sadoeuphemist

My first impulse would be to say that I was "violently unhappy"
always that particular phrasing,
"violently,"
as if I can only understand unhappiness through demonstration
as if, when left untreated, unhappiness lashes out,
resorts to violence, makes itself visible
in form of lash and tear and welt,
as if it forces its way out through the skin
as if we had moved past the usefulness of advice and frank discussion
as if I had to be restrained somehow,
placated,
pacified
through urgent intervention,
made unable to hurt myself or others
before any further progress could begin

You'll note the subtext here
"as if,"
meaning that I was lying
not just about the nature of unhappiness, mind you,
but the idea that I was ever unhappy to begin with

If I had been unhappy
instead of just malingering
surely I would have been able to identify, however vaguely,
the source of my unhappiness,
surely I would have had some conception of something lacking -
this absent happiness, what it might look like,
and how I might achieve it -
instead of just these fantasies of violence,
of wanting to be unhappy,
to be helplessly, uncontrollably, congenitally unhappy,
just to have some irrefutable evidence of my distress

If I had been unhappy
surely I would have wanted something better for myself than that

If you're pretentious enough for it, start your story with an epigraph. A quote without context becomes an artifact, something to be displayed in a museum. The line might have been unremarkable in the original work, a pretty line serving a purpose as banal as exposition. But when displayed on its own, all we can see is the strangeness of it. Every word takes on a disproportionate significance. A pot can be used to carry water back and forth to the well each day in quiet thoughtless necessity. Or you could shatter it and put the shards in a museum, and extrapolate an entire culture from the pieces.

Avoid adverbs. Adverbs sum up tone and emotion and purpose in a single word - haltingly, nervously, knowingly, kindly - obliterating the nuances of what actually occurred. Don't say, "He smiled kindly." Who are you to say how he felt at the moment, what was going on inside his head? Even from your third-person omniscient point of view, even if you stripped him naked and vivisected him and probed every nook and hollow of him, where would you find "kindness"? All you have to go on is induction, a fallible, falsifiable conclusion based on the sum of his actions. You might very well be mistaken. You might be deceived. You may be deluded.

Avoid generalizations, avoid abstractions. Thought is an abstraction, as is emotion. A story isn't something you think, or something you feel, but rather something that occurs. Say, "She was happy," and the words are vacuous. They're a Rorschach test. Every reader will imagine something different, and most of them have poor imaginations. What more do you have to offer them? Might as well splinter your pen and blot ink across the pages.

Write such that your writing is non-reducible to a simpler state. Take an Aesop's fable, a genre of story so straightforward that the moral comes attached at the end. WORK TODAY AND REAP THE BENEFITS TOMORROW. And yet, the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper is incomplete without the image of the once-joyous Grasshopper slowly starving to death. Take the themes of your story and then distort them through a character's voice, obscure them in metaphor, until they're buried within the scenario you've created and you realize that the message you started out with has in some fundamental way been proven untrue. If writing were as simple as communicating an idea, we could skip the stories entirely.

You may believe that the purpose of writing is to provide insight - to take a vast, overwhelming world and to put it to narrative. To find the perfect arrangement of words that crystallizes the reality of our lives and makes it meaningful. But there's no great skill in that. People instinctively reduce their life experiences to easily-communicable summary: Kindness. Loneliness. Joy. Pain. Any number of abstractions. Words are Rorschach blots; you can see an entire world in them. Everyone already understands for themselves what these words mean, understands the depths within them. If they didn't, living would be impossible. It doesn't take a writer to see the world for what it is, or to make it comprehensible.

Build a hollow facade of a world and people will populate it with themselves, read their own experiences into anything you write. Just write something as trivial as, "They were in pain," and already you'll have evoked that spark of recognition that passes for authenticity. Write about Death, or Love, or Hope, or Loss, in stumbling and generic terms, and somewhere out there will be someone who's had those experiences for themselves, and who will be satisfied with the simple acknowledgment of them. There's no art in evoking emotion, in writing down the right trigger phrase and letting the world do your work for you. A writer should aspire to something better than that.

Common advice to writers is to work in concrete details, as if to reproduce the world via its gross material constituents. Don't talk of kindness or happiness or pain. Rather, have your characters move through the story atomically, anatomically. Document every twitch, every idle gesture, where their eye falls, what their hand gropes for, all the subtle alterations in their posture. Write with the alien eye of an anthropologist. Know your characters and setting like the back of your hand. Document hairstyles, clothes, brands, all the status symbols that combine to constitute a society; build a city brick-by-brick and uncover the people buried there. Take a world that everyone understands and render it in such intricate detail so as to make it startling again.

I myself do not perceive the world in concrete details. I wouldn't be able to tell you my characters' eye color, or race or height or weight or form. I could not tell you what they were doing with their lives in the split-second before the story began. I can't tell you what I'm doing with mine now. I could not describe happiness to you, or its signs, in any degree of detail. I'm not sure I've ever seen it. I'm not sure it exists. The most I could do is gesticulate around its absence. I could not describe to you the world at all. I've only ever inhabited a tiny portion of it at a time.

All I can do is tell you a story.

I'm looking down at the backs of my hands as I type this. They're mottled pink and brown and yellow and green at the veins, slightly translucent at the tips. The skin bulges out and bags at the joints, is raised on the knuckles in a crudely quilted triangular stitch. This is an absurd description that evokes nothing to anyone. You'd think I'd never seen my hands before in my life.

Here's the truth: I find you fascinating. That's a sick confession now, a display of prurient interest. It's like the worst thing in the world right now is to be boring. It's fine to be cruel or sadistic, to take pleasure in one another's misery; it's fine to be belligerent or selfish or predatory, to command a gibbering squad of harassers, to claw and tear each other down. The real crime is to not be worthy of the attention we've been given.

