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Text: Serious Weakness
Author: Porpentine Charity Heartscape
Publisher: Insul Press
Plot: A self-diagnosed weakling-stroke-art conservator, Trianon, cultivates new layers of ecstatic/traumatic weakness when taken captive by a sociopathic vandal, Insul, with lovely beach house and multi-purpose tennis racket.
Subplot: A museum director faces her first real test after years of Krav Maga and boxercise.
Sub-subplot: The art world is rocked by a series of authentic/violent things happening way out on the fringes of its sealed-off misery dome.
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According to the more pedantic side of my psyche, the title Serious Weakness is either:
i] genuine self-recrimination
ii] reflection on self-recrimination + desire to fix it
iii] transgressive dive into said ‘serious weakness’
iv] ironic self-description
v] ironic twin description [of the two main characters, Trianon and Insul]
vi] outright lie, there is no weakness
vii] blank self-description
viii] blank self-description of total personality/psyche
ix] personification of weakness in human shell
x] abstract dragged from abstraction into human shell + forced to deal with things that to them, as a newly formed thing, feel serious
xi] someone called Weakness who is serious
xii] someone called Weakness who is never serious
xiii] alien MC whose name translates to ‘Weakness’ crashes in the US, in a town called Serious.
Looking at the cover pic, I’m gonna go with x], but there’s green blood sliding out of the nose so it could also be xiii].
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I know about this book cos of the author’s story, Relative Time Knife, on Tragickal. This weird, barely-fleshed out, ambiguous but aggressive thing that had pain beggars and torture millionaires. Written by someone with a not bland name.
I think I may have sent Porpentine an e-mail, asking if they wanted to write something for film dada, but I’m not sure. Sometimes I send e-mails and get no replies and then forget I ever sent them. Sometimes I just imagine things.
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Based on some of the comments I’ve read from readers [on Porpentine’s site], this is a transgressive work, which, in the current world-climate, means the MC will be insanely positive at all times.
Probably not.
The last transgressive work I looked at was…pretty much every piece I’ve done a De-con-struc on. As I mentioned in the Vitiators one, I thought transgressive just meant serial-killer-protagonist fic, but then I searched ‘transgressive lit’ and remembered that I’d studied it at Uni for a module and…I think I’m on firmer ground now.
You With Your Memory Are Dead was the most recent one posted up here, and I would say that’s transgressive even though the narrator doesn’t leave the room or act out his “morals” in relation to any other living thing. He just decomposes himself. Something that I now know is possible.
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I bought the PDF of Serious Weakness, so maybe the physical copy is different, but page 1 is page 1, as in the story just starts without any blurbs or preamble or chapter headings whatsoever.
[Actually, there are chapter headings but you might miss them as they’re normal text size and right at the top of the page].
On one hand, it’s refreshing, no phoned-in quotes from their mates, on the other, I’d like a little scrawled pic or something to ease me in, but that’s just cos I do that in my own stuff.
+
The total page count is around 400. I’m a bit drained from YWYMAD, so I will do about 100-150 pages of this and then just read the rest without making notes. Or come back and put in a bit that adds something to what I’ve already written, or contradicts it, or is just glaringly wrong.
As ever, there will be tangents.
And dead-ends.
And probably some half-assed psychology/philosophy about self + intersubjectivity.
Expect confusion.
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Blind Cleavage [Chapter 1]
+
‘The Nexusa painting, worth two million dollars, has two bold slashes across its center, swallowing Paris and its river, along with thousands of bodies, horses, cars, birds, a watercolor sunset, in fact, the entire universe.’
+
The opening line of Serious Weakness, giving ambiguity to art damage.
Is this Nexusa thing a real painting?
Seems like the ‘two bold slashes’ are the destroyers, superimposing themselves on a fixed scene.
A fixed scene is, at its heart, lifeless.
The slashes have done nothing wrong.
If it had been another horse or bird or body, no one would’ve cared, but a slash is a shape that has connotative meaning [I assume] across most cultures.
Doesn’t it?
Maybe indigenous groups view it as a pleasant tick?
A slash superimposed onto blank space is a caught thing; on a canvas with recognisable shapes and signs, it is an intrusive force.
I think the Nexusa painting may look like this:
Trianon is the first name introduced, the MC?
He is writing down the damage done to the painting in a little black book. Then crosses out his writing?
I’m not sure if he’s erasing his own words or describing the slashes on the painting. Either way, it feels like the tone/theme has been set. Or permanently swallowed as the painting and its fixed Paris state is eternally there, as are the bold slashes.
The question is: did the original artist put them there? Did Trianon?
+
Trianon is an interesting name.
Tri = three
Anon = anon
Trianon = anon to the power of three?
[I’ve just searched the name and there are some other possibilities, from a small elegant villa inside a larger establishment to the codename of the CIA spy in the 1984 Soviet film, TASS Is Authorised to Declare…, to Catherine Trianon, a French fortune teller and poisoner. If I’m feeling perverse, I’ll go with the last one, the murderer.]
Reading a bit more, it’s clear that the slashes were done by the artist, Nexusa, and, to Trianon, that’s unimpressive.
He is a conservator and it’s actually general blemishes that he is appraising .
I should probably read the whole chapter before speculating.
But then the theories wouldn’t spill out of my Id, and there would be no beautiful mistakes to be proud of.
+
Trianon, as a character, keeps his hair [ponytail, green highlights] neat and makes sure it doesn’t intrude into unpermitted spaces [past the neck].
This matches his work as a conservator.
And invites potential contradiction later?
+
‘ “How old are you?”
Trianon hesitates. “Twenties.” He waits for Insul to reciprocate, but nothing happens. It feels bad to have given something away like that. Exposed. He can’t parse that blank expression. Maybe it’s a snobby, automatic rich person thing. The way you shut your face off when passing a homeless person.’
+
Blankness requires the effort of blankness [especially if you desire to rip someone’s face off].
I like that Trianon’s thoughts are written out. ‘Show don’t tell’ is a Romulan oubliette for writing. I’m inside someone’s mind, not scaling their plastic face.
Should those thoughts be so controlled? Even within a slash of emotion?
There are no run-on sentences here, no stream of consciousness. Yet.
Trianon = composed, blank, anxious.
Insul/Nexusa = blank, composed, interrogator.
