#nothing more hilarious than catholic family dynamics

[cadmiumscarf]

my grandmother just told me that when she was little she was terrified to go anywhere near a protestant church because she thought it’d put her immortal soul in peril. and once she was tasked to go chase down a family member and couldn’t because they went near a protestant church

this is just to say that this would absolutely be young ronan and young declan would avoid him by sitting in a protestant church while ronan yells that he’s going to hell from across the street

[the-resurrection-3d]

so what was ever good about acotar anyway?

For some reason, I’ve been very tempted to reread ACOTAR lately, and so I’m going to just make a quick list of what I remember specifically endearing the book to me back when I first read it in 2016 so we can compare notes later. This will, however, also include some retroactive criticisms now that we’re four years on from ACOWAR ruining everything forever. 

Twigger warnings for discussions of abuse, csa and neglect, as well as me using my complimentary R Slur Pass.

For some context: 

>Be 18yr me in 2016. 

>Be in your first semester at college. 

>Be so fed up with YA romance that you avoid books just for hinting at them in the summary. 

>Be also brainstorming a series with your roommate called The Cuckmaster Saga. 

This is probably going to sound embarrassing, but I’m being completely sincere when I say that part of why this book excited me was simply the novelty of finding a YA romance book that I liked. 

I’d fallen out hard with YA in general by this point in my life, partially because of a string of fairy tale “retellings” that clearly gave zero fucks about the source material beyond using the iconography in its marketing. Folklore had been my special interest for a while, and my excitement for the series and all its little extra niche references coincided with finally getting to study folklore in a true academic setting.

Which leads me to point one:

I love the idea of combining BatB and the Tam Lin ballad. I know some people have complained about this, but honestly, I enjoyed finding a retelling that mimicked the mix-and-match structuring of a lot of folktales. ACOTAR isn’t even the messiest or least coherent mash-up by a huge margin. Unfortunately, this aspect of the series severely lessened as it went along — remember when we all thought ACOWAR was going to be a Snow White retelling and then there was just one scene with poisoned apples? Lmao.

[If anyone wants an author who does YA mash-ups that are actually YA, I’d recommend Rosamund Hodge, whose books are always interesting in their sheer weirdness even when the story itself slightly falters. I mean, I wrote a whole 20-page thesis on her Red Riding Hood/Maiden Without Hands retelling and still didn’t cover everything I had thoughts on. (Tragically, however, I must inform you all that she is a Catholic Reylo. Rest in pepperoni.)]

It is fucking hilarious in retrospect that SJM clearly knows a bunch of different folktales and folkloric creatures but thinks it’s believable for shadowsinger powers to have no theorized origin “even [in] the rich lore of the warrior-people” (ACOFAS 65). Bro fuck outta here. 

But this leads into point two — Feyre and her family. It’s very obvious that SJM based Nesta and Elain’s dynamic with Feyre off the common folktale trope of having the youngest sibling be the only competent person in the room (and Katniss Everdeen). I thought it was honestly a lot of fun to see this trope done with some interiority; you can practically hear Feyre seethe about what useless hoes her sisters are between every line. I genuinely giggled through these parts on my initial readthrough. 

I’ve seen some people complain that Nesta and Elain’s behaviors aren’t realistic in this situation, but au contraire! Nesta and Elain’s actions in book one are (...almost) perfectly realistic. Without revealing too much, my grandmother grew up in poverty with a few older sisters, and yet my great-grandmother would make her do all the work and constantly force her to give up her possessions (like her car) to the older sisters whenever they wanted them. Even to this day, when they’re all in their 70s and 80s, one of these sisters still relies on my grandma to do basic shit like balancing her checkbooks. I’ve also observed similar dynamics play out plenty of times between an adult child and an overindulgent parent, with people literally ruining their lives and bodies all for the sake of sitting at home all day buying furry porn off the internet. 

Nesta and Elain are basically the psychology of this type of person split in two — Elain the soft, delicate, perpetually victimized front they put on for the world, and Nesta the ice-cold, bitter, and aggressive bitch they truly are. 

