I awake and the birds are singing. God help me, I’m killing everyone.”
step 7: think that all of life just seemed to be one thing: one slapdashed, stuffed cornish hen of a thing, flying out of the oven and straight through the window, into the night and into orbit until the thing that used to be familiar and under control was just sort of out there, unknown, by itself, charred, brainless, and rarely seen.
“This was the best day of my life. Or, at least, it wasn’t the worst day of my life. That will be tomorrow.”
step 8: remember how a weightlessness entered your blood – a ventilation of sorts, like a bacteria of ghosts – and how your heart, your small and weary core, neglected for the past few years, vanished a little more, from the center outward, and took on a strange and hollowed heaviness like a weakly inflated party balloon.
“The next aisle is the oriental food and that is my favorite aisle because it reminds me that America is not the whole world and maybe other places aren’t so terrible as this place and that killing myself might be less productive than just going to some faraway country.
“I think that maybe it is also not normal that the oriental food aisle is some kind of suicide prevention.
“Oh yes sesame noodles. I feel a surge of a deep spiritual calmness and I think I definitely won’t die any time within the next couple of days at least.”
“Do you know how many nuts you can eat before you get sick? I do. Four cans. Four whole cans.”
thank you for your cooperation thus far
though it appears your success rate remains
at [zero]
please take comfort in the fact that phase two
is considerably less pleasant(!)
“When you’re walking, running, or jogging pathetically in an attempt to keep up with fitter, healthier friends.* *--for example”
step 9: realize that your sadness is not a sort of desperation or despair, nothing like desperation or the cries of some heartbroken character on the television screen, but more of a plain, artless kind of loneliness. something uninteresting, factual, straightforward. something taught on flashcards, like unfinished coloring books of forgotten things (snowflakes melted mid-air) and a few real-world reflections (halloween night asleep on the couch, Saturday dinner in a parking lot looking through the windshield of the pizza place you just got take-out from).
“You’re sleeping here? In the grass?”
“I am sleeping, yes, here. On the ground. In the, yes, grass.”
“Hopelessness is the most powerful human emotion. That sort of bleak, empty feeling reaches a point that is just far outside of the potency of any other human emotion. There’s no positive equivalent to suicidal.”
“There’s a knock on the door. You immediately assume it’s the police.”
step 10: acknowledge the future as dully unstimulating as a tropical fish: colorfully darting, then slowing, then not floating to the top but just sort of self-destructing and being gone. and take no comfort in the fact that you aren’t alone in this.
“I think there’s a distinct possibility that I am the most powerful being in the universe. Sometimes I just think: Holy shit, I just made that thing happen with my GODMIND.’ You know?”
we would like to [acknowledge] the lack of control
you now exercise over your entire body
we have that affect on people [sometimes]
please attempt to focus on the pain
we apologize for the inconvenience
“Yes. Let’s everyone on this plane go to Paris. Let’s introduce ourselves to each other and live out the plot of a shitty romantic comedy.”
“Fine.”
“I am exactly 200% happier than you.”
“How did you possibly calculate that.”
step 11: recognize that everything you do is an attempt to escape the dull repetition of this reality. movies, drugs, emotions, plagiarized pseudowisdom, several failed attempts to find some sort of spiritual understanding, have all been so you can convince yourself that “this reality” and “this normal” isn’t all there is. but it is all there is and you want to die.
“How do we live with ourselves again?”
“You have gin. I have twitter.”
step 12: note that the future is full of people talking about what the future is going to be like
“Cutting corners like it’s crunch time at the circle factory.”
“Oh, you got that pen-holder.”
“Yes.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
“The pen does not fall out with much regularity.”
“Oh, good.”
step 13: life, you learn, is not easy. life is not cake. life is not delicious carrot cake. it was something else. a failed attempt at a birthday party for yourself. you, the botched clone of you, the oakland raiders. berry-berry kix, lo mein grease on paper plates, a dwindling supply of the last food that doesn’t make your insides curl into knots.
“I pour small amounts of sunflower seeds into the palm of my hand and throw them into my facecave.”
“Just let me have a problem. Don’t try to fix it or understand it or resolve it. Just let me have a problem.”
step 14: try to comprehend what it would be like to be a single other person. just being anyone but you, whether someone from japan or myanmar or across the street or your best friend and you can’t even fathom it. you are unable to even vaguely understand what that must be like and you wonder how you can feel empathy at all but you do and maybe, you think, life is just paradoxical and that you should stop trying to make sense of it in the first place.
