This Week's Laughter #20
An archive of an attempt toward something like happiness
Marriage is a form. Laughter is a form. Nitpicking is an inheritance. Knowing when to knock stray and when to commit, entirely, devotionally, to an effort. Of course, I’m thinking about abecedarian poems or other forms that involve, mostly, counting and constraint. Jeopardy, really, being the primary fuse of the work rather than something of sonic quality or cultural lineage. Poems functioning like a talent show. I do believe that form and environment (psychic, physical, emotional) of a poem all affect the words being used and what comes of it. Quoping, a poem is sensitive to touch.
Here we see this contemporary trend that a poem is a distance to travel rather than a labyrinth to become lost within. Recently I read something similar to that line as a quote on Twitter — I think posted by Christina Tudor-Sideri or Alina Stefanescu — but I cannot find the source tweet. Gifts from some intervening minor God of scrambling. Sinapise meaning how you wish. Form is a marriage between laughter and nitpicking. Throw the towel. Ecbatic sentences here; I mean well enough. Under it all is this effort to tell you, dear reader, that sometimes we can be walking down a road under the streetlights of an early evening and find a path constructed for us already, like leaves of cracks in the pavement, and we might even follow this path to some splendid nothing. Defiance proves nothing when you’re alone. Voussoir of intent here allow me to clarify: vehemence has a place in conversation and often you may have conversation with the world around you talking in your mind or aloud either way conversation is vitelligenous as in the yolk of your brilliant capacity to invent new potential for connection. Call the rock a rock. Win the day. Bare, once more, and then once more again, a feeling. Xyloid heart of the moment, xenodochial, let your sap cure the soul of today’s xerostomia. Yep. And there it is, I broke the backward-forward-backward abecedarian because I miscounted in the beginning, you see, I should have gone forward first from ‘M,’ and instead I went backward first, and as a result now here I am at this ending moment caught with too much to continue the pattern to its completion. Zeugmatic, I open like this out of adoration and love.
This past while has been, truthfully, full and then empty, in the way that endings-of-years tend to be. I think they unhinge themselves and all of us in quite delirious ways. We went to Los Angeles. We meaning Heather and I. It was my first time there, her second. She delights in showing me around places, I think, even more than she delights in experiencing new places with each other. Not that either is better or worse than the other, but I love witnessing her in her directive element. I drank with dear friends Nich, Amanda, and Sarah on the patio of a bakery-bar and ate a vegetable pot pie. I received many compliments about the style and clothes I chose for the trip and, didn’t realize it until my first compliment, that I do think of Los Angeles as something of an aesthetic-forward city and that their complimenting of my style was quite a high affirmation of myself.
We went to the city for dear-friend-and-almost-brother’s wedding — Lucas and Nisa — congratulations once more. They had a short dinner celebration and marriage certificate signing at quite this fascinating upscale restaurant and part club-lounge. But they’re from other parts of the world — respectively Argentinian and Turkish — so their more formalized wedding will take place elsewhere. Lucas and I were born only hours apart from each other and found our way into the same dungeons and dragons group who we’ve all played together with for almost five years now. He got engaged after Heather and I, and will be married before us, which I think is a very little-brotherly move to do. I like describing our connection and timelines in this way mostly because I think it’s funny to depict such a great friend, their relationship and pinnacle-of-love, in such a self-referentially petty way. I hold absolutely no grudge and wish them nothing but happiness. But as someone whose lived the entirety of my life as a little brother, it’s very fun to be put in my place like this.
Recently — very recently actually — I described myself as an egotistical bastard. Dear friend Hope then immediately changed my name in her phone to this.
And did I mention how utterly beautiful Heather is? All night at the wedding I couldn’t stop myself from thinking — all those novels and letters I’ve read — of writers and artists and musicians describing the inspiration of their works or writing of their unending love for their partners with the most effuse dramatics — that their partners were singular, summit of beauty — they’re both right and so wrong for they never knew Heather and had they I’m certain they would have to asterisk their praise. Forgive me, egotistical bastard, for I love my vanity and I love my pride and I love my love my love my love.
A woman on a shuttle at an airport was humming very Christian Christmas songs. It was both sincere and a little startling. Each Christmas I’m reminded of how the difference in definition between religion and cult is mostly a classification of how large the group following their belief is.
The day before we left on our flight to Los Angeles, I spent moving friends Jacinda and Andrew’s Dad into his new home. I always find myself laughing with them, and I cannot help but stress that the thing which has made me laugh the most in days following was: I did not know it was possible to have as much model train equipage as this individual had. Also, I saw a yearbook photo of an unfortunately unblessed Zac Efron preteen. Woof.
I fancy using unclear descriptions, inexact positions, and tenuous vantages for the sake of conveying the schizofascist state of global humanity. I think the internet was a mistake, mostly and especially because I don’t believe humans are meant to carry all of the information that we’re bombarded with on a moment’s notice. In the last ten seconds, the song I’m listening to has changed to Kendrick Lamar’s ‘squabble up,’ I saw an advertisement for Hot Ones, I saw a discussion about decision-making or promotion of the Cercador Prize, a recent-ish prize for literature in translation, I saw a share of Victoria Chang’s poem Grief, I saw someone shitposting the tech billionaire who is virally documenting his quest to age backwards but effectively just looks like someone put skim milk in a dehydrator, and I got an email about it not being too late to order express delivery by Christmas. It took the duration of ‘squabble up,’ for me to type that sentence. Literally my fingers and mind cannot convey information fast enough before the next signal for transition of information to occur. The effect, I’d wager, of this bombardment of information is to cause the distress that I express in that first sentence: a fondness of inexactitude without the recognition that detail is being obfuscated. Details everywhere create the disorienting effect of being in a new, unique, labyrinthine metropolitan environment where there are so many street lights, yes, lanterns, lights, jarring and bright, everywhere, that no matter which way you look, no matter how you crane your neck, if you move your body laterally or transpose yourself somehow above it all, all that resides are those little black dots that come to your eyes when you stare at the sun for longer than you should. This was a laugh for me in the moment of writing this.
I had the horrifying realization that I’ve only read 80 books this year despite being unemployed and with all the time in the world for 70% of it. But — what can you do except for laugh when you don’t live up to unnecessarily placed expectations on yourself?
Friend Sarah regaled us with the story of how she’s trying to get fired from her job so she can get severance or potentially sue for medical negligence. It’s a long story full of drama and unfortunate circumstances that are not my place to share. What makes me laugh about it is how adamantly and completely she has created what amounts to a several-hundreds-of-pages worth of documentation and case for why she ought to have been fired and actually it’s cruel of her employers to have not fired her by now. I support her so much and she is absolutely in the right here, but I’m not sure if ever someone has tried as hard to force an employer to fire them.
Yesterday, my therapist and I discussed how we’ve ended up paralleling our respective paths — beefing with family over ridiculous and toxically narcissistic behaviors, feeling like we’ve been stuck in our respective paths for an undue amount of time because this abuse weighs on us, draining our energies and mental faculties. I proved my toxicity by suggesting to her — as she was telling me she was preparing and going-over the Hard Truths message she was going to send to her family member — that she should start her message with, “I’ve attached a voice note of this so you can hear how earnest I am about this all; however, if you’re not ready to hear that, you can read below” and to record her speech alongside the message. I don’t think cruel people necessarily deserve cruelty in return, but I do indulge in the fantasy of cruelty for the sake of bettering those who do mostly good.
This will be the end of this documentation today. I’ll finish with something from poet Chen Chen recently, ‘Love you to bits and debris and lint’ — vitally, always, yours.