~

Desire is only complicated when you want to find it in something that has none for you. I know I’m simple. The problem with film is that it can be boring and I know I don’t want to be bored. I could walk, but my mind still wanders because my hands are free. Ideally they’d be exploring the inside of a woman’s thigh, or covering her mouth while I say, “shut the fuck up you whore,” or spinning a fidget spinner. Or, as the film points out, I ought to be holding a camera.

What?

“You asked me wrong.”

I know what you said.

“You asked me wrong today, but you might ask me right next week. I don’t know.”

Would you say yes if I asked you out right?

“I don’t know.”

How do I ask you out right?

“I’m not sure.”

That’s not fair.

“Yeah.”

I stared at her for a long time. This girl. She’s cute.. and cool. Taller than me too. I enjoy that. Dating a woman taller than me is a scientific experiment I keep chipping at when one gives me the time of day. But I have not produced the desired results yet. She always ends things too soon. It’s because I didn’t have the data yet that more trials would have acquired. How to cuddle, how to hold hands in public, how to kiss in public. Really I haven’t figured out how PDA with a tall girl works. In any case, we started talking every day. Sometimes all day too. I asked her out because I thought it made sense. I told her I thought it made sense to ask her out because we talked every day, why not just go out? It makes sense, we’re all but going out, why not just go out?

“Because you asked me out wrong.”

I started getting a little pissed off.

“You’ve been pissed this whole time.”

How do you know?

“Because I feel like shit.”

How do you think I feel?

“I don’t know.”

I’ll admit I didn’t feel anything about her supposed bad feelings. I heard her say the words that she felt like shit, but it didn’t give me pause in a way that she would have liked. I simply thought she was lying or pretending to feel bad. I didn’t know anything except that I was supposed to say what I did, which was, “I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

It’s just… it makes sense, doesn’t it? For us to go out.

“Not if you make me feel like shit.”

Right.

…

Do you have any advice?

“Do you want to fuck this up? I don’t mind what we got going on. Liking you and not loving you. It’s not bad. You’ll leave on your own as soon as I find someone I consider suitable for long term companionship. It’s funny because it will seem as if you did something to me when you do it. I’ll say to myself and others, “so you just wanted me for my body all along HUH? Nice guy my ASS.” In any case, you’ll fully disqualify yourself if I have to explain how to get me to really love you. Is that okay?”

You wouldn’t say I’m already disqualified?

“Not really. I care for you. I really do. You’re sweet. And handsome enough.”

I’ll admit, I fell for that a bit. I have a chance! But women are clever. They’re wired to, at every moment, give a man a shot at being a man. Make a decision. Is it over? Or is it not? … How did that become my call?

I’m going crazy.

Ok there are two choices: either I read her unwillingness to give me a clear sign one way or the other as an implicit rejection. Letting me down easy at it were. In which case, I would have to commit the final act of letting myself down. I have to say “it’s over, and I must give up” without any external proof that it’s actually over and that I must give up. I anticipate that relying on myself for this kind of closure will leave the flame of my desire for her lit in the most minimal sense of the term. This minimal desire will curve every action I take to distract myself from the fact it hasn’t been fully extinguished, surprising me every so often when it comes into contact with any flammable material. So to speak. Or, I could submit myself to the humiliation of showing that I care about her like that. Trying to spend time with her. Allowing myself to think she could help soothe my soul in important ways that you ordinarily don’t permit yourself or others to consider you need. Like, sometimes I just want someone I admire to tell me that I’m smart. It’s worthless hearing that I’m smart from almost anyone. But from her, it means everything. And I’d have to let her know that, and it’s unbearable because if she rejects that sort of thing I’d be devastated for weeks and months. I would be functionally dead and would have to spend more effort trying not to die than anything else.

I drew her a flow chart with these options and asked her which one she thought was better.

“I think what you have to say is interesting but I’d like to inject some nuance into your argument.”

Oh you bitch, just pick one, this is all there is.

I have been fantasizing intensely about being approached by a woman, preferably one I found attractive and had been staring at and making observations about for 30 minutes, asking about the notepad and telling her, “I’m a writer.” And then she might ask, “what are you writing about?” And then I would respond, “I’m looking for something to write about.” And then she would ask, “what are you looking to write about?” And then I would tell her, well I’m a modern artist. I tow the line between art and journalism. I’m a journalist, but of feelings. Our experience of modern life is opaque enough that hazarding an interpretation of what it’s like to sit at a bar and talk to a woman is already considered art. Here I’ll show you what I mean. But you’ll have to bear with me, it’s important to read my writing. I’m not going to tell you a story. I am not a story teller. I am a modern artist. And then I would take my notepad and start writing this:

Journalist: some stupid comment about “the atmosphere” of the place. Some bullshit about who owns the building. Descriptions of the prices. A deeply perverse “ratio” of men and women.

