displacement, replacement. i’m not trying to moralize or make haste to draw false origins - we always start in the middle: i’m just trying to draw your attention to something: displacement, replacement. you make dinner with someone you care about, you talk over dinner and this conversation is not monetized - the gaps are existential, not commercial displacement, replacement. you comment on a Facebook wall, saying to your friend that you love the way they cooked those sun dried tomatoes last night, mmmmm, so delicious!. this conversation, on the other hand, will be monetized, the canyon, commercial - the bridge: Facebook, of course. displacement, replacement. oh, lovely automobile - you get me everywhere so quickly and it’s super nice to just hop in the car and go wherever I need to with such ease: on top of that, it fucking sucks to carry groceries home on the bus or on my back without one. displacement, replacement. i’ve been spending so much time in my car, sitting, commuting, just driving around: i need to find a way to get active once again: I think the gym will do. displacement, replacement. go ahead, move wherever you need to for whatever you need to move for, but make sure to grip your phone oh so tight, because someone might need you - anxiety, phantom ring - in fact everyone apparently needs you - so they’re shouting into fake-sun blue: never leave it behind, ever: make sure you pay your bill on time, or else you’ll be unreachable or, possibly worse, unable to reach. displacement, replacement. work is such a drag, i just wanna have a good time, man. you know, unwind, smoke some weed, maybe drink a bit: TV, Netflix, or some shopping - what else would I do with the money I just made? displacement, replacement. i wanna disconnect, I’ve been spending too much time infected by the variety nodes and networks that constantly encroach on my attention. I think I need a digital detox or a technological sabbath, because I’m cellular sick. oh look, here’s one! displacement, replacement. hyper-anxious and over-thought, your mind on the brink of becoming perpetual-motion-machine you demonize all the swirling words, the chaotic syntactical clusterfuck that you bathe in every day and open up amazon to buy the newest book on mindfulness: enjoy the aesthetic experience of scrapping last night’s pasta sauce off of a bowl, this is your life: isn’t it experientially vibrant? displacement, replacement: the treadmill always wins you're having commercially-created, eyes closed conversations with yourself in the dark. the simulacra that you see, frankenstein vitalized by tech savvy smart heads looking to find new ways to get you to pay that way they get themselves paid. displacement, replacement: its gaps - mind the gaps, watch the gap. innovation is Yucca Mountain: we’ve solved a previous problem, but now we’ve got all this pesky nuclear waste: we’ve stopped being physically engaged with the world, planet fitness will do. we’ve decided to hollow out a mountain - it will hold all the waste in one place, perfect: oh wait, it’s built on a fucking fault line.

I feel quickened by a book about sadism and bowling trophies. I bet its got something to do with free flash brewed iced coffee. I stomp my feet hard onto the pavement, and if the rock you gave me hadn’t already been smoothed by the ocean, I’m sure my fingers would have done the trick. At the bus stop I watch a girl walk by the bus stop that I’m sitting at, which is unfortunate because I probably just need someone to talk to. I start to wonder if she sees what R. saw, but the bus finally comes. I’m sorry that I can’t sit through Carl Sagan tonight. It’s mostly because I wouldn’t know how to process the cosmos especially when the space around me is already too much to bear. the more I more than like you the more and more I miss you and I always know I’ve got it bad when I start worrying about how absolutely, indescribably, fucking awful it’ll be when you die. you’re addicted to cigarettes and i’m allergic to doorknobs, or at least that’s the way I’m choosing to look at it because it explains why it’s so tough for me to go outside which is where you ended up last night when our sicknesses collided. I start uncontrollably laughing because they’re selling a couch good enough for a psychoanalyst at goodwill. I think about laying down on it, because I’m not too sure what any of this is all about.

