It makes sense that death has been on my mind. I haven’t seen sunlight for more than 2 hours at a time in over a week and two of the people I hang out with most are over 90. God, their lives seem depressing to me.
They can barely see, can barely hear, can barely walk, and need to take naps all the time. PLUS they don’t have the internet! What kind of hell do they live in?
Death is the most frightening concept to me because I will stop being able to control the attention I’m getting. Death is like publishing something that you have no ability to defend or discuss afterward. People are going to interpret your life however they want without you getting to say: “No wait, you didn’t get it! That was supposed to be that way!”
What being around death has taught me though is that old age is gonna suck too. My grandmother died when I was 12 after a long battle with the most hilarious disease in the world – Alzheimer’s. It was the grandma that I am with now who told me she was dead. She comforted me. Now she is forgetting the thing she just told me and asking me to read pictures that she thinks are words, and once again, it is very funny.
In Swedish the word for fun and funny are the same so sometimes someone well ask me: “Well, is it funny being in New York?”
On her 90th birthday party I sat next to her best friend from middle school. This woman can’t hear anything and speaks no English. Our conversation consisted of her telling me something, me telling her my name, her telling me something, and me asking if she needed help, and her telling me something. I’m sure it was interesting, but at the time it was very dull. Old people have lots of stories, and I’m already very good at making stories out of my life, imagine how interesting I’m going to be when I’m old. By “interesting I’m going to be,” I mean “little I’m going to let others talk.”
I worry though that I won’t have that same fervor for speaking when I am that old, and that scares me. A flight of stairs may disable my grandmother for a day, and fervor takes energy. If I don’t have energy, will I be able to care that much about making people care about me?
I don’t want to get old. I don’t want to die. I wanna live forever with a lot of energy. Now I understand why people work out.
I was supposed to meet this guy to show him around the city. Big Mistake.
I forgot to give any indicators as to what my appearance would be, and he did as well. So, here I am, asking people if they are Daniel – the guy I’m supposed to meet.
I’ve past this guy thrice on my awkward trips to the water fountain attempting to make him initiate eye contact with me – this guy with the skinny jeans who looks 20 something and vaguely Swedish – this guy who fits the undescriptive description that I have of the person I’m supposed to meet.
Finally I ask.
“No, why do you ask?”
What the fuck kind of question is that? Who cares why I asked? What other option is there besides that I’m supposed to meet someone named Daniel here. “I just thought you looked like a Daniel.” “I’m doing a name survey.” “I’m going to murder the first person I meet with that name.” Asshole.
This woman is very self-conscious about her teeth. Laughing is such a chore. Too bad she’s talking to someone she finds so funny.
I realize why I want fame. I want people to have the same instant reverence and disgust for me that I have for them. I am constantly frightened, nay sure, that people hate me, and yet I hate them back. I strive for equality. I want people to look at me and assume they are not worthy, yet look at me and think: he isn’t worthy.
It is also how I see myself. I am not worthy of the barrage of compliments I silently give myself.
I have to do my laundry and get toilet paper and garbage bags and sponges.
People in pajamas don’t do these things. People in pajamas lay down. I’ve essentially been wearing some element of my pajamas for the past 4 days, and it’s felt great. It feels like when you get up from your bed and there’s still an indentation where you had been, except somehow that indentation is still surrounding you – walking around with you – holding your shoulders and hips in its sweet embrace.
In other words, it feels terrible.
So often in my life the words terrible and great seem synonymous. I don’t know if I know what I want, but I do feel as though the knowledge would unhinge me. I’d rather oscillate like Sin(Tan(x)) at x=Pi/2 between love and disgust. I have no interest in x-axis emotions.
This is why I refuse to do my laundry because laundry is never as bad as I think it’s going to be. It’s always really easy, but it takes me 4 days to get up the energy to walk two doors down and empty one container into another container. It’s impossible. It’s impossible because it’s so boring. Nothing interesting happens in the two minutes that it takes for me to do my laundry, which is why I can’t get myself to do it. Boring is the x-axis emotion.
