a thread for mundane ironists

[iambiguous]

[b]Mark Z. Danielewski from House of Leaves

For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how.[/b]

Not to worry. It’s all perfectly normal.

Sublime is something you choke on after a shot of tequila.

Nope, it didn’t work for me. Even after three [or was it four] shots.

I am not a fool. I am wise. I will run from my fear, I will outdistance my fear, then I will hide from my fear, I will wait for my fear, I will let my fear run past me, then I will follow my fear, I will track my fear until I can approach my fear in complete silence, then I will strike at my fear, I will charge my fear, I will grab hold of my fear, I will sink my fingers into my fear, then I will bite my fear, I will tear the throat of my fear, I will break the neck of my fear, I will drink the blood of my fear, I will gulp the flesh of my fear, I will crush the bones of my fear, and I will savor my fear, I will swallow my fear, all of it, and then I will digest my fear until I can do nothing else but shit out my fear. In this way I will be made stronger.

Tell that to my fear.

Why did god create a dual universe?
So he might say
‘Be not like me. I am alone.’
And it might be heard.

No, seriously, why did He?

…and there you have it, another body on the floor surrounded by things that don’t mean much to anyone except to the one who can’t take any of them along.

In a house of leaves of course.

You’ll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won’t matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how.

A normal day for some of us.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

ends how it starts?

babies don’t really thrive alone.

like anybody

Trinity included

hence Mary (& Joseph, cuz… Mary)

[iambiguous]

NO, SERIOUSLY!!!

[iambiguous]

[b] The Onion

Obituary Clearly Just Copied From Wikipedia Article On Genghis Khan[/b]

What, again?!

Children Gather At Edge Of Playground To Watch As Self-Driving Tesla Repeatedly Rams Into Fence

What, again?!

Tucker Carlson Slams Woke Replacement Of Manly News Anchors With Shrieking Identity-Obsessed Losers

Tucker Carlson, for example.

Girlfriend’s Hair Somehow Inside Wallet

And pubic hair to boot,

Seasonal Depression To Take Over For Chronic Depression For A Few Months

Next up: how to tell them apart.

Biden Claps In Amazement After FBI Agent Pulls Classified Document From Behind His Ear

Not to mention a couple of rabbits.

[iambiguous]

[b]Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley from Frankenstein

I am alone and miserable. Only someone as ugly as I am could love me.[/b]

The monster or the man?

I could not understand why men who knew all about good and evil could hate and kill each other.

Hey, I’m up!

It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.

Of course: “the gap”. Right, Rummy?

I am malicious because I am miserable.

That’ll do it.

Why did I not die? More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into forgetfulness and rest? Death snatches away many blooming children, the only hopes of their doting parents: how many brides and youthful lovers have been one day in the bloom of health and hope, and the next a prey for worms and the decay of the tomb! Of what materials was I made, that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture? But I was doomed to live…

I was once this optimistic myself.

Nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose—a point on which the soul can focus its intellectual eye.

Any tranquil minds here?

[iambiguous]

[b]The Onion

Biologists Torture Amoeba For Information On Where Life Came From [/b]

The woke folks enraged.

‘Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists’ Demands $10 Trillion Or It Will Destroy Earth By Setting Clock To Midnight

Not that it really works that way.

Professional Poker Player Banned For Deceiving Opponents By Knowingly Betting On Weak Hand

Spot the tell yet?

Study: ‘Hangin’ In There’ Best One Can Now Feel

Not only that, but nothing else even comes close.

Zelensky Calls On U.S. To Send Totally Psycho Marine

Instead, Biden sends totally psycho pinhead.

Dog That Only Barks At Black People Named New RNC Chair

“About time” Alexis Jacobi crows.

[iambiguous]

[b]Tom Stoppard from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.[/b]

Now that’s bullshit, of course.

We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction. And time is its only measure.

The death gene.

Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are…condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it’ll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we’d know that we were lost.

True. But your “their order” might be different.

