A translation from Cioran

Ship smith clued me in to Cioran; I don't know whether this passgage has been translateed earlier and better than this, but what I'm reading right now particularly sez it:

" If an obscure universal force has decreed that you will belong to the order of victims, you'll go to the end of your days stumbling, squishing the scrap of paradise that you hide inside under your feet, and the bit of force that pierces out from your smoldering stares and from your dreams will soil itself in the face of the filth of time, matter, and men. You'll have a compost heap for a stage and your tribune will be an instrument of torture. You'll only be allotted a leprosy-infected glory and a crown of drool. Feh, you would try to walk alongside those to whom everything is due, for whom all paths are clear? Dust and cinder will rise to bar time's exits to you, will bar the escapes of your dreams. No matter where you turn, your feet will stumble, your voice will only call hymns of filth, and, past your heads which are bent toward your hearts, where only self-pity lives, the breath
of the happy will barely pass -- the happy, those blessed toys of a nameless irony, and just as guiltless as you are!"

Pardon my tortured translation, I've had a few. And cioran wasn't a native French speaker anyway, so pardon his tortured fucking Romanian.

now i think it has gotten worse

If anyone at all was reading this blog, it has lain dormant due to Fate and teeth-kickings. I don't suppose I believe in Fate, but if I did I would seriously suspect that She plans on using me to generate very dark and hopeless writings. Perhaps she wants all of humanity to finally wake up to its dismal pointless condition and commit mass suicide.

By the way, how did all the wealth in the world just disappear? How the fuck did we go into a depression during a war? Who stole all the fucking money, kids? SOMEBODY IS LAUGHING.

I continue to be mesmerized by the horror that is homo sapiens. I highly suspect that if there is somebody behind this mess, they did it just for fun. To see what would happen to everyone else, look down, and laugh.

Well, I suppose we deserve it. Look at us. Just look at us.
Monsters.

FEEL THAT?

Do ya FEEL it? I think, higher up, even they can hear it grind: it's the wheel of history, crushing the peasants again. You whined and whined when it crushed your dreams, but the fun's only beginning: wait till it crushes your bones! Ha ha! One likes to tell oneself that at least the wheel will feel sorry when it notices that now there are things it wants to get done, and there aren't any peasants to do it anymore, but SINCE YOU FUCKING MORONS KEEP POURING MORE BABIES INTO THE NIGHTMARE, it ain't ever going to learn its lesson. Not that, lacking a central nervous system, it could have done so anyway. HA HA HA HA HAH HAHAHAHHAHAAHH!

Still alive

To the disappointment and/or indifference of nearly 100 percent of the human race, I haven't hung myself. I've merely been very busy reaping the reward of a youth pissed away in dedication to the literary arts: I've been studying night and day to pass the training exams at a corporate restaurant, where decisions regarding my progress toward the right to wear a baseball cap and be tip-stiffed by subnormals who can't properly read a menu are routinely made by people who are A. Ten years my junior, and B. Invariably more drunk from the night before than I am.

Yeah, last night I was held back a training stage (which means losing 4-5 days' work, and probably being stuck with lousy shifts till I 'prove myself,' ie forever) for hitting two incorrect buttons on a touch screen. I wanted to grab my youthful trainer's collar and scream, "YOU WRITE A COMIC NOVEL THEN! GO ON! WRITE A FUCKING COMIC NOVEL IF I'M SO GODDAMNED INFERIOR!" But I couldn't really grab his collar, since he was wearing a t-shirt, so I pretended to be a good sport. And to ignore the fact that the shift had kicked off with a lecture on how there was too much server error being committed by people who were already full servers. No punishment, mind you. No loss of income or status. But for NEWBIES (even when I'm not one, I detest and want to kill people who use that word), there's no quarter. Typical humans: once you're in, you're in. If you aren't inside the circle yet, show any weakness and WE will tear your throat out.

(Ah, well. At least, once I'm finished with training hell, I will be able to GO HOME ON MY OWN TIME AND DO WHAT I WANT. Fuck you, academia, fuck you still. I guess I'm not really mad at the young trainer; I'm still enraged by my former employer. I shouldn't be starting over at this point in my life. The years these kids are giving to perfecting their table-waiting skills, I pissed away at a 'liberal' newspaper where promotions and permanent careers as a journalist were only ever a real possibility for those to the manner born. So fuck you too, journalism; fuck you harder. I want to be the real thing anyway, not a professional cocktail-partier with a tape recorder.)

(Funny: up till this humiliation, I had been feeling the fine sensation of being back in the polis with all my heart. I hope the anger dies quickly. It was nice to feel well for a little while.)

Anyway. I'm working on a pair of articles on a 2005 Philip Larkin biography for FISTAGBLOG, but paying gigs take precedence at the moment: see the tale of my first day in retraining for the restaurant industry at www.intheweedsmag.com.