There's another idiot on Twitter shrieking about the end of the world - the end of their world - and a couple of thousand idiots all clamoring behind them. There's another white male savior. There's another public intellectual rephrasing common knowledge, stumping for the status quo. There's another armchair revolutionary. Pick who to follow, who to subscribe to, hold your mouth open for all the little trickles and daubs of opinion. This is what the world is now, this is what it means to be aware. All we are is enablers for the worst of us.

We can outsource our morality now, our aesthetics, our ideology. We're cyborgs, and the internet's all an extended repository, all the information and emotion in the world ready to be called up at a command. Reblog something, and it's someone else's best impulses, most artful phrasing, co-opted as our own. Or, conversely, we have our supporters hanging off us like prostheses. It's the loudest of us that thrive in this world, the most shameless, the most reducible into soundbites and snark. A stray neuron sparks in the brain and the body lurches, mindlessly, destructively, tearing apart lives at a whim.

Spin the wheel and take your pick. Are any of them worth listening to? Are any of them worth killing? If any of them were evil - if they were some urgent and existential threat - we'd be compelled to kill them or die trying. If they were evil they'd at least be interesting. But no, they're only people, in all the dull banality of the word. If it wasn't them, it'd be another figurehead babbling roughly equivalent words in their place. A person doesn't mean anything anymore. At most we're an echo, an appendage, swarming and replaceable. An individual is just a weak link, after all - a flaw, a vector for attack. It's the ideas that matter, the vast and monstrous ideologies that crush us by the thousands. Kill your idols. Aim your sights higher.

Take the worst person in the world and isolate them, and they're so fallible, so pathetic, so full of chaff. Without their followers they'd be useless. The worst thing that can be said about them is that so many gave them the time of day.

So who am I to say you're the one worth the attention? Are you so much smarter, kinder, gentler, braver, nobler, more insightful than your fellow man? But I can't help it, I find you fascinating. I could watch you for hours, over months, over years. I could watch the walls, watch matter transition between states, harden over and crack, lose its viscosity. I could watch the shadows of leaves on grass moving almost imperceptibly into night from behind the glass. There's a hundred landscapes in there, as if you could connect them all side-by-side and have a panoramic view of the world from your backyard. I could listen to you talk for hours about your petty thoughts and complaints, about the fleeting thoughts across the internet that you happen to reblog, I could listen to you talk about nothing at all.

Listen: art's greatest failure is in its purpose. In theme and theory, in climax and conclusion. It's over, yes, and satisfying, self-contained, but it's over. It's already receding backwards into memory, partially eclipsed by the next new thing, the logical progression. I can't read the same book twice because by then I've already consumed the story. It's in me, digesting, moving via peristaltic motion ever closer to being shat back out. You'd think if a work of art was so great I could keep coming back to it forever, that it wouldn't go inert with time and familiarity. That I wouldn't turn to it one day and find nothing left that I needed.

Life grinds all attempts at illusion to dust. We tell ourselves we are righteous, we conscript history to our side and convince ourselves our enemies will peter out and die. When all history is, is the the slowly-eroding surface of the world, the bodies fertilizing fields, nations boiling over and collapsing. We've subsumed ourselves in story, and even though it's not over yet, we've still projected an ending forwards, rehearsing our lines, worrying away at them like gravel between our teeth. We turn to history to vindicate us and see only the slow mindless convulsions of it, the lack of direction or conclusion.

We tell ourselves we're part of something bigger, and it grows and grows and grows. Until it is bigger, until it's something vast and amorphous, until it's something so big that it encompasses the whole blindly-whirling world.

You're a nothing compared to that. So many puffs of air. So many breaths, so many heartbeats, so many days, so many nights. So many pores gaping open on your skin, so many farts, so much dead skin. So many fuck-ups, so many fleeting passions, so many false starts and failures. So many fragments, so many half-formed thoughts, so many vitriolic opinions. So many insecurities, so many trivial needs and desires going unfulfilled. So many anxieties, so many conflicting hopes, goals, that you latch on to and nurture. So many little acts of kindness. You could go on forever without completion or purpose in sight.

I could watch the grass grow. I could watch the paint dry. I could watch the world keep turning. I could watch you forever.

The dogs are dead. I don't want to see what's inside of them. That's the cruelty of a dog, or a cat, or a rat, or a weasel, or anything furred and open-mouthed, anything that licks its young, anything that pants or snorts or purrs or growls or wafts moist breath against your hand, anything warm-blooded, that you can put your palm against its torso and feel its heart beat.

(Have you held a shrew? it feels like they're dying. It feels like an insect beating its wings against the inside of your hand, battering itself to death.)

The cool intelligence of a reptile, or an insect, or a fish, is mostly all projection. There is fear there, sure, but indistinguishable from the mindless thrashing instinct not to die. Like a magnetic shaving being repelled from its polar opposite, like scraps of paper picking up the updraft from flames and flying away to safety. They don't make faces. They don't show terror. You don't hear them screaming.

When they crawl or swim or glide across your skin, there's no intimacy that lets you make-believe they love you.

That's the cruelty of being mammalian in a world ruled by hairless apes. There's all the capacity for emotion there, expression, joy and sadness and fear and loss and deviousness and greed and smug self-satisfaction, and no capacity to live privately. They're naked, every fucking emotion jolting down their nerves and involuntarily wagging their tails, standing their fur up on end, gleaming in their eyes and mouth and tongue. That dumb animal awareness exposed to the world with no option to tamp it down and put on a neutral face and go about your day without every eye on you.

No animal is born for scrutiny. We're social animals, not societal ones. We only really see each other through a web of necessary relationships. Parents, children, rivals, subordinates, superiors, lovers, mates, siblings, caretakers, predators, prey, symbiotic ties. I know you because I need you, because I depend on you in one of a hundred different ways, and that necessity is what endears you to me. We're hideous alone, patchwork products of evolution, simple-minded, feeding our own biases, focused on building scaffolding to support our own self-interest and well being. Who could love you, objectively? Who could tally up your pros and cons and conclude that another person should depend upon you for their continued happiness? We invented a God to tell us that we were loved, and concluded that we absolutely weren't worthy of it. That's what Grace is, isn't it? The conclusion that we otherwise shouldn't be allowed to exist.

