review of losing my job and drinking 18 beers and watching blade runner 2049

Last Friday I was laid off due to the economy, so I bought 18 beers and watched the movie Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve). I started watching this movie at 2am, a point by which I had drank a considerable number of my 18 beers, such that drinking further beers during the 2hr43 minute duration of this movie was difficult. The movie’s atmosphere was rain-washed and moody in a way that reminded me of driving to McDonald’s late at night. During the opening scenes, it struck me how masterfully cool the phrase ‘blade runner’ is, a term referring to the job of hunting down replicant androids hiding as humans, and I felt a desire bloom within my unemployed essence to find a similar occupation, one where I could also be cool and rain-washed. However, the real-world equivalent of robot detective is just a cop, I gradually realized, and my fantasy of fighting robots to the death in a deluge of neon-soaked rain was kind of marred with competing visions of mundane policework, minor traffic infractions. This got me thinking about physical fitness and how in high school I was mocked in the locker room for my hairy ass. My ass, as it was determined by peer consensus, had too much hair on it, such that it was less like the ass of a high schooler and more like a monkey’s ass, in the opinion of my classmates, it was like the ass of a mindless, thrashing animal, the ass of a species that has not developed society or conscious thought. It’s been a decade since I graduated high school. I’m unemployed, I have no future or prospects. As I continued to watch this movie, I kept thinking about how this was basically a three hour-long movie. I’d started at 2am and drank a lot of beers, I didn’t know if I could or should finish this movie. I was having mild, whimpering thoughts like ‘oh nnno… no…’ and ‘three-hour long movie…Jesus Christ…that’s too long of a movie..’. The lead actor of Blade Runner 2049 is Ryan Gosling, who to me has a reputation of fulfilling male fantasies of stoic autism. Even though in this movie Ryan Gosling is supposed to be a robot, I continually caught myself relating to him. I’d think ‘he’s just like me’ during yet another scene of Ryan Gosling driving through neon-soaked rain. Ryan Gosling grappling with the existential ramifications of being programmed with a false childhood is just like losing your job and drinking 18 beers. It’s just like driving to McDonald’s in the rain. I didn’t like this movie’s portrayal of advertising. In the future, this movie argues, advertisements will be building-sized holograms, they’ll be projected into the night sky, they’ll play in the urinal you’re attempting to piss in. Actually, though, I think advertising’s modern problem is that it’s ever-internal. It is the square of your phone, it’s a personalized YouTube notification, it is your most private and dark pocket. The McRib is back. The McRib is always back, it seems, the shambling corpse of it. There is something dark as a church’s shadows, maybe, about naming a fast food product after the rib, the most cathedral-like part of man. Ryan Gosling has a computer girlfriend in this movie, his girlfriend is like, she is the computer, but he puts her on a chip and so she’s a hologram that can walk around with him while he does police stuff. This strikes me as another incorrect futurist cultural ‘take’ from this movie. It seems a lot of people want to argue that the modern incel substitutes the girlfriend with the computer, but I disagree: the incel goes to the computer because of a lack, because there is no girlfriend; the computer is less of an escape than it is a trapdoor, a fall into ever-deeper, no girlfriend darkness. The entire first two hours of this movie seemed comically extraneous to me, in terms of tangible plot details and development. Three hours, that’s too many hours for a movie. Eventually Ryan Gosling finds Han Solo from Star Wars who is also the first blade runner guy from the first movie. There’s an essential plot point—I think this whole movie is happening because Han Solo fucked a robot? I felt confused by the thematic messaging of this. What are we, as an audience, learning here? Fucking robots is bad? You can’t fuck your phone. This is supposed to explore the boundary of humanism or, whatever…I don’t know…in high school they said I had ape ass. They said I had the hairy ass of an ape. The movie ends with the Ryan Gosling robot defeating a woman-robot in combat and then subsequently drowning her to death. Critiques aside, I still do genuinely think this movie is one of the most accurate portrayals of ‘the future’ I’ve seen, in that the future is still, to this day, the neon lights of a McDonald’s seen through a sheet of rain, it is abandoned mall parking lots. This was a good movie about me being unemployed and drinking 18 beers.