Me (modern artist): I was surprised when she walked over to my table after I’d been watching her. The American mind is spontaneously offended when the gaze is returned. That’s why Americans need porn. We wouldn’t be able to handle looking at each other, much less survive in each other’s fantasy if it weren’t for pornography. In any case, my porno involves a lecture on the difference between modern art and journalism. I hope she plays along.

Then she looks at me. And then I say, see I even have observations about you in my notepad from before you walked over. And then the fantasy ends there. I’m not sure why.

In any case, I’m really going to do this. The first step of modern art is acquiring a harem. A harem is really the infantile wish for your mother to do everything for you. You really wish you didn’t have to go out and talk to girls yourself. You wish your mother would just find girls for you to fuck. The pathology concerns the repression of the idea that you want your mother to feel guilty enough about not fucking you that she will go out and find other girls for you to fuck, an infinite amount of them corresponding to her infinite guilt. Your mother is the woman you simply torture with all your demands that get increasingly complex and tortured as you grow up. The first step in acquiring a harem is finding a woman and dumping all of your demands on her at once and seeing if she stands up. It’s a numbers game really. Come up with a routine and dump that weight on as many girls as you can. There’s no way all of them will buckle. It’s just not possible.

In any case, it was the first time I ever really noticed the tracks. I get why they’re called “tracks” now. The metal that guides the wheels was shiny. At the start of the fall, I felt my body too much. At the sight of the shiny metal, it vanished again and appeared in the reflection. It was me, but over 10 years ago. It was the summer after my last year of high school. I was at a graduation party hosted by a friend. That year, the brand American Apparel had entered my consciousness as something very cool. I was an avid user of Tumblr at the time, and had been so for a few years. I was excited to have found an outlet at Venice Beach a few weeks prior. I was even more excited to peruse the clearance section to find a light gray shirt with thin red stripes. I was wearing it at the graduation party. I was sitting at a table with the host and his friend N—. N— was a year younger than me, but much taller. Something about her felt unattainable. Like a big sister. At some point in the conversation, she looked at me and began laughing uncontrollably. Somewhat insecure, I kept asking about what. And then I looked down and noticed two huge sweat stains on my armpits. Relieved, I laughed too.

Later in the night, when the party was winding down, N— and I ended up alone in the living room on the couch. Something about her felt so unattainable. Like we spoke to each other from behind a glass. I don’t remember saying anything to her. I just remember looking at her and thinking something felt so unattainable about her. She was wearing a tight dress. She looked beautiful. She had a smile made for convincing others it will be okay. And a pointy nose. She told me she was tired and then laid down. I just sat there, staring off. She was laying on her side when she tried to get my attention. She pointed at her ass and asked if I wanted to lay there. Astonished, I asked if she was serious. She said yes, very.

Thank you God for ending me before I lived longer after this moment than before, I think, as I learn the end is just time stretching infinitely along a beam of light until it pops. Desire is space after time. Objects molded by long thwarted plans and purposes sit there. You get one last look at them.

Resolved that a modern artist must live a modern life, I decided to raw dog my walk to the train station. I take the same path every day, but I wouldn’t have my AirPods for this particular journey. As an old joke goes, the Inland Empire is neither inland nor an empire. Though it is located a significant distance from the coast, every city in the Inland Empire is the same. This one’s downtown area is quaint and populated by hostile buildings that mostly seem like fronts for nothing with walls of red-orange brick. If you’re quiet, you might see a pack of dolled up bureaucrats scurrying about from one shifting door to another, vanishing. But, no doubt filing important paperwork and signing consequential documents.

S— is not quite dirty, as LA is, but it’s getting there. You can see improperly disposed trash on the floor and behind fences that block off nothing. The wall of the underpass I walk through is decorated with an impressively symmetrical parabola of dried human shit. The big urban centers, New York, LA, they have their highs and lows. Highs and lows mean potential, or the illusion of it. In LA, it makes sense to wake up one day thinking you could, say, flip a pound of weed. That’s what gives LA its friction. In S—, you get a sense of something still born. It’s as if the land itself were slowly declining, gradually dissolving into hot desert air, and the city’s construction was just a minor occurrence somewhere along that trajectory.

I was on my normal path to the train station, a path not without the danger of walking in the opposite direction of a homeless person on the same side of the road, when the smell of smoke drew my head towards an odd urban configuration composed of some contraption with pillars hooked up to thick wire, a brick wall, and trees. At the base of the wall, sitting, were two homeless guys sharing a cigarette, and emphatically reading and discussing a paperback. I had read last year that a Chinese factory worker living in a shoebox and working 14 hour shifts had emailed numerous American professors with a request for feedback on his Cantonese translation of a minor study in Marxism, The Death of the Millennial Left by Chris Cutrone. This unfortunate fellow had enough internet to use email, but not enough to know Cutrone is the most hated man in academia. These guys were likely not much better off than our factory worker. They were using a thin layer of cardboard to separate themselves from the ground and were wrapped in filthy rags. Yet, they were brought into raptures by none other than a book. Considering myself a scholar, I can’t help but get touched by the efforts of the downtrodden to reach for culture. It even makes me emotional. It’s like, the struggle for survival can never be so bad that you can’t make time for a book. The guy working 15 hour shifts, in his one hour before bed, picked reading and translating (completely thankless work) over something like, I don’t know, dating?

