"it rests me to be among beautiful women. why should one always lie about such matters? i repeat: it rests me to converse with beautiful women even though we talk nothing but nonsense, the purring of the invisible antennæ is both stimulating and delightful."
deep breath in, and release
something I evidently believe with my whole being is that continuous effort is required not only for success, but for existence. the evidence for this belief is the degree of tension held throughout my body, mostly concentrated, unconsciously, in my hips. I occasionally semi-deliberately exert energy, flexing at the neck and shoulders, walking gingerly on tensed tip toe, as some kind of proof of existence to myself, in times when it feels as though I need to prove to some hitherto unseen observer that I am here. subperceptual muscle tension seems somehow related to the unfolding of the Tao through human life, and the fact is I often am unconvinced of my presence in the world.
therefore, of course, I am not very flexible. I never have been, even when a competitive swimmer, despite the stereotypical lisomeness of that set. least of all in my hip girdle. if ever to prove the point I attempt a sideways split, groin barely stretched obtuse, someone will inevitably, hoping to make me feel better, point out that I’m attempting the pose in jeans, which tend to prevent use of a full range of motion. “I assure you, the jeans are not limiting my mobility even slightly. this is all me, baby.”
whence this constant wincing in anticipation of some yet-to-be sprung ambush I don’t know. as though constant vigilance is a healthy, open-hearted way of encountering the unexpected. as though rigidity ever promotes the supple spontaneity required to grapple with whatever will next be throw from an angle unaccounted for.
this morning, and last night before bed, I did a few yoga asanas focused on loosening the hips, which, to be fair to myself, are often a place people store their tension. I have attended many yoga classes where the instructor warns prior to entering poses that stretch the hip girdle that such movements sometimes overwhelm yogis, not merely physically, but emotionally, revealing buried worry and despair stowed out of mind. it sounds wonderful to break down and cry from yoga.
now I feel like, legit high. like. stoned as fuck. positively soporific, baby. at the same time, aches appear in response to a new distribution of strain–knee slightly sore, left side dorsal oblique mildly smarting. my legs feel like they’re going to fall off. my body is unused to being comfortable in relaxation.
not sure what to make of that, but I do know that all the increased blood flow through my hip area sure gets my dick hard.
bitter, as lime peels
Andre couldn’t even say what he was missing out on. People populated the bar’s wooden deck. Conversations, here polite curiosity, there intimacy, everywhere boisterousness: a warm ambience in minor protest against the gloom. Moments prior, considering where his head was, he decided against having Maria order him another drink, a beer this time, what with work the next day being an obstacle to the good times he imagined. Every day he had off approached in his mind as pure possibility, another chance to….something, he couldn’t exactly say, least at the end of the day, when whatever it was he hoped for ultimately, inevitably, failed to happen.
With Maria inside, Andre sunk into the margarita he’d practically chugged. He spent many afternoons on this deck, reading Flaubert or Henry Miller, but that was a few years ago now. Since getting a promotion, and therefor working twice as much, he no longer had days to fill wandering about town, fancying himself a flaneur. He needed the money, of course, so there was never any choice about accepting the position, but that only made it worse. In the months leading up to the first round of pandemic quarantines, Andre managed to establish a growing network of acquaintances and drinking buddies. But then the lockdowns, the mandates, the shuttered establishments: major buzzkill. By the time things uneasily reopened, he was working forty hours a week and much less inclined to spend Tuesday night making an ass of himself at karaoke or following strangers home for half-remembered trysts.
Was that what he missed? In a sense. On certain nights, girls kept scantily clad long past sunset by the summer heat, the World felt a great carnival, norms upholding the order of things apparently dissolved, much as his inhibitions were by drink. This of course wasn’t true, another rosy reminiscence. But sitting there, Friday afternoon becoming evening, Andre pined for the nights when cute bartenders served him drinks for free, and every new face could potentially change his life forever.
Not that he always used that free time to good ends. In fact, by any karmic accounting, Andre blithely allowed minutes, hours, days of freedom to slip by him entirely uncapitalized. Structure was good; obligations keep him honest. Whatever romanticizing he might do by idolizing bohemians belied what he knew to be true of himself, namely that he didn’t trust himself. Benjamin Franklin cliches floated through his head. Early to bed, early to rise. Idle hands are the devil’s playthings.
