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Cast my bread against
still water. The ducks have gone,
white clouds bloat and sink.

.

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At eleven p.m. the fish tank light turns off and I snap out of it and realize that I am alone in the house. Except for the fish but they are going to bed and I never feel like going to bed. The darkness starts to bother me so I walk around turning on lights until every light is buzzing with electricity. The buzzing starts to bother me, so I go outside and climb to the top of the roof.

I walk up to the edge and I keep walking and I walk off the roof and I keep walking and I walk across the street and I sit on the hood of my car in a kind of half slouch. I watch the house.

In a few minutes it explodes and I am homeless. After the fire is put out the neighbors and firemen and paramedics form a line and come up to me one by one. They all shake my hand and congratulate me and everyone wants to give me five ten and twenty dollar bills. I smile a lot and take the money.

Everything is pretty much the same when I am homeless. In the morning, the neighbors and the birds and the sunshine try to wake me up through the windows of my car but I need to get back to the dream I am having. In the dream a police officer is driving me around and we are both happy and she is telling me that she thinks Snoop Dogg is really cool; I agree because it is true.

My cell phone alarm clock keeps going off and I let it ring and ring and ring.

Eventually I have to pee so badly that I leave the car and walk up to the charred footprint of the house. I take some time to get ready for another excellent day. I sit on the hood of my car and stare at the house for a while. All of the grass and bushes and everything else around the house are stuck on fast-forward. There are already a lot of green things coming up from inside of the basement; the humidity sticks to my skin.

I put on a clean shirt and drive to work. Eight hours later work is over and I hang the mop up in a closet. After work I will eat something from the deli. If it has enough grease, I will wake in the middle of the night. If it has no grease I will need a pop can. These can be purchased in aisle seven, next to the bottles of water. Everything I buy fits in a plastic bag and sits next to me on the drive back. Everything near the house is still stuck on fast-forward. There is already a family of squirrels living in the tree sprouting up where the couch used to be.

There is plenty of grease in the food, but I have a pop anyway. High-fructose corn syrup makes me happy for an hour. Everything is pretty much the same when you are homeless.

I sit and I stare. I have an urge to brush my teeth that will not go away.

When you are homeless you don’t ever brush your teeth. You could, but that’s not the point. Only some of us know that there is a point to being homeless. The point is a kind of slow-motion disintegration. Everything is pretty much the same when you are homeless. The squirrels in the house are stuck on fast-forward. Eventually, I put on a clean shirt and go to work. Some days I am happy for more than an hour. Brushing your teeth is a slow-motion disintegration. Every day I feel more and more alive.

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You have to crack the shells to know which days are hard-boiled. To know which ones will give you salmonella. Stack the plate with what’s left of the fridge. The appetite is non-essential. You have the right lids for all of your tupperware.

Twirl a few bits around. Stick the fork in your mouth.
Pretend the wind blows into your window, but it never gets back out.
That’s fifteen more hours logged conscious. Gut-fulls of eggshell and vomit.

Eeeee Eee Eeee

So for starters I’m just going to post this really long excerpt from Tao Lin’s novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, because I think it’s really great. Eventually I’ll write some kind of a response to the whole thing, or I won’t. Probably before I have to bring it back to the library. But here’s what he wrote:

“…He’d catch himself thinking, ‘I don’t know how to feel happy,’ or ‘I am fucked,’ or, more recently, ‘I [blank] [blank],’ like a Mad Libs, which was kind of hopeful, he guessed; not completely a bad sign. What frightened him (though sometimes calmed him) was the first of those thoughts, about not knowing how to be happy; there was something irreversible about it, except possibly by potion or true love, like in every movie by Disney, as it was like a fairy tale in that sketched-out, theoretical way. But it was a fairy tale gone wrong, without any domestic whimsy or fast-moving plot, and in real time, without any pleasant summations of long periods of despair, loneliness, and ennui. It just didn’t seem good, or allowed. It felt off-limits, or something. Was this for real? Andrew had forgotten how to be happy! He suspected that it involved unwarranted feelings of fondness for other people, too much self-esteem, a sort of long-term delusion that manifested as charisma, and a blocking out of certain things, like lonely people, depressed people, desperate people, homeless people, people you’ve hurt, people you like who don’t like you, politics, the nature of being and existence, the continent of Africa, the meat industry, McDonald’s, MTV, Hollywood, and most or all of human history, especially anything having to do with the Western Hemisphere between 1400 and 1900, plus or minus 200 years- but he wasn’t sure.”

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Eat more post-modern cake.

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I bumped into someone who was thoughtful and articulate today, and they challenged me to try and do the same. I usually just kid around about having ‘offensive’ religious views and leave it at that, but this is the long version for you and the rest of the world.

(This may not be all that offensive)

The nutshell version is that my take on things is a delightful blend of metaphysical/moral objectivism, humanism, and skepticism.

Objective roughly means that I think reality is objective in nature, though our perspectives of it are constantly in flux. I view ethical decisions in the same light.

We will probably never make the maximally correct choice in an ethical quandary, but I view a subjective ‘any/most things go’ approach to moral choice as alternatively lazy, willfully ignorant, or just plain selfish, depending on the person.

Since it would be nigh impossible to make the ‘perfect’ choice, screwing up is a fundamental part of being a person. We just have an obligation to try and screw up less as we figure out the consequences of our actions. That’s where the humanism kicks in.

