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April 19 - July 12, 2022
The first nice thing I ever did to my body was tear it open. Before then, my standard cruelty to myself was taking things in that hurt and holding them there. I said yes when I meant no: at work, at dinner, in parked cars. I tried to annihilate myself through abundance, absorbing and sloshing and wallowing along. I wanted to be swollen with misery.
Michelle Beaulieu-Morgan liked this
“Great uncaring mother of life,” I chanted to the ocean. “Drown us all in your watery tiddies. Flood this whole bitch-ass peninsula. Reduce this nightmare to crumbs. Return all our matter to the hungry universe.”
Professionals yammer on about the “mental health crisis” in These Turbulent Times, like, GEE I WONDER if it has anything to do with most people being constantly in a state of desperation to sell their joy to oligarchs forever and ever?
“I GET TO KEEP MY RAGE!”
People always get deep after they don’t get what they really want, AJ thought.
To take shape is to sever the infinite possibilities of wanting into a fragile burden of being.
It’s that feeling of having time but no future.
In my first thousand years, I was proud to have no trace of what must be shattering grief, a pride in what I thought was maturity, because I still did not yet understand that I am a great wounded bundle of coping mechanisms.
The more I obsessed, the more copies-of-copies replaced my certainty,
Choosing is extremely powerful magic. Its power derives from the death of what is not chosen.
the sacred impulses of living, dying, and reproducing. There are no simple opposites, no dualism or dichotomy. Persisting consorts with negation and multitude.
Eventually, even Pavlov found that when he heard a bell he had the overwhelming urge to feed a dog.
A cityzen is one who keeps the memory of a specific place long after it’s been demolished for high rises.
Whatever work my soul was fated for is naught for this world.”
Yearning is more radical than having because having is possession and that’s bad, maybe?
Every advertisement is speculative fiction. The ever-blank future. The myth of forward momentum. The cipher where the present gets stolen and sold off in pieces. The apocalypse is the past, the dystopia already happened, and is happening, and will happen again.
Sebastian adds, “There is not really any job anywhere that says, ‘Oh? Too sad and gay to function? Come here! All you need is a pulse and a heap of self loathing! We’ll take it.’ You know?”
he records words he sees, reads, hears, writes, says, sings, or repeats. What difference between them is there, anyway? Slogans, idioms, quotes, allusions, prayers, marketing campaigns: anchors to the delicate vessel of his memory, some heaviness, a weight not unlike certainty, sequence, and significance.
Sometimes it moves in a different direction or not at all, he was sure of that much, or it could be that his life passing by was the temporal illusion, and these moments were a repeated experience of some platonic truth he could only discover by not seeking it out.
What was the point of carrying around the knowledge that he came from a long line of people who also felt this much despair all the time?
we can pretend together that feeling good is the same thing as liberation.”
there is no safety in naming mortal power, least of all to satirize it, when all the good that does is inspire the power to take you at your word, enact your dystopian exaggeration as their next move, turn your hell into your next reality.
There is not really such a thing as selling out if you don’t have much of a choice. Just don’t let them break your heart.”
Do you love her, or, are you so desperate for recognition you will seek it even when it destroys you?
Look at how the winners get history and the losers get culture.
I should have known that God is not in the meal but in the sharing of the meal.