Go into a shelter and argue for a dog's right to exist. To eat, to breed, to piss and shit as it will, to wander the streets and bark and scream at every stranger, to mark off its own territory, to defend its life with claw and fang. Argue that a cat should be allowed to predate, to fend off all perceived threats to its safety. Go ahead, argue for a rat's right to be happy.

A human can at least dissemble. A human can withhold. A human can put on a public face and offer that up to the world. If we're excoriated, revealed to be two-faced and hypocritical, all our flaws put on display - at least there's always the option to say: that's not the real me. That's not my entirety. You don't know me like my friends know me, like my family knows me, like I know myself. I'm here, underneath all of it. I'm just slightly displaced, always one step away, just beyond your judgement. I'm here.

Or worse, imagine being abruptly thrust into a celebrity you were totally unprepared for, imagine that fannish idolatry, that validation from strangers, and having it come and go, ebb and flow with the attention span of crowds. Imagine living like that, imagine being responsible for a thousand strangers' happiness. But even then there's always the small consolation of restraint, of fading gracefully, of the intellectual understanding that all those people never saw the real you at all. They were following a trend, validating their own biases, picking out the bits of you that they liked. They were looking in a mirror, seeing the possibility of their own acceptance, their own success, a place for them in the herd. All they were seeing was a person to teach them how to be, a position they could occupy in your wake.

A dog doesn't have that luxury of knowledge. A cat doesn't. A rat, a hamster, a weasel. Anything furred. Anything bright-eyed and screaming. There's nothing to an animal but boisterous fulfillment, nothing but bare affection. Feel them licking at your fingers, watch them dancing at your feet, understanding nothing but kindness and cruelty, food and hunger, affection and neglect. A dog can't understand why it's loved, it can only pant and wag its tail and prick up its ears and prance. A dog can't understand why it's being yelled at. A dog can't understand why it's needed. A dog can't understand why it's being killed, or being left to die.

We see a dog and think, if only we could be so happy. A dog only understands loyalty, you know? The words, 'can I pet them,' a stranger's hand running through its fur, cooing baby talk in a stranger's voice. A dog only understands itself and the other. A dog can only understand that it must have somehow been their fault.

The dogs are dead. There's something I could have been, probably. There's a thing absent of affection. There's a thing that used to be. There's a thing that screamed.

MODERN PASTIME
Or, IN-DOOR AMUSEMENTS.
INCLUDING

VENTRILOQUISM—PARLOUR MAGIC—ELEMENTARY
GYMNASTICS—BILLIARDS—FUN & FLIRTATION FORFEITS, ETC. ETC.

No. 8.
SELLING ADONIS.
One Lady and one Gentleman.

The gentleman must stand on a chair in the centre of the room, while the lady-auctioneer, pointing to him, says, "Adonis for sale!" She must then enumerate all his charms, qualities, and attractions. The company then bid anything they please for him—such as a red-herring, a tea-kettle, a curb-bridle, a magic-lantern, the old grey goose, a lump of sugar, &c. The bidding is to go on till the Lord of Misrule bids a pound of soft-soap, when the lot is taken to him by the auctioneer.

No. 15.
THE MAN WHO IS TOO HAPPY.
One Gentleman and six Ladies.

The gentleman sitting in the middle of the room must be complimented and paid attention by each lady in turn. Without rising, he is to respond by every species of grateful manner; first murmuring, in a whisper, "I'm too happy,"—increasing in the tone of his voice each time, till reaching the highest note, he rushes out of the room.

No. 17.
THE LORD MAYOR'S DINNER.
Eight Ladies and eight Gentlemen.

The ladies each successively go and fetch a gentleman and place him for a quadrille, according to the value of their respective numbers.

1ST LADY TO 1ST GENTLEMAN.
This is my chicken for roasting.
2ND LADY TO 2ND GENTLEMAN.
This is my calf's heart for mince-meat.
3RD LADY TO 3RD GENTLEMAN.
This is my wild duck to make game of.
4TH LADY TO 4TH GENTLEMAN.
This is my lamb's pluck for putting in a stew.
5TH LADY TO 5TH GENTLEMAN.
This is my green goose for stuffing.
6TH LADY TO 6TH GENTLEMAN.
This is my calf's head for my brain sauce.
7TH LADY TO 7TH GENTLEMAN.
This is my flat fish for a vol au vent.
8TH LADY TO 8TH GENTLEMAN.
This is my pigeon for cutting up with brain sauce.

No. 27.
MISS ANN AND JANE SMITH'S TABBY CATS.
Two Gentlemen and all the Ladies.

The ladies all remain in their places, and two gentlemen in shawls and bonnets or caps go round, one with a saucer of milk, the other with a teaspoon, with which she gives a sip of milk to each, saying, "Take that, my pretty puss!" to which, after taking it, "puss" must gravely answer, "Mew."

No. 30.
THE HORRID MAN.
One Gentleman.

He must go round and pay a bad compliment to every lady in the room, who is to answer, "You horrid man!"

No. 47.
INTERESTING QUESTIONS.
One Gentleman--one Lady; seated in front of each other.
LADY.

Are you Adonis?

GENTLEMAN.

No, Miss.
Are you Juno?

LADY.

Oh no!
Are you Cupid?

GENTLEMAN.

No, stupid.

Lightning strikes.
Lightning spikes.
Lightning spills and stains the sky.
Lightning crackles.
Lightning shivers.
Lightning spasms, shrieks, and dies.

Lightning sings.
Lightning stings.
Lightning cleaves the world asunder.
Lightning threads through gale and thunder.
Lightning strips the leaves from trees—thin bare branches, stark and grasping
at the wind in helpless tremors.
Lightning sets down roots and sighs.
Storm is coming.
Lightning sends the people running, lights the raindrops,
draws a jagged line between us
and the darkness. Lightning flickers,
shows the world in all its glory
right before the gloom moves in and
lightning cracks the vault of clouds, makes the rain come tumbling down.
Lightning, fine-veined, many-fingered, writhes and reaches for the ground.
Lightning hangs untouched, inverted, looming rocks far overhead.
It could kill us.
Just a word, and lightning plummets
from the heavens,
torches burning for the dead.

