18

-I’m No Nihilist-

Didn’t feel the earthquake but saw a bunch of birds that felt the earthquake,
fleeing from our permanent planet and from the smells of cars that need repair

I am eager for a different weather, for a storm to keep me company

I am disturbed by the photoshopped cats on the bags of cat food
I like my cats how I like my humans: real looking, with a disconcerting amount of facial hair

I am eager to forget how absurd a set of traffic lights looks beneath such a big sky,
and that there is no such deliberate cooperation in space

Things smash into each other with an embarrassing amount of disregard,
And this is the same spirit in which aphorisms are formed:

We have coached ourselves to say “live in the moment” when a moment is obedient,
and we say “this too shall pass” when a moment misbehaves.

Really these both hint at the same thing: life is happening while it moves closer to not happening

So really these phrases are interchangeable.

I’m no nihilist, but I’m certainly spearheading the movement to make people aware of this.

Can you imagine if we reversed the occasions for these phrases?
How much more interesting and creepy they would become?

Imagine someone telling you, “this too shall pass,” while you’re throwing back drinks and having a great time with friends,
And that same person rubbing your back while you vomit into the toilet later that night, advising you to “live in the moment.”

14

this

13

with each passing year the new cars look more and more like insects.
insects are efficient I guess.
and now I hear the stars are for sale.
anyone who owns a star is on my shit list.
with each passing year big things become more confrontational if you let them.
like fields.
an empty field at 2am can peel away at the onion of my faith like nothing else can.
I try to nominate myself away from all such onions.
is the onion god? I don’t know. whatever it is, it oscillates.
it’s an oscillating onion.
too big to love, too absent to be big.
and sometimes: too absent
to love, too big to be absent.
I turn from the field and dwell on the goodness of no onion.

one never stops wanting to find oneself, even if one knows there is no base self to be found.
I.E. FALL 2006 / SPRING 2007:
I took some time off from school to ‘find’ myself.
I found myself all right.
found myself stoned in the mcdonald’s parking lot in my dunkin donuts visor.

it’s the old man at the coffee shop who has the answers/has the onion in his pocket.
it is impossible for me to look at him: first of all, it is necessary
to gaze at him if one is to observe him at all, and it’s like gazing at the sun.

gold watch.
white skullet.

he stares straight ahead, deep into his own wisdom, silent and still with his cup of coffee.
the only thing that can shake him from his zen is his own 2am field:
the radio playing “menha menha” by the muppets.
he twists his head around as if to contemplate: what the fuck is this,

surrendering to the mystery before it reduces him to admiration

12

oh to be the nurse who kisses your burn. it is a moot point. it is all a basket of moot points, parading in my mind. the basket of moot points laughs at my attempts to make sense. ha! it says. look at this precious (i.e. pitiful) creature, trying to make sense from feelings! I reach for a rice cake and try not to look back. it is hard not to look back when the thing you are trying not to look back at has the audacity to walk in front of you (thoughts of the object, not the object itself), although I am the first to admit one must first approve of the audacity and therefore consent to the confrontation, rice cake in hand. it is hard to conduct the day. it is hard to scramble an egg. it is hard to pursue the ideal of the breakfast before noon. the times and frequencies of meals indicate how close I am to attaining functional personhood, as established by the world around me, a world I increasingly trust with an ease that gives me permission to feel peace via the utilitarian truth of the meal routine. it is hard to determine if personhood really is at odds with the basket of moot points. at some point I hope it is not: one should not have to choose between the basket and full-time personhood. one can perform the personhood in the basket, ideally. one can kiss the burn and achieve the egg before noon. one can truly have it all. before one can have it all, one must first have oneself, though. one must learn to inhabit the body that performs the personhood in another’s basket, before one can feel the happiness of being in such a sexy place. one must first feel that their own basket is not weaved from barbed wire.

11

you gotta click it at least once to make it bigger.

