a thread for mundane ironists

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4401

[b]Chuck Palahniuk

You had a near life experience.[/b]

Yes, those things really do happen.

I irritate; therefore I am.

In spades you might say.

About my boss, Tyler tells me, if I’m really angry, I should go to the post office and fill out a change-of-address card and have all his mail forwarded to Rugby, North Dakota.

Sounds like something he picked up from Marla Singer.

…you can make mean anything…

And then make it mean something altogether different.

My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what?
My dad didn’t know.
When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn’t know, so he said, get married.
I’m a thirty-year-old boy, and I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer I need.

Really, what are the odds that this is not a true story?

Just because it’s anal intercourse doesn’t mean it’s not love.

Maybe, but that’s where the turds are, right?

4402

[b]tiny nietzsche

I don’t care what your cult is about, just give me that daily regime.[/b]

Think, for example, Satyr’s. Or, sure, if you are really desparate, Turd’s.

My déjà vu has déjà vu.

Then it’s déjà vu all the way down. Well, if you don’t count the trutles.

Ahab: mute the crew, unfollow the ocean, block the white whale

If Melville had a Twitter account.

Why do we have Sunday every week?

And who decided to put it after Saturday?

Would a person that doesn’t exist do this?

Come to think of it, no.

there is a burning bridge that never goes out

I know: Let’s charge admission to see it.

4403

[b]Orson Scott Card

Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.[/b]

I know that mine here is.

He could see Bonzo’s anger growing hot. Hot anger was bad. Ender’s anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo’s was hot, and so it used him.

A distinction worth noting, Kids.

We have to go. I’m almost happy here.

Or, sure, take your chances and stay.

Home is anywhere that you know all your friends and all your enemies.

Never been there then

This emotion I’m feeling now, this is love, right?
I don’t know. Is it a longing? Is it a giddy stupid happiness just because you’re with me?
Yes, she said.
That’s influenza, said Miro. Watch for nausea or diarrhea within a few hours.

In other words, out in the real world.

The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

You tell me: dasein down to the bone?

4404

[b]Richard Yates

Wasn’t it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn’t really wanted to do?[/b]

Trust me: There’s a point out there with your name on it.

If you haven’t written a novel by the time you’re forty you never will!

I wrote two of them. But that’s not the point, is it?

If you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail…it takes backbone to lead the life you want.

As though backbone were really all there was to it.

As an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man, wasn’t it simple logic to expect that he’d be limited to intense, nicotine-stained Jean-Paul Sartre sorts of Women?

Seems reasonable to me, but: is that the same as being logical? Let’s ask [among others] James.

How could you ever learn to trust the things you made up?

Well, you might forget that you did.

Whoever said you can’t love ridiculous things? God knows I love you, and you’re the most ridiculous woman I ever met!

Five will get you ten she’s thinking the same thing about him.

4405

[b]Leo Tolstoy

But that’s the whole aim of civilization: to make everything a source of enjoyment.[/b]

Provided you can either buy or sell it.
Our civilization in other words.

One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way – said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.

Clearly one of those observations that is true only to the extent that you believe it is.

But that had been grief–this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.

Clearly one of those observations that is true only to the extent that you believe it is.

Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.

Not unlike [in some respects] life itself.

In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.

In order to misunderstand too.

People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about “these days,” imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of “these days” and that human nature changes with the times.

Not unlike those days and the days to come.

4406

[b]Randall Munroe

There were no earthworms in New England when the European colonists arrived.[/b]

Hmm. Were there supposed to be?

They say lightning never strikes in the same place twice. “They” are wrong. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s a little surprising that this saying has survived; you’d think that people who believed it would have been gradually filtered out of the living population.

Really, when it comes to weeding out the weak links, those folks are the least of our worries.

It’s weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it’s literally the most predictable thing in the Universe.

I know: Whatever that merans.

If we divide up the world’s land area evenly, there’s enough room for each of us to have a little over 2 hectares each, with the nearest person 77 meters away.

Good to know when we ever get around to it.

In conclusion, if the Sun went out, we would see a variety of benefits across many areas of our lives. Are there any downsides to this scenario? We would all freeze and die.

Perspective as they say.

That’s one in 27 quinquatrigintillion.

Probably just something that he made up: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers
But maybe not.