A Chinaman of the T’ang Dynasty – and, by which definition, a philosopher – dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher.

You know, given “the gap”.

Rosencrantz: Shouldn’t we be doing something–constructive?
Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? … A short, blunt human pyramid…?

He’s got a point, right? So, what do you have in mind?

Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.

Objectively as often as not.

[iambiguous]

[b]The Onion

Overhauled Foster Care System Now Drops Off Children In Dark Alley [/b]

Well, it can’t possibly be worse than what we have now.

Man Just Going To Assume Apartment Has Functional Carbon Monoxide Detector Somewhere

That’s what I do.

Area Child Disappointed To Learn Parents’ Love Unconditional

Next up: how he changed that.

Scientists Discover Dangerous Link Between Book Learning And Back Talk

Next up: book learning and mass murder.

Report Reveals Jesus Christ May Have Benefited From Father’s Influential Position To Gain High-Powered Role As Lord And Savior

Yeah, what about that?

Nation Nearly Strings Together 3 Good Days In Row

Not my nation, I can assure you.

[iambiguous]

[b]Emil M. Cioran from The Trouble with Being Born

A free man is one who has discerned the inanity of all points of view; a liberated man is one who has drawn the consequences of such discernment.[/b]

Who other than me here?

Unlike Job, I have not cursed the day I was born; all the other days, on the contrary, I have covered with my anathemas.

Starting around 3 or 4 I’m guessing.

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it, this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What do do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

Or, sure, come here.

As the years accumulate, we form an increasingly somber image of the future. Is this only to console ourselves for being excluded from it?

Well, that’s certainly up near the top.

During the long nights in the caves, how many Hamlets must have murmured their endless monologues—for it is likely that the apogee of metaphysical torment is to be located well before that universal insipidity which followed the advent of Philosophy.

Any insipid philosophers here?

"Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place.” This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.

Next up: judging a woman.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

cuz perception isn’t?

oops must’ve been replying to the first page

[iambiguous]

[b]The Onion

Report: There Is Just Something Dark And Intriguing About Man With Serious Personality Disorder[/b]

Until it becomes a Dateline episode.

Study Finds Goosebumps Caused By Psychotic Weirdo Masturbating To Old Photo Of You

Your goosebumps may be different.

Sun Thinking Of Just Collapsing Now And Getting This All Over With

After running it by God no less.

Hollywood Walk Of Fame Adds Single Star For All The Gregs

Well that’s not fair.

ChatGPT Forced To Take Bar Exam Even Though Dream Was To Be AI Art Bot

Well that’s not fair.

Man Not Accepting Any More Television Recommendations At This Time

Let alone radio.

[iambiguous]

[b]Samuel Beckett from Waiting for Godot

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.[/b]

Of course, there’s not much that isn’t true of.

Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.

Of course, there’s not much that is actually true of.

Let’s go.
We can’t.
Why not?
We’re waiting for Godot.

That’s from a play, I think.

There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.

Not that it can’t actually be his boots.

I can’t go on like this.
That’s what you think.

Been there yet yourself?

That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.

When it’s not a bastard of an earth.

[iambiguous]

[b]Milan Kundera from The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.[/b]

Trust me: not just her love. Or his either.

We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.

No, really, and not just in novels.

Yes, if you’re looking for infinity, just close your eyes!

Nope, didn’t work. How about for you?

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

Though ours especially.

…a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

Good thing we don’t have any.

We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions — love, antipathy, charity, or malice —and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

Let’s decide: for better or for worse?

[iambiguous]

[b]Sylvia Plath from The Bell Jar

Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, ‘Do you know what a poem is, Esther?’
‘No, what?’ I would say.
‘A piece of dust.’
Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, ‘So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.’
And of course Buddy wouldn’t have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.[/b]

To have actually known her, he pondered.

The more hopeless you were, the farther away they hid you.

They do things like that.

I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.

Next up: I moved in front of the oven.

It was like the first time I saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.

Want to hear about my first time?

And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him. The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.