This is the second big reason that I like wearing pajamas constantly. If I wear them over my other clothes than they will not need to be washed. You only sweat into your first layer of clothing.
Last night I was at a party wearing my pajamas and everyone else was wearing clothes that had been organized and thought about. The hypocrisy of me criticizing someone for wearing clothes to present an image is not lost on me, but the difference in goals led to a difference in person. Was I wearing PJs mostly for attention? Absolutely. Other people were also wearing their clothes for attention, though the amount of attention that they wanted was a specific amount. Some perfect level of attention – some line that they could walk as thin as a tightrope where the right people would give them attention and the wrong people wouldn’t and all the attention would be the right kind of attention. BORING! If you’re going for things, go for them all out. Get all the attention you can get. PJs get a lot of good attention and bad attention, and I embrace it all – just as my PJs embrace me. The problem comes with that people are confused by a desire to achieve sadness, badness, and negative things. People are confused when I dive purposefully underneath the x-axis.
I can’t hang out too long on one line because even if that line is positive, that line becomes the default with which you measure all other emotions from. That line becomes the new x-axis. I want to keep my x-axis where it is and continue to oscillate around it.
So I left the party, jumped into bed and allowed my terrible greatness to surround my shoulders and hips.
I haven’t shaved because it is too cold and I haven’t eaten because it’s too far.
I have played jump on my bed. It’s a game where I run toward my bed and jump on to it while making an explosion sound. It’s a pretty cool game.
I believe in fun. Fun is the act of enjoying what you are doing. The key to that is the word: “you.” Self.
In order to have fun you need to understand what causes fun. To enjoy you need to understand what you enjoy.
I have often propagated the idea that self-awareness will save us all, but that is wrong. Self-awareness will save yourself. But it will.
It will cause you to doubt and hate and fear, but all of yourself and then at least you are the cause of whatever – which then gives you the ability alter that cause.
I keep using the word “you” inappropriately.
I hate a lot of this writing because it is masquerading as important by employing a very simple aesthetic trick.
Important is relative. This isn’t important because it’s the 400th post of me telling others how to live not because I think they would be happier, but because I want people to act like me so that I don’t look so weird. But in reality I want to look weird because if I didn’t look weird then I wouldn’t stand out and I wouldn’t be able to complain.
In reality I love where I am, but being where I am involves being unhappy where I am.
I don’t understand how to live. I constantly selfanalyzedoubtworry because I enjoy thinking about important things and I am important.
Nicki Minaj wrote a love song to herself. She’s more important than me.
I originally wanted to break this fast by writing about my adventures in facial hair. The post sucked. The only sentence I liked was “it started as a novelty on my neck” and that’s only because I’m into alliteration.
I watched Chuck and Lie To Me this morning to wake myself up. It’s not because I don’t have things I need to do – I have a lot of chores to accomplish before work today, but because I missed Hulu.
This is the way I should start this post.
Hulu is the best girlfriend I’ve ever had. She’s always there when I need her to tell me stories as I cuddle with my giant u-shaped body pillow that I got off craigslist for free. She’s there to give me vague sexual arousal that can transition nicely into porn. And most importantly she doesn’t need me when I’m busy and when I come back has just stored up hours of time for us to hang out in her neat little queue. I love her little queue. The bigger it gets the bigger I get. She’s perfect because she allows me to have the non-monogamous relationship that I always wanted – one where the relationship part is still accented highly.
I have a confession to make.
I like my relationships. I like the ones I get in. For the most part they are healthy. I enjoy being in them. I’m happy.
Whew. That was tough. I didn’t want to have to admit that.
The point is that I like being in a relationship. I just like to be able to put it on the back burner for anything else. Hulu lets me do that. It’s not that I need to be able to sleep with other people – though Hulu wouldn’t care. It’s just that I want Hulu to feel comfortable sleeping with other people because she knows I don’t care. It’s not that I need her to not pester me when I have more important shit than her needs – Hulu always gives me a number in parenthesis next to the word “Queue” that lets me know how long it’s been since we’ve hung out, which directly corresponds to how guilty I need to feel. It’s just that I want her to know that I will come back and spend obsessive hours fawning over her glossy moving images and full screen buttons, but sometimes I work on other things and may need time away.