when pressure is exerted on an object sometimes that object gets slowly distorted and squashed left to take on the shape of that which exerted pressure upon it. other times, when pressure is exerted on an object sometimes that object, right before it gets flattened shoots out from under the weight sent off, stochastically trajected. i forget sometimes that I can just quit that even though all of these things might be more difficult without me, they’ll go on, or they won’t, but if I stay, I sure won’t... as autopoietic systems we suck up the shit we’re stuck in until we become shit. living in shit eating shit fucking in shit and treating one another like shit. as so elegantly put by a friend, we’re sucking up the shit through straws and we’re paying for the straws. my body outright refuses. its affirmation of life is refusal of this particular life, because the best way to affirm life when you live in shit is to affirm and disavow the shit through the sideways step of “I’d rather not.” this isn’t a suicide letter. it’s more a damnation of what I have no choice to accept as life, that is instead rotten, acrid, and decaying i’m made up of trash. garbage in, garbage out the filth is imminent. we live amongst trash and try to fashion it fancy for some reason wildly addicted to revising and reforming, faithful that some things just need to be tinkered with and altered, but if you want to get away from the madness of the world, you have to sacrifice its grotesque charm as well. sour and sweet indistinguishable. its charm, like pedophilic candy. we’re locked in deathly double binds. everyone and everything has a rotten core that they didn’t choose. composed of trash, emitting shit. we’re squeezed by multiple unbearable pressures. how can we gain the breathing space we require when breathing is necessarily choking? there is no such thing as purity. there is nowhere to breathe. to hate the things around you is to hate yourself. revolt is a first bite down as hard as you can with rotten teeth, and oh the pain...

am I a monster or is this what it means to be a human? sometimes our conversations haunt me like a body that just won’t sink. you step, you make ice out of snow – if you shout, you steam and I’m worried that all of my thinking out loud will make you turn away. we are shaped and fashioned by what we love – more insidiously though we contain the negative space just the same. if I could I’d take back the things that I have said. we all kill good things, we do it all the time, but if it don’t shit sometimes, it ain’t living. what I need to understand is that it’s not one or the other, but on the contrary both at once. monster-human human-monster.

if you ever fall asleep and definitely while you’re awake, try not to dream, it’s futile, and you might as well wish for the end of gravity. don’t bother getting out of bed. the world is crowded enough without you and your big ideas. the world spins. we stumble on. I’ve had enough. I attach no importance to life. I do not matter to life. I’m of the opinion that when one ceases to feel one should keep quiet, so I starting to wonder if one bullet would do. as hard as my head is, it would probably take two.

lean in. think of you and the whatever-isn’t-you as waves. like the way you dive through the big ones while wading deeper and deeper. think of the moment of impact like two colossal tectonic plates, like how if one just gave in or gave up there wouldn’t be any mountains.

when we go out tonight, what will we say when they ask us: “so how did you guys meet, anyway?” because we’ve gotta get the story straight - you can’t say, “oh, at a bar down the street from my apartment” when I say, “we rode the bus together for months, one thing lead to another, and now we’re in love.” thanks for reaching out to us today, we believe that this choice will be one you’ll think of fondly for the rest of your life: this nice little piece of property is our best, isn’t it beautiful? it’s nestled snugly at the intersection of the two most wonderful, breathtaking views I’ve ever laid eyes on: lush, rapturous embodied joy and pragmatic, capitalist practicality. once you get married and have kids, that’s when this place will really begin to work for you. it might seem like a bit of an investment up front, but let me tell you, these things don’t stay around for as long as they have if people aren’t happy with them! we drove, mixed and tangled with the sound of the open windows, faintly recognizable was a song that I love: “But I….can’t….help….falling in love….with….you.” this site fucking sucks. whatever, let me check the “who’s new” - maybe someone, somewhere, will open up an account that I find interesting. well, just like I thought, nobody - there’s nobody out there for me. let me increase the radius from “within 25 miles” to “anywhere” yeah, now we’re talking: tons of people I’m interested in: oh look, she likes existentialism, too. oh look, she seems depressed like me, too. oh look, he likes abstract drawing and Deleuze, I think we’d hit it off. oh shit, they all live in Europe, too bad. let me go back to screening what there is around me, then. you see, I’ve got this date with this girl, we’ve got a really high match percentage, something like 98%, totally outstanding, so of course we’ve got a lot of the same opinions on things that are really important: do you want your partner to be kinkier than you? how do you feel about documentaries? how often do you brush your teeth? i like dating websites because they get right down to it, no bullshit, enough of the small talk, you know? i love ice cream. i love this show. i love this song. I love my mother. i love you so much.

