This particular wish – the desire to remain a child forever – strikes me as a defining aspect in American life right now: a collective sentiment that imposes itself over the neutrality of facts and context. This narrative is about how we wish the world worked out in contrast to the disappointment that everyday life offers us, and it helps us to shield ourselves from not only the chaos of reality but also from our own personal failures.
Talking animals were the topic of this morning’s Patty Winters Show. An octopus was floating in a makeshift aquarium with a microphone attached to one of its tentacles and it kept asking – or so its “trainer,” who is positive that mollusks have vocal cords, assured us – for “cheese.” I watched, vaguely transfixed, until I started to sob.
But if you look at everything only through the lens of your party or affiliation, and are capable of being in the same room only with people who think and vote like you, doesn’t that make you somewhat uncurious and oversimplifying, passive-aggressive, locked into assuming you are riding the high moral tide, without ever wondering if you might not, in the eyes of others, be on the very bottom?
Feelings aren’t facts and opinions aren’t crimes.
There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed.
This was why it seemed to many of us in that summer that the Left was morphing into something it never had been in my lifetime: a morally superior, intolerant and authoritarian party that was out of touch and lacked any coherent ideology beyond its blanket refusal to credit an election in which someone they didn’t approve of had, at least legally, technically, won the White House. The Left had become a rage machine, burning itself up: a melting blue bubble dissolving in on itself.
My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this – and I have, countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed – and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding.
Okay, even though you think Erasure is a good band, I think I can still trust you.” “They are, Victor, and –.
The feminist reaction to Playboy seemed unfair because our options pre-internet were so severely limited – maybe a couple issues of a magazine per month – that to apply moral criticism to our desires seemed cruel.
Once upon a time I was liberal. Well, to be honest, less than a year ago I was still a liberal,” he announced in a video. “But I reject a system which allows an ambitious, misinformed, dogmatic group to suppress free speech, create false narratives and apathetically steamroll over the truth. I reject hate. These are the reasons why I became a liberal. And these are the same reasons why I am now walking away.
I suddenly thought again: as a writer, you’re always hearing things that aren’t there.
I have to return some video tapes.” – Patrick Bateman’s all-purpose exit excuse in “American Psycho.
This is my reality. Everything outside of this is like some movie I once saw.
Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is it’s only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in.
And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn’t and probably never will. This relationship will probably lead to nothing... this didn’t change anything.
Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape.
We stare at each other endlessly. I’m convinced she senses I’m about to say something. I’ve seen this look on someone’s face before. Was it in a club? A victim’s expression? Had it appeared on a movie screen recently? Or had I seen it in the mirror?
People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as her car drives up the onramp.
Some clowns make you laugh, but Bobo will make you die, and then he’ll eat your body.
It’s getting to be toward midnight and someone pays the check and I tell Trent, after Blair’s left for the restroom, that I didn’t have the slightest idea who Walker is. Trent looks at me and says, “You don’t make any sense, you know that?” “I make sense.” “No, dude. You’re ridiculous.” “Why don’t I make sense?” “Because you just don’t.” “That doesn’t make sense.” “Maybe it doesn’t.