She holds tight to some normative definition of what’s rude and will only talk to me on the phone when it’s not rude. Of course, then, I become a burden. Every time she talks to me on the phone, therefore, she feels as though I’m keeping her:

– Trapped outside where it’s hot/cold because it’s rude to talk inside
– Trapped in isolation because it’s rude to talk in front of others
– In a position of holding everyone else up because they wait on her but she won’t talk in front of them

So definitely I’m a burden. The only way that I’m accessible is via cell phone, and the cell phone places innumerable restrictions on her behavior.

Great. So it’s either minimze contact or be a burden. Sucky choice.

I’m tired.

Some company abuse.

Why I think that news anchors should be chosen on the basis of qualifications, and not looks:

“Researchers believe that using stem cells, specific tissues can be grown in peach-tree dishes.” (CNN)

Why I like FedEx better than UPS:

UPS: “HellathankyasirfircallenUPeeeS” (girl with ridiculously rapid southern accent)

Me: “I have a package coming next-day that your tracking system shows to have arrived at the warehouse. I was wondering if I could arrange to have them hold it before it goes out on the truck.”

UPS: “hinckeltimejabberwockyquickchinook beep beep, I’msarrysir.”

Me: “Um, I’m having a little trouble understanding you, but it sounds like you just said that the package is still in transit to my local area?”

UPS: “luckamankyhankypanky, I’msarrysir.”

Me: “Okay, I think that was a yes, but the package clearly shows as being at the local center already, I just want to have them hold onto it rather than send it out this afternoon for delivery.”

UPS: “mosesjokesandmareseydotes, I’msarrysir.”

Me: “Okay, whatever. Thanks anyway.”

UPS: “ThankyasirfercallinUPeeeS’n’UPeeeSacomhavagudday.” (click)

I am a twisted, twisted motherf*ck. I always have been. Not in the amusing way, not like the S&M people or the punk rockers who drink Ajax dish detergent. I’m twisted in the “I can never express myself fully or I will sit in the electric chair” way. In the Columbine way. In the Stalin way. Deep down inside, I am forty percent Lama, ready to kill myself to save a mosquito, and sixty percent butcher, ready to destroy, to cause immeasurable pain and suffering.

It’s why I could never be a real activist: I’d kill somebody. Or why I could never be an S&M freak: I’d kill somebody. Deep down inside, I’ve always thought that some day I will kill many, many people. Torture them, probably. Pull their limbs off one by one, watching them scream and writhe in pain, tearing the raw flesh off their dismembered limbs in front of them with my unbrushed teeth as they bleed to death in horror, twitching and vomiting between final sobs.

I am unfit for society. I always have been. Since the first day of kindergarten, when I realized that my parents lied to me about everything and was kicked senseless on the ground by everyone in my school just because I was Chinese (and I’m not even properly that), I have been ready to destroy.

So far, I do my uncontrolled destroying in secret. I demolish a possession, squeeze a drinking glass until it shatters and I have little cuts all over my hands, make cuts in my arm with fingernails or pencils… but someday, when something pushes me over the edge, I will be Timothy McVeigh, Ted Bundy, Saddam Hussein, Adolf Eichmann. I want to see people writhe. I want to see pain. I want to pull the legs from humans like a small boy pulls the legs from spiders. I want to transplant cow ears onto their empty, screaming eye sockets and the cock of a bull onto the place where I’ve grated off their nose with with the rusty heart of a broken light bulb, one stroke at a time.

I want to damn my enemies to hell, to exercise the power that Satan would exercise, were he here. I want to push pins into eyeballs, over the course of hours. I want to remove skin one piece at a time with a pair of pliers, pulling it off inch by inch. I want to break each bone in each body by hand with my own strength, grasping every bone directly after having sliced the flesh wide open with an oily screwdriver, one rip at a time.

I hate. I have always hated. I was raised the target, and now I want to exact one pound of flesh for each act through which I was made to suffer. I have never forgotten the face of any of those who hurt me, and someday I will be the angel of death.

Last night I think I fucked everything up even worse, though I don’t remember much of it.

Then I dreamed about rattlesnakes and water moccaisins and caves at the sea’s edge.