Lightning shatters.
Lightning scatters.
Lightning bathes the world in fire.
Lightning flashes.
Lightning lashes
out obliquely, groping, seeking,
churning air into a frenzy. Lightning quickens.
Lightning rages in the distance.
(please don't see us)
Lightning punctuates a chorus,
echoes through the world unhindered
in the great and lowly places.
Lightning stoops to kindle fire.
Lightning leaps atop a spire, splits the crown
of tree and tower, tears stone down,
anoints the sacred site with ash—
Lightning lingers
for a moment,
imprints itself in afterimage,
as we huddle, glancing skyward,
waiting
for the storm to pass.

He sneezed six times in quick succession
Like waves breaking upon the shore
Each time the buildup, then the crest
Then spray and salt and nothing more

He drank two glasses of water with dinner
Like pouring it all down the drain
The glass sat empty in his hand
Ready to be washed again

He set his shoulders and clenched his stomach
Trying to will himself to piss
A dribble came, and then a spurt—
All water was reduced to this

Write out your grievances on a piece of paper. Fold it in half, and then in half again, and then again and again until the paper starts to resist you, pushing back against your fingernails. Put it between your lips, under your tongue. Let it settle.

When you're ready, reach to your lips as if you're performing a magic trick. Unfold it like a flower blooming, like a scarf from a sleeve, like a map being spread out against a table. Flourish it, show them the ink that's been set, that's smeared and dried and smeared again, undeniable.

The secret to the trick - the trick to the secret - is the kernel of truth, the grounding in the familiar, the space beneath your tongue and down your throat and up your sinuses. Everyone will be astonished that it was in you all along.

Walk around stuffed with grievances, one for every occasion, ready to perform the trick on command. Write them down as they occur to you, fill pages with them, tamp them down between your lips and gums in a paper mache sneer. Use your teeth as mnemonics. Run your tongue across your gums, so many benign lumps on the inside of your mouth. Each one ready - at a moment's notice! - to emerge from their cocoon.

Your mouth will taste like paper, sure, but that's a benefit. They''ll leach up your spit, leave your mouth dry, tasting the hollow of air. Never forget you're lacking something. Never forget how badly you want to want to spit.

Paper's non-toxic. There's no danger in this. If the opportunity never emerges, no harm done. The little wads will wear against each other, dissolving into pulp. You'll carry them with you until your mouth slackens, until a moment of forgetting, and you'll absently brush the leavings off your lips, or you'll swallow them. As easy and as painless as shedding skin.

And if you find your chance and reach for your lips and unfold a paper rich with spit, only to see that you've revealed the wrong one - who cares? They're all the same, aren't they? All wadded together and indistinct and indivisible. The magic's in the reveal of it, not in the information. The magic trick is that you were unhappy all this time.

Keep your grievances close to your lips, as little acts of wonder. Plant them, and let them decompose and die, and give them the chance to bloom.

You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
Give them something to eat, and they'll bite at your hand
You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
You've seen this play out, why don't you understand

You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
Show them the horizon, and they'll want to fly free
You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
Sure as the shore's worn away by the sea

You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
And there are only so many more miles to claim
You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
Pace out your borders, let them to do the same

You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
You'll measure in inches the progress you'll make
You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
The least you can give, the most they can take

You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
And be not one inch closer than you were before
You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
Still a mile between you, a mile and more

You give them an inch, and they'll take a mile
And you'll be left wondering at how far you've gone
In the space of that inch, they imagined a mile
You gave them an inch, and the lines were redrawn

Hold this, she said, and I gathered up
a fist of her hair, undoing her frame from behind,
unbuttoning the knobs of her spine,
unlacing the tendons in her neck and shoulders
to the musical twang of her ribs popping free

Her lungs escaped her like a sob,
unfolding, spilling out like a rumpled dress
that I arranged atop the tiles,
one hand smoothing out the wrinkles,
gliding across her skin until she sighed,
divested,
exposing her pale back to me in its entirety

It's amazing how much there is to a woman:
silk and bone and a thousand scribbled notes inked onto her innards,
unwritten love letters, angry scrawls,
knots of twine and rawhide that I fished out
and laid delicately against the tiles like a diagram,
careful to memorize their places

Her heart, sluggish and warm and tough as leather,
and indistinguishable from
all her other organs,
years of padding and upholstery unseamed until
the bathroom floor resembled a butcher's palette,
and she hung loose and slumping, dozing gently,
with so much of her to still unpack

There's room for happiness in there, I think,
there's so much else in her

There's room for everything I lack

My parents did not raise healthy children.
There's nothing to be done about it, I suppose,
just a quirk of genetics.
A new malady would periodically surface, each
removed from the last, as if
it was simply in our nature to be sick, absent
any particularities:
insomnia,
violent allergic reactions that burst
out in hives across
our groin and thighs and the backs of our hands,
dry eyes,
asthma of the skin,
UTIs,
sensitive teeth,
depression,
sudden pains in our knees
that kept us from the gym
for months on end,
tendons tightening in our necks,
inexplicable bald spots,
open sores that we scratched into our skin.