Honestly, the only thing I would change about this set-up is either keep Ma Archeron alive or give Papa Archeron more personality than a plank of damp wood. What’s truly missing here is a parental figure enforcing this fucked up dynamic — I don’t remember it being clear that Feyre’s always had this role, just that she took it on after her mom’s death. Making it clear that Feyre’s always been forced to be this way — alongside giving the mom more characterization — would have gone a long way towards making this dynamic feel more realized and less like the narrative using trauma and pity as a shortcut towards reader engagement. 

Then again, that would require SJM to have a female villain in this series who isn’t a rapist, and quotes I’ve seen floating around from ACOSF make it pretty clear SJM doesn’t know same-gender sexual abuse even exists. 

Anyway. 

Point Three (or rather 2B): Feyre realizing she doesn’t have to hang around her family just because she feels obligated to love them was a fucking banger. I loved it so much; having a story, especially a YA story, that showed you aren’t obligated to love a family that treats you like shit was so special to me. Especially since I was also leaving my family for the first time, and going home to visit them every other weekend felt like being hit point-blank with a Psyduck blast. 

Thankfully, my relationship with my family has gotten a lot better, but I’m still really disappointed that Nesta and Elain were forced back into the story, rather than them reaching out to Feyre and making amends because they wanted to do better.  The closest we got to this was the revelation that Nesta almost made it to the Border by herself after Feyre was taken, which was definitely badass, but also unfortunately the only Nesta scene I’ve liked in this entire fucking series. If SJM was going to force Feyre to regress into being Nesta and Elain’s tardwrangler again, then she should have followed up on Amren’s line in ACOWAR that Feyre treats Nesta and Elain the way Tamlin treated her. 

“I asked them to help once—and look what happened. I won’t risk them again.”

Amren snorted. “You sound exactly like Tamlin.”

[. . .] and I said, “She’s right.”  (169-170). 

But I’m sure everyone who’s read ACOSF knows how well that’s going. 

Point Four: the femindhjdfhfdh I can’t even write that with a straight face. I mean let’s be real, I too enjoy seeing female characters I like become queens and all that other stuff, but it was clear to me even on my initial reading of ACOMAF that it was all shallow and designed to help delineate good guys from bad guys without much in the way of nuance. It certainly took me out of the experience a little, but at least it ties into the books’ themes of recovering from abuse and shacking up with a Certified Women Respecter. 

My actual point four: Truthfully I only bought this series for the meme of having the first shitty love interest getting cucked in the second book. ACOWAR gave me some complicated feelings on Tamlin, and I honestly think he should have just stopped appearing in the series after that — BUT, having him be dragged back in once per book just to call him a cuck and cockslap him around a little bit is fucking hilarious. Pointless! But hilarious.

I also think that this kind of arc is a great critique of the standard “happily ever after,” acknowledging that in real life, you’re much more likely to just pass from one abusive household to another because you don’t know what healthy love, communication, and boundaries are. (Arguably many folktales are the fantasies of women who are well aware of this reality but want to imagine a world that’s otherwise). I definitely have a lot of problems with SJM’s claims of “sex positivity,” but acknowledging that Feylin used sex as a means of avoiding communication was another great touch.

I wish that this whole King of Hybern shit was completely cut just to focus on these themes more; it’s very clear SJM only included it because fantasy series = BIG EPIC WORLD-ENDING STAKES!! I've read maybe ten pages of Throne of Glass, so I can't speak for how she handles epic fantasy there, but I know for me and a lot of other stans, the Hybern plot had licherally nothing to do with what we liked and connected to in these books. 

But I must soften here, because I totally empathize with feeling like big stakes are “necessary” for a fantasy story and that no one would want to read your books without them. YA fantasy is the reason why TV Tropes coined the term “romantic plot tumor,” after all. (Source: I’m making shit up.) 

What else… what else… uhhhhh. I think that might be it, at least for substantial things I don’t have to qualify too much. I of course have plenty of little things I used to like but have now been tainted because ACOWAR ruined everything forever and ACOFAS danced on the graves (such as how I liked Lucien but everyone in the books shits on him now to the point it’s stopped being funny). But this post is too long anyway.

[pandoraspocksao3]

What are you reading this week? 03/18/2018

So, you know how Netflix has that thing where they recommend movies based on what you last watched? How cool would it be able to do that for fanfiction? In the spirit of that idea, I'm doing my fic recommendations for this week as:

Pandora's Picks!

