Porn is  the method men use to imagine what they would do if they were women, how they would apply themselves to satisfying other men, what good sluts they'd be, what prick-devourers. It is often said that reality frustratingly doesn't live up to pornographic performance; the reality where men have to fuck women who aren't like porn star women, or not often anyway. It is interesting to note that the "real" women who really exaggerate the feminine thing, those who repeat a dozen times in the space of one conversation how "womanly" they feel, and whose sexuality is most compatible with that of men, are often in fact the most masculine. The frustration of real life can be summarized as the necessary rejection by men (if they want to be heterosexual) of the notion of fucking men with the physical attributes of women.

—Virginie Despentes

Things are often the exact opposite of what we have been told, which is why we are told them so repeatedly & ferociously.
                                        —Virginie Despentes

I woke up this morning thinking one should live life like a sonnet. Then I thought, to live life like a sonata would be even better, so much richer and symphonic, or something. But then I realized I didn’t know what a sonata actually was, how it was structured, how it sounded,  or anything. It might be too complicated. A sonnet is relatively simple & straightforward. Anyone can follow the structure of a sonnet. Okay, then. So, live life like a sonnet, it is. But then I started thinking how would you go about doing that? How would you live your life like a 14-line composition written in iambic pentameter, which, if you were following the Shakespearean model, would be organized in quatrains with a rhyme scheme of abab, cdcd, efef, gg? Maybe it’s just another one of those things that people say that sound good but really don’t amount to a whole lot of anything at all when you  stop to think about them. Live life like a sonnet? What does that actually mean? I had no idea. So I got up and started the coffee.

FIRST MANIFESTO OF EXTRATERRESTRIALISM

Everyone has already thought of everything in the world.

Cows,  in a field,

on a roof,

on a billboard,

munch-munch.
Moo.

It's depressing.

We've really outlived our usefulness  as thinking beings,

we sad apes,
we humans.

The only new thought to think is the extraterrestrial thought.

We need to open ourselves

to thinking from outer space.

Human beings are out of gas.

All the new ideas are just old ideas

with the word "neo" stuck in front

to indicate they're "new."
It has become painfully obvious.
We're talking faux new.

Everything must be a remake from hereon out.

To start: Being out of context is analogous to being 
in outer space. Words stripped of meaning are either 
weightless or heavier than gravity.
Here we go through the black hole.
Words must be used in new ways, heretofore unimagined.
Images, too. 
Framing is everything.  
Human sight must be altered.

What would an extraterrestrial think?

That's the only question worth answering

nowadays.

The only question that can possibly 

produce new ideas.

But they will be ideas that no one will 

1) understand

2) find aesthetically pleasing

3) consider anything less than aggressively ugly, unpleasant, 

inhospitable, even threatening to human sensibility & survival

and not because, as previously, they are ahead of their time.

But because they are outside of time.

Outside of the parameters & possibility of the human brain.

What would an alien painting look like?

An alien sculpture?

An alien poem?

To start: it wouldn't have the colors, proportions, or syntax

that are the basis of human aesthetics.

It would seem, well, alien to the requirements of

human beauty.

The human mind being conditioned 

for human beauty,

human understanding,
human relevance.

And yet extraterrestrial thought and aesthetics might begin to offer an answer to the problems

that plague us. Because it must be clear to anyone

by now that the human mind cannot solve human problems;

it only creates new ones.
The human mind is a machine for creating human problems.

NOT ANOTHER HUMANISM.

At long last, let's have an end to this galactic humanist egoism, this particularly human plague, that insists we see everything through the human sickness, ie. Evolution but it stops at Homo Sapiens, as if we are any better, any more worthy of permanence than the Triceratops or the Cro Magnon or the angelic Pterodactyl. 

AN EXTRATERRESTRIALISM!

What are these new ideas the extraterrestrials have?

What is their notion of beauty?

What if it's ugly? 

What if it sounds like nonsense?

The fact is: alien intelligence & aesthetics 
will exclude human beings. 

There must be some of us ready to take this bold first step into the only true avant garde remaining,
the step not just beyond human
but that negates the human altogether,
ie. human not as stepping stone,
as evolutionary rung to something higher,
but as a draft of a project flawed from the get-go, history being a record of its repeated failed rewrites.
A project that any clear-eyed artist would see must be crumpled
up & destroyed.

LET US BEING FROM SCRATCH WITH A FRESH SHEET OF PAPER. 

LET THERE BE LIGHT.

[ie. The New Nonsense]
There must be some of us ready to accept the new anti- information.

There must be some who can appreciate the new anti-beauty if only in a theoretical sense.

Some of us must have been seeded for this moment.
Some of us must be Extraterrestrialists already.

One thing is certain to be true, ready or not.

THE EXTRATERRESTRIALS HAVE ALREADY LANDED.

—from The Antonin Artaud Spring Roll Society

Me, Remembered as a Totem Pole

I am shivering in a necktie

I am swallowing something cold & slippery

I am watching you

walk among the artichokes

so alone

so alone
it's awful

I am standing before a mirror

with a flashlight under my chin

flicking it on & off

on & off

scaring myself 

I am telling myself I can’t take it anymore

I am breaking plates 

on a concrete floor

dropping them one after another
from a long way off—

I don’t know why

I have lost my car keys

I am brushing my teeth with a plastic razor

I am sitting in a small blue boat
far out at sea
in rocky water

No, I'm sitting in a small blue boat
in the middle of my kitchen floor
that buckles beneath me
like rocky water

There is an oar in my hands but it's useless
it is not even an oar
it's the first line of this poem

I don’t know where the cat goes in the night

what she’s hunting

or if she ever finds it

but when she comes for me in the morning 

she always seems surprised to see I’m still here

& indicates 
I should be, too

I've stopped waiting for the planes overhead
the ladder to drop
the trap door to open
the clowns, the dancing pomeranians

This is what is called surviving
This is the easy part

The problem is how do you survive
all the continual surviving?

It's a lot like giving up hope
Hope itself, I mean 
is packing a suitcase like a parachute
& walking out the door 
into loneliness 
into space

You'll see.
It all tastes like cherries in the end.

Nowadays, whenever I see a pretty girl, I imagine her with a soft, flaccid, useless penis in her panties & she immediately becomes prettier, sexier & ten thousand times more interesting to me.

Missions are stupid. I have no mission. No one has. And it's a terrific relief to realize you are free. Free of all missions.
                                 —Milan Kundera

I wish I'd learned this earlier, much earlier. I have no mission. What a relief! I've been repeating this to myself for a week. I smile into the darkness. I'm free. Free of all purpose, of a need to be. I simply am. Through no fault of my own, I'm here. I didn't want to be, I wouldn't have chosen to be if I'd been given the choice, but that is beside the point. Up to now, it's always been the point. But no more. The point is, I'm here. And for no reason. No reason at all. And I don't have to make up a reason. Or worse, accept a reason imposed on me by someone else. I don't have to justify my existence. That's been the secret I've been trying to uncover my entire unhappy life. The secret is that there is no secret. There it is: out in the open. And, just like that, I'm unhappy no more.