Response to a tragedy

Response to a tragedy.

Infectious Smile Dating Service

Infectious Smile Dating Service.

Warfare Of The Weary :Passive Aggressive Status Updates

I am a half generation removed from the high water mark of social media. My greatest upwellings of stupidity and indiscretion occurred in an era where shame was limited by the size of the room that you were in. The worst of my judgment is locked away on answering machines tapes and barely comprehensible hand written letters. By the time Facebook existed I was a grown man and handled my business as such. But I have watched from afar while strangers and acquaintances conducted social warfare against the recently beloved by means of status updates and photo essays.

While I have largely stayed out of the fray one such exchange captured my imagination to the extent that I feel the need to share it. Not out of malice for those involved, but concern for the like minded that might chose that path. Let this serve as a cautionary example for all.

* We here at Beats Entropy censor neither by trade nor inclination, so I apologize in advance for the sloppy redacting. I am unsure of facebook law but our lawyers felt this course of action would get us “less sued”. Our lawyers are not highly remunerated.       

Click down yonder to see the pictures big like

A damning superlative

I can no longer say I am young without qualifying. There is a certain amount of shuffling upside an uglier demographic necessary to cast myself in a flattering light. People now parenthesize compliments with “for your age” and “relatively speaking”. It’s a small thing but I enjoyed objective praise void of nuance.

I am in my prime, what a damning superlative. This is the net sum of my youth. I was given thirty six years and a thousand pounds of clay and I’ve only just figured out you need to get that shit wet if you want to form without breaking. So I find myself on a mound of misshapen ashtrays and questionable vases considering what can be built with the time and materials that remain.

I was going to continue the pottery metaphor here but it turned into a rambling diatribe about the heat needed to set a glaze on a painted pot and the whole thing got way too sexy.

None of this is to say that my life is anything less than delightful, the reality of age is fine, it’s the threat of it. The implication. You now have less!  Admittedly the less is of the nebulous variety: potential, opportunity, time, but it’s that lack of substance that gives it infinite weight. Real things meet definable needs but cast us in finite opposition to them. There is a sense of being fixed in place and state that rips me from a dead sleep like some existential silverfish running across my back. “This is my prime”, why is that so uncomfortable a statement?

I do not keep a diary

I do not keep a diary. I’m introspective, but a private transcription of my day feels thin and recursive. I am not a reliable enough narrator to consider without reframing. Within a few lines it becomes fiction in service to color and context and ego. I realize this may be due more to the limits of the author, than the medium, but there it is.

If I want to understand something I have to show it to someone, to lay the pieces on common ground in shapes that can be gathered. The pressure to self define is subsumed by the desire to be understood, to have someone know a thing close to the way I’ve known it. For that end product of a moment to exist in an others mind it needs to be a true thing. It can be constructed, but it cannot be false. Still entirely self involved, but a process that forces a degree of awareness and honest disclosure. But this requires an audience.

It’s the literary equivalent to being a flasher; I can’t just reveal, I have to be exposed and discovered. The violence of public disclosure transforms an act into a deed. It’s no longer a statement, it’s an argument. A provocation. A live idea that can co-opt and adapt and become the thing it needs to be true. And in the best of cases return a more considered expression of something I only thought I understood. A diary holds dead words best forgotten.

 

Dysfunctional verse: The poetry of distance

I communicate poorly with women I’m attracted to. I’m an impactful speaker at’er, and savvy reflective listener, but proper two-way exchange is dodgy at best. Something in the demand and expectation narrows the channels. So, in lieu of grownup conversation, I tend to express my intentions or dissatisfaction via bad poetry. Usually in a public forum. While wildly ineffective as interpersonal tactic is has provided me with a deep well of shame to plum for literary edification. Let us examine:

The following is a roughly chronological rundown of questionable verse written in the last half decade.

Let us prepare our palate with something appropriately bitter.

A blameless life

I wonder what would it be like

to lead a blameless life

and have my brittle pieces cut

but never fall

What was I trying to say?

“You do thoughtless things and never hold yourself to account for them”

Though it amounts to: How about that, you’re the nameless antagonist in poem you will never read…who’s pathetic now!

What was actually going on

 This falls under “Fuck you, you made sad so I’m going to slander you from the bully pulpit of an obvious poem that I don’t have to be accountable for” school of narrative verse. See the collected work of Mr. Trent Reznor for further reference.

Technical merit:

Not as bad as I remember. Nice cadence, flows well, efficient, conveys the inner state. Good effort linguistically, poor effort dignity-wise. As a general rule the person writing accusatory poetry lost the relationship on all cards.

Beaten by Entropy

My name has been stolen. Or at least my sites name has. Japanese cyber squatters made off with it while I was planeward bound to the tropics. This is why I don’t leave the country. The individual pieces remain, but feel somehow disconnected and unclaimed. The memories of a man erased. On a technical level my links are busted and google has forsaken me, but more troubling is this sense of a dispersed locus of being; an idea that somewhere in the heuristic tangle of bad punctuation, prose, angst and running jokes a vestigial personhood had formed and been lost. Damn.

I translated the front page of the new Beatsentropy [1], it felt very much like google stalking an ex’s new boyfriend. It appears to be an employment scam for aspiring Japanese sex workers. Or perhaps I’m being unfair and it’s a genuine recruitment center, I’d feel better about that.

An Exceprt

“Miss sex work

Speaking of high-paid jobs, sex is the best.
However, many of the girls’ work in sex is disgusting! “I think that.
So, what’s bad manners because of work.

“Nantes sex but not a boyfriend can” “do not want to touch a stranger!” I think that many people think.

Such feelings can certainly understand that, if you’re really looking for high-income part, this is not the better part.

For example, my friend has sex with Miss Gotanda.
And $ 10,000 in revenue each month in the city of Gotanda.
In the same college may be very bright child.
Gotanda is a city child is

Though I appreciate the absurdity and beat poetry cadence of my usurper I can’t help but feel wronged by Miss Gotanda’s hunger. While arguably classier than many of our posts, it lacks the wit and profundity of our profanity. And why the hell is a Japanese company stealing such an esoteric English phrase for their name? I shudder to imagine the context that Beats Entropy has been hamfistedly translated into. Jerks. I guess I’ll have to think up a new name.

[1] I haven’t felt so bad since that time I discovered my arch rival A.J. Valliant, the albino Irish soul singer. Though, maybe, in this time of deepest woe, we can mourn together. Take it creepy AJ