Feed

by M.T. Anderson

It’s strange — once you start listening to wailing that’s also singing, that’s also like a ritual, you start to wonder — how much does anyone really miss anyone else? How much are they just crying because it’s what they have to do, the song they have to sing?

I deleted everything she had sent me.

Fucking asshole

No, I didn’t get anything. Any memories or anything.”

Liar, piece of shit rich bitch kid.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, great. So that’s going wrong, too. My chat and messaging. I wondered why you didn’t say anything. Oh, god. Oh, shit.” I didn’t say anything. I just stood there.

Fuck Titus so much. He's just letting her think she's malfunctioning that much. What a dick.

She laughed really short and harsh. I didn’t think she should joke about that, because you just don’t joke about your life. Especially because it can make people really uncomfortable, if you have something wrong with you, and you keep bringing it up in certain ways.

Titus really is all up his own ass.

She grabbed me when we went through, like it was romantic, and she had the front of my coat in her hands, and she pulled me right up to her and kissed me. She whispered, “I want to experience everything, Titus.” I said, “Oh. Okay.” I hoped she would like get the signal, which was the null signal.

“It feels like being felt up by a zombie, okay?

Yup, I hope this prick dies.

The first night. That guy. The hacker. It was like I was being punished for even trying.

“You mean ‘sorry.’” She looked up at me, with her eyebrows weird, and what that kind of “sorry” meant to both of us was that it was over, that I had just broken up with her. “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry in that way.”

“Do you know why the Global Alliance is pointing all the weaponry at their disposal at us? No. Hardly anyone does. Do you know why our skin is falling off? Have you heard that some suburbs have been lost, just, no one knows where they are anymore? No one can find them? No one knows what’s happened? Do you know the earth is dead? Almost nothing lives here anymore, except where we plant it? No. No, no, no. We don’t know any of that. We have tea parties with our teddies. We go sledding. We enjoy being young. We take what’s coming to us. That’s our way.”

She was crying. It made her ugly. She crossed her arms on her lap. I thought how ugly she was. Her one hand was limp, like a flipper.

It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it.

My mom had lost so much skin you could see her teeth even when her mouth was closed.

It was weird to be in the room with her. It was like being in the room with her if she was wood. It didn’t feel like you were in the room with anyone. You could stand there and you would feel completely alone, like you were just in a room with a prop. You could watch the prop, and not feel anything, or remember anything about how the prop used to joke with you, and how you wanted to kiss it and feel it up. I had thought it would feel like a tragedy, but it didn’t feel like anything at all.

The worst stage was when one could tell she was still awake and almost alert, but she knew that nothing worked. Imprisoned. She was imprisoned. In a statue like the Sphinx. Looking out from the eyes. Her own mind, at that point, was as small and bewildered as a little fly. Behind great battlements.”

“Sorrow,” he said, “comes so cheap.”

“We Americans,” he said, “are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they were produced, or what happens to them” — he pointed at his daughter — “what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.”

“And the worst thing,” he said, “is that you made her apologize. Toward the end. I didn’t say anything to her, but she told me she was apologizing to you for what she said, for how she behaved. You made her apologize for sickness. For her courage. You made her feel sorry for dying.”

Go Violet's dad! Take Titus to task. The fucking prick.

Go along, little child. Go back and hang with the eloi.”

“There’s an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we’re all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there’s nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.”

us: If you just get this, and buy this, and order that, you’ll be cool, and you’ll be loved. See how much fun these kids are having? If you want to be wanted, then you need to want what other people want. And other people — what they want is this. Buy it. Buy it now.

But even then I was still tapped into a wider system of corporate communication. Already my dreams of who I wanted to be, my understanding of who I had been in the past, my hopes for who I’d become in the future — these things had already been influenced and perhaps even constructed by advertising images, movie sequences, and prime-time TV,

I don’t think this would have been an interesting book to write (or to read) if I had only hated the hyper-marketed world I describe. For me, the key to the discomfort — and the exploration — is how much I love some of it, how much I still do want to be slick like the people on the tube, beautiful, laughing, surrounded by friends.

Now I am more worried by how this media shell actually insulates us from understanding the world around us.

Subjective versus objective reality.

Our winter clothes are stitched together in concrete bunkhouses in tropical climes.

Free Labor Zones

We’re responsible for a world we don’t understand.

I believe it already was the reality when I was writing. I was already dreaming in advertisements.