a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Meg Wolitzer

Irony was new to her and tasted oddly good, like a previously unavailable summer fruit.[/b]

Remember when irony was new to you? Of course no one ever forgets that, right?

It wasn’t easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you.

Or, sure, it isn’t easy to not understand this.

Soon, she and the rest of them would be ironic much of the time, unable to answer an innocent question without giving their words a snide little adjustment. Fairly soon after that, the snideness would soften, the irony would be mixed in with seriousness, and the years would shorten and fly.

True, but it’s all just part of being an adult.

Love transcended breath, eczema, fear of sex, and an imbalance in physical appearance. If love was real, then these bodily, human details could seem insignificant.

Back again to this: So they tell me.

…the Iraq war was the Ishtar of wars.

Of course Don Trump hasn’t had his yet.

In March 1997, Jules and Dennis went to dinner at Ash and Ethan’s house along with Duncan and Shyla, the portfolio manager and the literary advocate. The prick and the cunt, Jules had once called them. Jules and Dennis had never understood why Ash and Ethan liked this couple so much, but they’d all been thrown together so many times over the years, for casual evenings and more formal celebrations, that it was too late to ask. Duncan and Shyla must have felt equally puzzled at Ash and Ethan’s fidelity to their old friends the social worker and the depressive. No one said a word against anyone; everyone went to the dinners to which they were invited. Both couples knew they satisfied a different part of Ash and Ethan, but when they all came together in one place, the group made no sense.

Just another postmodern moment.

[b]tiny nietzsche

cocaine isn’t vegan[/b]

Really, what if it isn’t?

A cramps t-shirt, a misfits t-shirt, and a joy division t-shirt walk into a bar. The bartender kicks out the last two for being underage.

Let’s debate this.

I filled my pockets with polaroids and walked into the ocean

I’m still collecting rocks myself.

for sale: democracy, never worn.

By you know who.

is it today?

It’s one of them

a ballgag for your thoughts

You can write them down.

[b]Ambrose Bierce

Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion.[/b]

Though surely not with mine.

Christian - One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

He either does or does not know this.

Alliance - In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.

Collusion anyone?

God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.

If only to shap and mold it into the present.

Birth, n.: The first and direst of all disasters.

Unless of course you’re lucky enough to be aborted.

Clarinet n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments worse than a clarinet – two clarinets.

You tell me: youtu.be/u2AYTLU-Zy8

[b]May Sarton

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation.[/b]

Time to drop out I always say.

It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.

If for example you are a geologist.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

Anyone here ever try that?

I am not ready to die,
But I am learning to trust death
As I have trusted life.
I am moving
Toward a new freedom

Pure poetry.
But that’s all.

There are some griefs so loud
They could bring down the sky,
And there are griefs so still
None knows how deep they lie,
Endured, never expended.
There are old griefs so proud
They never speak a word;
They never can be mended.
And these nourish the will
And keep it iron-hard.

With grief [obviously] one size never, ever fits all.

Nobody stays special when they’re old, Anna. That’s what we have to learn.

And, for some of us, that’s the least of it.

[b]Dorothy Parker

If I didn’t care for fun and such,
I’d probably amount to much.
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.[/b]

Of course that won’t work for everyone.

You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.

How dumb clever is that?

This wasn’t just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.

And, for some, with a cherry on top.

I require three things in a man: he must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.

Along the lines of Julie Brown perhaps: youtu.be/vEU_5lVjRFQ

That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can’t say ‘No’ in any of them.

Not only that but it’s the way she says ‘yes’.

If wild my breast and sore my pride,
I bask in dreams of suicide,
If cool my heart and high my head
I think ‘How lucky are the dead’.

If only we could be poets, right?

[b]so sad today

i’m tired of being strong and i’m not even strong[/b]

Sounds like a personal problem.

i’ll see your fake positivity and raise you a genuine cynicism

I’m with her of course.

a group of people is called an annoying

Who doesn’t know that?

I realized i was awful and then i realized it again

Personally, I never keep track of that.

i loved it when i didn’t know you

And by you she means all of us.

what should my next mistake be

How about posting this?

