a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Robin Wasserman

But things don’t just fall apart. People break them.[/b]

Not counting acts of God of course.

You don’t even realize you’re living in a before until you wake up one day and find yourself in an after.

Or even the day after that.

I longed to return to that bloody riverbank, to throw myself in the path of the final arrow, to die ignorant, and so, in love. Better to be killed by an arrow than by the words of the one I most trusted.

Never been there myself. Unless, perhaps, I’m in denial.

Rudeness was a sign of weakness. Grace stemmed from power, the power to accept anything and move on.

You know, in theory.

I spent most of my teen years trying to figure out the rules of life, theories for why things happened, why people behaved as they did, and mostly I came to the conclusion that either there were no rules, or the rules sucked. Reading science fiction wasn’t about imagining myself into some more exciting life filled with adventure, it was about finding a world where things worked the way I wanted them to.

I suspect that no one reads philosophy for this.

The only thing more dangerous than a willingness to ignore the law is an ability to change it.

If, for example, you’re “one of them”.

[b]Rick Moody

Which man among us is not, most of the time, possessed of the desire to curl himself into a foetal ball?[/b]

And let’s not forget the women.

There are men who need to defile themselves in order to get on with their lives.

Anyone here doing that now?

The middle is the longest in any story, and therefore the time with the most desperation.

Maybe, but the very end is right up there.

There should be a sex-related metric with which you could measure sex in hotels, especially the illicit variety, but of what would that metric consist? How about increments of remorse?

After you come, for example.

Isn’t a tangle of limbs a glorious thing to behold? Don’t you wish to be in a tangle of limbs?

Anyone here want to tangle with mine?

There were just enough flaws to make her perfect.

Not many like them around.

[b]Maurice Blanchot

A writer who writes, ‘‘I am alone’’ can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.[/b]

Point taken. And then some.

There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agreed that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him.

Who would have figured on it being all that complicated.

I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates. To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity.

Who would have figured on it being all that complicated.

But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.

And then, eventually, for all of eternity. Whatever that means.

If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.

Of what you might ask.

And there is no question that we are preoccupied by dying. But why? It is because when we die, we leave behind not only the world but also death. That is the paradox of the last hour. Death works with us in the world; it is a power that humanizes nature, that raises existence to being, and it is within each one of us as our most human quality; it is death only in the world - man only knows death because he is man, and he is only man because he is death in the process of becoming. But to die is to shatter the world; it is the loss of person, the annihilation of the being; and so it is also the loss of death, the loss of what in it and for me made it death. As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death, but the impossibility of dying.

And, as luck would have it, he had damn near a 100 years in which to ponder it.

[b]André Gide

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. Essential to remain between the two, close to madness when you dream and close to reason when you write.[/b]

Or [sometimes] the most ugly things.

How would one tell a story about happiness? One can only tell of the origins of happiness and its destruction.

That sounds like a story to me.

Everyone was good at talking about day-to-day events, but no one ever looked at what motivated them.

On the other hand, with folks like me, that’s all we do.

One has to choose. The main thing is to know what one wants…

No, the main thing is to know how to get it.

There is no feeling so simple that it is not immediately complicated and distorted by introspection.

Indeed, we don’t see much of that here, do we?

The self requires a story.

Not to worry. As soon as you’re born you’ll be given one.

[b]Sad Socrates

I will never get tired of lying to myself.[/b]

But not you, right?

We have so many desires which are not important.

To him maybe.

I am the source of my unhappiness.

Unless of course we count you.

Consciousness is the least interesting feature of a human being.

Above the belt in other words.

I don’t care about who I am.

As, for most of us, it should be.

Stay tuned for more boredom.

Maybe, but thank god for Robert Mueller.

[b]Philip Pullman

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.[/b]

Or, for some, before them.

We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.

Indeed, once upon a time that was true of me. And it still is.

I think it’s perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don’t know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it’s because he’s ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they’re responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I’d want nothing to do with them.

My kind of God then.

You cannot change what you are, only what you do.

Like the two have absolutely nothing in common.

I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.

Like the two have absolutely nothing in common.

I write almost always in the third person, and I don’t think the narrator is male or female anyway. They’re both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and skeptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once.

Same here. Only in the first person. First person plural as it were.

[b]Lou Reed

I think it’s important that people don’t feel alone.[/b]

In other words, always be your own best friend.

I always believed that I have something important to say and I said it.

Let’s pin down what that was.

The only thing constantly changing is change
The living only become dead
Your hair falling out
Your liver swelled up
Your teeth rot your gums and your chin
Your ass starts to sag
Your balls shrivel up
Your cock swallowed up in its sack
The only thing constantly changing is change
And it’s always change on your back.