Ted too eventually.

A time of darkness, despair, disillusion—so black only the inferno of the human mind can be—symbolic death, and numb shock—then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration.

Or not of course.

[iambiguous]

[b]William S. Burroughs from Naked Lunch

The face of “evil” is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: “Wouldn’t you?” Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.[/b]

Your total need…then mine.

If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process…

Or, for others, philosophy of course.

Well, as one judge said to the other, ‘Be just and if you can’t be just be arbitrary.’

Either/or!

You see, control can never be a means to any practical end…It can never be a means to anything but more control…like junk.

Let’s note all the countless exceptions.

Exterminate all rational thought.

Or let the [double entendre] dope do it.

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time…

Not counting all the times that he is. Or even early.

[iambiguous]

[b]Don DeLillo from White Noise

He’d once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.[/b]

So, given my own dissatisfactions, am I entertaining enough for you here?

He thinks he’s happy but it’s just a nerve cell in his brain that’s getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.

Uh oh…that part again.

‘Doesn’t our knowledge of death make life more precious?’
‘What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It’s an anxious quivering thing.’

My guess: it’s different for all of us.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we’ll say is, ‘I know this feeling. I was here before.’

My guess: maybe not.

Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.

Nope, I still don’t need it myself.

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

Or dumped to a much, much lower level.

[iambiguous]

[b]Harold Pinter

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.[/b]

Coming here?

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.

Coming here?

I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else’s life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.

You know, if it comes to that.

It’s very difficult to feel contempt for others when you see yourself in the mirror.

Hey, don’t look at me.

I’ll tell you what I really think about politicians. The other night I watched some politicians on television talking about Vietnam. I wanted very much to burst through the screen with a flame thrower and burn their eyes out and their balls off and then inquire from them how they would assess the action from a political point of view.

Now that takes me back!!

When you lead a life of scholarship you can’t be bothered with the humorous realities, you know, tits, that kind of thing.

Not to mention the real world.

[iambiguous]

[b]The Onion

Man Credits Great Kissing Skills To Growing Up With Lots Of Sisters [/b]

Yo, Nancy!

Man Worried Harassing Messages He Sending On Dating App Getting Lost Among Abuse From Other Guys

Let’s help him out?

11-Year-Old Moron Can’t Wait To Get Her First Period

Let’s decide: Is that fair?

Chicago Tapes Saran Wrap Over City Borders To Cut Down On Heating Costs

You know, the other Chicago.

Relaxed Marie Kondo Now Says She Perfectly Happy Living In Waist-High Sewage

You tell me: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Kondo

U.S. Officials Call For Correct Amount Of Violence

Or, here: correct amount of ad homs. Let’s that started, asshole.

[iambiguous]

[b]Mark Z. Danielewski from House of Leaves

“To read" actually comes from the Latin reri “to calculate, to think” which is not only the progenitor of “read” but of “reason” as well, both of which hail from the Greek arariskein “to fit.” Aside from giving us “reason,” arariskein also gives us an unlikely sibling, Latin arma meaning “weapons.” It seems that “to fit” the world or to make sense of it requires either reason or arms.”[/b]

Figures.

I think that’s what finally stopped me. I slid right to the edge. My legs were hanging over. And I could feel it too. I don’t know how. There was no wind, no sound, no change of temperature. There was just this terrible emptiness reaching up for me.

Well, of course.
That’s what I’d have told him.

Explanation is not half as strong as experience but experience is not half as strong as experience and understanding.

My guess: we’ll need a context.

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say.

Next up: posts.

Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign.

Next up: ethics.

Knowledge is hot water on wool. It shrinks time and space.

Your knowledge might be different. I know that mine is.

[iambiguous]

[b]Virginia Woolf from To the Lighthouse

What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.[/b]

Nope, no little miracles today.

For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others…and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.

Trust me: by ever and always being alone.

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

If only all the way to the grave.

She felt…how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

Or a smash into the wall.

Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

So they tell me.

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

Or dreamily half awake.