The logical anti-nihilism argument goes something like:

1. Nihilism claims that no truth exists
2. But then the nihilists themselves cannot claim to truth
3. Ergo not 1

Silly anti-nihilists. As though the fundamental basis of nihilism is a rational, logical claim. It is not; it is the despair at despairing of ever having come across the truth thus far, and knowing not with any degree of sincerity that one will ever come across it, while at the same time the only pathway to human (not merely mechanistic) sanity or hope (i.e. not rational quantities) lies within the certainty of same. It is nothing less than radical doubt, an ontological characterization that cannot be refuted through epistemological ready-mades.

Thus, the philosophical refutation of nihilism approaches the problem in grounds far afield of those in which nihilism is essentially embodied. This is similar to the way in which it is nothing better or worse than comical to use instrumental reason to argue against the notion that instrumental reason is flawed.

Nietzsche wins.

Also, too many people use reductio ad absurdum to mean that’s so surreal it must be bullshit!

People should only open their mouths if they know what they are talking about. Problem: nobody seems to know what they are talking about, to say nothing about the utterly necessary problematization of speech and its particulate constitutionals. Solution: it would seem that nobody should open their mouths.

—

Fuck you all.

Corrollary: I am better than, or worse than (take your pick) anything or anyone you can care to name, including yourself.

These days don’t exist. I don’t exist. I am like the myth of Mata Hari, gone before I existed, lost before I was found. I am not here. I have gone. I go.

I just realized that the call letters for the local news station in this town are “K-COY.” Stupid fucking southern Californians… as though they weren’t already oppressed enough by their self-rape and self-exploitation.

evasive… snap
evasive… snap
evasive… snap

annoyed!

Sometime soon, I have to embark on a repeated deep reading of Lefebvre and others, in an attempt to really get at the fundamentals of what I’m intending to research. In the meantime, I have to find another book project to begin. I need to write. Even boring nonfiction stuff. It turns out I really am a writer. It’s driving me crazy not having a paid writing project right now! Gah!

I have no idea what I’m going to do for lunch. I’m fscking tired of lunch as a basic category. Time for something new, I guess, but I can’t think what. There’s a limited selection in a town this size.

Assuming I have the funds to do it, here is the final list of schools to which I will apply this fall for acceptance in 2006.

Tier 1: Chicago, UCLA, Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Harvard
Tier 2: Michigan, Cornell, NYU, CUNY, New School for Social Research, Cambridge
Tier 3: Yale, Penn, Utah, Northwestern, StonyBrook, UCSB

Note that inclusion in “tier” doesn’t necessarily indicate my order of preference, though it comes close. Locale is likely to play more importance than this list suggests.

I’ve been sitting here for hours needing to post, but nothing I begin to type feels like what I need to say. I wish this was Morocco. I have to go to work.

I would give anything — anything — to be standing in the middle of falling snow, in the middle of city traffic, under a grey sky right now. I’d kill. I’d cry. I’d sing. I’d die.

Alas, such things don’t exist anymore for me.

I see through you all, you weak Americans. You are all bought and paid for. You all know you don’t measure up to TV. You are all scared of yourselves. You are all shooting up and fucking around because you know you aren’t kooler than Calvin. The capitalists have raped you, and you are suffering from abuser identification syndrome.

You are all violated. You are all violated. You are all violated. You are all weak.

The Philippino cardinal of the Catholic church until he died today was named “Cardinal Sin.” This may be the funniest found-joke in all of human history.

the relentless hum of the air in the subway tunnel is as close to happiness as you will ever get you love it like you loved the ones you threw there and you can smell them still on the tracks, the tracks where all of life runs north and south, the tracks where all of death runs east and west, on the tracks you made your fortune and kissed them goodbye and on the tracks you found your hum

on the tracks

the relentless hum of the air in the subway tunnel prays to you, touches the back of your neck, your hairs stand on end, you become aroused, the trains cum, they go off in a shot, you run up and down along the platform touching rubber, screaming living, loving timetables, falling, falling, electricity everywhere and rats like the ecstasy of a broken einstein you smile and smile and touch them smooth metal

on the tracks

the relentless hum of the air in the subway unable stop like you have to keep descending the stairwells and they go down and down through level A and level B and level C and every color, red green blue yellow comic masterpiece wonka man please touch my elevator timeschedule song please love the conductor he isn’t too long deep hat knife dreams kill, kill, kill

on the tracks