I watched trailers on Hulu for 2 hours last night.
I needed to catch up.
There are five movies out right now about people attempting to have non-monogamous relationships and failing because love is too strong.
First is Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis deciding to be Friends With Benefits. Which means that they are like totally friends and then they decide that they should also have sex because they are beautiful. But like she’s totally cool with that even though she’s a woman – which we can tell because she likes to chest bump and watch football. This is not how non-monogamy is done. This is how patriarchy is enforced.
Then it’s Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman try to do something where they have No Strings Attached. This one is totally supposed to work because it is totally the girls idea!!! She’s the one that’s too busy and men don’t have feelings and don’t want to get attached anyway – especially men who have friends like Ludacris! Don’t worry guys though. Even though she says she doesn’t get jealous and hates monogamy, when he starts playing the field (you know, like we men do) she realizes that they need to settle down and tell their kids about the time Ashton brought a bouquet of carrots to the hospital because of that inside joke with bunnies.
Then Adam Sandler pretends to be cheating on a wife that doesn’t exist to get a series of girls to Just Go With It. But then! Love! Ahhh! Big boobs! Slow walking! Big boobs! Love! Big boobs! Blonde! Now he has to follow through with the lie and pretend Jennifer Aniston is his wife. Wacky! She has kids. She’s a woman who lives like a normal person whereas the man is sooooo weird and wants sex all the time – whoaaaaa! And now he just wants to settle down but his lies are catching up to him. This movie is about honesty, guys. That and enforcing gender roles.
What about Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway experiment with Love and Other Drugs. This is about a guy who likes sex so much that he starts selling a exist pill that allows guys to have sex even when their bodies are telling them no and in no way help a woman. Then a girl comes around who lives even more free spirited. Why’d I say “even more free spirited?” Because that’s what it’s called when a man lies to a bunch of girls to sleep with them and then enforces his capitalist position of power to ruin lives just to get his rocks off. She on the other hand is bizarre because she’s into just sex too. WEIRD! Don’t worry, she’s not. She’s dying and she can’t handle the fact that she’s dying so she’s just doing a bucket list of sex with hot dudes to distract herself. If she were a real woman, she’d want to settle down as soon as the guy does – like a good little girl.
Also there is Owen Wilson and Jason Sudekis getting a Hall Pass from their wives: Christina Applegate and Pam from The Office. A hall pass is where they get to fuck who ever they want for a week. Obviously they can’t fuck anyone because only marriage is the safe way to stay in a happy sexual relationship.
Sometimes Hulu can be a bitch. Sometimes she expresses the wrong opinions. But that’s what I love about her. That’s what I love about our relationship.
We don’t always have to agree but we’re always willing to listen, and that’s really the key to a non-monogamous relationship – because as soon as I find someone I agree with on everything I’ll want to settle down because it would be like hanging out with a mirror that fucked me.
I want a mirror that fucks me, but until then I’ll live non-monogamously with Hulu.
I finished a notebook last week, so I’m going to begin posting things I wrote in it and never typed up. This post is “Shit I Wrote in the Library While I Waited for my Tutoring Client to Show Up.”
She ran back and forth from the library counter to her stacks of books she had compiled on the floor taking two at a time. It wasn’t that she couldn’t carry more, but rather that she originally picked up two when she leaned over, her lower lip extended to catch any errand snot that dripped from her nose. Bending back over seemed like too much work so instead she ran across the library one hand holding up her bright purple corduroy pants that only fell when she ran, the other holding the books she had picked up from her neat pile in the middle of the busiest library aisle. Her unwashed straight hair bounced off her head like someone was continuously shaking a sheet free of crumbs.
Her mother laughed, charmed with her daughter’s incapabilities.