4407

[b]David Wong

When a man plans, a woman laughs.[/b]

Right, like it never works the other the way around.
It does, doesn’t it?

People die.
This is the fact the world desperately hides from us from birth. Long after you find out the truth about sex and Santa Claus, this other myth endures, this one about how you’ll always get rescued at the last second and if not, your death will at least mean something and there’ll be somebody there to hold your hand and cry over you. All of society is built to prop up that lie, the whole world a big, noisy puppet show meant to distract us from the fact that at the end, you’ll die, and you’ll probably be alone.

Well, John did die at the end, right?

Let’s say you have an ax. Just a cheap one, from Home Depot. On one bitter winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don’t worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you’re the one who shot him.

More to the point, can the family of the dead man sue Home Depot? You know, in a perfect world.

John, let me make one thing clear, Jim said, cutting me off in his most stern, evangelical voice. Every man is blessed with his gifts from the Lord. One of mine happens to be a penis large enough that, if it had a penis of its own, my penis’ penis would be larger than your penis.
.Fuck all of you, John retorted. You don’t even exist. We’re all just a figment of my cock’s imagination.

Let’s file this one under, “the mother of all pissing contests”.

Are the most dangerous creatures the ones that use doors or the ones that don’t?

Obviously: Yes.

You know if you walked around the world, your hat would travel thirty-one feet farther than your shoes?

He thought: How about my belt?

4408

[b]Michio Kaku

I concluded that, unhappily, I’d been born into a world dominated by a rampaging monster called ‘law’ that was both all-powerful and all-stupid[/b]

True, but consider the two alternatives: right makes might and might makes right.

My own emotional feeling is that life has a purpose—ultimately, I’d guess that the purpose it has is the purpose that we’ve given it and not a purpose that came out of any cosmic design.

That can’t be good.

There isn’t an equation that can confirm something as self-evident (to us humans) as “muggy weather is uncomfortable” or “mothers are older than their daughters.” There has been some progress made in translating this sort of information into mathematical logic, but to catalog the common sense of a four-year-old child would require hundreds of millions of lines of computer code.

Well, then we better get started.

And Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, said in 1943, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Obviously he meant per person.

My feeling is that in religion there are very serious things, like the existence of God and the brotherhood of man, that are serious truths that we will one day learn to appreciate in perhaps a different language on a different scale. So I think there are real truths there, and in the sense the majesty of the universe is meaningful, and we do owe honor and awe to its Creator.

There’s no way of course that he can really believe this.

“The brain, like it or not, is a machine. Scientists have come to that conclusion, not because they are mechanistic killjoys, but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain.” —Steven Pinker

Right, like that settles it.

4409

[b]Hilary Mantel

When he wakes he has to learn the lack of her all over again.[/b]

And she of him?

I know she’s rather plain, but every girl has a right to conceal that fact from people who haven’t seen her.

A natural God given right as it were.

Nothing hurts, or perhaps it’s that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out.

Been there, done that. And now [of course] it’s back again.

He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities.

Also, the occasional undiplomatic pssibilities.

I think, if you’re going to kill a man, do it. Don’t write him a letter about it. Don’t bluster and threaten and put him on his guard.

Unless of course you can get away with it. And you are really, really sure of it.

You…person, he says; and again, you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer.

…you philosopher. Nope it isn’t quite the same is it?

4410

[b]so sad today

horoscope: you shouldn’t text him but you will[/b]

Applicable however only to the first 12 signs.

you don’t know I exist: a love story

Not only that, but with a happy ending.

everyone is doing the best they can, which kind of makes it worse

You know what’s coming: And not just here.

what should I wear to never leaving my room?

Nothing at all works for me.

the light at the end of the tunnel was just somebody’s phone

Let’s look for it on youtube.

i sexually identify as a vague sense of impending doom

Maybe, but did you cum?

4411

[b]Muriel Spark

If I had my life to live over again, I would form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is not another practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life.[/b]

Aside from being absurd, sure, it might work.

…you’re quite wrong there, Collie. One does miss sex. The body has a life of its own. We do miss what we haven’t had, you and I. Biologically. Ask Sigmund Freud. It is revealed in dreams. The absent touch of warm limbs at night, the absent.

