Disclaimer
The aphorism has a paradoxical distinction in literature as a medium of the loser and of the showoff. First because it is the safety net for those who lack the patience for extended argument and the discipline for formal poetry. It is the ideal format for anyone who has nothing to declare. Second because, even in absence of everything we cherish in sensible verbal communication, sharing them presumes a certain value as to the aphorist’s miniaturized wisdom and compacted style, like a self-made participant’s ribbon. To put it more aphoristically: the aphorism intermingles the undernourished remedial kid with the overindulged gifted kid.
I have resigned myself to the possibility that the aphorism is my primary medium over all other brevity-positive formats. A kind of détente is reached through it: the reader encounters a tolerable level of my personality and I exert an acceptable level of lucidity through my talent. I’m not stoked about it. Even if they say something interesting, I’m unsure of the stylistic value they have against the prevailing fashion that prefers the concussed Shakespearisms of Dril, the autist Zarathustriana of Bronze Age Pervert, and the Robert Burton-but-horny act of The Last Psychiatrist. But that’s enough prologue for a bunch of stupid word-rectangles.
Of cheeseheads and headcheese
Ed Gein is considered one of the most notorious serial killers in America, whose legacy inspired such iconic works as Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. This is a slight overstatement, however, given that Gein’s confirmed body count is only two; much lower than the 17 bodies amassed by fellow Wisconsinite, Jeffrey Dahmer. Much of Gein’s time, in fact, was given toward his hobbies. He was a natural and ingenious craftsman, creating his own dinnerware and jewelry, upholstering lamps, and tailoring clothes. That his crafting material happened to come from bodies he pilfered from local graveyards is not a little unseemly (even if the turn of progress may yet neutralize that stigma), but you cannot argue that he was listless or idle. While Dahmer merely kept his fridge stocked and his neighbors nauseated. In Gein you find the platonic recluse: who you should be. In Dahmer you find the loner: who you are.
On being pulled apart by horses
Bullies, like the rest of us, are inert creatures. What they are, they will remain. But unlike the rest of us, their humanity is incomplete—or just failed. When they dominate someone, they know they are dominating someone, but they do it instinctually, as an animal would, with a conception of power or consequence rooted in appetite and its satiation. And a bully is forever feeding. It’s a habit that can be utilized for the designs of others with a flair for manipulation, the only thing that can control bullies.
Bullies are capable of real hurt and inspire in their victims feelings of condemnation and retribution. These feelings are genuine but overtaxed relative to the size of the object. Though unchanging at their core, bullies are also shrinking. No one feels it less than their former objects of torment, who simply see it as a matter of distance. The bully, ever hungry but without sustenance, knows the truth and pulls himself into pieces as if tied to four horses at the wrists and ankles. Only the cruelest of us would wish that on anyone.
A teachable moment
The pupil asks: “What is blood for?" You, to be a great teacher, must answer thus: “God’s design is mysterious, indeed. But it is really very simple: aesthetic effect. It was not by error that red is the signal color of fear and romance. Though reflective in temperament, they are equal in intensity of feeling. What more, they are codependent and demand an audience. Blood is drama’s lubricant. Even a slight nick from shaving startles us into a crimson reverie. If blood was hued less thrillingly, closer to deep-fryer grease or engine coolant, it would stay where it was to serve its dull purpose. If it had been otherwise, we’d be stringing cars up by their hind wheels and sticking them the same way we do pigs, irredeemable felons, and anyone with bad credit.”
Lie vigilantes
My objection to lying is more a matter of function than of morality. Lying is too common in our society to fight it effectively. Even well-meaning, virtuous people find themselves doing it without thinking. People lie about their professional history, their business acumen, their sex life, their political beliefs, the books that they’ve read, their happiness, and their marital status. But the utility of lying is limited. Lies, no matter how sophisticated and well-concealed, are eventually found out. You and other people of cosmic-scale inconsequence think you can speak nothing but lies with the protective shield of mass indifference to whatever you say. But even you are not exempt from that one person with a vocation for malice who, having caught a single confirmable falsehood, will hound you from the highest mountaintop to the darkest chasm as someone worse than Hitler, worse than Pol Pot, worse even than Ryan Adams.
Body horrors
Readers sometimes like to describe writing as though writing was a body. They like to size up a piece of prose as they would a model in a magazine, a woman on a sidewalk, or a corpse on a slab. They use words like muscular, sinuous, toned, lithe, clumsy, skeletal, anemic, or flabby. Prose can walk on its own two feet in triumph or it can rot in a ditch at the mercy of poor life choices.