+
Reading the conversation flow, Trianon is like a guy who’s laying the flimsiest of sand for his black tent of psychic-nomadism. Or many black tents, as he shifts quite a lot in this scene. He’s nervous, then assertive, then jarringly playful/sarcastic, nervous again, unsure of his own answers, confidently knowledgeable. Appears to be a strange type of consistency in his inconsistency, perhaps a loop of nomadic states based on how the other, Insul, reacts. And Insul is reacting quite blankly, which makes it even more nomadic.
Is this a ritual to shield the ‘serious weakness’?
Not sure.
I’m running off a tiny sample, should wait to see how it develops.
+
‘ “When you get raped, it’s usually by someone close to you. Shared history. That’s what I heard.”
The red light of a thermostat burns through the darkness. “I don’t think that applies to
paintings.”
“They have history.”’
+
Can a painting be raped?
The opening scene has meandered into some dark tension. Trianon is described as having a small frame. He can’t find the light switch. Insul can. He has his hand on the tennis racket, a potential weapon of defence for Trianon or a decoy from his nerves.
CAN a painting be raped?
Yes.
And should be.
+
They’re playing tennis indoors?
+
‘ “Sure.” Trianon hits the ball back. “And culturally there’s this meme that art is…”
“Important?”
“Right. It’s on a pedestal. People feel insecure.”
“So they want to humiliate it.”
“Right. They grew up with cartoons where art is used as a signifier. References to ancient paintings and statues as a catch-all for an intellectualism that died before they were even born.”’
+
I’m in two or three minds on this dialogue.
Trianon + Insul know about art, it’s fine to show that, and there are stammers and interjections every now and then [from Trianon], yet it still feels a little ‘written’, particularly the last line from Trianon.
It’s tough to get that balance right.
Maybe a ‘…’ between ‘an intellectualism’ and ‘that died’? Could make the last part a bit more staggered, a bit less recited.
But then, maybe this is Trianon’s style?
Pockets of packaged statements, maybe even pre-packaged. Or consciously pre-packaged [all thoughts are technically pre-packaged, the interjections are a lie…while drowning?].
I don’t know.
+
I suspect Insul is vandalising his own art. And may try to fuck Trianon by chapter’s end. Or Trianon may shift to a blacker tent and fuck him.
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‘He sees his reflection on the floor, in the black marble with glittering gold streaks. He covers his face and leans back, trying to remember what he wrote in the little black book. Was it useful? Was it an insight? It doesn’t have to be clever. Just document. His girlfriend will take care of the rest. But he feels hollow as a pipe, conveying matter from A to B. If he could formulate his thoughts into some kind of security brief or psychological profile, he’d feel like more than a camera. Something to impress his girlfriend, or the director. The museum is creating all kinds of new jobs after the recent upheaval, there has to be some label he can squirm inside. It’s all made up anyways.’
+
Starts with a reflection in black contradiction + oscillates from there.
Trianon wants to be special, insightful.
He wants to tuck himself inside a cozy label.
He’s scared of standing out.
He wants to impress.
It’s all fraudulent?
+
‘He looks like an energy drink.’
+
From one loose, green hair.
Already unraveling.
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Double Fault
Chapter two [at least I assume it’s a chapter change, the heading is easy to miss at the top], page 10 + we’re still at the art house out in the desert.
I like stretched out things, feels more real.
In my own kind of transgressive near future sci-fi thing – Void Galaxia [1000+ pages, way too long, don’t bother] – I did this a lot, called it hauntological drift cos it was a distorted pastiche of a made-up 80’s/90’s. The first chapter had my disguised alien transgressor slaughtering the Serbian version of the Sopranos and then spending 4-5 pages at the end wandering around the death-space playing with corpses and cutlery. The last hundred or so pages did the same thing, only in a moon chateau on Triton.
Nearly a thousand pages long, never again.
+
‘He swings by the kitchen, grabbing another alcopop.’
+
Drinking again despite being drunk and uneasy.
Aroused?
Maybe this is the ‘serious weakness’?
Steering harder into situations that may destroy him.
+
‘He stares at the pool, mesmerized by the caustics. It has an interesting shape. Rectangular but curved at one corner. An unusual embellishment. Asymmetrical. The shape has a hand, white and wrinkled. His eyes adjust and he sees someone floating face down.’
+
Interesting way to introduce a corpse.
Trianon is drunk, but still, to notice the oddness of the pool shape, the macro-aesthetic, before the floating body…and then not to jump in and try and pull them out.
To go back and mumble about calling 911 instead.
Is he afraid to vandalise the scene, the beauty of it?
Or is he just in shock?
I want to say both as it keeps some aspect of realism while also inverting it. Could also be thematic. Just like the painting, he sees the distant-view first, then the details…and doesn’t actually have to do anything to correct it. Just make a note of it in his book or in his brain. The action-image is someone else’s job.
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‘ “I think someone’s hurt in the pool.”
“Hurt a little or hurt forever?”
+
The phrasing of a sociopath.
Tension just went up.
Ichi Insul the killer?
But then, Trianon might be a sociopath too.
He just can’t process it properly.
Or it could be something else?
+
I was just thinking of getting to the end of this Trianon-Insul scene and then dialing down the note-making a bit, but now I’m wondering if this scene might be the entire novel, the journey to the end of the night and the end of the night beyond that if there is one, if it’s dark enough.
The hauntological drifter in me hopes I’m right.
I love one-location, dual-character death spirals.
More spirally the better.
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‘ “When was the last time you didn’t have your pills?”
Trianon answers without thinking, like he always does when he knows the answer. “Eighteen.”
“Near the end of high school.”’
+
Trianon is on medication for something.
Anxiety?
Insul is probing, manipulating. He definitely took the pills from the bag. He wants to unravel this conservator who speaks in pre-packaged statements without ‘…’ interludes, separate him from his art hideout.
‘Trianon answers without thinking, like he always does when he knows the answer.’
At first, I thought the second clause here was a little redundant, but then I took it out of the sentence and realised what it took with it.
Trianon is acting.
Beyond the pedantic ‘we’re all acting to some degree’ counterpoint.
You don’t realise how automatic/instinctive a lot of our conversation is [until it suddenly isn’t]. When my mind turned on me years ago, the automatic became manual and I couldn’t cope. I didn’t understand the process of speaking out my thoughts, it terrified me.
[I think I said this in the last de-con-struc, and another one before that, sorry for the repetition, but it keeps popping up].