And each time, our parents would schedule a doctor's appointment
after it became clear
our condition wouldn't go away on its own.
We'd sit silently in the waiting room,
waiting to give non-committal answers:
"No, I don't know what caused it"
"No, I don't remember that far back"
"It kind of hurts"
"Sort of"
"Not really"
"No, I haven't eaten anything unusual"
"No, here's been no change in my schedule"
"No, no undue stress"
"No, this is - you must understand -
"There has been no change in our lives since before this started"
"This is how we live"
"This is how we have always been living"

And the doctors, faintly puzzled,
would scribble down their prescriptions anyway and
treat the symptoms.
Our parents paid the consultation fees, paid for
the MRIs and the urinalyses,
the blood tests that revealed no proximate cause,
paid for the physical therapists and
the sedatives and cortisone creams,
as we hovered around
all the while unable to shake
the conviction that we were wasting
time, bleeding away money,
that this was all bearable, somehow, or had progressed
to the state that it was bearable
by the time our parents had brought us here. That we were
too far removed now from sickness, from dysfunction,
that we would heal on our own,
or grow used to it,
or progress to the point that our suffering
was unmistakable;
that despite our parents' urging -
"Be specific. Tell the doctor
what he needs to know. You can't get better if
you don't pay attention
to what's going on with your body."
the cause of sickness was so inherent
so as to be invisible, that we might wake up the next morning
having forgotten how to sleep, how to eat,
how to look at things without crying,
how to breathe unencumbered, how to walk, how to
not tear apart our own skin.

We'd take home our tubes of creams and our
artificial tears and neat rows of pills and
we'd smooth this patch over.
We'd wait to get better.
We'd wait
until everything
was normal
again.

"Ah, excuse me. But if you're not busy, could you hold this, please? Thank you. Ugh, it's skittering around in there. You can see it, can't you? Wedging itself into all the little nooks and quarries.

"Pass me the hook thing, would you? Yes, that one. Thank you. Just got to ... just got to claw it out and ....

"Ugh. Damn. I'm sorry. I'm imposing on you. You don't want to see this. You don't want to have to stand around looking over my shoulder while I try to fish this thing out.

"Oh. Well. I hate to impose, but that's very kind. I - no, no, it's nothing. Thank you for your help.

"I just can't sleep sometimes, you know? With it crawling and skittering around in there, keeping me awake. At night, my god, the sound is magnified. I'll be dozing off to sleep, and there it is, resurfacing. It's more frustrating than anything, you know? To be coming so close to sleep, and to have it snatched away from me ....

"Even in the daytime it's not that great, you know? You'd think - I mean, it seems like it would be interesting, wouldn't it? Like having a pet. A tarantula safe in its cage, or a - something you can feed, you know? You can put a dead rat in there and watch it eat.

"But even in the daytime, it's ... I can feel the ruts it's wearing inside my skull. Why am I doing this? Why am I still watching this? Why aren't I doing something more productive with my time?

"Eh. You don't have to stay, really. It's not your problem.

"All right. This is - I appreciate it, I really do. It's too easy to fuck this up going it alone. Stab your own fingers by mistake. Reach down the wrong crevasse and be feeling down there for hours. And a person here, it -

"I get so alone sometimes.

"Sorry. Could you just grip the sides of it, please. Yes, just like that. Thank you. Thank you. Just keep a hold of it, and -

"There it is there it is there it is c'mon c'mon c'mon I've almost got you you little bastard -

"Ah, fuck. Well, it's bleeding, at least. I think maybe if I stab it enough - Haha. Can you do that, do you think? Bleed out from a sore on the inside of your mouth? Just keep worrying it and worrying it and stabbing at it and jabbing at it and keeping it open all the time until you eventually bleed to death?

"Well, regardless. Couldn't do it. I'm done. I'll try again tomorrow, or ... It's not that big of a deal, it's really not. I'm used to it by now. And it's entertaining enough, in the daytime, in a decrepit sort of way. And even the nights ...

"So I don't sleep. Eh. Who sleeps anymore? What's the point of it? To wake up again and ... ?

"If I'm awake sixteen hours a day, or twenty hours a day, does it really make a difference? To be awake, and it's so unbearable that ... ?

"No, no, it's perfectly acceptable. As if the number of hours matter. Thank you for your time. Honestly. I'll be ...

"No, no, I don't want you to feel obliged to me or anything, thanks to the stupid human impulse towards compassion. Imagine, a stranger approaches you in the street, asking for help as if you owe them something! Haha! It's idiotic, isn't it! We've got to train ourselves not to respond!

"So please, know that you were no help at all! Ha ha! We didn't come any closer to getting this damn thing out!

"So thank you for your time, but really, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. There's nothing to be done about it. You should go back on your way and forget about me.

"Oh, i could get it out if I really wanted to, you know. Flush the whole thing. Smash the sides of the container. Do something irrevocable. Just take up a hammer and WHAM! Smash the thing to pieces! Send it scurrying out in the open air where it dies!

"But I don't do that, you see, so I suppose I don't really want to be rid of it. I just want to ... probe in there, and jab at it, and make it bleed, and ...

"Ah, but I'm sorry. I've exploited your kindness far too much. No, no, this must be it. Go on your way! Goodbye! Goodbye!

"I'll be perfectly fine, I assure you. I own a hammer, eh? What more could a person need?"

The truth, to get to the heart of the matter, is boring. Saying what I think and feel is the dullest thing in the world, it's a reiteration of my own circumstances, as if I'm in my head staring out of my eyeballs and dutifully taking note of what is going on around me. In order to communicate - in order to produce anything, even marginalia that goes unseen by anyone - I need a hook. I need the structure of artifice.

For example: I dreamed about M again last night. Her mouth on my mouth, the curve of it sympathetic, the cushioned contact between our bodies. But what would be the point of returning to it, of describing it to anyone, even if just to myself? I could lay out events in sequence, I could chronologue our history. I could give that all-important context. But there's no context to be had. I reread some of my old diary entries again the other day, and the self that wrote those entries is a foreign entity, another person, who couldn't have predicted that years and years from then they'd wake up, dreaming. I hadn't thought of her in years, honestly. I just dreamt about her again last night, that's all.

Even back then there was the distinction between what I did when I was with her, and what I wanted to do, the distinction between reality and fantasy. What we did was utterly mundane, the sort of stuff you've surely experienced yourself and promptly forgotten about, because your brain needed the room to store more important memories. "I met her at the mall." How fascinating. I could dig up old chat logs and shudder at the inanity.

