White Hot Harlots

On creepiness (the name is fake, the story is true)

Jenny Smith is a creep.  She—you already know that, obviously, but sometimes looking at her facebook I am just shocked at how deep her creepiness runs.  She is creepier than any woman should be.  There’s a reason that when women commit sex crimes, we almost never regard them as seriously as those committed by men.  It’s because your average woman is far less creepy than your average man, and so while a male teacher banging his student is grounds for a lynchin’, a female teacher doing the same deserves at most a firing.  The dude was creepy, the woman—that’s actually pretty hot.  Good for the kid.

Hell, Smith aside, the creepiest women I’ve ever known couldn’t even begin to keep up with mildly creepy dudes.  You catch a guy sniffing his own armpit and it’s like, jesus fuck, get him out of here, clear out his locker, check to make sure he’s never been near your pets.  You catch a girl doing the same thing and who knows, maybe you think it’s a little cute.

Smith has shattered this glass ceiling. You might remember that I used to get frustrated while attempting to describe her, wondering why it was that she was so repellent.  Eventually you said “she’s ugly, man,” and while I let the conversation go, there was actually more to it than that.  She is, indeed, bad looking.  But not, like, epically.  She’s not morbidly obese, doesn’t have an extra hand, and while her face is defined by a greasy, lizard-like masculinity, it’s not especially jagged or disproportionate.  The woman’s soul is ugly.  Or not ugly—creepy and terrifying, every sound and movement she makes is like an air raid signal, specially designed to put you on edge because something Dangerous is happening.

For some reason, her status updates occasionally sneak into my facebook feed.  (Facebook filters, see, so you only are exposed to the stuff it things you’re interested in.  If you and a friend interact a lot, either directly or by visiting one another profiles, their updates are more likely to enter your feed.  If you barely know someone, you don’t see their updates unless you visit their profile).   These updates emanate with the same sort of indescribable and yet palpably dangerous weirdness as her face-to-face interaction. 

Just—first of all, she’s dating a guy who looks like The Monarch if The Monarch was a computer programmer who got paid to eat weird shit people found underneath sofas.  She keeps posting pictures of him, and in these pictures she’s always grinning and hugging him while he frowns wanly, as if contemplating eating a handful of bottle caps in order to extricate himself from her embrace.   

Secondly, she’s always autistically cryptic.   She’s not trying to be vague or mysterious.  Her brain just works on a plane utterly bereft of human empathy, and so she leaves out vitally important details that a cognitively normal person would never think of omitting.  Like, if a house burned downed and two people got out but an old woman was trapped inside, a normal person would describe exactly as I just did.  Smith would say “that house burned but I think they saved the fridge.”

 Here’s one from yesterday, verbatim:  “May have witnessed a murder today on college hill, over by spunky’s.”

What the fuck?!   Some of her weirdo friends posted stuff like “are you serious???” while I, unable to resist such strangeness, posted “were you watching me play scrabble because I got ‘murdered’ several times tonight LOL” 

The reason I wrote that was because I wanted to get some sort of reaction out of her, even if it was shock.  Because normally she just leaves these things hanging.  But enough people posted questions, I guess, because she just followed things up with “stay away from spunky’s, it’s dangerous.”

No, it’s not.  Spunky’s is fine.  Don’t spill beer on anyone’s Affliction shirt, don’t slap any strange women on the ass, and you’ll be cool.  Jenny Smith is dangerous.  She’s the kind of person who will set you fire because she thinks you’ll think it’s funny.  That coffee taste a little off?  That’s because she laced it with beryllium flakes.  N-not out of malice, but because she wanted to see if it would give you superpowers. 

This, my friend, is the essence of creepiness.  The word gets misused when it’s applied to people who simply seem gross or clammy or otherwise off.  Creepiness implies danger.  As in, that guy who asked for your number didn’t just want to date you, or that guy with the very white teeth sure seemed happy about buying all that drain cleaner.  Notice in both examples that I refer to “that guy.”  That’s because women aren’t usually dangerous, at least not in a “my basic interactions with you are predatory” kind of way.  She is.  She’s exceptional like that.    