Trianon doesn’t know/understand/feel comfortable with most of what he’s saying. Speech is born from ‘you-inside’ but is external. When received by someone else, it is no longer yours. When you hear the sound of it even, it is no longer yours. It is part of your appearance, the painting of yourself that you half-control. Less than half, perhaps. All those tiny pigments…
I couldn’t control anything, years ago.
Everything was alien.
How the fuck did I make it this far?
I love writing.
I love what I have written.
Don’t want to explain anything.
Tired of it.
[See you in the next de-con-struc, dark hallway].
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‘He wishes he’d had the pills during high school. A time when he was sitting next to so many people, every failure of his body visible to them.’
+
Has the external/superficial infected the inside, or did the inside reach out?
High school can be a miserable place.
For me, my body was okay, I was a bit short compared to my friends but not that much. My brain was the problem.
Are American high schools worse?
[I assume Porpentine [the author] is American, could be wrong though].
Trianon had or has an enemy in the form of his own body and, consequently [or precedingly – not sure if this is the right word, my brain’s stalled. I mean, his mind causes the view that the body is an enemy], his own psyche. Now he’s a conservator of art, looking for the tiniest mistakes in a thing valued by the elite of society.
A corrective or unconscious revenge?
Revenge on himself?
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Went off track a bit there, which is weird cos there’s quite a lot of dramatic tension in this chapter, tension that doesn’t usually exist in most de-con-struc pieces I do, as they’re all abstract or surrealist [or philosophical torture rack].
Think the last one that had any kind of narrative was Vitiators, but that was just playing with me.
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‘ “I can’t only see part of something.”’
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Said in relation to the ID in Trianon’s wallet, but sums up Insul as the Great Interrogator. He’s going to open up every aspect of poor Trianon.
Poor?
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‘You’re not Nexusa, even if I want you to be. The real Nexusa is at a party somewhere, in a well-lit, surveilled part of the world, subject to its consequences. But Insul is a dark hallway. The art destroyer, appearing as if summoned by the burning of the notebook, hypotheticals transformed into flesh.’
+
Okay, I was half right.
Insul does like vandalising art.
Didn’t think that he might not be who he said he was though, not sure why. Skill on the author’s part. Made me think it wasn’t that type of scene. Then flipped the switch.
Nice juxtaposition in the language – the uselessness/homogeneity of the surveilled world.
Interesting use of third person throughout these opening chapters, makes the ‘I’ parts quite jarring.
I mean, I know I’m with Trianon’s psyche.
Yet there is still a distance between his surface actions and thoughts. A slicing of the mental + physical aspects of him.
Who is he actually?
Psychic-nomadism is my guess – now that he’s off the pills, drunk, fighting for survival, how many aspects will emerge?
Counter: is Trianon even the MC?
Maybe it’s Insul.
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My earlier doubt about Trianon’s overelaborate speech patterns has been assuaged; the text says he talks too much when he’s off-balance, and the character directly chastises himself for it. Which makes it an aesthetic doubt on my part.
Is it ‘what I like’ for a character to be this way?
Did Porpentine make a choice that I approve of, writing Trianon’s dialogue that way, without ellipses to stagger it a bit?
‘Approve of’ sounds tyrannical.
‘Am convinced of’ is better.
Am I convinced that Trianon would speak that way?
Don’t know.
Am I a pedantic cunt?
Maybe.
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‘His spine turns white-hot and folds in half, dropping him hard on the ground.’
+
More language flux, similar to the pool/corpse description earlier.
The racket is not connecting, it’s his body turning against him, failing him.
That’s what it reads like.
Could just be a style choice to avoid a repetitive ‘the racket hit him on the face, the racket hit him on the neck, the racket hit him on the spine’, but then we’ve got Trianon’s body failing him in high school and failing him now too, so I’m betting it’s intentional.
Also links into the theme/title, the ‘serious weakness’ being a part of and apart from him simultaneously.
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‘Beneath the battered mask of drying blood, there’s something else. Your pre-existing condition, Insul thinks.’
+
Insul’s psyche has taken the wheel.
Will it stay?
I’m thinking this might be a psychological two-hander now, the zero-point of an inversely unhealthy friendship.
Healthy, ultimately?
Trianon is further ahead on the unravelling journey [to the end of the night], but Insul’s blankness has started to crack.
The camera-subject controls.
Yet the narration has followed only the ‘interrogated-subject’ so far.
Which makes it ‘camera-object.’
If you reveal nothing about yourself, what is the point of you?
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Two chapters in and I really need to stop making so many notes or this will become another 12,000 word odyssey into ‘wretch-blankness’ like YWYMAD.
New strategy: I’ll read a whole chapter first and then make notes on it.
Aim for 100 pages total.
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Just read through to page 40 [on the train], about four more chapters. Can recall most of the plot but have forgotten some of the details I noticed while reading. It’s frustrating to lose that cos I had some decent observations. I felt it. But the gap between the train-me and the now-me has swallowed them.
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Insul hasn’t taken over the narrator’s position yet, or even butted in now and then, but I suspect he will at some point.
Is it transgressive if he’s just an antagonist?
He will probably mellow towards Trianon – he’s shown signs of it, fleetingly, followed almost immediately by violent push-backs – however, would that qualify as transgressive?
I’m not sure.
Should ask Elytron, he’s entrenched in this stuff.
+
It’ll be transgressive if it’s a love story, between a thorn on the vine and a smaller thorn lower down.
+
I do remember one thing I noticed: the lack of build-up to an action moment e.g. Trianon trying to escape from the car.
There is no artificial gimmickry, no internal monologue of should I/shouldn’t I, it’s just ‘I feel shit, there’s people outside, open the car door, go.’
I love this style.
Fits the MC so well, especially the state he’s in at the Chapter 5 mark. His brain and body are beaten, defeated, black tents all over the place.
He can barely recognise the car door let alone open it.
Insul will kill him for sure if he tries.
Doesn’t matter.
He’s going anyway.
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The inner monologue never over-stretches either.
Trianon will add a lot of thoughts, a lot of half-framed memories, insecurities, mania etc. but it never overwhelms the physical situation at hand. The only time it comes close is when he’s in and out of consciousness e.g. sinking into the bathwater/sewage-sea escape hatch. And that’s understandable.
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Sorry for the own-work-referencing again, but the more I read, the more it feels like Void Galaxia. A genre narrative hiding a stowaway, a main character at the mercy of some other stronger force but a long, drawn-out mercy that ultimately folds in on itself.
I used ‘folds in on itself’ a lot in the YWYMAD de-con-struc, I should probably retire it, but that’s not how my brain works.
