a thread for mundane ironists

[b]David Sedaris

People in trailers were canned and labeled much like the apple juice down at the plant, stamped with ingredients for all the world to see: chicken fried steak, overcooked vegetables, no working knowledge of any major Italian movie directors–the list went on and on. [/b]

Or “trailer trash” to some.

The thing to remember is that more than anything in this world, these colored people wish they were white.

He insisted in the tanning salon.

Her expression changed then, becoming fearful rather than merely pained. It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shakey ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape.

I know what he means. But so far I’ve been lucky.

In the role of Mary, six-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin.

Is it even possible to explain this?

It was the artist’s duty to find the appropriate objects, and the audience’s job to decipher meaning. If the piece failed to work, it was their fault, not yours.

Same with your posts here, right?

Leeches are singing in my asshole.

That can’t be good.
If it’s actually true of course.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Belief means not wanting to know what is true.” Friedrich Nietzsche[/b]

Anyone here believe that?

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Werner Heisenberg

And how uncertain might that be?

“Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour." Euripides

And who can’t understand that?

“Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.” Martin Heidegger

Very existential, right?

“If you have selfish, ignorant citizens you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders.” George Carlin

Especially when those selfish, ignorant citizens are assholes.

“Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.” William Faulkner

Which one is this then?

[b]David Bowie

I haven’t changed my views much since I was about 12, really, I’ve just got a 12-year-old mentality.When I was in school I had a brother who was into Kerouac and he gave me On The Road to read when I was 12 years old. That’s still been a big influence.[/b]

So, is that something to boast about?

I think fame itself is not a rewarding thing. The most you can say is that it gets you a seat in restaurants.

Right, like he actually believed that.

People look to me to see what the spirit of the Seventies is.

And not, for example, Marx and Engels.

I surrounded myself with people who indulged my ego. They treated me as though I was Ziggy Stardust or one of my characters, never realising that David Jones might be behind it.

Doesn’t surprise me.

I hate albums that are really happy. When I am really happy, I don’t like to hear happy albums, and when I am really sad I don’t wanna hear happy albums… and I tend to gravitate towards the lonely and isolated anyway when I write.

One more reason to like the guy.

I’ve never responded well to entrenched negative thinking.

Still, better that than entrenched positive thinking. In this world anyway.

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.” William Faulkner[/b]

Is this as ludicrous as, say, Satyr will insist?

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner

And, perhaps, going all the way back [at least] to the Big Bang.

“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.” William Faulkner

How insightful is that? No, really.

“The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future”. Frank Herbert

Lots of concepts do that. Right, Mr. Abstractionist?

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” Frank Herbert

Or even miles beyond it in the multiverse.

“In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death. I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.” Albert Camus

Well, not that weeping at your mother’s funeral is all just a game.

[b]Neil deGrasse Tyson from Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.[/b]

No, not even you, Mr. Objectivist.

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.

The last part certainly.

The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. In other words, after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.

Think about that though. If our opinions are less subsumed in the physical laws.

Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc.

Piss in other words.

Matter tells space how to curve; space tells matter how to move.

Though not in English I suspect.

The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote. But it’s a precious mote and, for the moment, it’s the only home we have.

Mote actually doesn’t even come close to describing that relationship.

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

If you stand in front of a mirror at midnight and say ‘Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft’ three times, no one will appear, but your jaw will be broken.[/b]

No one has ever said it four times.

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

Starting with the Big Bang of course.

Poets have dreams. The rest of us - plans. Of becoming dreamers.

As you might well imagine, I skipped that part.

Hello future, my old friend.

One of them for example.

Love is the only language with grammar so unpredictable that any rule may suddenly become an exception and vice versa, and with just one grammatical voice — passive-aggressive.

This might actually pin it down. Either that or not.

My body is composed of 80% caffeine. The rest is tremor and insomnia.

Of course that goes without saying.

[b]Tara Westover

Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known.[/b]

So, what do you think, of the nature of men too?

I had decided to study not history, but historians.

Let’s explain the difference.

Tyler stood to go. There’s a world out there, Tara, he said. And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear.

And not just Dad of course.

Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.

On the other hand, there’s always this: That maybe it shouldn’t be.

This seemed so obvious to me now, it was difficult to understand why I had ever believed anything else.

And, on some days, for me, dasein being the least of it.