As I passed by, they looked up from their book smiling. Likely a leftover from a recent bout of laughter, but I read the expression as an invitation to engage. I said, “salutations gentlemen, what are we reading?” In a gravelly voice, one of them said, “have a seat.” As I did, I tried to fight the nature that curses me to say all my thoughts with my face, as the most pungent shit and piss smell that’s ever hit my nostrils washed over me. I surely failed. Then he offered the cigarette. Staring intensely at the herpes covering his mouth and then at his eyes like Jim from the Office, I declined.

They were reading Hamlet. Academics read books to write books. Good academics understand the phase of the academic cycle they’re in. Sometimes it’s time to define terms. Other times it’s time to redefine terms. It’s all very boring. Academic even. Real people are free to use language how they want. Especially the homeless. They can say things like, “the last girl I fucked squirted on my shit like a horse,” and we can do nothing. Nothing but clutch our bags and pretend we didn’t hear it. The last line of defense for a threatened soul is a bag pushed as close as possible to one’s chest. Like armor defending… Ah anyways, I was delighted that the pair were reading something as important to the western mind as Hamlet. An ocean of ink has been poured without reaching the depth of soul embodied by our titular character. I thought my new friends could help cut the bullshit and get me right to the point. I asked, “so what did you think of the play? What had you both so riotous?” The two men looked at each other and began laughing again, joyously now. I was getting excited. I smiled. Finally one of them said, “well you see, basically the main guy’s dad is a ghost.” I stood up immediately and walked away.

Now that we’re under his spell, the leader starts calling the shots. “You, see if you can walk over to the station to get some news!” “You, see if you can get a cab!” “You, see if we can get a reimbursement for our trouble from the agency!” Caught up in it, you start giving yourself orders. “Hey, I’ll see if I can get some water for the pregnant lady!” “Hey, I’ll go with you.”

It was hot as sin, and we waited for the train to open up. Contradictory announcements rang over the speakers, and at one point the train glided to the other side of the station. I followed it, while the rest stayed behind. Eventually a worker popped out and I asked him if the train would return to where I had just walked from. He said, “regrettably, yes. But it will be there in about 10 minutes.” I walked back. Two kids looked at me like I knew something. A tall guy with a cowboy hat and an asian kid with a bike. Under some pressure I, in a goofy voice, exclaimed, “erm… public transit moment!”

There might be truth to the idea that power corrupts because after saying the one sentence that differentiated myself from them, I asked, “well, what’s with the hat?” He said it was launch day for the rocket club at the nearby university, and he always wears a hat for launch day. I asked him a few more questions but at some point my phone alerted me to my rapidly declining blood sugar. My endocrinologist always asks me what symptoms I exhibit when low, and I always say I feel “sideways.” I started eating potato chips and kept asking questions. But every time I opened my mouth a small bit of food would fly out of it onto the ground. At first I feigned shock by widening my eyes at the projectile, but after a while, it didn’t matter. I was schooling the kids on reality. I told them they don’t want to end up like me, 29 and stuck in a dead-end job because you studied something useless. I told them you need to make money. I figured out too late that you need to make money. Just kept repeating that and spitting food at them until the train came. They said the Trump administration has reduced funding for scientific research at universities. Two ambitious kids doing research in the summer said they always feel behind. I hope I could get across that there are some people that are really behind.

In the administered society, the purpose of the group is its dissolution. I was happy to openly remark, “now that the malfunction that brought us together has been corrected, we may now part ways. Have a good day and good luck with your studies.” And then I stood in place and turned about 45 degrees to face the train and stared at my feet again.

~

When sports betting was on the high court’s agenda midway through the 2010s, the leagues fought tooth and nail against it. Three or four cases brought by the state of New Jersey in support of legalizing the practice were thrown out by the federal courts before the Supreme Court rather abruptly decided to take on the issue in 2017. The only real problem was that association with gambling schemes would threaten the integrity of the games. For some reason, they thought this was the thing that would finally get sports fans to realize they were consuming a fiction, living a lie. Of course that wasn’t true.

~

My early thoughts on Philip Traylen’s diary concern the fact that it blew me away. This novel throws down the gauntlet for contemporary writing in general, and whatever it is that we do on Substack in particular. There is snark that bemoans the lack of activity, the wasted words on the webpage, contempt for contemporaries. And there is action. Proof in the flesh that literature can still astound and educate, enliven and humor, challenge and soothe. Literature can still make one feel. Literature must. Everything has been drivel up to this point. Now we must change. I have been so agitated by reading this book. I can’t focus I can’t write as I face the humiliating juvenile nature of every thought and every word I dare to type and string together. Everyone feels the same or they mask it by wishing Philip Traylen would just tell jokes. It is your own soul at stake if you refuse to be educated by what Philip Traylen aims to teach.

