horse taming
lists and entries from journals, the notes app, etc. from september 24th to september 27th.
Entry titled “ZERO”, 9/24/2024, 11:47 p.m. In a notebook.
Cleanliness, godliness, and emptiness go around and around in a neat little circle, stuck in a never-ending Ouroboric cycle. There’s really no other way to say it. Billy Corgan was right, as insufferable as he is. God has been related and equated to various forms of emptiness and absence for thousands of years, cleaning is synonymous with emptying—ergo, cleanliness is godliness, and for the first half of the month I’m hellbent on divinity. Hell bent.
Protect me from what I want. Hide me from the sponges and spray cleaners. This is the first time in my life that I’ve ever run out of laundry detergent this fast— can you imagine that? Doing so much fucking laundry that you go through a quarter gallon of soap in two days?— and all I’ve got to show for it is the pneumatic breathing of the dryer. I take out the trash. I take the trash cans into the street to be picked up. It’s late and I’m awake and my hands are soft and raw from steel wool. I don’t touch the vacuum because I don’t like the vacuum, but there isn’t a single spot in the kitchen or bathroom or my bedroom that hasn’t been wrung out into that holy emptiness. Praises Be Alleluia Thank The Lord. No more grease on the ceiling fan or chipped lead paint sitting in the seat of a windowsill or dirty sheets— I have slain the beast, the foul beast that permeates my house. And my parents are gone for the night so yeah, it’s my fucking house, and no foul beasts are allowed. Except the dog I guess, but she’s not so foul and I’m sweet on her anyways.
No point to any of it, by the way. It’s not compulsion or neurosis or desperation. I just have nothing better to do than scrub out the bathtub over and over and over.
It’s cleaning or else it’s smoking like a chimney or endlessly scrolling YouTube or sleeping. I need art, but I don’t want to take it right now; I want convenience and therefore, obviously, I must want to kill any sort of integrity I have. Did you know that sometimes my life can get so repetitive and homogeneous that I’ll shave my legs just to experience a different texture? Neither did I until I sat in the bath for two hours and meticulously removed every single hair with a dull men’s razor. I couldn’t believe what I was doing. Do I really have so little going on in my life that I can just spend time willy-nilly on something so foolish?
Mess is always created— it’s created by the mere act of existing. Eating means mess. Bathing means mess. Existing in a space means mess. And I’m not so stupid to think that I should stop doing these things to avoid mess, because that’s not how that works at all and I care about the cleaning more than I care about the mess, but it’s a matter of principle. I’m sitting on the couch, eating tuna out of the can and watching a movie like a chump. It never ends.
Entry titled “Jenny”, 9/25/2024, 4:41 p.m. In the notes app.
SOMETIMES YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO WATCH SOMETHING GRUESOME OCCUR. YOU DON’T HAVE THE OPTION OF CLOSING YOUR EYES BECAUSE IT HAPPENS FAST AND ENTERS YOUR MEMORY.
YOU’RE HOME FREE AS SOON AS NO ONE KNOWS WHERE TO FIND YOU.
THERE’S NO REASON TO SLEEP CURLED UP AND BENT. IT’S NOT COMFORTABLE, IT’S NOT GOOD FOR YOU AND IT DOESN’T PROTECT YOU FROM DANGER. IF YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT AN ATTACK YOU SHOULD STAY AWAKE OR SLEEP LIGHTLY WITH LIMBS UNFURLED FOR ACTION.
IT’S HARD TO KNOW IF YOU’RE CRAZY IF YOU FEEL YOU’RE IN DANGER ALL THE TIME NOW.
GO WHERE PEOPLE SLEEP AND SEE IF THEY’RE SAFE.
THERE IS A PERIOD WHEN IT’S CLEAR THAT YOU HAVE GONE WRONG BUT YOU CONTINUE. SOMETIMES THERE IS A LUXURIOUS AMOUNT OF TIME BEFORE ANYTHING BAD HAPPENS.
SOME DAYS YOU WAKE UP AND IMMEDIATELY START TO WORRY. NOTHING IN PARTICULAR IS WRONG IT’S JUST THE SUSPICION THAT FORCES ARE ALIGNING QUIETLY AND THERE WILL BE TROUBLE.
REMORSE IN ADVANCE IS EFFICIENT.
MANY DOGS RUN WILD IN THE CITY. SOME ARE ABANDONED BY THEIR OWNERS AND OTHERS ARE BORN TO LOST DOGS. STRAY HAVE A LIMITED LIFE EXPECTANCY EVEN WHEN THEY BAND TOGETHER IN PACKS. THEY ARE PREY TO DISEASE, PARASITES, WEATHER AND AUTOMOBILES. THEY TEND TO BE FRIGHTENED AND VICIOUS. THEY ARE UNABLE TO PROTECT THEMSELVES OR ANYONE ELSE.
HOW DO YOU RESIGN YOURSELF TO SOMETHING THAT WILL NEVER BE? YOU STOP WANTING JUST THAT THING, YOU GO NUMB, OR YOU KILL THE AGENT OF DESIRE.
YOU CAN WASH YOUR FACE UNTIL THE SKIN GETS TIGHT AND ITS PRESSURE PULLING ON YOUR FACE IS A CONSTANT REMINDER THAT YOU’RE ALIVE. THIS IS A MILDER AUTISM THAN SMASHING YOUR HEAD IN AND CAN BE HELPFUL IN THAT IT KEEPS YOU SENSITIVE.
ABUSE OF POWER SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE.
