Family snapshot, for Mother's Day
- Mama: If she just brings her open and loving heart, she'll be fine.
- Dad: Yeah, that's almost like pepper spray.
yes. and?
a dictionary of received ideas
May 11
May 10
No one has ever asked me that before
- Would you like to hire an extra horse? US$ 15 a day: Yes/No
May 08
Shallow Data Pools
“ For me the world has always been a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on.
— McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses, 231
May 07
» The gap between your stupid face and cold hard reality is increasing all the time
For three days, my tongue was too big for my mouth. Then, I called it first stages of an inevitably life-threatening disease; now, someone allows me retroactive diagnosis. Speaking was strange, so I stopped, except to talk about the size of my tongue, which no one else could see or notice and didn’t help my case because there was nothing strange about the way my mouth moved. Similarly, regurgitating what I thought was real makes it not real and not reliable, but I remember.
These ideas aren’t new, and people have said it better, but I like the idea of it always being there, yourself as human, inside your mouth.
The stories about Morgellon’s disease— I hated those stories when they came out, but I so wanted them to be true and not the psychosomatic bullshit the doctors were calling. Fibers growing from your skin, out from your body: this is a nightmare, but a nightmare with tiny, multicolored proof. It’s terrifying because it is the artificial growing out of you. If your body isn’t real and you forget that you are too, then when I pull the strings you move.
Suspended Disbelief-land
What would happen if your tribute band became really, really famous?
May 01
“ Or you could just listen to The Lovin’ Spoonful for 6 hours and 34 minutes.
Apr 30
Rampant fandom already sloppily spilled here,
this is one of my favorite quotes of all time:
“Minimalism’s just the other side of metafictional recursion. The basic problem’s still the one of the mediating narrative consciousness. Both minimalism and metafiction try to resolve the problem in radical ways. Opposed, but both so extreme they end up empty. Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes “it” the subject of the text. Minimalism’s even worse, emptier, because it’s a fraud: it eschews not only self-reference but any narrative personality at all, tries to pretend there “is” no narrative consciousness in its text. This is so fucking American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.“ -DFW
Had lost most other brain functions the past two days finishing. I already knew how this would end, opinion-wise, after the first page, which is a stupid way to read a book but mostly inevitable. And, still, it was better.
Word: möbiusizing
Phrase: projectile-weeping
Simile: “It’s like being strangled somewhere deeper inside you than your neck.”
Pages: 694, 900
What you wouldn’t really know from the book’s inside critical blurbs (most some iteration of “hilarious satire”) is that it’s sad— a dull, unfocused kind of sad, and lonely in a way that unknowingly leaves half-moon fingernail imprints in your skin the same way remembering something embarrassing or painful does. This is something you should know.
Apr 29