~

~

Videodrome teases. As some sort of perverted Freudian, Cronenberg seems to have this tendency. It’s the same with his most recent film (some film with a confusing conspiracy about cancer from microplastics being a new organ). But where it gets to be too much is the teasing of the gore. Practical effects produce the best gore in film, and it was present in this film but not much. He could have added more. But he knows that. In fact, the film is about just that feeling. That a film could always go just a bit further.

~

Critique is essentially the negativity embedded in the demand for, “just a little more.” For example, a work of art can always be just a little more ambitious. For a long time, I’ve felt the topic of Art’s name in the Terrifier to be too explosive a topic to touch. I want it to be done right. I believe everyone feels this way as I’ve never seen anyone else even try. When I visited Universal Studios for the Terrifier haunted house, I saw someone wear a fan shirt that said “art never dies,” referencing the critical attitude that “art is dead,” but that’s about it. Art holds the mirror to us. We ask for just a little more blood, a little more pain, a little more brutality from our killer… because it’s what makes us feel something. The critics of an older generation helped people look at art we find boring today, the Pollocks, the Picassos, etc., and feel something (I think Ferris Beuler (I’ve never seen the film) has some scene where a kid passes out or has some deep profound experience in front of a Rothko. But try to imagine that people really felt like that in those days). In any case, it’s not wrong to ask for a little more. Art will give us more blood, but his point is that we can ask for something else.

~

After the Videodrome showing, I walked around the downtown area, which featured a small, but nonetheless vibrant night life. Really, I’m a pervert, and wanted to see if I could catch a glimpse of some young women in tight clothing. I’m almost 30, and getting the sense I won’t be permitted such modest pleasures soon. It’s funny when some feminist defends this activity against pornography, demanding men to “use their imaginations.” As if the game of leering at a woman and thinking, “well her breasts could be just a little bigger, her top could show just a little more cleavage, her ass could be a little rounder” were somehow dignified. But that’s not really what I want to talk about. I was walking around, and staring into bars, and feeling very left out of something. I’m sure it’s just pointless chatter and drinking that goes on here. But how much purpose goes with walking around with envy? Nightlife has some of the main trappings of a conspiracy: untold pleasure locked behind the entrance to a secret society. For my part, I imagined some woman exists to guide me through the initiation. In her absence, I was nothing. A pure human animal, base. I thought here enters the appeal of the strip club. You didn’t make any friends of this sort on account of your poor socialization. Fine. You can pay a woman to be your friend and teach you what you need to know about life. I thought I had the added benefit of being witty and clever. She might get it in her head that she wants to teach me. In fact, I’m counting on it. All the other unfuckable guys are fat and ugly with bad personalities. Further, they don’t know how to hear the words of a woman. I would be different. When a woman talks, I listen. I am the only man that wants to understand women. I would be… irresistible.

~

I wish philosophy had something for the soul. But we didn’t do well in school because we knew our professors, the academics, had nothing to teach us. An academic will be the first to tell you not to follow their example. These are the people we mistake for philosophers.

~

Some kid is autistically packaging the toys he won at an arcade. Either it’s autism, or he does not care that his packing tape screeches when he pulls it across the part where the two flaps on a box meet. I wrote about Benjamin’s thoughts on collecting a year or so ago. Baudelaire announced the characters to play out capitalism’s drama, Benjamin often described the ones falling out of the story. He thought the collector was one such figure. To my mind, part of the joy of a prize from a crane machine would be the fact that you won it. And then you can build a collection of things you won from crane machines to demonstrate your skill. I’m that guy that’s really good at crane games. I wish he did it for the love of the game. I wish he didn’t play the crane game with the idea of whoring out his skills on eBay for buyers that can’t play the game.

~

~

So what is the right question? I was discussing art history with my friend yesterday, and was astonished to discover, artistically, we primarily live in the dream of the surrealists. Ideology is primarily a term from the discourse of historiography. Most of the time, people are not in touch with the historical process enough to know, and much less determine their own ideology. “The renaissance” is a term brought into use in the 19th century. Yet, it proves to be so useful at characterizing a certain period that it’s almost like a product of the renaissance itself. And so, in this way, we can speak of a “renaissance ideology.” From a Marxist perspective, ideology only becomes a “problem” when it is unsuited to its circumstances. It’s a problem but a dialectical one because an ideology can only be suited to its circumstances when viewed retrospectively. The renaissance is perfectly suited to the renaissance because the people involved did not think of themselves as “part of the renaissance.” However, when a group tries to actively assert its ideology on the world, it starts to grapple practically with the way that ideology is unfit for the world. When it exerts enough force, the world starts to grapple with the way it is unfit for the ideology, and transformation in the truest sense becomes possible. This is why ideology is never “wrong” in an analytical sense. What we mistake for wrongness is really weakness. Being unable to change the world, they are changed by it. I say all this because the interesting thing about the surrealists is that they were such a force that exerted its will on history. In tortured sentences I’ve tried to describe what we simply understand as “revolution.” Art used to have them, and it’s possible the surrealists were the last revolutionaries.