Your mood:                                                   

What a shit day. I need hugs/cuddles, some action, but mostly romance!

PP recommends:              

Reign by Optimistic Beth @optimisticsprinkles​ - *WIP.  Fluffy romance, slow burn, arranged marriage, spunky Rey, enemies to lovers, great original characters! Intriguing original plot devices. Great writing style, easy and fun to read.

Thwarted by Perry Downing @perrydowning​  - *Complete. Slow burn, lots of feels, humor,  and a cat! Fantastic original characters you really care about. If you want less action and more of just Kylo and Rey's love story, this one focuses on exactly that!  There is also sumptuous descriptions of the surroundings and minutiae that really make you feel you are in the fiction yourself. And this is an author who delivers big time on “the feels,” so have tissues for when they creep up on you! The girl in a gilded cage and the man who doesn't understand why it's not enough. (Her latest, Unbidden, *WIP, is also fantastic!)

 A Gift for the Emperor by LastMouseLeft - *WIP. Slow burn, Rey is captured and presented to the Emperor, but is a little too docile to be believed. What is really going on? This has a dreamlike quality to storytelling I really love. Original characters, beautiful details of settings and costumes. She has two other fics that are also very good, so check under her profile to explore!

Your mood:

I want some Reylo sex and I don't want to wait 10 chapters for it! My devices are charged, and I'm not talking about my phone!

PP recommends:

Dreaming Against the Stars by DragonWhiskers *WIP. Nothing "slow burn" about this! Fantasies spurred by reader prompts and author's vivid imagination, this one is pure erotica!  

 Wanton Lullabies by CoraRiley. *WIP.  Reylo fantasies that are explicit and fun! This smut was so enjoyable it became a spinoff, Lascivious Weapons, also by the author, who wrote about Rey as a courtesan brought to the First Order who is quickly discovered by Kylo!

Hypothermia by LucidLucy @lucidlucy. *WIP. Kylo Ren and his wicked, wicked ways....oohh-la-la! Seriously, if you need a booster shot of sexy, read Chapter 2 (which is a long chapter) and see if you aren’t swooning at the end of it! This is HOT! This author has been on my “to read” list for a long time, and I’m finally getting some of hers started! 

Your mood:

I need to laugh. I need something so funny I pee, but I also want smokin' hot sex. Does this fic even exist?

PP recommends:

The Force Arranges A Marriage and The Force Arranges a Honeymoon, both by Terapid @terapid​. *Complete. This is, bar none, the FUNNIEST and sexiest thing I've read in AO3! It is explicit with graphic sexual content, but Rey and Kylo have a lot of steamy sex amid dueling each other, and there are other unconventional couples you will gasp at. (I don't want to include spoilers!) 

Seriously, I have never laughed so damn hard I have had to put the fic down and wipe the tears off my cheeks! This is a satire that pokes good-natured fun of the Reylo Fandom, the author himself, and Star Wars in general with hilarious results! It's over-the-top hilarity and also scorching hot sex. I didn't even know that could be done, but somehow the author manages it!

Your mood:

I'm burnt out a bit Star Wars stuff, but I still want that Reylo dynamic in a different setting.

PP recommends:

Stranger than Fiction by Daxcat79 @wheresthefuckingexit79​. *Almost complete! This is one of my favorites at the moment. Ben Solo is an author in England writing about Kylo Ren, but his publisher, Hux, insists the character needs a girlfriend. Ben meets Rey and pays her to hang out with him (not for sex), and from then on, art imitates life as Ben's world expands. This is REALLY FUNNY, but there are also deeper themes as the plot deepens. If you have a dysfunctional family like Ben does, you might even recognize things about your family or yourself (as I did), and it becomes something very relatable. Longer fic review to follow on just this story because of its awesomeness.

The Escort by Grliegrl @grlie-girl​. *Complete. Amazing crossover fic that crosses Pretty Woman with Reylo. It is FUNNY and also has some great action and fabulous detailed settings in Chicago. Rey is spunky and independent and Kylo is the billionaire who finds himself swept away by the escort he hired. (I did a whole post about this you can search for under Pandora's Review or "The Escort" with details.)

