ADVENT 1.6: Folie à Plusieurs
Indisputable fact is:
I’m a professional writer1 again.
I enter text for cash returns
.
A
PAID subscriber, singular
—
my delusions are officially being
⍜⍜⍜◯ENABLED
I have sanction. Glory, GLORY ALELUIA. Now for the luau.
An apparatus, self-forming, takes shape behind me.
Now I’m a gladiator now I’m a pugilist now this is prizefighting now I gotta kill shit.
I’m being egged on. Shit. Shit,
YOU ARE ALL COMPLETELY FUCKED NOW.
Having microdosed the chanciest of successes I assault my machinery in the new light of favor, and it has given me cause, as it should, to consider What It Is That I Am Doing Here, beyond the clear task of VOLUMINOUS DATA ENTRY
and confessional shedding
I MAKE GOSPEL MUSIC FOR GENIUSES
These word-shapes are here to
GIVE YOU ENERGY ϟ
These, These, These! THESE are hierogrammatical hypersigils
wrought from the excesses of the
of the LEFT BANK of LOS ANGELES.DUMBSHIT APOLLINAIRE
Your ideal interaction with them — the Shapes
! involves a brief swish (tasty
) or a roll (horny
) or a whiff (smelly
) or however you’d like to think of it, and then fuckin’ huckin2’ The Thing3 Away
From You because you feel ENERGIZED to go and as per MIKE
“
MEGA
”
WATT
“START YOUR OWN BAND” IF
an imbecile such as me can GET IT
then surely there’s a recipient for yy𝒚𝒀OU
— should you be a sufficiently advanced creature to admit the need for recipients4 — it’s an allowance, it’s an indulgence, but the EMBODIMENT
of ANY
DESIRED
END
is necessarily an exercise in shared delusion — OF COURSE I BELIEVE THAT YOU’RE A PILOT,
I mean, you’re wearing the uniform —
▰▱ TANG of ATTENTIONAL CRAVE on the FANGS ▱▰
Inchworms mark miles in the spark of absurd luck shone upon
In LIFE you may find an audience in want of understanding perhaps a time or two or
N E V E R
and so its cultivation must be cherished.
in DEATH you become a poppet,
canonical, stuffed, to be used as needed.
Me, HERE, Now
— I could BLEED
out, and SO I SHALL.
QUALIFICATION is CROWD-SOURCED CHARLATANISM ◑◒◐◓ SCIENCE is SCIENCE until it’s DUSTBINNED ◑◒◐◓ EVERY "HERO" is BOOTHEEL DEEP into SOME SOMEBODY ◑◒◐◓ SUCCESS is a COLLABORATIVE GAME ◑◒◐◓ To PLAY at it AT ALL is to be COMPROMISED ◑◒◐◓ SUCCESS is a CONSPIRACY ◑◒◐◓ SUCH is LIFE, SUCK is LIFE
I’ve been paid to write before.
The earliest and saddest
irritationiteration of this particular model of labor exchange entailed being unaccountably mean to complete strangers in the pages of a particularly shitty third-tier alt-weekly5.
I was a teenager living in an apartment trying not to have a job at the time6.
I’d receive e-mails with attachments of a dozen or so photos of people doing the most teenitiny slightly autre out-of-place things with their appearances, and tasked with captioning them in an early VICE-like ‘Do’s and Don’ts’-type format, without the Do’s:
no byline, all viciousness.
$50.00/WEEK
I’d oSteNsiBLy
been HIRED for an expressed interest in “fashion writing
,” but it pretty quickly became clear that the majority of people being photographed and submitted (a sad and creepy endeavor, for which I’m sure some aspirant Avedon was being compensated at a similarly robust rate) as intended targets of mockery had generally committed one of a few cardinal errors:
failing conventional attractiveness standards! fatness! poverty! queerness of some stripe, ATYPICALITY ——
They’d have to have broken some PATTERNICITY
to have been noticed for CAPTURE and subsequent humiliation.
The publishers didn’t really want me to pettily snipe clothes, which was roughly the extent of the LOWNESS
to which I’d been willing to stoop
at the time (largely borne of the inconsideration that typifies youthful decisions, juvenility
writ dumb
) —
they wanted flesh and blood.
Took a harm reduction approach, still reductive & gross gauche gross.
I’d shit-talk the clothes I thought ugliest and leave The Form Alone (I await a medallion and fanfare) — this Did Not Please the Publishers.
In the shortest while the withering became dispiriting as it’d seem and I began to scheme, submitting what were effectively nonsensical captions that did not reference the provided image at all — this DID NOT Please the Publishers.
I can’t remember if I got fired or quit — Baby Bird days were a malfunctioning carousel, I did a lot of coming and going — but I can remember being glad to be DONE WITH IT, and I can recall the near-immediacy with which my successor took to collecting their weekly U.S. Grant7 for plain-statingly fatso and faggo and uggo
’ing everyone who so clearly HAD IT COMING.
It’s no wonder I’m paranoid about digital image circulation.
ShutterStock or laughing stock, Jack and the giant.
was effectively a paid enforcer of normativity is a varied irony not THAT ILOST
on ME, much as I might like to GET LOST.
I AM GLAD, HERE, NOW, to be using my letterism
in service of focused energy rather than undue mercenery potshot scorn, and with FULL
DARK MERIT
I await the dungheap steamshovel opprobrium sure to accompany my own zoo exhibition
.
THE COMMENT SECTION IS A GREAT PLACE FOR EXCORIATION ▰
Most correctly I suppose I am a “transmedia artist” but that makes me sound like I went to school (vomit_emoji)
"The Voice of the Ohio River.”
Right now it’s a computer or a phone, unless you’re printing all this shit out and reading it that way, like you’re the President of the United States or something.
Midwesternness trains you not to find interest in your own experience and absolutely not to shake the limbs of any existing hierarchies and should be regarded as a form of on-board spiritual dysfunction: apoptosis for dreams and imaginings, the nothing-grinder.
There used to be these things called printing presses, and weeks, and alternativity. It is my near-certainty that in your time, in which I am dead and canon-stuf’t, none of these things remain.
🔄
There used to be this shit called money. It was Bad News, man.