Obscurantisms

This is said with all the love a person who has suffered and forgiven, suffered and forgiven, can muster— that is to say, as much or more than the average person.

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Truly: Who gives a fuck about your day? Do you? Will you?

“Took a shit. Why do I hate mom? I never called her mommy. My fault? Mustn’t think like that. Ignore that splotch by the way, just a milk stain. Headache today, 2 ibu.”

The egotism of you people is sickening.

“Hard to get out of bed. Harder to write. Went to yoga class. Made great eggs. Turmeric is key. Thought about dad. Should call him, don’t want to. Another day.”

My curiosity is genuine: Is this helping you? Is recording every inanity which passes through your head really worth the time you’re taking to do it? Doesn’t it simply, at the very least, double the amount of time you’re wasting?

“Jerked off to porn. Not proud of it. Wonder what in me likes that sort of thing. Wonder where I’ll be in a few years. Probably here.”

If it were helpful, why are you thinking the same things you were when you started the journal? You’re wasting your time. You’re wasting your time and you’re going to die soon, any minute now or any minute after that, you’re going to die and you spend one of those minutes writing about one of the other minutes, and you’ll forget both, and the product of both, and then you’ll die. And no one will read any of it.

Stop proving to yourself, and to some posterity you ridiculously imagine will one day read your drivel, that you exist. Your existence will always be forgettable, so be strong and stop pretending otherwise, and write as if you care for the experience of the person doomed to read the memoir of the least impressive person ever to exist. If hell exists, we’re all there, reading those journals we kept when we had nothing to say, and crucially, criminally, no interest in anything besides ourselves. It’s a misanthropic, nauseating, despicable sort of narcissism which makes one record their day. Might historians of the future wonder what the day-to-day experience of your average do-nothing shitheel? Perhaps. But here we arrive at the true evil of your “harmless little exercise”: You don’t, at any point in your recording of your own existence, express yourself. It doesn’t just make for poor writing (and therefore reading), but calls your sanity into question. Why not, instead, scribble the words down and immediately burn them? Or flush them? Better yet, skip the middle man and pop your head in the water and “journal” out loud as you flush, flush, flush, and don’t stop until either the words or the air run out.

Once upon a time I too made a bureaucrat of myself, by myself, recording my day as if composing the most useless character study possible.

One must be flighty, thrifty, and concerned chiefly with the worlds which surround, rather than the internal swamp. I once made a bureaucrat of myself, dutifully filling out my paperwork, checking the box which confirmed my existence, that I had been alive and that I had done something, even if it were nothing, and it was often nothing, on that day. In this way I smothered my own soul. “What sort of magpie keeps this book?” said Didion. Said Didion, “Remember what it is to be me: that is always the point.”

Impressions will remind you who you are, who you were. There are people over there having a conversation. Listen to it. Write down the funny thing she says. Light is streaming in, tell us how, from where. What’s that woman wearing? Something cheap, no doubt, you’ll write, but not as cheap as you. She looks like a whore, but you admit you only think so because you envy her legs, and you feel a bit guilty for thinking that, now. The man beside her is a horror to witness, though, so maybe there was some truth in your judgement. You’re judgemental, but you enjoy that about yourself, your judgements keep you company. You’re lonely, but you’re fine with that. Look at that— the fattest cat you’ve ever seen is being pushed around in a stroller by a man only slightly larger than his charge. A wedding ring glints on his finger. But you never wanted to get married, anyways. Eat the pastry and keep watching, listening, it’s what you’re good for.

Cassidy knew her plan was working when a month had passed without her having received a single invitation. No more meeting after work for drinks, no friend of a friend performing in any basements or garages, no shared cigarettes with coffee on Sunday mornings. At long last, the anxieties which had long plagued her faded. Her phone lay silent, and with a grim satisfaction she reflected on her success, the fears which once gripped her at the phone’s buzz no longer a risk. She’d tried putting the phone away, but she’d then live in a malignant panic, haunted by the idea of missing out, hyper-conscious of second spent solitary as yet another tally mark towards the ever-increasing percentage of her life which she will never have returned to her, and has now wasted forever. So she attended, a slave to that buzz, dragged ever onward by the kindly intentions of friends and would-be lovers.

There was only one thing to do. She had, many months ago, determined to deracinate herself, whittled her social existence away party by party (and party by party), and by the terribly drawn pace she set convincing those around her by degrees that she was no different from yesterday, that nothing had changed, that there was no need to check up, check in, or check on her, and by allowing less of herself to pour from her drunken mouth with each get-together, she succeeded in willing herself into the backdrop of even her most dedicated friendships. She’d begun to believe her skin had come to resemble the wallpaper of the room they drank in; quick eyes which had once relished settling upon her, ready for her expressions, now merely slipped past, recognition barely flickering. The background suited her, she felt, and watched the conversation-circle she sat in as would a microbe, or a god, both considering universes which depended upon physics which would not comprehend the notion of a converstion-circle. She stood and made her way from the room, then the party, without a word to or from her. She thought that the photos taken that night might find a smudgy-Cassidy shape where once she had smiled and, gripping her fully charged phone with knuckles white, she let herself be swallowed by the inky night.