Across Alternate Universes by INTPSyltherin_reylove97. *WIP.   Summary: Somehow two Ben Solos from different universes switch places, leaving their Reys to figure out how to handle a Ben vastly different than their own—not to mention the finicky thing called a force bond. So, TWO sets of Reylo couples here! I just started it and I love it! I came across this randomly. I don’t know who this is on Tumblr. 

Your mood:

Enough with the rom-coms; I want a thriller/horror story. Scare me!!!

PP recommends:

Praxis by CoraRiley @corariley​. *Almost completed! This is about serial killer Kylo Ren, and there is no Ben Solo to be found! Rey is kidnapped by a creepy yet sexy Kylo who has already abducted and killed several women. Can she escape him? Explicit sexual content - not for underage readers or readers who are not okay with violence and sex. This is Dark Kylo Ren...expect twists, surprises, kinky sex, and plenty of suspense!

Your mood:

I'm ready for some Gothic horror or vampire stories with Reylo in them.

PP recommends:

Sanctuary by Terapid @terapid​ *WIP.  This is one of my absolute favorites in the Archive. I lost my mind when I read the setup for it, an old Catholic boarding school of Gothic design. Professor Solo and student Rey are the main characters (Rey is not underage). Leia is headmistress, and...the rest of the cast is in it, but I won't spoil the plot by saying what their roles are. I was fascinated by this. Angels and demons and the occult figure in heavily, and this author is a master of suspense and action sequences, not to mention smut when called for! An interesting tidbit is that I would see a long black feather in my backyard usually the day before it updated. In fact, a few things turned up in a chapter once that were items I had that the author couldn't have known about and it freaked me out to the point that I wondered if the fic was "haunting" me a bit! True story!

Vampire's Kiss by DragonWhiskers @belovedunderwing​. *Complete.  An eerie Gothic read about Rey finding a Victorian mansion that she takes refuge in that is owned by Vampire Kylo Ren.

Witch's Moon by DragonWhiskers @belovedunderwing​. *Complete. Kylo is a witch hunter who is sent by Snoke to investigate Rey. This is also one of my favorites. I'm very partial to this author, so I've read everything she's written!

Your Mood:

I just saw The Last Jedi again and I need a great post TLJ fic to read!

PP recommends:

Songs of Innocence, Songs of Wisdom by Cosmogonika @cosmo-gonika​. *WIP. I just found this story and had the honor of doing a beta on a chapter for it, so I got to chat with author for quite a bit and I love where this is going! The title caught my eye because I'm a poetry buff and I recognized William Blake's words immediately. I haven't read all of it, but this fiction explores the dichotomies between Rey and Kylo, just as the poem suggests (poem can be viewed on the first page). It delves deep into the psyches of Rey and Kylo and has a good rhythm and pace, with a good plot and a lot of description.

Your Mood:

Meh, I'm so sick of conventional couples. How about polyamory?

PP recommends:

Codega, by Juulna @juuls​. *Complete. This is another one that you should be able to do a search on in Tumblr by title and find my long review on this. This is a Reylux fiction that was recommended to me by Terapid, one of my favorite authors, and even though I didn't think I'd enjoy a pairing with Rey, Kylo, and Hux, he told me to give it a chance, and I really did like it! It's a slow burn and tasteful. The writing is so beautiful! There are lots of descriptive details about the setting and food and wine, and her action sequences with lightsaber training were fantastic.

Three’s Company by LucidLucy @lucidlucy. *Complete. Summary:  Three might be a crowd elsewhere... but not here.  A collection of unconnected Reylux (Kylo Ren / Rey / Hux) stories, some in-verse and some AU. I haven’t read this one, but I’ve read other’s by her and she’s a sublime writer, so I’m sure this will meet expectations!

Your mood:

I really need some interrogation chair crack fics...

PP recommends:

Admissions by Miss Harper @missharpersworld. *Complete. This is a short, sexy one-shot that packs all the fun you’re looking for in the “interrogation room” scene! 

Forces Intertwined by Marla_Singer21 @marlasinger21 . *WIP. This is an excellent writer who started at the interrogation room scene and worked her way forward from there. It’s one of the first fics I found initially when I got on AO3 and it remains a very sexy and well written Reylo fic!

