Then again it wasn’t until The Elementary Particles that he could even quit his job. You can’t write for a living. People whose sixteen hour days are Taylor Swift is Problematic and Top Ten Tips to Market Money Management to Millennials barely get by. People who actively sell out their dream can’t get paid. Too many people want to write. Life’s work worth less than laying cheese on Quarter Pounders.
One person writes good shit on the internet. Cat Marnell, who had a trust fund and a free apartment and unlimited speed. A room of one’s own. She could barely crank out ten columns for Vice. Her XO Jane shit still had to be half about mascara. She got a half million dollar book deal that will never earn out and God knows if she’ll even make the book. Will it be pure raw brilliance like her rhyming Vice piece or will it be fucking garbage like 99% of her shit and yours and mine. Anyway she’s younger than me. Someone gave her half a million to write a book. My book made one month’s rent.
Can’t make a living. Society: complete shit in every respect. We worship money grubbing lying hustling Ryan Colin Kavanaughs. Mothers tell their children: grow up to be Mark fucking Zuckerberg. Other days what saves me is: it’s just another day. Today’s the fucking day I turn 40 years old.
Hadn’t expected to be this miserable. I’d heretofore considered my job a “good” job. Now it’s killing me because I’m good at it. They heap on responsibility. Fine. I’ll leverage it into money, which I’ll hoard and fucking hope to God it’s enough to take some god damn time off and write before my mind goes. Already slipping. Thoughts eyes muscles leaving me. I’m turning slow and stupid and I forget big words but on the other hand when I’m rawdogging a fat 22 year old half Korean off Tinder I instantly get hard again after nutting in her navel. My cock still works. Will 22 year olds still fuck me since the odometer rolled over.
Don’t want to turn 40 this morning. Take stock of my life. Not rich not married no kids. I have a mildly popular blog and I can play Bach on guitar– the achievements of a 17 year old. Help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety– for what. So they too can be platitude spouting jerkoffs.
Don’t want to turn 40. Turn back the clock. Yesterday I was working. The day before that and the day before that. Then I was at dad’s funeral. Shaking hands with my cousin Steve. Been 20 years. He went bald and his face turned into a cave man from the museum. He’s cockeyed now. He once set himself on fire trying to illegally burn garbage. He has a girlfriend and a kid. I’m less than him.
It’s over. You’ll never achieve your dreams. Thank God. Relax and beat off. Being 20 wasn’t so fuckin great either.
It’s Over Between Us
It’s over between us, she says. She’s mad about this thing again. Where are the girls who don’t dredge up old shit. Just because it’s time; you haven’t fucked up in a while. Girls who don’t make you prove it. Girls want you to love them but not so much it’s clear they can do better. Listen: I love you, cunt. Leave it alone.
I’m tainted by the the manosphere. I think it’s a “shit test.” My internet peers hate women but just want a wife and kids. You stay home I go work. Saturday I cut grass in the cul de sac while you occupy yourself with weaving. But women work now. Jobs pay half as much. We have the same money but the work just multiplied. And besides you’re fat and you hate me so I might as well just jerk off into other people till I’m dead. A bad belief system but what else is there.
Meanwhile girls ask where are all the good men. Smart funny stable tall handsome rich men with no ex wives and kids. Well where are the big tits big ass perfect teeth child’s face Asians. The ones who turned 18 today and aren’t already a side piece for Vincent Gallo or Devendra fucking Banhart. Where are the girls who play chess at strong expert level. Any level. Where are the girls who identify hummingbirds based on a vermillion versus magenta gorget. Its neck’s 3/8ths of an inch thick and she can tell watching it drink from my neighbor’s hyacinth at 20 feet. Or at least, where is the girl who thinks anything. About any topic. She was it. It’s over between us.
Well good luck out there, numbnuts. I don’t need you. I’m a 40 year old male secretary and I go to bed at 9PM and I still shred two new pieces of ass a month. Inner life is sadness, dreading the morning, scrutinizing my widows peak; watch my eyeballs turn permanently red like I’ve always just had an airbag deploy in my face. Giant scrotum; weird bulky potato nuts. Dick a shriveled blue acorn at temperatures below one hundred eight degrees. While my nuts expand, expand, seething and squirming like a gypsy moth tent in the trees.