thoughts on some tweets that I like

In a The New Yorker interview with Salley Rooney I recently read, there’s a section that physically describes the author, detailing her quirks, gestures, and speaking habits, her ‘bright and crisp’ voice, the way that there is ‘something autumnal about her’. This kind of writing about writing fills me with an ephemeral rage. I think my problem is that writing is fundamentally unsexy—at its core, the act is little more than spending hours at a keyboard with bad posture—so prestige magazines like these feel the need to ‘glitz up’ the profession, to portray normal awkward humans as esoteric celebrities. Still, there’s lots of writing in this world that appeals to me, and I want to learn how to talk about it. I’m frustrated by the inadequacy of cushy write-ups like The New Yorker, but also by my own inability to describe exactly what it is I like about the writing I consume. So, in an ongoing challenge to myself, I’m attempting to explain why I like the writing that I do. Today’s post will be focused particularly on tweets I’ve liked. Please consider this a The New Yorker-tier puff piece on Twitter posts that I think are good.

1.

                    

Megan Boyle is to tweeting what Lorrie Moore is to the short story, I feel, both masters of their craft. Megan has consistently displayed the ability to chart daily events/emotions in ways that are funny, unique, and often surprisingly wrenching. I like how the sentiment Megan expresses here is both singular, hyper-focused in its detail, and universal—it doesn’t just trigger familiar memories in me but plants them, giving me déjà vu for an experience I never had of a sweltering summer crankiness textured by vaguely failing relationships. I also like how Megan isn’t longing for some generic creature comfort but instead an unorthodox, even distressing event. I think this is an accurate depiction of ‘craving’. I don’t think people really have rational desires. I think our brains and logic are at best schizophrenic, jarring and ape-like, that we lust after certain angles of displaced sunlight without context for the gloom surrounding them. As an example, nostalgia to me feels like the interior of a Kia Spectra at night lit by passing headlights, which then in turn reminds me of the smell of mown grass during summer, the muffled carpet softness of a friend’s house during a sleepover, a cool basement flickering with the candlelight of a Nintendo Wii—yes, I long for the 2008 global recession.

 

2.

Fascism is obviously bad, but I think it’s easy to forget that at the basic, individual level, we’re all a little authoritarian. I don’t think people actually like the fact that other people with different opinions than them can vote. I don’t think anyone I know seems pleased with the results of the American democratic process thus far. I suspect, at the end of the day, we all have a fragment of a desire for a stallion that will bash our enemy’s fucking skull in. Tweets like this, curdling in their infantile anger, are captivating to me. Prince Edward eloquently captures a real sincerity here that’s become so rare in the sweeping ironic detachment of current Twitter; the sheer, childlike honesty of bile. 

 

3.

Early 2010-era Tao Lin tweeting seems unparalleled, a period that I look back on with the same sunset fondness that historians usually afford ancient fallen empires. Tao here is an utter maestro of the Twitter formula, playing his 140-character limit elegantly as a Chopin piano piece—the precise and perfect use of quotation marks, the hilarious comparison implied between holidays and sporting events. I think Tao’s strength as a writer in general is his ability to re-examine the mundane shit we take for granted from a distant, alien-seeming perspective. He can investigate the average daily experience, be it a mall, restaurant, or subway, and expose its underlying insanity with these simple yet stark observations. Since ~2016, it seems Tao’s tweet output has dramatically reduced, but instead of a negative I see this as a sign of health and progress in his life, signifying his escape from the internet’s hellhole sucking. Alternatively, I also enjoy viewing his new tweeting format—which seems to have moved away from these extraterrestrial-like snatches to more straightforward, ‘advice’-based tweets like his March 27, 2022 post at 3:14 PM: ‘I recommend increased paranoia against corporations and governments’—as a stylistic shift, the way authors can evolve from book to book, a maturation of craft.

 

4.

As a matter of principle, I generally don’t like tweets about Twitter, but I have a soft fondness for this variety of detached belligerence. I often think things like ‘ten seconds of my life would kill the average person’ while debilitatingly hungover at work. A good tweet must accurately pick apart the workings of our society while also being completely insane.

 

5.