WRAP-UP:

I could go on for pages and pages, but I think this is long enough for this week! I try to keep alternating and adding in new authors, although I'm repeating myself a lot on this one. I'm trying to expand my reading and author list currently. Part of the reason I chose these is because I'm so familiar with them.  I don't get as much time to read as I would like and I have a lot of fics going at once, probably like a lot of you!

There are a lot of recommendation lists going on that I'm making sure to reblog as well, because I do think people find fiction a lot that way. I used to just do arbitrary searches on AO3 and found some great ones. A lot don't have the kudos they deserve, so they deserve our support. And I also feel the authors who do have a lot of kudos deserve reblogging, too, because they spend a lot of time honing their craft and working on providing us with free entertainment!

Don't forget to leave kudo and a comment - even just a short one - for the author to show your appreciation. You won't believe how much even a short comment can make someone's day! And feel free to reblog this and add your own story or stories you like if you want! If you are a fic writer and you have a story no one seems to have found, I want you to reblog and tell people about it! Get it out there and circulating so people can find it. 

[mutualhighmaintenancemachin-blog]

I need a fix cus I'm going down

Made the mistake of appraising myself sufficiently healthy to attend a bonfire with normal decent tax-payer type folks. Stood up too fast in my chair and blacked out completely, hit my head on concrete. When I came to i had no earthly fucking memory of having driven to the bonfire, nor could i really recall the names of the three concerned hipsters perched over my limp doughy abscessed jaundiced shit heap of a body. Told them it was a problem with blood sugar, i had forgotten to imbibe my afternoon orange juice! Translation-haven’t slept in four days, taking in roughly two hundred calories a day all in ginger ale. Meth heads opt to sustain themselves on a diet of paranoid resentment in lieu of proteins and grains. The cook gets super spun and lectures us like we’re babes about the dark leftist forces presently waging war on the masculinity of the white man-for one thing, he's convinced that jews run the porn industry and that fucking pornhub is riddled with overtures both overt and subliminal intended to brainwash white guys into identifying as weak and feminine and to associate men of color with heroism and strength. He also believes that soy causes gender dysphoria. All of these batshit crazy delusions act like stars in the broad constellation of the cooks worst dystopian fears-a workforce with no room left for traditionally male-centered leadership characteristics dominated from top-down by a host of future ladies who make their trade in creative collaboration, rather than fear and theft of other peoples ideas. Without a need for a provider, our nazi-bespectacled methamphetamine cook envisions a new sexual economy in which women will jettison their attachments to the family structure in favor of like, industrialism, i guess, and men will have no other resort but a desperate turn to cross-dressing and dick-taking and i guess maybe stitching scarves. It was at this point that i was really tempted to tell the cook something he needs to hear-if you really believe that large shadow societies are orchestrating history just cus they want to make you some dudes boyfriend, its probably cus part of you wants to be. I get that, sucking dick is a blast. if you’re terrified that you can’t compete in a post-modern job market, it might just be because you aren’t. There’s no place left for cowboys or outlaws or methcooks cus those professions only make sense in the context of an insanely violent frontier. You feel obsolete and useless because you are, but make no mistake, that hurt has nothing to do with the world everything to do with your soul being severely malnourished. I know cus mine is too! Real moral christian courage is showing up to your crucifixion with a smile on your face ready to graciously thank the romans for every nail they put through your wrist. You feel empty because your a paranoid fascist meth cook, i feel bad cus I'm a junkie. We are bad. The nazi pilots who blitzed france in two sleepless, speed-fueled nights probably felt fucking fantastic, as if they were aloft on the trade winds of history itself and their momentum across europe must have seemed like proof enough of the moral righteousness of the german cause. But then the morning comes and the meth wears off and your skin smells like piss and your back aches and you can’t stop grinding your jaw and the first wave of survivors begin to trickle out from the camps and presumably in that moment a few nazis had the epiphany-that the very same starved beaten traumatized jewish women and men and children they had aspired to extinguish from human memory were now going to tell the story of what had happened. Power loses, grace is its own kingdom, etc etc. Furthermore those german officers who managed to transition back to civilian life and start families must have experienced a very strange new parental dynamic-can you imagine a family at a dinner table and the proud head of household instructs his small son to finish his vegetables and after pausing to mull it over for a few moments his son turns to him and says Father having thought about it a great deal i don’t think ill be following your instructions-after all you were only following instructions yourself when you helped to engineer the greatest cruelty in human history! To which ostensibly the father mumbles to clear his throat and asks his wife to pass the potato salad. Not even to invoke the possibility that the Fuhrer himself Mr. Adolph Hitler probably died surrounded by a swarm of shadow people, fucking hilarious just the thought, him yelling in that distinctive manic patois of his that he’s the leader and the abeyance of his will is sacrosanct blah blah blah while the little invisible mites under his pale skin shift and swell and scratch and the shadow people dancing around his peripheral vision taunting and cajoling and ridiculing him and the absurdity of his final solution and because he didn’t know speed the way we now know speed he probably didn’t know anything about the shadow people at all from his perspective they might just as well have been the ghosts of his victims come to taunt and ridicule him in his lowest hour pointing and laughing and daring him to pull the trigger!   