~

~

What purpose could art serve today? We are most excited for art that announces a new world, but if no such world is coming, what is art really for? Have we been sidelined by history? Is our job to help pass the time? If art is for nothing but passing the time, it is worthless. As worthless as soccer. For my own psychology, art has been a self-soothing tool. A way of transforming certain thoughts from unbearable balls of tensions “in” my psyche to clear expressions of some distant past, outside me, to be pondered like artifacts in a museum. In my own way, I’ve adopted art as a “craft” as the MFA’s like to put it. I write on the train every day with the conscious purpose of practicing and honing in certain skills. It’s a diary of sorts, but the dating of the posts only exists at the moment of their publication on Substack. There appears to be progression between certain paragraphs at certain points, but they are otherwise intentionally scrubbed of identifying features concerning time, place, and the relations between the paragraphs.

~

Sometimes I wonder if a relationship should be treated like a bureaucratic process. If it were, the problem was that I didn’t take stock of everything with copious notes and specific procedures for recording data. If I had, when it came time to make a claim to what I was owed, I would have had my receipts and would have been prepared to make my case.

~

~

My mother tried to teach me something when she told me not to trust a woman’s word. Being a Tumblr feminist sjw for so long made it difficult to hear her. There is a meme about women pretending to like Nirvana or whatever for male attention. This always erupts into great conflicts, but the disputed territory is really the, “for male attention” part. Women wear costumes. To say it’s for male attention would be reductive. Meaning the real reason is always enigmatic… to men. It’s probably a source of their attraction. But women are not shy about their lack of interest in a deep reason behind their behavior. For them, there would be nothing to be interested in.

~

Men are too concerned with deep reasons behind their behavior. Men wear costumes, but typically go in search for the reason why they are doing so. This is the thin line between man and woman. If he did not madly ask why, he would be different.

~

I hate the “Yorbis” costume. But I suppose he is frustrated to find only men who live to appease women. Yes yes, it feels good when a woman likes my post or speaks to me. But fear of “scaring the hoes” has pulled the emergency break on the development of English letters. It astounds me that we can openly refer to women as hoes, and yet a certain trepidation surrounds what can and should be said because some fictional woman may or may not find it appealing. Maybe that’s marketing. I hear women are the biggest readers. Always have been. There is a type of “whimsy” that women respond to on substack, and it is endlessly varied upon for their attention by “the boys.” But nobody wins and nobody is happy and no one is enlightened. Speaking so callously opens me up to misunderstandings. I’m just saying, there must be a higher standard for posting than, “will this make a woman giggle?”

~

Of course I’m only saying this for the attention of women. On the one-hand, my mother always wanted me to be brave. She never said that. But I got a sense of it. She always said I didn’t follow through on things. Not unlike my father. She never made that connection. On the other hand, it’s clearly attention seeking behavior to criticize and complain. One that acts like this is always searching for a milky breast to shut him up.

~

~

Feelings of loneliness and despair are well-known sedatives designed to aid in self-destruction.

~

Freud saw science as both perpetually primitive and advanced

~

With the heat, you can start to feel it all slow down. I didn’t think Summer would hit, but it did and it hit hard.

~

Reading Baudelaire and his comments on the art of his time. I envy the clarity with which he maps out the territory of art in his time. He simply describes, as Walter Benjamin puts it a bit more clearly, art in the age of mechanical reproduction. He describes the modifications to the notion of beauty and therefore the task of art implied by this transformation. He can’t understand exactly why, but only in his moment appears “ahistorical” art, namely the various Neo-classicisms. Baudelaire points out that these movements were signs of decadence. They were historically learned, but unwilling to apply that learning to the present, to take stock of the new modern art. It’s that familiar image of the ivory tower intellectual that we Americans love so much. Baudelaire, making this attempt to characterize modern art, points to the dilettante, the sketch artist, the journalist reporting on his immediate situation. The fragmentary pictures produced by these unlikely heroes, tended to be of lower technical skill, and represented certain ugly features of urban life, were not easily recognized by the institutions as art. But for Baudelaire, this was it. The Neo-classicisms are new, and only possible in Baudelaire’s time but rejected art’s historical task by retreating to the somewhat easier task of making the past whole. The modern artist knows it’s not for art to fix a broken thing, but to remind us of the broken thing. To remind us of what hurts.

~

In certain practical ways, truth and beauty contradict each other. In my last piece, I felt pulled in two directions: on the one hand, I wanted to describe the ugly, frankly pathetic reality of a breakup and regret, and on the other hand, I realized, I wanted it to be beautiful. This is the difference between what it was, and what it should be. Although the confrontation was real in my mind, it was already a fantasy, and therefore on the level of what should be. So, every attempt to push the fantasy into the territory of what really is, was met with fierce resistance.