I’m walking down the street carrying something; groceries, dinner, a book, some bananas, whatever. a few steps in front of me is another someone carrying something; groceries, dinner, a book, some bananas, whatever. I walk a bit faster to catch up, so that I can fantasize about what it’d feel like to carry something; together.

the unfolding of today’s events remind me that I’m just a conduit a junction a confluence an assemblage a temporary coming together emerging out of multiplicity. that whatever I am is constituted out of chaos and that whatever feels solid is an illusion, because even though solidity insists and subsists through moves or rhetorical beauty, it’s a mirage. how else could I go from the feeling of turning into brightness, the experiential analog for how I felt while looking across the table at you today - to the flailing ungraspable feeling of helplessness in less than one clock turn? I’m left traversing the tension between the simultaneously incompossible desires to communicate and to hide. although we’ve been temporarily separated and at this point I have a closer relationship to your negative, Please know that I’m trying my fucking best to wait for you on your side of things

the alfalfa, you can have it. the couch, you can have it. this fucking TV, you can have it. you can have the xbox and the only video game I play, too. if you make a decent argument, I’d probably even give you my computer. I don’t want any of it, for real, you can have it. I don’t want my job or my debt, this degree in this made up discipline called “psychology” with it’s anachronistic theories about daddies and mommies and brain chemicals. we’re all just brain chemicals. seriously though, shut up about the fucking brain chemicals. the way your “helpers” will reach and pry, ajar the jaw and shove their hairy arms down your throat until they are touching themselves, not you. for your own good, of course. it’s always for your own good, of course. they’d never wanna play in your headspace, only comfortable in recognizing themselves and their techniques. to really be with you would mean risking themselves. to really be with you would take time. to really be with anyone takes time. to really be with anyone takes attention and care, like a stack of phones in the middle of the table, or really just going out of your way for once. nothing that’s complete breathes, so I’m trying to be everyone’s breathing space. I’ve started waking up at 7:55. I’m getting rid of almost everything, and that includes my self. because our possessions possess us, and that includes your self. because we furnish these selves like rooms: a little something here, a little something there - “how bout a plant, sweetie?” “I really love the way the light shines in through the window…” these little pieces that we can call ours in this big world. unless you rent, of course. and even if you own, they put police officers at the front of the grocery store because god forbid you eat for free. you, alone, control nothing. we’re at the mercy of known and unknown vectors. sitting on blood-red couches at the edge of a lake trout fishing for the nerve to scramble “me” up: what did they do with all those fish, anyway? what do you do with all of your fish? and all these things, what things? all about me.

looking into your eyes is like visiting hours, I just don’t know if I’m at a hospital a jail or the morgue. taking the hands of someone you love is like putting them in delicate cages. host. hostage. every face is mine, reshaped. your hands are mine, reshaped. of course I’ll hurt you. of course you’ll hurt me. of course we’ll hurt each other. our experience is our own, we’ll register the agonies as greater or lesser than the previous. “the pain you feel today, it will never go away.” among the wolves live very tired sheep because mankind is kept alive by bestial acts. I’m trying not confuse being used with giving all I am.

I feel like adulthood is all about filling pockets with things and I prefer them to be empty. when I was a kid, I never had shit in my pockets. a lot of the time I didn’t have pockets at all because they were useless to me back then! I didn’t need a drivers license for my bicycle or a frequent shopper card for the grocery store or a phone to call my friends, because if they wanted to hang out they just came over, slammed their fist against my door, and asked if I could come out and play. Walking today I felt some loose pennies in my back pocket, and instead of tossing them in the trash where they’d be of no use to anyone, I tossed them onto the ground in hopes of them landing heads up to change the luck of someone far more superstitious than me. One halloween, when I was far too old to be trick-or-treating I accidently stepped on a dead animal on the side of the road. Actually, it was fall, so it could have been leaves, but it felt like a dead animal. I couldn’t bring myself to look to confirm. it was like the dead animal became attached to my shoe, and i shivered and nearly gagged, silently, for the rest of the night. have any of you ever stepped in something dead? It reminds me of this short story I read about this man who walks through the woods and comes across a horse than is either sleeping or dead and instead of waiting to see which one is truth he walks away. the unexpected tension that arises from absent-mindedly moving on gnaws at his existence. so he retraces his steps day in and day out but has no luck. eventually, maybe, he burns his house down with his family in it. dead leaves or dead animal, I stepped in it.