I think the majority of people go through their lives with the same borderline megalomaniac-level of delusion expressed by this post. In fact, to break that illusion might render the daily grind of work, rent, and stagnating relationships unbearable. Beyond the basic realities tweets can explore, I’m fascinated by their anatomy, the way that through character limits and idiosyncratic grammar, they mirror poetry, where the author can play with the space of the page to create an effect that transcends straightforward prose. Alex’s scattered syntax here, how his words squeeze together claustrophobically yet gasp with a maniacal grandiosity thanks to the disjointed comma and otherwise lack of punctuation, is nothing short of masterful. This tweet is not a sentence or statement but an intrusive thought, burrowing, expanding, yet disappearing even as it’s uttered: it is the snow of dandelion seeds in summer. Life, love, the universe’s howling unfurling—everything is balanced perfectly in this tweet.

 

6.

This, to me, is the Ulysses of tweets. As stated previously, a post is much like poetry—immune to convention. A tweet’s power as an art form, then, is limitless. Even (especially??) emojis have relevance here, and I’m awed by Bionis Interior’s choice to use them in addition to emoticons, a feat of hieroglyphics. There’s also a narrative journey at play, as is typical of these longform posts, Kabuki theater compressed into less than or equal to 280 characters. In the first act, we explore society, the whole: white women conjoining with the world, a merged dissolution. But even as we join, we must separate. There can never be complete instrumentality, a truly equal civilization, and so we snap back, snakelike, to the individual. Our protagonist's murmured monologue is less a threat than an escape, the dogma of the alone. For those unfamiliar, the display name of this account, Bionis Interior, is a reference to the video game Xenoblade. So, too, is the dual-wield backstab multiplier effect of silver daggers (with accompanying shock damage). This tweet’s conclusion, then, is not a roar of resistance to conformity, but a collapse into itself—the final retreat into the video game playground of loneliness. This is more than a post. It contains rising and falling actions, poetry, multiple screenplays, slabs of ancient texts unearthed. It is a star whose glimmer could be mistaken, from a far enough distance, for a single falling tear. Sometimes the weeping can be so cosmic we never notice it. Sometimes galaxies resound, again and again, and we never hear even the echoes of their echoes.  

thoughts on some books I've read this year

As of this writing, it’s August, and I’ve read 54 books this year. 54 books, that’s a lot of books. That’s more than a book every week. Despite this, if you were to ask me what I’ve read in the past month, I’d be unable to tell you. If you wanted my opinion on these books, if you challenged me to name favorites, give summaries or critiques, I’d be paralyzed, my eyes would glaze over, I’d space out and think instead about the level design of the video game series Metroid. So, in an attempt to become more actively aware of books I’m reading, I wanted to write down various thoughts I have on them, to engage with the texts, or something. This is that. That is what I’m doing right now. These are my thoughts on some books I’ve read so far this year.

 

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

I think Lorrie Moore might be one of the best short story writers in existence. I love her short fiction but have always been nervous about reading her longer stuff, probably because of this love, not wanting to risk disappointment, etc. As such, I’ve never actively sought out any of her novels. I decided to buy this one on a kneejerk impulse upon seeing it in a local used bookstore. The cover is comedically ugly, with a giant “SHORTLISTED” sticker taking up 28% of the visual space. Seems insane that you would want to market your book around not winning a prize. The book is otherwise basically fine. It was written in the 2000’s, and there are obligatory-seeming references to 9/11 and the Iraq War. Probably these themes were necessary to keep the book “relevant”, to ensure that it remains timeless and literary, although I found they seemed to date the book, feeling like an elbow constantly jabbing me in the ribs to remind me that the plot is important and I should pay attention because it’s grappling with the cultural fallout of a post-terrorism America. The short stories by Lorrie Moore I like most are the one where the narrator’s cat dies and she’s sad about it. Or the one where a character takes their cat to the vet—the cat is fine. Maybe I don’t like literature where things happen. I’m working-class. I make $30,000 a year and I spend 10 hours a day minimum on the computer.

 

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Read this mostly just to feel superior to guys I went to high school with who now make more money than me. It’s a big book. It’s a big book and I read it.

