a thread for mundane ironists

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6541

[b]Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.[/b]

All these insights and it rhymes too.

I have no enemies. But my friends don’t like me.

The best of both worlds.

Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.

And of course with each passing year more and more do.

Morning, noon & bloody night,
Seven sodding days a week,
I slave at filthy WORK, that might
Be done by any book-drunk freak.
This goes on until I kick the bucket.
Fuck it fuck it fuck it fuck it.

Close enough?

How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It’s sad, really.

If you want to call being a wage slave a career.

Originality is being different from oneself, not others.

Or, in particular, both.

6542

[b]Werner Twertzog

How about instead of playing the National Anthem before U.S. sporting events, there could be an inspirational reading of the Bill of Rights?[/b]

They’d never stop laughing.

Life is a parade of absurdities and pain, and then we die, alone, in filth. So, yes, little girl, I shall buy a box of Thin Mints.

Not much that can’t be put in perspective.

In the vastness of space, a billion-trillion intelligent beings are extinguished every second, so tell me again about the long lines at the grocery store.

Not much that can’t be put in perspective.

Why can’t I be happy?
]Because happiness does not exist.
Why can’t I be loved?
Because love does not exist.
What can I do?
Wait awhile, you’ll die eventually.

After all, no one has not died yet.

Optimists are happier, and live longer, because, as we all know, they are less intelligent.

Fucking idiots is what they are.

Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.

If only on reality TV to start.

6543

[b]D.H. Lawrence

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can grow wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes, and says, is always true.[/b]

I know: If only that were actually true.

Shame, what was it? It was part of extreme delight. It was that part of delight of which man is usually afraid. Why afraid? The secret, shameful things are most terribly beautiful.

You either learn this or you don’t.

Moby Dick, the Great White Whale, tore off Ahab’s leg at the knee, when Ahab was attacking him. Quite right, too. Should have torn off both his legs, and a lot more besides.

Written today, of course, he would have.

Here’s to the thorn in the flower!

The bigger the better!!

Life is beautiful, so long as it is consuming you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is glorious. It is best to roar away, like a fire with a great draught, white-hot to the last bit. It’s when you burn a slow fire and save fuel that life’s not worth having.

You know, when it’s not the other way around.

He knew his heart’s core was a fat, awful worm. His dread was lest anyone else should know. His anguish of hate was against anyone who knew, and recoiled.

Either that or did not recoil at all.

6544

[b]William F. Buckley Jr.

I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.[/b]

Of course that works the other way around too.

Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.

Any liberals like that here? Any conservatives?

The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana in their jeans simply makes no sense — the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy.

Remember how he handled it? On a boat 12 miles out.

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.

Let’s pin down who they are.

Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them.

I think he means the government.

Life can’t be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.

Of course he’s only paraphrasing Woody Allen.

6545

[b]God

Sometimes I wish I were real.[/b]

Sometimes I wish you were too.

I apologize to the depths of My being for creating and embodying the patriarchy.

In other words, so much for being omnipotent.

I will be meeting in person with Chuck Grassley very shortly.

You know, when he dies of natural causes.

Expect disappointment and you’ll never be disappointed.

Like it can ever actually work that way. For, to cite just one example, mere mortals.

Most people use only 10% of their democracy.

And even that’s the wrong 10%.

If I could create the world again I’d do it sober.

And, if I were sober, I’d let Him.

6546

[b]David Sedaris

The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you’re a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence.[/b]

Or [of course] the American man in Korea.

When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon.
It’s a typewriter, I say. You use it to write angry letters to airport security.

Imagine then their reaction to an 8 track player.

It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. “A bow tie announces to the world you can no longer get an erection.”

Any exceptions here?

He looked as though his life had not only passed him by but paused along the way to spit in his face.

If not kick the shit out of him.

Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless — that’s what hell must be like.

On the other hand, what about “ignorance is bliss”?

Often I’d take out my magnifying glass and stare into the chaos that was her face.

At least for her, you need one.

6547

[b]Arthur Rimbaud

I shed more tears than God could ever have required.[/b]

Anyone know how many that might be?

In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.

In that case, he thought, it worked.

I is another.

And many more beside.

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

Forced is a bit of a stretch though, right? If only for most of us.

I’m intact, and I don’t give a damn.

I’m not even close, and I do.

But the problem is to make the soul into a monster.

Not unlike the solution.