Maybe. Maybe not. But the part about dreams is right.

They are demanding equal rights with us, says Mrs. Fiedke. That’s why I never vote with the Liberals. Perfume, jewellery, hair down to their shoulders, and I’m not talking about the ones who were born like that. I mean, the ones that can’t help it should be put on an island. It’s the others I’m talking about. There was a time they would stand up and open the door for you. They would take their hat off. But they want their equality today. All I say is that if God had intended them to be as good as us he wouldn’t have made them different from us to the naked eye. They don’t want to be all dressed alike any more. Which is only a move against us. You couldn’t run an army like that, let alone the male sex. With all due respects to Mr. Fiedke, may he rest in peace, the male sex is getting out of hand. Of course, Mr. Fiedke knew his place as a man, give him his due.

Thank god we’ve finally resolved all that nonsense, right?

Remember you must die.

In the interim though: Remember you must live.

Miss Brodie was easily the equal of both sisters together, she was the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle and they were only the squares on the other two sides.

Well [as they say] that’s settles that!

4:15. Not 4 not 4:30 but 4:15. She thought to intimidate me with the use of quarter hours.

We all know that kind.

4412

[b]Emma Donoghue

Scared is what you’re feeling. Brave is what you’re doing.[/b]

Of course [depending on the consequences] you might wish it were the other way around.

Stories are a different kind of true.

In other words, they don’t actually have to be.

When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I’m five I know everything.

Seems a bit premature but some kids are more precocious than others.

Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.

Still, it’s far and away better than, “we’ll see.” Or maybe that was just something that I was told a lot.

People move around so much in the world, things get lost.

Let me know if you find mine.

Books are the air I breathe, so I don’t notice the seasons.

And to think I once aspired to that myself.

4413

[b]Existential Comics

I bet the last human on earth will be pretty pissed off if we haven’t solved the internalism/externalism debate in epistemology by then.[/b]

Hasn’t James S. Saint already solved that? :wink:

The real truth is that I feel quite comfortable comparing apples to oranges.

I know: You thought you were the only one.

Husserl was the first philosopher to have the brilliant insight to solve the mind/body problem by just ignoring it.

Hell, there’s not much you can’t solve that way.

And then a miracle occurred, and there was still one beer left in the fridge.

In other words, a real miracle.

Beware when fighting monsters, lest you become a monster. But also beware quoting Nietzsche too much, lest you sound like an edgy teenager.

Worse: You sound like a satyr.

Sartre: Manager, I’d like to register a compliant.
Manager: Yes?
Sartre: My waiter didn’t bring my soup out of pure authentic freedom.

He should have been the cook in other words.

4414

[b]Walker Percy

Consider to what extent an “antique” is prized because it is excellently made and beautiful and to what extent it is prized because it is an antique and as such is saturated with another time and another place and is therefore resistant to absorption by the self.[/b]

Nope, that might be taking dasein too far.

Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.

No fits anymore for him, right?

I prefer to live in the South but on my own terms. It takes some doing to insert oneself in such a way as not to succumb to the ghosts of the Old South or the happy hustlers of the new Sunbelt South.

But how hard [or easy] could that be?

I subscribe to Consumer Reports and as a consequence I own a first-class television set, an all but silent air conditioner and a very long lasting deodorant. My armpits never stink.

Of course they don’t do tests on philosophies.

Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life…

Not even close. Well, maybe in a determined world.

Neo-Darwinian theory has trouble accounting for the strange, sudden, and belated appearance of man, the conscious self which speaks, lies, deceives itself, and also tells the truth.

I’m sure that neo-neo-Darwinian theory accounts for it. Or, down the road, neo-neo-neo-Darwinian theory will.

4415

[b]Paul Bowles

He could not feel at ease with gourmets and hedonists; they were a hostile species.[/b]

Trust me then: I’ve never been either.

If you could not have freedom you could still have vengeance.

Sure, I’d settle for that.

There’s something repulsive about an American without money in his pocket.

Indeed, it’s practically unconstitutional. It might even be mentioned in the Bible.

The people of each country get more like the people of every other country. They have no character, no beauty, no ideals, no culture-nothing, nothing. Everything’s getting gray, and it’ll be grayer.

The McWorld in other words. Brought to you by literally hundreds and hundreds of sponsers.