There are those who believe the Devil to be man’s true steward, for he taught us that even divine prohibition may be ignored.
This week though, Andre merely slept off his sour mood.
there’s no denying the reality of climate change, but
I just think it’s curious that science, the thing that was supposed to banish the demons of superstition, ended up in the same place as religion, scrying omens and prophesying The End of the World
an automaton updates his resume
some jobs higher up the organizational hierarchy opened up that I feel no choice but to apply for. this on the day I sent out a newsletter that I’m proud of but feel conflicted about, since no one cares, I’m just spinning my wheels getting no where, barely scratching the surface of what I’m capable of because any greater commitment would make it too difficult to stay on keel enough to maintain the normal obligations of a typical middle class existence. (bourgeois coward). it would be easier to feel empowered diving into the derangement process of literature if I didn’t believe doing so would only cause me difficulty and psychic instability for the sake of self-aggrandizement. like, maybe if people were already waiting to hear from me (a cushioned ego), or if I had a good literary agent (bourgeois respectability). both of those, obviously, catch-22, require that I already have work published. but the work required to get writing published is all self-aggrandizing, self-branding, self-promoting, and the pathways so esoteric to me that even if I were less scrupulous with my egotism I wouldn’t know where to start. and that’s getting worse, not better: I made a new Instagram account, thinking I would use it to promote the music I’m posting to my Soundcloud and YouTube channels, but after three days of compulsively opening the app despite there being nothing to look at, I realized I can’t handle social media any more. so that’s one fewer “democratic” means for distributing my work. but if I don’t want to do the bullshit that might maybe no guarantee probably not actually give me a chance to make art full time, then I’m left keeping a day job, and looking at my resume, thinking about further embedding myself in an organization’s structure, the decades stretching out before me like an American highway, straight, flat, and with no discernible end….there is a plot against me getting this writing done. Guilt, Embarrassment, Fear, Sloth, Pride, these conspire, contracting Agents of Distraction and Discouragement, many of whom have invaded my mind…the task must be in ferreting out these rats, these accomplices of the Organization working to steer me away from the path of righteous splendor…..
three from Dolce & Gabbana re: literature
Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from D.H. Lawrence to Malcolm Lowry, from Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier. And of course they fail to complete the process, they never cease failing to do so. The neurotic impasse again closes—the daddy-mommy of oedipalization, America, the return to the native land—or else the perversion of the exotic territorialities, then drugs, alcohol—or worse still, an old fascist dream. Never has delirium oscillated more between its two poles. But through the impasses and the triangles a schizophrenic flow moves, irresistibly; sperm, river, drainage, inflamed genital mucus, or a stream of words that do not let themselves be coded, a libido that is too fluid, too viscous: a violence against syntax, a concerted destruction of the signifier, non-sense erected as a flow, polyvocity that returns to haunt all relations.
As if the great voices, which were capable of performing a breakthrough in grammar and syntax, and of making all language a desire, were not speaking from the depths of psychosis, and as if they were not demonstrating for our benefit an eminently psychotic and revolutionary means of escape.
Every writer is a sellout. The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form of content.
