RIPOSTES TO THE AFTERLIFE THEORY
They say that you’re a knot when born. I say you are going there.
It’s harassment to ask someone nicely to invert a photo 180° so the legs are positioned thigh-calf-feet downward how a man would see. Flip the photo to match the viewer’s POV and watch the male group-psyche melt down. Or no, the photo configuration feet-calf-thigh is an obstacle for men to scan in frustration. Something happens in the extreme end of your dream, boobs in your face, and you respond so slow you don’t get hard until half a minute after you wake up. Arousal passing disguised down from your dreaming mind through your waking body, the fortified border between sleep and wakefulness.
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Passive aggressive “Jesus” whispered, lords name in vain:
That weird cringey apologetic feeling when you want to over-explain
to the woman poet like “no I didn’t ever want your address qua address
I just wanted to beat the int’l shipping cost by ordering your book
from within the continental US—
Jesus”
The publishers contribute to the unholy library, open inroads to the devilish one. Biographers on twitter doing irritating hagiography in real-time. Adding chambers of mosaic tiles to the underground crypt, the coffins of iron. Lined with effigy mirrors to destroy, marking the outer fence of the lit community. Imaginary beefs with other writers, animals bristling & making noises to scare competitors, intellectual envy to diffuse, sublate, resolve. Reputation destruction turned inward. Wargaming literary fame-armies. Then one of our hands knocks over all the fake pieces on the tabletop.
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“Don’t recruit me into whatever you’re doing here.” The cultural wind chime of death lore the impressionable kid can’t dodge. Eyes are wide open sinks to suck down children’s TV folklore of ghosts, angels, suicidal cartoon characters. You’ve mentioned it before. Trying to trace the public origins of the afterlife theory to produce private ripostes to it. Theology and sexual repression leaks in.
Going amongst the unbelievers as a spy, making people think you’re an unbeliever until the crucial moment when you do damage to somehow take people with you, do a bit, do a con, sell people at the last moment. J-hook maneuver of a believer in the end times snagging an unbeliever just the moment before the world-elevator floor drops away, you lift them up to save them. But then if you flinch even a little during circumcision, you are ostracized from the tribe. Christianity a so-called “circumcision of the heart.” Real circumcision something baby boys never consented to. A shock to the system just days or weeks old that has lurking origins somewhere within a shoal of the parents’ love. No wonder males are psychopaths. The doctor who performed my circumcision had had a few martinis first and screwed it up so it’s asymmetrical and spiraling. Like an apple peel the foreskin came off.
Try to find the secret origins of the pathology. Maybe that’s a theory that needs debunking itself. Sequence of trauma, then inner defense mechanism, then pathology. Yawn. Wake me when it’s over. This idea that you unearth the origins and solve the puzzle. It’s bogus. Bogi, as my dad would say. The texture of life is much more non-linear, radial and occult than sequentially progressive thinking can uncover—so that the secret origins may lie in your future not your past, origin a meaningless word in this case. To your lateral. Peripheral. Hard to graph. Directional concept relations like “forward,” “up,” “back,” “left,” “right”: a mistaken idea. Return to the disorienting flipped woman’s body photos.
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In my imaginary world, which is all I have, I find a way to write something breathtaking and full of this texture of life, my life, the texture only I can seem to nail down or recreate. Jesse-centered. The texture evades me. It is locked up in poetry-boxes I have to pick the locks of. I know it when I see it. Poetry is the highest tendency.
In my imaginary world, which is all I have, I’ll meet someone in my sparsely populated region who’s into my sad game. I’ll go to an art opening or poetry reading and something will happen and I won’t be me for a change. I’ll be suave and radiate a counterfeit savior faire so convincing it takes months of her poking to unravel. But before then that person who thinks I’m great and wants to know all about my thoughts and meshes with me will be meshing with a falsehood. I’ll have a good night and that will be attractive to a woman and I’ll be peaking but then when she’s invested and linked up with me my true being will emerge from behind the bamboo wall. My tarantula-self will come into the candlelight, meet hers (she’s got one too), and something strange will happen.
In my imaginary world, which is all I have, suicidal ideation is like tinnitus. Something caused by hearing once and it never goes away, you just have to figure out how to live life around it. Or, another metaphor, it’s like you’re driving down a four lane highway and out of nowhere there’s a sign that the three right lanes are one big exit in 1000 feet and you have to crank the wheel hard to the left and cut across four lanes to make it into the left-most lane to avoid the unexpected massive exit. That’s what suicidal ideation is: a big exit that just appears. And those big ridiculous exits come along every so often and you have to strategically avoid them.
I was going to write more about something sexually graphic in my imaginary world (all I have) but I will withhold that from you. I notice you’re there now and decorum has returned. Your presence here in this writing was seen at an oblique angle up until this moment, now I’m looking directly at you, your body right side up whatever that means. Has it ever occurred to you that we’re just these life forms and our five senses, nervous systems, awareness, consciousness shapes for us which way to see each other? The configuration of our senses finding their path in the dark pools of the unsensed could have gone another way. I’ve written about the sixth sense, the ESP or telepathy I have indulged belief in. It’s pointless. What there is to apprehend by extra sensory means is so detached that its superfluity, its lack of utility, can never be challenged or even described by science. I feel like a kid writing sci fi stories now in the middle of a room full of beakers and rat mazes. Lab rat fumetti. There’s this idea that we only sense a tiny fraction of the perceptible world and to the rest of it we’re insensate. We might be like a blob dazzled by an absurd, flickering light for a few seconds, then it goes out. But I won’t let the nihilistic existentialist horror kid in vogue right now cramp my style. There is something beyond the flailing pseudopod, I believe. There’s expression. There’s vocabulary. There’s a soul. However, it’s hard to reintegrate it back into the substance.
This was all brought to you by me, resurfacing after being in a feverish state from getting a COVID vaccine booster. I get the side effects pretty bad. For 24 hours my muscles have felt like rotting garbage awash in a bath of toxins sloshing around inside my body. I couldn’t sleep and I tossed and turned throughout the wee hours of the night imagining all kinds of cerebral tortures. I wrote this substack post to try to pull myself out of it. I feel better now. These vaccine side effects have a psychedelic quality for me. They are like a trip. A bad trip. The first one, I took a fuckton of NyQuil and just dreamed heavy for 48 hours and woke up feeling like some shamanic closure had been reached. For the next two I stayed away from NyQuil, I “raw-dogged” it as they say. It’s a horrible feeling. But it cleans something out. A stagnant bolus of mood is spat out, hopefully ejected. You were preserved through the fever. You did something to choose life. It’s a “continuity device.” More on those later, more personal mythology. I’ll wrap this up.
This was written with the Stone Roses “I Wanna Be Adored” playing in my head, particularly the bass line.