Meanwhile, there was the impulse I could extrapolate outwards, the recurring themes I'd retread and wear thin. The push and pull of the tides, their regularity and inevitability. That clockwork structure of desire that was made to seem like it was counting down to something but would just go 'round and 'round forever. The distinction between everything that was going on inside my head, and everything we did together. You appreciate the difference, right? The fantasy was fine, albeit repetitive. The reality was the dullest thing on earth.

Even now, to speak of her in dreams, I could psychoanalyze, I could slot her into an archetype. I could say, I dreamed of happiness, or, I dreamed of comfort, or, I dreamed of being loved, as if that's all she was and that's all she represented. As if I was happy, or comforted, or loved back then, and this is all a throwback to a world that once existed. I could say I'm miserable, or frustrated, or alone, as if there's a solid justification for my dreams and desires, as if she's part of my story, genuinely, and this all comes together by the end.

That's the artifice in it, you know? She was a real person, but you wouldn't know it by me talking about her.

I could say I fantasized about killing her. That's not true, I never did, but wouldn't that be interesting? Wouldn't that be the big reveal that finally sheds light on the whole situation? Just a single lie, and suddenly we're hinting at meaning, as if everything that happened last night and all those years ago somehow makes sense.

I dreamt about M again last night, and I woke up and didn't feel anything. That's the gist of the story. That's the truth of it.

There's a horror living in your head. It's yours, entirely. It doesn't map to anyone else's. Doesn't that make you feel special? You've got something that's exclusively your own.

I've got my own horror, and so does everyone else, presumably. We can only talk about it in vague terms, and it only occasionally solidifies into an incomprehensible metaphor. Mine is shards of glass staring up like dead eyes from the ash and sand. Even that's too specific. It's other things too. It depends on the time of day and the weather.

Our ineloquence makes us believe that the horror is amorphous, ever-shifting. We find like-minded people and we hammer out a jargon for it, big, expansive terms with no set definition, words capable of containing the world. Only a philosopher could properly understand them, but even an idiot can shriek out the words and feel a chill. It's coming, it's coming, it's here, it's coming; we say the words and it's surrounding us; we say the words and we're grasping at the edges of a vast and protoplasmic thing.

It's a mass delusion, though. Your horror is not mine, no matter how much we may agree it is. You can see it now in your head, can't you? How to describe it? Its borders are perfectly defined and intricate, tendrils crawling around the edges, reaching into the crevasses in your brain. Whose face does it have? Say the name. It wouldn't mean anything to anyone outside a small group of people, just a random name in the phone book, so you don't say that, right? You grasp for a word that someone else might be able to understand. You could map it out, probably, if you were so inclined, but it would take a lifetime. You'd have a spiderweb of string and pushpins, old photos, newspaper cutouts, words scrawled on scraps of paper. It would stretch across the walls of your house. You'd look like a lunatic. And you're not. You know you're not. Other people have talked about it too, a thing like this, though not entirely. All the distinct little differences in experience. But it's close enough, right? Close enough to a reality. Close enough to cling to.

So you take your horror and you file the edges off. You generalize. You find that something close enough in the outside world and you adopt the vocabulary as your own, just grateful for the ability to finally speak. You take your horror and you make it universal.

There's a horror in my head, and it's not yours, not at all. That's the only thing for sure we have in common. Mine is a pyramid of human skin, sagging and weighty like a dumpling, its surface prickled with gooseflesh. It's clammy. Ugh! I can feel it sweating from here. It's not your horror, is it? No, no, not at all. Tell me all about yours. Be specific. Be a lunatic. It's good to talk. It's good to let it all out. It's good to speak the truth.

Because what we do, in our mass delusion, is we let all our horrors blur together. We ink out intricate, personal maps and then we pile them on top of each other and let the ink bleed through. Until it's huge and blotted black and faceless, until it's ready to swallow us whole. Kundera talked about totalitarian kitsch, a smiling bland face that swallows us whole with happiness and the sentiment of the universal brotherhood of man. This is a kind of kitsch too, isn't it, this is anti-kitsch, this is apocalyptic kitsch. This is an aesthetic we can project into the void and hear the voices screaming back, until it seems like the whole world is screaming in horror with us. This is the stark perfect picture of our despair. This is the growing black tide that we're all going to have to beat back together, or we're all going to suffocate and drown.

But it doesn't happen, and instead we all drown separately, in disparate groups, except for those of us who don't drown at all. And we stare out in shock because that makes the horror worse. How are they not dying? How can they not see? How could you abandon me at this, my hour of need? I'm drowning! I'm drowning! Can't you see that? Can't you feel the suction of the tide?

Listen: there is a horror in your head, and it's not mine, and it's not anybody else's. There are points of overlap, sure. There are good and useful group projects. And then you will wander down the tributaries of your horror, you will feel its tendrils grasping, and you will look around and you will find your friends and compatriots have abandoned you. No. They were never there to begin with. There are people being dragged down in the privacy of their overgrown lawns, the roots creeping up from the grass, far from your sight. There are people privately quietly suffering with all their variegated horrors creeping up to play. And it's not your horror, and it doesn't fit into your map, but it's there, and that's all you need to understand.

There's a horror in your head, and it's as real as mine, it's as real as anyone else's. I won't understand it completely, and maybe no one ever will. That doesn't take anything away from it. We like to think we'd all shriek in unison, but our voices rise and fall away one by one. The closest we can come to compassion is to understand that we intersect in convenience, and that we are not abandoned when we diverge. We are all in this together. We are all very much alone.

I have to go. I have my own problems to deal with. Take care of yourself, especially when no one else will. Navigate the edges of your horror. Tend to it. It is as unique and intricate and as beautiful as you are.

Walk your lonely paths, and pull it out by the roots.

Please read the following text and then answer the questions below:

I'm pretty sure writing is impossible.
I'm pretty sure writing and being read is impossible.
Writing involves the formation of a "self" that I'm not ready to share with anyone; that's how much I fear intimacy.
The horrifying thing about writing is that no one ever understands what you're saying.
They only ever understand how they feel about what you wrote.

QUESTIONS: (Please pick the best answer)

1) What does the writer mean when they say "writing and being read is impossible"?