Face coming to resemble a bad Halloween mask, body unmistakably dying and it wasn’t much to begin with. I consider myself smart but at this age smart better mean money. A professorship. Something cool a girl can tell her parents and her cunt friends. Anyway I still shred pussy so you better keep your ass in check. Don’t make waves; I’m not afraid of the punks you date in Texas. See if they can write three paragraphs about the skin of their balls at 6:30 on a Monday morning. Cut it down and down. See if they keep you interested with something that’s not money. They talk about football. They wear white tube socks. They are white tube socks.
I can take you or leave you. Made peace with my genes being extinguished. Dying alone. Living at fifty, sixty in this same – I was going to say squalid apartment but there are flowers in the park. Good neighbors. Redtails, goshawks, owls, a kestrel. Many hummingbirds. Woodpeckers thrushes robins blue jays; mockingbirds, of course, but also still song sparrows. An unkindness of ravens who have words. Butterflies, gophers, fat underage Mexican teen cunt cracks in yoga pants. All this when merely the clouds would be enough.
I’ll never get married. Never have children. I’ll suffer and die alone and I’ve made peace with this so go fuck yourself with it’s over between us. You emotional terrorist. It’s over between me and the fucking planet. I love you baby but don’t push me. What holds people together anymore. All I can do is tell you take a fucking walk. I’ll fuck a hummingbird.
Art Review: Self-Portrait (Performance with Object) by Emma Sulkowicz
She thought you were hot, my date told me. Well shit. Could I pull it off. I’ve beat off to her rape video 15 times. You stand on a plywood box; she stands across from you on another plywood box; there’s a painted line between you and you talk but you’re not allowed to touch her. Close by there’s a mannequin of her called Emmatron hooked up to an iPad with canned questions. If you ask about the rape she directs you to the mannequin. The iPad says why didn’t you go to the cops right away. Why did you Facebook message him: fuck me in the butt, and so forth. You pick one. Her recorded voice comes on. Fuck me in the butt is an expression like shoot me in the head. If I told you shoot me in the head, would you literally think I want to be shot in the head.
My date blew it with her. I couldn’t hear but you could tell Emma couldn’t stand her. I’m glad she went first. I had a plan for what I’d say. Bunch of banal shit then one real question.
Yes she does get tired. But she’s able to sit down. The show’s gotta be very different at 7PM the last day than now, I told her, trying to sound cool. At some point you must start thinking: oh, blow it out your ass. That’s why I made Emmatron, she said.
Yes people cry like with Marina Abramovic. People come up and look in her eyes and cry and also, a lot of people want to talk about their own rape. Just to tell somebody. It got to where she had to hand it off to Emmatron. Well your work is so much about people’s baggage, I said.
You ought to take this on tour, I told her. Colleges have money. Five grand a night and seems like they’d be into this type of shit. Maybe but I can’t spend my whole life doing this, she said. I said something about her in in an RV on tour, out in the Nebraska cornfields with the fuckin robot in the passenger seat. She didn’t quite laugh. But I got that feeling of making a girl laugh.
**********
Have you been accused of rape, my date asked in the car. She reads the manosphere. Well no but the day is young. Really, I said, I’ve never raped anybody. I’m the world’s
horniest man and I’ve been in bed with blackout drunk hot naked teens, drunk and on speed myself. I know I couldn’t do it. But then sometimes you don’t know. I keep thinking about one girl I fucked off OKCupid in 2014. When I looked down she was crying.
At lunch she asked why don’t you apply to the Iowa Writers Workshop. This girl found me when someone emailed her one of my OKCupid stories. Why don’t you submit that to Paris Review. I don’t want to be in Paris Review, I said. I want young girls to think I should be in Paris Review. And it’s working.
Really it hadn’t occurred to me. I think my work is shit. Later I looked at Paris Review. The first story is by Chris Batchelder. I remember a plaque with that name at my prep school. Flint Batchelder, captain of the 1902 lacrosse team or something. Now his descendants are in Paris Review. My father was a pipefitter. He did jail time for stealing tires in Alabama. I was at that school on scholarship, to get bootstrapped out of 10,000 years of pregnant teen alcoholics. I had impostor syndrome. And rightly so. Look at me now. My writing is bad and I’m bad and Paris Review would laugh at me. I literally want to be shot in the head.
