a few words about love and nothing

Jonahthinice 

I fell in love with a hurricane, with the sweet warm evening
If nothing because there's nothing
Time and distance blossoms pleasure to cut, cut, cut through you

 

Note: Haiku form

love sweet warm evening
time distance blossoms pleasure
to cut, cut through you

 

a note from the downtown office

The custodian lady at work is over 80 and won't pick up our trash if it's wet or has loose food. She trained the others to keep their trash clean. I resented her at first but eventually had to respect her impudence. She never checked my trash. I threw nothing away.

She was gone a while because she had a heart attack. She returned, and we picked up where we left off.

about Augusten Burroughs’ “Running with Scissors"

Running with Scissors, published in 2002, describes an especially noxious and wild period in American writer Augusten Burroughs’ youth. As the story goes, Burroughs’ parents, who fight loudly, frequently, and then violently, divorce. Burroughs, a smart, resourceful 13-year-old who is gay and neurotically image-conscious and clean, stays at first with his mother. But she starts to suffer an identity crisis, and her long-simmering mental health issues snowball. She sends her son to live with her psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, who is clearly insane and lives in a dilapidated Victorian house. Also living there is an assortment of people that includes Finch’s children (some possibly adopted), apparently a wife, and sometimes live-in patients and drifters.

The large house is the home of a repulsive, squalid chaos. It is without rules, without discipline, without sanity.

 

Although initially repulsed by the set-up, Burroughs assimilates. He even forms a close friendship with Finch's daughter, Natalie, who is one year older than he is. Meanwhile, though, Burroughs’ mother gets much worse under Finch’s care.

 

The book is run-through with darkness and disturbances. Like, a sick 33-year-old squatter named Neil rapes the 13-year-old Burroughs; then the two carry on a bizarre sex-power relationship for two years afterwards. Everyone, including Dr. Finch, knows. That is just one of the book’s rape and assault episodes.

 

Burroughs and Natalie eventually leave the house together, but their friendship dissolves after Burroughs fails to take Natalie’s father’s side when Burroughs’ mother accuses the doctor of rape. The book ends with Burroughs’ decision to move to New York City to try to become a writer.

 

A blurb on the dust jacket of the edition I read (St. Martin’s Press, 2002) affected how I read the book. Haven Kimmel, author of A Girl Named Zippy, commented: “Harrowing and hilarious. I haven’t laughed this hard since David Sedaris’s last book.” I understand the reference, but reading this is not like reading Sedaris.

 

Some parts of Running with Scissors are funny—I laughed when I read about Finch’s self-described office masturbatorium, a room in which he rubs one out between appointments. But that is an easy laugh; Sedaris is a smug laugh.

 

Also, Sedaris writes tight prose and can be beautifully sentimental; the prose in Scissors is unremarkable, and Burroughs never sounds sincere.

 

Moreover, Scissors just seems unbelievable. I assume Sedaris exaggerates, possibly straying at times into fiction. He’s a storyteller and humorist. Burroughs, I suspect, goes further and more frequently into fiction that he admits. He writes in Scissors about a time when he and Natalie, both young teenagers, pulled out a window from a pantry room and tried to fit it in a big hole they cut out of the roof. I just do not think that happened. And apparently the irresponsibly, undeniably crazy Finch, who readily tells patients about his masturbatorium and goes through a prolonged phase in which he divines in his own shit signs from God, stays licensed and practices for decades, thinking that the only threat to his practice is back taxes.

 

Burroughs ardently claims his work is "entirely accurate" and insisted the book remain marketed as a memoir during a 2005 lawsuit filed by the family of the real Finch, Dr. Rodolph H. Turcotte, who alleged defamation of character and invasion of privacy. The lawsuit was settled, and afterwards Burroughs reportedly said “what I wrote is the truth” and “it's still a memoir, it's marketed as a memoir, they've agreed one-hundred percent that it is a memoir.”

Notes: 

Running with Scissors spent eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. 

