The hair-thin towers, blipping lazily through the evening and the night; beautiful as they are. The docks and the boats and, God— the boat awnings, punctuating the far shore with their limp blankness; hard to find beauty in those. Something so sadly aspirational about docks, on a lake—these stubby fragile fingers, reaching out just far enough to attain a little grasp of the water's glory, the perfection that we're certain is hidden out there, somewhere, beneath the surface or far above it, or perhaps a billion years past. So we perch on our piers, just long enough to escape the tedium, the sameness, the ordinariness (because it was all ordered, had to be, by someone, some time) that lies behind in the houses, and the yards, and the roads. How much more perfect, it would be, without us here—or without all these things we bring with us. We down here are no different than those astro-nauts, those Super-Men, or the closest we've got to that, penetrating the perfection of space, the perfect vacuum in its perfect everlasting stasis, only with the necessary entanglements of their triple-lock suit, and their synthetic fabrics, and their nest of hoses, quickly tangled. Restricting. How profound, it must be, the urge to burst out of that face mask, to ignore the alarms and the building pressure and the utter cold, and to leap into the void, finally, at last, for real this time, and damn the consequences. I feel it even now, down here, parabolically at this moment five-hundred-twenty-six miles away.

Aborted theses/schizophrenicisms #1

The reason it sometimes has been called conquest is not because it necessitates an act of domination, at least not exactly; the allusion is not to Napoleon but to Cook, to Amundsen — to those brave, blatantly pointless men who charted the unknown of our earth back when it couldn't simply be said, "it is known", and in so doing excuse our personal responsibilities to know it. The female body, to the masculine mind, is a landscape far more mysterious than the tundra or the steppe, and more interesting not in its exaggerated variety but in the infinite inexplicable subtlety of its variations. This thirst to know her, to know all the hers, so flatly parallels the line of Human Progress, that with a start we must realize that it is of course not a microcosm of that grand struggle but a precursor. If man thirsts for knowledge it is only through abstraction of the carnal thirst, the urge to continue through physical acts of spirituality, through the only one thing we have always known with utter conviction to be true. To not recognize these facts of thought, the truths embodied in our collective earnest anecdata, and to nonetheless proclaim a revolution, a Philosophy, a system of thought for the relegation of human experience without the input of human experience — it is folly.

Strange, isn't it, that our homunculi so reliably take form as some sort of troll, a weak foetal presence, incurious and turned inward, fat-faced and defiant. And how revealing it is. These little men, these representatives of the corporeal, ever-underfoot and loud and insistent in that irritating yet undeniable way, crammed into the space of our minds, crippled like lotus feet, incapable, we are sure, of life in the world that lies outside the mind. And, we suppose like so many representatives in more noble times, such a pale image in the face of the serene authority on whose behalf they speak: and how sad, that the body, such a perfect and unimpeachable thing in this so thoroughly impeachable world, a thing so heavenly we needed only to collect its best specimens and graft the wings of birds to them to create a convincing representative of Divinity, a thing which can walk through the world of God proud, so proud it need not walk at all, as it has no need for the reassurance of earth beneath feet — that such a thing can be so debased, be made so crippled and weak and unadmirable, by a cage so complex and yet so simple in its purity of implication as the mind.