I’ve been waking up early lately. I think the morning job and the fact that I don’t have blinds of any sort which causes light and cold to enter my room at 6:30 is part of that. That would be the logical answer, but as fun as logic is, it is less fun to blame things on.
It’s because I wake up in guilt ridden panics of self-doubt and then I can’t get back to sleep because I feel to guilty and self-doubty. Not because of anything in particular but rather just a constant worry that I am doing nothing in life. I am accomplishing so little. I don’t give homeless people money because I don’t have money. I don’t save things except for piles of trash that I mistakenly compile in the corners of rooms I spend too much time in. My only output to society is art which is so intangible and useless and helps no one except a bunch of other people who do nothing but produce intangible and useless contributions.
If I were famous all this would be different. My audience would be so far reaching that the things I said would be important. When I talked about my inability to get out of bed for fear of having to put on clothes and accomplish something I would guilt some young teen suffering from depression into getting out of bed and making love to another young teen suffering from depression instead of just causing 10 of my friends to be a little more disgusted with the prospect of making love to me.
Let’s all stop judging what I do until I get famous – it’s really only interesting then.
Music is a very different artform than any other because it is so much more about the audience that enjoys that music than it is about the music itself. By saying that you like a kind of music, you are not telling someone anything about the music that you enjoy listening to, but rather the people you wish to identify with.
This is why I like how we’ve transitioned away from full CDs and albums and vague musical pretensions from any long form musical appreciation that implies that you gain something besides image from the music that you listen to. Instead the single has become king – and a single becomes king from its video.
I loved freshman year of college because no one has any friends. No one has any friends, so, for once in my life, I’m on equal ground with everyone else. Desperation is the overarching feeling for all and as a result we have constant conversations with people about inoffensive, useless drivel, commenting only with unbridled enthusiasm for the other person’s interests. That sounds like something that I would hate, but it’s the best because it is the time where I get the most attention because I refuse to participate properly. I am most interesting on first meeting and then it just goes downhill as you realize that my desires are boring and self-obsessive instead of quirky and counter-cultural.
One reoccurring question in these first couple weeks of trying to make friends is “what type of music do you listen to?” This is because music is our greatest signifier if the person likes the same things you like without actually bringing up the things you like. Nobody can genuinely be offended that you like Wilco instead of MGMT or that you listen to classical music instead of early jazz, but they can secretly despise you and find other people who say the same thing about The Dead Cranberries early 90s influences.
I like Lady Gaga.
I like Kanye West.
They aren’t musicians – they are icons of our time.
Kanye West’s penis has more influence on our society than half the artists that you think are upcoming, underground, and uberawesome.
This isn’t to say that I only pay attention to music if the artist is famous because fame is the only way to have an influence in music. I almost agree with that, but I think that music has an ability to force people to self-reflect (the only purpose I find valid in art) because it can appeal to a group of people based solely on shallow signifiers while subverting the message that they are typically bombarded by.
If you don’t know her, you should. Princess Superstar is one of a group of maybe 10 people that I think are perfect.
This is what music should be.
Telling someone you listen to Princess Superstar does not tell people that you prefer to dress a certain way and smoke a certain type of cigarette, it rather tells someone the opinions you find valid and the ones you don’t.
On November 28th at The PIT my sketch group will be doing our forty minute debacle on fame entitled: Rachel and the Elf Present: Fame: I Wanna Live Forever, I Wanna Learn How to Fly; A Rachel and the Elf Production featuring Rachel and the Elf.
But this is a story about circles.
It was early June. I wanted to write for money. It didn’t need to be much money, but I needed to brag that people were paying me to write. The way I was making money was by shelling out Veggie Reubens to people who were getting paid to write. They were getting paid to write blogs.
