g. 2600

you're a droid and i'm annoyed

[guattari2600]

an otome romance route taught me something therapy couldn’t

as bizarre as it seems because this is about a visual novel where you date anime boys for your phone, actual serious content warning for discussion of abuse. ALSO mystic messenger spoilers ahead, including for super new content.

I have played maybe four visual novels (including Hatoful Boyfriend, a masterpiece) so I’m not an expert in the field, but I absolutely love Mystic Messenger. Partly for its format (it’s delivered like an app on your phone complete with e-mail, chatrooms that appear in real time, calls and text messages from the members of the chatroom). I also love that all of the characters feel like, if not real people, super individual in their personalities. It can seem a little one-dimensional (as opposed to two-dimensional, ha ha ha. ha) at first, but once you start to get to know them better there’s a ton of history underpinning pretty much all of them. One thing that has really struck me about Mystic Messenger is that the way to get the “Good Ending” on most routes is to pursue the healthy relationship options as opposed to the unhealthy ones that feed into the characters’ insecurities. One character, Yoosung, is really young and struggles to get work done instead of playing video games. You can choose to enable his bullshit and step in as a surrogate mom - but that results in a bad ending. Another character, Jumin, who has problems expressing himself emotionally, gets very clingy very fast. You can choose to dive headfirst into a codependent relationship with him - but that, too, gets you the bad ending. Taking your time and being respectful of people’s boundaries and empathetic are the best way to “win” Mystic Messenger. 

Seems reasonable.

So I was super psyched when the newest route for the mysterious head of the RFA, V, was released this month. I knew V’s backstory was a clearly unhealthy & codependent relationship with another character in the series (Rika). I didn’t realize that watching them communicate in real time would knock me on my back the way it did. I’m writing this to deal with the fact that I got enraptured by the anime boy messenger program for a few days, but also to advocate for what I think was a nuanced & powerful representation of codependence and abuse in relationships.

I have (like many of us) a history of abusive relationships that have damaged my ability to connect with others in a lot of ways. Luckily, I’ve had a great support system backing me up and some really great mental health professionals who have helped me get through a lot of it. But some stuff still stings.

V and Rika’s backstory, in a nutshell: V was a famous photographer who met Rika when she was looking at one of his photos at an exhibition. When she talked about his paintings he felt like she understood him and they got involved. The way they talk about their relationship is really burdened with metaphor - him being her “sun” and promising to love every part of her, even the parts that are “darkness.” As Rika’s mental health deteriorated the “darkness” kept coming out more and more. V tried to continue to be the “sun” to her darkness but this just resulted in Rika feeling more and more suffocated because it felt like his obsession with trying to fix her was rejecting the parts of her that weren’t perfect. We get cutscenes interspersed throughout the story that show us times that Rika and V spent together where they were happy, the deterioration of their relationship, and Rika in the present day.

When things started going downhill.

Eventually, Rika’s mental health deteriorated completely and after attacking V and doing damage to his eyes that could result in him going blind, she disappeared and formed a cult where she tries to “save” people by letting the darkness inside them out instead of focusing on the “light” (yes, this is where the anime cheese truly emerges). Her feelings in the present-day of the game toward V span the entire spectrum of grief - she goes from raging about how she wants to hurt him, to begging him to save her again, to telling him he means nothing to her and she’s just using him. What makes Mystic Messenger particularly remarkable - and painful - is that because of its format, you get to not only watch their dialogue in real-time, but participate in it. You’re there whenever V tells her that what they had wasn’t love, but obsession: 

And you’re there whenever V starts to lose it and think that he’s worthless unless he goes back to her:

Whenever the two come face-to-face in the chatroom, you’re there to plea in what felt like the most futile and devastating scene for me, where you try to beg V not to go back to Rika as he’s talking to her:

And maybe most disturbingly (for me, because it rings a little too true to past events), you’re there whenever Rika admits that she’s fully aware of how manipulative and abusive their relationship is:

While the rest of Mystic Messenger had some rough emotional moments, watching the dying throes of an abusive relationship being played out in front of me (including the character who I was growing emotionally attached to in this route of the game) drove me to put my phone down and have a glass of wine. Several times.