These were the first moments of a new existence, a strange one in which she already glimpsed the element of timelessness that would surround her. The person who frantically has been counting the seconds on his way to catch a train, and arrives panting just as it disappears, knowing the next one is not due for many hours, feels something of the same sudden surfeit of time, the momentary sensation of drowning in an element become too rich and too plentiful to be consumed, and thereby made meaningless, non-existent.

Time again. And what to make of it.

In the school they teach you what the world means, and once you have learned, you will always know, Amar’s father had told him.
But suppose the world changes? Amar had thought. Then what would you know?

What would you know, Mr. Objectivist?
In other words, and still be “one of us”?

4416

[b]tiny nietzsche

Will them all to power, let nietzsche sort them out[/b]

I know: you wish you’d thought of that.

when skeletons collide

I’ll collide with yours if you’ll collide with mine.

I’m not the boss of me either.

I’m not even his secretary.

There would be a lot more goth astronauts if NASA wasn’t such a dick about cigarettes.

Mars: A smoke free planet.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who want to die in the heat, and those that wish to die in the cold.

Me? 72 degrees please. Fahrenheit.

locally produced nihilism

See, they’re not all the same.

4417

[b]Marquis de Sade

Were he supreme, were he mighty, were he just, were he good, this God you tell me about, would it be through enigmas and buffooneries he would wish to teach me to serve and know him?[/b]

So, is that a good point or not?

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

Indeed, and fiction does, after all, rhyme with friction. You know the kind.

The past encourages me, the present electrifies me, and I have little fear for the future; and my hope is that the rest of my life shall by far surpass the extravagances of my youth.

And how many of us can say that? Not me, for example.

I assumed that everything must yield to me, that the entire universe had to flatter my whims, and that I had the right to satisfy them at will.

Let’s assume that he was disappointed.

Chimerical and empty being, your name alone has caused more blood to flow on the face of the earth than any political war ever will. Return to the nothingness from which the mad hope and ridiculous fright of men dared call you forth to their misfortune. You only appeared as a torment for the human race. What crimes would have been spared the world, if they had choked the first imbecile who thought of speaking of you.

I wouldn’t go that far. Though sure I have gone farther.

One has always had too much when one has had enough.

Oddly enough, as it were.

4418

[b]Ethicist For Hire

I’ll troll someone who blocked you, if you troll someone who blocked me…[/b]

Or, here, foed.

Costello: “Who’s on first?”
Abbott: “Wait, I’m Googling it…”

Go ahead, try it yourself.

What makes you happy?
Socrates: “Debate”
Montaigne: “Doubt”
Hegel: “Dialectic”
Nietzsche: “Dionysus”
Zizek: “Dumbasses”

I know what you’re thinking: being one himself.

Today is Hegel’s birthday. Celebrate by reading some Kierkegaard.

Or skip right to Nietzsche.

Who’s your favorite philosopher?
Define ‘favorite’.
The one you like most.
Define ‘like’.

And then it’s definitions all the way down.

Trump: “Correlation implies causation.”
Hillary: “No, it doesn’t.”
Media: “Tell us what YOU think!”

And who are better qualified than US?

4419

[b]Haruki Murakami

According to Aristophanes in Plato’s The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people. In ancient times people weren’t simply male or female, but one of three types : male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangment and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half.[/b]

Of course back then you couldn’t opt for a sex change operation.

If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.

Maybe but, come on, He either is or He isn’t.

Even chance meetings are the result of karma. Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.

Of course this is like his God above: It’s true if you think it is. Although, sure, it either is or is not.

Find me now. Before someone else does.

Not to worry: No one ever does.

For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?

It does if you need it to.

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.

Meaning that [at any time] they are apt to come back.

4420

[b]Richard Ford

You’re only good if you can do bad and decide not to.[/b]

I’ll let you know if I ever do.

Life’s passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.

In other words, along with all the other fucking parts.

Some idiotic things are well worth doing.

And we’re doing one of them here.

Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. You rarely miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.

Of course I’m the exception. Well, along with you.

Your life doesn’t mean what you have or what you get. It’s what you’re willing to give up.

Though sometimes you really don’t have much choice.

Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things.

Let’s just say we all have our own rendition of that.