a thread for mundane ironists

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10921

[b]The Onion

Man Arriving Late Forced To Use Excuse He Was Saving For Leaving Early [/b]

Bummer.

Man Ice Skating For First Time Really Getting Hang Of Clutching Wall

Some never do.

Green Comet Slows Down To Gawk As It Passes Totally Wrecked Planet

You know, if that’s even possible.

Biden Casually Tells National Prayer Breakfast He’s Been To Heaven Several Times

This and, God assured him, Trump is going straight to Hell.

Woman Puts On True Crime Podcast To Entertain Herself While Cleaning Up Husband’s Entrails

Two birds, one stone.

Study Finds Not Acting Like Total Fucking Moron Most Attractive Quality In Potential Mate

Not here of course.

10922

[b]Tom Stoppard from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Give us this day our daily mask.[/b]

He means masks, of course. Plural.

Uncertainty is the normal state.

Anyone here not certain of that?

Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn’t death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn’t bring death home to anyone—it doesn’t catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says— ‘One day you are going to die’.

Let alone what I do here.

I’ve lost all capacity for disbelief. I’m not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.

No, really, what if you did?!

We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good’s a brick to a drowning man?

Or, for that matter, a straw.

Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.

I’ll chance it myself.

10923

[b]Erich Maria Remarque from All Quiet on the Western Front

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.[/b]

Next up: the Second World War.

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.

Next up: the Second World War.

But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony–Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?

Tell that to the “masters of war”…to those who own and operate the military industrial complex.

It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.

Next up: the unhappiness here.

We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.

Alone works for me. Though not terribly.

We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.

You know, eventually.

10924

[b]The Onion

Nation Surrenders To Chinese Balloon[/b]

Deep State still insisting it shot it down.

Florida Board Of Education Removes Africa From World Maps

Replaced with snow white Antarctica. But no one is fooled.

Newly Discovered Sketches Reveal Regional Chain Restaurants Lewis And Clark Encountered On Expedition Across America

Owned and operated by Native Americans of course.

Walmart Destroys Another Local Business

It’s in the millions by now.

Whites Ousted From Role As Master Race After Racist Past Comes To Light

Alexis Jacobi shits himself!!

Deep Down, Area Man Knows He’s Not Done Vomiting

Next up: not done shitting.

10925

[b]Jean-Paul Sartre from No Exit

So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people![/b]

As though that’s all they were. But, no doubt about it, point taken.

You are your life, and nothing else.

An existential thing let’s call it.

I never could bear the idea of anyone’s expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.

Not unlike what they’re thinking about you.

Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.

Nausea let’s call it.

I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.

Philosophy let’s call it.

There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror. And then, next day, you didn’t know what to make of it, you couldn’t interpret the horror you had glimpsed the day before.

Next up: the day after that.

10926

I never could bear the idea of anyone’s expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.

Not unlike what they’re thinking about you.

Nietzsche thought that was pretty weak, as I recall. Unless he was doing it, of course, the ornery little temple smasher.

10927

[b]Samuel Beckett from Waiting for Godot

What do they say?
They talk about their lives.
To have lived is not enough for them.
They have to talk about it.[/b]

Yo, Oprah!

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?

And then [of course] the mystery of time itself.

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

Billions and billions now and counting.

People are bloody ignorant apes.

And naked to boot.

To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.

How little is yours?

We always find something, eh Didi, to let us think we exist?

All the way to the grave as likely as not.

10928

[b]The Onion

Local Bar Comes Out As Gay[/b]

I know what you’re thinking: What if my bar does?!

Area Mom Off Thinking About Princess Diana Again

Area Dad too. I mean, who doesn’t?

Woman Pieces Together Timeline Of Boyfriend’s Past Relationships Like Detective Tracking Zodiac Killer

And what do you know…!

Victoria’s Secret Releases Sexy Black Lace Sleep Apnea Mask

Next up: Sexy Black Lace tampon.

Man’s Garbage To Have Much More Significant Effect On Planet Than He Will

Next up: your garbage.

Self-Conscious Flasher Fully Clothed Under Trench Coat

Or so says the self-conscious victim.

10929

[b]Milan Kundera from The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.[/b]

Some traps more than others.

Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Some kitsch more than others.

If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life’s so light.

Unbearably sometimes.

Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.

Language games, let’s call them.
Or not.

Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).

Your task now is to make sense of that.

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head. they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely, but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-powering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!

Hear! Hear!

10930

[b]Sylvia Plath from The Bell Jar

He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like.[/b]

Me too. At first. Then I was really hooked.

I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over - dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.

Me too. From the other side, of course.

To the person in The Bell Jar, black and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.

On the good days, maybe.

What I didn’t say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

Not counting Dasein of course.

A man’s world is different from a woman’s world and a man’s emotions are different from a woman’s emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.

Pick one:
1] divorce
2] suicide

The reason I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly. It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash it again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.

Next up [eventually]: the reason I hadn’t posted today…

10931

[b]The Onion

Perverted Little Boy Asks To Sleep With Parents[/b]

Perverted parents consent.

Woman Spirals Into Vortex Of Self-Doubt After Trader Joe’s Cashier Does Not Compliment Any Of Her Selected Items

So, could that actually happen?

Man Honestly Better Off For Having Turned Self Over To Algorithms

Anyone here better off living algorithmically?

Study Finds Majority Of Americans No Longer Bothering To Unwrap Hamburger

Or take the Big Mac out of the box.