Something is folding in on itself in Void Galaxia, and I think it might be happening here too.
Still wondering about the weak narrator device.
Device?
Choice.
The weak narrator choice. Is it common in other work? I mean, even in novels where the narrator is in a weak position society-wise, they’re still in control of their own mind-scape i.e. the narration.
In Serious Weakness, the narration is close third person.
It’s an intruder inside Trianon’s brain, both observer and patient.
I used that phrase in the YWYMAD de-con-struc too. Can’t help it, I suppose. It was 12,000 words, and drained pretty much all this kind of quasi-philosophical vocab out of me.
And now I’m coughing out the remains.
Doesn’t matter.
Repetition is beautifully annoying.
And there’s some crossover with Serious Weakness, in theme, in aura. Trianon is a less secure version of Gary, Insul is Begotten?
Maybe not that far.
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Doesn’t make much sense but I’m gonna bring the 1990 movie Alienator into this. Cos I’m watching Alienator right now.
[Note: I have since watched and written a piece on it that cribs from some of the following notes but, in the spirit of not changing much for a de-con-struc, I’m keeping it in].
Plot: a rebel leader escapes execution on a space station and crashes in some woods in Northern California. He is then pursued by a hyper-masculine female hunter-android [the actress was a bodybuilder] who will kill anything in their way as long as it’s not a deer.
Straight away it’s transgressive.
The rebel leader is a villain who was captured while fighting a tyrant.
He’s a murdering pervert.
The hunter-android is just a murderer until it’s the end and then they’re not.
Jan Michael Vincent is drunk, supposedly the good guy, pulsating fascist vibes.
Is this really transgressive?
Maybe not.
I’m struggling to relate it to Serious Weakness also.
Insul is the rebel villain?
Trianon the android?
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Imagine Alienator caught in hauntological drift. A novel can do this much better than a film. The Rebel Leader crashes in Northern California, gets run over by four, thirty-five year-old teens, hangs out with them while he recovers and then gradually folds himself in different directions based on mood and who’s with him at the time. He can change his appearance to look like anyone too, this is one of his most xeno-type skills. The Hunter-Android locates + captures him. They are forced to interact, the Rebel Leader leveraging his weaker position to elicit not sympathy but obliviousness and then, when the chance to turn the tables arrives, he folds again, morphs into Fanny Kaplan + fucks the hunter-android against a single loose complex called TAZ. Beyond that, there is confusion at the NEW STATE of their relationship, the constant shifting of it. The Hunter-Android wounds the Rebel Leader on a whim, tells him to run, chases and slashes at his thighs with a coat-hanger, takes care of the consequences [the deer does not have a med kit]. They both swear that they will kill the other at some point, this lack of limits cannot go on, yet they keep going, deeper into the depths of Wisconsin in a caravan they stole from an elderly couple they previously mutilated. Their apraxia has NEVER been this bad/alluring. Meanwhile, the fascist prison guard has lost everything. Bored of just sitting around not executing anybody, he raped a glitching hologram of himself in a bold, purple wig and now he’s the one who’s going to be executed. But not before drinking himself to death. And that is what he does [off-screen]. The news hits the Rebel Leader pretty hard as their perversion was defined in relation to each other and the bond with the Hunter-Android is wavering. They both seem uninterested in sadism nowadays, ever since they left Wisconsin. And he can’t turn on her physically as she can bench 500kg and has a laser arm. Best thing would be to hook up with those four teens but they’re already middle-aged and spent spiritually and, besides, their characters died in the woods that day. Other teens? Yes, but first a trip back to the space station to dust the execution booth. That’s what makes sense to the suicide note side of his psyche. If he has a psyche. According to the last psychologist, he was a dark hallway, occluded by a death-fog of vicious mirror neurons. Maybe he should just be that aspect. Why not? Beats fucking a bodybuilder. Pissing blood. Reading Mysteries over and over and over and-
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Back to the transgression at hand, Serious Weakness.
Feels aimless to read several chapters and then write notes based on half-memories so I’m gonna dive deep into the next two chapters, Black Box + White Box, see what I can uncover/pin down.
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‘Insul is wearing an orange parka jacket, legs long and bare under the fringe, his eyes groggy. The outline of a zipper is pressed into his neck.’
+
A recurring part of the plot is to have Insul decked out in the clothes of the people he has killed. The old guy in the pool, the brown cardigan of the woman who owned the flat, the orange parka of…??
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‘ “What’s a daydream like?”
“You know. When you see a little movie inside your head.”
“I don’t see that.”
“What do you see?”
“Nothing.”’
+
Insul is the one here who doesn’t dream. Like a blank canvas-…like a bold slash apart from a Parisian cityscape.
Psychic nomadism in superficial motion, without a base understanding of what exactly each temporary psyche-state means.
Is he guarding himself?
Does he really not dream?
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‘His myasthenia has never been this bad. New layers of weakness have been eaten away by caustic applications of shock and brutality, Insul dissolving his overpainting and restoring it to the hidden pigments underneath.’
+
Had to look up myasthenia.
Trianon suffered from muscle weakness before those four blood-thinning pills Insul forced down him?
The quote above is actually from the previous chapter, Black Box. I went back to it cos of that one part – ‘new layers of weakness have been eaten away.’
The phrasing is so seductive here. Seductive meaning good.
‘New layers’ implies there are old layers, and that the new layers were cultivated either by Trianon himself or the third person intruder.
Why would you create new layers of weakness, unless you already loathed yourself? Believed that ‘weak’ was what you intrinsically were?
The last clause to that quote – ‘…Insul dissolving his overpainting and restoring it to the hidden pigments underneath’ – is a mixed bag [to me]. Feels unnecessary, but does fit the art symbolism [where the art begins, which layer?] grafted onto the text throughout.
What are the hidden pigments underneath?
Atoms of weakness?
Do they make sense as a total mass?
Can they even exist that way?
Trianon has moments/interjections of different emotional states [the theorised psychic nomadism], including a death-drive one that has popped up a few times already. Fantasies of either dying in a blaze of nihilism or slaughtering Insul [also in a blaze of nihilism]. There is crossover in the psychic nomadism too. With Insul, it’s in what he wears [for now], perhaps the quirks [20 salads] + the inactions [not murdering Trianon] etc.
Whereas, with Trianon, it’s the insides.
The inside of the insides.
He doesn’t know who he is beneath all those layers of weakness he keeps manufacturing.