What made this route particularly tough for me was that it followed the rest of Mystic Messenger in that the only way to get the “Good Ending” (and I did get the Good Ending) is to give the healthy, empathetic answers. I caught myself making the same mistakes I’ve made in the real-life past in the game too. Whenever Rika said something particularly spiteful, I wanted to tell her that she was evil and beyond help. Whenever V was hurting, I wanted to beg him to run to me instead of her. But either of these choices will result in a bad ending, so I had to bite my tongue (and in several cases, rewind and restart a chatroom so I didn’t tank my game).

As I progressed it started getting easier. There are several checkpoints along routes in Mystic Messenger where you can fail and get a bad ending in different ways, so if you continuously choose the “good” answers the characters will respond differently to you. As I forced myself to understand more about Rika and what she was going through, it became easier to not respond with kneejerk disgust and to instead say “You’re not evil, you need help.” And whenever V was vulnerable, instead of trying to force my way in, I could say “You need to learn to love yourself - you’re precious beyond what you offer to others.”  In retrospect, there are some situations from my past in which I deeply wish I’d made those choices instead. Eventually, if you do it right, V tells Rika goodbye once and for all... and watching her begging him one more time to take her back is one of the most painful conversations to sit through.

Playing through V’s story was profoundly difficult for me, and when it was over I breathed a sigh of relief. The “Good Ending” isn’t V running into your arms, it’s a 2 year lapse after which he comes to you and says he thinks he’s ready to start again. My one complaint is that we don’t see what happens to Rika (although I expect that’ll be in some post-game content that’s slated to be coming soon). I’m left here feeling absolutely silly that a game where you message anime boys on your phone could do such a number on me (believe me, you can’t laugh at me any harder than I already am).

There is, however, a really dangerous lesson that I'm trying not to take away from this route. The nature of the visual novel's structure runs the risk of encouraging the idea that your choices matter in other people's abusive situations. Here's what therapy HAS successfully taught me: sometimes there's no right thing to say, and even if you approach someone in the healthiest way possible it won't keep them from making self-destructive decisions. In the real world, even if I said all the right things to V, he may have still decided to go back to Rika because he couldn't manage to love himself enough to leave. Maybe you've heard the statistic that it takes a woman on average 7 attempts to leave an abusive relationship. You can't just fix people by selecting the right option on the chat wheel - you can only tell them that you believe they deserve to be happy. You can't make them believe it too.

I do understand, however, that telling that story would make for a pretty heartbreaking video game (especially in a phone app where you date anime boys). So if you wanna get your heart put through a wringer you have both my recommendation and my warning. I think that if I'd gotten a bad ending I may have just put my phone down and taken the week off to lie in bed. But I do feel like I’m better off for playing it.

[guattari2600]

on choosing a life without a father

I tried to write this a few days after his death and it was rambling and hard to get through, so this is my second attempt - it took a few years to get here.

I didn’t open the last card my father sent me until after he was already dead. For seven or eight years before he died I didn’t speak to him and my family didn’t give him my address (thankfully), so on birthdays and holidays my mom would have a card from him that she’d hand to me without comment. Usually I didn’t open them at all because I knew what would be inside - a plea for me to get in contact with him, to have dinner with him, a claim that he didn’t know what he had done wrong. Sometimes a strain of indignation that I was his daughter and he was entitled to time with me. As time went on and he was clearly mentally deteriorating, sometimes he would write on legal paper instead of a card and meander into rambling accounts of money he was giving my brothers and mother, in an attempt (I’d guess) to make it sound like he was trying to be responsible, to hold it together, to make things up to the family.