Running with Scissors was published in 2002; the defamation lawsuit was filed in 2005; the film was released in 2006.

 

a review of a noise rock EP by Coilguns

I wrote about this band’s 2021 EP. Now comes “Peace Trader,” a new Coilguns single about testing a country’s values and you not seeing that most people don’t care to live up to them.

The song starts with an octave chord and quieted drums. At 10 seconds, the sound goes big, raw, and passionate. It feels like good Deftones. A few chords swing back and forth to screams of “Tell me, what have we done with our history of peaceful force? Yet, we still have hopes!” Then the bass and a guitar drop out, the intro is recalled—the octave chord and drums pushed back in the mix so the almost spoken message can be heard, "Still thought that our land would export dialog instead of weapons / Still naive enough to support what we thought was our main goal / International help and solutions for a solidar world / But you’ve traded it all and pretend to be forced now to cope."

Then the sound explodes again. The most effective part comes at 2:40 with a falsetto mourn followed by the realization, however fleeting, that "No one’s land here, but a place to die; we will mourn them all, we will mourn them all.” Then belief in life after death returns.

Unlike migration flows, Coilguns runs tight.

 

off another life

I waited in the parking lot, bloody knees in a bad town, a girl there running around. She was special, aching in my tears. She was so lovely, fantastic eyes, the one I used lay beside. I don't have a home anymore and walked into the strip mall bar with threats all over the walls. The people in there had some drinking money sent from home. The monsters people feed. We drank, and the evening robbed the graves of lives we couldn’t bother with.

These rusted-out ears hear the sound of cicadas breathing a second wind into the afternoon, bringing honor to evening. I blinded a few cicadas once—held a magnifying glass to concentrate the sun into a beam burning their eyes out. Then I set them free. I watched with burnt-out eyes that died a string of illnesses. Cicadas flew away like normal.

There are some lives you don’t want to peek into, and hers was one. She told me she raised four children but was the biological mother of three. One died last year at age 26. What remained was a skeleton’s stare filled with secrets.

 

about spending 4th of July trying not to think about the hearts at stake

I was trapped and strained toward the trapper. I tell you to work backward from a valley in the Carpathians through the age of apocalypse here in America, to California, to the birth of nanotechnology. When a single molecule splits itself into two and eats you and drinks water into its structures, you discover life is widely available. You consume cold babies to survive but find a dead body kept warm by the levitating boy at Old Moon Creek.

subpar lyrics

Ever Since

 

Why should I wake up now?

The meaningless call

Why should I put myself through it?

Why does this happen at all?

 

I can’t find the reason

Put feet on the floor anyway

I stand in the humid air

And wish for winter’s say

 

I wished you loved me once again

But those days are gone

I want to see you

But now I must go on

 

How can I?

Maybe I’m in some kind of phase

I’ll think of you too often, even years from now

I’ll know I’m going the wrong way

for the love of AI

People like us with criminal records eventually wash out of the loop toward the black star. Right before it happens, the energy level of our blood increases as it flows through the compressor due to the action of the rotor blades which exert a torque on the fluid. I chose to suffer, and the warden got murderous with her language until reaching the skeleton-hurts point. Then I was rescued by alcohol-induced psychosis. Exhaustion triggers the simulation of thought. Bypass ratios reached greater than 10:1 because of blade aerodynamics. Thought in the form of prepackaged synthesis makes old thought feel redundant because it has been already simulated. Not a pile of data but structures of knowledge: metaphysics (what is real), epistemology (how we know), and ethics (what we do with that knowledge). Then warden offered to erase my record and set me loose. Still, the deeds we do are ones we've been doing our whole lives. Trained in systems thinking, I looked for feedback loops but found none. We will all die, and, oh, I bet it’s black inside that box. 

about a tired-sounding punk/hardcore band

Industrial Puke’s second album, “Alive to No Avail,” opens with a serrated guitar riff, then comes the whole shebang.