Rationality is harlotry, politics is fuckness

Writing seems like a good idea.  Too bad I’ve recently become aware of the pointlessness of all discussion.  Too bad, also, that I’ve averred not to write any more letters wherein all I do is bitch about my depression.  W-what else is there to talk about, then? 

We could communicate in nonsense, the preferred nomenclature of facebook and twitter.  Sometimes, rarely, my nonsense has reached the state of the pure poetic, sort of like a window into the Lacanian real. Other times it’s just been cat jokes or poop puns, and judged by the number of Likes and Retweets, those seem to be much more popular than poetry. 

But, oh, good nonsense requires clarity.  Muddled nonsense is too real, a reflection of its speaker’s pathetic inability to say anything worth hearing.  There is a sadness to real mumbling.  Stay sober and hang out at a bar around closing time and you’ll see what I mean.  People cannot express the simplest things, like basic commands or announcements of desire, and while the fresh-faced undergrad drinkers may laugh at the novelty of mushmouthedness, us seasoned alcoholics accept it as wanly we accept aging and death, refusing to talk about it, refusing even to open our mouths because that would remind us all of its existence. 

 Right now, I’m not clear enough to speak in the nice nonsensical.  Right now, my lack of clarity demands I make a sad attempt at rational prose.

Rationality is for shitheads, though, which is why all discussion is pointless beyond contempt.  No matter how “well-informed” they may ostensibly seem, all opinions are prejudiced bullshit, basically just brand preferences done up with the pompous blandishments of logic and information.  You believe in anything? That’s because you’re a tool. 

I used to write political columns.  That was pompous.  Not because of the intentional divisiveness of my writing nor the fact that I refused to hide my disdain.  The pompousness came instead from a naivety.  I didn’t realize how fucking stupid everything was, and in not placing myself far enough above it I got dragged down into it, tried playing the game by the rules as they are officially written and, accordingly, failed in spite of my success.  All you had to do, I thought, was come up with the most rationally sound argument, describe that argument in a clear and convincing manner, and then naturally/rationally everyone would come over to your side. So, for example, the reason we went to war wasn’t because craven, profiteering assholes exploited the massive racism of the American public, convincing them that spending a trillion dollars killing a million muslims would be a barrel of fun.  Not at all!  The reason was because the information was bad!  Things weren’t rational enough, people weren’t told the whole story. 

What bullshit.

 My mastery of the political realm inflated my sense of intelligence and filled me with a rage toward nearly everyone—especially those who took politics too seriously or not seriously enough.  The rage was stupid and the self-righteousness was pathetic.  Again, not because I was wrong, but because the game I had just beaten was ridiculously easy. I mean, of course I was conceited.  Except for the profoundly jaded, who wouldn’t be?   After a few years of dedicated study, I had figured out politics!  And politics are super important!   But this was like I considered myself an arcade whiz because I made it through Sesame Street:  A-B-C, 1-2-3. I didn’t realize that nobody, especially the people who designed it, takes a game like that very seriously. 

You read more than a handful of books that aren’t about vampires and don’t have the word “freedom” in the title, you’re going to reach the same level of “mastery” I did.  Unless, of course, you are one of the pathological:  racists, xenophobes, morons drunk with religious or rationalistic purity.  The rich and the self-serving don’t count, as those guys are the real masters of all this.  As for young writers who get co-opted, made by their bosses to treat all sides with respect, to kiss the asses of important contacts, to never rock the boat—even when dealing with sickening corruption, idiocy, or greed, because pointing out bad things is impolite—those writers especially don’t count.  Not as political actors, and not as human beings. 

Political discourse—and all the opinions attendant to it—are generated by the political structure itself.  And that structure makes damn sure that discourse is non-threateningly moronic.  Academics does the same basic thing, but we are 1) neutered by a lack of funding and 2) much more concerned about our own opacity, because we can’t let outsiders know what we do because then they’ll stop giving us money.

True story, with speculation

Texas executes retarded people.  Why?  Because they need to learn.  This is the only way to make sure they don’t keep hugging rabbits to death, or accidentally sitting on people, or doing whatever the hell else a mentally handicapped person does to deserve being condemned to death.

