Hey y'all,
[First: My city is still in a really rough spot after last month’s storms. If you can, please give to Austin Mutual Aid—or any mutual aid fund you know of for Houston, Dallas, or any other Texas city. AMA is saving lives. You can give directly to Austin Mutual Aid through Venmo at @austinmutualaid OR @austinmutualaidhotels. Thank you.]
At first I was going to start this off by saying something about what a goddamn year it has been, and then I thought maybe the last thing anybody needed was a reminder that it has, indeed, been more or less a year since everything has gone upside-down—who needs reminders of “In these trying times” emails? Why revisit every phony abundance of caution? Discourse on circuit party faggots? Zoom room ennui? Should I just take solace in being 285,000,008th in line instead of 296,040,042nd when over half a million people are definitely truly dead?—and then I realized that sometimes we need neither a reminder nor a distraction, that there is no comfort in mirthless laughter nor automaton reflection, that there is no “outside” of this quite yet.
So now we’re just going to stare at the birthday cake I threw on the floor.
It’s weird, though: the past couple weeks have brought some odd distractions from the pandemic—some professional, some personal, some horrible, some beautiful. This isn’t to say that I’ve adapted to anything, or that I see some light in the distance. I don’t feel any stronger or resilient. I don’t feel that smart or useful most days, anyway. Again, there is no “outside” here: this administration is every bit as disappointing as we suspected and then some. We are in a general glide toward shrugging at another two years of inertia because I guess it beats high blood pressure over Trump? In the past month, we have already been lectured that: bombing Syria is okay because Biden did it respectfully and without rambling to Twitter; ramping up ICE and deportations is more than fine because we’ve rebranded “keeping kids in cages” to “processing children in waiting centers”; eliminating student loan debt for the most economically susceptible is bad because rich people also take out student loans; raising the minimum wage is a pipe dream because we have vaccination priorities; ensuring people can pay their bills and rent is not a vaccination priority; vaccinating everyone before I turn thirty-fucking-five is not a vaccination priority. We did it.
There is so much of this goddamn world that I wanted to leave behind with the virus.
But it is Pisces season, a truly marvelous time for many obvious reasons—a period for finding the meaning in dreams and wandering in them, through them toward something new. There’s power in dreams, because you’re never fluent in their grammar. You are always swimming in translations with yourself, to yourself. You are always in a milky glow in a lake of words you don’t know you don’t know yet. The next time you dream of fish see what they say back, listen underwater. The next time you dream of fish, see if they have new words for you, about you. The next time you look at me looking at you, our eyes milky for obvious reasons, let’s find new ways to say I love you, I love you too in our sleep. The next time you sleep say hi, I’m the fish who says hi back.
Okay, so here’s a bunch of stuff I wrote over the past month or so. The big prose poem in the middle is about being banned from Twitter. (Oh: I got banned from Twitter.) There’s other stuff about wanderlust and schadenfreude and whatever German word I can use for my grandfather. I recorded some of it, too, in case you’d rather listen! I’ve stopped shopping my stuff to most journals because I realized I already don’t pay myself for this and literary magazine rejections are worse than gonorrhea. But if you do pay, hit your boy up.
Something something,
KJ
reappearing act
oh, don’t worry—
there’s no need for a well-
ness check from either you
or county PD and, besides,
where would i even go
without a jab?
i’m just here,
unwashed with these dishes,
the stale ferment of half beers
and someday’s dinners wafting
to corners eighteen feet away,
things on things on things on
things—an archaeology i have
no training for
what i’d like, really,
is basic: maybe a day, maybe
a week, maybe an oil change—
long enough to run faster
than the smell of myself—
to catch seaside funk in my hair
and jacket, feel the salt and wind
buff away my fine lines, the fish
water mixing with my vinegar feet,
seagull buffets masking stale musk
and morning breath
then to return—
hair left copper by the blister
bright sky
to open my door—
and catch myself unfamiliar
in my nose, to smell my home
as a stranger would, to think
“well, shit: you live like this?”
speech acts
1.
Let’s start with actual literature. Fifty years ago, Little Golden published The Monster at the End of this Book, a concise piece of postmodern metafiction in which Grover—a lanky, furry, construction paper-blue Muppet—begs the reader not to get to the end of the book. He knows what you already do: there’s a monster on the final page! You know what he doesn’t quite yet: he is the actual monster at the end of the book. As children flip through the thirty-nine-cent tale, Sesame Street’s truest ingenue gets more exasperated, frantically reminding readers to no avail that there is a monster at the end of the story. It’s wonderful mischief, being told not to finish a book, having a joke surprise and delight us despite already knowing the punchline, seeing a television friend flail at wit’s end because there is a monster at the end of the story.
2.
I know what you already do: I am the monster at the end of this story. You know what I don’t quite yet: I am the monster at the end of this story. I know what you don’t quite yet: I am the monster at the end of this story.
3.