“I have to make sure when I eat a piece of candy that I move it around in my mouth like a labyrinth because if it hits the magic tooth, it makes me forget my middle name for two hours.”
“Everyone has experienced problems related to a relentless sense of hopelessness, but few realize that an inefficient or insufficient consumption of a wide variety of easily accessible narcotics is responsible for their lack of a successful repellant to this philosophical pest.”
unfortunately, phase two does not seem
to have been very successful
next time, however, we’ll
FOCUS ON THE PAIN
FOCUS ON THE PAIN
FOCUS ON THE PAIN
IT IS THE WAY OUT
“Sounds like the quiet, polite mumbling through the door of a doctor’s office.”
step 15: stop going to classes. apply for jobs in little italy. try not to think. try just to love. anything at all, try just to love it. but it doesn’t work. love doesn’t work that way. love isn’t sold by the plate. love isn’t fourteen dollars and topped with marinara sauce at the place down the street.
“I don’t think anyone likes Arcade Fire. I think everyone just pretends to like them because they think they should. They think they should be the person who is really into Arcade Fire. But no one really likes them. If someone says they enjoyed a whole Arcade Fire album, I don’t believe them. No one likes Arcade Fire. But we all have agreed to pretend we do and not call out each other. When did we make this agreement?”
“And she was lovely and eloquent and unique and seemed to embody all of the fictional characters I’d fallen in love with over the years and she was beautiful and clever and all of those other things that people like me say about people like her.”
“Was she? Was she really all of those things or did she just have short hair and a tattoo?”
step 15.5: think that if love exists as an animal, it is probably bigfoot. if it didn’t exist, ti didn’t matter. people made models of it and took pictures of it and the hoax was good enough. the idea of it. though some people feared it and wished it would just go away and had their lives insured against being eaten by it. were you that person?
“I’m buying this mach-3 turbo. The package implies that it is perfect for my purposes. Try to fucking stop me, go ahead.”
step 16: stop caring about politics. hope that terrorists take over manhattan. hope they attach outboard motors to manhattan and drive the whole island like a barge into the atlantic. hope they cruise around the world and throw a party. low-key with virgin pina coladas.
“I’d like to be the kind of person who likes soccer. I like the idea of soccer. But watching it for five minutes makes me feel like finding the most beautiful person I can and beating them over the head with a piece of priceless jewelry.”
iiiiiiii will be your guide in the journeyyyyyy
andddddd i hope to be of assistance without
intruding more thannnnnnn is
absolutelyyyyyyyyy necessary
“It seems to me like pretty much everything in life is some sort of middle ground. Mild to moderate. Partial. There are very few objective and absolute things, but brains like objectives and absolutes, and they make them out of half-assed things whenever they can. People are dumb.”
step 17: think that you’re wrong. think that maybe reality functions differently than you’ve been perceiving it. think that maybe you’ve been looking at everything wrong your whole life. begin to consider the legitimate possibility that – no, you stop thinking. your brain just gives right the fuck up. then you think, ‘i hate myself’ in a manner that is tonally incomprehensible.
“Sad moments would be easily dealt with if they could just be hit hard and be over with. But they can’t. They drag on. For days. Weeks. Months. That’s the heart of human suffering. We’ve only got to eat, breathe, and reproduce, and we’ve got ninety fucking years to do it. That’s just too long. Everything takes too miserably fucking long.”
“I’m going to break his skull in. Is everyone okay with that? If anyone here isn’t okay with that, could you raise your hand so I know?”
“The best way to keep teenagers off of your property is to hang up a variety of posters advertising physical labor jobs. This represents a nearby opportunity for a correlation between hard work and reward – something teenagers have an almost-Jungian inherent aversion to.”
an instant of existence
at the table in the kitchen
how well do you remember your childhood?
you are going to be okay
i promised you that you would be okay
i care a lot
is that okay with you?
i trust you
i care a lot
where are you going?