The band plows ahead with its volume-equals-good ethos and centers a maxed-out vocal. The loudest part is always the vocal—chorused layers of it parading machismo.

The Swedish band’s second full-length tries to squeeze a few more miles out of the sound first heard on its 2022 red-blooded crust EP, “Where Life Crisis Starts.” The whole thing was seven minutes. Soon followed the band’s full-length debut, 2023’s “Born into the Twisting Rope.”

I wrote about the first one, “Where Life Crisis Starts,” here.

The band insists on one speed, one volume, and one trick. Its monotonous sound stumbled across the finish line of that brief four-song EP.

It was okay then, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far.

 

something about "Dry" by Augusten Burroughs

I was underwhelmed by Running With Scissors, his much-ballyhooed memoir and debut, but I still tried Dry, another autobiographical work by American writer Augusten Burroughs. Supposedly Dry was written first. I stopped reading it about halfway though.
 
I enjoyed parts of Running With Scissors and understood it to be a memoir when I picked it up. But as I read, I grew deeply skeptical about its truthfulness and quickly learned after reading that the people depicted in the book also disputed the accounts. This soured me.
 
Dry includes in the beginning this author’s note:

This memoir is based on my experiences over a ten-year period. Names have been changed, characters combined, and events compressed. Certain episodes are imaginative re-creation, and those episodes are not intended to portray actual events.

So the story is no memoir. And I guess Burroughs's lawyers were also skeptical of this recovery tale and wanted to head off more lawsuits.

Besides this, the story is repetitive, and the prose did not alleviate my frustration.

Dry supposedly describes the author's battle with alcoholism. In the story, Burroughs is a fairly successful advertising copywriter but gets hammered frequently and eventually his colleagues and boss decide to stop giving him a pass.
 
He goes to rehab, gets out in 30 days, and resumes life somehow, succeeding against his urges. Totally real.

a text message from the past and a friend gone and from the here and now

He texted me—

I have had some weird dreaming trends lately. It weird because in a way it lasts all night and is absolutely meaningless other than the brain power it must burn. I come in and out of sleep, roll from side to side to get comfortable. As I come to and go back down, I am faced with a near impossible problem to solve, that even though I normally realize this will just go away when I wake up, I become obsessed with solving. It could be very visual. Like some sort of Iron Man movie user interface. Or, some very technical mystery of why something isn't turning on. But, I will dream of this ALL night long. It's almost painful. I’ve never come to a resolution that I can remember. All I know it [sic] that it will end when my alarm clock goes off and I have to get up to do life...

Please tell me but don’t tell me. It’s too much, and I have so much to say but want to say it all only in person. Please get me out of this sunrise shootout where we all get written off again. The saddest summer has no shape because grief is shapeless.

about the album "Camgirl" by Crippling Alcoholism

She's doing whatever you want. She recoils. Her injuries are minor. See her on camera sitting up suddenly, taking a moment, taking inventory. She's a new camgirl now—a girl drowning in the disappointment of being at center of another breaking metaphor. Watch her face and body. Do you picture every sad moment that happened in her life? Every step dad line up, every line up her nose? Why don't you picture that?

something about our boss, Bill

Bill is a soft-spoken man, but his soothing tone and cadence fail to hide the bite of his mind. He is driven, and he’ll drive you. He has power, and his ideas, right or whimsy, come with an official stamp. He arrives early each day, a withdrawn soul always shooing validation farther down the path.

about living her life

The house was full of fucked-up people. The landlord lived seven minutes away. A girl moved in, wanting the excitement, a house with seven wild roommates. But it was bad. One tenant killed somebody in his room. She listened to the beaten-to-death guest choke on his own blood on the other side of the wall. Now she hears the noise he made all the time. She listened to the police interview a couple of other tenants outside, heard this through her window. She moved back in with dad. For old dad, she thought, what couldn’t be measured on a gauge—pounds per square inch, mileage, fluid ounces—could hardly be said to exist at all. So it was with all her trauma—she felt alone, and she hungers to make the sound of death herself.