Slaughterhome
Accumulated mental health opportunities.
What I like most about America is that it is extremely cool and unceasingly fucked up. There are monster trucks crushing smaller trucks, red solo cups filled with fake sugar, and pep rallies involving huge mounds of fire. The living rot in their dens and the dead rampage to Slayer. Emerson writes of this.
Better to be a YouTube essay topic than a YouTube essayist. Not that there’s much chance of that happening. YouTube viewers regurgitate into the algorithm which regurgitates into the YouTubers who regurgitate the regurgitation back into the viewers.
Give the cows the run of the slaughterhouse and watch it turn into a slaughterhome.
Gazing out along the Turnpike. An expanse of mausoleums with built-in hot tubs.
Some people just can’t help asking questions. Like “Why is there a casket where the groom should be?” or “Why is everyone at this birthday party a mannequin?” They would sooner interrogate life than embrace it, I guess.
“I guess a bad relationship can teach you about love in the same way J.G. Ballard can teach you how to drive.”
The demand to take the sincerity pill acts on an assumption that doing so turns everyone into some kind of David Foster Wallace-by-way-of-Gordon Lightfoot softy—who is always introspective, patient, and tolerant. As if washing off a clown’s makeup also washes off, rather than accentuates, the clown’s menace.
A moral outlook born out of quiet disrespect and solemn stupidity.
“We like to think of them as mental health opportunities.”
“So on a scale from asking to speak to the manager to burning down your house while your family is sleeping, where do you place your chastened optimism?”
“Tricking my niece into watching Faces of Death.”
“Oh, so somewhere in the midrange.”
I don’t have predictions for 2026, only hopes: that the people I love prosper, that the people I do not love suffer, or a contented third thing for myself to make me indifferent to either of them.
At least on a personal level there is hope in hate. Because that suggests that admiration existed before souring into its reflection. But precisely because of that, hatred is too much for most people. So they will have to settle for a glacial politeness: acknowledgment without respect; recognition of your voice without comprehension of its content.
My most Emersonian belief is that freedom is not achieved through self-improvement, but by defying expectations. If the heirlooms you already have do nothing for you, throw them out and discover your conscience and principles without a map to guide you. Even if that leads you to surrender them to a more amenable family.
There is an ongoing conflict between those who post and those who write so as to resolve, finally, the relationship between content and literature. Posters think content rises to literature; writers worry that literary craft online sinks into content. Cultural history shows that it’s not up to the disputants but to the judgment of tomorrow’s editors. Ultimately it’s a stalemate. Content compels aesthetic shifts and offers more formal variety, if not innovation. Literature absorbs the shifts and varieties that work into the craft traditions, while assuring that tomorrow has editors to judge them.
Staging a play in a meat locker is cultural resilience. Writing a play for a meat locker is cultural decadence.
Morbid aesthetics, gallows humor, and absurd ideas can come from a natural affinity satisfied by no rational defense. You always risk ruining the mood and putting off other people by indulging one or all of them. Unless the mood and the people bore you near to death, then it’s their own fault.
“Leaving New York” essays grate not because they exist but because they are dishonest to the point of inertia. All the wistful regret of an unserious romance belying a subtext of “I made coming to this city my whole personality. It spat in my face anyway. I wish nuclear fury upon it as it eats my dust.”
Morvern Callar is a guilty pleasure of a special kind: on my account, not the film’s. I always fail to put away the nationalist lens when watching it. I can’t separate the film’s own achievement from Scotland’s, through its articulation of a cinematic language that is wholly Scotland’s own. Easily equaling great English films like The Go-Between. A declaration of cultural independence more lasting than the political. Like Lanark before it. Not cutting off from England, just proving it wrong. Again.
I don’t begrudge people-pleasers. They’re right to fear the crushing dullness of not being well-liked.
Nuclear paranoia is just nuclear entitlement, a blinding self-love that fails to appreciate the difficulties a nuclear attacker faces in determining which population is most worth the expending of their payload. So let’s not make it about ourselves. I propose an essay contest to determine the most cogent, morally honest case to claim the status of nuclear casualty. The prize for which will be handed down sooner or later.
“You’re a broadcast signal intrusion in a world of Tubi original movies.”
