Experienced professionals? They have dragged out their life in stupor and semi-sleep, they have married hastily, out of impatience, they have made children at random. They have met other men in cafes, at weddings and funerals. Sometimes, caught in the tide, they have struggled against it without understanding what was happening to them. All that has happened around them has eluded them; long, obscure shapes, events from afar, brushed by them rapidly and when they turned to look all had vanished.

And then, around forty, they christen their small obstinacies and a few proverbs with the name of experience, they begin to simulate slot machines: put a coin in the left hand slot and you get tales wrapped in silver paper, put a coin in the slot on the right and you get precious bits of advice that stick to your teeth like caramels.

yeah.

we are imprisoned in an endless sea of ice. . . . we have told all the tales, real and imaginative, to which we are equal. time weighs heavily upon us as the darkness slowly advances.

“O ghosts of fuckin’ mist and ice, guide this blessed fuckin’ vessel to the wastes of the South Pole. May our boots taste that dead earth at first light. Amen.”
—Gritt Calhoon

one of the most revolting images i can think of is two human beings pantomiming being in love. there are subtleties in the real thing and then there are all these other people in their weird cardboard worlds with their weird cardboard love. i’m trapped in a nightmarish disneyland where i can see the zippers on the backs of the costumes of all you fakers.

you’re going to end up killing me, but then at least you never fooled me. yeah.

i would rather read an article titled “the top 10 types of elephant turds you’ll encounter” than one titled “the top 10 types of new yorkers you’ll encounter” (i just saw a similar article)

this place will be my tomb!!

jusy fyi it is snowing like hell outside and also i am evil now

Herman Melville wrote this to Nathaniel Hawthorne:

. . . the calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose, —that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning upon me, holding the door ajar.

One of the realest dudes who ever lived, no doubt about it.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, where visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.

wow, yeah

i am the inertia king in my winter palace and the planet is dying right outside my window