General Critique Thread

Lyricism in writing is as defenseless to mechanical analysis and criticism as a lone guitar chord.

I'm not trying to write airtight syllogisms or ethical absolutes.

Great writers like Cioran, Kafka, and Pessoa demonstrate that writing doesn't have to be constrained to rigid genres of realism, poetry, or philosophy. These all have their uses, but combining them has a very important use as well--more closely emulating and capturing actual sensations of being.

Aphorism has its place and its a place you should consider visiting.

Yeh, this is fine. If you want to capture a sense of how you feel about things that's fine. You can find a building depressing, you can find it wonderful. Same with you being able to find a woman disgusting or she brings up some wonderful feeling within you. Any of these are fine and after that it is up to you to skillfully express it in the style you like.

When you start making commentaries summing up people's lives and how futile people's lives are because they don't get such and such this is just a lazy, blanket fiction you've laid over the lives of everyone which does not hold up.

If you're trying to make insights into the lives of people you don't get to cop out and say, well it's not even close to accurate but it fits the style.

Or rather you can but if you do I think you quite rightly should be criticised for being vapid. If you feel this is how things are for these people, fine, but I think it's on a par of juvenility of those who sum up all those who work as 'tired and depressed' or all those who believe in God as 'idiots'. A nice style doesn't make up for that... to me.

I think he is trying to say how society is treating them not how they view themselves

Society is made up of individuals. Individuals get varying degrees of accolades. Many get a big pat on the back from their families and that is enough. Many get no pat on the back from anynoe but they don't care because they like their work. It's not uncommon for some to be not particularly talented and get huge accolades. Some are lucky, some are not. It's just so much more varied and nuanced than this that the analysis is just redundant and it has clearly moved from just lyricism to some sort of insight into how 'people' are. And I think it is way off the mark

Susan did dread the stop on Clyde Street. Especially when the drizzle became a shower. She had to sit in the shelter now, and pray the 12:15 came on time - as well the drivers could tell for time on their leisurely cruise around Campton Central. It wasn't empty, but it was only Duncan.

“Susan ey, 'ow are ya? D'ya eat proper this mornin'? Day's bright and shining today an' all ay?” He hadn't looked up from the blurb of the book he was reading. The Rig Vedas, a Penguin Edition.
“No, Duncan, it's pissing it down with rain. But I'm well thank you. I had eggs benedict for breakfast.”
“Eh? Oohh!” Looking up he leaned outside the shelter, and shivered when runoff from the roof ran down his neck. “Ay, so it is. Susan ey, uh, what d'ya believe in?”
“I'm sorry?”
“Like, are ya' religious or 'out?” Duncan mimicked signing the Cross on himself, like those Brazilian footballers on Sky Sport.
“No, can't say I am Duncan. What about you?”
“Oh uh, I dunno to be honest. Me Mam always 'ad me at Church when I was little, but uh, never did see with it, ay. Tell y'what though, bin' readin' this-” he held up the book, “-all these Indian Hindu legends, crazy stuff. D'ya know they 'av over three million gods?” Duncan's face, normally gormless, flickered with a tinge of interest.
“Too many for me, Duncan.”
“Aye, they prob'ly 'av a god for rain. Bet 'ee's right pissed at us with it pissin' down an all.”
12:16, the bus doesn't look like it'll be arriving for Susan. She wasn't in a rush to get away from Duncan though. He's an odd bloke but not really annoying so much as a fount of white noise. All you had to do was affirm for him the odd question or two and he'd ramble the night away.
“Yeeaah... Or a god for annoying-ness. Susan ey, d'ya reckon right – keep wimme 'ere – can a god that's respons'ble for annoy-ness-”
“Annoyance, Duncan.”
“- yeah that, can a god be respons'ble for annoyance, and get annoyed as well? What I mean, right, what could annoy it?”
Again, for anyone else, this would annoy Susan, but not with Duncan. He was someone in his own world. You merely came to spectate.

Thanks for sharing, user. Couple thoughts.

I like your use of dialect, and I like Duncan's character. He's garrulous and likable.

The way Duncan asks Susan about her religious beliefs reads oddly to me. It feels abrupt.
He's an idiosyncratic guy, so it sorta makes sense, but it would read more naturally if he talked about the book first, then asked her about her beliefs.

You do some odd tense-shifting near the end of the excerpt.

