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February 8 - February 25, 2022
He worried that language had come to the Earth and invented people in order to perpetuate itself.
Language had arrived from outer space and mated together lizards and monkeys or whatever until it had customized a host which could sustain it.
Outside of language he didn’t exist. There was no method to escape. To feel anything, anymore, required ever-increasing amounts of words. Great landfills and airlifts of words. It took a mountain of talk to achieve even the tiniest insight.
Conversation was like one of those Rube Goldberg machines wherein a bird pecked a kernel of corn glued to a button, pressing the button which activated a diesel locomotive and sent it speeding down a hundred miles of polished track until it slammed into an atom bomb the explosion of which startled a mouse in New Zealand so that it dropped a crumb of blue cheese onto a scale and tipped the pans so that the empty pan rose and flipped a switch which jiggled a trip wire, unleashing a tiny hammer so that it swung down with just-sufficient force to crack the shell of a pistachio nut.
In hushed respect for the dead, they recalled burners who’d left the safety of their tribes.
Another cough of static hung in the dusty air.
Some young, feminine seeker lay fast asleep. The comatose brand of asleep. Asleep like somebody under a fairy-tale curse.
Build it. Burn it. Build it. Burn it. Worship and destroy. The festival was civilization on Fast-Forward. They embraced and celebrated the pointless lunacy of human endeavors.
It worried him, how, anymore, his only reaction to beauty, beauty and vulnerability, was to grow himself a boner.
The topless stoner chicks went home to be neurobiologists and software designers. The slack-jawed burner types were all district attorneys in real life. None of them wanted to lose this.
To young people he was proof that age wouldn’t end their fun. To older campers, he was a living link to their youth.
That might be the best any generation could achieve: to pioneer its own brand of corruption.
That word was heroin to the young. Talent.
Marcel Duchamp was right. Nobody could hoodwink the French. Context was everything. You could depict something lovely, a lovely sun setting over a lush rose garden, and no art lover would fork over a red cent. But if you executed a masterpiece, something misshapen and discolored, and you stuck it up some rich somebody’s ass, they’d pay a king’s ransom to have it gone.
it’s possible to trace the unhappy progress of the thoughtlessly discarded human viscera as it was discovered and relocated by a series of both domestic animals and indigenous vermin, namely rats or raccoons, all of whom lay claim to the increasingly decayed item, abused it, and interred it at a new location.
who eschewed taking any noble and decent action.
Long after our pets are dead, we, ourselves, will resurrect the memory in order to savor it and carry it forth into the world. We will fling it at one another for laughs.
he fought back by bleeding copiously
“We’ve failed at failing,”
“In order to know virtue we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.” —Marquis de Sade
The barriers are to exclude the innocent and the judgmental, specifically respectable women. It’s accepted that the presence of a woman not selling her body would shame those who were, and doesn’t every person deserve some measure of respect? Perhaps no one more so than the women who have so little else.
Every city has such a barrier, tangible or intangible. To preserve the respect of the fallen and the sensitivity of the others.
For that which can’t be spoken of does not exist.
rubbing elbows with such denizens who did not exist in the comfort of daylight and human industry.
He invented words as if creating tools for entirely new purposes.
he needed something beyond the standardized language that tied every human to the past and reduced every new adventure to merely a slight variation on some earlier episode.
A vivid pornography of other people’s misery.
The well-off adored scrutinizing those in poverty. The moral craved stories of immorality, more so when those stories were couched in the spirit of social reform.
All men are doomed to spend most of their existence among the dead.
Felix longed to hear the stories only told in whispers, in tears after midnight.
It is only after the intellect collapses that any true communication exists.
making himself known in the mass of swaying, salivating, sin-pitted sub-degenerates.
“Prithee pay heed, the first-most rule regarding the monster is thee must nevermore speak of meeting the monster.”
To be a boy without a father is to grow guns in place of arms and a loaded cannon for a mouth. Always, at all times to be under siege with no reinforcements.
His life was powered by a battery with loneliness at one pole and rage at the opposite
The glory of anger was how it left no margin for fear.
“Do you forgive God?”
“Our salvation lies in not only forgiving one another,” his father intoned, “but in forgiving God as well.”
Life is nothing if not a baby-oiled slope.
By the time you turn thirty, your life is about escaping the person you’ve become in order to escape the person you’ve become in order to escape the person you started as.
Everything you want to forget, you never can.
It’s like in death, we all get a Glamour Shots makeover.
I could tell her drugs were working because she didn’t laugh.
It’s awkward to tell someone in her situation that she’s not such an original thinker. It’s like the final insult.
In lieu of professional help he consulted with a Gillette double-edged. She found him in the bathtub.
She says she told the mortician an open casket and a short skirt. By that she meant a negligee. “I want my ex-husbands to see what they’re missing.”
It was like being water-boarded with no secret confession to offer.
“It would be like giving birth to only half a baby.”
It was exhausting, all that work to become a widow.
What came next is Kevin Clayton saw Mindy with her 400-horsepower, driving on her deluxe, chromed wire–rimmed wheels. So for his sixteenth birthday Kevin Clayton asked for a subscription to Elle Decor magazine. In September, he asked for a gerbil. Days later, when it went missing, he asked for a replacement. He was going on his fourth gerbil by Homecoming. His sixth by Halloween. He went to his mom’s grocery list stuck under a magnet on the fridge door, and he wrote, “We need more Vaseline.” Using squares of Kleenex, he’d scooped out the jar in the bathroom and flushed most of its greasy
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