I begin to reason with myself, to doubt whether I had spoken clearly: what had I whispered and what had I screamed? I decide that if I had asked differently, been more calm, he would have stopped. I write this until I believe it, which doesn’t take long because I want to believe it. It’s comforting to think the defect is mine, because that means it is under my power.

For philosophers of course that’s just a trick of the trade.

[b]Werner Twertzog

The humblest prole in Germany lives amid culture, eats wholesome food, has free healthcare and education, and is loved by an extended family, but the American bourgeois lives amid ugliness, eats toxic garbage, is bankrupted by cancer or one child in college, and dies alone.[/b]

Of course we’re freer than they are.

I have a cat:
From time to time,
I change his name.
He does not care.
He knows that identity
Is a human construct
And is content Just being.

Unlike most dogs.

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.

First, prove to me that this is not a true story.

Bats cannot fly through solid lead using echolocation waves, as we all know.

But that’s just on this planet.

There is a nihilism gap in America. There are entire elementary schools with little or no access to Nietzsche.

Next up: Day care centers.

America, listen to me: you are tattooed enough.

Believe it or not, not a one on me.

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.[/b]

Sounds like it might be true.

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.

This time really think about that.

It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

Though it is almost always going to be a little [or a lot] of both.

They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

And not just the Christians.

People ask without wanting to know.

Starting now, let’s be honest about that.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

And that includes ourselves as well. And, for some, especially ourselves.

[b]Charles Krauthammer

Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.[/b]

Of course now they’re in the White House.

Highfalutin moral principles are impossible guides to foreign policy. At worst, they reflect hypocrisy; at best, extreme naivete.

And we all know what can be rationalized from this frame of mind.

Don’t touch my junk, you airport security goon—my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I’m a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come?

The angry white man rant.

Religion—invaluable in America’s founding, forming and flowering—deserves a place in the schools. Indeed, it had that place for almost 200 years. A healthy country would teach its children evolution—and the Ten Commandments.

Right, and not necessarily in that order.

‘Know thyself’ is a highly overrated piece of wisdom. As for knowing the self of others, forget it. Know what they do and judge them by their works.

Well put. If only for all practical purposes.

History has blessed us with all the freedom and advantages of multiculturalism. But it has also blessed us, because of the accident of our origins, with the linguistic unity that brings a critically needed cohesion to a nation as diverse, multiracial and multiethnic as America. Why gratuitously throw away that priceless asset? How mindless to call the desire to retain it ‘racist’.

So, is this racist?

[b]God

It’s not that people use only 10% of their brains, it’s that only 10% of people use their brains.[/b]

He means us, right?

I created mankind to spend half its time praising Me and the other half killing each other over who praised Me better.

Okay, but on purpose?

It’s rare to see a national emergency declared by a national emergency.

I wonder if He means Trump?

Everything happens for a reason you make up afterwards.

If you think up one at all.

Overwhelming evidence suggests many people choose to ignore overwhelming evidence.

Of, for example, collusion.

Happy birthday to Charles Darwin, who would have been 210 today.
210, and extremely disappointed.

Let’s list all the reasons.

[b]Edward P. Jones

We are all worthy of one another.[/b]

That and unworthy.

A woman, no matter the age, is always learning, always becoming. But a man . . . stops learning at fourteen or so.

Up on the pedestal she goes. But, sure, point taken.

Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans.

I’ll leave if you will.

He went on to tell her that certain work songs made the work a little easier, but that there were others, depending upon the time of day, that dragged a body down, so ‘you just gotta be careful with your songs and your hummin’ and whatnot.

And this ain’t no small thing either.

He knew he was going to die but he thought this little thing might provide him with a nothing stool way off in the corner of heaven reserved for fools, people too stupid to come out of the rain. People got to that corner by heaven’s back door.

Or for people so stupid they’d believe something like this.

The wonderful thing about writers like James Baldwin is the way we read them and come across passages that are so arresting we become breathless and have to raise our eyes from the page to keep from being spirited away.

That ever actually happen to you?

[b]Hans Arp

Zurich in 1915. While the thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance, we pasted, we recited, we versified, we sang with all our soul. We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the madness of these times. [/b]

Clearly, no one has ever found that.

All things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure.

Just short of complete chaos if we’re lucky.

The important thing about Dada, it seems to me, is that Dadaists despised what is commonly regarded as art, but put the whole universe on the lofty throne of art.

Sounds about right to me.

Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster mankind’s ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.

Sounds about right to me.

Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man’s vanity to be loathsome.