6548

[b]tiny nietzsche

fall equinox to do list:
get winter sword out of attic
dry garlic /craft wooden stakes
make sure the dead stay dead[/b]

Of course that’s all just routine now.

rock, paper, nihilism

Steer clear of this one, Kids.

form follows fuck this

And only then follows function.

me: i dislike sunday
doktor: what about the rest of the week?
me: fuck them too

Times 52 of course.

fuck romeo, marry macbeth, kill hamlet

So much for Shakespeare.

existentialism is saturday night in a bathtub

And, for some, while waiting for godot.

6549

[b]Hannah Arendt

The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene. [/b]

That and the military industrial complex. Or, rather, the military industrial complex and that.

The antisemites who called themselves patriots introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.

Not all that different from how it works for any number of folks in Israel. Only the condemnation there is aimed in another direction.

The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.

Of course we will really never know, will we?

What proved so attractive was that terrorism had become a kind of philosophy through which to express frustration, resentment, and blind hatred, a kind of political expressionism which used bombs to express oneself, which watched delightedly the publicity given to resounding deeds and was absolutely willing to pay the price of life for having succeeded in forcing the recognition of one’s existence on the normal strata of society.

In other words, one way or another, we’re stuck with it.

Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.

It sounds better though when we call it “manifest destiny”. And considerably more noble.

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

Or is this still being too optimistic?

6550

[b]José Saramago

We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts, if one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we only have the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.[/b]

Probably true…but only more or less than it’s probably not.

There are such moments in life, when, in order for heaven to open, it is necessary for a door to close.

Anyone here ever had one?

Don’t you know, If you don’t step outside yourself, you’ll never discover who you are.

Oh for christ sakes, he thought.

It was my fault, she sobbed, and it was true, no one could deny it, but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.

Sounds like a plan, he thought.

Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions, decisions make us.

Loosely speaking that may or may not be true.

Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious.

Let’s tie this somehow to Brett Kavanaugh.

6551

[b]so sad today

ever just look at a dude and know his name is “Brett”.[/b]

Starting now, okay?

i think i’ll spend the day imagining the worst

Not unlike all the others.

obsessing over a problem that doesn’t exist

Thus making it considerably worse.

making the same mistakes and expecting different results and lovin it

This can take years to perfect.

imagining a world without frat boys

Better still: A world without jocks.
And Kids of course.

sorry to hear about your positive attitude

But keep it away from me.

6552

[b]Ayn Rand from The Fountainhead

One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance. There’s no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes.[/b]

Let alone objectively.

Now take a human body. Why wouldn’t you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now.

Right, like a stark naked unadorned human body is ugly.

What in hell are you really made of, Howard? After all, it’s only a building. It’s not the combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture, and sexual ecstasy that you seem to make of it.
Isn’t it?

We’ll have to see the building first, of course.

Before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people.

No getting around the beauty of that.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.

In other words, not see in precisely the same way that she does.

It’s such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don’t even know that you’re being subtle and vicious.

More to the point [sometimes]: don’t even care.

6553

[b]Herta Müller

I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.[/b]

You know, like I’m doing here.

Women always need other women to lean on. They become friends in order to hate each other better. The more they hate each other, the more inseparable they become.

Hard to believe, but people think like this in much the same manner that you and I think like we do.

When we don’t speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.

More or less, he thought.

Once upon a time they had some bad luck, and they blame everything on that.

In my case though, for good reason.

Everyday brought me further away from other people. I had been placed out of the world’s sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended.

Going on decades now, he beamed.

If only the right person would have to leave, everyone else would be able to stay in the country.

Let’s make list of those assholes here.

6554

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Custom is the great guide to human life.” David Hume[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “ouch”.

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.” Niccolò Machiavelli

Trust me here: Including yourself.

“Always assume incompetence before looking for conspiracy.” Niccolo Machiavelli

Not counting the dumb bastards who combine them both.

“How perilous it is to free a people who prefer slavery.” Niccolo Machiavelli

More or less than the other way around?

“A sign of intelligence is an awareness of one’s own ignorance.” Niccolo Machiavelli

Not to mention the ignorance of others.

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.” Niccolo Machiavelli

Don Trump!!!

6555

[b]Lillian Hellman

Nobody knows what you want except you. And nobody will be as sorry as you if you don’t get it. Wanting some other way to live is proof enough of deserving it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell. [/b]

Been there, done that.