If there’s a divine presence out there, it doesn’t seem to be doing a whole lot in the physical world; good or bad, the world we live in is a product of our actions, and by extension our responsibility. For me, this responsibility to live in and take ownership of an imperfect world / state of affairs means two things. First, we have to acknowledge and be aware of suffering. It’s a constant, it’s not going anywhere, and it’s generally viewed as ‘bad’ despite the apparent disagreement over which kinds of suffering are most important.

The second thing is more complex, so I’ll chalk it up to my gut for a start.

I believe we have a moral obligation to reduce suffering which we should take into consideration when making decisions and considering their consequences.

This requires compassion for others, which I feel is reasonable for two reasons. First, because our initial placement in the world (social/economic/geographic/cultural/etc) is an arbitrary accident of birth. Second, because our cause-effect progression from that point is bound to include a litany of poor decisions and unforeseen consequences (see above).

The skepticism tacked on to the end is essential to keeping an open mind re: past and future decisions, and to remain conscientious and critical rather than dogmatic or oblivious. It also nets me either a healthy dose of scorn or patience from fundamentalists both religious and ‘rational’.

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You said something like
‘I fantasize about jumping off bridges’
and it made me angry-

because I take life seriously.

because I need to feel ‘significant’

even if it isn’t as dependable as this gravity
forcing your lungs beneath the water.

I guess from far enough away
it would make no difference
if you, or anyone
were to drown themselves
in the river.

Well, fuck that.

Tao Lin. v2

Thank you Tao Lin for writing about that ‘bitch ass ho’ at MoMA. It’s definitely working for you, and I bet it could work for me. I have to work pretty damn hard to not stare at people (ok, ok ‘bitches’, swearing is hip) stare at bitches all day. I can’t imagine the kind of batshit crazy you’d have to be to sit in front of a bland forty-something ‘performance artist’ for a few minutes and just lose your shit. Vomit? Tears? I want to imagine either one livening things up but you know that in the artificial ‘art space’ the line of bitches created, the tears only added a bullshit false solemnity and the vomit just crinkled some noses and forced some poor bastard from the janitorial staff to fetch a wet mop.

You’re telling me not one person sat there and just stared her down until closing time? Not even just to fuck with her/the line of bitches? I’m losing my faith in the indomitable will and spirit of humanity. I guess I could see how she could make a dude freak out. Just look at her. I can’t even imagine her breathing.

You get that look from someone on the bus and you figure they’re ignoring you/comatose/sleeping/retarded and it’s just another day in the life. Most of the time, staring at bitches gets you at least a ‘what’ or a ‘what the fuck?’ or they’re daydreaming or oblivious or what have you, and you see them sitting there doing their thing and maybe you think to yourself: damn, I wonder what crazy mental hoops they’re quietly jumping through right now just to be – which of course reminds you once again how isolated/unknowable we all are from one another which reminds you of how much of same you are, hence reinforcing your feelings of mental/emotional primacy and uniqueness in the world. That shit is life affirming.

Thought Catalog’s staring woman looks like a cadaver. Sit across from that for a few minutes and you start to wonder if you’re dealing with a ‘bitch ass ho’ or just a cleverly disguised sack of meat. And then you remember that we are all just cleverly disguised sacks of meat that occasionally think and feel but more often than not lie prone and senseless and gurgle and slosh around a little bit because the meat has a lot of water in it. And there is a lot of sweat on your skin because the bitches forming a line are staring at you and the sack of meat is staring at you and you can feel the weight of your arms, feel the weight of the meat attached to them; there is sweat behind your eyes because they are dry and scratchy and you spend too many late nights prone and senseless and masturbating because you can’t find another sack of meat that finds the shape of you appealing.

The amount of time it will take you to cry in this scenario is roughly equivalent to

([the number of times you've masturbated today]x[the number of minutes you spent pondering feelings of mental/emotional primacy])÷[the number of [romantically appealing] bitches forming the line that you perceive to be silently judging you]

Don’t forget that in this sacred ‘artistic space’ you will probably realize they are coming to much the same conclusions about yourself that you are which is to say that they are [disappointed].

This is the part where I self-consciously and sincerely prostrate myself before my distant benefactor because Tao Lin I want you to know that I cherish and admire you in much the same way as your [loved one] does even though I don’t know you very well and also don’t know your writing very well and this is a thinly an unveiled attempt to get some free stuff from you so I can maybe get to know your writing persona better because I think I like it but I am not in like with it.

Please understand that whenever I try to conjure a mental image of you I end up imagining you staring at people. Your shtick is kind of a staring contest and I think maybe you want to make people uncomfortable because you’re curious how long it will take, and probably also kind of enjoying how ridiculous and absurd the whole exchange is especially when anyone tries to take it seriously.

Sometimes when you are a mental image in my head it makes me a little uncomfortable so I give you a bear hug and you explode into a shower of chunks and then there are bits of banana and peanut butter and cucumber everywhere but it doesn’t matter because the crowd of people enjoys that sort of thing almost as much as poetry.

My favorite part of your essay was when that guy was disappointed in you because you maybe take adderall and/or cocaine and have friends who masturbate or at least you think it’s funny/clever/useful to write stuff that makes people think those things about you are true. Also you seem to enjoy referring to an earnest pale forty-something performance artist as a ‘bitch ass ho’.

Well you are a weak-ass role model Mr. Lin but you are the kind of dude you are, and that is the kind of dude who all of us bitches expect and probably need to see publish a ridiculous ‘true’ drug-laced fragmented profanity-strewn article about the kind of absurd shit that passes for vomit-inducing art in New York City.