It is similar, but not the same, for the writer. The text is always enduring growth. One version lets itself go. Another version becomes leaner. A text may acquire irksome skin tags, painful corpuscles, enigmatic rashes through no action the writer can recall. When they excise them they reappear elsewhere. A text may have glandular fluctuations and oily outbreaks. A text mouths off and has tantrums. More than a body, writing is puberty’s boomerang.
Horror’s boundary issues
I’ve seen plenty of horror films where fringe cults are vindicated; and I’ve seen plenty more where demons are literal entities. As a horror film framed religiously, but still typical of the prestige mode, Saint Maud prefers to cultivate ambiguity. The film portrays the literal and figurative cases with equal intensity before making a fairly conclusive case for one side. It’s good enough art; but if it is to be taken as seriously as approving critics insist, that means questioning whether it must be seen. “Peak horror” is often complained of as being boring, but it also cuts the other way as being far too confrontational toward any viewer’s greatest vulnerabilities, whether of their grief, their traumas, or their belief in Hell.
Applied beast mode
The concept of prophecy has taken an odd turn in our long flight from Biblical antiquity. Perhaps accepting its intrinsic value, we’ve opted to reupholster it in more pristine leather instead of jettisoning it entirely with the spring-cleaning as we’ve done for alchemy and sorcery. The prophet’s status never truly diminished even after the rise of the tolerance-based society that would threaten it. Instead, tolerance put a fence around the prophet. It bathed and fed him; dressed him in the latest fashions. But every so often there might come a different prophet who breaks through that fence. It brings a vision that is bleak, expressed in a style that is repulsive. It runs exactly contrary to the tenor of the moment at which it is heard. The true prophet shows an indifference to tact and boasts a deprivation of moral authority. They are counter-authority—an absolute animal.
Welfare punk
If a punk decided against progressing or otherwise could not progress beyond a certain point technically, the punk could always, and often did, fall back on the art of the rude gesture. Often the gesture produced a safe echo of all the previous ones. Mutation-producing gestures were rare but far-reaching. One such mutation was reorienting punk almost entirely from a rock genre to a movement. Punk, the gesturers thought, could be more than disruption, let alone a consumer market; punk could be a source of edification and support—a kind of social service. It became a set of civic tools that could be called upon to address oft-neglected concerns of the community.
But when punk becomes a set of tools, what’s to stop the social service from becoming a bureaucracy? Or punk bands from becoming civil servants?
Daydream nationalism
Americans have lately become a little obsessed with punk, some might say they’re driven to the brink of madness by it. It is irritating and a bit precious to casual onlookers, especially to the long-committed; but it is neither surprising nor all that offensive. The punk is a naïve creature of daydreams; so is the American. The punk is driven by an appalling dearth of inhibition; so is the American. The punk and the American will scream until they are good and tired of it, which they never are.
Debbie Does Frontierland
It’s not altogether clear just how women came to be discovered in pornography. Whether its pioneers came in search of them or if they had been found by chance or happy miracle, no one can or desires to positively confirm. It is only clear that a steady supply of the resource is needed for pornography’s animation to remain constant, integral to it much in the same way that oil is integral to the life or our cars or to conflict in the Middle East. They come as if freshly mined from the soil itself. There are no dry spells and there are no rushes. Refinement is simple; conversion to energy is immediate and brilliant. When energy is spent, often quickly, it is replenished without effort. This is a system running smoothly.
Why you don’t want nice things
The key to hate-watching is the pleasure of beholding something definitively inferior to you. Though you yourself may have created exactly nothing, something about this or that show imbues you with a confidence that you would never have created something so bad if given the opportunity. Moreover, it confirms security of conscience: you are nothing like the people who like the show in earnest. They are beneath you. Your life is in a good place—morally and spiritually if not materially—unlike those plebs, losers, and bougies. The experience is never so harshly demystified as when something you hate remains hated but for reasons you did not anticipate let alone wish to exist at all. Rather than letting you sprout wings and rise above it, the still-hated show insists on chaining you down at its level.
Eternal mimosas
Watching something like Modern Love, truth, excellence, and freedom recede into grey triviality leaving only survival, comfort, and the desire to survive comfortably with someone else. Normalcy has a strangeness all its own, a compellingly comfortable strangeness at that. Something like mental illness, through Modern Love’s prism, becomes almost cozy. Aren’t we all, on some level, taking Klonopin? the show seems to ask us. As one episode drifts into another these assertions ring truer. Though you don’t look or feel anything like the people depicted, they do not repulse you. You feel close kinship with them and their world. This suggests that you were being lulled into some kind of trance, as if you were an earth-toned Manchurian candidate. But it may have been that this was what you always longed for: to belong, to love and be loved as best as you are able. To brunch eternally in a Lena Dunham afterworld.
