Spam #1

fifteen years ago when i was the co-owner/administrator/second-most-decorated-troll of a freeform fantasy role-playing chat/message board site (we paid for vbulletin unlike the poser dragonborne faggots indiscriminately diddling each other—hope they lied about the “s” or the “l” and not the “a,” you dumb motherfucker—on invision free boards) i used to fill the spam forum (inspired by Gaia Online, my god, but with no gold to farm. no reward for your wasted time but an inflated post count that would just be wiped into oblivion sometime in 2008 when rudy and I were both unemployed and I had just dropped out of grad school and neither of us could conjure the serotonin necessary to back the website up before we stopped paying for webspace) with these stream of conscious ramblings (ha, you had to backtrack before the parenthetical to remember what the fuck i was on about—is it cultural appropriation to use the phrase “on about” if you’re not fucking Welsh or whatever?—didn’t you?) where i would free associate (jeffrey epstein suicide is painlesser of two evils … fuck, I can’t do this anymore) for hundreds of words and even though it was disposable ephemeral trash (defined by content by medium by proximity) that probably felt more like how i imagined the creation of art was supposed to feel than anything I’ve ever created except maybe 6 Page Manual (a parody of jeepform “sensitive issue” RPGs full of incoherent tables for random character generation [you are … “a homeless drug addict with no friends left to borrow money from,” “a toddler with clinical depression,” “an autotech teacher with a degree in philosophy, “Sir Francis Drake,” “the Drake Equation,” “a Palestinian werewolf on the the wrong side of a border checkpoint and the moon is full,” “a house fly.”] with its limited, meaningless rules written in a shoddy, offensive approximation of an Eastern European accent) but as I write this I realize that I am old (essentially middle age, well past that if we’re being honest with ourselves. Earlier this week I discovered David Berman’s music and learned that he had killed himself on the same day, in that order, in direct contradiction to the basic rules of hashtag causality that I’d come to accept as a fact of late life in late capitalism, and, anyway, he only made 52 and had far more significant accomplishments than I do [and hell maybe fewer attempts—both at art and at death—for all I know] while John Berryman [a white poet who wrote in blackface during that fleeting cultural moment where doing so was not a career-ending choice but would still make the cosmopolitan {saw a twitter thread recently arguing that “cosmopolitan” was a dog whistle for “Jewish.” You’ll have to take my word for it, reader, when I say that I’m not an anti-Semite, not one of these racist sexist autistic irony-poisoned alt right incels no matter how much I may resemble them physically demographically neurologically tonally and in terms of my social, professional, and reproductive success. |hahahahaha|} over-educated consumers of contemporary poetry wince {and award him the Pulitizer in exchange for their discomfort}] drunkenly limped all the way to 57 before he stumbled [flew?] off the Washington Avenue Bridge so why should I expect more than that) and my calcified synapses no longer have youth’s pliability and cannot cannot cannot cannot cannot cannot cannot cannot cannot cannot stretch towards those glorious idiosyncratic connections (a few months ago I joined a discord full of 18-to-20whatever year old twitter cringe artists and instead of being invigorated by their manic embrace of the vile transitory artform [i loathe the repetition here: art -> artform {fucking artless of me} but could not think of another word] I simply felt overwhelmed and ashamed. Eventually I muted its notifications. Later I stopped signing into Discord at all.) and now all my ambitions (not dreams) are unattainable (in spite of life’s persistence).