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‘Insul can’t see his high school in his head. Just a stream of words. CAFETERIA. NOISE. FRIEND. BEST FRIEND. The word after that pops in his head like a blown bulb.’
+
It’s happening.
We’re back in Insul’s head [briefly].
This is in reaction to Trianon opening up about the recurring dreams he has about THE END. He says it’s to do with the wildfires near where he lived when he was young, but I don’t trust him.
I know he cultivates layers [of weakness].
Both of these characters are hidden/occluding themselves.
Insul either fucked and killed his best friend in high school and erased the trauma of it, or someone else fucked and killed his best friend, and he erased the trauma of witnessing it. Or something else that involves fucking + killing.
And now he wants to murder others/desecrate art?
Art is esoteric.
Connective.
Isolating.
Miserable.
Euphoric.
The darkest of all hallways.
The candle light of Hell pretending to be a firefly at the end.
A furless claw of-
Why does he hate it?
Because it circles depth/death?
Maybe there is no direct reason.
Does he really not dream?
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‘ “Is all this blood making you too excited?”’
+
End of the chapter and Insul reasserts control. Grabs Trianon by the ear like a naughty kid. Digs a nail into his veins.
Trianon promises he’ll go back to sleep.
But he doesn’t.
A shift in the terrain?
+++
+++
As is common when it’s pissing it down, I went to the library, looking for Urdu in 3 Months and ending up with Self + Other by Dan Zahavi. Never heard of the guy, but I’ve skimmed through and it seems to slot in with what I wanna say about Serious Weakness, especially the chapters on empathy + intersubjectivity. Can’t wait to force it on all of you too.
+
Experiential vs. social constructivist self.
Trianon is a fucking mess, bodily and internally.
Insul is a blank desert house.
So far.
Does the self possess diachronic unity [the idea that, despite changes, we are still the same person across our lifespan]?
As an amateur who’s just picked up a random book on this topic, I’m not convinced.
How would you even begin to prove that?
The self is a canvas that is painted on + chipped away at, or the self is the paint?
But, in this analogy, at what point does a core self/the painting materialise? Or…at what point is it a painting?
I guess a painting is being painted by someone, so the self [as painting] is being directed by an external other.
The third person narrator/intruder who both is and isn’t Trianon, who is Insul too, now and again…are they the painter?
Trianon referenced 17 years old and high school and the possible diversion of wildfires. Was this when the self/painting solidified a core? Or, in the realm of psychic nomadism, a more permanent black tent?
A more permanent series of black tents, within a certain TAZ?
Don’t think I have enough detail for this. And perhaps not enough mental energy. It’s tough reading psychology books when they start using German terminology.
I’ll come back to this later.
Or move on to empathy [and Insul’s seeming lack of it].
+++
+++
Not sure if I can continue this.
Feels like what I’m potentially gonna write isn’t there [which is weirder now that I’m typing up my notes and know that it was there], and whatever I do put down will be worthless [this part still stands].
I’ve always found it hard to keep track of narrative progression, character arcs…which is probably why I do repetition + dead ends + absurdism in my own work.
Maybe it’s related.
That I can only see one group of pigments [of a work] and then another, and another, and the total is just a scattered mess.
I do want to follow the Insul narrative-hijack theory though. I think I can manage that. Just need to attune my brain to it, that specific aspect.
+
‘The merciful gaps in reality are over.’
+
I’m onto White Box, Chapter 8 [?].
Trianon [in a lightless oubliette-bathroom] is about to soak in a fantasy-memory state, playing emulated video games.
Memory with a lyrical vibe of nostalgia, but I know he’s not really back there.
Ah, his girlfriend is called Oenone.
Meaning = One-one? Oe-none?
Maybe it’s a real name.
[Just checked and it is a real name. The first wife of Paris of Troy who was abandoned when a braless Diane Kruger turned up].
Oenone in this novel is about to be abandoned in favour of Insul, the nymph-grotesque?
+
‘But his brain is queued with an intricate sequence of tactics that only make sense within the idiosyncratic rules and troubled production of this game.’
+
Troubled?
Just like his role as art conservator, Trianon can only function in a measured [surveilled?] environment?
[MIC WORD keeps telling me surveilled is not a word but I’m sure it is. Isn’t it?]
In this game, he plays as six robot girls who fall from the sky after each death, who continue with brief invincibility frames, rely on glitch exploits, enemy telegraphing.
There is no peril, even in death.
Does he see Insul as a telegraphed enemy, a glitch?
Feels like he was blindsided by him, has yet to figure him out…or figure out how to play him. Not as him but around him, in his distorted world.
In Mario Maker, there is a concept called RNG – I think that’s what Ryukahr calls it – where the enemy doesn’t follow a fixed-action routine i.e. you never know what you’re gonna get.
Is that Insul’s programming?
+
Is this whole narrative a video game?
Trianon and Insul the troubled players?
Doesn’t feel like it.
Probably just an occasional metaphor, like the art vandalism/appreciation.
+
‘ “Haha, yeah.” Trianon touches her blond hair, mirroring her movements, as his other hand mashes the controller, a robot girl crashing through a pixel door and lasering an insurgent in half.’
+
Nice juxtaposition.
Reality as simulacrum within memory-scape that focuses more on the robot girls than the soon-to-be abandoned Oenone.
She also seems to be a bit of a director, telling him to ditch the green hair [for the museum job].
Reasonable or not?
I don’t know.
She’s not real [to me] in this narrative yet.
+
Looks like Trianon can’t get it up.
Due to newly cultivated layers of weakness.
Insul to the rescue [on blood-drenched horse]?
+
‘ “The sushi is here, babe.”
The sushi tastes funny. A little coppery. But he ignores it.’
+
More disjointed time flow.
This is an aspect I really appreciate, similar to the skewed-perspective description of the pool earlier.
It must be a reflection of character routine i.e. Trianon’s brain excises all extraneous actions/dialogue and skips to the bits he consciously notices e.g. coppery sushi.
Writing-wise, most would warn against this kind of action-to-place skipping as it might disorientate the reader. And it does at times. I have to re-read to make sure I read what I read. But it also puts me inside Trianon’s head [alongside the other intruder].
And we’re in a memory here.
Apparently.
Time should be skewed.
In fact, Trianon’s sense of it is Bergson’s duration taken halfway to the extreme. Not fully as it’s still a relatively linear narrative, and time isn’t completely out of joint [yet], but it is playing with the idea of it.