Philip won't disappoint you, the poor dead humiliated antinatalist bastard. If I ever catch up on my day humiliations. The trick is to pretend you're watching a movie. The more stupid shit that happens to you, the funnier the movie becomes, yes? Ha ha.

P.S.

Shit like this is why I'm going blind... usually such false fanciness makes me want to stab the student in the eye, but at least it's funny:

One of the first women mentioned in the novel is Meroe, a witch who runs an inn whom Socrates stays in.

Imagine reading hundreds of essays that are written like this... I'm feeling sort of psychotic, I've been at it all afternoon... GODDAMNIT OBAMA, DO NOT SEND EVEN STUPIDER PEOPLE TO COLLEGE! WORRY ABOUT THE DAMNED HIGH SCHOOL KIDS! BY THIS POINT IT'S TOO... FUCKING... LATE!

Ethics, Shmethics -- this is why I'm not going to finish grad school, part two

OK, time for a direct quote from a student. I'm sick of protecting the guilty. And anyway, I'm not going to tell you this little fuck-tard's name. Lucky him! Because here is a prime sample of the shit that lands in an average public-university TA's e-mail every godforsaken day of the semester:

| Hello i am emailing you because of my last exam grade. It says i got a 27 but i dont know how i could of scored that low. I thought i knew evewrything. Would i be able to stop by and see my exam by any chance. Thank you for your time.

Uh huh. Are you going to thank me for my time by giving me some money to make up for the freelancing work I am not going to be able to do because I have to come in and deal with your bullshit on what's supposed to be my day 'off' (i.e. moonlighting day, since the state doesn't see fit to pay me enough to live on -- too busy subsidizing the FUCKING BREEDERS who go on creating more wastes of air like you)? Nah, I didn't think so. You're just going to show up in my office ten minutes before our appointment and bitch at me for worrying you because I was only five minutes early and oh goodness, you would have wasted your time if you'd left before I got there!

I don't know how I could of agreed to take this job. I thought i knew evewrything.

(My god, that e-mail is a lapidary treasure of hubris!)

At least it's almost over. I can go back to waiting tables, so I can have money left after the bills, some unadulterated free time to write, and customers who don't demand that I come in on my days off to discuss why they're so goddamned stupid.

Not a noble calling? Hey, I've already written my academia novel. Now we shall spy on the human race at large as it unwittingly struts its stuff before the servants. (The first time I tried this, my own ego hadn't fully congealed, and I spent more time licking my wounds than analyzing the data.) Any academic research I would do would be read by ten people, and the rest of my time would be spent torturing and being tortured by mouthbreathing adolescents.

So goodbye, undergraduates of the world, and here's a word of advice: either shut up and do your schoolwork, or shut up and go be half-assed somewhere else. Not all of the time and money you're wasting belongs to other people; this is your nasty surprise and my consolation.

Ah... but really... is there any consolation for wastes of life? When I think of how isolated and peerless and glum I have been since I left Chicago I feel afraid at how much it must have changed me. No one will even recognize me. In a week I'll be wandering around the city like a ghost, unable to speak through the wall to anyone, and not really giving a damn -- it's only more soul death, after all. If they recognized me they'd only want to break the glass cage around my heart, and the fragments would rattle around and kill me. In Carbondale, my prison till next week, it has been raining every day for what seems like decades. And I still have hundreds of undergraduate essays to go. I thought i knew evewrything.

Pirates, part twaaaar.

Seriously, though, I can't get over this pirate thing. I'm not so much taken aback by the fact that there are still pirates, but -- to paraphrase They Might Be Giants -- where the fuck's my jet pack? Are you reading this shit? The pirates are attacking conventional, earthbound, seafaring vessels with... a skiff.



A FUCKING SKIFF! THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY! EIGHT THOUSAND PLUS YEARS OF PIRACY AND THESE MOTHERFUCKERS ARE STILL ATTACKING EARTH BOATS WITH A LITTLE -- FUCKING!!!! -- SKIFF?!



I give up. I read Evan Dorkin's space-pirate comics when I was an adolescent. I was resigned to a universe peopled by glamourous brigands in ska outfits, just so long as they attacked me while I was flying between galaxies on some noble mission in a space cruiser with a nice warm swimming pool. Jesus fucking christ, I want my fantasies back. Seriously, if the Christians are allowed to walk around in their own little fictional world, why can't I? I'm going to go fall asleep in front of Doctor Who now, and dream of the day when he shows up to take me adventuring. Wake me when someone destroys the earth with a herd of elephants. On second thought... don't bother, my final nightmare will probably be more interesting.

(Anything would be more interesting than dying of swine flu... can you think of two less glamourous words for Armageddon? I mean, besides 'mad' and 'cow'... "Help, help, I'm being killed by Tipper Gore!"...)