2/4/16; 2:09 PM; front page of
ESPN.com reads: ‘Larry
Bird believes he will die young. Is he right?’
They
are asking the reader, rhetorically. But, being the egocentric knave I am, I take the question personally. Do I think Larry Bird
will die young. I think first and foremost that Larry Bird is a psychotic name to bestow a human being
with. It is the pet name an urbane yet haggard woman gives her husband of too many years. Larry, Bird, darling, fetch the laundry will you? Larry Bird, the television, it is affecting my tinnitus, won't you turn it down? Larry Bird, you will die, uncomfortably, in the liquid stool of your memories. Yes, you are right, Larry Bird. You will die young.
So I’m
not the most lurid rug on the linoleum, but lately I’ve been trying to get all
this death crap out of my head. So give me some fucking credit. Because it’s crap,
is what it is, the death thoughts. For two years I lived in an apartment with
linoleum floors. Try doing this while avoiding mortal obsessions. It’s like
rubbing your tummy and patting your head, while dying.
The
running joke being our mortality. What are your coping strategies? Do you
laugh? Do you cherish your laughter? Or are you like me, and your laughter is
only a desperate signal to our cruel design, Help, Help, for I laugh only to
avoid crying. I also perform cross-legged onanisms. Ohns, I call them. My
monkish retreat into the mind of the cockatoo, peacock feathers fanning from my
fervid feather-fugues. Larry Bird...
So what
do you do? Do you manage? In what manner do you blunt the charge of death’s
battering ram? We are but the lives of Troy, daemons of Greeks at our walls.
My Achilles Heel is my agnostic god’s parlor-room knee-slapper, and their
laughter is real and drunk off seraphim sipped from godlike thimbles. I no
longer ingest Scheduled Substances. Why? You first.
During Blizzard ’16 (because fuck ‘Jonas’ or ‘Snowzilla’ or any cutesy sobriquet for a fucking
snowstorm), I bunkered up with my boy B. Sammons. I told you this, before, at
an earlier mortal hour. Really, if we don’t listen to each other, what do we
have? Anyway, despite the snow falling like tetris blocks, we at some point got
bored. So we got on OKCupid and essentially harassed people, i.e. sent the
following messages:
Notice that all messages were decoded by their receivers, i.e. read. Respondents to date: 0. Yet this is also equal to the number of restraining orders and harassment charges placed upon yrs trly, so I think we're coming out even on this one.
Things that are
bullshit:
Symbolism. Symbolism is in bad writing. Symbolism is also in good writing that makes fun of bad writing.
Symbolism is like post-aesthetic art that fails to speak and instead contains
invisible ciphers, like some overwrought DeLillo novel,
or a good DeLillo novel that’s parodic.
It’s an internal conversation, with itself or its esoteric community, perpetuating
precisely that which art stands to eradicate: divisions. Why people who make litter
boxes with cat shit in them and call it anything but a litter box with cat shit
in it is bullshit. It’s not a symbol of our caged feculence. It’s bullshit. It’s
shit in a box. A box is a box, and if it has shit in it, it is then a box with
shit in it, a box in which cats do their shitting. Symbolism – e.g. an
MFA-style short story with 178 line breaks that's framed in some hipster gallery near the
Bowery and has to be explained on a 5x5 copper placard for want of meaning that is detectable to
the naked eye – is bullshit.
Acronyms. Namely for TV shows. They circumscribe an area in which
you stand, looking to the outside, where I crouch in the stool of my ignorance.
You bearing the smug expression that knows something I don’t. Me contorting my
countenance into the false shape of indifference against your knowing. The acronym, its powerful
knowledge, is written in your gaze, which is gluey and slack from too much
Netflix and Chill, too much weed. The only worthy acronym
is DFW, because he is almighty and we face east to accept his grace.
Feeling
like ding dong dick, like, 65% of the time: bullshit. E.g. no coffee in my
system, e.g. too much coffee in my system, e.g. not enough sleep because of either of the
former e.g.'s. Or, e.g. you all not reading my blog in the numbers and ways I want you
to, which are, respectively, great, and with a sense of profound gratitude
toward the regret I accrue as burden for all your sins. Further dickish
feelings swell dickily from: e.g. the hero sub I order from the nearby bodega (~10-inch chicken cutlet bacon cheddar onion green pepper tomato bbq sauce); e.g. my ensuing despair, despite the warm mass which has gathered inside me; e.g. white underpants; e.g. that quadrant of the A train mezzanine where that kid threw up and sat in it and was slapped and cowed by his frat brothers for not holding his liquor 'like men should'; e.g. killin' the game while still playin' it, and other paradoxes of such ilk. Oh,
and e.g. acid reflux. Great band name, that. Bullshit, this.
The
Iowa Caucus. Goes without saying, but why ~45,000 people of nearly homogenous
demographic should set the primaries’ inertia is, yes, aside from eerily analogous
to Canada’s curling league, you guessed it, bullshit.
That’s
all that is bullshit today. Everything else is fine. Just fine.
Oh,
and George? I still see you, George. I’m here, George. It is tomorrow, and you
are here in my apartment, and we’re stoking the fire that I set on the new rug
that covers the linoleum of my memories, and we’re laughing, George, we’re laughing
only because we mustn’t cry. This bonus track is for you, George. George?
Important note: zoetrope-0 insisted in her profile that her suitors should also hate Hemingway. So I sent her this (you're welcome, George):
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