Post hoc, primo rex
Would you feel more copacetic if this was all just a study of advertising, narcissism, Ben Lerner novels, chronic fatigue syndrome, and the semiotics of leopard print throw pillows? Maybe you booked the wrong sleeping car on the train that starts at John Hopkins with the double Ds, Paul and Jacques, and ends in the eerie rectitude of nihilism that was the trench coat mafia? Scuzzy townies across the land do what they want to who they want to do it to, and Craig Finn takes note. Except this time there is a saxophone player on each song and a pious Dadaist chant coming from the speakers of the Muzak in the gender neutral bathroom.
Do I contradict myself? Very well. Picture the man in the suit staring in the mirror of an investment bank’s opulent bathroom, basking in what a woman he fucks but does not like calls his aura, but with blood streaming out of one nostril onto a Ferragamo tie (paisley, in aquamarine and turquoise and cream) and a heart rate of which coupled-up humping rabbits would be jealous. A frozen moment, yes? Or am I just seizing on that decade-spanning trope as a fictive dodge? because maybe even false confessional narratives of the mid-born triumphalist hitting bottom end up sounding nothing like the high-born being snuffed out by fate. As though Michael Fried’s theatricality and Michael Jackson’s aching falsetto did not eventually teach the same lesson, if on different ends of the existential spectrum.
[sharp cut] “no gods no masters,” in black ink on oh so many torsos. We aren’t promised tomorrow anymore than we are promised a full moon. I heard the one about the last priest dies asphyxiated by being strung up by the last capitalist’s disemboweled entrails, and I heard the gasp too. Then what? Do humans even have entrails? Does it take a radical to verify or is it just biology?
Would you be copacetic with some real talk about self-help, self-care, self-actualizarion, and the shedding of the self’s skin as an overcoming to, rather than a succumbing to, the baby-stepped half-assed but still virulent gesture toward self-annihilation? I think maybe when we talk about the virtue of vulnerability maybe what we mean (and risk) is a shallow form of voyeurism. Call that a trenchant confession or buoyant form of social commentary.
It is rare to be in the midst of a metastatic mode, of painful transition and productive growth, each one extending and calling into being the other. Yes yes yes I am in that midst and it is bringing this year of our lord 2020 to a fine point.