The global outhouse
There is in every human person the urge to piss in or upon something that is not technically designed to receive piss. The rhyme or reason for doing so is not often exact. Perhaps the traditional receptacle is unavailable; or it is unworthy of you compared to a pool, a shower, a campfire, the East River, your sister’s boyfriend’s truck, or the flag of Connecticut. Doing so just makes sense in the moment and does harm to almost no one of consequence.
And yet the institutions of arbitrary power (your mom) insist on shackling you to popular decorum, or else you get no dessert. Having no resolve to smash the institution, you resign yourself to it for the sake of appearances, all the while remaining vigilant for that choice moment when the institution is negligent, your bladder is at capacity, and there is no urinal in sight. In that fleeting moment the world is yours to piss on.
My regional school district of dirt
Of the person who loves dirt, we assume two things. One is that he is very dirty himself. The other is that cultivating dirt is more passive than fending it off. The lover of dirt is freer to express his love of dirt and expends less energy in doing so. Obviously if the first count was true we would see evidence of it, and the life of the lover of cleanliness would be at once easier and more anxious.
No. The lover of dirt might not mind being dirty from time to time and where it cannot be avoided, but I think that in itself is not very interesting to him as a regular practice. Nor is the idea of casually spreading dirt around. Precision loves precision; and the truth of dirt is a much more flexible toy than the truth of cleanliness. Where cleanliness finds an enemy in dirt, dirt finds a playmate in cleanliness. Dirt is loneliness. Dirt is the prospect of contact with cleanliness, even if that contact means its annihilation.
The War of Northern Affection
That northerners are arrogant, aloof, pragmatic, and a bit vampiric is not in dispute. Non-northerners have assessed the substance of the northerner’s character with admirable precision. Though they err in assessing the style. They say the northerner is loveless; but this is incorrect. The northerner is boundless with love; it is rather in how they dole it out that gets understandably lost in translation. Exploitation is a form of love in the north. It may even be among the highest forms of love: love through utility. When the north seeks to exploit someone or something it never does it out of indifference. Indeed, it is ever respectful of the vessels by which it extracts its resources. Though it is a very temporary relationship, to have never had it at all would be of great distress to the northerner.
Joy, contagious and incurable
Happiness today appears more like an illness with highly transmissible and mass-affecting derangements if it is left untreated long enough. Happiness is a kind of stupidity that clouds us of our better judgment to see the world as it really is: broken and unjust. Our joyful ignorance may not have been the culprit, but it was an enabler. Two cures are available: earnest self-righteousness or ironic detachment. At worst you can just crouch in the corner in paralytic self-mortification. But those who resist any cure to happiness are nothing short of emotional Typhoid Marys.
Freedom’s flux
It was long the custom that the limit of acceptable freedom was based purely on its appropriateness to a given situation. Such was the prohibition against shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater. You could not do that, and apparent woe unto those who did. This custom endured provided that the uniqueness of fire and abnormality of arson remained static. But society is ever in flux, and freedom echoes society. If burning or exploded objects impose increased inconveniences to large gatherings, it follows that the intentions of fire-yellers become more complicated, if not less offensive.
Weaponized disappointment
There is no more powerful weapon in the arsenal of any lover of the dramatic than disappointment. When it is done on your own terms, and with minimal material risk, the fruits of disappointment are bountiful and juicy. Disappointment, the kind we’d run headlong into incoming traffic to avoid, is often linked with personal failure or betrayal, yet seen another way, disappointment can be a route to self-definition.
I contrast this with the desire to surprise, which is overall positive, it is more sincere and not necessarily done for its own sake, and the effect is evenly distributed between surpriser and surprised. There are no losers.
Disappointment as a conscious act is less equitable, it requires a decisive advantage on the one who is disappointing and marked, even lasting, despair on the part of the disappointed. It is a way of negating estimations others have made of you, unsatisfactory for whatever reason. Think of the believer who turns atheist, or the intellectual freethinker who succumbs to despotism.
Ghostwritten tell-all memoir
CHAPTER ONE: You could never fully cure yourself of the urge for belonging. This seemed to persist because rather than in spite of your natural individualism, which always seemed less like a personal blessing or genius and more like a series of accidents crashing comically into a single vessel. No one of greater wisdom could ever give you persuasive reassurance of being too special for good company. So you trudged onward in search of a place to fit in, only circling back around to your supposed uniqueness, and with an acidic layer of bitterness seeping out of it, when the preferred option failed to complete itself as you’d hoped. You have always regretted this, though you’ve never been quite able to place on whose side the problem lies: your poetic pride or the group’s theatrical monasticism. THE END.