Just what we need, another optimist.

[b]I don’t know just where I’m going
But I’m goin’ to try for the kingdom if I can
'Cause it makes me feel like I’m a man
When I put a spike into my vein
Then I tell you things aren’t quite the same

When I’m rushing on my run
And I feel just like Jesus’ son
And I guess I just don’t know
And I guess that I just don’t know[/b]

On the other hand, a lot of folks just don’t know. They just don’t know that.

It takes a busload of faith to get by.

And, hopefully, not all of it blind.

They listen to the music of idiots and amuse themselves with the sordid miseries of their businesses. They are not the things of angels or of any higher outpost that humanity might aspire to. Your loathsome vomitous businessman king is of the lowest order, his advisors crumbling mockeries of education driven by avarice. My love, dress them in the suits of mockery, and in their advanced state of stupidity and senility, burn and destroy them, so their ashes might join the compost which they so much deserve.

Of course they do produce all the things that we buy.

[b]tiny nietzsche

How can you identify someone who thinks they’re nihilist?
they will tell you over and over again[/b]

And with groots no less.

it’s raining knives

Hunting knives around here.

baby, it’s sexual harassment outside

And not just among the ruling class…or the Christians.

Sunday night was for depression, but monday night at dusk was always for the existential dread

You know, if you can tell the two apart.

crouching heidegger, hidden derrida

Let’s signify what that means for Nazis.

if you love a meme, set it free. If it comes back, ignore it

Genes? Forget about it.

[b]Jeanette Winterson

Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.[/b]

For some, they can’t come too soon.

I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.

Shame on them!

You had once asked me if I was afraid of death.
I said I was afraid of not living.

Or, sure, maybe both.

I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying.

When it isn’t shattered on the floor in a thousand pieces.

If there’s such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.

Let’s pin this down. Then move on to the father.

I can’t believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but we’re here, we’re alive, we’re the human race, we have survived wars and terrorism and scarcity and global famine, and we have made it back from the brink, not once but many times. History is not a suicide note - it’s a record of our survival.

Obviously: Some more than others.

[b]Mary Roach

Monkeys offer an unadulterated demonstration of the power of hormones, as the females are not concerned about pregnancy or what their friends will think.[/b]

Just like chimps, right Satyr?

Last year, I was conversing by e-mail with an acquaintance who was investigating the black market in cadaver parts. She came into possession of a sales list for a company that provides organs and tissues for research. On the list was “vagina with clitoris.” She did not believe that there could be a legitimate research purpose for cadaver genitalia. She assumed the researcher had procured the part to have sex with it. I replied that physiologists and people who study sexual dysfunction still have plenty to learn about female arousal and orgasm, and that I could, with little trouble, imagine someone needing such a thing. Besides, I said to this woman, if the guy wanted to nail the thing, do you honestly think he’d have bothered with the clitoris?

I guess we’ll never know.

…many space psychology experiments these days focus on ways to detect stress or depression in a person who doesn’t intend to tell you about it.

Nothing gets past them these days.

You don’t need proof. You just need an inclination.

Ain’t that the truth?

A patient on the way to surgery travels at twice the speed of a patient on the way to the morgue. Gurneys that ferry the living through hospital corridors move forward in an aura of purpose and push, flanked by caregivers with long strides and set faces, steadying IVs, pumping ambu bags, barreling into double doors. A gurney with a cadaver commands no urgency. It is wheeled by a single person, calmly and with little notice, like a shopping cart.

Let’s file this one under, oh, I don’t know, “common sense”?

Aspirin and ibuprofen combat inflammation everywhere but the stomach and bowel; there they create inflammation.

Clearly as God intended.

[b]John Cage

It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.[/b]

Like this is [more often than not] a distinction with a difference.

College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.

In 200 classes for example.

I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.

Perhaps even as unfamiliar as you are.

The world is teeming; anything can happen.

But: For any particular one of us at any particular time, it all gets narrowed down considerably.

What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life–not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.

Come on, for any particular one of us at any particular time, what are the odds it’s anywhere near this convoluted?

The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accordance with nature, in her manner of operation.

For example, in an essentially absurd and meaningless world. A world in which everyone and everything becomes but the brute facticity of, well, something.

[b]so sad today

I don’t feel at peace unless I’m torturing myself[/b]

Apparently this is a real condition.

likes: death
dislikes: dying

Apparently this is a real condition.

person: hi
me: stop pretending it’s not fucking weird that we exist, ok?!!

Well, isn’t it?

capitalism is making me want to vomit and also buy stuff

So, don’t forget to vote!

when people are nice to me i feel guilty: a love story

Fuck them: a love story.

what should i wear to never leaving the house?

