Anthology of the Self - Entry XI
Rot while Her, Rot while Her - Smiling under Calcification of the self
I TURNED THIS ESSAY INTO A TWINE
play it for the ideal rottweiler experience!
ton of revisions + tons of new text for interactibles!
I'll leave the first draft here, but don't regret it!
Rot while her, rot while her. Conspiraling, Conspiraling against oneself, rotting by my aphorism emotions, present by my aphorism memory. A cocoon of mold subsumes and holds. Feel as a caterpillar who smokes bongs in his mother’s basement. What is happening to me? Unfurling, unfurling like a tugged thread on your favourite sweater. The skein is still sweet, but she won’t cuddle my bod. My heart, too, imparsibly gone the way of Waldo. She’s somewhere in this art gallery… somewhere. Maybe? No, no. It’s wandered so far that it may not be in the picture anymore. I’m a poor blind soul without my walking-stick heart. My amygdala must have been calcified by the ‘Got Milk?’ campaign. T’wasn’t milk but irony and kidnapped children codified into broth. That’s not the only organ Bush took. No Child Left with a Soul. Nietzsche didn’t kill God, Reagan and Thatcher did. What aisle are the Cherubims in? We don’t make the real ones any more, but artificial Angel Hearts are in little jars on Aisle 7, packed with Red 40 and Sodium Benzoate. I think the substitute is human hearts. We don’t need ‘em, we’re automatons with dubstep pacemakers instead. All to say, a fruit bush would have been a much more pleasant leader of the free world. The raspberry standard is still in the books, dear mascs, femmes and thems. Would’ve built this great country up one carb at a time.
A ruby blossom falls, but no teeth can see. No tears left to lick my wounds. Hollow, hollow girl. Rot while her, rot while her. Aesthetic means beauty, not memetic movement. Memes are a shared heroin needle. A sickly needle, rusted in the bloodstream of countless confluent souls in laconic lines of code. The balloon has popped, and egg drips out. Our neurons are sickly sinking in glue. Soppingly bloated, I’m at a breaking point. Glue will overtake brain matter in this grand race for control. Glue is adherent, cohesive, unbending. It hates potential for it is static. I am becoming more glue than flesh.They hold only what sticks, muddle in puddles of glue. I’m brimming with gluety, beauty has been evicted. I’m brimming with clots, thought has been evicted. Volition is a piece of paper someone else writes on, someone either sunk in the glue or intangibly motivated.
A cautery has wrongly identified my exhaustive, warbling meat as a target. I’m a cute little pile of ashes though, which I guess is alright. Butter-seared neurons dream of fog. That lump in my sauna of a skull is sweaty, steamy, panting, heaving under my bunsen burner soul. Foolishly, it smells good so my voracious bile has thrown worry asunder in realizing who it’s toasting. But it’s okay. The road travelled is long enough, dense as tungsten, of split-end spark plug projects. I’d like to rest now, if you don’t mind. No frat parties with angels, no onsen with imps, just let me blow out, a cute little twirl of smoke. I don’t think I’m cute, but I can’t think of any other reason people would be so charmed by me. I don’t trust “I love you”s, deny advances and snub my friends, so obviously no care for poor little me rests in the blood of foreign souls. I wish I were David Byrne, that I could Stop Making Sense and have a blast. But I’ve never made sense, can’t delve into the sauces of chaos. There are no tea parties in a turbulent void.
There’s rot under the glue, no solidification without decomposition. This is the brutal reality of one composed of monads and explosion residue. Wormy, smarmy meat is no meat to be. Rot while her, rot while her. Is any meat ideal? These questions aren’t worth asking for the blessings meat has brought about. We are magical meat, methinks. Easy to see why thousands of years of humans love filling nothingness with space wizards that like fucking with you. It’s OK to be oblivious paste, we’ve all done good so far. Those of us that don’t aim the way of the space wizards, anyway. We’re jam-packed with enough jargon to strive towards infinity, at least that’s my take. Every thought pre-thought with all eight billion of us in a room. We’re just another man’s jargon.
Our thoughts have been penetrated. The attention economy is the privatization of our neurons for corporate memes. I love being made of memes of the system, my coziest of ironic coats! I love being composed of defanged slop baby-birded by the collective to fuel my mental expanse. I love eating a good friend’s vomit as if it were a pastry. I love being marinated in the expectations of ink. I love my own lack of sincerity with the most beautiful word in the English language.
It's LOVE by the way… Love! Prismatic, Sepulchre and Miasma fuck too, but they lack the same oomph. We have organs for love, it’s a word as much flesh as friend! I don’t believe we have a sepulchre organ. I suppose the heart is a bit like a prismatic sepulchre shrouded in the miasma of soul. See, it all comes back to love. Let’s start treating love more gently, out of love. Love keeps us warm, makes the world go round, is a drug, has come to town. The only thing it won’t do is tear us apart, sorry JD. I’m blaming you for all the nihilists. There’s nothing cute about nihilism, kids, but there can be cute nihilists. That’s love right there.