“I don’t know how to interact with humans.”
hello(!) greetings and welcome
in this poem, words specifically chosen
for their [desirable] affect on your mind
will be carefully delivered to your body
through a cool, blue-colored liquid
“You’re sure that nobody has ever felt this much emotion before ever. Or at least, if they have, they’ve never done it at 4am on a railroad track in an obscure West Virginian suburb.”
step 18: who the fuck knows at this point. maybe you’ll invent something. maybe it’ll be really hip and you’ll be really famous and you’ll be sponsored in japan by a medium-famous energy drink company with an ironic name.
“How could they make it any worse?”
“Poison. Poison was how they could make it worse.”
“ You said I’d been drinking. You were so right.”
step 18 but better: no maybe you’ll create a really useful bathroom-related device that makes lives all across the first world more convenient (third world doesn’t have bathrooms, have no ideas for how to help them, probably something rice-related). then you remember that your idea for a bathroom-related device has been developed exactly as far as this one sentence in your head about ten seconds ago and give up.
“You screamed. You fucking roared. You shoved forth every ounce of energy inside of you and erupted it forth through your neck, veins throbbing, jaw hinged wide. You screamed like you had never screamed before, and not because you felt any enthusiasm or rush, not because you felt “alive” or happy – you didn’t feel any of those – no, you screamed at yourself for not feeling them. You screamed to God and spat in his face for not giving you that rush. Your rush was an antirush. And you screamed alright.”
"She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director."
step 19: spend your days watching tv and just dwelling on shitty things. when a scientist on tv points to a series of jagged lines on a computer screen and says something complicated about what they signify, you think: he’s bullshitting. it’s just a fucking line, you think. fuck everything, you think
“The place was packed as though every square foot that went unoccupied for five minutes must have shamed its family and should be destroyed with a jackhammer.”
“Are you high enough to smoke this? Holy god you're Spongebob Squarepants under the fucking sea.”
we apologize for that
unexpected complication
we are doing everything we can
to resolve the issueisthatokaywithyou?
the answer is blowing in the:
step 20: guzzle antitussives
“Portugal: best known for being the most Portugese country in all of Europe,”
“My hat was described as “pimptastic” by a few white youths.”
step 21: watch low budget indie films you torrented and send text messages about potential future drug deals.
“Smells like gatorade.”
“That feeling when something warm splashes on your face and you know you’ll be known as the school slut by tomorrow afternoon.”
hello(!) greetings and welcome
in this poem,
step 22: click on an online video, watch the 30 second pre-video advertisement, then shut the video off. what the hell is wrong with you.
“A strange profession, like crab-husbandry.”
step 23: put your wallet into your back pocket. think about a huge natural disaster that kills everyone and take another bite of pizza.
all of this is going to vanish
as quickly as it arrived
flood lights illuminating
midnight highways
put the windows down it is summer[/color]
hello(!) greetings and welcome
in this poem,
“Thank god you are here.”
step 24: wonder why everyone seems to talk in half-riddles or use vague references and despite a general level of honesty, lack the ability to be blunt and speak plainly. then think that maybe doing so would remove some basic level of romanticism that’s necessary for finding enjoyment in anything. maybe if everyone was completely blunt and straightforward things would seem so off that they would become unappealing and repulsive. maybe a certain amount of delusion is good.
step 25: consider the fact that your past self was a fucking idiot relative to your current self so that your current self is probably just a fucking idiot who doesn’t know it yet.
“i made my way to someone
with a name-tag and that
felt comforting. felt familiar.”
my arm wrapped around
her ribcage and yeah
hell(o!)greetigNSndawlEcome
step 26: consider accepting sadness. maybe being sad isn’t awful. maybe being a sad asshole will be your shtick. like house. house is cool.
step 27: make yourself cry so hard that your heart turns into a small mouse of some sort and escapes your body through your choking mouth and you just fall over dead.
how well do you remember your childhood?
sky color: indiana red
the sprawling grey like (cloud-stained body of water)
high-tops pounding out a beat
hot pavement (cool, blue-colored liquid)
sun-stained fairgrounds!
there’s a heartbeat in the dial-tone!
oh, yes! another, even nicer, simpler sort of day!
oh and the summer!
don’t you remember it?
it’s the snowfall coming
and it’s the falling down
this is what the note said:
i love you i love you i love you
thank god you are here
step 28: gaze at the glowing teleprompter and consider that there is nothing stopping you from killing or raping most people who are physically smaller than you but you don’t do it anyway so you’re probably not that awful really.
“We should build planes. Like, little ones. Out of balsa wood, yeah.”