I started doing some research and found a website that seemed open to new ideas and I was full of new ideas. I wanted to contact them, but I wanted to make sure they were willing to back the type of shit that I’d be writing. Then I found this article. It was great. I read everything that the feces pusher wrote. She was brilliant. I loved her work. I thought: I will write for this website, then there will be a writer’s meeting and I will meet this girl and then we will talk and I will compliment her on her work. Then that will be the end of it because anything more is frightening. But that was enough. I wanted to compliment her in person on the article she’d written – on the articles she was going to write. Mostly I wanted to be as famous as her. Have people reading my writing and thinking: “Man, if only I were cool enough to compliment him in person.”
Then I got the job. I started by writing about Urban Legends, and then I began writing Fantasy Basketball advice, and now I’m a staple at this website, and people have contacted me personally to compliment me on my work and it both doesn’t feel nearly as good as I thought it would and feels really fucking good. I have fantasy basketball fans. Y’know how cool that is? No, you don’t. Because you don’t have fantasy basketball fans.
Then I went back to her to read her latest article. It was good. It was great.
But that’s not the point. The point has to be about me.
I read the comments and one of the comments said: “I recently read a quote that said ‘the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.'”
I said that! Am I the only one to say that? No. Did he read it from me? No. Did I even say it in those words? No. But for a split second I thought someone was quoting me, and it felt good. Real good.
Here are some quotes you can use around the office or in your writing to prove a point if you want. Call them Nissesques (because that’s difficult to say and I want you to work hard to love me).
I just spent 10 minutes thinking of only one quote, here it is:
– The smell of jizz is either the sweetest smell of beauty and triumph or the sweetest stench of depression and loneliness.
When I started this blog it was for a reason. I had this high and mighty concept of unlikability – of relatability and disgust – of forced self-disgust. People were meant to read and not say: “That’s like me!” but rather “Oh, shit. That’s like me.” They were meant to see the thoughts they had extended to further, lazier, grosser, more selfish ends and realize the dystopian future that they had set out before themselves. My blog has changed. I got tired of walking the fine line of lying and truthing – of constantly worrying about how an audience would react and if that desired reaction would be appropriate – and instead I just wanted to write. I now write.
5:37 am
My alarm was supposed to go off at 5:30, but it was now 5:37 and I was waking up without any additional sound. Should I go back to bed because my alarm didn’t go off? Should I set my alarm for 5:40? Should I assume that this is an illusion and break my cell phone? No. I should just get up.
I take a shower, I check my email. I have two more messages from a Fantasy Basketball fan who has been pestering me on how to improve his team. I tell him that I just don’t think Ray Allen is worth having on his team. I head out the door with my cell phone, wallet, and … keys? My keys feel small. That’s because yesterday I had lent the store keys to a co worker and then forgotten to get them back. Shit. I call her. She wakes up. She feels bad. I feel badder. I run. I run all the way to her apartment. 1.1 miles. It takes me 15 minutes. I didn’t run the whole way. I’m still making up lies.
When I started this blog, it was about a lot of things that were unlikable, but it focused on the lazy in us. Each title ended with “seems like a lot of work” and each entry was generally about me being unable to function correctly in society because I was trying too hard to not try. I wasn’t just lazy like Nisse Greenberg is. I was lazy like H2$. H2$ refused to admit he was wrong. He was right and he was a douchebag about it.
6:21 am
I arrive 9 minutes before I’m supposed to be at work. I grab the keys and stand out in the dark with a girl in her pajamas. She isn’t pajama rich. She’s pajama poor. I’m also pajama poor. We stand pajama poor staring out of half closed eyes made of anger we can only misdirect at our life situations. She is calling a car service so that I can get to work on time. I’m attempting to distract her by talking about how everybody I passed on my jog through crown heights was drunk and coming home from fun nights out, but I was going to work. I’m attempting to distract myself from the fact that I am going to work and there are drunk people coming home from fun nights out by talking about it. One of the groups I passed was two females and one male. He wanted to have sex. They also may have. None of that was interesting. What was interesting was that one of the females was carrying a portable metal detector that airport security uses on personal searches. I guess it’s phallic?