Paris Review can suck my balls, I told her. More people read my shit than Paris Review. That night I took an at risk teen to a Clippers game. The Staples center is so big it gave me vertigo. Twice as many people as can fit in the Staples Center have read my story about an artificial pussy, which is in some ways amateurish but also ought to be etched into titanium and launched into space for aliens to find. But then that was 2013. What have I done for me lately. Can’t write good shit because now I have to work. I could barely do it unemployed.
Chris Batchelder does not have this problem. Emma Sulkowicz does not have this problem. Like Cat Marnell she’s the daughter of two rich New York psychiatrists. But also she’s brave enough to sleep in a garage. And look, I don’t know if she got raped or not. If it went down like the video then yes. That’s why it’s so hot. Even with the Shaw Brothers sound effect when he hits her.
**********
Do you read all the shit about you on the internet, I asked. At this point is it white noise to you. Or can it ever sting. Well I do and the answer is yes, she said. She was telling the truth. I also put this one in Emmatron, she said.
I tried not to think: I’d like to put one in Emmatron. But I’m a robot.
I got the girl home and got a finger in her jeans. Her pussy was hard to navigate. I’m 40 and I still need the beginner model. Please stop, she said. I don’t want to sleep with you. It felt good to be surprised.
In conclusion: four stars.
Bud
I was with a girl, this was maybe 2007. We went to the county shelter in Burbank to get a cat. A young male because my last cat was cool. The cat room there is a long row of tanks with plexiglass in front, air holes. 30 cats but no young guys until the very last cat in the very last row. Black and fluffy with a white star on his chest. Who’s this handsome fellow. He’s one of the bucket cats, the woman said. Two kittens found in a sealed paint bucket. The sister adopted already. This guy was aging out of “cute kitten,” maybe headed for the firing squad.
I put my finger on the glass and said: hey, bud. He put his paw on my finger. On the way out the clerk with the paperwork said do you know his name, and I said: Bud.
I got a call at work. Someone at the neighbor’s left the gate open; the pit bull got out. Neighbor took him to the vet. They thought he might make it. He didn’t.
Nine years it was you and me. Now you’re gone and without you I’m gone too. I can’t move your food bowl. I hear you outside wanting to come in, get brushed, sit next to me on the piano bench while I look at stupid shit on the internet, you groom yourself. That was what we did most nights. You just sitting with me. Just being with each other.
We’d go out in the park in the morning. I’d sit and write and you’d rub against my legs and stalk things in the grass. Puff up when a dog was coming but stand your ground. You knew I’d protect you. I’d walk back toward home and you’d wait for me to get twenty feet and then run after me, try to catch my legs.
My cars came and went; you knew them all by sound. Come running up the street when I’d come home from work. Run along the high cinder block fence at eye level with me. I’d go in the door and you’d run up the stairs outside. I’d go to the base of the stairs and you’d run down them and run into the door. You loved that game.
Cars broke, girls left me. Hard jobs, hard days, and I’d put my face in your fur and you’d purr and it would be OK.
When I first got you home I let you out of the box in a dark quiet room. So you wouldn’t be scared. First day or so I’d just sit there and talk to you. When you trusted me enough I put out my hand. I don’t think you’d been petted before. You walked around me in a circle with your tail up, beside yourself with pleasure. Six weeks ago I started brushing you at night to entice you in earlier. You’d act just the same.
When you were little and I fed you, petted you, I’d make that ch-ch-ch sound so you’d know it meant good things, and I called you in with that every night. I want to make that sound now. Have you come in. Where are you, I can’t sleep if you’re out. Coyote might get you. I’ll go out in the dark and walk around. Call for as long as it takes for you to come. You’d come running up, follow me inside. Get in bed, knead the blanket with your claws and lay with me in the cold. Bud you can’t be gone. I come home and it’s not home now. Just stuff. Coming up the driveway without you running in the corner of my eye, scared of running you over. You weaving yourself into my legs while I was on the toilet. You crunching Meow Mix next to me while I was in the bath. Rustling the blinds perched in the bedroom window sill, always next to me. You stayed with me.
