i just finished reading american psycho, a picture of dorian gray and watching mulholland drive. i think all of these things were perfect to encounter around the same period of time, they seem to intertwine somewhat and are all equally powerful and terrifying. i feel as if each of these things would have changed my life on their own, but together they are all the more depressing and disturbing, and now i just feel numb.
"... there is an idea of a patrick bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though i can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: i am simply not there. it is hard for me to make sense on any given level. myself is fabricated, an aberration. i am a noncontingent human being. my personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. my conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago if they ever did exist. there are no more barriers to cross. all i have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem i have caused and my utter indifference toward it, i have now surpassed. i still, though, hold onto one single bleak truth: noone is safe, nothing is redeemed. yet i am blameless. each model of human behaviour must be assumed to have some validity. is evil something you are? or is it something you do?"
- from american psycho by bret easton ellis, probably the most shocking and traumatizing and amazing book i have ever read in my life.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
psycho
Saturday, August 21, 2010
l'enfer, c'est les autres
this is the most boring year of my life yet. all i do is lie at home watching the office and avoiding doing homework, i never go anywhere anymore and i am so sick of high school but it's dragging on forever. and i am utterly resigned to not doing that well at the end of the year, i have never been motivated to do well in my life and it's not going to start now because everything i do is just an endless pathetic learned-helplessness cycle
don't look back in anger - oasis
Saturday, August 14, 2010
ode to the pistols
in year 8, i was suddenly, inexplicably infatuated with the sex pistols. i had graduated on from pop-punk like blink 182 and green day, and downloaded a few of their songs, instantly falling in love. while my friends started listening to simple plan and something corporate, i blasted anarchy in the uk and the dead kennedy's i fought the law (and i won) every morning on the way to school.
something in the sex pistols' music, and punk music as a wider genre, moved me, as much as a privileged private schoolgirl could relate to a bunch of working class british yobs. something in johnny rotten's maniacal laugh was exciting and rebellious, in a time when i started skipping maths classes, ringing my eyes with black kohl every day and putting safety pins in every item of clothing i owned because it was ~so punk rock~. i got a white t-shirt and wrote "i wanna be anarchy" in black permanent marker over the front; i drew the anarchy symbol all over my pencilcase with white-out; i got an electric guitar and turned up the distortion as far as it would go.
at some point in my life - and i can't pinpoint where because i think it was a subtle change over a long period of time - i started being more sad than angry. i replaced the sex pistols with the smiths, and the clash with the cure. but there is still part of me that is bitter and angry at something intangible, that wants to tear up all my clothing and pin it back together again, that wants to start a band without caring how rubbish we would sound. and "no future" still rings a little too true.
Friday, August 13, 2010
letters to unnamed people
dear unnamed person,
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Sunday, August 1, 2010
lost in space
“everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. the best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too.” - daniel handler
"choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, i remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when i felt i had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, i was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which i knew i could transform myself and everything around me." - stephen fry
"i'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. just like the cheshire cat, someday i will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. i am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. when you look at the picture again, i want to assure you, i will no longer be there. i will be erased from history, like a traitor in the soviet union. because with every day that goes by, i feel myself becoming more and more invisible." - elizabeth wurtzel
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
blank
fitter, happier, more productive, comfortable, not drinking too much, regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week), getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries, at ease, eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats), a patient better driver, a safer car (baby smiling in back seat), sleeping well (no bad dreams), no paranoia, careful to all animals (never washing spiders down the plughole), keep in contact with old friends (enjoy a drink now and then), will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in the wall), favors for favors, fond but not in love, charity standing orders, on sundays ring road supermarket (no killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants), car wash (also on Sundays), no longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows, nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate, nothing so childish - at a better pace, slower and more calculated, no chance of escape, now self-employed, concerned (but powerless), an empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism), will not cry in public, less chance of illness, tires that grip in the wet (shot of baby strapped in back seat), a good memory, still cries at a good film, still kisses with saliva, no longer empty and frantic like a cat tied to a stick, that's driven into frozen winter shit (the ability to laugh at weakness), calm, fitter, healthier and more productive, a pig in a cage on antibiotics.