In the last card he sent, a new tone emerged - he added a line about how “one never knows what will happen” and “we don’t have forever” to reconnect. He died unexpectedly of a heart attack shortly after my youngest brother left for college, his license for practicing law was suspended after it was found he was spending his clients escrow funds, and my mother moved to a different city and cut almost all contact with him. I don’t think his letter was prescient so much as he knew that the last handful of dirt was about to be tossed on the grave that he had dug for himself; the long years he’d spent abusing, controlling, and ultimately alienating those he’d loved had finally ripened into the poisonous fruit of loneliness that he’d been cultivating for decades.

My father’s death had the effect of expanding and prolonging the negative effects he’d had on our lives. Having just gotten out from under his thumb and moved to a brand new place, my mom now had to deal with the fact that he hadn’t updated his will in over a decade, so she had to manage all his financial affairs. During his life my father repeatedly tried to alienate us from my mother’s family by claiming they were brainwashing us against him and stealing from him (!), but it was my mother’s father who, now in his 80s, took on the awful task of cleaning out my father’s hoarder house, including wading through piles of trash and having to defrost an enormous freezer filled to the brim with food. It turned out that my father had triple-mortgaged the house, so immediately after his death my brothers and i had threatening letters from multiple banks who wanted to foreclose - we left them to fight among themselves.

My mother never spoke with much nostalgia or regret about her time with my father, but she did reflect on the time and money she’d dumped into the house - a few years before leaving, she’d funded a giant renovation that included hardwood floors, a brand new kitchen built to her specifications, a giant piano room to hold our baby grand piano and a room full of plants with skylights that was her sanctuary. She had a garden outside, too - I remember one year, she ordered ladybugs online to help kill aphids in her garden, and for a few weeks the entire house and yard was full of ladybugs.

There are a lot of things I remember, and a lot of things I don’t.

I remember the night my father promised to watch a meteor shower late at night with me - I set up lawn chairs between the trees and made a thermos of hot chocolate for us - he came home drunk and passed out on the couch, so I watched it alone.

I remember sitting on my grandparents’ stairs screaming and crying and holding onto the banister because I didn’t want to go home with him, and him trying to pry my fingers away. 

I remember him laughing at my mom when she was pregnant because she was too big to tie her own shoes, and helping her tie them so she could take me to school. I was eight.

I remember being at church in a dark blue velvet dress and white tights on Christmas and hearing my mother sing for the first time, and looking up at her and thinking she was the most beautiful person in the world.

I don’t remember ever seeing them touch each other with any affection, except once when she was sitting at the kitchen table - he kissed the top of her head, and she flinched.

It’s hard to feel like anyone understands my relationship with my father, or that I can understand other people’s relationships with their parents, dead or alive. His death has had a double barreled effect on my feelings about relationships. It’s forced me out of a cavalier attitude toward something more serious because of my fear of dying alone, the way he did. And it’s opened an uncrossable emotional gulf for me. When my father was alive, there was maybe a 1% chance I might talk to him again. It was low, but it was still a chance - a thread that people could connect to. Now that he’s dead, that connection is severed entirely, and so is my experience of other people’s relationships with their parents. It’s not jealousy or resentment, just loneliness. The scariest part, that I’ve worked on a lot, is the similarities I see in myself to my father - the quick temper, the struggle to change my opinions about the world and see things through the lens of others. And the good things too, the quick wit. And the physical things, my nose. When I fear dying alone, it’s not so much the dying alone part that’s scary, but the dying alone because I grow into him. Because of his aversion to mental health professionals, the giant question mark that is half of my genetics - will I suddenly lose control when I’m his age? My grandpa, upon going through my father’s things, found piles on piles of brand new clothes that my father had gone into debt to acquire instead of washing the clothes he had - he let the house crumble around him and filled it up with expensive things never removed from the packaging. It’s the act of someone ill, and I have no idea if that illness will hit me too. Maybe I’m a ticking time bomb. Maybe it’s not worth letting anyone get close to me, because I’ll just destroy them the way he destroyed people.

