#460

FACTUALLY MACABRE 2024

WILL MURDER YOU IN YOUR FANCY CAR

AS PUNISHMENT FOR YOUR LUST FEELINGS

*

A friend of mine reads new books; that is to say, almost entirely writers and trends that have surfaced not only this millenium, but the few years surrounding whatever screaming NOW we happen to inhabit should we bring the matter up again. A current reader, a reader of trends. I read new books, yes, but as anyone who reads this blog knows, a) I am into too many things at once to try to keep up with everything happening at the bleeding edge of anything, and b) my requirements even within the book spectrum are too omnivorous and exploratory to be satisfied by this model at all; I am as avidly curious about old books and dead people as I am about who the most interesting living writers are and what they're up to, according to my own metrics. Finally, c) things like books on tikkle tokkle and the best sellers on the argmazon merketplorg mean less than nothing and in fact anything that thrives in such an environment must penetrate my most virulent antibodies and craggy, hardened carapaces.

I am aware that I myself have had products on sale on the ahrizon mellscapelace, but they could never have succeeded in such an environment. I'd hoped to sell a few books more or less on terms I could live with and a few--a laughable handful--is exactly what I accomplished. 

Anyway. The horror stories that they read and send passages of in the group chat seem mostly horrifying in how they are written rather than their subject matter, and in this they achieve levels which must be understood as pure evil, though nothing like the spiritual corruption and total abandonment of human feeling and standards of personal quality on display in the "erotica" and "fantasy" I am exposed to in this way. 

These doses act very like inoculation. If I didn't see shit like that for ten years and then got blindsided by it? I might have a heart attack and fucking die. I might snap right then and there, on the goddamn spot like a sick cartoon, unrecognizable. Shitting pissing nutbag lose my grip and start gnawing on the nearest human face. 

So if I let this person administer tiny doses of lethal toxins, I can continue to live in this world, and try to understand the people I was born to share it with.

*

They got gross shit, these horror books, sure. Revolutionarily gross maybe, stuff that sure, traditional publishers would not acknowledge a market for--perhaps wisely, perhaps not. Not for me to say, though my basic stance on traditional publishers is that they are scorpions trying to cross a river. But they--the stories--are not, at the same time, exactly, what I would forthrightly call books. They are long-form pieces of writing, yes. People read them, this is true. However everyone knows that all kinds of evidence about the given duckness of a thing does not necessarily equate to a thing being a duck, conventional wisdom notwithstanding. Guess what: we live in an age where we have to discard a bunch of that shit, and rediscover much that has been forgotten or erased. So it goes.

Oooooh, graphic descriptions of skinning a penis like taking a sock off a foot. Am I talking about the horror or the erotica? Yes.

Dang, groundbreaking. The year two thousand and two AIM'd; they want their basic flame war threats back.

*

So boring. I know, nestled deep in the folds of the great beast's hide, great books struggle for air and will die smothered, some of them so scary that it's probably a good thing that no one will ever read them.

*

Still haven't watched the theatrical run movies I been meaning to! This is not optimal, especially re: The Substance. I just want to stay home and play video games real bad, is all, and there's always chores to do. The days go by how the days go by.

And then you die. Maybe in the room you're reading this post in. Maybe in the bathroom. Maybe somehwere you never could have guessed. What will your last thought be? I'm trying to get my house so that if it happens here, no matter where I happen to be within its envelope, I have interesting and beautiful colors and shapes and objects to look at and trigger my last thoughts. Something hopefully semicoherent, towards the ecstatic; something poetic and complete into and of itself that places the kind of punctuation I could marvel at and laugh with after all is said and told and told again. 

REMEMBER EVERY DAY THAT YOU GONNA FUCKING DIE

MEMENTO GOD DAMN MORI

PEACE

FACTUALLY MACABRE 2024

--JL