There was this one time where a retarded guy was about to get executed.  It was his last meal, and he didn’t finish his bowl of Lucky Charms or whatever.  The guards were like, “hey dude, live a little, go nuts, eat everything.”  And the inmate’s response, swear to god, was “oh it’s okay, I’ll save some for later.”

Here’s my question:  when he said this, do you think the jailers all went “aww?”  Like “ohh, that’s our Corky, always making us smile.”  

In defense of religion

Cribbing Bruno Latour, I would like to say a few words about ufology, religion, and love.  Ufology is the supposedly organized science that studies UFOs, and I use the term broadly, referring to all scienticized ghosthunting.  I refer to religion and love in a discoursal sense, as types of speech.  The love is agape, the non-eros kind, which is the love god feels for man, or people feel towards one another when the other person is such an important part of your life that you can’t imagine living without them.  The religion is more of a feeling than an organized thing.  Think of it as “being in touch with god,” or else being religiously affected by some type of speech or communication. 

Latour call himself a scientific ethnographer.  His work is of great interest to me because he focuses on the creation of popularly recognized truths.  The findings of science aren’t considered true because they are transcendently, manifestly true.  Instead, science creates and manipulates discourses, and these discourses ensure the popular acceptance of its findings and dictates.  Sometimes this works wonderfully, like in how nearly every living person believes the earth to be round, even though only a few dozen of us have seen it from outer space.  Other times this works poorly, like in how the scientific community has done an awful job getting its consensus on manmade global warming to cross over into the greater public understanding.

Latour’s work doesn’t aim toward helping science better frame its discourse, though.  Instead, he stresses the once-radical notion that scientific consensus is constructed by scientists.  Scientific facts are not divined, as if science is a big decoder ring waved over empirical phenomena, granting users immediate, objective understanding of the meaning of things.  Instead, scientists construct facts through their field’s controlled methods of observation and description.  These facts aren’t considered factual unless they are shown to jibe up with the empirically extant world, and science is pretty good about maintaining standards according to which some facts can be verified and others dismissed.  Still, construction takes place. 

Once this realization has been accepted, it quickly becomes clear that rationality exists mostly as a rhetorical device.  That is, things are classified as rational as a means of making them socially, situationally, institutionally, or politically viable, and they are classified as irrational when their classifers wish them to be dismissed. 

Notice the incendiary wish them in that last line?  That was intentional.  Saying that scientific fact is constructed doesn’t mean very much if we, as realists, are talking about something that can be closely observed and carefully controlled—if we’re dealing with what happens when certain chemicals are heated, say, or observing tumor growth in beagles who have had shampoo poured continuously into their eyes.  But nearly every observable thing isn’t so cleanly observable, which means that, however well hidden or accounted for, the scientists observing these things must exercise a great deal of authorship in coming to any conclusions about them.

The obvious question is, how do scientific philosophers deal with this?  There appears to be a huge split between theory and practice:  Modernists claim empirical precisions to be a window into the absolute, objective real, but actual scientists and scientific citizens practice an imprecise, hugely subjective, and yet fantastically successful form of science.    

Latour says the reconciliation of this split comes from the fact that people only sometimes care about it, when it’s convenient for them to do so.  Indeed, people almost never give a damn about the fact that theory and practice conflict with one another; the entire Modern project is, he says, perpetuated by a certain form of ignoring the split in our own actions but being very harsh in our denunciations when we see it appear elsewhere.

An example:  19^th century French imperialists wrote scathingly dismissive descriptions of the religious practices of Gold Coast Blacks.  The Blacks built totems of wood, and to the totems they ascribed a wide range of mystical powers:  this one kept the sea from flooding, this one kept the crops growing, et cetera.  The French were stymied.  “Can’t you tell,” they asked the Blacks, “your own invention from a divine force?  Cripes—you made this freakin’ statue.  You should know full-well that it’s not magic.  It’s from your own hand!”