Tweets should not, under any condition, be confused for literature. There have been perhaps fifteen or twenty actual worthwhile tweets in the past fourteen-or-so years, most of which involving baby animals or the instruction “antonin scalia retire bitch.” Part of this is bound to the constraints of the medium. Tweets can only be 280 characters long—and before that, only 140 characters long. That’s long enough for a complete thought, a round sentence, sure, but it places a definite cap on the length of expression—if one even wants to adhere to the idea that a complete thought should be contained within a tweet. Since we can now string tweets, create threads as long as one wants, there is no real reward for brevity, either. It is a genre in the same way that academics speak of teaching statements and historiographic essays as genres: sure, but why? There is no comfort in boundary here, nor is there boundary in expression, and so the medium is stuck as just form. A tweet, in other words, is not bound to anything besides what is captured within that 280-character limit. It is merely the shape of an utterance: meaningful only in its meaninglessness, a speech act that fails on grounds of speaking and action, a virus stumbling towards thresholds of life.
4.
Guys I have no formal training.
5.
Prior to last month, I had tweeted probably seventy-or-so thousand times since the beginning of the Obama Administration. I don’t want to do the math on what that amounts to as a compulsion, but I’m sure it’s somehow more damning and damaging than the pack-a-day smoking habit I had for nearly a decade. Plenty of it has been for work, sure, but nowhere near enough to make sense of that amount of utterances, even if a few did contain baby animals and/or threats toward Antonin Scalia. My first tweets emerged while laying on an apartment floor in east Orlando, waiting for a bed I ordered on shaky credit: “wondering when they will show up” I pondered into the genuine void.
6.
Once I yelled at Iggy Azaelea and Brazilian teenagers harangued me for six months.
7.
‘You seem to have a lot of opinions.’
8.
At various points on Twitter I have been: a sincere graduate student; Kimmy Gibbler in a hellscape Full House; an insincere graduate student; an alt which contained no nudes; a communications manager; someone who sold underwear and jerkoff videos for charity; someone who stopped posting nudes; someone who writes poems; someone who was publicly disillusioned with academia; someone who used punctuation; a policy wonk; someone who was publicly disillusioned with faggotry and/or the faggot art complex; someone who abandoned all capital letters; someone who picked fights with academics; someone who picked fights with pundits; someone who picks fights with faggots; someone who picked fights with himself and then themself; someone who live-tweeted episodes of 90210; someone who loved the puzzle of the speech act; someone who loved talking to strangers; someone who loved talking.
9.
Perhaps a monster—even a lovable, furry, blue one—is still a monster.
10.
What Twitter rewards—and this is no grand revelation for anybody who has spent more than fifteen minutes on the platform—is conflict. The commodity produced on Twitter is your outsized reaction. This reaction is valuable when it is rooted in antagonism. Even one’s agreement with a tweet is encouraged to have antagonistic posture; one is nudged to not just retweet but quote tweet, complete with all the qualifiers one can can shove in thirty-five or so words. This reliance on antagonistic posture means that Jack Dorsey makes his money on your elevated blood pressure.
11.
Forgive me, but:
Things that will get you immediately suspended, temporarily or permanently, on social media platforms:
Writing “men are trash” on Facebook (a day)
Directly calling Paul Krugman “a shithead” for his sudden handwringing over economic recovery policy proposals (a week)
Saying, as a gay person, “stupid faggots” in a reply to another gay person, in response to gay people who are being, in fact, stupid faggots (permanent)
Things that have not gotten people suspended on social media platforms:
Insisting police brutality is always warranted and that Black people simply have to learn how to operate / walk / breathe / exist in public better
Advertising raves in the middle of a pandemic
Being Donald Trump until and only until it was unprofitable for Twitter
Starting a genocide in Myanmar
12.
There is no such thing as a neutral algorithm. Unless you take superhuman care with how you source and search and engage with information, you are always facing algorithms built by humans that, in turn, reflect and reinforce biases. These biases are racist and classist and sexist, homophobic and transphobic and xenophobic, albeist and ageist—and even the most minor prejudicial design choice can have massive outsized impact. Because search suggestions are increasingly molded by cloud-based monitoring of other nearby searches (both in terms of subject and searcher location), we are now informing and enhancing each other’s biases at breakneck speed. We are ruining each other faster than we are aware of how we are ruining each other.
13.
An axiom: the tweet “Just got a job rejection almost a year after the fact.” will invariably be met with three academics replying “At least they sent you an email.”
14.
In the end, we really shouldn’t have been surprised that something designed by the American military is inescapably terrible. The Internet was a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake.
15.
You seem to have a lot of opinions.
16.
Last month I saw a woman respond to tweets made by the family members of people in recovery for COVID. She wrote—repeatedly, dozens of times in dozens of threads—that photographs of children and parents and spouses in hospital beds were a cheap and desperate ploy for attention. When pressed by others about how she could be so heartless, so insipid, she said that Facebook was a more sensible place for sharing personal information. When pressed by others on how else people should then spread the word about the importance of masking and vaccination, she wrote “Fuck you.” This woman’s only other tweets—besides the dozens that she made rallying against dying children within three days—were full-throated supports of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
17.