I just moved to the city this week, and have been struggling with the cockroaches. My girlfriend says that it’s because humans don’t like things that don’t move then move all at once, but I think its a Jewish thing. I was raised as any middle class Connecticut kid is raised; poorly but with a library card. The first time I realized I looked any different from any of my friends was when one said my eyebrows looked like caterpillars. I didn’t know why I looked different until the following year, my first year of high school, when my history teacher asked me if “my mother was Indian, right?” and I started to answer by saying “No, she’s normal.”

She looked different when I got home that day. Browner and fatter, and her teeth seemed more yellowed by the coffee she’d always drunk, but her hair is what stood out the most to me. She had a light mustache, made up of tiny dark hairs, and the more I looked the more revolted I felt. They covered her face and arms, making her look darker and uglier and, watching from the kitchen table as she made me a snack, I felt nauseous. I realized in that moment that she was animal, and her skin felt so oily when she hugged me that I showered after, replaying in my mind how she’d talked and smiled and cooked all at once, each action further condemnation, for how like an animal to perform the little actions it has been trained to do, over and over, responding to stimuli and outputting the ingrained reaction. She may have complex actions, I reasoned, but apes can learn sign-language. The basic building blocks were the same, biology and conditioning, all the way down. All the way down.

I’m the youngest kid by 8 years, but I wasn’t a mistake. My mom got lonely as soon as my siblings began to use compound sentences. She’s the one who taught me to fear. We’d watch documentary after documentary on the Holocaust, but by age nine I only tuned in for the part where dead jews, piled high, are being tossed out of a flatbed truck.

There was one moment, though, that disturbed me more than anything. It was of Hitler— but he wasn’t giving a speech, I’d seen all that footage a thousand times on a tiny screen with tinny headphones in some tiny corner of the museum “so as to not aggrandize him”, I’d been told. But one documentary had just a few seconds of Hitler waiting his turn to speak. Because of how cameras worked then it might have been a full minute of him waiting patiently to be introduced, but all I saw was the man who apparently wanted to kill everyone who looked like me, fidgeting just how I did as he waited his turn. He looked more like me than any of my friends did, he didn’t have blonde hair or blue eyes either, even though that’s what he was into, same as me. Then he called me a cockroach, and I felt a type of sadness I’d never felt before. It was sharp and made me turn away, and I only later knew it to be pity for the both of us. My mom asked what I was thinking and I asked why he wants everyone to look a way he doesn’t, and she said it was because he was an idiot.

Sometimes I felt like a secret agent, going to all these (secular) Jewish celebrations with the knowledge that I was the only one who had ever let himself empathize with the big one. When I got out of the shower I saw myself in the mirror. I was too skinny and my eyes didn’t recognize themselves, and my skin seemed stretched over my face. I got up close so that my nose touched the mirror, bent naked over the sink to reach, and watched as the remaining flesh hung from my frame. I looked myself in one eye, then the other, trying to catch a glimpse of the spark which claims to be having all these thoughts. They looked flat. I couldn’t believe there was much going on behind them. I bared my teeth and saw the chimp, but it hurt my face so I went blank again. I saw lips. They were full. Feeling awkward, I smiled, just a bit, nose still to glass. I pulled back, lightheaded. Just some boy making faces in the bathroom mirror.

This contains footnotes marked numerically and parenthetically, to be found at the bottom of the page.

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The common perception of LSD was by far most damaged by the hippies of the 60s. Accurately introduced, the power of Lennon’s “wonderdrug” was immeasurable, but coming off of the emotional repressions of the previous three decades to two thousand years, respectively depending on whether one asks a sociologist or a philosopher, your average draft-dodging deadhead(1) just couldn’t help themselves, and so acid’s reputation was left to be decided by those happy to regurgitate sheaths of sheaves, eager to be rewarded with attention and influence(2), their role to fill the public’s mind with only the most melodramatic, overwhelming visions of LSD. No matter how we’d all have wished it(3), the American conservative did not sample LSD to make up their own minds, but simply funhouse-mirrored the claims made by the monolingual kumbaya-ers, turning stories of transcendentalism into tales of mental degeneration. Hand in hand, “Peace and Love” and “Just Say No” waltzed LSD into a prohibition which has lasted half a century.

With its subject redacted, a modern reading of the testimonies so frequently and famously given by the longhair camps would bring to mind not LSD but DMT, or possibly Ecstasy, two substances distinct from LSD which, respectively, inspire psychedelic visions and heighten emotionality beyond even acid’s “God-Dosages” of the 60s. To those who have long warmed themselves by the idealism of the flower children this can be a disappointing discovery, painfully humanizing in its reputational corruption. We’ve discovered the celebrity of LSD is like any other’s celebrity. In order to be worthy of the headline, an oversimplification and exaggeration of something or someone’s finer points must take place, and all the subject can hope for is an opportunity to attempt to reveal those subtler