The Blacks were just as stymied.  Of course these totems were made by them.  Nobody said otherwise.  And of course they were divine, too.  Why did those two aspects necessarily occlude one another?

And, of course, these Rational and Scientific Frenchman were being quite hypocritical.  The religious ones worshiped man-made idols:  some kissing rosaries, others clutching crucifixes.  The irreligious among them—those intellectually dedicated to the primacy of the scientific, the steely march of reason, who sought not convert the Blacks but to civilize them, bring them towards a properly logical understanding of the world—they were worshiping man-made idols just the same as the Blacks.  Their truths were developed in laboratories, by men.

The Blacks saw no essential split between theory and practice.  The fact that their objects of worship had been obviously constructed was no big deal.  The French, and all other Moderns, recognize such a split conceptually—and they consider it the dividing line between truth and falsity, rationality and irrationality—but they completely ignore the fact that their own practices routinely traverse this split.

To their credit, most scientists take a down-to-earth approach to their own work.  They realize that science is a messy and imperfect business, and that even though they work hard to eliminate their own biases and perceptions from the data their work generates, some bleeding over is bound to happen.  Perhaps the reason they’re so free in their denial of any Cartesian transcendence of the empirical is because they realize they don’t need it; science has accomplished great things even while being not fully pure.  Even the things that aren’t great in a moral sense are still great in size.  Jesus:  we blew up an entire goddamn city by tearing an atom apart.  It don’t matter whether or not the Manhattan experiments were a window into objective reality. They generated some pretty spectacular results.

The question of the purity in scientific propriety comes up instead in those fields whose success is more controvertible—the social sciences, and especially the pseudo-sciences.  Here I’ll slag off the social sciences (my usual target) and focus just on the pseudo sciences, particularly ufology, which is such a wonderfully funny thing that I can’t even type its name without smiling.  Latour marvels at how ufologists, creationists, climate change deniers, and bigfoot hunters are practically the only people who demand the maintenance of scientific purity.  This is partially because they all wish to dismiss scientific consensus, but also—more tellingly—because they can conceive of no other reality except that which is scientifically, measurably factual.  The only way things can be real is if they can be proven real in some lab, shown to cause a spike on a meter, made to leave cloudy traces on a Polaroid.

Something about this is very sad, but also indicative of greater trends in widespread belief.  People, it seems, are disinclined to believe anything unless it can be proven scientifically.  But as most people lack the knowledge and acuity to properly judge the sciencey-ness of declarations of fact, they put their trust in placeholders or aesthetic signifiers.  Certainly, you and I do this every day: there are some websites and newscasts we distrust just because of minor things, like layout, font selection, or the tone of their descriptions of events.  It doesn’t matter how correct or important a person’s tale might be:  if he chooses to tell it in Comic Sans, I’m going to choose to ignore him. 

Ufologists take this superficial verification just one step further.  They cling to notions of the objective realness of all phenomena which can be measured through careful, controlled observation.  If they can generate honest, unsullied data demonstrating a disruption within a field, then that disruption proves the objective existence of their phenomena of choice.  For ufologists, this is achieved through photographic evidence, or by those rare instances when SETI picks up strange statistical noise.  Ghosthunters prefer the data generated by any of their numerous meters, which are purported to measure electronic, magnetic, or radioactive disturbances.   Notice that in each of these cases, machines are used to detect what’s presumed to be a material presence.  That presence is beyond the realm of the sensate but must nonetheless exist, because without materialization the phonemena at hand cannot be considered real.  

This is quite a limited way of understanding things, don’t you think?  And while it’s sad when evinced by ufologists, it’s downright tragic when you see it coming from religious people.  But that’s the way things are going.  It’s how mainstream atheists dismiss religion, and how mainstream religion seeks to combat atheism:  “You can’t prove the physical form of god!”  “Yes we can, just examine such and such!”  Such childishness this is!  Such a pitiably limited manner of comprehension! 