“Nothing you’ve said has made any sense. Nothing you’ve said has made any sense.”
step 29: consider that some people view the world in a 3d range of happy/sad/indifferent. some more emotional people are in a 2d line of happy/sad. think that you are a 1d point of ‘oh god’.
finally arrive on the runway
it is summer and it is nighttime
and i am free and so are you
and here is the Goodness!
Haha, do you see it? I found it!
The Goodness is here
the Goodness is flowing
through a cool, blue-colored liquid
step 30: focus on the pain
hello(!) greetings and welcome
this is a new beginning
“Haha!” [/blockquote]
In the movies, when the great storm breaks, it's always sunshine left to break through the clouds. But I want to write a story where it's not sunshine that breaks through. Where the darkness opens up to stars. A story where some child looks up and says, "The storm left. The stars are out." And nobody can even be sure that the storm hadn't left days or weeks ago. That the stars hadn't been out the whole time, quiet, dark, looming. And that they were just waiting for someone to notice before they'd let day break again. Not that anyone would understand the symbolism. They'd chalk it up to science or something. But the sky was speaking to them. That's the kind of story. You know?
My mind doesn't really "set" on anything. It's either spontaneity or emptiness. Those are the only two settings. It's like the machine can either be switched off, or switched into a mode labeled 'Disco' in handwritten tape where everyone else gets queasy and a little concerned.
That was a weird simile but it works.
There are two types of people in this world: people who will leave here alive, and people who put food coloring on my dog.
[/u]a simple guide to painless suicide that does not work
hello(!) greetings and welcome
in this poem, words specifically chosen
for their [desirable] affect on your mind
will be carefully delivered to your body
through a cool, blue-colored liquid
step 1: remove your head completely
“I’ll kill all my neighbors and move to Saskatoon and never be heard from again.”
everything we talked about yesterday
[/u]“Some say that I, being cleverer and wiser than humans, am a self-aware parody of humans, while others say I’m not. A third group of people choose to remain neutral on the subject, mumbling, “I don’t know” or “I can see how you think [one interpretation] but I can also see how people are able to think [another interpretation],” in a quiet monotone, often while staring vaguely into some abstract distance. A fourth group of people will say anything to shorten or end what they feel is a useless conversation, even, “I completely agree with you” while totally not at all agreeing with you.”
step 2: lie on your stomach for 5-10 minutes to prevent yourself from having a panic attack. imagine yourself happy and on a plum farm.
“Sometimes I just zone out and feel like I’m going to make some sort of spiritual connection with the universe. I burnt a smudge of sage and listened to neoshamanic music. Nothing. Nada. I have never had a spiritual moment and my best explanation for this is that they don’t exist and people lie. Or drugs. Drugs is also an explanation.”
you may notice a large, thick wire
protruding from your sternum
an inch above your metaphorical heart
and two inches below who you’re [supposed] to be
filled with a cool, blue-colored liquid
“I think about a beautiful feeling of pure hope. Like being awoken after a long winter and being filled with a universe-ful of energy. I have never and will never feel that way.”
writing a battle hymn for the teenage cynic
[/u]“You may ask how I arrived at this conclusion. Well I will tell you.”
step 3: look at the clipart of two smiling flowers. notice that they are almost identical but the one on the left looks more sincerely happy and the one on the right looks like he is faking it. (The one on the right, he cheats on his bees with flies. He’s a floral deviant, but he keeps it all secret. He sometimes thinks about taking a hit of fertilizer, but it reminds him too much of his dad. The one on the left is a cultist. The New Church of the Celestial Germination (which is under surveillance by the Floral Department of Investigation). In a few weeks he’ll drink weed-killer amongst a hillside full of other flowers and kill himself. It’ll be called the greatest peacetime gardening disaster since the Great Rosebush Burning of ‘74.)
“Dying your hair red, are you? Think that will help? We’re all still going to die.”
step 4: lost in thought, when you come out of it, you realize you’ve been staring blankly at a stranger the whole time and you feel like an asshole.
“Her blowjobs would subsequently conclude, if at all, in a despair-inducingly form of vague, low-level orgasm that’s distinguishable from pre-cum only by an MRI, which caused me to feel like my penis was trying to eat itself or jump off a cliff or something.”
i cannot save you all from drowning and i am sorry
[/u]“... oh. Oh. You two. You two are fucking strange. Would you like some mushrooms? I have mushrooms.”
step 5: cram heartworm medicine into a dog treat; think about cramming a razorblade into the pineapple of someone you hate.