A question that people who have similar relationships with their parents ask me - sometimes out loud, sometimes not - is whether I wish I had reconnected with him before he died. A world in which I’d opened the ominous last letter and seen it as a path to redemption. I don’t have any regrets about not talking to him, but that’s mostly specific to my situation - I would happily have reconnected with my father if he’d admitted that he was mentally ill and abusive and sought help. Instead, he systematically shut down any criticism. He lived in a world where he couldn’t be wrong, and any attempts to make him seem wrong were either deflected or outright ignored. He threatened therapists in the area where we grew up because of his extreme aversion to him or any of us getting the help we needed. After leaving, I wanted to have him committed but my entire family was in a state of paralysis about it because he was a well-known local lawyer and had too many connections in the police and courts. He created a world in which it was impossible for me to feel like reconnecting with him would be worth the mental anguish of reopening the wound.I’ve spent a long time trying to untangle the relationship between my father’s mental illness and abuse.

Oftentimes (especially online) people will say “having mental illness doesn’t make you abusive.” That’s true, but it’s often tangled up together in ways that can make you feel guilty. My father grew up in a world where he had almost no control over anything around him, so he tried to build a world that he controlled. His mental illness made it possible for him to eliminate the parts of the world that didn’t fit what he wanted it to be. It didn’t make him do cruel things, but it helped him to forget them so he could live with himself. After he did something particularly cruel, his eyes would glaze over for a moment, he’d start laughing, and then he’d claim it never happened.

One of my therapists said that people who experience abuse are often more likely to empathize with abusers because we are forced to face their humanity every day. My father the monster loved Bobby Darin and had bookcases on bookcases of high fantasy books that he loved to read. He loved cowboy movies, especially John Wayne. The only thing he ever cooked was some kind of Eastern European tomato soup with so much pepper it’d make your eyes water. He put heaps of pepper on everything, even watermelon. He wore too much cologne. When he was growing up, his father died and his mother was also severely mentally ill and untreated, so she put him and his brothers through hell. Not only was the genetic lottery stacked against him, but he grew up with someone who saw snakes in the washing machine and blurred the boundaries between truth and dreams regularly.

Today’s Mother’s Day. One of the lasting effects of my father’s death is that when Mother’s Day comes, the dread in the pit of my stomach starts building in anticipation of Father’s Day. On Father’s Day, I disconnect from social media so as not to spoil everyone’s joy. I chose a life without a father. And I guess I’m writing this today in case you chose one too, or are thinking of choosing one. It’s hard, I won’t lie. It’s lonely. But sometimes a life without a father is better for you than life with one.

I loved my father despite everything, but I had to choose a life without him. And I think maybe for the first time over the past few months I’ve realized that’s okay.

[guattari2600]

i have no job for a month might as well write again

I’ve never gotten along with airplanes. The flight itself doesn’t bother me – it’s the parts before and after, sitting on the runway, breathing canned air and listening to the small noises that people make when they aren’t thinking. There’s something about near-silence that’s cacophonous – when I lie awake in the city at 4 AM in dead silence, after the bars have let out, I miss living in the country and falling asleep to the sound of crickets, trees in the wind, an owl or two.

I wish I hadn’t stopped writing poetry because it feels like I should be writing some, but I’ve lost the sense of the form. I know I write better when I’m forcing words to fit into a shape, constrained by rhyming schemes and repetition, the more limited the better. Maybe I just feel more free with bindings on my throat and hands, dictating what I say, what I write. Maybe it’s just easier to let someone or something else take the wheel – less risky.

The plane is over the Rocky Mountains right now, probably my third favorite place in the United States in terms of landscape. I think a lot about landscape, and how you can fall in love with someone for a second or a day or a year. I can’t think about longer than a year because that’s never happened. When I worked in a coffee shop I used to fall in love with people all of the time – sometimes regulars who I’d see every day and whose lives I probably  knew more about than they realized. Sometimes I’d fall in love with someone because of a smile, or the careful way they pulled out a chair before sitting down.