For a long while, I’ve attempted to escape this mode of thought by accepting that religion operates on a different ground from logic and science:  there is no need for  religion to prove itself logical, because that’s simply not it’s point.  It does something different.  It does not purport to objectively prove or predict the material existence of things, like science, nor does it mean to necessarily explain anything.  I now realize this was a bit of a cop-out, and also a little snarky.  In feeling this way, I made no effort to actually understand religion.  Also, in spite of my seeming tolerance, this belief was just a nicer-sounding way to allow me to keeping considering myself above religion, making it secondary to logic.  

What’s needed is a matter of classifying certain discourses as existing respectfully aside (not below) logic.  After all, logic is largely a rhetorical affect, so saying something is logical or not shouldn’t constitute a judgment of validity.  Instead, we should think about things functionally.  We have to figure out what it does, rhetorically, and then compare that to what effective religious discourse does, before we can set the two discourses on parallel paths.  Latour attempts to do this by comparing religious discourse to love discourse.  While discourses of fact mean to transmit information, discourses of love and religion mean to transform participants. 

This is not as hippy-dippy as it might sound, especially when you look at it from the agape angle.  Think of the phrase I love you.  On the one hand, there is no more empty or clichéd a phrase in the English language:  there’s nothing inventive about it, and some 90-odd percent of the time when it is spoken, it is spoken mechanistically.   On the other hand, however, the phrase is one of the most profound and meaningful any of us will ever utter or hear. 

The cynical understanding of I love you is a rational one, where we expect it to convey some unique or worthwhile information.  The actual understanding of the phrase is much more complicated, however.  It is a transformative affirmation.  It strengthens the bond between two people.  It imparts a sense of trust or comfort, the closeness of a renewed sense of presence.  It lets the person know that you are with them, spiritually, in a manner completely aside from physical presence.  There are yours even when they are not near you.  You are theirs, even though they do not own or control you.

How horrible it would be to dismiss such a phrase because of its lack of logical content!  It means to do—and succeeds in doing—something completely apart from the logical project.  The phrase does not describe a material state or convey raw information.  It changes the status of the parties involved in its delivery and reception.

This is the intended affect of religious discourse.  It is what one means when he claims to have received religion.  Only, sadly, this has recently become conflated with the narrow, rational understanding of the purpose of the speech act.  The transformative, affirmative presence of god has come to be mischaracterized as the physical presence of god, and so those claiming to be in god’s presence are dismissed as lunatics.  But this accusation misses the entire point!  It is very stupidly myopic.  And, most importantly, it should not be combated with claims to some type of actual, material existence of the spiritual.  It should instead be called out for being dishonestly obtuse.

Harlot6 Bad mental states

These past 7 months, I’ve been caught in cycles of aggression and devastation which are separated by short periods of energizing stability.  The cycles last between 1-2 weeks, and the rest periods between 24-72 hours.  The only period that I recognize as it is happening is the devastation, which always comes after the aggression and before the stability.  The slip between aggression and stability just happens, then, unintentionally and unrealized, until something makes its foundation sunder in twain and I find myself at the bottom of a deep, cold pit of despair. 

I first recognized this pattern about three months ago, and I figured it correlated to my alcohol consumption.  A miserable, week-long experiment in sobriety disabused me of any such notion, thank god.  Excessive drinking does tend to accompany the aggression, but the former does not trigger the latter.  And hangovers of course accentuate the bleakness of the despair, but they really just crank it up from a 7 or an 8 to a 9 or 10.  But the “pink cloud”—that misleading, cultish description of the rank lucidity of extended sobriety—was much worse.  It truncated the aggression and extended the despair.  Whereas I would normally spend no more than 48 hours refusing to get out of bed, or taking several showers a day so as to prevent my roommate from hearing the violence of my sobs, the sober despair was much more chronic, if less intense.  I’d leave bed and only rarely break down, but my motions and interactions felt palpably (if vaguely) mechanistic, devoid of direction or purpose.  There is, I realized, a solace in heightened despair.  It’s transience is much more conspicuous.  Hungover, I can always remind myself that I’m just hungover and so will probably feel better in the morning. 