“They, much like the Wu-Tang Clan, are not to be fucked with.”
2 hamsters for sale: small; young.
Will sell to children only;
fetishists/deviants need not call –
we don’t need your kind.
We are good people.
Will sell to children only;
fetishists/deviants need not call –
we don’t need your kind.
We are good people.
“A body best suited for stationary pursuits.”
step 6: maybe just let things go. maybe just be tolerant and easy-going and not worry so much. maybe ease yourself towards acceptance and quietude, towards... what, death? no, that doesn’t seem right. you’re supposed to resist death, i’m sure of it.
“The lime, having recently been declared the least erotic of all fruit, called this announcement, “just one of the thousands of faults of the modern human being, who doesn’t want to work to get anything and only cares about orgasming within a few minutes, who likes to complain for hours each day about the ‘meaninglessness’ of life, the fleeting nature of pleasure, the evils of capitalism and the bourgeoisie and gentrification, the likes and passions and accomplishments and lives of others.”
medicine worse than the disease
[/u]“Stole $7 out of the pocket of a child. Used it to buy ricecakes. Fuckin’ love me some ricecakes.”
we’re glad you are beginning to [understand](!)
though we would like to again stress
to please try to keep your thoughts
to a bare minimum in order to receive
the full extent of [benefits] from this poem
“I awake and the birds are singing. God help me, I’m killing everyone.”
step 7: think that all of life just seemed to be one thing: one slapdashed, stuffed cornish hen of a thing, flying out of the oven and straight through the window, into the night and into orbit until the thing that used to be familiar and under control was just sort of out there, unknown, by itself, charred, brainless, and rarely seen.
“This was the best day of my life. Or, at least, it wasn’t the worst day of my life. That will be tomorrow.”
step 8: remember how a weightlessness entered your blood – a ventilation of sorts, like a bacteria of ghosts – and how your heart, your small and weary core, neglected for the past few years, vanished a little more, from the center outward, and took on a strange and hollowed heaviness like a weakly inflated party balloon.
“The next aisle is the oriental food and that is my favorite aisle because it reminds me that America is not the whole world and maybe other places aren’t so terrible as this place and that killing myself might be less productive than just going to some faraway country.
“I think that maybe it is also not normal that the oriental food aisle is some kind of suicide prevention.
“Oh yes sesame noodles. I feel a surge of a deep spiritual calmness and I think I definitely won’t die any time within the next couple of days at least.”
i nodded like i understood
[/u]“Do you know how many nuts you can eat before you get sick? I do. Four cans. Four whole cans.”
thank you for your cooperation thus far
though it appears your success rate remains
at [zero]
please take comfort in the fact that phase two
is considerably less pleasant(!)
“When you’re walking, running, or jogging pathetically in an attempt to keep up with fitter, healthier friends.* *--for example”
step 9: realize that your sadness is not a sort of desperation or despair, nothing like desperation or the cries of some heartbroken character on the television screen, but more of a plain, artless kind of loneliness. something uninteresting, factual, straightforward. something taught on flashcards, like unfinished coloring books of forgotten things (snowflakes melted mid-air) and a few real-world reflections (halloween night asleep on the couch, Saturday dinner in a parking lot looking through the windshield of the pizza place you just got take-out from).
“You’re sleeping here? In the grass?”
“I am sleeping, yes, here. On the ground. In the, yes, grass.”
You are a fucker.
Please be so kind as to sign
this notice of agreement
as to avoid any unnecessary conflict
upon my physically beating you.
Please be so kind as to sign
this notice of agreement
as to avoid any unnecessary conflict
upon my physically beating you.
“Hopelessness is the most powerful human emotion. That sort of bleak, empty feeling reaches a point that is just far outside of the potency of any other human emotion. There’s no positive equivalent to suicidal.”
the air was thick with alcohol
[/u]“There’s a knock on the door. You immediately assume it’s the police.”
step 10: acknowledge the future as dully unstimulating as a tropical fish: colorfully darting, then slowing, then not floating to the top but just sort of self-destructing and being gone. and take no comfort in the fact that you aren’t alone in this.
