#folderol

[lifeinpoetry]

   Con    tact

             your

    sick              ness, prescribe

                 it             names.

— Daniel Scott Tysdal, from “Folderol,” published in The Puritan

[propriosepsis]

gaze long enough into the abyss and the abyss will gaze back: past its prime. we’ve all seen the abyss by now bud. and each other. mortifying ordeals for everyone.

scream long enough into the abyss and the abyss will scream back: merit varies, either some solipsism shit about echoes or something about “help me” being the first communication anything with the ability to communicate says, and never really stops. and that’s pretty alright.

“abyss” is our name for the immensity of what we can’t perceive, as though our ability to perceive what isn’t abyss means anything. sometimes if you greet the abyss, someone else in the dark will respond to the abyss’s greeting in kind, and the abyss will be just a little less empty: awwww yeag thats theg OOD shit babeiy

don’t gaze into an abyss you’re not gonna get all up in to begin with: well that’s just good etiquette. the cosmos is not showing hole for no reason. take the fuckin hint.

[propriosepsis]

Every person I have ever interacted with for more than a few hours- every one, without exception- has at least one thing about which They Should Fucking Know Better. What seems to be a glaring gap in their worldview, a Normal they have not questioned even while priding themselves on ripping their Normal to shreds looking for answers. A moment of “how is that a thought that you can have alongside the rest of your thoughts and not notice something is very, very incongruous?”

Every person, at least one thing. Obviously it’s usually more than one. And that’s only what I get from the limited time I interact with them.

This has, over time, coalesced into a rubric for how I interact with the world;

- I am not the miraculous exception to this human trait. I, also, have something about which I Should Fucking Know Better. Obviously I don’t know what it is, or I’d… know better. And if I am fortunate enough to find and correct one of these, there will always be another. The negative space carved out by what I should realize and don’t is as much a part of me as anything I do.

- The people I am most interested in interacting with are the people most likely to recognize that about themselves, too. It’s not quite inversely proportionate, you gotta have confidence in some of your thoughts and beliefs. But it’s been my experience that people who are confident in all of them are not paying nearly enough attention to things outside their skull.

I am, maybe foolishly, pretty confident in this approach. Seems to be working okay for me.

But there’s a simpler one too, that has never gone wrong for me yet. And it’s encouraging how much it seems to line up with the above.

It’s this;

- I do not trust anyone who is happy to have a reason to hurt people.

That, for me, has largely sorted the world into “people I can work with” and “people I have to work around.” And the simplicity of that binary pings some warning bells for me, because I damn well do Know Better than to think any framework can be applied to 8 billion people that easily.

But, of course, I’ll never be free of those blind spots. So I am content to Xeno’s Paradox this one: if this is where my worldview goes asymptotic, the inflection point where anything further is guaranteed to never actually hit the mark of really, truly and completely Fucking Knowing Better… it seems a pretty good one, to me.

[propriosepsis]

From the moment I first saw this, and for over a decade since, I have had this specific sentence turn up in my head unprompted on a regular basis. This sentence just installed itself in me and my brain will continue to quote it at me forever.

Groin idiots. It's sublime.

[propriosepsis]

If you encounter someone whose behavior or motivations you do not understand, it is very rarely the correct course of action to try and figure out some explanation for why it actually does fit into your understanding. It is pretty nearly never the correct course of action to decide their expressed reasoning for their behavior or motivations is an attempt to deceive you and hide from you their 'actual' reasons, which are purely negative things that you do understand.

There are more than 8 billion motherfuckers on this wet rock. Eight billion. You were not the one-in-8-billion occurrence of someone with the Platonic ideal of thoughts and motivations, from which all others are derived. You were not born with completely perfect opinions, you certainly did not luck into the only family or culture in the world with perfect opinions to instill into you. The vast majority of humans on this earth think, feel, and value some things that are incomprehensible to you. The number of people whose behavior and motivation are almost identical to yours would not even register as a rounding error. "Why would anyone-" because they are different from you. That can be a jumping off point for many helpful lines of thought, and is a question worth asking. But you have to accept that initial answer. They do not have the same values as you and are merely confused, or trying to deliberately subvert them. They are different. That's gonna happen sometimes in a population of over eight billion people. Learn to deal with it.

[marcogiovenale]

18 ottobre, roma, folderol: presentazione di "audio doc sound title", di pietro d'agostino

A Roma, sabato 18 ottobre, alle ore 18:00 presso Folderol Studios c/o Kappabit – Via Sgurgola 7 Presentazione del cofanetto di Audio Doc Sound Title di Pietro D’Agostino dialogano con l’autore Giuseppe Garrera e Marco Contini Audio Doc Sound Title vuole partecipare e farsi espressione del dialogo e delle relazioni. Trentuno personaggi sonori, tra scrittori e musicisti, hanno collaborato alla…

[propriosepsis]

It seems a little strange to me that there isn't, like, a constant background roar of people arguing over Bugs Bunny's gender identity at all times. I think it might be because everyone recognizes that the gender is Fucking With People, and if there is any significance to any behavior beyond that, it will always be impossible to tell. You are not going to get an answer to that question, you are going to be blown up by a stick of dynamite that you thought was a microphone to ask the question with.

And that is... very, very good. I am glad the little fucker's seared so hard into the cultural consciousness.

[propriosepsis]

they let me hit because a solenoid has accelerated me to ~c towards them for the purpose of seeing what we're made of