Good night you princes of Maine! You kings of New England!
Preface/Epilogue
This is a blog. It’s a tumblr. It’s a bunch of stuff that I thought up, typed out, and posted on the goddamned internet. The part you’re reading right now is the preface/epilogue. Maybe you’ve been following me for awhile and you’ve already read all 1000 posts and you’re wondering, what the hell happened to theknifebusiness? So this would be the epilogue. But maybe I just sent you this shitty link and so you’re reading this trying to figure out what the hell it is. And you’re wondering, what the hell is theknifebusiness? So this is the preface.
This tumblr thing got started because of a girl. I was either going out with this girl, or maybe I was just having sex with her, or maybe I was just trying to have sex with her, or maybe I was in the friendzone or something. But there was this girl. And this girl was a writer. And I don’t know how exactly it went, but she probably just said at one point, “Start a tumblr.” She was in the habit of suggesting things and I was in the habit of doing those things.
So I started this tumblr, and that girl was the audience. It wasn’t like I was doing this only to please her, or like I was doing it only because I thought it might somehow make her more open to the possibility of having sex with me. But that was the initial, basic motivation. And just for the record, I did, at some point, and more than once, end up having sex with that girl. So shout out to the inventor of tumblr.com for that one.
It turns out there are other girls on tumblr. Some of them, according to my imagination, and according to the law of probability, are pretty cute. Some are actually quite beautiful. So I kept this tumblr thing up for 2 years or so, occasionally picking up a follower or two, some of which were attractive girls. And though these other beautiful tumblr girls lived far across the country, and sex with them was a near impossibility, it was only slightly less possible than sex with any girl I happened to know in real life, and so they too were muses for my writing. You can see from the messages pictured above that some of these attractive girls are actually obsessed with me and want to get to know me if I send them my credit card number.
And so you can start here and work your way back, or you can jump back to the beginning and work your way up, or you can hit the random button, until you’re bored or confused, or you can just not read any more at all. There’s 1000 posts. When I first started posting, it was just all random. In the end, I had no filter, and it was random. But in the middle there’re a few coherent storylines. If you read close you might catch a few leitmotifs and a little bit of character development. It’s best to picture yourself (if you don’t already) as an attractive female. Because that’s how I picture you, the audience. To me you’re an attractive (and single) female. In fact, I picture you as my soul mate. Eventually I will meet my soul mate. And I’ll send her this link. And through my tumblr, and my mesmerizing good looks, and some XTC, she will fall in love with me.
In the meantime I stopped having sex with that original tumblr girl. And so that’s pretty much why I stopped posting here. I moved my shit to some other social media site called facebook. Yes, there was a girl involved in that decision too. And no, despite my inane posts, we haven’t had, and probably never will, have sex. Sad face.
But the tumblr is still here, and you can read this shit if you want. And for those of you who already read my shit, and even though you probably aren’t my soulmate, my facebook is here: http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1197953297 And you can read that shit if you want.
And so the main point is, this is all for the girls. Originally it was for a girl, I stayed because of girls, I left because of a girl, but it’s really just all for the girl. Maybe the only real reason I write at all is for girls. Not that it means anything, or has ever gotten me anywhere, or has had any effect on any girl. It just means it’s why I write. The byproduct is that the rest of you who aren’t girls, or who aren’t my soul mate still get to enjoy these retarded ramblings. And every couple of months I go back and read this shit too. And quite honestly, I crack myself up.
It’s not really necessary that I wrote this preface/epilogue, because it all stands on its own anyway. It’s not necessary that I sent you this link or that you followed me, because I probably barely know you and even in the best scenario you might slightly chuckle or nod your head and then just move on to something else. It’s not necessary that I wrote any of this or that it exists at all, because it already existed in my head before I wrote any of it, and it was probably in a more ideal form in my head before I decided to type it all out. The tumblr.com, and the internet, and the world at large is neither better or worse because I typed this out and posted it. But I did type it all out, and I did post it, and it does exist. And whether it has any meaning for you, or for me, or for the capacity of the tumblr.com servers, this exists unto itself for no further meaning than that it exists now, existed before, and really, has and always will exist.
These fragments I have shored against my ruins, bitches, and so we beat on, boats against the mutherfucking current, borne back ceaselessly into the past!
On the beach, at night,
Stands a child, with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.
Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower, sullen and fast, athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends, large and calm, the lord-star Jupiter;
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate brothers, the Pleiades.
From the beach, the child, holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower, victorious, soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.
Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears;
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky—shall devour the stars only in apparition:
Jupiter shall emerge—be patient—watch again another night—the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal—all those stars, both silvery and golden, shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again—they
endure;
The vast immortal suns, and the long-enduring pensive moons, shall again shine.
Then, dearest child, mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?
Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding, I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter,
Longer than sun, or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant brothers, the Pleiades.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Shout out to my sister Kate who somehow stumbled upon my blog. Don’t worry Kate! I’m not really living on the brink of poverty/depravity/insanity!
I did however—to my sister’s alarm— really do that thing where I threw out all my kitchenware. And now that I’ve moved back into my own place I’m really starting to feel the effects of the rash, illogical, irresponsible— yet wholly necessary— cleansing of the kitchen cabinets and drawers.
I really do have only 4 plates now. I have 4 bowls. It makes it sort of awkward when you try to cook something and then also serve it. I also for some reason have no butter knives and only 4 big serving spoons and 4 baby spoons. No regular sized spoons. Did I leave them in the dishwasher at the old place? Would it be awkward to show up at the old house and ask about those spoons?
One thing is for sure. It almost forces me to do the dishes every day (almost).
I also threw out my couch and some chairs. I’m not getting any new ones. I gave away a bunch of stuff on craigslist.
And I got rid of 90% of my books. And I threw out 25% of my CDs. I don’t have a TV or internet connection (some people say with pride that they don’t have a TV. Well that doesn’t mean shit because I know you hulu and youtube your share of TV. I don’t have internet or even a goddamn laptop. I’m keepin’ it real, yo!)
And now I’m killing my tumblr.com.
I can’t say that I exactly thought this whole thing out, or that I’m making a conscious effort to reinvent myself.
But this process is very interesting. I highly recommend it.
I go to the coffee store to grade papers. Because I can’t do anything productive at home. Unless you call just sitting and listening to music productive. On a Sunday afternoon I can’t even leave the house unless I force myself to turn the stereo off first. Otherwise I’ll just sit there and keep listening. Same with the computer. I’ll just sit and stare at my empty email box endlessly if there’s music on.
So I don’t bring any music or anything with me to the coffee store. Only thing I bring is 100s of essays and a few red pens.
But the limiting factor for the amount of time I spend at the coffee store is not the amount of coffee there is, and it’s not the amount of work I get done. It’s the amount of pretty girls in the coffee store.
Hey, I finished grading all my papers. Coffee’s gone. Time to go. Oh hold on, there’s a pretty girl over there. Better wait this one out.
Same goes with tumblr I guess. Pretty girls were keeping me here past my due. I was going to try and wrap this thing up a little neater. I was going to order my queue up a little more artfully. I was going to say something. But it ended up being not as important to me as I thought.
I guess it was just always about the girls.
I figured out my funeral. In the past I was contemplating 2Pac Picture Me Rollin or I Aint Madatcha. And then maybe have some fireworks or something. But I finally I have the real thing figured out.
First of all I don’t want a normal burial or a cremation. I want a Green Burial. Basically put my body in a sack, bury it, plant a tree on top of it. I want to be broken down naturally. I don’t know if that’s exactly legal, but I’ll let you bastards figure that part out. I’m dead; respect my wishes.
The event should be outside, like in a forest maybe. And it should be good weather. I want sunlight and open space, so it should be a meadow outside a forest or a clearing in a wood. Deciduous please, not coniferous.
/I never finished this. But to make a long story short, I want an elaborate dance routine performed to Aracde Fire’s Wake-Up.
Humans live 2 lives: 1)birth-adulthood and 2)old age. And old age is the most mysterious life. No one understands what it means to be old except the old themselves. And even they don’t understand it.
We focus a lot on the childhood thing. We talk about it, analyze it, study it, romanticize it, extrapolate from it. It seems very idyllic and nice. We put childhood— and youth in general— on a pedestal. Our culture, our society, our media, and our biology are youth/childhood obsessed. And I won’t argue with that. But another reason we focus on childhood is simply because everyone can relate to it. Everyone has been a child and we all like to think it really means something. Childhood and youth might be magical. Or maybe childhood and youth could just be the most simple common denominator we all have.
But not all of us have been old. In fact, the vast majority of us have never been old. And we don’t discuss old age, we don’t analyze it, we don’t romanticize it. Old age is not in our culture, it is not a part of our media, it goes against our biology— it’s invisible.
The old know exactly what it means to be young. No one understands what it’s like to be old.
When does someone become old? When is that exact point take place? I don’t know. But when one becomes old, they are born into a second life.