10

Remember fend-for-yourself nights? Yeah, like four nights a week. Rememeber shit-on-a-shingle? What? It was something mom used to make for dinner. It was steak cooked with mushrooms and peppers and thrown on toast.
Shit on a shingle. And pancakes. She made the best pancakes. But she would use the instant mix. But she would use the instant mix that required mixing, at least. Like, she added the egg and the water and stirred it and poured it into the pan. Crispy-edged pancakes. Syrup. For dinner.

Dreams about my professor being a disagreeable lover. He looks like the sister of my first ex boyfriend, but with a y chromosome and an eternal nineties grunge essence.

Some college in the country is establishing a men’s studies department to examine the ways feminism has created a culture of misandry. It’s sad that when I type misandry into Microsoft word it tells me it ain’t a word, and am I thinking of masonry? No!

8

found:
group therapy. a nice change of pace. in the most confidential way, I can tell you that we sit in the room, less than ten of us, and talk about things mundane and things not so mundane. I feel humbled when I leave the room, and I feel like I want to say so many things to the people inside the room that I don't say. like, e-, you're not even remotely fat, tell your boyfriend to fuck himself, let's get coffee some time, even though I don't drink coffee, because you seem pretty cool, in an i could be friends with you outside of group therapy type of way. it's weird though, group therapy etiquette. inside the confines of the room, in the space of eighty short minutes, we can share our deepest neurotic tendencies. outside of this room and the eighty minutes, we must forge a weird strangerdom for the sake of respecting each others' privacy. in the waiting room I have to pretend i'm not picturing the boy flipping through the sports illustrated magazine being asked for sex advice by his mom who is cheating on his dad, i'm not envisioning the girl with the green backpack ten years ago being told boys will be boys and at the same time feeling a deep need to tell her I heard the same thing once. even immediately after therapy, it's weird interacting with these people. once the threshold of the therapy room door is crossed, I don't even know how to go about holding the door for these people, I don't even know how to encounter them in the bathroom. refusing to acknowledge that we know each other is a lie, and casually acknowledging that we know each other only feels like a half-truth.

the particular day that i'm writing about was really nice from the get-go, even though I forgot to ask if anyone found the soft red and new gloves I left behind the week before. i swiveled from left to right in the teal swivel chair, and when n- said h-, can you start us off with something from your week?? I found myself talking about going home, about not having a home to go home to. I’d tried it the week before, and I’d have to do it this summer for the first time in three summers, and I was worried about this, I said. then I burst into tears for the first time in many months and said I was embarrassed because I don’t really ever cry. after that everyone acted really nice to me but I wasn’t really that sad anymore, in fact I felt pretty good, but I had to kind of act sad because I’d spontaneously cried and given the impression that I’d had a bad week. this is one thing about group therapy I dislike: sometimes if your week is just all around good, you have to unearth things that you normally don’t get hung up on just to start the group off on an introspective note. m- went on to talk about a text message that a boy she liked never replied to, and e- said her boyfriend came through her window drunk last night and vomited on her at two am, and then she had to give him a sponge bath and wash her sheets. i feel persistent hostility towards her anonymous boyfriend. we all agreed she could do better, but only after we laughed at the absurdity of the situation and then apologized for doing so. m- said she thinks she doesn’t have enough problems to be in the group, and she feels like she talks about trivial things in comparison with the rest of us. I often look at m’s bone structure and think she’s beautiful. we talk about how we’re not competing or ranking our issues, and then f- asks us why we like to come to group therapy, what do we get out of it, and how do we want people to respond to us? everyone is silent for a while and then e- says: “sometimes it’s nice if people just respond with silence, instead of trying to console you or relate the conversation back to themselves. sometimes silence is nice.” a time when I should have been silent: p- and I were laying on a mattress on the floor, his hamster making dying noises behind us, his eyes bloodshot to hell, when he mentioned his dad to me for the first time. memory: his dad had wanted to see how much tylenol a cat could consume before dying, so he administered a gradual dose, observing the signs of gradual death in p’s cat until p's cat became drowsy with death and died of an overdose.