The Super Company Announces It’s Not Renewing Sponsorship Contract With NFL Bowl Game

Let’s think up a new name for it.
Mine: The Pinhead Bowl.

Police Chief Vows Officer Accused Of Misconduct Will Receive Harshest Possible Nickname

After the promotion of course.

10932

[b]William S. Burroughs from Naked Lunch

The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell… Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.[/b]

And here, post by post…

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

Wow, insect agony no less.

He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells…

A doper fiend, let’s say.

Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don’t if the shot is right. That’s the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit — Kid, it was tasty.

A doper fiend, let’s say.

If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the “higher ups” so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.

You know, now that the American Dream is in tatters.

Mohammed? Are you kidding? He was dreamed up by the Mecca Chamber of Commerce.

Next up: Jesus.

10933

[b]Don DeLillo from White Noise

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.[/b]

In Turkey, for example. Praise the Lord?

Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.

Was, anyway. But there are still those around wanting to be larger than him.

The world is full of abandoned meanings.

Okay, but with two more to take their place.

Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn’t it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don’t want to go to Montana. How do I know I really want to go and it isn’t just some neurons firing or something? Maybe it’s just an accidental flash in the medulla and suddenly there I am in Montana and I find out I really didn’t want to go there in the first place. I can’t control what happens in my brain, so how can I be sure what I want to do ten seconds from now, much less Montana next summer? It’s all this activity in the brain and you don’t know what’s you as a person and what’s some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to misfire.

Here? Of course: pick a thread.

The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire.

Check it anyway, right?

For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.

Next up: talk radio.

10934

[b]Jennifer Egan from A Visit from the Goon Squad

I’m always happy, Sasha said. Sometimes I just forget.[/b]

Not unlike I’m forgetting now.

If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.

Unless, of course, that’s why you come here.

Sure, everything is ending, Jules said, but not yet.

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

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.

My guess: with you it’s actually true.

There’s a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours - days, if I have to.

Weeks? Months? Years?
There’s somebody for each of them.

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

Your questions might be different.
Not unlike your answers.

10935

[b]Mark Z. Danielewski from House of Leaves

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you’ll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You’ll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And for better or worse you’ll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you’ve got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name. And then the nightmares will begin.[/b]

Been there, done that. Come on, join me.

Come morning I found the day as I have found every other day–without relief or explanation.

25,000 plus now and counting.

Beautiful women are always drawn to men they think will keep them beautiful.

How’s that working out for you?

Absolutely nothing visible to the eye provides a reason for or even evidence of those terrifying shifts which can in a matter of moments reconstitute a simple path into an extremely complicated one.

Either that or absolutely something.

…the finest act of seeing is necessarily always the act of not seeing something else.

Let alone nothing else.

You wouldn’t believe how much harder it’s getting for me to just leave my studio. It’s really sad. In fact these days the only thing that gets me outside is when I say: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck this. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck

Yeah, something like that, I’d agree.

10936

[b]Virginia Woolf from To the Lighthouse

Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.[/b]

You know, whatever that means.

No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.

Wow, what if that happened here?!

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 then my own more “fractured and fragmented” take on it.

The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.

Pick one:
1] really, really profound
2] really, really ridiculous

…for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge…

Shades of Olivia Dresher let’s call it.

But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.

Well, maybe in the best of all possible worlds.

10937

nudges biggy’s fragments with elbow

biggy breaks up into a unity

10938

[b]The Onion

Cancer Patient Harasses Poor Little Insurance Company Into Covering Bill[/b]

That’ll be a first.

Woman At Supermarket Imagines Entire Narrative Where Bagger Is Happy With Life

Is that even possible? Any baggers here? Also, haven’t baggers gone the way of the dinosaurs? Discuss.

AMC Now Basing Ticket Prices On Proximity To Guy Masturbating In Dark

Wow, is this actually true?!

George Santos Panicking After Prospective Aide He Thought He Made Up Accuses Him Of Sexual Misconduct

Serves him right, doesn’t it?

Police Stop Black Civilian For Fitting Description Of Giant Fire-Breathing Reptile Terrorizing Tokyo

Again, in other words.

Priest Cursed With Incredible Penis

Miraculously as it were.

10939

[b]Erich Maria Remarque from All Quiet on the Western Front

How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.[/b]

Next up: the Second World War.

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

That’s what I remember too. About who, however, I will keep to myself.

We came to realise — first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference — that intellect apparently wasn’t the most important thing…not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill.

Our drill then, their drill later.

Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?

Don’t even try to think that through. It’s futile in more ways than you can count.

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades — words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.

Next up words: Nuclear bombs.

A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, a single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.

Or, to some: blah, blah, blah.

10940

[b]Jean-Paul Sartre from No Exit

Much more likely you’ll hurt me. Still what does it matter? If I’ve got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands.[/b]

Ah, Simone!

So it comes to this; one doesn’t need rest. Why bother about sleep if one isn’t sleepy? That stands to reason, doesn’t it? Wait a minute, there’s a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable? …Ah, I see; it’s life without a break.

Well, not counting dreams of course.

You’re lucky. I’m always conscious of myself — in my mind. Painfully conscious.

Any of the lucky ones here?

Human feeling. That’s beyond my range. I’m rotten to the core.

Was rotton to the core. Though I’m still around.

Could hell be described as too much of anything without a break? Are variety, moderation and balance instruments we use to keep us from boiling in any inferno of excess,’ whether it be cheesecake or ravenous sex?

Pick three:
1] yes
2] no
3] maybe

One always dies too soon – or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up.

You know, in an essentially meaningless and purposeless world.