I wish I could slip imperceptibly into a world where I could go to class barefoot. or, better still, not go to class, barefoot. this world would be the kind of world where you could coffee-paint all day long, and absolutely nobody would give a shit about discovering anything like a universal law.

I said, “we’re all so small” jack-in-the-boxes, walking in the shape of a human. those kernels at our core, “pop goes the weasel.” those more-than-reflex real visceral places - I’m sure I’m composed of many, I just don’t know what or where they are. we all contain the infants we once were, those snot-filled precarious soft-bodies. the tale we’re told is that we grow larger through acts of alchemy that biology and chemistry describe. but I’d like to suggest instead that we’re stuffed blood-filled by experience until we must stretch and expand our skin, lest we explode. because the mass of our multitude, the variety of selves we must become to acommodate the flesh remainders of expectation, chaos, and shoulds demand us to grow large. to swallow car accidents filled with best friends turned feral screams, and other best friends turned cancer patients... prone, tube filled, distended-headed fathers, and red, nightmarish, lighten-up-your stomach bad interpersonal embarrassment, you are required to mutilate, make more space - call it a type of house cleaning, if you’d like. to continue on living, is to attempt at infinity. we all lose, eventually overrun or overcome. no longer able to split, fracture, or multiply, we collapse. I said, “we’re all so small.”

I feel like the atonal music blaring out of my tiny radio. sometimes the different players find a groove that grooves, but most of the time it’s a bunch of experimenting, feeling things out. I’m really okay with my life being a sort of chromatic scale, a coloring and inflection on the typical diatonic, you know, real upsetting to the gods. there’s this song that I’ve recently started to like, and in it, the mouth says: “no matter who we are, there’s someone in your head waiting to fucking strangle you.” when I first heard it through the speakers, I thought: “Eh, maybe.” Now when I hear it, I say: “yeah, that sounds about right.” but the only thing I’d change is that these someone’s aren’t in your head, they originate in places of unknown origin but constrict nonetheless. these unhuman, non-organic, impersonal nooses spread thinly across the landscape. and you only know you’re caught when it’s too late.

there is a voice inside of you that whispers all day long: “people are not hospitals and love cannot save you. sick birds don’t like to be watched.” YOU RUMINATE IN KNOTS OF LINKED LOOPS “people are not hospitals and love cannot save you. sick birds don’t like to be watched.” talking in circles is not so much talking to ourselves, but taking the subject and subjecting it to our sense of separation. how insubstantial the pageant of external reality can be… the light finally began to break through the cracks in your all-too-closed mind and you leapt up to breathe onto cold windows to make sure there was something, anything warm left inside you. even in a place you know intimately each night’s darkness is different. just as the stomach cannot digest itself, the mind is constructed in such a way that it cannot grasp itself.

my body swells full of disjointed signs, overcome like a slow moving shadow in seeming overcompensation. like there’s some sort of ontologically primary desired elemental solid state - that the teeming cosmos have an affinity with equal signs but sometimes they overshoot their mark and I’m left to endure the remainder for some indefinite amount of time. I don’t know how to go if you don’t guide me. to put it crudely, I’m walking with my eyes closed, and the darkness is saturated with overwhelming meaning because every step is swollen with all the possibilities of things I can bump into. and the silence… it crushes me.