LTIG unspecified #1

4,

Nobody believed me when I said the flood was coming, least of all you, because you hadn't talked to me in a year or so and I can understand why you were shocked by my behavior, and maybe concerned. Even more so when you came to check on me and found me sandbagging my house, attaching water wings to my cats and praying the rosary. I warned you, a biblical flood is going to drown this neighborhood. But you didn't believe me, even considering the vorpal effect of my sunglasses was rapidly getting to you. An old friend from the shadowland with a grocery bag of cigarettes carefully ziplocked against the imminent rain. Afraid of heights you were watching me unsure if this was some sort of joke or scheme, a longtermer like I've been known to pull, but it wasn't. I saw all the bloated gentle dead facedown at a level roughly below my roof. And so I planned. Even though you were concerned, or appeared to be concerned, I noted that you had time to put on a sundress and perfume. I myself was too busy preparing. The decongestants in your purse rattled like bone dice, auguring black water, but you didn't listen. And here you are imagining I'm trying to fuck you while a truck dumps a ton of sand on my front lawn and the clouds overhead turning vindictive Olympian black. Ha! You followed me onto the roof and I was raving about mold and property damage and bereavement, not really listening because you wanted to peek in my room and see if any other girls had left their stuff there, and also to try and steal my blueprints for the Navel Stone. I told you, even though we discovered the capabilities of the Navel Stone together, I made the sacrifice and therefore the psychic data it collected belongs to me. It is proprietary information. That's how I knew about the flood, because the Flinski gauge on it noted a drastic rise in bedwettings over the week. Also when I went to get black beans from Joe's on Friday they were sold out. On Tuesday there were four cans. You should have known the significance of such subconscious hoarding. And you should have known when you asked me if I wanted to go to Manning's with you and I refused the flood was deadly, presidentially serious. The Navel Stone doesn't lie. Maybe you wanted to catch up but my cats can't swim and moving the Navel Stone all the way to the roof, and then recalibrating it to search for pretty brunette survivors was a labor of hours and I just didn't have the time to waste swilling vodka and making secret references to new sex friends. Rain had started to fall, and you left.

Fifteen minutes ago I saw you float past, Opheliac and sadly dead. All I have on this roof are some soggy Camel Filters, two perturbed cats, and our Navel Stone, stolen so carefully and piecemeal from your father's laboratory. He's going to pissed when I deliver the news.

Regretfully (but happy the Navel Stone was correct and not a shared delusion), J.

"

Blogs like Daily Apocalypse and Retro '90s MADNESS remind me of my mother's best friend. My godmother. She'd discuss publically and voluably the present condition of her reproductive organs, bowel movements, the metric weight of snot she'd wrung from her hankerchief (result of dander allergies, number of cats in her household exceeding that allowable in Emily County building code) erotically-inclined mailman fantasies, envies and other sins venial or otherwise. She'd hit as many as five of the Big Seven during the brief ride from my elementary school to her house. Husband either in jail or otherwise engaged. If I had to live with choral mewing and a broadband connection into my supposed better half's Inner Monologue I'd also find re-shingling houses more interesting than home. Hardly connubial bliss. Even a little bit, no. He was vaguely Mexican and had erectile difficulty after X amount of cervezas. She'd always have 2 less than X in the fridge at any given time. Tetchily admitting she couldn't control his cerveza guzzling anywhere but her (very ominous smelling) fridge, a point she often shook her feathered hair and scowled to punctuate. I am reading a Goosebumps for Book-it and overhearing a basic equation for boning. Tell me this wouldn't damage you. Danielle Steel as far as the eye can see on the bookshelves but not one volume of Dr. Spock, or even any doctor. I was turning twelve in December. You really can't appreciate the indignities inflicted upon you in childhood until you pass the buck to the next generation. She was gainfully employed in technology or wore a headset or both. Eighty-five lbs of Meow Mix a week is a financial strain on a household, as is Negra Modelo, when you can't get a bulk discount because you can only buy enough at once to keep but not exceed (hacks, empatically stabs at record button with finger) ... but yeah Meow Mix is expensive, as are frequent OB-GYN consultations that even to this day keep me at an junior high understanding of women's sexuality for fear that learning more could birth a Biblicly punishing repressed memory. One so bad it would get an article in a journal or become a popular Wikipedia destination. These and frankly inappropriate updates on the advance of her father's cancer drove me into the living room for Fox 9's syndication of The Simpsons at 4 and 4:30 almost daily. I was sick at her house one afternoon because my mom had work, and I was watching Total Request Live. She walked in and made a noise indeterminate to an 11- or 12-year old's ears. She said, "Attractive people being mediocre. I could do that. How am I different from them?"

So that is sort of how I feel about blogs like Underwear Mattress and Last Night's Drug Abuse and White Privilege Irony.

"

-pgs. 2 and 7, "WATCH ME: CONVERSATIONS WITH MARTIN SNAPPLE," Martin Snapple, Gumshoe Press 2014