No mightier preservative than love. Love is formaldehyde, the great embalmer. Any beloved corpse lives on through other’s love of their work and legacy. No rot occurs under the visage of love. Or hate, too, I guess. Don’t think Hitler was exactly a bouquet of flowers. So here I sit, my skin melting off my face, my hairs flippantly jumping ship, my teeth loosening from their bungalows. I’m a candle with only so much wick, I gotta at least one up Hitler in the formaldehyde game! I hope you do, too. Let’s all love each other to dry up Hitler’s evil formaldehyde factory. Rot while her, rot while her. Rot is the great reducer, the great equalizer. Without rot, we would have bloat and junkheaps and asphyxiation. Thank the mushrooms for rot! But reduction, reduction scares such a temporal being. I have only ‘til winter comes, ‘til the clock strikes midnight! I can’t afford to lose, recover and lose! Rot is cyclical until irreversible. We love to reduce others to mere language, but scoff at the notion of becoming mere words on a page. Scar the public, our greatest target!
Labels bad, this much is cliche. We, the arrogant irreducible, are reduced by labels and that makes us grumpy. Or comfortable, I don't know you. But if you take comfort in being called "a lovely soul" (which you are, by the way), Sartre would snarkily ask you, through snickers, "What's it like being only the tip of the iceberg? Your quantity of ice is pathetic". "Hey Charlotte," one tells me, and I, an existentialist, reply "I understand you are verbally pointing at me, but I am more than 9 letters. I am infinite in my nothingness, call me only by that". But that, too, is in flux, right? Can one socially be anything? "I love you." "No, you love an objectified packaged meat-puppet that you keep perceiving around you and stare at." I ache at Bad Faith. Bad Faith currently has me hooked up to a chair with a syringe of creosote in hand. I am authentic and am codified only by rejection and delusion. I accept no descriptors else they sink their teeth in me, I delude myself out of experiences so they don't take control of me. I am an edge-case failed experiment on the subject of bad faith, transcendentally overwhelmed.
Every morning, I greet my body parts individually to make sure they're all still coherently one against my roller-coaster volition. Can I even be "I" without casually destabilizing my flexibility? I perform all of my life as I, and construct my personality around the concept of having a self. Too close for comfort, throw out the coherent self. Hello, my new identity is vapours and fog that gesture at being but whether they are coherently singular or of one narrative thread is intangibly basked in miasma. Hell, can I even call myself authentic? Is it bad faith to be authentic? The two don't even seem contradictory. If one defines themselves by plunging head-first into the chaos of being and taking pleasure in undermining their behavioural patterns (as I am quite a fan of), are they really authentic or authentic for authentic's sake, which is simultaneously authentic and inauthentic. I'm getting dizzy, spare me a moment.
All to say, even conceptualizing Bad Faith, reducing it to tangible examples and words that we can patch over all sectors of our being, is to fill yourself with hell in attempting to leave Bad Faith. Google, how do I leave Bad Faith? Does anyone know? Isn't our entire being, any codification of personality or being conceptualized as words, bad faith? Who has the key to this prison, because I sure as hell don't. I have this thing we call a key, but it's sentient and staring at me and thinking in a means that far surpasses our notions of keyhood. I can't grasp the conceptual key to unlock my conceptual cage. If you're reading this, do me a solid and make *something* solid, danke schön.
For now, she rots. Rot while her. There is nothing left to gaze it but my own meatliness, nothing left to feel but my own ephemerality. Profundities are the defibrillator keeping me kicking beyond my natural lifespan. I’m an experiential corpse, a zombie to all but my own arrogance. Rot while her. There is no her or she or they or he. There is only meat and language. Rot while her. Time is a turbulent jetstream which my paper-thin ass is a toy of. Ink-stained paper is all there needs to be. Indelible as paper, but paper too can rot. There is no age, no space, no moment, no gender, no identity, no object, no entity that signals a point in the timeline where we are perfected. We are in a constant state of mental accrual in a tug-of-war with the decay of skin and childhood. We are children with overloaded hands. Pick up this flower, drop another, pick back up that leaf, drop another. A causal chain of perpetual sameness. Life, at its height, is a zero-sum game.
Her is a privilege I’ve fought a half-decade for. I was a bad person, a real bad person enabled by equally bad people. I was hedonic, sardonic and fruitlessly inept. Her is the blossoming of a half-decade of frustrations, depression, lowered defenses, unlearning, anxiety, courage and love. I love her, but a half decade is quite a long time. Who I was is a dead face, but too dead volition. Her is denied potentiality, undermining myself by my own tenderness, staying quiet enough to stay her. My spider web is in utter decay, my boulder is back down at the bottom of the hill. Rot has won, yet for now I am happy. Rot while her. Rot while her.