Paint by numbers in particular. That and tracing.

Ever since my childhood, I was haunted by the search for perfection. An imperfectly cut paper literally made me ill. I would guillotine it.

What exactly is a perfectly cut paper?

[b]Existential Comics

It is very easy to hate everything, and very hard to understand anything.[/b]

And how problematic is that?

[b]All great literature belongs to one of four types:

1. Stories of tragic love.
2. Criticisms of society.
3. Examinations of the human condition.
4. Heavy handed metaphors about nineteenth century whaling expeditions.[/b]

Not sure about the first three, right?

A rigged election is one where the Russians buy influence.
A free election is one where multi billion dollar international corporations buy influence.

Of course he’s a Commie, isn’t he?

Probably the weirdest thing about capitalism is how a tiny cabal of billionaires own our sports. Sports fandoms are an integral part of the culture of cities, and one dude can just be like "sorry lol I can make 12% more money if I move to LA.

Here it was Robert Irsay. And in the middle of the fucking night.

I’m declaring a State of Emergency: no one understands Hegel.

Not counting those who think they do.

[b]How to make a romantic meal this Valentine’s Day:

1. Make a normal meal.
2. Go to Google translate and translate all the components into French when you describe it.
3. Serve with wine.[/b]

Maybe next year…

[b]Margaret Atwood from The Handmaid’s Tale

Maybe the life I think I’m living is a paranoid delusion…Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.[/b]

Of course mine now comes and goes.

Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you.

And now you know this.

You can’t help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.

Sometimes anyway.

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

Of course that in and of itself is beside the point.

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.

They say that can never happen here.

They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose.

Undone. Now that’s a tricky word.

[b]Andre Breton

Objects seen in dreams should be manufactured and put on sale.[/b]

I’ll buy yours if you’ll buy mine.

What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real.

Not counting what we buy and sell from our dreams.

Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession.

Or, for some, more desire.

A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it.

On the other hand, how far into the future?

Words have finished flirting. Now they are making love.

Or here [sometimes] fucking.

The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.

Still, let’s not dismiss the part about reality altogether.

[b]The Dead Author

Drafts, the dick pics of literature.[/b]

What am I missing here?

Depression is just your body’s way of telling you to give up.

The brain in particular.

Send nudes but never your unfinished writing project.

Has it come to this for you?

Me:
Kafka: The meaning of life is that it ends.

We’re all “Me” here.

Valentine’s Day is like reading Sartre: unnecessary because most people already know that they will die alone.

Just in case though, buy the flowers and the chocolates.

Capitalism alienates you all year, and on Valentine’s Day makes you feel guilty for it.

When is Valentines day this year?

[b]Lenny Bruce

You know there’s no crooked politicians. There’s never a lie because there is never any truth. [/b]

Imagine then his reaction to Trump!

You can’t do anything with anybody’s body to make it dirty to me. Six people, eight people, one person - you can do only one thing to make it dirty: kill it.

Moms and dads? Brothers and sisters? Pets?

Koolaid is goyish. All Drake’s Cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish, and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes - goyish. Black cherry soda’s very Jewish. Macaroons are very Jewish - very Jewish cake. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime Jell-O is goyish. Lime soda is very goyish. Trailer parks are so goyish that Jews won’t go near them.

What’s that make philosophy then?

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

Or, these days, William Barr.

Alright, let’s admit it, we Jews killed Christ – but it was only for three days.

We can run this by Jesus when he returns.

Never trust a preacher with more than two suits.

And that now includes pant suits.

[b]David Foster Wallace from Infinite Jest

Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.[/b]

No, really.

It’s always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned.

Well, after all, he is Hamlet.

I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.

Though more easily crushed.

Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.

Here? Let’s make it the Kids.

…his own father told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.

Anyone talented here?

The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything.

And then one day it all becomes too much.

[b]Daniel J. Levitin

Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.[/b]

Plus they could dance to it.

As the old saying goes, a man with one watch always knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure.

Imagine then the man with 5 or more.

No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.

He means on this planet of course.

Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new—the proverbial shiny objects.

Proving yet again that’s it’s always never nothing.

A bowl of pudding only has taste when I put it in my mouth - when it is in contact with my tongue. It doesn’t have taste or flavor sitting in my fridge, only the potential.

A distant cousin to the tree falling in the forest.

…people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person’s emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters’ thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not.

Totally agree. At least I think I do.