Some lines of Byron

Thursday 2/26/26

You're such a loser if you try and take credit for, or glom on to, someone else's achievement. And yes, that includes all the sports fans who say, "Yeah, our record is like literally the best..." as they power-chomp through another bag of Doritos. "Don't mind the dust, it's the good kind."

Oh, look--something actually funny. And not let's-all-lie-our-faces-off publishing system-of incestuous-evil funny from the likes of Lydia Davis or George Saunders. It's here that I'll issue one of those periodic reminders that that shit by those writers wholly lacking in ability which is so plain if you actually look at their work rather than do the Pavlovian publishing thing automatically say it's awesome is supposed to be--officially now--incredibly witty. Because how would you know from actually fucking reading it. Which no one is doing, including the people who publish it and hype it. Not really. Other things. It's always other things, brothers and sisters.

Sincerity is very hard to fake through language. To he or she of the discerning brain and capable eye, anyway.

Publicists are typically just people who spam you with mass emails. They're not these master crafters of image. Like almost everyone, they are usually bad/inept at their jobs. The idea that they understand people and have such great skill in shaping words as if they read minds and then help deliver just what people have yet to realize they want and need so much is comical. Practically everyone does an Intro 101 version of their job.

Publicists are also usually clueless about what to do when things out of their control change--that is, when life happens. They're very stick-to-the-canned-script people. That's why you see the publicists of these NHL teams putting out their tone deaf "We're back!" type of posts on social media. The campaign was already rolling--that is, the Intro 101 class was already in session--and extemporization is too hard, despite what an incompetent publicist would tell you like they're some hero, the brains behind the operation, these finesse virtuosos of interpersonal skills and a kind of one-person bomb squad that goes in and defuses situations like no one else can without leaving any fingerprints. This simply isn't reality.

Most marketing just amounts to spamming, by the way.

The shitty author who is also an editor who will scream at you for following up twice in a month and a half while they hook up their similarly disgusting and talentless fake friends--the birds of a feather special--will have a vapid publicist--kind of like the literary version of a rich suburban housewife who got a gig as a realtor and now thinks she's the world's Yoda but with a face full of work--who sends you the same cringe-inducing copy about their cringe-inducing book a couple times a week for many weeks, unless you unsubscribe to these emails you never subscribed to, but often that won't stop the emails from coming. I'll give you an example before too long from this idiot publicist used by the publisher Delphinium. It's so bad, so embarrassing, you won't even think it's real. I have a lot to say and share about Delphinium, and this will help route us to a discussion of an insane editor there.

Most people aren't going to have a social conscience. They're not going to be thinking "large" and about others. Yes, they'll be vocal (if vocal means repeating what many others are saying, in language that doesn't belong individually to any of these people, but is just what the group re-uses again and again and again), but that's usually about other things. They want an identity. They are projecting. They want attention.

Most people's thoughts go no further than the extent of their own lives, or, at most, the walls in which they live, where other people might happen to live. If those other people were the same people and they knew them but weren't related to them, they wouldn't give a fuck about them usually. In other words, there usually has to be a direct, built-in relation to them personally. People aren't thinkers, but they're also not expansive thinkers. They're belly button thinkers. Their gaze also usually goes no further. Hell, people rarely have a personal conscience, let alone a social conscience.

For the geniuses looking to show others how smart they are by using this phrase: It's bury the lede. Not bury the lead. This kind of thing matters when you're trying to fool people into believing you inhabit a level of intellect that you don't.

Men who go online to call another man "an absolute unit" disturb me. The men who do this do it a lot. These are the men who call another man "big guy" without irony and as a show of the utmost respect, who will have truck nuts on their trucks, and who are very proud--and often vocally proud--about the size of their dog's testicles. "Yeah, look at that, right?"