Right now I’m in the end of phase of a mild desperation episode.  It has lasted since yesterday evening and will probably subside by tomorrow morning.  My stability period will be markedly productive, as they always are. I’ll read feverishly, write decently, prepare class notes, grade, and do everything else I’m supposed to do.  Gradually my work will become more intense.  My everyday interactions and behaviors will soon follow suit.  This intensity will then very gradually turn to a general recklessness which will seep into every little thing I do.  For example, I might pull out of my driveway, which leads directly onto a busy highway, without bothering to turn my head to see if any trucks are coming.  Or maybe I’ll solicit intense eye contact with strangers, daring them to come try and initiate conversation.  And if they do—they sometimes do—I’ll come up with a goal, something I want to get out of them, and not let the conversation end until I have gotten that something.

The onset of the aggression will be unmarked, and so I’ll never stop to question myself, never try and slow things down.  Everything I do will seem fine, since the only times I’m ever able to enunciate the dangerousness of my behavior is when I’m dealing with its psychic consequences.  That is, I’m only aware of the danger after it’s made me crazy, and after I’ve entered my minor period of recovery I am not wont to take the advice of a crazy person

Harlot 5 “By light of magnesium wire”

All Serious Drunks have the occasional, especially regretful morning after.  These differ from the spectacularly regretful morning afters in that it is hard for the Drunk to pinpoint where, exactly, his regrets emanate from.  He wakes up in a familiar setting next to no one new, his car is fine, his body bereft of cuts, and his mouth still full of all its teeth.  Heck—there’s even a few bucks left in his pocket!  So why, then, does it feel like the ceilings have been lowered?  What accounts for this emotional ache in his pelvis?  Chronic nervousness pushes and pulses on his head and crotch, like he’s minutes away from a deadline, like he has to make a phone call or race across town, right now, to apologize to someone important for something awful?  He wants to get up and use violence to erase these bad things, but getting up… oh, getting up.  He needs to figure out how to do that, first. 

Nate and I had the same feeling the same morning, and we could not place it.  We asked Chad what we did bad and he said naw, naw everything was absolutely fine.  Sure, you—glancing at Nate—were loud a little bit, trying to kiss everybody on our way out.  And you—looking at me—stole a bunch of silverware and told that one guy to run his fat ass around the block.  But no, it was fine.  We’re all fine. 

He said the last little bit as if pressing himself to move past something.  He broke eye contact to stare at his Xbox and then, two seconds later, repeated:  “everything is ooookay,” speaking only to himself

Chad looks like if Clark Kent had Down Syndrome.  He once smoked all the way through a cigarette he had lit on the filter end.   He is not a reliable barometer of anything, even conspicuous badness.  So I called my girlfriend—wh-why I had fallen asleep over here?—and asked her how things were going.  She laughed and said “it’s nothing.”  I asked what she meant by “it,” and she said “you know… you guys.”  It was the same tone my aunt used to try and be playful about the fact her six-year-old son still sometimes shits his pants.  I told her I loved her, to cover up for whatever, and Nate and I continued to sit and stare at the wall.

“Oh,” Chad said, switching Xbox games, “Jersey’s probably pissed off.  But I talked to her, she’es just having a bad day.”

Ohhhh.  Jersey the bartender. From New Jersey. Who has blush tattooed onto her cheeks.   Nate, ever the charmer, somehow talked her into—or, no, pardon me, refused to leave until she agreed to—kissing him on the cheek.  At the last second he turned his face so she got his lips and then she slapped the everloving shit out of him.  Then in the parking lot, that fat guy’s girlfriend accosted me—slapped me, too.  Her fingernails were pink and when I turned to see her boryfriend sitting in the car his Tap-Out shirt was ruffled and he looked like he’d been crying.  Then we came home, drank a bunch of vodka, and slept where we fell.

Our compunction was approximate to what normal, feeling human beings would go through had they done what we had done.  The terrifying part, Nate and I agreed, was that even though we were rightful in our shame, last night was just a hair scuzzier than our normal, everyday drinking. 

“It’s like we’ve been progressing, getting worse by little steps, and not noticing.  Like-like how your parents don’t notice you getting older, but then when your grandparents visit they think you’ve grown a ton.  Last night we just took two or three steps, instead of the usual one, and so this seems so fucking awful.”