“I think there’s a distinct possibility that I am the most powerful being in the universe. Sometimes I just think: Holy shit, I just made that thing happen with my GODMIND.’ You know?”
we would like to [acknowledge] the lack of control
you now exercise over your entire body
we have that affect on people [sometimes]
please attempt to focus on the pain
we apologize for the inconvenience
“Yes. Let’s everyone on this plane go to Paris. Let’s introduce ourselves to each other and live out the plot of a shitty romantic comedy.”
“Fine.”
at night, we’ll send out mass, illogical emails.
during the day, we’ll ride the trains.
[/u]during the day, we’ll ride the trains.
“I am exactly 200% happier than you.”
“How did you possibly calculate that.”
step 11: recognize that everything you do is an attempt to escape the dull repetition of this reality. movies, drugs, emotions, plagiarized pseudowisdom, several failed attempts to find some sort of spiritual understanding, have all been so you can convince yourself that “this reality” and “this normal” isn’t all there is. but it is all there is and you want to die.
“How do we live with ourselves again?”
“You have gin. I have twitter.”
step 12: note that the future is full of people talking about what the future is going to be like
“Cutting corners like it’s crunch time at the circle factory.”
quetzalcoatl and ganesha get hammered
[/u]“Oh, you got that pen-holder.”
“Yes.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
“The pen does not fall out with much regularity.”
“Oh, good.”
step 13: life, you learn, is not easy. life is not cake. life is not delicious carrot cake. it was something else. a failed attempt at a birthday party for yourself. you, the botched clone of you, the oakland raiders. berry-berry kix, lo mein grease on paper plates, a dwindling supply of the last food that doesn’t make your insides curl into knots.
“I pour small amounts of sunflower seeds into the palm of my hand and throw them into my facecave.”
Casual chit-chat;
nothing too deep/serious or personal
-- $15 an hour.
nothing too deep/serious or personal
-- $15 an hour.
“Just let me have a problem. Don’t try to fix it or understand it or resolve it. Just let me have a problem.”
step 14: try to comprehend what it would be like to be a single other person. just being anyone but you, whether someone from japan or myanmar or across the street or your best friend and you can’t even fathom it. you are unable to even vaguely understand what that must be like and you wonder how you can feel empathy at all but you do and maybe, you think, life is just paradoxical and that you should stop trying to make sense of it in the first place.
“I have to make sure when I eat a piece of candy that I move it around in my mouth like a labyrinth because if it hits the magic tooth, it makes me forget my middle name for two hours.”
three days at the bottom of the ocean and the first fresh breath of air after
[/u]“Everyone has experienced problems related to a relentless sense of hopelessness, but few realize that an inefficient or insufficient consumption of a wide variety of easily accessible narcotics is responsible for their lack of a successful repellant to this philosophical pest.”
unfortunately, phase two does not seem
to have been very successful
next time, however, we’ll
FOCUS ON THE PAIN
FOCUS ON THE PAIN
FOCUS ON THE PAIN
IT IS THE WAY OUT
“Sounds like the quiet, polite mumbling through the door of a doctor’s office.”
step 15: stop going to classes. apply for jobs in little italy. try not to think. try just to love. anything at all, try just to love it. but it doesn’t work. love doesn’t work that way. love isn’t sold by the plate. love isn’t fourteen dollars and topped with marinara sauce at the place down the street.
“I don’t think anyone likes Arcade Fire. I think everyone just pretends to like them because they think they should. They think they should be the person who is really into Arcade Fire. But no one really likes them. If someone says they enjoyed a whole Arcade Fire album, I don’t believe them. No one likes Arcade Fire. But we all have agreed to pretend we do and not call out each other. When did we make this agreement?”
i believed in you and he never did
[/u]“And she was lovely and eloquent and unique and seemed to embody all of the fictional characters I’d fallen in love with over the years and she was beautiful and clever and all of those other things that people like me say about people like her.”
“Was she? Was she really all of those things or did she just have short hair and a tattoo?”
step 15.5: think that if love exists as an animal, it is probably bigfoot. if it didn’t exist, ti didn’t matter. people made models of it and took pictures of it and the hoax was good enough. the idea of it. though some people feared it and wished it would just go away and had their lives insured against being eaten by it. were you that person?
“I’m buying this mach-3 turbo. The package implies that it is perfect for my purposes. Try to fucking stop me, go ahead.”
step 16: stop caring about politics. hope that terrorists take over manhattan. hope they attach outboard motors to manhattan and drive the whole island like a barge into the atlantic. hope they cruise around the world and throw a party. low-key with virgin pina coladas.
