Squirrels

Saturday 2/17/24

Was talking to a military nurse. Thirty. Attractive. Absolutely nothing to say.

I just can't.

People are so simple. They can't even talk. One word. Then it's like you have to play twenty questions with them. One-word answers.

Someone asks me what I'm doing, I answer. It'll be like eight things. They'll all be interesting, dynamic things. There's a lot to work with there. You could comment about one of them or ask me about it. But it will be intimidating to someone, because they are so simple. They won't know what to say. So they'll go, "Cool."

I don't like talking to someone--or trying to--simply because they're attractive.

And then I'm just gone.

It's funny--you see all of these pretend writers on dating sites, right, and they can't write a thing on there. They're no different from that person who tells you just like the last 2000 people who were able to manage ten words that they're laid back and easy going and can stay in or go out. They're no better at writing. They can't come up with anything and what they do say they don't say interestingly. They don't even possess something as basic as what we might call a way with words. They just have this need because of their emptiness inside to pretend they're this thing so they can have some self-esteem, when they're no more that thing than someone who never writes.

You would never think, "Oh, she must be a writer." They can work for The New York Times, and they're no better with words than someone who doesn't normally ever write more than a text. It's entirely because of other things why these people have these. None off it has anything to do with writerly talent, knowledge, insight. Anyone can do what that person at The New York Times does.

It's pathetic, really. You're not that thing. Why can't you accept it? You don't even care enough about that thing to work hard at it. But then there's this system that exists almost solely for the fostering and enabling of these delusions and fantasies.

In so many other arenas, people have to accept that they're not that thing. The person who couldn't hack it--no pun intended--didn't become the surgeon. Your fifty-six-year-old neighbor who used to shoot hoops in his driveway has accepted he's not in the NBA.

But these people? It's endless self-delusion such that the entire publishing system has now become all about feeding this self-delusion. It feeds on itself and that, as such, is the business model. Which is to say, this is not an actual business.

It's like if people who made cakes only did so for other people who made cakes as part of this bizarre ego charity and all of the cakes were just for the people who made cakes. Not "outsiders," not the world, not the buying public. Cakes were only for other cake makers. And in this metaphor, all of the cakes taste like rancid ass, so no one in the buying public would want any of the cakes anyway.

No other business is run like publishing because publishing is not really a business. Its efforts to make any money--which is done for the sole purpose of keeping the BS going and people in the positions they have where they need not do anything, create anything worthwhile, possess competence, work hard--are all centered on getting the people in it to pay for it and never to produce and sell anything that might be of use to people in the world, which to some degree or other is how every other business works.

But back to people in general.

There are so many people where trying to talk with them is no different than if you were trying to converse with a squirrel. I'm being literal. Or close to it. The world is your conversational and romantic oyster if you are such a person. Because everyone is just like you. They're that simple and they have as little to say--and no ability to put anything into words--as you do. The further away you are, though, from being that kind of person, the more you're just fucked for options.

I seriously could have a more rewarding exchange in the Public Garden today with a squirrel, and if I have a peanut on me, it won't be close.