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July 14 - August 17, 2022
David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
Some people see my stitched and bandaged gashes and my cauterized holes and say, there goes a bitch who has really fucked herself up for good. There goes a real mess. They think they’ve seen a tragedy. But these people don’t know the first thing about scars. They’ll never understand how I could be so proud.
SELF CARE
Masterpiece
He gave me that swollen look like he wanted to do some random acts of kindness at me which is a thousand times worse than any rival witch’s evil eye. The REAL creeps in this world are optimists.
The Church always gets its cassocks in a twist about witches but witchcraft has all the props I do like about religion that I first acquired in church anyway: 1. singing and chanting in dead languages, 2. lighting things on fire, 3. impractical headgear.
They must have known we would be a variety pack of undesirables because they were the most diverse model minority trio of fuckos. One had an expensive salon version of a do-it-yourself haircut and tattoos on her face. She looked like she’d really turned her shit around with rehab or Jesus or lifestyle blogging.
Father Gaspren told them, “Please, no soliciting” and they took it for a joke (I’ll give them that one because “Don’t come here to forcefully sell things” is kind of a hard line to defend when you’re the colonial proselytizer, oopsie doopsie).
“Pardon us, Father,” they said. “I thought all were welcome in God’s house?” So I grabbed a thurible and swung it around my head like a slingshot and got in all their faces and chased them out the front steps screaming, “YOU LEAVE GOD’S HOUSE ALONE!” but by the time I came back the movie was completely over. I HATE professionalism and professionals!!!
A world of terror has at its core the god of money and not the people.” Back in Priest Mode. “You would have made a cool punk,” I told him.
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?
There was a white pill that I could take every day but it would make me much fatter and it might make me cry. There was a yellow shot I could take every week but it would make me much hairier and I might stop crying altogether. She presented both options as hopeless, because if I changed my mind, I’d be permanently fatter or hairier, by which she meant uglier, which even doctors equated with unhealthy.
My brother thought that he might burn the fairy out of me when we were children. He had learned about them in school. Common wisdom held that a fairy would reveal itself if held to flames or iron.
I understood what they had worked so hard to teach me. A changeling was a devastating loss to bear for any parent. A changeling was a queer and sickly substitute for the good and healthy child they had planned for and expected, the child that had been stolen from them.
“My parents, hm? Mother, father, brother, sister, family.” She over-enunciated the words, rolling and stretching each syllable in her mouth like it were taffy. “Seems like some kind of weird blood cult. Since you mention brainwashing and all.”
I hated the grinding sound of the motor and the way the cut scent of the lawn that everyone else found so pleasant was, to me, so clearly an odor of distress.
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?” “I don’t know, Seb,” Yonatan has that weary air he puts on whenever he plays the long-suffering burnout. “Maybe that excludes, like, sales and life coaching, but you’re sort of describing most gigs.”
Maybe, like, let people like things.” “Oh, absolutely not.” Yonatan looks more alive and engaged than he has all day. “It’s absurd how compulsory fun and positivity are.”
Everyone he knows who is at least half-way sensitive or self-aware does, because even though his parent’s generation sort of invented pre-internet self help, anyone who grew up online has the full vocabulary of a mental health diagnostic manual and critical theory if both were run through the biggest, worst game of telephone where the telephone is logging on, and not even through a telephone line like old-school dial-up, just twenty-four-seven, wirelessly-transmitted, context-free, bot-posted ideas about why everyone is so fucked up all the time.
many varied grandparents and great-grandparents came to the area same as tens of thousands of others did in the Eighteen-Hundred-and-Industrialization times: from elsewhere, to work in the mills and factories that surged along and over the Immaculate, powered by the current. The water flowed in through turbines and out through waste and exhaust pipes that brought inventive new colors and temperatures and textures to the river’s ecosystem.
No matter the industry, these executive types slobbered from the same dog dish of bullshit and expected everyone to smell charisma on their breath.
How’s the Robber Baron’s Ball or whatever? Haha LARA: pretty restrained reception vibe for a bunch of settler colonialist gentrifying war criminals out to conquer the moon!!!
everyone leave the moon alone! LARA: leave space alone, actually LARA: she doesn’t want us there LARA: it’s against the rules on an existential/moral/ethical level to try and live there and you go immediately to hell if you try to profit off it
Sebastian might like to change his mind by going back in time to never having made a decision at all. Linear time is so confrontational.