“I’d like to be the kind of person who likes soccer. I like the idea of soccer. But watching it for five minutes makes me feel like finding the most beautiful person I can and beating them over the head with a piece of priceless jewelry.”
iiiiiiii will be your guide in the journeyyyyyy
andddddd i hope to be of assistance without
intruding more thannnnnnn is
absolutelyyyyyyyyy necessary
“It seems to me like pretty much everything in life is some sort of middle ground. Mild to moderate. Partial. There are very few objective and absolute things, but brains like objectives and absolutes, and they make them out of half-assed things whenever they can. People are dumb.”
step 17: think that you’re wrong. think that maybe reality functions differently than you’ve been perceiving it. think that maybe you’ve been looking at everything wrong your whole life. begin to consider the legitimate possibility that – no, you stop thinking. your brain just gives right the fuck up. then you think, ‘i hate myself’ in a manner that is tonally incomprehensible.
“Sad moments would be easily dealt with if they could just be hit hard and be over with. But they can’t. They drag on. For days. Weeks. Months. That’s the heart of human suffering. We’ve only got to eat, breathe, and reproduce, and we’ve got ninety fucking years to do it. That’s just too long. Everything takes too miserably fucking long.”
death of a family pet, the
[/u]“I’m going to break his skull in. Is everyone okay with that? If anyone here isn’t okay with that, could you raise your hand so I know?”
Lingerie (assorted).
Will make you seem slightly more attractive
than you actually are;
unlikely to stop asshole husband
cheating on you with 26 year-old secretary.
Will make you seem slightly more attractive
than you actually are;
unlikely to stop asshole husband
cheating on you with 26 year-old secretary.
“The best way to keep teenagers off of your property is to hang up a variety of posters advertising physical labor jobs. This represents a nearby opportunity for a correlation between hard work and reward – something teenagers have an almost-Jungian inherent aversion to.”
an instant of existence
at the table in the kitchen
how well do you remember your childhood?
you are going to be okay
i promised you that you would be okay
i care a lot
is that okay with you?
i trust you
i care a lot
where are you going?
remember me as 3am
[/u]“I don’t know how to interact with humans.”
hello(!) greetings and welcome
in this poem, words specifically chosen
for their [desirable] affect on your mind
will be carefully delivered to your body
through a cool, blue-colored liquid
“You’re sure that nobody has ever felt this much emotion before ever. Or at least, if they have, they’ve never done it at 4am on a railroad track in an obscure West Virginian suburb.”
step 18: who the fuck knows at this point. maybe you’ll invent something. maybe it’ll be really hip and you’ll be really famous and you’ll be sponsored in japan by a medium-famous energy drink company with an ironic name.
“How could they make it any worse?”
a dozen lonesome ghosts standing between you and i
[/u]“Poison. Poison was how they could make it worse.”
Why pay for store-bought suffering
when you can make your own at home
for the low everyday price
of a few poorly chosen words?
when you can make your own at home
for the low everyday price
of a few poorly chosen words?
“ You said I’d been drinking. You were so right.”
step 18 but better: no maybe you’ll create a really useful bathroom-related device that makes lives all across the first world more convenient (third world doesn’t have bathrooms, have no ideas for how to help them, probably something rice-related). then you remember that your idea for a bathroom-related device has been developed exactly as far as this one sentence in your head about ten seconds ago and give up.
“You screamed. You fucking roared. You shoved forth every ounce of energy inside of you and erupted it forth through your neck, veins throbbing, jaw hinged wide. You screamed like you had never screamed before, and not because you felt any enthusiasm or rush, not because you felt “alive” or happy – you didn’t feel any of those – no, you screamed at yourself for not feeling them. You screamed to God and spat in his face for not giving you that rush. Your rush was an antirush. And you screamed alright.”
i am maybe not a human
[/u]"She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director."
step 19: spend your days watching tv and just dwelling on shitty things. when a scientist on tv points to a series of jagged lines on a computer screen and says something complicated about what they signify, you think: he’s bullshitting. it’s just a fucking line, you think. fuck everything, you think
“The place was packed as though every square foot that went unoccupied for five minutes must have shamed its family and should be destroyed with a jackhammer.”