~

Beauty is an essentially formal dilemma. In writing it’s not about what you say, but what the form allows you to say. A form imparts certain directives about what can be considered beautiful within the form. In a dialogue, for instance, it is difficult to work around long sentences spoken as if they were written.

~

I read Baudelaire’s description of the man on the street, getting a feel for modern life and reporting on it, as the final inspiration that will get me to be the guy I’ve always want to be: the guy that goes out and talks to people and makes friends and all that. “If that’s what takes to be a modern writer, then a baby’s got’s to do what a baby’s got’s to do.” Then reality hits, and I remember I am poorly socialized. If I wasn’t poorly socialized, then I wouldn’t need help from the likes of Baudelaire to go out and socialize. Imagine how retarded I would be. Going out there thinking I’m being “Baudelairian,” when all I’m doing is talking to bimbos at a bar. If you need Baudelaire to talk to bimbos at a bar, then you are lost, truly lost. Ok, well then I will focus on studying for the LSAT and playing video games, the solo pastimes. Eh that doesn’t do it either. Studying for the LSAT makes me want to kill myself and all the people I game with have found their partners in the … heh… game of life.

~

That last piece might be the last sincere piece of writing I can muster. I feel an overwhelming dishonesty and scorn for life come over me

~

~

I look up. There she was, with a big toothy smile, looking at me. She didn’t like her teeth, so I knew this meant something.

~

Surprised in a broader sense, I said nothing. But a bashful smile started and I looked away. She gets a point.

~

Well… How are you?

~

I’m fine.

~

She tries to reach a hand towards mine. I let her touch it. Her fingers are just as perfectly slender and soft as I remember. Soothingly, she investigates the skin around my knuckles and tries to make her way to my palm. I pull my hand away. I still haven’t looked back. I hate my shyness. I hate my weakness. The child kicks and screams, but I hold him back and scowl at the window.

~

I miss you

~

…

~

I’m still looking down. Out the window. For a long time. My chest is tight. I can hear her crying. A tear falls down the left side of my face.

~

I miss you. I miss you so much.

~

Fin

~

Literacy is still a hot commodity. No one is buying journalists and bloggers. But if you can find a buyer, the more retarded the competition, the better things are for you.

~

I feel unconfident to move beyond the sketchbook

~

One experience I am sure I will die of is jealousy. Being-towards-jealousy

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Another experience I hate is attraction. Attraction makes me a liar. It probably makes everyone a liar. Sure there’s one partially interesting thing about you, but now I feel the need to exaggerate it. You’re not smart. You’re not funny. You’re not creative. You’re not ambitious. You’re not kind. You’re not fun to talk to. You’re just hot. I thought love could be a lie. It probably is. But not that kind. It’s my fault for lying. But everyone knows I’m a terrible liar. My face couldn’t hide a thing. So it’s your fault for believing me. But I’ve done it too many times for it to be your fault. I ought to know better at this point. I hate to be so old and so naive. A cool black guy from the 90s probably could have told me that you can’t save these hoes. But I didn’t know how to listen.

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I think I will die of some respiratory disease. And I’m embarrassed about it.

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A woman is essentially embarrassed. The connection is clearer in Spanish. That’s why you can’t stare at them. They’re never ready to be looked at.

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I understand the main character of Houellebecq’s Whatever when he tries to convince his friend that he’ll never be a woman’s fantasy, despite all his best efforts. I think when you’ve watched porn your entire life, you are fascinated by its effect on you. The way your pupils dilate and your mind stops and you get the urge to masturbate when you see a naked woman is so automatic and therefore so beyond comprehension. If you never mature past a certain point, you might even confuse this feeling for love. If you make that mistake, then you’re toast because you’re only going to really understand the signals from women that seem similar to that. It makes you functionally homosexual. You don’t really want to know a woman. You just want to know that when she looks at you she wants to masturbate. You want to know you’re worthy of that. But knowing that doesn’t feel good. Nothing feels good.

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For a few months, a quote of Nietzsche’s has propped me up and carried me around like Weekend at Bernie’s. He said, “there are people who possess so little of this force [to reshape oneself] that they bleed to death incurably from a single experience, a single pain, often even from a single tender injustice, as from a really small bloody scratch.”

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Forgiveness is a device for suppressing ambition.

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I was writing something the other day on the acquisition of the 60 Minutes territory by the Republican Party. I’m not sure even the millennials give a shit that this happened. But it seemed inevitable from my perspective, as I’v noticed the program already hollowed itself out into the afterimage of the Joe rogan Experience. It justified itself similarly: Anderson Cooper remarked, “I just talked to people I found interesting” in his ‘goodbye’ episode. 60 Minutes has thousands of episodes as it has been producing a few a week for about 50 years. The sheer productivity of the show is enviable. But when it came to saying good bye to itself, it had nothing to show but conversations that its correspondents found… interesting. It’s become clear to me that the number going up on my train scribbles may indicate productivity, but not ambition.

