*If you feel like it, please recommend Incompatible and share, subscribe, etc. (You know what to do.) I posted this on my other stack, Black Snake, too.
**What follows are some fun random thoughts which moved from my brain to my fingers to the page to this Substack. Enjoy!
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1. I’m just a random unknown smalltime writer with no agent, no published books, a lot of creative drive, uneven intelligence, and aspiration, pinched, perhaps, with a chunk of neo-narcissism.
2. Life is a bizarre, warped phenomenon; it’s almost never a straight easy line; it’s nearly always a zigzagging, wayward, twisting dose of chaos.
3. What is the realization of Man? That he does not truly exist, except, perhaps, only in his own demented self-consciousness.
4. What is narcissism? Being alive in our contemporary moment. To exist now is to see only fragmented distortions, illusions of oneself. Shards of social media glass that cut into your own eyeballs, slicing out your own ability to see yourself. A special kind of anti-Human self-loathing. Yet we call it love.
5. What is the point, precisely, of Death? Or rather to the point: What is the point of worrying about Death? Pre-birth we have zero essence. Ditto after we die. We worried not before being born. We shall worry not after. This is the most religious statement I can think of to say. (Isn’t the knifelike quality of Father Irony wonderful?)
6. Who cares about life, love, hatred or death? It’s all subjective, in the storyteller’s mind. All humans are natural storytellers. Mankind has told itself stories since the dawn of hominids millions of years back. When we started agriculture 10,000 years ago, we told ourselves stories about the sun, the moon, man, god, life, love, death. It’s not different now. Only these days we use TikTok.
7. God is dead. Nietzsche said that in the 19th century. But everybody knows God never existed in the first place.
To be exact, death does not concern me
as long as I am, he is not
and when he is, I am no longer
Epicur
Hi! When I was young, my friend showed me this poem, and at different stages of my life, the phrase "don't leave the room, don't commit that fateful mistake" had different meanings.
JOSEPH BRODSKY
Don’t leave your room, don’t commit that fateful mistake.
Why risk the sun? Just settle back at home and smoke.
Outside’s absurd, especially that whoop of joy,
you’ve made it to the lavatory--now head back straight away!
Don’t leave your room, don’t go and hail a taxi, spend,
the only space that matters is the corridor, its end
a ticking meter. She comes by, all ready for caressing,
mouth open? Kick her straight out, don’t even start undressing.
Don’t leave your room, just say you have the influenza.
A wall and table are the most fascinating agenda.
Why leave this place? Tonight you will come home from town
exactly as you were, only more beaten down.
Don’t leave your room. Go dance the bossa nova,
shoes without socks, your body bare and coat tossed over.
The hallway holds its smells of ski wax and boiled cabbage,
writing even one letter more is excess baggage.
Don’t leave your room. Do you still look handsome?
Just ask the room… Incognito ergo sum,
as petulant Substance once remarked to Form.
It’s not exactly France outside. Don’t leave your room!
Don’t be an idiot! You’re not the others, you’re an exclusion!
Choreograph the furniture, essay wall-paper fusion.
Make that wardrobe a barricade. The fates require us
to keep out Cosmos, Chronos, Eros, Race and Virus!
1970