H2$ wasn’t simply lazy though. He was so set in his present that he refused to understand how his actions affected the future, and how his actions were affected by the past. His lack of understanding of history forced him to demand equality in gender by assuming equality in gender. When presented with an inequality, he tried first to indignantly equalize. This was a manifestation of laziness. This was refusing to study history. He thought he was just an asshole, but he was an asshole to women more then men because he couldn’t accept the basic concept that patriarchy had given him such an advantage in life. He was an asshole.
6:22 am
She hung up the phone. “You could just ride my bike.” Less money, get on my journey immediately. “Yes.” Two jackets, one pair of jeans, and loads of sweat, I headed off on a road bike meant for a 5’2″ girl in the pitch black darkness. I’ve been wearing two jackets lately because I like the way they look and feel. My lower jacket has good pockets, and feels nice against the skin. My overjacket looks hearty, and has a nice collar. I’ve come to somewhat respect a look that fits. I still don’t think there is objective good and bad in taste of clothes, but I do think that clothing is a form of expression.
The night before I had been in Bushwick at a concert that included a toy piano, a band with 7 members and 12 instruments and two video installations. It was loftlike because it was in Bushwick and had long flowing fabrics attached to the wall and ceiling in a way that made it feel very theatry. Oh, and the concert ended with a square dance. I love square dancing. I love dancing. After the first song, a couple of us went outside to drink our beers and get some fresh air. A man in a suit, blonde crew cut, and authoritative walk approached us quickly and demanded that we get inside with our beers. We obliged politely and watched as the man perused the concert, seemingly looking for someone at fault. Kyle and I began discussing how we had so quickly obliged to enter with our beers despite the fact that he had no real authority. Who was this douchebag? Who was this asshole? If he had had a scruffy beard and disparate plaid would we have listened to him? No. Kyle stopped mid-sentence. Wait, I was into this, I wanted to rant indignantly about image! “Dude,” Kyle started “That’s the guy.” I looked toward where his finger would have extended to see a man in a blonde crew cut, red hoodie, and triangle patterned neon tights. It was him. He was still walking authoritatively around as if something must be wrong. Our mouths unable to speak as this man had completely proven our point for us, we watched as he took off his hoodie, revealing the tights to be a part of a one piece leotard, climbed a ladder on the wall only to grab a child’s sombrero to wear and unhook one of the fabrics, which cleared the dance floor for simply a hanging chunk of fabric. Kyle and I gravitated toward the dance floor. “Oh he lives here, he’s an acrobat.” He climbed up the fabric and did some crazy circus shit to square dancing music. It was the most badass thing I’ve ever seen.
When I began writing, I did not want to seem cool. I did not want to get myself laid. I wanted to make others feel as bad as me. I wanted others to share in my shame – to recognize, embrace and the runaway from that embrace of the things that made them bad people. It was a disgusting goal, but I was living as a disgusting person – unemployed, half-bearded, and consisting mostly on free samples from Whole Foods. I was a scumbag, but I was bringing you all down with me.
6:39 am
I got to work only 9 minute late. The bike ride sucked though. The bike had those foot pedal foot holders, the ones meant to wrap around your feet. I wear shoes that seem like some sort of mix between gogo boots and clown shoes so fitting into anything meant to wrap around normal footwear, but I couldn’t just switch around the pedals because then the foot holders scraped against the ground. I panted as I rose my key to the door. I’m out of shape. Biking is tough. I didn’t even have to go uphill. It still seemed like a lot of work.
My blog wasn’t simply mental masturbation. It was full on masturbation. It was a fantasy of my life that in the end made me feel unfulfilled and dirty because I was unfulfilled and dirty. Mostly because I masturbated so much. I sat in my bed full of crumbs jerking off to the ramblings of a jerk off jerking off on a page.
I then worked a 10 1/2 hour day.
Things have changed.
A year and a half ago I started off lazy. Now I exercise before working a 10 1/2 hour work day and then heading off on a nearly two hour journey around Brooklyn to buy a new bike. Oh yeah, I did that too.
Nisse Greenberg 