a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Doth

I am fully prepared to die trying to pet a wolf.[/b]

Or, for others: I am fully prepared to die trying to fuck a wolf.

It’s a perfect night to slip into something more comfortable, like the darkness.

Buck naked of course.

Please, just be the best human you can before your body becomes dirt.

Or ashes as the case may be.

Be the reason why a priest clutches his bible when you walk by.

Piece of cake, right?

As your goth therapist the key to happiness is getting lost in a fog-covered forest & never being seen again.

Or, again, for most of us, a fog-covered urban jungle.

I respect the moon because it controls two of our most precious elements, oceans and wolves.

Plus there’s that astrology stuff.

[b]Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Words are seeds, Casiopea. With words you embroider narratives, and the narratives breed myths, and there’s power in the myth. Yes, the things you name have power.[/b]

Well, not our words, of course.

Dreams are for mortals.
Why?
Because they must die.

Nightmares too.

The things you name grow in power.

For example, in your head.

Ah, there is none more fearful of thieves than the one who has stolen something, and a kingdom is no small something.

Let’s call this a kingdom.

I follow the direction of the wind, and I cannot be blamed if a new wind begins to blow.

After all, among other things, it’s “beyond my control”.

It wasn’t fair. But there wasn’t an “after” in stories, was there? The curtain simply fell. She was not in a fairy tale, in any case. What “after” could there be?

Well, death of course.

[b]John Dos Passos

I never see the dawn that I don’t say to myself perhaps.[/b]

And then one day: I never see the dawn that I don’t say to myself forget it.
Either that or fuck it.
And then maybe, if you’re lucky, you fall back to sleep.

I’ve always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.

Or even making it.

A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them.

Yo, Joker!
Among others here of course.

The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there’s nowhere else. It’s the top of the world.

Not counting Mayberry perhaps.

The people of this country are too tolerant. There’s no other country in the world where they’d allow it… After all we built up this country and then we allow a lot of foreigners, the scum of Europe, the offscourings of Polish ghettos to come and run it for us.

Of course that’s debatable, isn’t it?

A writer … whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow’s generation.

I know: How scary is that.

Man seems to be an animal whose capacity for lies is only equalled by his credulity…

This may well be the most perfect description of Trumpworld: the lies he tells, the lies they believe.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Is Twitter a waste of time?
Kant: What is “time”?
Bataille: What is “waste”?
Schelling: What is “is”?
Heidegger: What is “of”?
Wittgenstein: What is “a”?
Camus: Yes.[/b]

Camus, right?

English poetry: I’m in love
Italian poetry: I was in love
American poetry: I thought I was in love
German poetry: I traded love for demonic powers

Among other things, he thought, who cares?

[b]By the time you reach your 30s, you should have:

  1. realized you’re not Leibniz
  2. started pretending to understand Hegel
  3. developed at least 3 sarcastic quips for when people ask why you study philosophy
  4. started 2 failed podcasts about Spinoza[/b]

Among other things, he thought, who cares?

Read Schopenhauer to understand Nietzsche.
Read Hegel to understand Schopenhauer.
Read Kant to understand Hegel.
Then read Spinoza to understand that you don’t understand anything.

Of course Spinoza never read me.

French lit: Why didn’t she love him?
British lit: Why didn’t she marry him?
American lit: Why didn’t she meet him?
Russian lit: Ice axe.

Let’s run this by Putin.

I have a Schrödinger’s cat joke but I don’t have a Schrödinger’s cat joke.

I’m laughing but not laughing.

[b]Helene Cixous

Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort.[/b]

She thinks.

You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.

Unless of course you’re ophidiophobic.

We must learn to speak the language women speak when there is no one there to correct us.

Tried that once myself.

I am not innocent. Innocence is a science of the sublime. And I am only at the very beginning of the apprenticeship.

Guilty as charged.

There is no greater love than the love the wolf feels for the lamb-it-doesn’t-eat.

Like there is such a wolf.

It is said that life and death are under the power of language.

Well, that and all the rest of biology.

[b]God

Now that Trump has pretty well-established that libel laws don’t apply to Twitter, I feel more comfortable discussing the many times I saw Geraldo Rivera having sex with underage girls on Jeffrey Epstein’s sex island.[/b]

See Him in court, right Geraldo!

Right now it’s much easier to believe in Me than believe in reality.

Fuck it, why not.

Why do bad things happen to good people?
Simple.
To even out the good things that happen to bad people.