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To not die of experience is the first step I’ve taken. But I wonder if I’ve taken it up as sadism. My thought was that if I’ve made someone uncomfortable, rather than withdraw and ruminate, I should lean into the overwhelming sensation in my esophagus.

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There is no ctrl + z. Ctrl + z has done irreparable damage to the mind. There is no ctrl + z because people do not forget perfectly. Hell is living to the standard of ctrl + z.

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I don’t know how, but I’ve gotten it in my head that I need to protect myself from any form of emotional warfare that my exes may or may not be capable of. Primarily I am concerned with the possibility of being made jealous. And so, I submit myself to random hostile interrogations throughout the day. I demand a report on what I would feel if I learned, say, she got a new boyfriend. If I can’t imagine my response as anything but perfect and serene indifference, I begin to spiral. On reflection, it’s not fair to demand perfect indifference about these things. Especially before I’ve experienced it, if I experience it at all. Of course I devote significant energy to making sure I never experience it.

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The other day I was working on a summary of Chris Cutrone’s thoughts on genocide. A recent obsession with Civilization 6 has sparked some urgency to publish these comments. I got a sense of the moral feeling of our time when wiping out the Cree with the Roman Empire. Despite all the flaws of native culture, any native culture, traditional society as sociologists might call it, it’s depressing to see its leadership fight to the last breath. The fact that cultures do in fact draw their last breath turns out to be a depressing.

The other day I also mentioned the Hegelian defense of summary. The intention of the summarizer matters in the comprehension of the summary. For our purposes, we will take the phrase,“history is the history of class struggle.” This summary of history is, properly understood, a call to action for the proletariat socialist movement: the call to abolish class society and begin history anew. In other words, it’s a call to continue and fulfill the bourgeois revolution on different footing. It’s not simply an analytic description of history to be read in a textbook. Anyone reasonably educated on the subject will point out that the working “class” is not the same kind of thing as the peasantry or the slaves or the clergy and all the other groups. Nonetheless proletariat socialism understands these other groups, and crucially their revolts as different moments in another summary of history: the history of freedom. “History is the history of class struggle” is really the title screen for the finale of the all-encompassing historical drama called “the history of freedom.”

Once the struggle for socialism has failed, and has been abandoned by humanity, we are stuck with the universal society created by and for the history of freedom, but experience ourselves as defending the particular tribal essence of our and other groups. Out of this tension emerges the feeling of our time that history is not so much the history of class struggle, but is really the history of genocide. The history of freedom is about freedom in time: freedom for humanity itself. Modern man is opposed to feudal man, who is opposed to ancient man and so on. The history of genocide is about freedom in space. The freedom to grow in and develop a certain piece of land without restriction from others. On this view, we have the competition between particular ethnic men. The white man vs. the native vs. the black man vs. the Chinese.

When we give up on liberating humanity as a whole, we imagine that all of the different ethnic groups can and should get along: that there should be no war and definitely no conquest. We believe that freedom means preserving the dignity of each culture, or preserving its specific mode of dominating itself. Every culture has this right. We may understand that disagreements may cause tension and flare-ups between cultures, but everyone has a right to exist with dignity and so on. To dominate a group militarily, to take conflict to its completion, is ultimately a genocide. To get a feel for my point, what would have been viewed as heinous in the heyday of the history of freedom, say the Five Nations owning slaves and joining the south in the civil war, no longer demands a real explanation because that crime pales in comparison to the colonization of the natives by Europe and America, which we now call a genocide.

The problem is not so much that genocide doesn’t happen. Of course it does. The problem is that we live in a world where genocide is ultimately not the highest crime, and therefore not the highest calling for justice. Returning something to what it was… we know that’s not justice. We know it’s “idealistic.” We know Make America Great is bunk, so why make Hawaii great again? Or Algeria? Who cares? We know that won’t make anything right. What there is, is the liberation of humanity. The highest crime is giving up on this task. And we pay the price for it.

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I despise when a woman looks at me like a wounded animal on the train

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The nods to pre-oedipal psychology might have been obscure in my last post. The Oedipus complex is a set of psychological problems that emerge in societies with an incest taboo. The function of the taboo is expansion beyond the otherwise insular community. A set of psychological problems emerge from difficulties with fully accepting the incest taboo. The neurosis, from the vantage point of the psychoanalyst, is a one-foot-in, one-foot-out, situation. One part of you wants to be social and follow the rules (go to college, get a job, seduce women, etc.), the other part is stuck in some pre-social, incestuous mess (characterized by desires of rape, murder, and of course incest). Each neurotic has some way of negotiating this tension. For example, procrastination on homework can be a symptomatic compromise between wanting to go to school to please your mother and wanting to kill and drink her blood. Dramatic, I know. The social part of you emerged from the anti-social part of you, and so the psychoanalyst has a purpose in guiding you into full humanity. We enter the domain of pre-oedipal psychology proper when we are discussing cases who have made little or no progress into sociality. The classic appraisal of this condition is in Freud’s thoughts on the category of narcissism. The narcissist has no real concern for the rules and obligations that society imposes on the rest of us. He only appears social, insofar as society benefits him. But with no internalization of the incest taboo, he is just as ready to kill, rape, murder, and of course, commit acts of incest. One figure of the narcissist is the melancholic, who, like all narcissists, has no capacity for loss. However, he deals with it in a unique way. When the melancholic suffers a painful loss, say a tough break-up, he comprehends the loss by identifying with the lost object. He cannot understand “loss” in any other way besides trying to act as the lost object and cause his own disappearance. Hence, the suicidal behavior associated with melancholia.

