Being on Earth has taught me that if you say something to someone, even if it the absolute naked honest-to-God ground-level truth, and they don’t want to hear it, then they won’t hear it.
The one-eyed man is not king in the land of the blind, he is a lonely old fool.
Sometimes on holidays I used to stroll along the sunny side of the Nevsky about four o’clock in the afternoon. Though it was hardly a stroll so much as a series of innumerable miseries, humiliations and resentments, but no doubt that was just what I wanted. I used to wriggle along in a most unseemly fashion, like an eel, continually moving aside to make way for the generals, for officers of the Guards and the Hussars, or for ladies. At such minutes there used to be a convulsive twinge at my heart, and I used to feel hot all the way down my back at the mere through of the wretchedness of my attire, of the wretchedness and abjectness of my little scurrying figure. This was a regular martyrdom, a continual, intolerable humiliation at the thought, which passed into an incessant and direct sensation, that I was a mere fly in the eyes of all this world, a nasty, disgusting fly—more intelligent, more highly developed, more refined in feeling than any of them, of course, but a fly that was continually making way for every one, insulted and injured by every one.
There were moments of such positive intoxication, of such happiness, that there was not the faintest trace of irony within me, on my honour. I had faith, hope, love. I believed blindly at such times that by some miracle, by some external circumstance, all this would suddenly open out, expand; that suddenly a vista of suitable activity—beneficent, good, and, above all, ready-made (what sort of activity I had no idea, but the great thing was that it should all be ready for me)—would rise up before me, and I should come out into the light of day, almost riding a white horse and crowned with laurel. Anything but the foremost place I could not conceive for myself, and for that very reason I quite contentedly occupied the lowest in reality. Either to be a hero or to grovel in the mud—there was nothing between. That was my ruin, for when I was in the mud I comforted myself with the thought that other times I was a hero, and the hero was a cloak for the mud: for an ordinary man it was shameful to defile himself, but a hero was too lofty to be utterly defiled, and so he might defile himself.
welp.
hey this is my website that no one reads so i’m allowed to write whiny melodramatic cripplingly self-aware posts about whatever i want
if you want to do that too then get your own website dude
anyway:
if i am a hot air balloon then everyone else on planet earth is a saddistic asshole with a blowgun
I just bought some truly terrible red wine. It tastes like toaster waffles. I am going to drink the whole bottle anyway though.
If Satan were to appear before me in a cloud of red smoke and tell me that I had died five years ago, and that he had created a new dimension just for me that was identical to my life on Earth, and that everyone I know is an automaton designed to keep the charade going, I would say, “Yeah I kinda figured that was the case.”
Man this poster is so good
(Kinda looks like Luke is chiefin a jay)
oh my god i cannot believe i am finding catharsis in the beatles
Note: This collection of short essays, originally published in January 2016, included a fifth part, which was part four. I have since removed it because the story could have been misconstrued as a sort of passive-aggressive jab at an innocent person, which wasn’t my intention, but hey: it’s gone. The rest, for good or ill, is untouched. Were I to subtitle ‘PHANTOM LIMB IN LIMBO’, which is just about the best title I ever gave anything, I guess I would say something about it being a series of quiet tragedies and miseries.
• • •
[01]
I had a sad friend in Los Angeles. She was sad and she made me sad too. She made me sad because I didn’t want her to be sad. She was smart and pretty. She was funny. I liked her a whole lot.
She didn’t like herself. She said was hopeless and futureless. She didn’t want to be alive anymore. She didn’t see the point.
We made a suicide pact. I don’t know if it was a joke. It was the tenth or eleventh suicide pact I’d entered into in my life. I didn’t know if those were jokes either.
She asked me how we’d do it and I told her I’d heard the garden hose in the tailpipe method is the way to go. My father had seen a lot of suicides like that at work. He said it looked like they had just gone to sleep.
Months later I was in Los Angeles for a writing assignment. My friend invited me over. She was housesitting in Echo Park. When I got there she was wearing a kimono. We drank two bottles of wine in the kitchen and smoked a lot of cigarettes out back.
At three in the morning we were smoking on the patio. She was sitting on a bench and I was standing in front of her. She looked at me in a certain way and I looked at her the same way. I asked her if I could kiss her and she said yes. She grabbed my shirt and pulled me towards her.
We went inside. It was a long night. She had a beautiful body. Her skin was very soft. I felt vaporous and ghostlike in comparison.
In the morning I had to go write about something for some people who were paying me to write it. I didn’t care what I was writing about. I was broke. They were paying me and that was good enough for me. They never ended up paying me.
I told my friend I was leaving Los Angeles that night. I didn’t want to leave. I had to leave. She was upset that I was leaving. She thought that maybe I was leaving because of her. I don’t know why she thought that. I told her I would rather stay with her than leave. I wasn’t lying. She didn’t believe me.
She stopped talking to me after that. I wrote her a few letters and told her I wanted to see her again. She didn’t write me back for six months.
and on that note, i just want to go ahead and say right here that i often feel like i am surrounded by people whose favorite beatles song is ‘ob-la-di, ob-la-da’ if you know what i mean
I see way too many people making decisions (or, worse, not making decisions) out of fear and exhaustion. When you let fear and exhaustion guide your decision-making, then the Reptiles have already won.
This is covered in the first chapter of my new self-help book, which my publisher tells me have all set on fire and thrown into an old swamp.