Finally, an answer.

If you could ask Me one question, what would it be?
Keep in mind, I won’t be answering it.

Let’s come up with one He’ll have to.

There is a 0% chance this weekend ends without the President insulting John Lewis.
0%.

Well, did he?

Thanks for the concern all, but I’m just taking time off to write My newest testament while on a working vacation on Bethselamin.
I will return angrier, wittier, and more ineffective than ever in September, just in time for lack-to-school.
In My absence, no one is in charge.

Jesus Christ, August without God?!

[b]Clarice Lispector

To think is an act. To feel is a fact.[/b]

Your context or mine?

Do you know that hope sometimes consists only of a question without an answer?

Of course your hope might be different.

Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

Let’s synchronize our time frames and get back to this.

I do not know much. But there are certain advantages in not knowing. Like virgin territory, the mind is free of preconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me: This is my largesse. And with this I understand everything. The things I do not know constitute my truth.

See, I told you. Repeatedly, in fact.

I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.

Fuck that, he thought. Repeatedly, in fact.

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.

Though not in English of course.

[b]Erich Maria Remarque

But probably that’s the way of the world - when we have finally learned something we’re too old to apply it - and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.[/b]

Okay, but how exaggerated?

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.

I knew a few of them. And a few of them knew me.

Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

Unless your life is a novel.

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There’s much too little forgetting.

On the other hand, tell that to your brain.

No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.

Depending on, among other things, the credulity of your audience.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

He knew that he was.

[b]Daniel Day-Lewis

I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.[/b]

Brutally honest enough for you?

I see a lot of movies. I love films as a spectator, and that’s never obscured by the part of me that does the work myself. I just love going to the movies.

Sublimely honest enough for you?

For as long as I can remember, the thing that gave me a sense of wonderment and renewal… has always been the work of other actors.

Sure, that can work here too. No, seriously.

You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you’re suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another.

Want me to explain that? Or will you give it a try?

Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing.

Anyone here from Hollywood disagree?

The one thing that I appear to have been given, bearing in mind that I am capable of being very, very scatty and extremely lazy, is the ability to concentrate on something I choose to give my time to.

Scatty: absentminded and disorganized.
Now you know.

[b]tiny nietzsche

it laughs when I hurt[/b]

Probably you, right?

too drunk to fibonacci sequence

Not drunk enough to care.

who can you alienate if you can’t alienate yourself?

Don’t get me started.

mercury is in despair

Yo, Fixed. Should we be worried?

my horoscope says don’t

Don’t what he dared to ask.

rock, paper, secret police

Coming to a city near you.

[b]John Cage

In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.[/b]

I’ll tell me my case, you tell me yours.

An artist conscientiously moves in a direction which for some good reason he takes, putting one work in front of the other with the hope he’ll arrive before death overtakes him.

Philosophers [sort of] too.

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

Is that scary or what?

To see, one must go beyond the imagination and for that one must stand absolutely still as though at the center of a leap.

Let’s translate this into English.

As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.

You know, until that bumps into the real world.

A mind that is interested in changing…is interested precisely in the things that are at extremes. I’m certainly like that. Unless we go to extremes, we won’t get anywhere.

So, tell me where you draw the line and I’ll tell I draw it.

[b]tiny nietzsche

all my hexes live in texas[/b]

Anything for a rhyme!

please leave the nihilist, reinforce his belief that life is meaningless

Or stay and reinforce it all the more.

your boyfriend wants to put a snowboard rack on your car and you don’t even like him that much

This ever happen to you?

it takes a village to burn it down

This ever happen to yours?

leaving the television on around the clock is not an answer for despair, it is the question

As longer as it’s one ot the other.

I’m often mistaken for a pile of rocks

Don’t you hate that?

[b]Terry Eagleton

All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.[/b]

In other words, thank god for the either/or world.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

Let’s just say, “close enough”, and move on.

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

They don’t make insights like this anymore.

One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.

For example: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=179469&p=2428516&hilit=ghost+writer+directed#p2428516

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

Cute, but, alas, increasingly more irrelevant.

Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.

Next up: Good.

[b]Ottessa Moshfegh

The idea that my brains could be untangled, straightened out, and thus refashioned into a state of peace and sanity was a comforting fantasy.[/b]

On the other hand, how comforting can a fantasy really be?

I could plan to do something and then find myself doing the opposite.

So, plan the opposite then.

Some families are so sick, so twisted, the only way out is for someone to die.

