a home of floating fethrs

So that's it. The last little bit of tp on the roll. I'd like to thank everyone who crossed paths with this li'l skidmark, few in number as they may be. I'll leave it up for awhile, let everyone say their goodbyes (Ha! as if), and if you'll indulge me, in no particular order, here are the top fifteen shantytownest orgasms ever:

muh manmeemown mormasms

get down

i wanted to be a forelock dangling from under your cowl

inauguration inoculation

architectural gonorrhea

what's this? a keyboard? wow! let's hit it with our fingers! pap pap pap pap isn't it satisfying?

filibuster

like my new uranium? depleted it m'self

finally someone recognizes it

come back to the five and dime, desiderius erasmus, desiderius erasmus

well there's always something to be glad about

jamie foxx dishes on his new recipe book

no relation to biz markie, unfortunately

oldthink is crimethink. doublethink is goodthink. oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc

bank holiday

Bartlett's Quotations tells me that Francois Truffaut said "airing one's dirty linen never makes for a masterpiece." This tells me that a) Truffaut never read Saul Bellow, and b) I don't need to feel that badly about never having seen The 400 Blows. (I know, I'll get to it.) But as I end this blog, I've had Herzog on the brain, because it strikes me as a kind of proto-blog, a man's own witnessing of his dissolution (and rebirth) through stacks and stacks of effluvia, letters to newspapers, colleagues, dead philosphers, his ex-lover and his ex-lover's therapist. And sure enough it's there, the apologia I need.

And this is not from fucking Bartlett's.

I would argue that we have fashioned a new utopian history, an idyll, comparing the present to an imaginary past, because we hate the world as it is. This hatred of the present has not been well understood. Perhaps the first demand of emerging consciousness in this mass civilization is expressive. The spirit, released from servile dumbness, spits dung and howls with anguish stored during long ages. Perhaps the fish, the newt, the horrid scampering ancestral mammal find their voice and add their long experience to this cry. Taking up the suggestion, Pulver, that evolution is nature becoming self-aware - in man, self-awareness has been accompanied at this stage by a sense of the loss of more general natural powers, of a price paid by instinct, by sacrifices of freedom, impulse (alienating labor, et cetera). The drama of this stage of human development seems to be the drama of disease, of self-revenge. An age of special comedy. What we see is not simply the levelling de Tocqueville predicted, but the plebeian stage of evolutionary self-awareness. Perhaps the revenge taken by numbers, by the species, on our impulses of narcissism ( but also the demand for freedom) is inevitable. In this new reign of multitudes, self-awareness tends to reveal us to ourselves as monsters. This is undoubtedly a political phenomenon, an action taken against personal impulse or against the personal demand for adequate space and scope...

It just goes on. Page 163, if you have it. What he ends up saying is that the modern technologies can and are a vehicle for delivering Good, as in Good vs. Evil, and what it is ending up leading to is the proliferation of the "inspired condition", a state of grace accompanying comfort with death, knowledge of truth, having and giving love: all of this is available universally now, or at least in most of the western world. All these choices are practical ones that we make every day, no longer esoteric fantasies to be observed only by kings and clerics.

Plus this is 1960's, so the technologies he's speaking of are pre-revolutionary. But it's only the more true now. Click on "next blog" till you find a language that works for you, and you'll see.

I'm wriggling around it. So is Herzog, and so Bellow. But the real thing I'm saying is that opening your mind isn't just about being a passive receiver of every kind of information. You also have to open it the other way, and get what's inside out. It doesn't so much matter, (thank God for me) if it's observed or not. The thing is, it's available. And once it's available, it finds a way into the horde of collective consciousness somehow or other. To write it down somewhere there's a chance it will be read is to teach yourself a little about your own monstrousness, and to gamble that you might repair a bit. It's worth it, it is so worth it.

get your fucking passport douchebag

When we leave for europe, this blog is gonna get canned. It's been nothing but a vehicle for morbid self-attention for awhile now, which is not really all that bad in and of itself, but it's a distraction. I don't do anything creative anymore except for this stupid thing that nobody reads. So it isn't really anything I should continue with.

I think my golyadkin days are over with, too. When I read The Double, I really felt as though Dostoyevsky had found me - that he'd sat down in front of me in the Rutherford library where I first read it, all in one sitting, and looked straight at me as I read each page. Not that I thought I'd someday wind up looking out the bars of a paddy wagon at my grinning spectral doppelganger, giving up my life to a fantasy, being institutionalized. Well, excepting in my more paranoid moments, like when I smoke up (see below). But Dostoyevsky had drawn it all out for me: social anxiety's influence on one's perception of reality, which in turn doubles back and compounds the anxious feelings, and so on, until finally there's a psychotic break.

What I have since come to realize is that while Dostoyevsky fucking kicks ass (I'm reading The Idiot now), he is not a prognosticator. It is absolutely true that perceptions and social anxieties can lay a trap more deadly than anything in the physical world. Unless you can step back from it, outside of it, from time to time, and state the following to the anhedonic part of yourself that you believe to be the author of all your actions, as clearly as you possibly can:

Kiss my honky ass, cockchafer.

Which I can do. Anytime I want to. Whenever I feel that a room full of eyes are fencing me in inside myself, whenever I'm so worried about what people think of me that I feel like anything at all that I do would be a mistake, I can just remind myself that i am a gigantic drooling cockchafer with squishy bits and cartilage meant for crackling under the boot of an apathetic destiny, and that the way I die will probably be at least a little bit funny.