I'll see many women make a post on social media in which they apologize for being gone for so long--you know, two weeks--so here, have a photo, like they're giving the gift of their amazing selves in selfie number 43,236. The delusional arrogance. And the crowd they play to. These nasty, frightening, jowly men with their graying, patchy neck beards and/or their wraparound sunglasses who all look like they're versed in the logistics of cleaning up a blood trail left by some woman they dragged off the road into the forest after spotting her broken down car from up in their deer stand. And all I can do is try and puzzle out which party--that woman or those men--is more pathetic. I honestly don't know. Such a toss up. And people don't know why they're depressed, and think it's other things, when it's usually a direct result of the empty, meaningless life they've chosen to live.

Nice to know that "Let that sink in" is going to be quite the verbal rage for all the stupid people out there in 2026. It serves the same purpose as "literally" and "objectively" in being an attempt by the very fucking dumb person to try and sound smarter than they are, which is about as smart as a gerbil suffering from the brain fog of advanced gerbil age. This sentence is always preceded by something that is just as basic as basic gets if you're a half-educated second grader. "People breathe oxygen. Let that sink in." "Someone's gonna win the Super Bowl. Let that sink in." "My cock started moving its hole at the top like a mouth and starting reciting lines of Byron. Let that sink in."

No intelligent person posts memes/gifs any of that. No intelligent person ever will.

Intelligent people use words that are their own. Very few people exist in the world who can even do this.

I actually just saw this right now from someone in real time:

I can never figure portnoy out.

As in Dave Portnoy.

Yes! What a mystery! Man goes on national television and says that women deserve to be raped. Then says it again. Man rapes women. Man spits in their mouths. Mmmm. That's tasty and sexy and doubtless much desired. Is he a good man or a horrible man? Huh. If only there was some way of knowing.

This person--a woman, amazingly--actually followed up the above sentence with, "On one hand, I love the relationship he has with his pups, and it makes him seem human."

I mean...what the fuck is wrong with so many people? Like, seriously? How out of your fucking mind full-on insane and insanely broken do you need to be as a human to write these words? Because...what...he doesn't rape his "pups"? How do you think Hitler was to his dogs if he had any? You think he gassed them in the camps? "Fuck you, Herr Fido, it's time to turn the nozzle for you, boy! Who wants a bone now, bitch!"

What kind of bar is that? He doesn't abuse or hump his dogs? That makes him seem human? Someone like this is just as bad because that's how far their stupidity goes. People's stupidity is dangerous. It's made the world what it is. More than any tyrant or politician. People's amazing, mind-blowing stupidity is why the world and humanity is why the one is a shit hole where everything decent and good and intelligent has little to no chance and the other is a shit storm of humans in post-human form.

I remember seeing this testimony from someone saying they were moved to see Harvey Weinstein kneeling down and zipping up his little girl's raincoat. Well he wasn't going to sodomize her on the casting couch, was he? What the fuck does this mean? Can't be that bad. Zipped up his kid's coat. Look at Portnoy. Can't be that bad "on the one hand." Doesn't put out lit matches on his dogs and cut them with a rusty knife.

Same woman/deep thinker goes on to add, "I can see his point that if the president calls up to congratulate you, you show grace and accept the call."

You can't use the word "president" there. Like it's just a president. The term(s) should be felon, rapist, racist, sexist ogre, pedophile. This guy has people shot down in the fucking street. Those are just some fitting nouns. I feel bad for all the others I'm leaving out. This guy would rape your fucking kid, man. So many of these motherfuckers wouldn't have a problem with him doing that, and I would have once thought a statement like that would have to be hyperbole, but I really have my doubts now. I think you can get people to do anything. You can get them to eat their own shit. Someone else's shit. And they'll say it's delicious if they're brainwashed enough to think that's what they're supposed to say and that it makes them this thing they think they need to be. I've seen it for decades with publishing. The similarities between Trump and many publishing people is something else, and we're going to get more into that here.

Then this same woman posts asking for advice about the best kind of yoga mat to get.

This world.