A) The writer has psychological / emotional problems that make it difficult for them to share their thoughts and feelings with others.
B) The writer is frustrated at their inadequacy at writing, and cannot find the words to adequately express their thoughts and feelings.
C) Any written text is separate from the author and can only be understood as the reader interprets it, making true communication impossible.
D) Writing and being read is impossible.
E) None of the above (Please fill in your own answer here)_______________________________________________________

2) Why does the writer put the word "self" in quotation marks?

A) The writer is talking about a fictional persona adopted for the purposes of writing.
B) The writer believes in an innermost self that is separate from the "self" presented to others.
C) The writer's existence is irrelevant; they might as well not exist outside of the text.
D) The writer is insecure, and finds it unnatural to express themselves through writing.
E) None of the above (Please fill in your own answer here)_______________________________________________________

3) The writer says they are "not ready to share with anyone". What literary device is employed by you reading these words regardless?

A) Paradox.
B) Irony.
C) Satire.
D) Tragedy.
E) None of the above (Please fill in your own answer here)_______________________________________________________

4) What does the writer mean when they say that they "fear intimacy"?

A) The writer writes about intensely personal things that they are hesitant to share with an audience.
B) The writer is afraid of having their ideas closely scrutinized for fear they are insufficient.
C) The writer fears being eradicated from the text and overwritten by someone else's interpretation.
D) The writer has genuine psychological / emotional problems with interacting with other people.
E) None of the above (Please fill in your own answer here)_______________________________________________________

5) Do you understand what the writer is saying?

A) No, the actual meaning is only available inside of the writer's head.
B) Yes, our understanding of something is dependent on objective reality, not someone else's opinions. Since the text is grammatically coherent and communicates intelligible ideas, we can understand it.
C) Yes, although how well we understand it depends on how closely our interpretations sync up with the writer's.
D) No, we only ever understand how we feel about what they wrote.
E) None of the above (Please fill in your own answer here)_______________________________________________________

6) Is the writer genuinely attempting to be understood?

A) No, they consider genuine understanding to be impossible.
B) Yes, they are in pursuit of a seemingly futile goal.
C) No, they are being deliberately vague to conceal a lack of insight.
D) Yes, and the words chosen express exactly what they were trying to say.

E) None of the above (Please fill in your own answer here)_______________________________________________________

7) According to the writer, is writing possible?

A) I'm pretty sure writing is impossible.
B) I'm pretty sure writing and being read is impossible.
C) Writing involves the formation of a "self" that I'm not ready to share with anyone; that's how much I fear intimacy.
D) The horrifying thing about writing is that no one ever understands what you're saying.

E) None of the above (Please fill in your own answer here)_______________________________________________________

8) Wouldn't the "best answer" always be some variation of E, as it's always possible to clarify and expand upon one of the other four answers?

A) Yes, any statement can always be clarified and improved upon.
B) Maybe, it depends whether we are capable of improving on the other answers or not.
C) No, because by that logic any answer in E could then be subsequently improved upon, ensuring that it will never be the best possible answer.
D) There are no best answers.
E) None of the above (Please fill in your own answer here)_______________________________________________________

9) What, exactly, is "the horrifying thing about writing"?

A) The realization that no one will ever fully understand you, and that you will never fully understand anyone else, because we all irreparably view things through our own sets of filters.
B) The realization that you will never be able to precisely express what you mean, not even to yourself.
C) Being exposed. Being seen. Being judged.
D) The realization that you have nothing meaningful to say, and that the only value your words have are in the insights of people who read their own ideas into them.

E) None of the above (Please fill in your own answer here)_______________________________________________________

10) How would the writer most likely feel about you trying to interpret what this piece means?

A) They would be relieved that someone was trying to understand them.
B) They would be horrified that they were being subject to someone else's interpretation.
C) They would be resigned to the inadequacy of writing as an expression of meaning.
D) It doesn't matter at all how they feel.

E) None of the above (Please fill in your own answer here)_______________________________________________________

Thus ends the test. Thank you for your time. You will not be graded.

"I resent these repeated accusations that I am a ghoul. It's a slur; it's an insidious insinuation. As if I would haunt graveyards. As if I crave the flesh of the dead.

"We all understand what it means to accuse someone of ghoulishness, yes? My opponents would have you believe that I am some macabre scavenger that grows fat off slaughter, slavering at the mouth, eager to pick through the aftermath of wars. As if I am shepherding your children off to die and to be rendered into meat. My opponents would have you believe that there is something morbid, something fundamentally inhuman and antithetical to life about my policies, merely because of the death toll associated with them. I assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.

"I want you to note the absurdity of this accusation - as if a ghoul creates corpses instead of consuming them. It would be as if wolves, hungry for mutton, midwife young lambs into existence, delicately tending to them until they are old enough to be devoured! Nothing of the sort! The act of creating corpses, my dear friends, far from being ghoulish, signifies a living, bloody, voracious appetite. From the smallest mite to the noblest beast, nothing can survive without predation. Is it ghoulish, my friends, when a hunter corners its prey, tears apart its throat and partakes of its flesh? Of course not! It is perfectly natural and vibrant and healthy. To kill is the most natural thing in the world.

"Will people die due to my policies? Of course. They will die in the thousands. But this is part and parcel of the metabolisms of a nation. Was Sahib Qiran a ghoul when he stacked the skulls of his foes into minarets? When white-skinned Quetzalcoatl donned flesh and began the conquest of the fifth world, was he ghoulish in his slaughter? Was Conotocaurious a ghoul as he devoured villages whole? Are nations little more than a banquet table built upon a charnel house?