The same entitlement motivates the mass shooter who imagines a world full of seven billion perfect strangers as an attack on his rightful pursuit of happiness. No one will sleep with him and he can’t make sense of his place in a world built on fucking so he begins to indulge in fantasies of coercion, revenging himself on the very public space he so craved Now if our hypothetical douchebag had any pretense of self-awareness he might have looked into the possibility of adopting several dogs, and in turn coming to see his life as a story about caring unconditionally for animals. That’s a helluva life-Saint Francis got into the catholic hall of fame for doing not a whole lot more. Or perhaps he could adjust his expectations of intimacy in consideration of the countless plain-to middling-to ugly folks who are forced to come to terms with the truth early on that all of our bodies are grotesque and hideously deformed billboard advertisements for our big beautiful impossibly dense souls-come see a kernel of divine inspiration made self-aware, shimmering in the glory of creation,  just two exits past the tits and chin and ankles and all the rest of our faulty parts. 

Now a discerning reader(however unlikely you’d be to find one in an audience consisting of absolutely fucking nobody lol) might have already begun to detect a certain heady strain of hypocrisy in this authors conclusion. Because while I'm not much of anything the one thing i certainly am is a self-destructive drug addict. So maybe its one thing for me to make fun of the cook for his wrath-filled flu-stricken infants tantrum of a way of viewing the world, assigning to his solipsism a generation-hopping solidarity with his nazi forefathers who came before and identifying in his politics the germinal seed of fascisms future, a politics so personal and self-contained that every divorce will be debated as if it were a stand in for larger cultural decay, every morning hangover a portent of spiritual decline, the vitals of the stock market remeasured and reassessed each time someone finds on the sidewalk a loose dollar bill. Political assemblies with real largesse exclusively devoted to trolling the instagram of a nebraskan man named doug’s now ex-wife  for pictures of her maui vacation with husband number two drinking mojitos on a beach with sand bleached white as bone and both of them grinning with surgical precision an opulent almost confrontational kind of public grinning Doug couldn't recall that bitch ever having felt for him and the kids off playing in the surf and well how could any concerned and conscientious citizen fail to see the basic threat to democracy that whole scene represents? Donald Trump is probably the loneliest man in the world. He’s never met another person. He spends his time wandering the halls of his head checking for reoccurrences of his own reflection, a lifetime spent pathologically re-telling the same story about how he came to be the most powerful person in the world, so that by the time he really became who he had always pretended to be, the most influential figure in the free world, he had long-since bought into his own fraud to such a great extent that even the real thing couldn’t compare. Only a selfishness and self-centeredness as grandiloquent as his could explain the mindset of the modern mass shooter and the micro-politics informing him. He confuses his head for the world and then becomes enraged when it won’t do as he wishes, cursing the rain for its cold lash against his shoulder where he’d rather there have rested warm summer glow, furious at the thought of all the people he would never meet in far-off places he would never see who never paid him any attention whatsoever. Playing peek-a-boo a little bit of cheating peer through chubby fingers arrayed like a geisha’s fan and for the first time see that objects don’t disappear without our gaze to ontologically anchor them to earth. What a hurt. Now it might be technically correct that my addiction does to my loving family what the selfishness of the mass shooter does to public space. It intrudes like an alien thing and turns the air chilly in our childhood home and it transforms the medicine cabinet into a contested territory in need of defensive fortification and now that Cassies marriage has crashed on the rocks of addiction nobody could blame her if she never allowed another addict to darken her doorstep again and there was the sight of Jan opening my trucks passenger side door and a few rigs fell out onto the floor and all the spoons in the house have one side burnt-and-bruised like a black-eye you say you got from falling down a flight of stairs despite body language that says something entirely else why is it we don’t have a single spoon in the house what ghost spends all night punching the walls full of holes 