[b]Angela Davis

Radical simply means “grasping things at the root”.[/b]

And then [sometimes] pulling them out.

The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what’s that? The freedom to starve?

For some, probably.

I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.

Next up: actual options.

If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.

24/7 sounds about right.

Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible.

More like a faint glimmer these days.

We know the road to freedom has always been stalked by death.

And, from time to time, with a vengence.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one’s enemy only when his back is turned?” Thomas Pynchon[/b]

My own guess: A me, myself and I world.

“Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.” Simone de Beauvoir

Unless of course you’re a Nazi.

“Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.” Simone de Beauvoir

Of course that can actually be a good thing.

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they never use.”Soren Kierkegaard

They do indeed. Right, Kids?

“The death of dogma is the birth of morality.” Immanuel Kant

On the other hand, what’s more dogmatic than to profess ones moral obligation to act in accordance with one or another Kingdom of Ends?

“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. ” Immanuel Kant

Deontologically as it were.

[b]Erica Jong

I’ve not ceased being fearful, I’ve gone ahead despite the pounding in my heart that says: turn back, turn back, you’ll die if you go too far.[/b]

Of course now she is right around the corner from The Big One.

There’s nothing good about being ordinary. People don’t respect you for it. People run after people who are different, who have confidence in their own taste, who don’t run with the herd. There is nothing gained by giving in to the pressures of group vulgarity.

True, but, you know, you can only take it so far.

The earth is God’s book but in our blindness, we have obliterated letters so we may say God has abandoned us. It is we who are illiterate.

…as she gets closer and closer to oblivion.

You go through life looking for a teacher and then when you find him, you become so dependent on him that you grow to hate him. Or else you wait for him to show his weakness and then you despise him for being human.

Let’s file this one under, “or something like that”.

What we fear we also desire, and what we desire we fear.

He wondered why people say things like this.

Women in America read ‘lifestyle’ pages which are really glorifications of shopping. They teach us we must veil ourselves in make-up to be loved. And we willingly take the veil, thinking ourselves freed by it. Make-up is no more optional for us than the veil is for Arab women: it is our Western version of the chador.

That and [for those who can aford it] plastic surgery.

[b]John Fowles, The Magus

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.[/b]

My guess: Not just ours.

He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.

Five will get you ten he was a Kid. Either that or Mitford.

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.

That and the military industrial complex.

We lay on the ground and kissed. Perhaps you smile. That we only lay on the ground and kissed. You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out. But whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know. But pity yourself for what it did.

This is a good point, right? Besides, there’s always pornography.

The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?

Unless of course there are no other options.

There is no plan. All is hazard.

Not counting all the actual plans that there are.

[b]God

I’m serious. You’re the worst species I ever created, and I made 3,500 different cockroaches.[/b]

Next up: He explains why.

What a fucking nightmare you people are.

Made of course in His image.

I’ve been very unhappy at work lately.

So much for being omnipotent.

I am colluding with Satan.

Who doesn’t know that?

I am not sending a meteor to collide with Earth and even if I do, collision is not a crime.

God. A yuck a minute.

With great power comes no responsibility.

That might explain everything then.

[b]Seneca

It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.[/b]

Never actually met one like that myself.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

Never actually met one like that myself.

What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.

If only from the cradle to the grade.
Well, if you’re lucky.

He who is brave is free.

Any brave men here who are not free?

No man was ever wise by chance.

That makes me the first then. If I do say so myself.

If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.

Unless of course the problem is all the others.

[b]Kurt Gödel

The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all. [/b]

Hell, you need go no further than here.

I don’t believe in empirical science. I only believe in a priori truth.

On the other hand, empirically, he did die.

Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine.

God knows, right?

All generalizations - perhaps except this one - are false.

Or, sure, perhaps not except that one.

I am convinced of the afterlife, independent of theology. If the world is rationally constructed, there must be an afterlife.

Obviously.

I like Islam, it is a consistent idea of religion and open-minded.

Well, he did die 40 years ago.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” T.S. Eliot[/b]

Unlike, for example, genuine philosophy. At least around here.

“The perfect state is one where men weep and rejoice over the same things.” Plato

Not unlike the imperfect state.