 

When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamin Labatut

This is a book that has won, apparently, a lot of awards. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it at first. There is no fixed narrative here but instead this sweeping, dreamlike sequence of scientific fictions. The best way to describe it is probably the first story “Prussian Blue”, which charts how the discovery of a specific pigment of blue led to the invention of the poison used in Holocaust gas chambers, a story containing only one fictional paragraph, but whose subject matter seems absurdly impossible—how could something as simple as a colored dye become an instrumental component in one of the greatest crimes against humanity, etc. The deeper you read, the more fictitious the book gets, although the subjects throughout remain scientific, inventions and formulas whose discoveries create a catastrophic domino effect, and the whole thing has this wheeling sensation like crashing your 2009 Honda Civic at a slow yet fatal speed on the highway during a blizzard. Like I said, I was hooked on this conceit, stories set up as fantastical histories where it’s hard to disentangle truth from fiction, giving the science discussed an aspect that is almost mythical. You read this book and it is as if we humans, mankind, are but puppets dangling on the strings of a God whose essence is not faith but the math of our everyday existence, the formulas comprising everything from mundane multiplication tables to apocalyptic nukes. I was thinking all this, and then I happened to glance at the back cover and see that this book was “included on Barack Obama’s summer 2021 reading list”. Oh, fuck. In that one instant, this book was immediately and thoroughly ruined for me. This is nothing against Barack Obama. This is not a statement on politics. From what I understand, Obama did some things that are bad, like drone bombing hospitals and weddings, but I also grasp, especially as I get older and less idealistic, the necessity of these evils. If anything, I’m probably more of an “Obama Guy” than ever. We need an increased amount of Obama in our politics to fix this country, probably: we need, perhaps, “Obama Two”. But regardless—or maybe, actually, specifically in this regard—Obama is a man who won his presidency by appealing to the mass median American voter. He and his tastes, then, are by definition a baseline average. You could not engineer a more generic person suited for mass appeal. So for a book to make it onto his reading list, it would have to be the “Harry Potter” of “hauntingly brilliant fiction”. It would be the “Game of Thrones” of “literature for people who like NPR”. With my new biased perspective, the remaining stories in this collection were but ashes to me, burnt cinders of a good idea. There is an almost fetishistic appeal to technocracy in this book—science is portrayed always as this deity-like danger, an altar of progress at which you must perform ritual sacrifice. In one story, thinking too hard about the physics of a black hole drives a professor to madness, he literally goes insane from the sheer knowledge that science has wrought upon him. In another, a genius can only complete his research by attempting to seduce one of his underaged tuberculosis patients—the lesson being, I guess, that great science is linked inextricably to the “forbidden” impulses of our darkest selves. What I’m saying is this book reads like a teenager’s Reddit post about how cool science is in an atheism subforum. My heart rate went up thinking about how much I hate this book. I’m staring wild-eyed at my computer screen, breathing too heavily.

 

The Novelist by Jordan Castro

Jordan Castro is maybe the “alt-lit” figure I’ve been least interested in, historically. Not through any identifiable fault of his own, there was just never a moment where his social media profile or writing specifically attracted my attention. I went into this book with a fair amount of hesitation, then. I felt skeptical of the “cute” premise—a novel about a novelist trying to write a novel!! suck my dick, Jordan!!!—and its initial reviews which seemed overly-focused on its scatological elements. “This is a book,” the reviews seemed to scream, “about shit and poop. Isn’t that crazy? You’ve never heard of a book like that before. Oh, and it’s meta.” I felt immediately relieved upon starting the book. Within 16 pages I felt awed by The Novelist. It’s good. It’s good in a relieving way, because I didn’t feel like I was sycophantically making myself to like this book—didn’t feel like I was “coping,” forcing my perception of something to match the popular response—it really is just plain and simple good. The Novelist is paced by the second, documenting every single instant that transpires within the morning its story is set within, from the browsing of Twitter to the brewing of succulent tea to the wiping of shit from the narrator’s ass (ha ha!! Jordan Castro wrote about shit!!!). According to the blurbs and write-ups and interviews, this is in the vein of Thomas Bernhard and Nicholson Baker, but the comparison seems as middling to me as saying something is “like Hemingway” because it uses sparse sentences. Castro is clearly doing his own thing here, inspirations aside. A quote in the book that I liked from a section where the narrator gets upset about how bad Twitter is: “I imagined myself as an ogre-ish monster, clumsily slamming the keyboard with thick, hairy hands. Doooo, I thought.” About halfway through, the book shifts from this endearingly defocused silliness to pure shit-talk, the narrator veering into a ceaseless stream of shit-talk for 50ish pages. I like how “goblin-seeming” this part is, cackling and maniacal, and I think the strength of the book is it cherishes our base human impulses, our tendencies toward distraction and shit-talk, without either glorifying or defusing them with irony. The effect is a kind of sincerity that I find new and refreshing in the modern lit scene.