recently went to an Alanon meeting to sneak a glimpse of how the other half lives...this lady said my addiction is to loving my addict. Bawled rivers out from red raw-rubbed rubber eyes and said my addiction is to my addict Not her person or qualifier or partner but her addict. Syntax almost seeming to suggest that something about the existential plight of the addict gets her intoxicated dizzy on pain. It’s quaint though cus that sort of sentiment is for fucking rookies-guarantee you no ones crying over me like a romantic. Not anymore. My thing these days is of a distinctly more shakespearian strand of tragedy, with wittgenstein and derrida’s influences also undeniable. I’m sick now in a way where people stop crying and praying you’ll find God and change and decide instead it’d be easier to just cross the street. Schizophrenics lost in a chorus meant only just for them, apocalyptic street preachers who stand on soap boxes while reeking of shit and give voice to visions of an America not our own, an alternate dimension where european arrival at the shores of the new world stalled out somewhere halfway across the pacific ocean on a wave so tall it scraped the heavens and America grew up a nation of nomads who set their watches to the rumbling migration of herds of buffalo and not even the highest priest could dream of a more beautiful idea than that of motion, movement without cease, the only acceptable fixed still frozen property being the burial mounds where the dead went after all their motion had gone-if they could view us on the other side of the looking glass stolen away in our own personal homes they would almost certainly come to the conclusion that this place where we live is just the land of the dead, a negative photograph of everything vital and good. Who would i be to disagree though, right? 

The point is anyway that some alchemical reaction of A. Mental illness and B. Amphetamine abuse has more or less stranded me in words. Verbs and nouns and adjectives and adverbs in place of sky and grass. What Fredric Jameson called the prison house of language. Where derrida’s difference goes to play for eternity, never quite meaning what it had meant to say. What shook wittgenstein speechless. The president’s rhetoric so hollow that you can almost see him suffering a kind of dementia or spiritual torpor that results from the badness of his faith. Chewing and chomping consonants and sounds till they all are made to mush and shearing syllable after syllable off the network of signification until all that’s left is one satellite pinging a distress call hello is anyone there off of its own side. It’s own side like Adam plucked Eve from his rib and said put on this dress-after they ate the fruit and God cast him/her out to walk the world alone reportedly God said have fun all alone you worthless slut. Imagine trumps final state of the union-i am very sick, i have been alone for as long as I can remember, i wish i hadn’t lied so often, i wish i had occasionally told the truth, i would trade all of it to have known just one person. 

Anyways, barring that miracle of political theater, the body gets sick and dissolves while the spirit is lost in words. I’d like to die in a bathroom stall in haughville with a rig stuck in my arm and the words I'm sorry stuck at the tip of my tongue and God decides to show some compassion and makes me a deal says you were never much good to people didn’t believe in a thing but you sure could do some impressive vomiting up of nonsense words and so what ill do is your soul will dissolve and turn into ink and for the rest of eternity you’ll be a naughty joke or a half-scribbled doggerel scrawled on the wall of a piss-soaked bathroom stall in the ghetto or you could say call this number here for a good time and don’t forget to ask for large marge and nobody’d ever suspect you were trapped in there or maybe a joke like this favorite of mine about my son it goes something like Jesus Christ was a God-awful carpenter, couldn’t pull a nail to save his own life. Christ was a God-awful, couldn’t pull a nail to save his own life. Couldn't pull a nail. Christ was God-awful. Couldn’t nail his own couldn’t save a carpenter terrible couldn’t pull god-awful a terrible carpenter he couldn’t pull a nail to save his own life. I can’t pull this nail to save my own life. It’s right there sticking out of my wrist, but for whatever reason I just can’t find the right words to pull it out he was a carpenter who couldn’t pull a nail even if his life depended on it couldn't save his own life he couldn't-

For a good time call this number 1-555-555-5555 and don’t forget to ask for-