weirder said the readers weirder wrote the writer
i want to talk about the word weird.
weird was my go-to word.
weird was the word i would’ve used to describe myself.
weird was the word i would’ve wanted others to use to describe me.
weird was my neon crucifix, guiding me through the darkness.
weird was my ultimate aim, in life and art.
weird was the supreme attribute, against which i judged all other attributes.
and now i’m not sure it is.
because weird just isn’t weird enough these days. i’ll tell you what’s weird. love island. love island is fucking weird.
it’s 2023. satire is dead. irony is dead. this is the age of the donald. of boris. of leave and remain. how do you caricature those ridiculous cardboard cutouts? how do you parody the post-truth pandemic period? ditto love island. how do you make genuinely weird art in the love island era?
i can’t do it. i can’t make art that’s one percent as weird as that shit. and this sick surrealist dreamscape is what so-called normal people watch every fucking day. no wonder we’re fucked as a species.
love island is the new normal.
what’s my new weird?
CATV
children’s adult television
it’s porn
basically
but for under-twelves
so no sex
no nudity
no drugs
no bad words
just the usual
misogyny
coercive control
physical violence
harmful, degrading stereotypes
and advertising, obviously.
a single paragraph-length section of the text caused me to have the hardest orgasm of my (adult) life. now it’s the only thing i can cum to.
anonymous
ooh! culture section!
new working title: high culture
bookshops scare me. i love ’em. but they’re scary. it’s the books. there’s too many. and they all seem to regard me reproachfully. wordily, spitefully. i feel their blind, disdainful stares. i’m a spineless no-title nothing without so much as a novelette to my name. i don’t belong there.
i much prefer a home library. nothing fancy. a shelf or two. a pile even. something i can leaf through leisurely, ponder, pontificate upon. it’s my favourite thing to do upon arrival at the dwelling place of any friend or acquaintance naive enough to invite me in.
it used to be dvds. before that, videos. i saw in those shelves such potential, such opportunity. i saw the next few hours of my life flash before my eyes in a storm of preemptive possibility.
and now i find myself on the netflix homepage, apathetically seeking the least worst thing. searching for whatever it is that it’ll hate myself least for watching. whatever it is that’ll waste the most time, with the least emotional investment. the lowest common denominator.
i hate technology. i really do.
the post you’re reading now is the tip of the iceberg. the one percent. the other unseen ninety-nine is me randomly raging at how staggeringly shit windows is, and ios, and wordpress, and fucking evernote. why is it that nothing just works anymore? is that too much to ask? every single time i write a post on here i re-realise why it is i write everything else on paper.
because if i had to mediate any more of my thoughts in real time through a ‘intuitive, useful editor’ or ‘updated, all-new, streamlined interface’, i’d jump in front of a fucking train.
fuck culture. this week i did nothing.