“She smelled like a burning car,” Nate said.

We then tiptoed a while before starting a discussion about our own shame.  I wondered if there was anything we did that wasn’t all gross and fucked up.  Nate said it didn’t go that far, but when pressed he couldn’t come up with a single memorable thing any of us had ever done that we could unashamedly tell our children about.  We sat quiet for a while and then I got up to leave before we could talk anymore, because it would have been dangerous to keep talking, because that would have caused to come to a conclusion when the only possible conclusion was one we didn’t want to acknowledge.  

And thank god we didn’t acknowledge anything.   Subjects look awful in the sharp focus of hangover tunnel vision, where certain, always unflattering things are held in light so bright that everything not in full focus is in dark shadows.  Who looks good in white light?  The pure. The rest of us are still okay, but only so long as we can sit in the shadows and be seen.  As soon as the night came back we drank again, and again everything was fine. 

Never judge yourself.  It’s unfair to freeze time like that.  

Harlot 4 “the spirit of Poetry”

There is nothing more desperate and sickening than the act of writing academic prose.  I’ve spent the last four hours translating complication into clarity, sacrificing the unintelligible spirit—the very base of that complication—to the stuttering bitch god of understandability.  Right now I envy poets, even though I also despise them.  Were they not the lowest form of all life, I’d try to talk with one, see how he deals with shit like this.

 He’d probably take a drag off his cigarette after I mumbled out my concerns.  Then he’d smile bigly, all fake—probably use tooth whitener, since he’s a poet and all poets are fucks—and this smile would be meant to convey the falsity he sees inherent in all academic writing.  Of course what I’m doing is dishonest, he thinks.  It’s doesn’t grasp at soul, it’s too hemmed in with “rules” and “conventions” and so it don’t, like, allow for the words to just fall into place like watercolor.  But oh, he couldn’t say that.  That wouldn’t be poetic enough.  He’d try to be clever, instead.

 “See, Tristan, your problem is… academic writing is like using legos.  My type of writing, we use watercolor.”

 “Wh-what the fuck does that mean?  I just shit that sentence out a couple seconds ago and I didn’t know what it meant.  Like, it felt right, I guess, so I left it in.”

 “There you go.  Did it work?”

 “I guess so.”

 “Then there you go.”

 But—ohh, that bastard.  He/Me doesn’t have any idea what that means.  He/Me is just trying to hope other people think it sounds nice and roll with it!  I see through the poet’s tricks.  I know how scum operates.  They—fuck, you gave me half a chance I’d poison the whole world’s supply of clove cigarettes. 

 Where does this animosity stem from?  The enviably half-assedness of poetry.  How wonderful it must be, to live in a world where sources need not be cited.  How deplorable, also.  This program has turned me into the academic equivalent of a barely employed Tea Partier who secretly envies the unemployed and so lobbies his congressman to legalize the hunting of undocumented peoples, so long as the hunters swear they’re only doing it for the meat and don’t try to make trophies out of the pelts.  That’s—come to think of it, that’s probably why so many of our grads get jobs in the south west.  Shit like that actually happens in Arizona, I think.     

Harlot 3 “Red flags from ladies”

Wrist Tattoos

 It don’t matter what they’re of or what shape they take, these are a bad sign.  At some point in her life, this woman has done awful things in exchange for cigarettes.  

 Never mentioning her kid

Picture this:  you had a nice, drunk evening.  Not blacked out, per se, but drunk enough where things aren’t maybe easily remembered come the morn.  She didn’t seem gross and you mumbled out some great conversation, probably, so, hey:  that’s a good night.  Good for you.  And what’s this?  A tiny little lady hand brushing against your face?  She feels so delicate!   So feminine.  So—why does she smell like cheerios?  Then you open your eyes, recoil, and have to explain to a child why it is mommy has a sheet glued to her back.

Pierced Nipples

You see these in porn and think they’re so cool. Then you come across them in real life and realize that a cold piece of metal isn’t really inviting or fun, since metal is firm and dead and basically everything flesh isn’t.  Add in the profound risk of infection and, well, you’re dealing with a woman who doesn’t think things through.