Anti-Oedipus
partial list of artistic influences
Thomas Pynchon, Emily Dickinson, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Samuel Beckett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Diane Williams, Francisco Goya, Cady Noland, Mike Kelley, Henry Miller, Henry James, Henri Matisse, Robert Henri, Philip Guston, Mariah Carey, Harmony Korine, Sylvia Plath, Gustave Flaubert, John Cassavetes, JPEGMAFIA, Jay Adams, Tony Alva, Lydia Davis, Baruch Spinoza, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, the Relentless Picnic, Stan Brakhage, Amalia Ulman, Bunny Rogers, Molly Brodak, Paul Thomas Anderson, Zhuang Zhou, St Francis of Assisi, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Plato, Kanye West, Remy LaCroix, Nick Mullen, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Pettibon, Édouard Manet, David Lynch, Lenny Bruce, Remedios Varo, Frida Kahlo, Charles Bowden, Britney Spears, Maya Deren, Bunny Yeager, Ezra Pound, Toni Morrison, Jack Kerouac, Black Sabbath, Black Flag, Oscar Wilde, DJ Shadow, David Wojnarovicz, MF DOOM, William S. Burroughs, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Sonic Youth, Tim Heidecker, Gary Larson, Herman Melville, Dane Rudhyar, Federico García Lorca, Nina Hartley, Laboria Cuboniks, Mark Fisher, Lord Byron, William Blake, Prince, Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Baudelaire, André Breton, Leonara Carrington, Max Martin, Marcel Duchamp, the Marquis de Sade, John Coltrane, Kathy Acker, Djuna Barnes, the Wu-Tang Clan, Buzz Osbourne, Alfred Hitchcock, Mel Blanc, Wikipedia, Dopesmoker, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hugh Holland, Aristotle, Richard Feynman, Voltaire, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabakov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, David Foster Wallace, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rocko’s Modern Life, Jimi Hendrix, Aeschylus, Ovid, Doris Wishman, Eric Stanton, John Willie, Bertolt Brecht, Dōgen, Br’er Rabbit, Karl Marx, Art Bell, Albert Einstein, Robert Graves, 808 Mafia, Francis Bacon, John Milton, Jacques Vallée, Vince Staples, DJ Screw, Sylvia Sleigh, Robert Altman, Frantz Fanon, Georges Méliès, Dante Alighieri, J Dilla, Anaïs Nin, Erich Fromm, Comte de Lautréamont, Ishmael Reed, Alexander del Mar, David Ray Griffin, Russ Meyer, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gil Elvgren, the Gospel of Thomas, Carly Rae Jepsen, Niccolò Machiavelli
YOUNG THUG ENACTS a Charlie Parker theory of trap. Virtuosity, drugginess, genius, vulnerability, an impish childishness almost as a compensation for the overabundance of talent, the superfluidity of imagination. A Cocteau from East Atlanta, he teases the beat, skipping off it like a yo-yo, yodeling, crooning, blurting, squawking, purring, working his game on you, finessing, playing ad libs like Curtis Mayfield worked strings, or scatting and growling low like Louis Armstrong if he were sweating it out in a freestyle battle with James Brown, bouncing back and forth between personalities. His polymorphously perverse sexuality is so insistently graphic and deadpan that it has virtually zero erotic charge, au courant pimp talk channeled through a kind of private board game of his own imagination, a Candyland fantasia slimed in promethazine. By contrast, his persona oozes sex. In leather jackets, ultratight jeans and Janet Jackson piercing arrangements, he’s a Mick Jagger–ish rake on the make who is also shy and easily wounded, suddenly open for a hug. A favorite and telling picture posted to Instagram account thuggerthugger1 (5.2 million followers) captures him with his arm around Sir Elton John, posing like a polite politician in photo-op mode (Obama-alt) next to Sir Elton, who is dressed in a gold-trim Adidas tracksuit and a black thugger cap.
“Notes on Trap,” Jesse McCarthy
in a humorless mood
sometimes it is impossible for me to extend the kind of generosity of spirit that usually makes me excessively empathetic and understanding–it’s like that well is just dry, and so I grow paranoid or indignant that whomever I’m interacting with only wants to stake further claim on a dangerously depleted resource of mine. I can be irritable, bitchy, nitpicky, belligerent, huffy. it is not attractive.
I need to give myself permission to express these feelings without concern for offending people or for not being understood. not like, go out of my way to be mean spirited, but I’m allowed to create an artistic space for those feelings to be sublimated into so that I don’t feel subjected to them without agency. this can produce interesting and worthwhile material, but only so long as I accept the consequences.
basically I’m trying to get to the Sontag place of going to the keyboard as I would go to a machine gun.
schemin and scamming amidst pestilence and famine
i’m plannin on standin behind a personal canon, and in fact it’s that act that maps a world beyond appearance, your adherence to dogma it’s not comin along ya wanted a name but you keep it too tame to ever deserve to be heard in this noise and glut, girl you know I’m a slut so show me that ass and grab the cash in the safe, now I’m blastin away all day with an AK, Viet Cong hit the bong movin on, song to song, all night long I be workin & lurkin & twerkin til my shit got you perkin up even if you’re sippin from a dirty cup.