Wednesday Jan 17 2024
I’m in the kitchen staring at a $47 sub sandwich from Big Mike’s. Mother ordered this an hour ago, and she is expecting to have it for lunch. The bun is dwarfed by the turkey and ham stuffed into its maw. Somewhere in that gelatinous mass of meat, I see color indicating vegetables. Also dwarfed by the meat. It’s a lot to take in. It must be, what?, at least 4 pounds heavy.
Easily.
No human would order this. No rational one, anyway. And yet: Mother ordered it. And expects to eat it.
I stare at this beast of a meal and wonder if this is just the sober id-freed expression of all consumers everywhere.
I imagine an individual freed from the constraints of a social contract, with a voracious appetite for everything everywhere — especially the faulty, inaccurate, chemically treated, artificially sweetened, industrially processed variety of food. Ingested with such confident gusto, refined over decades. Teeth missing. A maw stuffed with meat, masticating away, barely chewing. A real go-getter. A connieusseur of the act.
“What am I here for if I cant buy what I want?”, she declares.
It’s a statement that needs no refinement of tone. It just is. Like asserting the color of Orange Fanta.
I exist in this weather system of consumption, and pull my ragged hoodie tighter for warmth.
If I look outside, into digital space, I see the same. Digital cheese propagating across the net to feed the consumption. Nutritional value, next to nil; Authorities, undecided if it’s harmful.
Is it really a dead internet? The theory exists so it must exist as possibility. And really, what does the theory have to do with me anyway as a human condition ?
The majority of my interactions are mostly with constructs presented on a screen these days. A voluntary house-arrest. The occasional plumber or electrician not withstanding. And even then, the prolonged interaction — their presence — unsettles. They are intruders on a territory that has no map, but definitely has bounderies.
Friday Jan 19 2024
I’m staring at a dead gas heating unit in the basement. It’s the coldest day of the year, with a temperature in the upper-teens and still dropping. The ambient temperature is moving in the wrong direction. I can’t help but see it as an incarnation of my own creative insecurity, and, likely, soberly, the nagging thought of total creative penury.
I’m amused by the rhyme between this mechanical failure, and my creative frustration. How do we survive without heat: with difficulty and force of will. How do I survive without validation of my creativity, or acknowledgement, or, more modestly, a forced ambivalence and indifference. I wonder if I’m being told something and not understanding it. And is that a psychosis I alone created?
With the maintanance panel set askew against a laundry basket, I’m reading the protocol for restarting the pilot light.
The protocol is pretty clear. The steps easy to follow. The rhyming has now diverged as we get into the details. The steps for me are less so. I tell myself that “hope” (for what?) is not helpful. A sober, clear-eyed fatalism is what’s required. I wonder if I’m as bad as the lack of any feedback makes it out to be. Maybe more so because the feedback is completely absent. A silence of shame and mercy and compassion; a tendency toward empathy even. His delusion is total; any feedback would create unnecessary cruelty.
I turn the Gas knob to the Off position, as directed by the documentation. I wonder how long the basement has been filling with gas. I can’t smell it, but who knows. I’m supposed to wait 5 minutes for it to dissipate before continuing.
In the meantime, I sit on the basement floor and wait.