For Freud, these were marginal and ultimately lost causes. An untold, essentially unspeakable suffering goes with narcissism. Not unlike the obscurity of the pain behind a baby’s cry.

In the example above of procrastination, we can see that symptom skews closer to “social.” It seems in the art of the 90s, possibly earlier, there is an obsession with the symptoms that skewed more “anti-social”: The depressions, the gooning, the outburst of violence. But these artists were subject to a large-scale mystification that society had somehow disappeared and we were all increasingly of pre-oedipal psychologies. It was “the culture of narcissism.” Evangelion emerges as the culmination of postmodern psychological art by most clearly representing the drama of an anti-social, but otherwise oedipal psychology. On the one hand you don’t want to fulfill your societal obligations, on the other hand, you don’t want to fuck your mom and your dad and your pet penguin. The mental turmoil of realizing there are no other options is the oedipal drama. The narcissist experiences no conflict in these desires, and is ultimately a lost cause. We have a possibility of redemption. There is a possibility beyond Oedipal psychology, but we must acknowledge the objectivity of this progression. “Beyond” is not “pre.” Beyond Oedipus is not narcissism.

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Prestige TV is to be watched with someone you love.

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Let me make this easy. Therapy “doesn’t work on you,” not because you’re too smart. You reject its purpose. Therapy gives you a vantage point from which you can critically appraise yourself.

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Mad Men should be praised for its ability to suck the viewer into the erotics of its characters. The most impressive and poignant of these dynamics would be between Glenn, a 9 year old boy, and Betty, Don Draper’s 28 year old wife.

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Mad Men, thus far, has made no attempt at justifying the pointy tits thing.

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On the one hand, I’m willing to say I’ve left the past in the past. On the other, I cannot ignore the suspicion that I’ve “gone melancholic” on account of my recent diligence towards weight loss and skin care.

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If it were identification, then it feels smooth and effortless. I feel no distance from these interests aside from the knowledge of their emergence coinciding with a loss.

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This line of inquiry seems the invention of a problem.

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Then focus.

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I can’t. These thoughts have the force of significance. Work, friendship, even survival itself does not move me like getting to the bottom of this.

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Then get to the bottom of it.

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I can’t. It’s been over a year since I decided that I could hack it with real life, having sufficiently modified my mental approximation of it in psychoanalysis. I couldn’t possibly know myself on my own.

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…

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I just want to be able to say retard freely.

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…

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My father called me a retard a lot.

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Does it bother you?

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It bothers me that saying retard makes me unfuckable.

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Fin

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From the vantage point of philosophy, Camus appears juvenile. In society, the philosopher that kills himself was a suicidal case that happened to do philosophy. The suicide of the artist, however, always seems tied to the fate of art itself. Why? If creativity can only produce suicide, then we are lost. If the “other world” art is meant to orient us towards is simply death, then there is no hope. The artist who realizes that he fails to produce images besides that of death will succumb to his revelation. His pride won’t let something else author his death.

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The innocence of the savage that never made the link between semen and pregnancy appears ideal. He gets to stay where it is safe. With mother. No competition with father or brother exists. We are all one with mother. We don’t even speak.

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People wear adult diapers and shit themselves to stay in the front row at concerts. The conditions of art have never been so bleak.

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I’ve spent the past 20 minutes trying to imagine the creativity of primitive man. Mastery over the movement between a thing and its representation is prior to humanity. Any species that shares information among its members displays this capacity. In the days of primitive man, insofar as it was an extension of nature, some people produced art and some didn’t; with greater or lesser skill according to what their biology gave them. But what kinds of problems did primitive man have? Was he so immersed in the struggle for survival that he could not be jealous?

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What Family Guy is for short-form content, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett are for posting.

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You can only really learn from something if you can accept it is over. Only then you can see that the position you staked out in the process is just as illusory as the opposition. “Learning” is really overcoming your attachment to the way things should have gone. The tragically ignorant always ask, “what went wrong?”

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“Self-love” was ideology from the moment it was conceived. Obviously, you need another person for you to love and be loved. Yet no generation like the millennials believes in self-love. The millennial fears Clavicular because he exposes the secret that self-hate and hatred of others triggers a maternal response (you are a bit dense if you do not think all love has its origin here). It’s why he will never come out the fool, even if he bogs his face with plastic surgery or dies in a pool of his vomit in public.

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