That's what does it. A quick exercise in agnostic brutality, coupled with a few deep breaths. A mental teabagging. And I'm out, I'm free, I'm myself. As much as anyone ever can be, anyways.

golyadkin taught me a lot about how I work, how I behave. It is knowledge that comes in handy. I still slip, sometimes, in social situations. But when I see my doppelganger now, it isn't coming towards me on a bridge, in a night's unsteady fog, with an aim to cut my throat. These days, in fact, I'm chasing it.

marijuana

i feel like people are connecting with me on only a superficial level. they are bonding with each other like little bombs of affection and comprehension going off but i am just an empty house that people toss grenades in and i just sit there, like, absorbing it. sometimes i just sit there eating. other times when a new person joins the conversation i protectively bring my nose to my finger to scratch a fake itch or if i have a drink, and it's usually almost empty whenever this happens thus ensuring i'll have like some kind of crisis about whether my leaving wi-

people are whewing outside. there were some whewers in the condos behind the save-on, i yelled 'i love you' at them, which i think made a lot of people uncomfortable. you gotta say it, though, right? in that kind of situation it's important. it isn't just the sports team that we're excited about all right? it's everything like how you, the muscular guy on the top floor looking out over 109th like you were in a soap commercial, will someday die. so will i! i'm looking at the way my bullshit lower case i is sitting beside the exclamation mark and in the font of what i'm actually typing it looks like a digital version of yin and yang, two symbiotes, a pair of siblings sleeping head to feet, or the encasement of exclamations in spanish. i realize that won't be how it looks once it's published in arial. but i can see through that back to the here that is here, too. so much of life is that way, like a completely amazing thing that you can see for only a few seconds and even that's too long because you're already thinking about how you would describe it to someone else. and it's in the describing, too, however anyone is reacting to you and taking you in - it's what you're doing when nothing is happening. something happens and we're all on the same animal plane, lower level thinking, safety and fucking, and then you have to be able to put together what just happened and feel some way about it that is something you won't change you mind about the next day. and then you have to convey that to someone else. and they're waiting.

but let them wait. understand this, it is very important. it is a neglectful conversation that does not turn, for a time, in each direction. have a chance to be heard, far more important than whether anyone changes anyone else's mind or not or whatever you think conversation is supposed to be geared at. if it takes you a really long time to say what you have to say, say it. conversation is strategy. no. if conversation is a strategy, then there is room for everyone's rhythms. if someone doesn't know how to speak to someone who takes more time to say things, there are many people that they will simply never be able to talk to.

but it's also about matching up.

the last wave of outwardly expressions of excitiement is over now. there is the quiet of - jesus, is it only midnight? it seemed much later. the quiet of the city of mistakes. actually there's probably quite a few mistakes that haven't happened yet but will. like for instance me clicking this publish post button. eeeathy munny.

plus someone stole my goddamn lunch

And all of a sudden I'm in the blackest mood ever. End of the night, I let my plant operator know I'm going home. She's just gotten married, and it's to someone else who works there, so everyone is making fun of her last name changing / not changing, and how noone knows or whatever, or maybe she decided not to change it but everyone is calling her by her husband's last name as a joke, I don't know. Don't care. But I figured I'd get in on it and address her by both names, hyphenate-style. And she comes back over with the chilliest voice I've ever heard from her, as though I'd just run a rototiller over her Pontiac.

I've never heard her crack a joke, and she just refuses to get any of mine. I'm sort of a moron that way in that I'll often say things that are funny only to me, and truthfully I've just been burying my head in books in the lunchroom lately, so often a day will go by where I don't say a word to anyone except for my crew.

I tried not bringing reading materials to work so that I'd have to make an effort to engage in conversations over my breaks, but I found that I just stopped reading altogether, or I'd start poring over the Sun, so I don't do that anymore. If I'm going to read, I figure I may as well read something good.

So I'm not as firmly ensconced into the social coteries at work as I used to be. So much of it is just the ridiculous level of turnover where it's to the point that people would appear and disappear in a matter of a few weeks. There's a contingent of a half dozen or so who've been there a few years and who pretty much only hang out with each other outside of work, and I just think that sort of lifestyle is scary, so I avoid it, and by extension them. I'm antisocial - it's easy for me. Plus I don't care what anyone there thinks of me. I'm not looking to be unfriendly, I can keep up my part of the fuckarounding when necessary. I just don't feel the need to be the one to start it.

This is all by way of saying that it's entirely possible that there's some sort of subtext w/r/t the joking around about her name that I have never been in on, and my joking around about her name was maybe presumptuous.

But still. Was it necessary to use her I-could-just-stab-you voice?

The night had been a bit lax, kind of fun, a chance for our overworked feed stock inspectors to catch their breath and take it easy on their poor fucking feet. I'd heard towards the end of the night that there was some kind of huge mess that needed cleaning up; maybe she'd been counting on my crew to finish early enough to head down there and shovel. If so, I guess that would explain the attitude. Whatever. It wasn't their mess. And it wasn't mine.

Bitching about work. Gah. How dull. How completely without class. I haven't been able, lately, to think the kinds of thoughts I would like to think. Corrective action is necessary. Perhaps I need a grapefruit juice enema. Is that a thing?