Manifesto for Psycho-Social Sedentariness

or How to Fail Bolaño 

Why read?
Why fuck?
Why travel?

Watch television.
Nurture an emphatic solitariness.
Quash your instinct for risk and adventure.

Cultivate a bouquet of dependencies. 
Turn your back to the shelves, filling up.
Insist on returning to the same bed every night.

Lose your appetite for touch.
Gather ye insecurities while ye may.
Accumulate an insurmountable inertia.

Forget words.
Unrehearse flirtation.
Become a homing pigeon.

Good Advice

Never let your obnoxiousness exceed your utility.

Generic Neuroses

'If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.'

- Tim Kreider, in a terrific essay on anxiety

Worrywort

"One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of."

Let me count the ways

"Anyone inspired, crazy, pompous or naive enough to want to shape the future soon finds themself straining against the inertia of the universe, and if they can't budge it with words they have to find another way." 

—Indra Sinha, in an essay for The Copy Book

Je suis la belle et la bête.

Let us not self-destruct with longing and ennui. Let us not light the match of guilt and despair. Let us instead play records, turn on the fan, add ice, clean the cob of all its corn, and leave the rest to Amélie.

Keep Calm and Carry On

"The useless days will add up to something.
The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing
in your journal. The long meandering walks.
The hours reading poetry and story collections
and novels and dead people’s diaries and
wondering about sex and God and whether
you should shave under your arms or not.
These things are your becoming." (Here.)

BRB

Courtesy of Wasted Rita

It's like the saying: Don't get mad, get even more reasons to be fucking furious.

ME: Oh god I hate people who exhaust me...

MUM: (opens her mouth to speak)
ME:...but more than that I hate that I care about people who exhaust me.
MUM: (closes mouth, look of bemusement)
ME: (sudden manic laughter)

Silence.

LEARN THE GODDAMN LESSON YOU FOOL

No sense of proportion

 



I know it doesn't feel like it right now,
but the entire rest of the world is, in fact,
more important than this one little thing.

Theater of the absurd

 

 

Ricocheting from home to home, 
banging down doors yelling FEED 
ME FEED ME, never staying long 
enough to be fed, going steadily 
insane with hunger instead, always 
returning hopefully to empty kitchens, 
hands and mouth open, swallowing 
painful clumps of bitter air, still 
surprised at the absence there.

d) All of the above

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." - E.B. White

I've been circling ineloquently around this very thought for some years now, and after much unnecessary dialectical thinking and stress paralysis (do one, do the other, freak out and end up doing neither), I have, as always, settled on the most optimistic answer:

Do both.

Paradox #1

My estimation of my own value is highly contingent on my ability to find things valuable, but I'm often so busy evaluating myself that I lose track of the value of things.

Jagger would have something to say about this.

I said to them, Let's do things with our lives that aren't just about looking cool, and they cocked their heads and ruffled my hair as though I were a child.

I asked for companionship and she made promises full of youth and you.

I demanded his life and he sent me a schedule.

Entry-level nothing

We're sorry.

There are no Junior Public Intellectual positions available at present.
Please check back with us in the fall.

NY3 / Oh such a prima donna sorry for myself

Something is wrong. Chain bookstores smell of seduction and
lobotomy. First World poverty being marketed as Third World
luxury. Those girls look and smell overwhelmingly like plastic
puff pastries; I forget where I am going. No one stops to listen
to the band with a bucket-bassist and ghungroo-percussionist.
My precarious envy-admiration balance is suddenly way off.
Snow is banal with sunlight and efficiency. No fruit all day.
No sign of bliss. Every sound an irritation except this:



Spicy noodles aren't spicy. I don't have a crush on anyone.
Laundromat's givin' me the weepies, and not the good kind.

In other words: look at this fuckin' hipster.

Others

What do you think it would feel like to be someone else?

Cooler, I should hope.

Better-er

Reading is always more important than writing.
- Roberto Bolaño