I KNOW WHO YOU ARE AND IT DOES ME NO GOOD AT ALL.
Entry titled “Sedan”, 9/26/2024, 2:13 a.m. In a notebook.
Thinking about roadkill and being cunt. Mostly in relation to me, because whenever you’ve experienced Something— a capital S life changing event; whatever makes you rethink leaving the house— and people know that you’ve experienced Something, no matter if they know the details or just that there’s been some sort of Something, they look at you like roadkill. That’s so sad, rest in peace, maybe somebody will come along and stuff it. (Secretly: it must have been stupid to run out into the road like that and get itself hit. Because obviously it’s the car’s fault, the car is the one that hit and killed it, but what was it doing out there in the first place?) Pity me, pity me. It does nothing. And they keep going. That shouldn’t have happened, I’m so sorry. They start making absurd wishes about going back to the past and saving me because I didn’t deserve it—no one deserves it, they amend, like God’s going to cut them down if they even insinuate they’re apologetic towards the car. Which He should, because fuck the car. But these things happen.
I would like to address— theoretically, of course— the idea that maybe it was deserved. What if there were extenuating circumstances that made the car ethically obligated to hit me? What if I was laying in the road, belly up, dressed in all black so the car couldn’t see me? There were things I could’ve done, rules I ignored that I should have followed. I was warned dozens of times. Actions have repercussions; that’s the way the world works. I was warned and I went out into the road anyway either because I thought I was exempt from the car hitting me or because I didn’t care if I got hit. Of course, telling people you got what was coming to you only solidifies your position in their heads as roadkill, because doesn’t every piece of meat on the road think they deserved it? Saying you didn’t deserve it also solidifies your position as roadkill, though. Acknowledging the Something at all means that there was a car that hit you. But saying it was deserved seems to make it especially easy for you to be cemented as roadkill. If anything, your guilt and willingness to pay penance only pushes you closer to a Christ-figure, which is stupid because you’re a fucking raccoon. What if I deliberately disobeyed and therefore needed to be taught a lesson?
I’m the only one that’s ever needed to be taught a lesson, obviously. I could’ve stopped it, which wasn’t the case for everyone else. For everyone else it’s just abuse. Isn’t it ironic? And then I’m looking at them like they’re roadkill.
Untitled entry, 9/26/2024, 9:23 p.m. On scrap paper.
Get a job
Go back to school
Get into tai chi
Fitter, happier, more productive
Online less (not by choice) (buy a new computer so it can’t be taken?)
Go outside during the day
More trusting, more soft, less serene misanthropy
Drive, driver’s license, driver’s car, going going
Stop smoking
I am living on the moon, I have a little house all by myself on the moon— gold spoons, feathers in hair, rubies on hands…
Entry titled “Dream Women”, 9/27/2024, 12:35 p.m. In a notebook.
The women come to me in a dream— the ones that raised me, the ones I grew up with, the ones I modeled myself after. Tough-as-nails women, women with hard-line mouths and old work clothes and shotguns they keep by the door. We’re all sitting on someone’s porch. It’s warm and gently raining. A few of them were smoking, but they finished quickly, leaving the faint scratch of tobacco in the air. Due to a lack of chairs, I’ve been relegated to the banister, which I don’t mind at all. Balancing gives me something to do. When I crack my neck, one of them tells me I better watch out if I don’t want to break it.
Nothing happens in the dream. The women aren’t appearing to impart some mystical advice like Patti Smith’s cowboy, or even do anything except for sit on the porch and talk and tell stories about being young and stupid and breaking a screen door or losing a bet or something. If anything, they’re just a reminder about who I wanted to be when I grew up— someone who worked for what they got and knows how to take an existential beating without crumbling.
For a while there, I wanted to be pretty and refined. I think I’m starting to let go of that desire. I mean, with the era I grew up in, some tiny part of me is always going to want that because it’s easy to think everything would be better if you looked like a supermodel and had the manners and dignity of a fairytale princess. I don’t. That’s fine. I’m not ugly and I’ve got my pride, but you won’t be finding me in Vogue anytime soon. And it’s such a trap, you know? I’ve watched the other women I grew up with— the ones that don’t appear to me in dreams because I never looked up to them— burn their lives away chasing the idea of being beautiful or thin or whatever. Years and years of diets that do nothing and home facials that do nothing and Botox that does nothing good. Of course they had lives around it, but it occupied such an immense part of their time that even as a kid I felt uncomfortable with it. And time is no great strain on me, even if I’d like to be more conscious of its passing, but it’s still a finite resource. Using it to try and stop an immovable object like aging just seems dumb.
So there I was, sitting on the banister and looking around at these middle aged and elderly women. Rough hands on the whole lot. I think they’re beautiful because they look like living people, the type you can’t find in fashion or lifestyle photography because they’re always in historical photographs. Dust Bowl women. Great Depression women. Factory and farm women. It just makes you stop and think a little bit. If I can’t be pretty, what else do I want out of life? Beauty comes or it doesn’t, so the point is to completely exorcize it from your list of attainable options and do something that’s not related to how you look instead. These women are too busy breaking horses to worry about it. Horses don’t care if you’re beautiful— they’ll throw you off no matter how you look.
Obviously, it’s a dream and I’m not controlling where my mind is going, so I start thinking about what horses want and it turns weird real fast, but life outside beauty is good to think about. I don’t exactly have any answers about what I want right now. I guess I’ll just try to break my own horses, metaphorically speaking.
can i hire u for cleaning? i'll feed u salami & olives & strange smelling cheeses xx