Do you sleep in the most comfortable bed
in the world? Of course not,
as it’s owned by a Japanese billionaire.
But we saw a picture of it once
and we modeled all of our beds off of
what our friend Jeff says it’s probably like
(though obviously we can’t be sure).
Still probably a step up for you.
in the world? Of course not,
as it’s owned by a Japanese billionaire.
But we saw a picture of it once
and we modeled all of our beds off of
what our friend Jeff says it’s probably like
(though obviously we can’t be sure).
Still probably a step up for you.
“Are you high enough to smoke this? Holy god you're Spongebob Squarepants under the fucking sea.”
we apologize for that
unexpected complication
we are doing everything we can
to resolve the issueisthatokaywithyou?
the answer is blowing in the:
step 20: guzzle antitussives
“Portugal: best known for being the most Portugese country in all of Europe,”
it is spring above a dark sea
[/u]“My hat was described as “pimptastic” by a few white youths.”
step 21: watch low budget indie films you torrented and send text messages about potential future drug deals.
“Smells like gatorade.”
striving boldly into new areas and losing interest almost immediately thereafter
[/u]“That feeling when something warm splashes on your face and you know you’ll be known as the school slut by tomorrow afternoon.”
hello(!) greetings and welcome
in this poem,
step 22: click on an online video, watch the 30 second pre-video advertisement, then shut the video off. what the hell is wrong with you.
“A strange profession, like crab-husbandry.”
step 23: put your wallet into your back pocket. think about a huge natural disaster that kills everyone and take another bite of pizza.
you may emerge from this more dead than alive
[/u]all of this is going to vanish
as quickly as it arrived
flood lights illuminating
midnight highways
put the windows down it is summer[/color]
hello(!) greetings and welcome
in this poem,
invading the human brain with four-hundred armed men and a tank
[/u]“Thank god you are here.”
step 24: wonder why everyone seems to talk in half-riddles or use vague references and despite a general level of honesty, lack the ability to be blunt and speak plainly. then think that maybe doing so would remove some basic level of romanticism that’s necessary for finding enjoyment in anything. maybe if everyone was completely blunt and straightforward things would seem so off that they would become unappealing and repulsive. maybe a certain amount of delusion is good.
step 25: consider the fact that your past self was a fucking idiot relative to your current self so that your current self is probably just a fucking idiot who doesn’t know it yet.
“i made my way to someone
with a name-tag and that
felt comforting. felt familiar.”
my arm wrapped around
her ribcage and yeah
hell(o!)greetigNSndawlEcome
step 26: consider accepting sadness. maybe being sad isn’t awful. maybe being a sad asshole will be your shtick. like house. house is cool.
you are not going anywhere, you will die here, or close to here
[/u]step 27: make yourself cry so hard that your heart turns into a small mouse of some sort and escapes your body through your choking mouth and you just fall over dead.
how well do you remember your childhood?
sky color: indiana red
the sprawling grey like (cloud-stained body of water)
high-tops pounding out a beat
hot pavement (cool, blue-colored liquid)
you are already where you are going
[/u]sun-stained fairgrounds!
there’s a heartbeat in the dial-tone!
oh, yes! another, even nicer, simpler sort of day!
oh and the summer!
don’t you remember it?
it’s the snowfall coming
and it’s the falling down
this is what the note said:
i love you i love you i love you
thank god you are here
aurora borealis
[/u][/color]step 28: gaze at the glowing teleprompter and consider that there is nothing stopping you from killing or raping most people who are physically smaller than you but you don’t do it anyway so you’re probably not that awful really.
“We should build planes. Like, little ones. Out of balsa wood, yeah.”
“Nothing you’ve said has made any sense. Nothing you’ve said has made any sense.”
step 29: consider that some people view the world in a 3d range of happy/sad/indifferent. some more emotional people are in a 2d line of happy/sad. think that you are a 1d point of ‘oh god’.
finally arrive on the runway
it is summer and it is nighttime
and i am free and so are you
and here is the Goodness!
Haha, do you see it? I found it!
they have transcended this existence and become immortals
[/u][/color]The Goodness is here
the Goodness is flowing
through a cool, blue-colored liquid
step 30: focus on the pain
the catharsis of overwhelming grace
[/u]hello(!) greetings and welcome
this is a new beginning
“Haha!” [/blockquote]