"No, no, and a thousand times no. These were great men, generals, murderers. And yet rather than recognize the greatness of what we have accomplished, my opponents would have you believe that my policies are little more than the self-serving plot of a ghoul. The cowards who dare to defame me seek to exploit your natural horror of death. They tell you thousands will die, and they would have you believe that this is unnatural, despicable, immoral. They tell you only a ghoul would desire such a thing. And yet they fail to see the utter hypocrisy in their actions. They are the ones who feed upon the dead, are they not? They are the ones who haunt graveyards. My opponents cling to the dead and wail for sympathy, they pick among the remains and seek out the choice bits, constantly worrying the scraps of bone between their teeth. Just listen to them, to the false compassion in their voices, shrieking and hooting over every new corpse that is buried, eager to uncover it.

"A predator, my friends, is no ghoul. A ghoul accomplishes nothing, neither hunts nor kills. A ghoul, a true ghoul, feeds on stagnancy and inaction, wallows in past mistakes and sorrows. A ghoul can only sustain itself upon the corpses created by those more dedicated to the pursuit of life. Myself, I have nothing but distaste for the dead. I shudder at the thought of corpse-eating. The dead are dead, they are buried and sealed away and rotting, far from the sight of all good and civilized people.

"I assure you, my friends, I have only ever fed upon the living."

All I want is
All you want is
All I want is
To live without restriction.

Let's pretend we're improvising,
Say, "Yes, and" to everything:

Yes I love you and
Yes I need you and
Yes we'll be here for each other
And Yes and Yes and Yes and Yes and -
Until we're overflowing.

No scripts to follow, roles to play,
Generations' worth
Of learned behaviors.
No more hesitation, waiting
For a prompt, a cue, anything
To tell us it's okay to act
Or what to be afraid of.

Just Yes your hands and Yes my hands
And Yes all hands reaching out to us
And Yes your lips and Yes your thighs and Yes teeth Yes throat Yes tongue and
Your voice my lips and Yes each other -

Let's pretend we can't say "No"
As if that's the only thing between us;
As if all I want is
All you want is
All I want is
You.

Some books (and I mean this)

have greater worth as ashes.
People underestimate the value of a fire,
both practical, as in for warmth, and
in a very real way beautiful, more so
than a mediocre novel could hope to be.

Myself, I like to destroy books.
I like to compress them into pulp, the back cover
peeling off into rolls of dead skin as
it rubs against my palms. Oh,
I love to devour books, warping pages
with the imprint of my fingers,
darkening pages with my drool
and snot and sweat and
everything clinging to my dirty little hands
until the words run and become nonsensical.
I've digested books like fiber, shitting out
their words, rearranged.
I love books. I own a library.
I've never read the same book twice.

So I can understand burning books.
You get the light, yes,
and you get the warmth and
the scent of smoke and the roar of the flames.
Whereas if I'd read them
I'd have wads of yellowed paper taking
up space on my bookshelves,
full of silverfish nests and mildew and
the dumpy satisfaction of having been read.
But the fire! Oh -
but the fire, all-voracious,
needy, guttering, maddened with hunger,
devouring books whole to survive.
There could be anything in those ashes,
in those pages, in those burnt
and blackened imaginings.
There could be a monster in there.
There could be an apocalypse in there.

There could be the worst thing in the world.

There is nothing at all you have to be afraid of.

Fear is an immediate, visceral response based on proximity, a close and present danger. A threat to your continued existence. And yet your life, your hands, your children, your friends, your country, your identity has been extended outward, trembling at the touch of a spider's leg upon your extremities. A shiver goes running up your spine. Your brain has been extracted from your skull and placed in a great glass bowl that magnifies your senses. You can see for thousands of miles, you can sense vibrations from continents away. Good lord. People are dying. A great bristling hairy menace crawls across the land. The air trembles at its name.

Know that you are safe in here.

You will not die, and you will not die, and you will not die. The great glass bowl inoculates you from consequence. You will go about your day steeping in your own worry, a-tremble at every twitch and tremor, sick with a morbid compassion, perfectly safe from harm. People will be slaughtered, in ones and twos and tens and thousands, and you will know them only tangentially at best, names and faces that flicker across the glass. Friends, acquaintances, perhaps, but no one so close that you would be dragged down with them. It couldn't happen here and it has happened here and it will never happen to you.

Look at the statistics, look at the facts. At all the people who have died, and all and all and all the people who have lived.

You have no reason at all to be afraid.

The Black Rope is braided together from your hair, your dead skin cells, every scab and clot and bit of detritus that has sloughed off your body, every matted wad harvested from a shower drain combed out and braided together into a dead black cord. It is slightly thinner than your wrist and hangs suspended from the sky, dancing in the wind, one end disappearing into the distance. You can grasp it easily, loop it around your arms, and it supports your weight. The Black Rope is greased with your oils and sebum, made shiny and pliant so that it coils and bends with ease. It feels familiar against your skin.

It has been made especially for you, over the course of a lifetime.

The Black Rope sheds hairs as you touch it, black lines that mark out paths on your skin. They hide in the furrows of your palms, they cling to your sweat, impossible to peel off. You dig into your skin with your fingernails and the black lines merely writhe across your flesh like snakes. You are marked. The blades will come and trace along the lines, trace along your destiny, slitting you open according to the meridians of your body, following the paths of your veins. You cling to the Black Rope regardless. It is the only thing you have left of your life.

The Black Rope stinks of shit, of sweat, of unwashed hair. It coils like entrails. It is real, visceral, in a way that nothing else is. The Black Rope is warm. There is some decomposition in its tightly woven core, some process of decay that gives off heat. The Black Rope cradles you, comforts you. Knotted, it serves as a harness. Pulled taut, it serves as an anchor. You feel its imprints in your flesh, the thin black hairs pressed deep into the welts, embedded in the inflamed skin.

The sky looms infinite and grey above you. You grip the Black Rope, and you begin to climb.

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sadoeuphemist

September 2019

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Unhappiness

Writing Tips

Fascination

Pets

FUN, AND FLIRTATION, FORFEITS.

Lightning

Tides

Grievances

Give Them An Inch

Unpacking

Doctor's Appointments

An imposition

The Truth

Horror

Reading Comprehension

Statement to the Press

ad lib (at one's pleasure)

Book Burning

Don't Be Afraid

The Black Rope

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