I moved your food bowl and I want to collapse. Leaving the door open waiting for you to come bounding in. You can’t be gone. Don’t be gone. They let me say goodbye but you’d already left. Brain swollen up from being shaken, on a respirator with a clip holding out your tongue. They let me touch you but you weren’t there. They’ll give me your ashes in a clay pot. It will have a nice paw print, the vet said. An expert at watching people cry. But I don’t think she’d seen anything like it.
God, I wish it was me. But then how would your life be after. I was the only one you trusted. It was a joke with the girls: the cat hates you. The man across the street came with a card. He said Bud was in my yard for years but never let me pet him. When you got fleas I gave you a bath myself because you’d have hated the groomer. I didn’t want you to be scared.
I’m sorry you were hurt and scared when you died, Bud.
I moved your food bowl and I want to put it back. Closed the door and now you can’t come in. I’m not ready for you to go. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. I love you forever and I can’t let you go, I can’t.
You were a sweetheart. You were a tough bastard. You were a lap dog. You were a wild murderous savage; you’d uproot the gophers with their earth mover claws, laugh off the mockingbirds dive bombing you. You gave the dogs hell until they moved in with that killing machine. I think about killing him but he’s just an animal too.
You had a good life and a good home. You loved me and I loved you. I’ll let your ashes go in the park. When night comes and the wind blows in over the grass you’ll come home.
Just Stroke My Butthole and Tell Me How Great I Am
I had a Tinder date but I canceled and went to get jerked off at a whorehouse in Rosemead. I’d heard it was a hooker town. I was there already, for Alcoholics Anonymous’ General Service Area 5 Assembly All Districts Pre-Conference Committee Workshop… the real title’s even longer but I stopped reading. It’s two days long. You sit at a table with ugly old men with white nostril hair. Discuss how AA can reach more psychiatrists and clergymen. The girl was pimply and probably 30 but she had big Chinese titties. Ass like she deadlifts regularly. And she wouldn’t even jack me off.
She drizzled hot oil on me and stroked my ass crack and inguinal crease for an hour. When it became clear that sh
e wasn’t grasping at my angry red penis in its little sheet tent I asked. She said eef I do that I go to jail. Instead she swabbed my balls with her palm while I jerked myself off. Cupped her cinder block ass in my other hand through her knockoff Juicy sweats. White terrycloth.
Cops cracking down in Rosemead. God forbid a man gets what he wants. But then who cares about a handjob. She tickled my oily asshole. Told me I have a nice body. I can’t believe you’re 40, she said. I do have a nice body. I do look fucking good for a middle aged weirdo who’s smoked for 20 years and did black tar heroin under the freeway overpass with homeless wife killers. I know this but need to be told. Dates never say it anymore. They’re too busy with I’m not usually like this. Have you been tested. Shut up and savor my magnificence.
The date– she was a student of Hugo Schwyzer. She’d have fucked me. I could text her now, have her come out to the duck pond. But I don’t want the hour of talking before my apartment. I don’t want a date and I don’t want a hooker either. I need girls to want me but I’m sick of dancing. Only ones who come right to your place are mannish pigs built like Artie Lange. Giant sweaty pubic fat pads with razor bumps.
Even this would be fine, if I didn’t have to chase it. But Vladimir Harkonnen makes you message first.
What do I want. My mind wants a smart girl like Nikol. My body wants a 15 year old who picks rice, cries because deek too long. My heart wants Angela to tell me I’m sick of these other guys. Let’s buy a house in Montana and you just fill me full of children. I’ll stop sending cunty texts that I’m leaving you every time I have PMS. Maybe she’s right, it’s ending. We’ll be friends. She’ll marry a rich guy. Too bad. You turn 40 and start making a little dough, your dad dies, your cat dies, you realize the only thing that matters is taking care of someone else. At that moment there’s a pretty girl in your house. You want to take her out to a cabin in a meadow somewhere. The smell of her neck makes you want to merge with her on a cellular level. Forgive everything. Work hard make money change the tires and cut the grass forever if she was just there and it sure feels like it was meant to be but it isn’t. Nothing’s meant to be. The universe isn’t even cruel, just random. And you lost. The work hard part will be there. But the coming home to someone: you’re fucked. Now and forever. Your kid’s college fund money chopped up into eighty bucks after tip until they pass some new sex trafficking law and then to the robots. Plus she’d bug the fuck out of you after 3 weeks. Who are you kidding.
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