Buck naked always works for me.

[b]Ernest Hemingway

It’s funny, I said. It’s very funny. And it’s a lot of fun, too, to be in love.
Do you think so? her eyes looked flat again.
I don’t mean fun in that way. In a way it’s an enjoyable feeling.
No, she said. I think it’s hell on earth.[/b]

For example, unrequited love.

The gypsies believe the bear to be a brother to man because he has the same body beneath his hide, because he drinks beer, because he enjoys music and because he likes to dance.

Well, until you get to the part about memes.

But man is not made for defeat, he said. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

On the other hand, destroyed works for me.

Do you suppose it will always go on?
No.
What’s to stop it?
It will crack somewhere.

And the list here is endless.

He missed the prayers but he thought it would be unfair and hypocritical to say them and he did not wish to ask any favors or for any different treatment than all the men were receiving.

And that matters to God.

Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.

Let’s try that here. You first.

[b]so sad today

take a selfie at my funeral[/b]

Then post it on youtube.
That is what’s next, right?

it’s not my fault i was born: the musical

Soundtrack by Morrisey.

tired or dying? a memoir

Volumes I through IV.

“i’m different” – someone who is exactly the same

Though, really, not always.

we could wait for death together

Or, in the interim, godot

cause of death: your positive attitude

You know the ones.

[b]Neil Gaiman

Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled but halved. No man is an island.[/b]

Not counting all the times that he is.

Birds are the last of the dinosaurs. Tiny velociraptors with wings. Devouring defenseless wiggly things and, and nuts, and fish, and, and other birds. They get the early worms. And have you ever watched a chicken eat? They may look innocent, but birds are, well, they’re vicious.

Plus, to gall us all the more, most of them can fly.

This is the only country in the world, said Wednesday, into the stillness, that worries about what it is.
What?
The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are.

So, what is it then?

Not knowing everything is all that makes it OK, sometimes…

Let’s make sense of that.

The squirrel has not yet found the acorn that will grow into the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the babe that will grow to slay me.

Does the squirrel know that?

It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers.

He thought: Like country music.
Not counting Emmylou Harris of course.

[b]André Malraux

Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.[/b]

Though, for some, it’s more what they think they hide.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

You know, to be optimistic.

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.

Indeed, and you can take that to the grave.

I don’t argue with my enemies; I explain to their children.

And then [occasionally] arm them.

The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell.

Any folks here despise themselves? Were you forced to?

Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk - and to act.

So, does that explain you? Too, I mean.

[b]Nein

Saying “guns don’t kill people” is like saying “defibrillators don’t save people”.[/b]

Well, sure, if they’re worth saving.

This is the alternate universe other universes warn their kids about.

Wouldn’t you?

Ideology: The mistaken belief that your beliefs are neither beliefs nor mistaken.

Rhymes with objectivism.

It’s not you. It’s your socially necessary form of pathology.

Actually, in Trumpworld, both.

In the beginning: there was the end. And it was good.

Just not good enough.

A. True.
B. Sad.
C. Sad but true.
D. Sad enough to be true, yet somehow still false.

Hell, not much that can’t be.

[b]Terry Pratchett

There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.[/b]

If only in your head.
If that’s all it takes.

It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive.

Tragic music then for some.

Whut’s the plan, Rob? said one of them.
Okay, lads, this is what we’ll do. As soon as we see somethin’, we’ll attack it. Right?
This caused a cheer.
Ach, 'tis a good plan, said Daft Wullie.

See something. Attack it. See something else. Attack it.
If only all the way to the grave.

The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.

Let’s make this a cliche.

Look, that’s why there’s rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em.

If not hack them to pieces.

He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.
Which was going to be hard, because there wasn’t one.

On the other hand, how logical is that?

[b]C.G. Jung

Shame is a soul eating emotion.[/b]

For those who feel it anyway.

To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.

After all, where do the genes end and the memes begin?

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.

And I suspect it has only gotten [much, much, much] worse.

What you resist, persists.

Fortunately, as some insist, that only makes you stronger. Or, sure, with others, unfortunately.

The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.

So, how’s that working out for you?

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

The unlived life. And then some.

[b]God

Elephants are like people, only humane.[/b]

Unless of course they’re in musth. But, sure, we’ll pass this along to Mr. Trump.

Alabama is a stupid fucking state full of stupid fucking people and I forsook it long, long ago.

By Alabama, He must mean all the other states down there too. But, sure, maybe not.

A religion based on the teachings of Jesus would be a great idea.

Let’s call it, say, socialism.

If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t.

So much for omnipotence.

I apologize to some of you for most of you.

Well, that’s a start.

Sanity is becoming more and more of an achievement.

Any sane folks here?