In a way it feels like I’ve been sleepwalking for the last few years and I’m just now waking up. At times I worried that I’d stay dormant forever. For the last year I’ve worked from home. I tried at first to go to a coffee shop and work so I wouldn’t be by myself all the time but like I said, I’ve never been good at self-control in freeform environments, so without any reason to not just lock myself inside, I stopped leaving. My friends moved away and I regretted all of the excuses I made not to hang out with them before I left. My partners tried to salvage things but I was too far gone to worry about anyone else. The worst part of depression for me is how selfish it feels, I think. The second worst part is my aversion to helping others who are depressed because I feel a deep revulsion about my own.

This flight feels like a death, as if this is the last thing I’ll write before I start a new life. That’s melodramatic as well as clichéd and bad writing, but clichés exist for a reason (for your enjoyment, a cliché about clichés).

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re beginning our descent for landing in Los Angeles.

[guattari2600]

robert made me write a pantoum

i hate him with my whole heart. here it is:

i dwell in that uncertainty in the tips of fingers temporarily threaded through a slow goodbye

in the tips of fingers nerves pirouette through a slow goodbye waltz into muted air

nerves pirouette flinging themselves into a waltz into muted air to encounter likeness

flinging themselves into a pair, against chance to encounter likeness for now

pair, against chance, temporarily threaded. for now, i dwell in that uncertainty

[guattari2600]

attention, everyone

please direct your attention to the center ring for a demonstration of the clumsiest, metaphor the quick recognition of the self in the other. while cleaning out the refrigerator (as all good poetry begins) i found a forgotten bag of fern seeds long dormant, hiding under a pile of yeast packets the instructions suggest “nicking or soaking in water”.

I could not bring myself to hold a knife to them so I have soaked them in a mason jar full of lukewarm water empty husks riding the meniscus i do not know how long seeds can survive in the nuclear darkness of a refrigerator but really, i’m not asking for much no blooming necessary just angular, symmetrical silence

[guattari2600]

in which i remember i am depressed

[guattari2600]

#8: y'all like cyborgs

[guattari2600]

#7 (second attempt)

[guattari2600]

#7, first attempt: i dug this out of the trash to keep myself honest

[guattari2600]

#6: enjoy having a body today, everyone

[guattari2600]

#5: not so much a poem as a general observation

[guattari2600]

#4

despite having two of my favorite things (cats & the fuck word) this is a second grader-level failure

[guattari2600]

#3

day 3 and broke my own rules already but this is all i can muster. im gonna make some soup

[guattari2600]

#2

[guattari2600]

#1

im filling this notepad with one poem every day exactly as long as the page until the notepad is full or i am dead, whichever comes first

[guattari2600]

On The Dress: Finally, In Defiance of The Sam Kriss Interpretive Regime

Recently "the dress" happened; today, it continues to happen; tomorrow, will probably fade. To some social media denizens it is a deeply embarrassing event that shouldn't be spoken of (and in fact, while it was happening, simultaneously being passed around were screenshots of sneering B-list celebrities who apparently spend their free time wholly in contemplation of global tragedies). To others, it was a celebration of a relatively stress-free collaborative conversation about a curious trick of human physiology that didn't (immediately) devolve into shallow ideological bickering. To others, it presented an opportunity to smash a keyboard with a fist at random until "Adorno" was successfully produced and publish it on Buzzfeed.

Today, I write in defiance of Sam Kriss.

The events:

1. A picture of a dress was posted on social media. To some, the dress in the image looked blue and black/brown; to others, it looked white and gold. 2. The image was rapidly circulated at a bizarrely accelerated pace that in itself is a marvelous study of the structure of networks and their capability for producing virality. 3. Friendships were dramatically built and destroyed when people couldn't decide which color the dress was. 4. Theories began appearing about why the dress appeared differently to different people. Photo editors gnawed their fingernails off in frustration trying to explain temperature and balance. Screenshots of the dress on sale on a website of both color schemes appeared. 5. The original poster of the image uploaded another image in which the dress was clearly blue and black. Its authenticity was disputed. 6. Bored journalists fell out of their chairs trying to write about the dress mid-frenzy. Someone found some kind of scientist who studies colors who declared it a unique and interesting case. 7. Sam Kriss posted on Buzzfeed decrying those who see the dress as black and blue as unimaginative tyrannical rationalists.

