Inevitablilty

Baudelairean Satanism.

There, I said it.

[#nevermind]

Most Obvious

“I don’t know,” she recited, as if litany, “where you get all that.”
     “Don’t you ever follow the stories in the ads?” he asked, as if it was the most obvious question in the world.
     “No,” she responded, and her tone, as well, suggested she thought this the most obvious of truths.

On the Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Rivalrous Remix)

In consideration of a psychoanalytic meaning of history, it is enough to wonder what the classicist thought of any real possibility that the psychologist’s basic descriptions of dysfunction would become so influential a cooperative venture within a dissociated composite verging into an alternative, synchronistic paranormality.

Apropos of Howard

Circumstance sometimes reminds it better to take time out for calming breath and deliberate consideration that we might slip through distracting noise and manage something better than headbanging phuqueue and some manner of joke derived from douchebags, or maybe that’s just the coffee.

This Really Shouldn’t Need Explaining

There is a household discussion that has to do with why I never watch television in the living room. The problem with this discussion, of course, is that the answer to the question is essentially verboten: It is impossible to watch television in the living room.

There is, indeed, a television in the living room, and the problem is not so much the arrangement of the kitchen such that there is a lot of noise from the one into the other. Rather, it is that nobody is allowed to watch television in that room without having conversations about something else: How much cheese there is, or going to the grocery store tomorrow afternoon, or, hey, maybe we should buy a new television; I can’t remember the other six topics, but it really is like a television show or movie in and of itself.

If I managed to watch five minutes of the show, I couldn’t tell you what happened. In all the years I have known multiple people to behave this way, talking over a television program about something irrelevant and nonessential, then waiting quite literally a matter of seconds to do it again, it has never really made sense. Sometimes you can rewind and replay the same segment in front of them multiple times, and it starts to feel as if they actually resent that you are watching television, would very much like you to stop, consider themselves too polite to actually say so, and thus have no alternative save annoying you until you turn off the program and leave.

And that is what it is, but in the end, yes, that is why I watch television downstairs. The answer, when I actually encounter the question of why I don’t watch television in the living room is to look at the only person in the house who asks me that and say―

“Because you won’t let me. Because if you are home and awake, and I am watching television in this room, you absolutely must speak to me now about whatever you can think of in the moment, even if it’s a matter weeks away having precisely nothing to do with me. Because I have just rewound the same fifteen seconds of this show, several times, in order to hear what they’re saying, and every time I restart the video you start talking again. Because when I tried turning up the volume just to see what happened, you actually talked louder in order to be heard. Because I can take a hint, a’ight?”

―and you just don’t go talking to people like that.

Fortune Cookie

Every once in a while, act like it isn’t true.

You Wouldn’t Believe (The Legend of the Accursed Potato Chip)

I live in an American household that manages to make potato chips unpalatable. Let that point sink in.

This Does Not Make Sense

There is a certain futility in announcing anything, especially when there is nothing to announce. Still, two poems in two days and an actual effort to retain them feels like starting something. Here’s a joke, though, that isn’t actually a joke: National Poetry Month, having just ended, managed to remind of something apparently forgotten.

At some point in my nearly forty-five years I forgot that I am a poet.

No, really, I have no idea how this happened.

Except I probably do.

I don’t know, I should probably be embarrassed; but, y’know, whatever.

[#nevermind]

Groovy Mysteries and the Price of Tea at Arcturus

Why do people so desperately need mysteries?

Still, that is not the right question; one can easily see the potential for offense, but there is also a threshold at which it does not matter because someone, somewhere, will be offended by the merest whiff that their humanity is somehow imperfect. But if the comparative question arises that the gas bill is considerably less this year than it was last, and what we really want to know is why, how is it that the most obvious factors—weather and temperature, devices used, and unit cost, just for starters—must necessarily remain mysterious?

There comes a point at which one is frustrated at the lack of actual information about a chart and carefully-devised statistics that hide one particular bit of data: How much does the gas cost per measured salable unit? If we are paying X per Y volume, apparently both X and Y must remain mysterious as we discuss why the gas bill is lower this year than the same period last.

Wait, wait, wait: Must? Who says, “must”?

Either the gas company or the consumer; it is unclear which. Because in the moment when one exclaims, “Why is the one thing we don’t get, here, the cost per unit?” of course the answer is going to be, “I don’t know, it’s probably in all the other pages.” That is, the pages not simply thrown in the recycle bin without reading, but also determinedly torn up for security purposes.

The question remains: What is the proper question? That much, to be certain, remains mysterious.

Why? Why Do I Have to Bargain for This Part?

So here’s the deal: When you finally find it, will you please, just for once in your life, ask yourself how the fucking fuck-all it got there in the first place?

I swear unto you . . . .