[I say Bergson cos I checked it last week after forgetting it when writing the YWYMAD de-con-struc – this is a fairly common event for me, I mentally misplace most philosophy + anarchist texts I’ve read, especially in the last 2-3 years cos I’ve been laser-focused on writing surrealist nonsense.
+
‘He rests his head on her chest. Normally he’d try to raise to his full height, he was always insecure about that in high school, being shorter than some of the girls.’
+
Me too.
I used to make my friends walk on the lower part of the pavement cos they were all six-one, six-two. Even now, when I’m five-nine, I still feel like a little kid when a random, taller than normal high school kid walks past.
It really can ne debilitating.
+
Feels like Oenone is functioning as his mother.
Trying to correct the bad things that happened to him as if he’s a wounded raccoon.
It’s well-meaning, but, ultimately, doomed.
+
The last two chapters that I’ve intermittently focused on were called Black Box and White Box.
Black box = airplane recording device
White box = ??
Doesn’t feel right.
+
Ah, it looks like it’s a reference to computer engineering. White box is a method of testing aimed at verifying the internal code, checking for logical errors etc. while black box is focused on the software’s functionality, how it behaves from the end-user perspective.
Okay, let me re-read the black box chapter, check what happened, see if there’s a metaphor that flew tits out over my head.
+
Here’s what I got:
Trianon + Insul discuss dreams, and myasthenia is brought up [it’s also mentioned in the White Box chapter].
The dream discussion, and Insul’s lack of dreams, is an issue of functionality, but neither Trianon nor Insul know each other well i.e. they don’t know how they are run internally. The testing is based on questioning each other + hoping [impossibly] for honest answers.
The White Box chapter is between Trianon + a person who theoretically knows all his [surface/lithosphere] weaknesses + is attempting to fix them one by one. By doing this, she is a] aiming to alter that functioning to an ‘improved’ or ‘normal’ state.
But this chapter is also a memory.
One that follows on directly from a black-box testing.
Is Trianon comparing the two?
Trying to re-anchor himself to Oenone and kind of falling somewhere between ‘stay’ and ‘flee.’
I mean, Memory-Oenone half listens to him, but then skips follow up on any topic she has no interest in i.e. the robot girls game.
Because she’s a white box tester.
[On the flip side, does Trianon listen to her?]
It’s an interesting structure-choice.
Bringing in computer analogies alongside the art ones, both of which could also be in contradiction with the other.
Not sure I have the brain-stamina to keep track of it all, hold it together in one tapestry, but I’ll try.
+
A bit worried that this is getting too long again. I enjoy doing it, but I’m only on page 49 and I have about 30-odd pages of notes, which will be typed up as is in order to stay consistent with the de-con-struc concept i.e. read, analyse, doubt, stray, self-obliterate.
I’ve done a lot of ‘i.e.’ in this too.
Maybe switch to ‘that is…’
Okay.
I’m gonna go back to reading chapters and then making notes as this feels like a better way of gauging Serious Weakness as a total megalithic thing.
+++
+++
You’re Breaking Up
Trianon has a favourite song, possibly from high school, which means it might be closer to haunting/traumatic than nostalgic.
+
‘ “Feeling bacteeeerial
Infected by the reeeeallll.”’
+
Lyrics there not pointed at all.
Same number of ‘e’ in bacteeeerial and reeeeallll.
Trianon’s infected?
Perhaps, perhaps not, but it gives me a chance to bring in that psychology book I’ve been dying to bring in for quite a few pages now.
Emotional Contagion vs. Emotional Sharing [in terms of empathy].
The former = empathy is caught from the other/external as a type of infection
The latter = empathy is grown through the understanding of the other as another autonomous being like yourself, capable of similar actions/behaviour.
There’s probably a better definition than that.
But that’s the basic idea.
Actually, I was gonna save this for Insul the sociopath, the idea that Trianon is slowly infecting him with [lithospheric-] intimate details and pathos, and it wouldn’t be empathy he develops from that but maybe a confused state of perception. Or empathy for Trianon alone, as one singular other?
In short, a meshing of both, Emotional Contagion and Emotional Sharing, but within a very narrow, Trianon-shaped petri dish.
Is it narrow?
Don’t know.
Guess it’s still too early to tell; I have no proof of Insul operating in the outside world.
Come to think of it, I don’t have proof of Trianon doing that either. Only by way of the traces he left behind e.g. Oenone, his job, his thoughts, his anxieties etc.
Emotional Contagion doesn’t make sense for him. His brain is too active, too neurotic?
+
Insul seems surprised at Oenone’s reaction to the “breaking up” texts.
He is in control of the immediate realm, but doesn’t understand others beyond that. To him, they are not centres of autonomous selves.
But then, Trianon is.
Cos he made Insul laugh. And did things that were unexpected [via his layers of cultivated weakness].
Is the weakness alluring?
The construct of it, its architecture.
‘Infected by the reeeeallll.’
Maybe.
+++
+++
Retouching
Still in the bathroom.
Still a two-hander.
Is there a chance Insul is not real?
That Trianon is simply having an extended psychotic break?
+
At the risk of exhausting my own shit/work, Insul really does remind me of my alien-witch in Void Galaxia, only a bit more direct, and a lot more brutal to his prey/singular other.
+
‘I learned how to do this from a domestic abuse support video.’
+
Supporting the abuser or the abusee?
+
‘ “I just wanted to use the spray. See what it felt like.”’
+
Another distorted line.
See what it felt like to use the spray on someone else, but also to receive what they are feeling emotionally?
Insul is incapable of receiving.
He can only be infected.
Do the feelings of Trianon reacting to the pepper spray affect Insul’s own?
It could be a sadistic type of emotional sharing, where the subject’s emotional state is interdependent on the other. But the other as what? An object? A passive receiver?
Insul doesn’t spray into thin air.
Pepper spray is for use on a live target [usually by coward-cops].
There is definitely an interdependency.
Did Insul feel joy?
Regret?
+
Insul doesn’t know about starfish.
Neither do I.
But I wouldn’t ask someone, “do they bite?”
+
Of course, on one level, this is frustrating to read e.g. why doesn’t Trianon do something, Insul’s not the fucking Hulk, surprise the cunt, but then I’ve never been kidnapped and chained up in a bathroom with my blood thinned, never had my wife threatened by a blank-canvas psychopath, though there was one time long ago where I woke up in the middle of the night and a dark shape was standing in the corner of my room, and he pulled out a medium-sized knife, pointed it lethargically, took my computer, my phone, and I did nothing, just got a knife pointed at me in bed, and, a few days after that, a white American guy who lived nearby came up to me and said, ‘dude, I’ve got a sword in my room, if that shit happened to me I’d…’
What?
