Slugs on the sidewalk

Tuesday 7/23/24

People who say they're all about "witty banter" annoy me. First of all, they're never witty themselves. Secondly, they use what they call banter as one of their many attempted holding patterns in life. They live life in abeyance. Circling, circling, circling, never alighting and getting down to it. I don't want to do performance with anyone. Substance is all I care about. Getting down to meaning, value. There's humor then, and it's natural and it has value. But the whole performative, play-at-doing-would-be-witticisms thing is a cue for me to leave, but there were also probably about thirty others, frankly.

One will encounter women on dating sites saying, "Yes that's my real age," as if they've done what Ponce de Leon could not and taken a long, luxurious bath in the fountain of youth on their last trip to Florida. In each of these instances, the women look older to me than they're stated age. It's very odd. Then again: Is it?

I can't answer someone who doesn't know me honestly about many things, or I can, and they won't be able to handle those answers, or begin to understand them. This is just too much. The situation I am in is beyond anything people know from anywhere else. But it's everything. Do you know how many people ask me what "kind" of writing I do? What am I supposed to say? I'm the mega-genius who is the expert on everything and to whom no one in history can be compared and I constantly invent new modes of narrative? People expect you to say one thing. And anyone else would. Recently someone tried to be deep and ask me to tell them something I don't normally tell someone early on. It's such a presumptive question on so many fronts. But what could I say? There's nothing? That I have written the longest work in history and there are three million words plus out there in which I say, or potentially say, all, to whomever in the world? The person for me is going to have to be someone who already knows all about me. I can't clue them in. It really isn't an option. You can't say how things are, there's too much anyway, it's all historically unique, and I'm not interested in lying, omitting, any of that.

You're not going to meet anyone who doesn't hit you upside the head with a "lol"--I mean, you're an adult, use words--or not have a clue as to the difference between "any way" and "anyway." And I can't. I could never get around that. That's just the lowest of the low, bare minimum-wise, and you haven't even mastered the most basic rudiments of grammar? I can't. There is no way I can know someone like that. I don't have it in me. This isn't being brilliant. It's not being smart. Those things basically don't exist. I can't scale things back even more. There has to be some vestige of a standard. You make it lower, and lower, and lower, and lower, and lower--the bar, that is--and there are still fewer, and fewer, and fewer, and fewer people who an clear it. We are such a stupid race now. It gets worse every week. Can you really not see that? The machines do more and more. The computers. AI. Whatever you want to call it all. It's like an army going to battle against some slugs on the sidewalk. What resistance can the slugs offer even if they wanted to? And the human slugs have no interest in that anyway. They just want to do less than they did before. They want to do nothing at all. Learn nothing, achieve nothing, be nothing, offer nothing.