plato was a piece of shit. plato was an existence denying nihilist. plato taught everyone about ideal forms, and some have called it plato’s poison, and we’re still poisoned by it, you know how the way we think we’re just some rotten copy of the more perfect and how we all want to be just-so-perfect and for some reason we keep people around us who believe in perfection and constantly measure us up to it to the point that we start measuring ourselves up to it. in a way, plato was right - nobody on earth is an ideal form: sure. but he fucked up when he tried to teach us that there were ideal forms at all. sorry, but I’m not sorry plato: we’re sticky, stinky fucked up messes with rotten teeth and we grow hair all over the place, and sometimes we wanna kill ourselves. and sometimes we wanna drink ourselves into oblivion and sometimes we wanna smash our fucking phones and all the contacts in them. we live a variety of different bodies, none better than the other and sometimes we eat too much ice cream and sometimes we eat too much candy and a lot of the time our body punishes us for it and sometimes sleep too late or don’t sleep at all or say hurtful things to people that we care about and cheat on exams and cheat on each other and fall in love with people who are awful for us and spend far too long getting away from those awful people and do all sorts of other things that don’t make all that much sense. but that only makes sense if you feel like it has to make sense, like all these things have to measure up to some sort of ideal - when in reality, in existence, there are just a variety of different ways to go, and none of them are ideal regardless of what plato said. because in the end, plato was a life denying nihilist and even though we’re sometimes nihilists too and it feels really good to say it’s all meaningless our head is haunted with little plato’s, and it’s time for us to kill them we were laying shoulder to shoulder in my dark room, when i sat up, stretched my arms out touching both the top of your head and the bottom of your feet at the same time and said, i love everything about you. you don’t ever need to be anything different, your body is wonderful. and you cried. and i held you. and i knew how important this was, because fuck everybody else who has ever said anything different to you.

Well, the hot is back. I thought it wouldn’t happen. It did. I feel like my skin has more skin on top of it. Of course the hum is back, too - the white noise of over head fans, window fans, and air conditioners. and wherever memory comes from, longing to join the choral cacophony, jumps in: I’m thinking about sitting on blankets at the drive-in. I’m thinking about playing football in the street, the crack as one end zone, the tree the other. “suckers walk.” I’m thinking about kissing the neck of that girl when I was 12 or 13 and tasting salt, pure salt. and I’m remembering the day we greased our bike chains with a buttered bagel, and how we then applauded our newfound folk-punk ingenuity. I’m remembering the lazy hours I spent reading phenomenology and listening to something called “space music” the last time I was home on the porch that dad built. I bet you two fought and fought about it like when we all fought and fought about shingling the roof before my all-star baseball game, or was it a football game? it doesn’t really matter. And then there’s the day my brother looked at me and said, “You wanna be out?” and then we got up, threw paperwork at our bosses and drove home absolutely blasting Biggie, just laughing and laughing over-joyed at quitting our jobs in such a ridiculous fashion. I still remember all the words to “Gimme Da’ Loot” cause we were bad boys. you whipped yogurt at our babysitter and I held Richie down while you kicked him in his braced-up mouth – because that’s what people got when they our called mom fat. and the day we watched our dad, in seeming slow motion, walk up the street to punch that guy in the face because you went into the house and said, “Dad, that guy swerved at me when we were playing in the street.” No questions asked except “Is that him?” trailer park justice. the question, rightly, isn’t how we remember, but how we forget. and today, emerging from the hot and the hum, a refrain. bits and pieces of reverie.

I shave the hair off my face. I walk the streets, erect, making sounds like sentences. phlem, piss, shit, sweat: oh, we know how to name the glues. I look from a dark room into the light; unseen I see. when a man falls into a trap he growls because there’s no way out and there’s nothing else to say or do about it but stare up. I can’t make words work – if I could say the right things to you maybe you could tell me what it is that’s killing me. I want you to be weak – as weak as I am. I’m so sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. disobey your cells, she says – but I am a plaster doll, so I pose. time is no healer, the patient is no longer here. if you’re silent about your pain they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