And, with any luck, it’s not you.

Having a trash chute was one of my favorite things about my building. It made me feel important, like I was participating in the world. My trash mixed with the trash of others. The things I touched touched things other people had touched. I was contributing. I was connecting.

Oddly enough, people really do think things like this.

…in my frenzied state of despair, I understood: there was stability in living in the past.

All the way back to Miners Mills, for example.

Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness. I was not a narcoleptic—I never fell asleep when I didn’t want to.

Don’t kid yourself. It’s coming for you.

[b]tiny nietzsche

if you see me walking down the street and I start to cry, each time we’re at six feet, mask up boy, mask up boy[/b]

To this tune: youtu.be/ijhL9Y7skQs

my heights? wuthering

To this tune: youtu.be/-1pMMIe4hb4

I’m afraid of americans

If only because of the Kung-flu, Turd insisted.

the loneliness of a long distance nihilist

And loving it!

I never know what not to say

Or, here, what not to read.

find yourself a mountain to die on

Or, if you’re a Kid, a molehill.

[b]Karl Kraus

You don’t even live once.[/b]

Well, actually, I do. But point taken.

In a well-run mental household there ought to be a thorough cleaning at the threshold of consciousness a few times a year.

In other words, you first.

War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.

Next up: Peace.

Anesthesia: wounds without pain. Neurasthenia: pain without wounds.

This thing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurasthenia

Not greeting people isn’t enough. One also doesn’t greet people one doesn’t know.

The more the merrier.

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.

And then one day it was the other way around.

[b]Jeffrey Eugenides

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.[/b]

Wow, what if that were true here.

The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.

This and that there being billions of us.

And in some of the houses, people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.

He thought, hanging by a thread.

In the midst of my skeptical, cynical, often pessimistic nature exists a slender capacity to believe, if only temporarily, in a guiding, unseen power, and whenever this happens, I go with it.

Nope, not yet.

Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking it’s passage for some reason.

And then there’s what we do?

The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn’t hit us the way it does.

Or, for that matter, life too.

[b]so sad today

listen, don’t make me regret being passive aggressive[/b]

I still don’t really know what that means.

well, i don’t like my face

It baffles me too: google.com/search?source=un … 66&bih=657

okay, we get it, you’re one of the “good” people

And you know who you aren’t!

i don’t like you anymore and it’s beautiful

She got that from me.

if you aren’t thinking about me you should be

I know: Am I thinking about you?

can’t believe this giant disgusting thing is just a feeling

Believe it.

[b]Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Anyone who expects sweetness from the grave is a fool…[/b]

Then you’re a fool, right?

The things you name do grow in power, but others that are not ever whispered claw at one’s heart anyway, rip it to shreds even if a syllable does not escape the lips.

das…

You shouldn’t do everything you want just because you can.

But only if you won’t get caught.

There is a point when a man may swim back to shore, but he was past it. There was nothing left but to be swallowed by the enormity of the sea.

One suspects there’s a land version of this too.

A sea roared inside her and made demands, but she waded it, she bobbed up, took a breath, and opened her eyes to the cold winter morning. Then she rose because the day was there, the world was there, and she wanted to be part of it.

Ambivalence, he thought. Ever and always.

if she didn’t sit down, calm herself, and close her eyes, she was going to smack the god of the dead across the face.

You know, if there is one.

[b]Caleb Carr

It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.[/b]

Or, for some here, the greatest lie.

The defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people.

By way of, among others, Wilhelm Reich.

Imagine, Kriezler said, that you enter a large, somewhat crumbling hall that echoes with the sounds of people mumbling and talking repetitively to themselves. All around you these people fall into prostrate positions, some of them weeping. Where are you? Sara’s answer was immediate: in an asylum. Perhaps, Kreizler answered, but you could also be in a church. In the one place the behavior would be considered mad; in the other, not only sane, but as respectable as any human activity can be.

Life’s funny that way, he thought.

You want to believe that there’s one relationship in life that’s beyond betrayal. A relationship that’s beyond that kind of hurt. And there isn’t.

Going back [so far] to Adam and Eve.

She has that quality, does the Hudson, as I imagine all great rivers do: the deep, abiding sense that those activities what take place on shore among human beings are of the moment, passing, and aren’t the stories by way of which the greater tale of this planet will, in the end, be told.

Hell, any two-bit puddle could tell you that.

It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and temerity to style themselves “New York Society”.

You explain it first.