Chop the guy’s head off?
+
‘ “I had to listen to my parents tell me I was dating below myself. I told them you’d figure your shit out. I didn’t judge you.”’
+
Not the best dialogue in the novel.
Feels a little too unnatural, a little on the nose. Serious Weakness does slip into this at times. Don’t know if I really care that much. Could just be Oenone. Or the dialogue itself, secondary to inner life?
Or more than that: Trianon + Oenone come across as soap opera-ish cos they’re not real, their relationship is based on lies. An idealised projection that isn’t even that ideal.
+
‘A vein twitches in Insul’s neck. Would her blood be dark on the glass? Green?’
+
Another slash of Insul’s mind.
Would her blood be green?
Green = alien, other, not human like himself.
Or she is human and he is not? Humanity as the abjection, Insul as…normal?
I’m curious, are all his victims weak in some way? The old guy in the pool, the woman in the apartment, Trianon etc. He seems to be unnerved in this scene, by his own boldness in confronting Oenone. How does he function around people who bite back?
Theory: he is and isn’t Trianon.
Disgusted by and protective of his victim/relatable other.
+
‘ “Wow, cool, I like to read too, what kind of books…”’ Trianon feels foolish but unable to stop from trying to change the subject.’
+
This happens occasionally, a jarring, awkward line of dialogue followed by Inner-Trianon criticising himself for it.
Not sure how I feel about this.
It does excuse the awkward dialogue, but it is a little bit too transparent in its mechanics.
I don’t know.
Maybe that’s just Trianon, his way.
An awkward shifting from black tent to blacker tent to no tent and back to black tent again.
Maybe it’s supposed to be cringe?
+
‘ “I always wanted to cut off someone’s finger and use it to open a door.”’
+
Insul is full of shit.
As a trained psychologist in my own decomposing head, I feel around 51% certain of that.
He keeps saying what he wants to do, violence-wise, but we’ve only seen him do that to Trianon. And it wasn’t anything as extreme as finger-cutting. In fact, the worst thing was feeding him the blood-thinning pills and wondering what might happen, which is a passive act of potential killing, the behaviour of a scientist.
Thinking about it, he may not have even killed anyone.
The old guy in the pool could’ve had a heart attack, and Insul just took the credit for it. The apartment woman could be on vacation somewhere. Or not exist.
He’s living out a fantasy in relation to a weaker other he can control.
Also, he said he’d never used pepper spray before, seemed excited about it. A seasoned sadist wouldn’t act that way. I know I wouldn’t.
God, I hate guessing ahead.
This is what modern cinema + Netflix have done to us.
+++
+++
DUMMY
+
‘Your muscles, chosen by God to demonstrate weakness, can’t afford the strain.’
+
Trianon the egotist.
His weakness has become the size of the universe, the domain of God.
Kind of interesting in a way, inverting the ‘divine greatness’ trope.
+
‘Part of you wants to scream HELP ME to the clerk.’
+
A switch to 2nd person narration.
Separation of intruder-narrator from Trianon?
Can’t remember if this happened before.
Is it the first ‘you’?
+
Now Trianon’s dressed up in female clothing. Just like my sisters did to me when I was a kid. Just like my alien witch does to my male MC in Void Galaxia.
Is this a trans coming out story?
Trianon isn’t resisting much.
Maybe this is his cure?
The actualisation of something buried since 17?
+
DRAMA FREE ZONE
Feel like I’ve seen this t-shirt somewhere before.
On Gary Busey?
+
‘ “You don’t have a masculine side.”’
[And]
‘ “You’re trying, trying to, break down my identity.”
“You don’t have an identity.”
“What?”
“You’re nothing, just like I am.”’
+
Self and Intersubjectivity by Insul De Zero.
Are they both changing, unravelling?
Forming their own little TAZ?
+
Trianon may be a weak character, or a character defined by cultivated layers of weakness, but there are so many aspects to him, including varying degrees of fantasised sadism, from ethical violence to brutal retribution to curious savagery. It’s often fleeting, but it is there.
+
Mirror neurons?
Doing or receiving an action yourself, or being able to, fires up the same neural substrate as when you witness someone else doing or receiving the same action e.g. pain via pepper spray.
This creates empathy.
Sadism too?
The longer Insul + Trianon stay glued together, the more these mirror neurons get utilised.
What kind of state/identity will they arrive at finally?
[Or as a lot of kids books in Chinese say at the end of the blurb, ‘actually, who is the mastermind behind it all?’]
+
A Serious Weakness.
Trianon seems to think of it as an intrinsic state, a natural part of him, but the emotions he often deals in – shame, embarrassment, guilt, envy etc. – are socially constructed. Or at least I think they are.
The Big Six – joy, fear, sadness, surprise, anger, all the ones in that Pixar film – can be called biological in the sense that they pop up early in babies.
That’s what this Self book is saying.
[Better not be a fake Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Subjectivity Research, Dan Zahavi].
Trianon is beyond this state, he’s a reflector. As in, he functions from within a prison of objective self-awareness. And that means…what?
Losing my way a bit.
[Fucking psychology!]
But shame is a big part of this.
Trianon self-reflects on every perceived failure, in his life, with a special focus on the masculine. That is obviously a social construct, padded with superficial biological signifiers e.g. muscles, beard, height, by conservatives so they can wheel out the words ‘natural’ or ‘God-given’ when they feel terrified of some other [who might make them suck their dick in an out of the way hotel car park and leave them feeling erotically confused about it afterwards].
On this basis, Trianon is both weak and a failure, and Insul isn’t.
But only in relation to Trianon.
God this is fucked up.
And inescapable.
+
‘Shame is an immediate shudder which runs through me from head to foot without any discursive preparation.’
+
That was from Sartre, not Serious Weakness/Porpentine.
Saying that the third person narrator dipping in and out of Trianon’s psyche might be the ‘shame’ aspect of his consciousness. Insul’s too, if he keeps hijacking.
But the intruder beyond Trianon’s conscious self appears calm and reflective.
Is that how ‘shame’ presents itself?
Not with panic but assuredness?
I don’t know.
