I’m not planning on dying ever mostly because, in the third
grade, you bet me that I could not live forever. I remember. I remember. I
remember how scared I was to see your teeth for the first time, when we hid in
the dark of your closet in our church clothes. You pulled back your lips,
scraped at your gums until I could see your roots. I kept whispering that we
were going to get caught. You remember? You don’t remember a thing. You don’t
remember how you laughed at me, your clear voice not impeded by how many of
your teeth were falling out, the new ones quickly replacing them only to be
ripped away by shrewd five year old fingers. It kept happening until I begged
you to stop. That’s when I knew we were best friends. No, I remember
everything.
Do you remember that Clay Aikin song, “Invisible”? How do
you feel about that?
You told me I was the life of the party when I wouldn’t do
the electric slide at your cousin’s Bar Mitzvah. I laughed because that was an
amazing joke (you are so funny?) and also because “party” comes from the Latin
word “partyus” meaning “every man I have ever loved has died in bizarre
accidents my brother was struck by lightning my father fell through a hole in
the matrix of our earth and ended up in space the pressure didn't kill him but
he is frozen in place permanently underwater refracted he is the jpeg article
of bad parents”. We have lost so much linguistic density over the years. It’s electric.
Boogie woogie woogie.
I’m going to crawl into the microcosms beneath my
fingernails, and I will become its god, and I will live forever. I mean, I’ll
come for visits or at least send whatever is kind of like a carrier pigeon in
my dimension. There is important stuff I don't want to miss. Your wedding. Your
death (you are much less enterprising than I). Sleepovers. Pretend the pigeon
is me like I pretended I was in love with okay I can’t finish that sentence
that was too cliché. Or perhaps I will crawl into your ear and enter your
bloodstream and get stuck and you will have a massive heart attack and be cremated
and then i will be dust and you cannot kill dust. haha Put that in your pipe
and wonder why you invented me put me away in your closet you know with all the
teeth and weep for the way your fingers splay against the windowpanes the light
of the world to come the things you will never experience you were in college
when you first found a reason to learn latin to test my theory i was right i
was exactly right
I am alive I am alive I am alive I am alive i am alive i am
alive i am alive i am aliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveiamaliveいあまぃヴぇあああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああ
There are so many bad things that could happen.
Nonsense was created in the use of language, scene and imagery as well as in the flow of the piece. This was a very interesting take on nonsense. I got the impression that the author was taking on the persona of a mentally unstable person who took a dare too far. The voice has so many sick memories that could not possibly have happened. "You don’t remember how you laughed at me, your clear voice not impeded by how many of your teeth were falling out, the new ones quickly replacing them only to be ripped away by shrewd five year old fingers." Where did the fingers come from? Why such a sick memory? It also didn't make sense because this disturbing memory is one he ties strongly to the development of their friendship. Friendship is normally not grounded in unpleasant memories and events. I began to wonder what caused this character to create such a scene. The fire .gif added to the psychotic episode that is being described. It was confusing when following this fire and recollection of terror (which the voice seemed to subconsciously enjoy), he began talking about a funny moment at a Bar Mitzvah. There was so much nonsense in this tone switch. Toward the end, there was no longer a plot. Initially the plot was somewhat sensible but the actions moving it along were not. Towards the end, the flow was almost completely gone, but the main idea of immortality was still present. Then, the psychotic scene was exaggerated in the repetitions and language switch.
ReplyDeleteSo I'm not going to lie, I was interested in your response based off of your McDonald's video clip! I love McDonald’s so it was very intriguing to see fire incorporated with the video also. My own personal definition of nonsense is randomness and I feel as though you incorporate structured randomness into your response. I feel like there was a muted story line happening throughout all of the madness occurring. Also it seemed as though you were talking to a specific person that you may have been close with but wasn’t anymore. Going back to the idea that there was some type of story line here, I feel as though you were retelling personal memories. Or at least that’s how it felt. Even though those might not have been your exact memories, maybe you fabricated them to some extent to fit in with the madness you were creating. Towards the end of your response I got the sense that you were purposefully throwing yourself back in someone’s face. Almost saying “Yeah look at me now!” Which is great and I feel was highly encouraged by the repeating lines of “I’m Alive!” One of my favorite parts of your response was when you talked about crawling “into the microcosms beneath [your] fingernails.” I just related to that in my weird way because I just thought that was so cool to even think on that biological. Also the fact that you actually made the microcosms into beings that you could control was mind-blowing! Overall thanks for giving us a view into your subconscious it was great!
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading this post because it was written so that I could understand certain aspects without it being total nonsense. There were some more detailed and graphic elements to it, such as the “pulling of the lips” action being portrayed and the crawling of the “microcosms beneath [their] fingernails.” The beginning of this post sounds most like a memory the author is thinking about, which begins to escalate and finally come to present. I thought adding in the GIF to the nonsense was pretty interesting and refreshing. Specifically because of the one they decided to include, to me did not have much of a connection from what I understood in the post. The sentence in quotations was probably my favorite part of the post because it completely goes on a tangent of its own. When defining a party, I was not expecting that long run-on sentence. This reminded me of the feeling some parties evoke by sometimes being less structured and chaotic. I think that making the explanation of a party, a run-on sentence itself, was key in trying to describe the sensation of chaos and fun.
ReplyDeleteFinally the ending portion made me think that the author is some sort of small being based on the fingernail remark and crawling into ears, or that person’s bloodstream, and finally becoming dust. I thought that by the end of the post, I found myself getting more scrambled with trying to find a meaning to what was being written. The final sentences were very different from the beginning because of the repetition of the phrase “I am alive” being scrambled towards the middle and end.
Oh, I do love this... you can certainly tell which of these were written by the creative writing folks. Each of these lines reeks of a similar realm of feelings: disappointment, trauma, regret, sorrow. The reason this all works so well, though, is because some of the statements themselves do appear to make sense, and up until the very last lines, they all make complete grammatical sense, which coincides with Noam Chomsky's whole "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" coinage. This post, as well, reminds me of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The sentiment makes sense and is not confusing, but each statement does not appear to so well follow the one preceding it, thereby qualifying as nonsense. The addition of the Japanese(?) symbols at the end as well as the .gif of the blazing drive-thru in coupling with the sentence salad-y structure gives this post a somewhat, for lack of better phrasing, schizophrenic quality.
ReplyDeleteI feel a lot of artistic knowledge and/or critique is something that is known to a handful of people a priori, and the tone the structure the word choice the salads the everything made me sense something cool in this. It''s like Black Angel's Death Song: it might be nonsense, but it conveys something conversely concrete.