can I ask you all a question? okay. here it is: so, hypothetically of course you’re riding on a bus, and seemingly out of nowhere you’re overwhelmed by panic which isn’t uncommon, so whatever, you pull the stop cord and as your foot hits the ground relief flows through your body, you’re okay. so you start walking, and you’ve got a pretty long walk ahead of you, but it’s kind of nice outside, what a nice day for a walk, you think. unfortunately, though the street under your feet unbeknownst to you, becomes a bridge, so now you’re walking across a bridge and that bridge doesn’t have a sidewalk and you have to walk in the bike lane and it’s really long and when you get somewhere around the halfway point you feel like you’re about to have a panic attack. what the hell would you do? I feel like this is something I should have thought about before. I remember when I was a kid, my dad wanted to walk across the Beacon bridge for Father’s Day. I took about 5 steps and immediately turned around and walked back to the car. this time, though - I was in the middle, right in the middle. back the same as forward. really, this is a serious question what the hell would you do? do you just sit down? do you call an ambulance? do you call a friend to calm you down? do you jump over the edge, the water being closer than either side? well, take a second to think about it, and then I’ll tell you what I did. are you thinking? come on, it could happen to you! okay, this is what I did. I used my left hand to shield the left side of my face like the kid in my high school used to do, everyone made fun of him for it. then, i found a piece of gum in my bag, unwrapped it, and chewed it. i thought to myself, i’m going forward. i’m going to go forward. i thought about how fucking ridiculous i must look to everyone. or if they even noticed how ridiculous i felt like i looked, i probably looked unremarkable, actually. i started wondering if i could vomit and walk at the same time. is that possible? because i sure as hell can’t stop to vomit, it’d be an interruption, and i need to get to the other side as quick as possible, without interruption! i wondered if i could sit down on the bridge without people thinking I was preparing to commit suicide. i thought about the movie Strangers in Good Company and how the woman in the film who has really bad anxiety, doubles the difficulty of her situation by staying in the bus because she’s scared to walk through the woods, but then at night, she gets scared of the dark and is forced to walk through the woods, in the dark, alone. my stomach started doing circus routines, slowly crawling up my throat, wanting to display the tricks it had practiced inside of me. i would take a step, and with one foot on the ground, i’d feel like i couldn’t breathe or that I might throw up and I’d have to stop, and breathe, in through my nose, out through my mouth. (breathing for everyone) which of course is a bunch of bullshit when you can’t breathe in the first place, right? so instead i just forgot about all of that and walked quicker with tiny breaths. quicker, with tiny breaths. that got tinier and tinier until I couldn’t breathe anymore, so I jumped off the bridge, my body in full free fall limbs kicking, swimming in or on air, I’m not really sure how to say that until finally I came crashing down on someone riding a jet-ski, trying to enjoy their 4th of July weekend. and I died. nah, I’m just kidding. i got to the other side.

I guess you are curious as to who I am, but I am one of those who do not have a regular name. don’t ask me who I am. don’t ask me to remain the same. leave it to the police and bureaucrats to make sure our papers are in order. images of happiness, tried and true sensations, kind words, smooth surfaces, familiar feelings. instead, the stutter and stammer, the opening up. all the positive definitions are attempts to hold on and oh man, how we’re seduced by strangling. Like the back-patches on skate rats in the Parlor City, kill your self. and like it said in the darkest of letters on the back of those Milwaukee legs- I am no one.

I’m fighting a two front war – the heat and missing you. it’s a dark maroon hypotenuse or is it eggplant? either way I’m worried that my fucking chocolate might melt. I did what you said, you know, putting dryer sheets in my shoes, and now I constantly smell the back of the van I called Ace Vandura that I gave to my dad, that he filled with hard lemonade bottles, those glass skeletons of divorce. we made seventy bones off them, though. My landlord sent me a new lease he lives across the street, but for some reason he mailed it to me. the return address was printed on American Flags, so I spent an embarrassing amount of time while walking wondering if it’s a year round thing or if he crafted the idea perfectly so that I received the letter on Memorial Day. this is the type of day where everyone is a hint more attractive, but I still heard that girl retching as I walked past the family bathroom. I suggested that you may have tried to trade two eight hour bus rides for the hard work of telling someone you care about how you feel and you agreed. I couldn’t believe it. I blew far too much money on books this morning, and holy shit I can’t wait to see you tomorrow. in pencil, of course.