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.” Edmund Burke

Until of course we became civilized.

“After the collection of facts, the search for causes.” Hippolyte Taine

Our facts he means.

“Who lies for you will lie against you.” John Locke

Worse, they start in on telling the truth about you. Just ask Don Trump.

“The more often a stupidity is repeated, the more it gets the appearance of wisdom.” Voltaire

Cue these folks: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

[b]Neil Gaiman

Now me, said Mr. Vandemar. What number am I thinking of?
I beg your pardon?
What number am I thinking of? repeated Mr. Vandemar. It’s between one and a lot.[/b]

Come on, does that really help to narrow it down?

Not gay, just never met the right woman.

In other words, gay.

Notoriety wasn’t as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity.

And we should now, right?

You see, the outcome of the battle is unimportant. What matters is the chaos, and the slaughter.

And, no, not just in video games.

Nothing the demon could think up was half as bad as the stuff people thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into their design somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.

Of course that’s when God comes in handy.

I really don’t know what ‘I love you’ means. I think it means "Don’t leave me here alone.”

Or, maybe, sometimes, “fuck me”.

[b]Edgar Allan Poe

There lives no man who at some period has not been tormented by an earnest desire to tantalize a listener by circumlocution.[/b]

Especially if they deserve it.

I do believe God gave me a spark of genius, but he quenched it in misery.

That’s quite common some might surmise.

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.

Anyone recall what that word was?

A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul.

Obviously, there is no name for it.

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night.

Like what for example?

In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind.

Isn’t that really the only way that it can be?

[b]Sad Socrates

Being happy takes work. So does being sad.[/b]

Not unlike all the other emotions that we grapple with.

Why was six afraid of seven?
Because six knew that seven was an illusion and the primacy of dread was the real shadow it lived under; that it just used seven as a foil to mask its existential insecurities.

Of course that’s just common sense.

I perceive that all things are connected; except me to those things.

Me too. Only that’s the good news.

Society is death of the individual.

Probably including ours too.

Your identity is a poison.

Trust me: mine more than yours.

I tried to smile today.

The fool!

[b]Leslie Feinberg

Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.[/b]

Though here there’s not much that someone hasn’t been taught.

If I’m not with a butch everyone just assumes I’m straight. It’s like I’m passing too, against my will. I’m sick of the world thinking I’m straight. I’ve worked hard to be discriminated against as a lesbian.

Nope, can’t identify with that.

More exists among human beings than can be answered by the simplistic question I’m hit with every day of my life: "Are you a man or a woman?”

Nope, can’t identify with that.
But point taken.

I began to feel the pleasure of the weightless state between here and there.

Or, sure, no doubt about it: I began to feel the pain of the weightless state between here and there.

Everybody’s scared, but if you don’t let your fears stop you, that’s bravery.

You know, when it’s not stupidity.

I know the difference between what I can’t do and what I refuse to do.

Boy, he thought, does that bring back memories.

[b]C.G. Jung

Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul be just another human soul.[/b]

Let’s clear this up.

There is a desert on the moon where the dreamer sinks so deeply into the ground that she reaches hell.

You know, that never occured to me.

As understanding deepens, the further removed it becomes from knowledge.

Not counting most things of course.

If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin.

Right, and if only we died and went to Heaven.

This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance.

Anyone here have an example of this?

The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor.

And the Academy Award here goes to…

[b]tiny nietzsche

me: I wish there was a day we could dwell on our approaching doom as the cold light of another day slowly ebbs
sunday: hey[/b]

Monday: Hey again.

I guess we can all see russia from our house now.

True, but I’m less than 40 miles from the Oval Office.

hey, the abyss isn’t going to fuck itself

Can that even be done?

there are only two types of people in the world: waves and particles

Not counting the slits and slots.

you texting to me? you texting to me? you texting to me? well, then who the hell else are you texting- you texting to me? well, I’m the only one here. who the fuck do you think you’re texting to? Oh yeah? Okay.

Now, imagine that here: youtu.be/4e9CkhBb18E

find a wasteland, find yourself a wasteland to live in

Does here count?