Bottomless reserves of hate, people like Mónica "You Better Pretend Lydia Davis is an Amazing Writer" de la Torre and Raluca "Time for a Manic Episode!" Albu, McDonald's

Thursday 3/5/26

People have a bottomless reserve of cruelty. They can and will tap into this bottomless reserve of this over the slightest prompting, and the lightest perceived slight, which can be of their own mental making and not an actual slight. Nothing will potentially satiate their hate, their blood lust. They'll keep going, dishing out hate, rage, until they forget or move on to something else, because they're all very stupid and can't maintain focus. If and when the displays of hatred and cruelty stop, this will usually be the reason.

And it's not a rare person who's like this. It's many. You can't underestimate the power of projection in our world. And, with that--because this is where much of the power comes from--how much so many people hate themselves more than they hate the things they act like they hate. This is you end up with that bottomless reserve.

People don't sit with their thoughts, they don't look inwards, they can't even sit still in a room and think for five minutes. Thirty seconds. They are lost on themselves as what they are. They go over their own heads, if you will, because their heads are never there and instead elsewhere, seeing and understanding nothing.

No suffering is too great for another for a person who is this way. They would have someone starve. Have their kids starve. Have their kids die in the street. They would never say, "Okay, that's enough, you've had enough punishment for this thing I hate you for."

We weren't this way to the degree that we are now, in the percentage of people who are this way, until the internet age came along. The internet and the offshoots of its culture, if you want to call it that--the inroads it made into all aspects of human life, which becomes more an more of an oxymoronical term as we go along--had a seismic, changing influence even on people disinclined to be online much, because we aren't creatures of self-determination. We aren't our own people.

We're products of what's around us, the people around us. How they talk, think, behave. Save in the very rarest of instances, and then you're talking maybe a dozen people in the world, if that. I don't mean some hermit out in the hill country. I mean people who are still out and about in society, but are entirely their own person, of their own choosing, of their own making, but also aware.

I only went to McDonald's as a kid, and then when I'd go to NYC as an adult as I made the rounds with various horrible people in publishing, like Mónica de la Torre at BOMB, where fellow unbalanced hate merchant and old friend Raluca "Time for a Manic Episode!" Albu presently works when she's not at her regular gig of helping to advance the cause of AI, who barked at me and told me I would never be in BOMB if I didn't agree with her that Lydia Davis is an amazing writer--Christ are these people insane--and Brigid Hughes of A Public Space, about whom I will have much to share and say in upcoming entries in this record.

I'd go to the same one in Greenwich Village. I don't know why; it was just this thing I did. Why was I in Greenwich Village on these trips? Because I always tried to get to the record stores there before I went back to Boston.

As a kid, certainly, McDonald's was cheap. You'd go there for birthday parties, which were inexpensive affairs, whereas now they're often very involved and pricey. I don't think we had less fun, though, and I'd wager more at that, to say nothing of the memories that were made. It is truly amazing how far a little imagination goes in this world, and also how averse almost all people are to having or using one. Look at publishing. But look anywhere, really. I recall a wonderful birthday in which my father took me and some friends to the Blue Hills. This was free. Up went, down we came, and I've never forgotten it, and I think that would be true even if I was someone who forgot in the manner and at the rate of others.

I get the sense that McDonald's isn't this inexpensive option now. You can eat it when you're a kid, but if you're eating it as an adult, you're going to have problems, because it's terrible for you.

One thing I'm surprised by is how much McDonald's seems to play a role in the lives of adults. I don't mean in terms of going there with their kids, but in eating this stuff themselves, which I don't believe they're doing for reasons of cost, as that isn't much of a benefit, if it's a benefit at all, with McDonald's.

Why are we so bad at looking after our own health? I'd be rather worried if I was a regular McDonald's customer. How can you eat that and be healthy?

I don't follow McDonald's, I have no interest in McDonald's really, beyond what I'm saying here, I suppose, and yet every day I see many comments about McDonald's, and what, for lack of a better word in this wasteland of ours I'll "discussions."

Cesspool, wasteland culture. An entire world, all the possibilities, all the range, and almost everyone confines themselves to the garbage found within a tiny, tiny, tiny percent of a single percent.

It's like everyone has given up, even if they don't know it, or they never started. Lives are lived as if they're in this perpetual state of playing out the string. The team isn't in a pennant race, but rather is twenty-five games out with three to play and they're just showing up to finish off the schedule but without an eye towards next year, or being a professional and doing your best, or getting a look at some players who haven't played much up until now.

You cannot live that way because it isn't living.