I have seen academics from Yale—white and tenured—tweet that they have no sway to change everyday and systemic discrimination within their departments. I have seen academics tweet pro-cop messages because impeachment…means…cops are good? I have seen alleged leftist academics attack teacher unions because they no longer want to have their kids at home. I have seen “just a reminder” and “ one more for the people in the back” and “THIS” and clapping hands emojis and people imagining that anybody cares enough about academics to fight with them in order to compose a tweet in which they are responding to ghost critics. I have seen tenure gutted and academics wonder how on earth backing protections for fifteen percent of their workforce while ignoring the needs of contingent labor and support staff would lead to anything good. I have had academics tell me for the better part of a decade that I don’t know what I’m talking about, that the ship never hit the iceberg, that the water isn’t cold, that humans were meant to be amphibious.
18.
I don’t think Twitter made me monstrous. Imagine such a defense! I was already monstrous at eighteen, half a lifetime ago, with a litany of stupid jokes and bad ideas and ginned menthol breath. I was a monstrous child, a green-eyed creature of empire in the southernmost swamps, unaware my street was named after a confederate general, unaware the sheer dint of test scores would set me on a velvet path not afforded my brother nor my neighbors, There is a monster in the mirror, a monstrous body, a cartoonish chest and thick thighs, the sheer inability to ever be dainty or small or fragile, always an ironic little spoon. I was a monster when I [
]. I was a monster when I [
]. I was monster when I [
]. They should’ve [
]. I should’ve been [
]. I should [
].
19.
“That’s not what I meant and you fucking know that” is the appropriate response to two-thirds of all replies on Twitter. “Okay” is the appropriate response to nearly everything else.
20.
My state was frozen for a week. Our senator tried to leave for Cancun. Our governor told us to eat shit. Our former governor told us that freezing to death was more patriotic to the state than accepting any role on the nationalized grid. Our lieutenant governor—months after telling fellow senior citizens they should find it a necessary duty to die for the economy—told us that it was a necessary duty to pay thousands of dollars for electric bills because you should’ve read the fine print before we let people from Michigan run the Texas energy grid for decades. Bette Midler and a million liberals told us it was what we deserved. It is now seventy-eight degrees outside, I am writing this in my skivvies, my air conditioner now won’t cool, and a reliable grocery run is still a bit of a fantasy. People flushed their toilets with snow. People froze to death. A state the size of France with more people than Australia was a global laughing stock. My friends from other countries checked in on me. The gentlest way to detail what these people deserve, the most merciful expression of that, would go beyond being banned from Twitter. There is no suitable speech act for them allowed by their terms of service. None of this kept Jack Dorsey up at night.
21.
I am a monster. You are a monster. That woman is a monster. Better Midler and millions of other liberals are monsters. The politicians are monsters. Grover is still a monster. A rose is a rose is a rose; a monster is not a monster is a not a monster. Monstrosity is just the gentlest way to detail, the most merciful expression of the human condition: that’s actual literature.
22.
That’s it. That’s the tweet.
memorial service
rush limbaugh is dead and i am stuck
indoors, a layer of ice and slush covering
the city, keeping me from whooping
it up outside. rush limbaugh is dead,
the first truly great piece of news
we shared on group chat in a good long while,
no buts or wells or oh-damn-i-hadn’t-thought-
of-that-well-that-changes-things things,
just an l-o-l-thank-god when we realized
he was dead, truly, more dead than the trees
after this storm. rush limbaugh is dead and now
it’s probably legal to say i hope it hurt,
every bit of it, in his claggy porridge tumor lungs.
rush limbaugh is dead and i’m making
a casey kasem long distance dedication, play me
cece peniston’s “finally” on loop a good 6-8 hours.
rush limbaugh is dead and the shit i just took
has more social value. rush limbaugh is still dead—
i am editing this poem later today because
i contain tenses: i wrote, i am writing, i will write;
he is dead, he is dead, he is dead. rush limbaugh
used to mock the homos who died of AIDS,
did it purely for ratings, called the syndrome
“rock hudson disease,” used to get wet dreams
for ronald reagan, used to pop a hundred pills
and tell homeless people to kill themselves, used
to do a lot of things but now he’s dead, mary.
my heart is as frozen as these pipes. our
state is freezing its people to death thanks to
dittohead logic. the clay pulp cancer in his lungs
speaks to us as our mannequin governor. cancer
wins again. still, i cannot stop laughing:
rush limbaugh is dead and we are not.
jobs
I would have made
such a good
rottweiler,
short-lived and
double-coated—
at your feet—
treating necks
as our trophies,
eager for your
butcher treats.
wire service
when i was four, maybe five, the feds came looking for my grandfather. it wasn’t anything serious: he had sent the first george bush a western union during the first gulf war calling him a dumb son of a bitch. he had been a cop, so i’m not sure what for. he had been a cop, so his cop friends smoothed it over with the feds first, said he volunteered with at-risk kids. he would become a telephone psychic within a year. western union stopped offering telegrams in 2006. the first george bush died in 2018, nothing serious, a year before my grandfather, the dumb son of a bitch. i’m now thirty-four, maybe thirty-five and we’re still cops killing kids in the gulf.
Thanks so much for reading and listening, y’all. We should do this again sometime. If you liked this, tell your friends. If you hated this, tell your sworn enemies. —KJ
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