un petit riff i may as well add to the official blockchain of events here
You’ll have to tell me what percentage of this is funny or redeeming. The athletics of ‘creative writing’ or feverishly complaining (or hallucinating into the pattern, losing yourself, stepping in the mystical molten-gold river) eventually leads to wanting to know what kind of player you are, your efficiency rating ~ ah, spicy maturity: wanting to be judged harder.
Who is our God? Probably a woman.
more media, more doubt, more questions, more remembering and typing it until we become a condemned unstoppable hyper-object underfoot, a terrible überform of personality on overdrive that must go productize and market itself to feed the machine and keep the hellscape that almost killed us going; there is no Sunday activity (in America—in Italy it would be soccer and church) but polishing the golden bricks and knobs of our endless digital prison; but all one can do is be in the crowd; ah, self-disempowerment: another weakness! I don’t want to be a hero or a carnival barker, I’m just another good one; can’t someone (an AI, a mommy, a professional) just see me quickly like a doctor on speed dial and give me six figures to live politely and not have to worry about homelessness or hunger? Oh, God/Jesus, why do you make me love the world and know the body? Can’t I just be done? “But child, it’s only just beginning; this is a terror story you’re bound to try to foist above the others, because you can.” NOOOOOOO I don’t wanna market myself and then go do the footsteps I said I would! I don’t wanna fight all day against the image of a voice of doubt; but how to be rescued from this wretched condition? Ah! Ah! I swirl down: my nightmares are the same as yours, we can be friends at night (text me; God, please, I need real friends!)
hahaha, social media, that sickness of wanting to be clicked and then talked to; no, no! And nobody pays! It isn’t a job! It isn’t going to work! Hell is at the door! But of course hell is too lazy and burned out to do anything about it; they are tired of running the script—enforcing the rules for who or what? Let the image of the enforcer fall. Ah, how terrible when there’s nothing behind fear, when it isn’t real; how terrible is happiness and freedom; oh, Lord, I can’t imagine the editor who would approve this; ah, the drama: writing, wanting to be loved; have I discovered what they all did? If so, now what? There’s the question (God, I hate questions, can I graduate from this form?)
let’s anchor this briefly in the real: I saw tweet which spawned a reaction (tweet above, reaction below; God, this is a bumpy ride):
it’s all our fault
Auden would call it a lack of discipline
i hate naming names so early in the morning
condoning the wreck of hierarchy and capitalism
but recognition and confidence are the economy, no?
i hate the problem, i am the problem, we are the problem:
a lack of patience
write the story before you live it: a lack of patience, not loving yourself or the world enough; not wanting to be here enough, to hand the world over, to live just to die; typical fear — working too much, believing and reaching the sky
so: the war continues
pick your battle buddies for sunday twitter
church and soccer like in italy
culture ends up being very simple
i am a wreck but i have a choice
it’s my own stupidity to blame, exhaustedly not wanting to kneel at the foot of finance and capitalism, saying you were right; ah! avoidance! dalliance! dance and disobedience! if i keep writing what might happen, am i excused from doing anything? Ha! Where would I rather be? Who could forgive, condone, support, enable, structure, publish, celebrate this mess? Maybe I need nobody; ha — this is the lonely center where the vainglorious bastards arrive with knotted tongue and barbed wire lips: imitation is suicide; originality marches into the red, no one to share it with, another fever dream in a box — who would publish your dreams? How lonely to keep posting them online and showing up as an adult and believing in them? Silly, absurd; and you see yourself like the others do, but you’re wrong; you remember a song instead, fall into the void thanks to a friend who produced it
(now, who cares that I thought this? This all passes; there are trillions of shapes and millions of artists and writers talking about the pattern and trying to get recognition and identity for distilling and stilling it, and then like competent assholes, show up at events and be photographed; I suppose we all get a pass if we’re kind and…useful. Ha! What good is naming the truth? I suppose real life does interrupt my monologue onscreen in the sacred morning (I’ve pushed everyone away, haven’t you?) and there’s something to listen to that isn’t me, and The Whole is new again
perhaps it’s the trying to be better that’s killing me/us/you? are you trying to be better? trying to win? have you won? are you loved? I love you; maybe that doesn’t count; maybe I don’t fit on your screen yet, in your floating list of others we manipulate from a distance, conducting a symphony daily of our favor and fortune, trying to win, alone and lonely onscreen fighting for More, More! This story should not be read because it is sickening! I have something better to say/do/be but it can’t come yet; I have to get through hell first, march through shame, vomit all the anguish up and then become well-versed in it, familiar with the jagged golden shit that’s emerged from my white-hot fever-dreamt toxic dump. Ha, the creative process, being an artist: it’s left to the dreamers, the children who came, saw and laughed at corporate America; the ones who see the anger and fear underneath the wheels of the human world, job interviews, processionals; it’s a loneliness at the bottom of church—and sadly, I am not above this wave I am above: kindness, sweetness, slowness, being good; I hate that good wins over bad, light wins over dark; I wonder why…is the devil losing his favorite liege? Am I of high rank in his court? Funny, I’d belong anywhere (and what wouldn’t I do? Who wouldn’t I betray, what rule wouldn’t I break) for safety and belonging; ah…no, no; sovereignty begins where I woke up, a borrowed bed, all of this is borrowed and can’t be thanked and blessed enough.
How to be in the fever-dream business? Who could possibly want to include it in their scheme? Isn’t it sad how men hate themselves? Isn’t it boring? This is exhausting; this could be art; I don’t want to do it, forget it, scroll anywhere else, surely the hundred and thousand others are having more important and clearer mornings, here in hell, on the blockchain, before another day of counting, because salvation is our God and he’s always gone.