I’ll have to go back and check the more ‘outsider’ parts of Trianon’s thoughts. Or pay greater attention going forward.
No desire to go any deeper into Sartre, I’ll just end up with another migraine.
But shame is definitely a thing here.
Has to be.
+
‘Pure shame is not a feeling of being this or that guilty object but in general of being an object; that is, of recognizing myself in this degraded, fixed, and dependent being which I am for the Other.’
+
Sound familiar?
Trianon is the poster boy for pure shame.
Or the painting boy.
Pigment boy?
His being is shameful.
All the superficial action-failures operating as mere layers piled on top.
How to escape this?
Change your skin, your being?
Align it with what you feel inside?
+
On page 77 now, with about 42 pages of notes.
Only a masochist would have read this far [in this de-con-struc here, not the novel]. Even Porpentine [the author] has probably checked out by now.
Gonna switch back to stealth mode, read to page 150 and then come back and say I was right about everything. Or right about one particular thing and pretend the mistakes don’t exist. Just like the Feng Shui masters. That’s more realistic. Maybe my theory about Insul taking over the narration? I reckon he’s gonna get a large chunk of it soon, maybe even a handover for a few chapters, and when it comes, it’ll be a distorted mirror [neuron] of Trianon’s.
+
Okay, so I was wrong about Insul and the outside world.
He’s brawling now.
With the Museum director.
The whole scene, as I read it, is a loose riff on the trailer fight in Raising Arizona. Mildly comical yet deadly serious.
Insul wins and is humiliated [just like United’s recent FA cup ‘victory’ against Coventry]
Wins only cos the narrative needs to go on.
Is he a shadow aspect of Trianon, a skewed hallway?
+
It’s interesting, the novel forcing us into the mind of Trianon, this passive maelstrom of do it/you can’t/I hate myself, and giving no choice but to associate with him. It’s frustrating, depressing, infuriating at times…just muttering, ‘fucking do something, he’s not Triple H’, but then you’re still stuck there, with him, as him, doing nothing except the odd bit of sarcasm.
Trianon is a paralysis agent, encroaching on your own psyche?
I say ‘you/your’ but I mean ‘me/mine.’
+
I both want to continue this and don’t.
It’s a weird feeling.
Perhaps an adverse reaction to ‘being’ Trianon for so long?
But then, I could just stop reading.
Trianon can’t.
+
Did Insul feel humiliated during that fight with the Museum Director?
Is he capable of shame/embarrassment?
I think he is.
+
‘The muffled interior of the alcove makes Trianon nervous. “Aren’t you worried about people
coming?”
“I’ll take care of them. I’ll stack them to the ceiling.”’
+
No, you won’t Insul. You just got choked half to death by a Museum Director.
+
‘That hydrodoomer floodfag shit.’
+
Nice flow, quite lyrical.
Sometimes Serious Weakness feels [intentionally] overwritten, sometimes it sings.
+
+
I’m not sure, but I think I just read Trianon being figuratively fucked from behind against a ‘being-mutilated’ painting.
A lot going on there.
Psycho-sexual impulse to destroy something considered beautiful by the sociological other.
Considered beautiful by Trianon too.
Not that he seems to give much of a shit.
He’s been stabbed now.
I think.
As I may have written earlier, a lot of the action-description comes filtered through Trianon, and his unorthodox, hijacked mind, so it’s not always clear what’s happening.
It’s a bit irritating in this case, the lack of clarity, but then in the next chapter you get a segment like this:
+
‘Trianon feels like one of the sculptures, hanging paralyzed above everything. Like a replacement for the cameras. They’re gone, so he has to step in. Be a man. Fill the hole in the world. Your mom and I aren’t going to be around forever. Do you want to be like gramma? Leeching off the next generation? You need to pay rent. No free rides. Get that emo shit off your face. And while you’re at it, morph into a camera, fuse your eyes together into a single monocular orb, retract your bones into a box-like shape, and start remembering EVERYTHING. Now scuttle up the wall. There you go.’
+
Just a beautiful collision of memory fragments and emotional states and bitterness and crumbling black tents, glued on to plot, character and the reality of the museum environment surrounding him.
+
Thinking back on the Dante painting [or the painting representing one of Dante’s circles of Hell – I think that’s what it was], if Insul ever touches a Varo, I’m reaching into the text and orange-cabling the little shit out of existence.
I can type that cos I know I won’t have to.
And I wouldn’t, even if I did.
There is no Insul analogue with tennis racket in my life [yet].
+
Insul vs cop.
Another [fortuitous] victory.
I’m struggling now.
The Insul in my head just wouldn’t survive this battle. Although a lot of cops are cowards at heart, this one would’ve shot Insul [and maybe Trianon too] before he could say anything, let alone charge at him.
The fact that they have a scuffle, dilutes Insul’s character, makes him comical.
Comic book?
The character I’ve speculated out of a mix of this text and my own blank nothingness…I was sure he was ‘horror’ only in relation to Trianon. Now he’s murdering everyone in his path.
I’m not convinced.
Why?
Is it his name? Insul?
Insul = Incel?
I knew he was psychotic/sadistic, but within environmental or situational limits e.g. alone with someone weak/unprepared.
Not throwing himself at a burly cop.
Counterpoint: Insul might be surprising himself here. The fight with the Museum Director, the humiliation at a woman’s hands, needs to be compensated for, so he’s clawing at anything.
It’s possible.
Quite intriguing, the more I think about it.
Let’s see where this goes.
+
X marks the chest.
It was a slash across Trianon’s chest, not a full stabbing.
X = treasure, death, incorrectness.
Which one was Insul thinking when he moved the knife?
+
I’ve just had a thought, the whole museum scene, the cop fight, both of them have opened up the world within the narrative too wide, and that kind of opening has to be closed fast, to preserve some semblance of realism…or believability…which means, this could all be a type of simulated reality. The whole thing, from the beginning to now to beyond. There’s still 300 pages left, it has to be this. Unless Porpentine slows time down and makes it a two-hander in the beach house until the cops arrive and shoot them both?
I do not know.
A simulated reality would explain some of Insul’s actions, maybe his blankness, the burgeoning sadism, but then, is it something they’ve voluntarily entered or been forced into [as psych-experiment or punishment perhaps?].
I’ll continue on but won’t come back to type anything anymore.
I’m tired of thinking.
Tired of trying to wheel out psychology terms too.
Just wanna read now.
+++
Serious Weakness is available to buy here.
PsYChO hOLosUitE [zine] 