My body of work
I've been Instagramming my life for a decade, for all to see me bleed. When people tell me they don’t understand my content, I relish in that feeling. My family is constantly online, but they don’t know what I do there. They will never understand, and I’m glad they never will. I learned that to be understood is to prostitute oneself.
And still, I take the edge off the existential terror I’m involved in by posting relentlessly, and experimenting with creative non-fiction. It is the only bearable response to living a thousand-eyed existence in the gaze of the attention economy. I never know what to write, so I hide myself in rhymes. Or worse, I make memes with my face on it. I have become incapable of expressing emotions other than through humorous pictures. Sometimes I think I’m willingly making a spectacle of myself for others to gaze at for my validation. I exist, I exist!! But it’s all to make you laugh. I aim to map and document every aspect of my lifeworld, for nothing and for you.
Everything you think is worthless turns out to be everything. Once you stop choosing, you respect the succession and flow of speech. Incoherence is the name of the game. Nothing is systematic, everything is disjointed. There are people all over the place, populating my mind and text, I find their inconsistencies and put them in their place. I want to talk to these people. Not as a local, not as a servant, but on equal terms. I might have to fake an accent to make friends there.
My systematic anti-system, anti-systematic system, where nothing is nothing and everything is everything. I find myself swinging words of high pedigree at a screen that won’t deserve them. I convince myself that what I do is crucial to my surroundings, like an old ox pissing in the mud.
I pop these zit-like thoughts that bubble under my blistering scar-ridden boils. They burst in prose, oozing meaning into a thick crust of text, which I scrape off the previous night‘s face-like page I prefer to mutilate, not clean. Unclean pages fill the language of my skin, this dead-weight body of work comes from a wish to not exist. In critter-minded glory, I bask in the wealth of a pauper, the misery of kings, the loneliness of grooms and the hopelessness of children. The entire text shall free me from the shackles of my corpse. I’ll leave you with this quote from the man who couldn’t sleep.
“It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in a future to which I won’t belong) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I’ll have my own kin, people who ‘understand’ me, my true family in which to be born and loved.
But far from being born into it, I’ll have already died long ago. I’ll be understood only in effigy, when affection can no longer compensate for the indifference that was the dead man’s lot in life.
Perhaps one day they’ll understand that I fulfilled, like no one else, my instinctive duty to interpret a portion of our century; and when they’ve understood that, they’ll write that in my time I was misunderstood, that the people around me were unfortunately indifferent and insensitive to my work, and that it was a pity this happened to me.
And whoever writes this will fail to understand my literary counterpart in that future time, just as my contemporaries don’t understand me. Because men learn only what would be of use to their great-grandparents.
The right way to live is something we can teach only the dead.”
What a narcissistic asshole. When I die I want adderall at my funeral so everyone can focus on my corpse and read the words it spells. I tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. To omit is to betray oneself in suicide. My body of work is rotting to the core, spelling a gangrenous story of filth and regret. For now, I must see if the bullshit job creation project can find a place for an aging man of letters, or bullshit. I guess I’ll post until I die, if I haven’t already. You can find me in the many things I’ll never cease to share.
