Throwaway Pieces (1) – It's Way Too Late
Fred again.. – Actual Life
The 19th century German mope Schopenhauer and I would appear to have one thing in common. Endlessly philosophising, creating, and consuming art appears to be, to me, one of the only non-trivial respites from the endless cycle of pointless suffering and meaningless epiphany that equals the entirety of the human experience. Would Schopenhauer have embraced YouTube? Netflix? TikTok? Would he have seen binge-watching as the will turning against itself?
I would, it also appears, have something in common with his disciple, Nietszche. If life really is this endless cycle of pointless suffering and meaningless epiphany, the whole point of anything is to just get better at the cycle, I suppose. One must, as Camus might suggest, imagine Sisyphus happy.
Ruminations on lifting while watching All Quiet On The Western Front
Just purely as an experiment on societal norms, at what point would the average human bean find not crying in the cinema weirder than crying in one. How deep must the tragedy pictured be, how profound the sense of loss, how unbearable the pain of two dee characters, before your average dudebro thinks not crying would be perceived as a sign of serious apathy, psychopathy / sociopathy even. Before the very instinct to conform that has instructed him to flex his biceps at the sight of a child dying on tee vee informs him that the group of women two rows down from him might think him weirder for staring stoically as the seemingly random, objectively unnecessary brutality of war is captured brilliantly on the silver screen.
Ready for afters.
The good stuff is the after. The good stuff is when you’re ready. She says she’s ready for afters, but you are not. After the boom boom of the pretend-dark rave. After the cameraman struggles to pick the right Nikon lens to capture the smoky dancefloor. After dance dance dance. That’s the good stuff: when you’re ready for afters. She says she’s ready for afters.
Bernard’s prose, she had once said, is a study in repetition. Repetitiousness, she’d said, is a study of the limits of human patience. I’m not a patient person, she’d said; not like you, you can watch a wallflower wilt. Perhaps it’s true; since she’s the one who’s ready for afters. She’s the one who sees the lights stay dim, 3 am, 4 am, 5 am, and says, I’m ready for afters.
Interpol - Antics
We’ve all known evil, in some way or form. In some way or form, we’ve all known evil. We found evil in them. Several years after the fact, maybe; maybe after several years of having lived life among the far less evil, we found evil in them. We found evil in the way they kicked us to the dirt, sneered as our tears caked in the aftermud. We didn’t know it then, but it was pure, unadulterated evil that had left us for dead. I see that now. We all agree we see that now.