In keeping with the proud tradition of throwing highbrow critical theory at banal everyday occurrences, I would like to point readers to the chapter of Ranciere's The Emancipated Spectator titled "The Intolerable Image." It was originally intended to be about visual activist propaganda, but why not use it to talk about the dress? Cutesy leftist blogging not only makes possible such egregious acts of interpretosis, but heralds them as the new progressive canon. Warning: for the remainder of this post, I will continue to violently misuse theory in ways that prove my point.

Such is the dialectic inherent in the political montage of images. One of them must play the role of the reality that denounces the other's mirage. But by the same token, it denounces the mirage as the reality of our existence in which the image is included. The mere fact of viewing images that denounce the reality of a system already emerges as complicity with this system.. Thus, we need images of action, images of the true reality or images that can immediately be inverted into their true reality, in order to show us that the mere fact of being a spectator, the mere act of viewing images, is a bad thing. Action is presented as the only answer to the evil of the image and the guilt of the spectator. And yet these are still images being presented to this spectator. This apparent paradox has its rationale: were she not viewing images, the spectator would not be guilty. But the demonstration of her guilt is perhaps more important to the accuser than is her conversion to action.

The crisis described here by Ranciere - the tension between reality and mirage in political photography - is uniquely captured in the dress image, where both reality and mirage are self-contained. The internal magnetic repulsion of this crisis was what drove the rapid proliferation of the image across networks, the uneasy response to it.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the dress incident - and one that is entirely neglected in Sam's piece - was the initial mistrust produced by the normalized veneer of irony in relevant social networks in the early moments of the picture's circulation. Someone retweets the picture of the dress, "I'm freaking out." One friend responds: "It's blue and black." Another - "It's white and gold." The original poster, to the blue and black camp, uneasily "Haha, you're kidding right? You have to tell me if you're kidding." Another person: "No, it's definitely blue and black." Original poster: "Are you guys joking? I'm seriously freaked out right now." As it circulated further, some people reported experiencing dissociation because of the confusion. Rather than being limited to the straightforward tyrannical debate Sam reports, hordes of social media users were thrown into a state of perceptive liminality. Imagine the confusion, in particular, of those users who reported being able to see both the blue and black and the white and gold dress - by manipulating brightness, or occasionally when the image changed without warning.

The frenzy was not the friction between the tyrant and the oppressed, but rather a state of affective panic at the failure of the orderliness of the universe. This preoccupation may be born of fascism, but the desire for order certainly wasn't limited to the staunch blue and black supporters; rather, the desire for order produced a frenetic panic and eventually impulse of repulsion among nearly everyone who saw the image. I can only assume that the parading champions of The Blue And Black Sam reports were a creation of his feverish mind in the wake of his nauseated response to the image, because when the blue and black dress was posted and the experts were consulted, the sentiments I saw were primarily laughing relief - the resolution of the reality and the mirage.

In her chapter in the Affect Theory Reader titled "Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication, Anna Gibbs describes "the tension between humanist and nonhumanist forms of thought, between those who argue for the necessity of understanding formations of the subject and those for whom thinking is a practice that should extend us beyond the known forms of the subject," e.g., the proposed binarism of the blue and black and the white and gold. However, rather than rejecting all nonhumanist thought, Gibbs proposes work in which, "Rather than privileging one view over another, the task of theory may then be to know through which optic it is most productive to look at any given moment. Or - perhaps more difficult - to learn how to oscillate between these views, neither of which can simply be discarded." Oscillating between the humanist and nonhumanist contemplation of the subject is what makes possible the simultaneous understanding that the dress is blue and black, but the mirage of the white and gold is also a sensible formation. 