how do you hold it together without just laying down in the middle of the supermarket or screaming at the top of your lungs that you hate everyone who loves you? how do you hold it together without punching pillows and then screaming into them or going out binge drinking or binge fucking or binging on anything? how do you hold it together without sitting on the internet for 8 hours a day or rushing to your bathroom cabinet for pick-me-ups, psychiatric or other? how do you hold it together without lying to yourself about the fact that everyone, including you, is going to fucking die or that all of these things you find so profoundly significant might be absolutely worthless? how do you hold it together when you’ve felt like absolute and total shit for as long as you can remember and every morning you wake up still feeling like absolute, total shit? i wonder if you remember when I asked you if you ever felt well, you said yes, and I felt alone. how do you hold it together when it seems like everyone else just lives their life but you ruminate about what age will be the appropriate age to finally end your own life? how do you hold it together when you’re constantly worried that your insides are going to cannibalize you or turn against you - whatever that “you” is. how do you hold it together when almost every night your head pounds, like your brain wants to be aborted and the common respite of sleep just makes your head pound even more. how do you hold it together when a panic attack can grip you at any moment - whether it’s on the city bus, in the supermarket, or driving somewhere far away on your birthday. how do you hold it together when the amount of your debt is fucking laughable and you’re constantly getting medical bills in the mail, or when those issues get rotely politicized and no matter what happens you still have debt and bills, and can’t rent a car without a major credit card to get the fuck out of this city to see your family and friends? how do you hold it together when you don’t feel worthy of the love and care that others thrust upon you, when even with the best intentions the gift seems confining? how do you hold it together when the only thing you know is that you don’t know how you’re going to become, that your only operating theory is: “Fuck, I don’t know.” how do you hold it together when the life you live feels increasingly not-yours, like you’re watching yourself live your life from behind yourself or that you’re immersed in some sort of dream-world and can’t stop focusing on how bizarre everything seems - from minute details like the way your fingers touch keyboards, or chewing and swallowing to the more coarse, complex processes of driving cars, having sex, saying words, or caring for someone. how do you hold it together when every single person, every single second, every single moment is a moment that you could be unalterably, irredeemably other forever: sanity gone psychotic, having a father to having a dead father, having a brother to having a dead brother, having a mother to having a dead mother, well-gone-sick, walking to paralyzed, or from driving in a car drumming on your legs to Minor Threat in an attempt to deal with anxiety of being a passenger in a car to ruptured spleens, two week bed rest, and shitting in portable toilets behind sheets. when every moment contains a multitude of ways for you to become disfigured, undone, radically other, and unrecognizably severed from the ways you once were - without meaning and without reason. how do you hold it together when you hate the body you have to walk around in - that it is always a statement whether you wish to say anything or not? how do you hold it together when it’s too difficult to find the energy to do much of anything but for some reason, you can always find the energy to make your bed, sweep the floor, and construct a pot of coffee in the morning? how do you hold it together when your senses are too sensitive and everything is either too loud or too bright or too hot or too fast or too early and you don’t think that you’re being petty - that things just really are too loud or too bright or too hot too fast or too early? how do you hold it together when your future, to you, consists of being molded by people who have plans for you, empty deadlines, morgue-like conferences, unemployment, boredom, loneliness, and eventual death? how do you hold it together when you really, deeply, genuinely wish that you could affirm life, but instead you can’t stand it. it eats at you, corrodes you, abuses you, bothers you, and ultimately repulses you? how do you hold it together when sometimes the best part of your day is watching the 11 o’clock news and the tonight show? how do you hold it together when all you’re able to see, including you, looks like carp at a spillway, begging, open-mouthed for fucking scraps of horrible, poisonous white bread at a consumer spectacle gone horribly wrong? how do you hold it together when you realize that various people, spread all over the place, hold pieces of you that they could give to someone else without your consent, or, possibly worse, throw in your fucking face out of malice? that these people have shortcuts, cheat-codes, and special skeleton keys, that unlock and unfurl all the selves that you hate being. how do you hold it together when the depths of how terrible you can feel is incommunicable: like the best way would be through a type of animal alphabet consisting of grunts, screams, silences, punches, kicks, sleeping, crying, holding, touching, just being there, and who knows what else - at this point, anything but more words...