Tallness

Again, looks cool in movies but don’t work in real life.  Don’t believe me?  Do the following:  stand up, close your eyes, pucker your lips, and then stand on your tippie toes pretending to kiss someone.  Did that make you feel very masculine? 

Mom Clothes

Do they sell it at Dillard’s?  Then it’s 1)Expensive and 2)Hideous.  But she paid a lot for it, and so she assumes that it’s cool or pretty or otherwise unhideous.  Putting aside the fact that you’re speaking with a woman who takes pride in making herself look like a piece of furniture, you got to think about what this bodes for any relationship plans.  To this woman, there is no dividing line between monetary and aesthetic wirtg.  Attach yourself to her, and you’ll become one of those guys whose wife forces him to spend tens of thousands of dollars turning his home into a Sears catalogue set piece.

Harlot 2 “hitpics”

Dear sirs,

I’m writing you to express my exasperation at not being able to find my favorite Hitler picture anywhere on my harddrive.  I’ve gone through all my photo folders and run searches for “Hitler,” “nazi,” and “mein kampf,” and while I’ve come across dozens of cool Hitpics, none are the one I want.

 My favorite is of Hitler and some other nazis at a Christmas celebration.  Hitler is sitting next to a German Santa, who is kind of like if our American Santa was a terrifying specimen of Aryan perfection.  Ours is fat is jolly, theirs is trim, 6’5”, and resembles an evil wizard.  Instead of leaving presents for children and eating cookies, he fills wooden shoes up with unpalatable spice candies and uses his magnetic glower to set trees aflame (hence tenenbaum, roughly translated as “danger fire pine”).  Anyhow, this is my favorite of all the world’s Hitler pictures, because sometimes I envision Hitler asking Santa to bring him something for Christmas.  That cracks me up.

 So I googled “Hitler Santa,” and all that came up were a bunch of pictures where people did photoshop to make Hitler look like santa.   What kind of insensitive monster thinks that’s funny?  Hitler was an awful man.  He killed all sorts of people.  You think it’s nice to just put a Santa hat on him or give him a white beard, like all of a sudden you turn the death of 300 million Jews into a laughing gag?  Disrespect like that makes me sick.

 What is it with kids these days, thinking everything is a joke? If they’re not making fun of Hitler, they’re turning 9/11 into a pun, or else refusing to take of their hat during the Star Spangled Banner.  What could have happened in the ten years separating my generation and theirs that turned them all into such little shits?

Harlot 1 “Radifesto”

We have stayed awake these past seven days, my friends and I, beneath the glow of televisions beaming VHS signals as bright as our essences, because we like that medium were electrified by the buoyant buzz of the persistent rad. We have taken leave of our hearts and souls—mere superstitions, placeholders clung to by the radless—found our vital fluids replaced with Nickelodeon slime, our god usurped by the malicious, unseen “You Can’t Do That on Television” stagehand tasked with humiliating any man pitiable enough to claim not to know. We all knew. We all felt its pulse. 

We found ourselves distracted by the rumbling of a million hairdryers, an athlete entering an arena by first passing through an inexplicable wall of fog and steam, the buzzing of a large image tiled onto dozens of screens, as the projection of single, unbroken wholes would counter the prismatic elan of this, the only real moment. “Focus!” I screamed. “Come with me.” And out we went, to spread our understanding.

Much work was done. But we cannot rest. Not until the true rad has settled upon this whole large land, the sky turned azuline and spotted with tiny triangles, the air chartreuse and visibly rippling from the sonic wake of a guitar’s thrash, radness flickering down in mass sheets, radness all that we eat, drink, or breathe. The fountains shall dispense Sunny Delight. Pizzas will be purchased by promising to read a certain number of short books. The national anthem will be replaced with the end boss theme from Mega Man and blasted so loudly as to throw back the hair of every living being in this nation, radness become a wind more powerful than the gusts of venus, a din greater than the sky ripping itself in two, a light hotter and brighter than any produced by our or any sun. Go forth, my friends. Be rad.