Sam is, surprisingly, correct to point to the body as a site of interest in the case of the dress. However, it might be wise to start at the eye, rather than at the stomach. One of the most popular ideas about the dress thrown around in the early moments of the dress event included an extensive speculation about the rods and cones inside an eye. In "The Pineal Eye," Bataille suggests that the tyrannical rationality of science can be harnessed for useful purposes, to:

[reduce] science to a state that must be defined by the term subordination, in such a way that one uses it freely, like a beast of burden, to accomplish ends which are not its own. Left to itself, free in the poorest sense of the word (where liberty is only impotence), inasmuch as its legacy as the first condition of existence was the task of dissipating and annihilating mythological phantasms, nothing could keep science from blindly emptying the universe of its human content. But it is possible to use it to limit its own movement and to situate beyond its own limits what it will never attain, that before which it becomes an unsuccessful effort and a vague, sterile being.

Bataille goes on to suggest that when science incorporates the mythological, myth loses its spectral characterization and is formed into political order to enslave the impoverished. Hope remains, however, for "this act of destruction becomes, at the final point of development, an act of liberation: delirium escapes from necessity, casts off its heavy mantel of mystical servitude, and it is finally only then that, nude and lubricious, it plays with the universe and its laws as if they were toys." For Bataille, the eyes become the perfect site for "a phantomlike and adventurous description of the universe." In defiance of you, Sam Kriss, I, who can see only the blue and the black, envy and pity you, for it is precisely the intervention of reality that makes possible the white and gold; not as an oppressor, but by liberating you from the tension between the mirage and the reality; by making possible the sustained ethereality of the white and gold perception-space.

Please, Sam Kriss, I implore you, Sam Kriss, I believe in you, Sam Kriss. I believe in the white and the gold. But in order to have it, the blue and the black.

[guattari2600]

An Amateur Book Collector's Missing Inventory List

1. One paperback copy of "Dreadful Sorry" by Kathryn Reiss, a YA thriller, regrettably taken to an elementary school book sale in 1996 or 1997.

2. Three miniature hardback volumes from a boxed collection of Beatrix Potter, left in a forgotten house in Appalachia that the bank foreclosed on.

3. Used hardback copy of "The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe," gifted to a highschool goth sweetheart and never returned after his sudden conversion to Christianity.

4. Brand new paperback copy of "Christie Malry's Own Double Entry" by B.S. Johnson, lent to a coffee shop customer while working part time as a barista in Pittsburgh a few weeks before his sudden departure for Australia. When asked about the book at his going away party, he made an excuse and disappeared for the rest of the night.

5. Used paperback copy of Plato's "Symposium," a somewhat befuddling gift made while extremely intoxicated to a gay couple visiting the apartment.

6. Brand new paperback copy of "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski, given as a reference to a tattoo artist in Austin, Texas before he left the shop suddenly under questionable circumstances & moved to Lubbock, taking the book and leaving the tattoo half-finished.

7. Used paperback copy of "Simulacra and Simulation" by Jean Baudrillard, lent to an eighteen-year-old in a co-op living space in Austin, Texas after an apparently complex conversation over his new vaporizer. 

8. Heavily used paperback copy of "Lathe of Heaven" by Ursula K. Le Guin, gifted to a graduate school sweetheart and never returned after a messy and protracted breakup.

9. Brand new hardback copy of "The Drunken Botanist" by Amy Stewart, sent as a thoughtful gift by a family member and left on a Pittsburgh bus seat ten minutes after picking it up at the post office.

10. Used hardback copy of "Delete" by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, lent to a partner on a project who assured the lender several times that he was terrible at returning books. The project fell through a week later.

11. Mother's dogeared paperback copy of "Fifty Shades of Grey," lent as a joke to a younger brother's dirty, rotten, no good ex-girlfriend who unexpectedly moved to Syracuse and took it with her. 

12. "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen, purposely left in the rain over a period of several weeks as a perverse experiment in metaphysics and deterioration.