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter ‘repented’, changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.

And then it’s pentimento all the way down.

You don’t always know how to do things when they’re happening.

Of course that’s basically the rule here.

It doesn’t pay well to fight for what we believe in.

And that’s before we get to what it cost.

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

Just ask Bob Mueller.

Callous greed grows pious very fast.

Next thing you know it’s a whole philosophy.

6556

[b]Colson Whitehead

Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with the trees up close but from the outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn’t stand.[/b]

No getting around the slippery slope [or tangled web] that is freedom.

It was the softest bed she had ever lain in. But then, it was the only bed she had ever lain in.

So, in that sense it could have been the hardest bed.

He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect. He asked himself: How can I die? I was always like this. Now I am more me. He had the ammo. He took them all down.

I must fit in there somewhere, he thought.

…and for the second time that day he blesses the certainty of airports because he can always turn around and go someplace else.

Me, I’m a train station man myself.

Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.

You know, if that actually turned out to be a good thing.

She wondered why there were only two kinds of weather: hardship in the morning, and tribulation at night.

And that’s before the calamity of climate change.

6557

[b]Werner Twertzog

If I block you, you cease to exist. As we all know.[/b]

Or, here, if I “foe” you.

Yuppies were important for showing that Baby Boomers were, in the end, indifferent to the pain of others, unless it made them look hot.

Something to tuck away for your very own “dangling conversation”.

When you look in a mirror, the only question you should ask yourself is who’s behind all this.

You know, in case it isn’t God.

My followers are a mix of Hollywood types, academics, tattoo artists, comedians, sex workers, and religious professionals. Just like Jesus’s.

Let’s try to imagine Jesus on Twitter: WWJT.

I don’t know, define “suicidal.”

Or: I don’t know, define “murder.”

God to Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth.”
Job to God: “I do not know God, where were you when I was being tortured by Satan?”

Anyone here know?

6558

[b]Viet Thanh Nguyen

It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.[/b]

Let’s start doing that here, okay?

I gradually shrank in size until I was a teenager, then a child, and then, at last, a baby, crawling, until inevitably I was sucked naked and screaming through that portal every man’s mother possesses, into a black hole where all light vanished. As that last glimmer faded, it occurred to me that the light at the end of the tunnel seen by people who have died and come back to life was not Heaven. Wasn’t it much more plausible that what they saw was not what lay ahead of them but what lay behind? This was the universal memory of the first tunnel we all pass through, the light at its end penetrating our fetal darkness…

Holes [and tunnels] coming and going.

You tried to play the game, okay? But they run the game. You don’t run anything. That means you can’t change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside.

Let’s figure out who runs things here. Then, sure, change it.

If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.

Nope, nothing yet.
Right?

Marriage is slavery, I said. And when God made us human—if God exists—He didn’t intend for us to be slaves to each other.

And I doubt that changes just because you’re gay.

Ever since the first caveman discovered fire and decided that the ones still living in darkness were benighted, it’s been civilization against barbarism . . . with every age having its own barbarians.

Them as often as not.

6559

[b]Neil Gaiman

He had read books, newspapers and magazines. He knew that if you ran away you sometimes met bad people who did bad things to you; but he had also read fairy tales, so he knew that there were kind people out there, side by side with the monsters.[/b]

Any kind people make it here? Or are we all still monsters?

They also held that the way to salvation was to give way to lust and temptation in all things. And no greater percentage of them turned up here than of any other religion. Amusing, isn’t it?

Maybe, maybe not.

Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city: there can be a hundred roads, a thousand paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk toward the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take.

Either that or just make something up.

The universe knows someone is missing, and slowly it attempts to replace him.

Okay, but what about her?

None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you — even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.

Anything from God on the World Series yet?

It’s easier to believe in aliens than in gods.

And easier for the aliens to believe in us.

6560

[b]so sad today

what the fuck is everything[/b]

First off, why do you want to know?

in theory i’m totally over you

In theory I don’t agree.

just forgot that life is pain and then remembered again

And, no, not just in theory one suspects.

take a lot of naps and ignore a lot of people

Repeat as necessary.

i’m always late for everything because i don’t want to be anywhere

My advice: shoot for not showing up at all.

gonna stop worrying about shit beyond my control just kidding

Besides, if you’re doing it right, it can’t be done.