>12:16, the bus doesn't look like it'll be arriving for Susan. She wasn't in a rush to get away from Duncan though. He's an odd bloke...

Why shift between present and past tense here? If it's intentional, I can't see that it does anything for you. And the excerpt begins with past tense, so why no keep it consistent throughout?

Hope this is useful for you.

A runner who reaches the finishing line last and is panting can be called a failure and simultaneously praised for his fighting spirit. Both interpretations are correct and it’s the author who chooses which to emphasize.

That’s one runner. Society at large contains too much reality to adequately fit into any sociological study, philosophic or psychological conjecture, or even one individual’s mind. So when we write, we inevitably distort—like a mapmaker coloring half a paper blue and calling it an ocean.

You strongly disagree with the degree to which I readily distort things I in my writing. But I would posit to you that this actually serves an important purpose.

In everyday life, I completely agree you with. I smile, I make small talk with people, I buy furniture for my house, I work hard at my job, I support my friends and I love my parents desperately. All of this positivity—which is absolutely necessary to forge forward in life—I believe comes with a hidden price tag. You charge me with unbridled pessimism, but how often do functional people like you and I question our naiveté and the necessary illusions we nurture every day to avoid breaking down and crying right where we stand?

If we deny that we have a shadow which contains truths that are morose but just as powerful and true as those we spend most of our lives focusing on, we deny an important part of ourselves. We stagnate in our minds and, if you prefer, in our souls. If not outright liars, we are at least disingenuous if we refuse to ever look at things from an unflattering angle.

I believe that one antidote to this honest reflection is found in these alternative perspectives found in the works of Cioran, Pessoa, Kafka, and others. If I’m at fault here, it’s because I have the audacity to strive for the kind of honesty these men have already given to us.

I can't help but feel you are completely changing your professed intention to get around the criticism.

You now talk about how you are looking at things through the friendly illusions that we live our lives by.

Yet, in your first passage you talked about how the depressing nature of things is because the majority of people don't get to experience perhaps the most obvious example of illusion in standing ovations and accolades.

You can't claim your style to be one which sees through the frosted glass and sees things purely without illusions and then talk up these illusions as if it is their true saving grace.

Completely contradictory.

This has nothing to do with you penetrating to a dark, often unspoken side of human nature as far as I can see.

Again, it is you blanketing the majority of people with self-pity because they are not receiving the pat on the back that you've decided they all would like. To make myself clear. It's not even remotely nuanced or accurate for an apparently bleak picture of things. I'm not trying to prop up a happy worldview here.

This is not audacity of honesty, it's audacity of grand assumption. Bestowing people with a rather specific disposition which you've decided they all have but which anyone with sense can tell they don't

>You can't claim your style to be one which sees through the frosted glass and sees things purely without illusions and then talk up these illusions as if it is their true saving grace.
>Completely contradictory.

You might think I'm a dick for saying this, but I completely acknowledged the charge of contradiction with example of the runner.

>This has nothing to do with you penetrating to a dark, often unspoken side of human nature as far as I can see.

All I can say here is that I disagree.

>You might think I'm a dick for saying this, but I completely acknowledged the charge of contradiction with example of the runner.

You didn't because it wasn't in the passage that we are discussing. It's complete contradiction to say you're viewing things from some clear, sad vantage point but from that vantage point you pity everyone because you believe that illusion (i.e accolades and standing ovations) is a viable grand saving grace. Plus the runner example is another example of this sweeping generalisation. You've opted for two possible viewpoints: failure or praiseworthy fighter. There are an array of reasons people run and nuances as to why they might feel a huge variety of feelings in having finished last. To say you can judge them in one of two ways based on your absolutely tiny knowledge of their psyche and personal story and that you can do the same for everyone else in a roughly comparable situation and then claim you've penetrated some unspoken reality is pure hubris. Nothing else.

This is simple.

I like the beginning but right around-
>But where is this praise..."
I think it really starts to decline.

The first half is like a painting while the second half is like the artist standing next to the painting telling you what you see.

>Do not pity the impaired. Pity yourself.
cringeworthy

That episode of Louie scared the shit out of me

worth it for the ending song

Thanks for the reply. It was actually just an exercise in character dialogue I was given in a workshop. We were told to write a strange character who would ask thinks most people would hold back on. I thought the idea of asking another person's beliefs like that was rather blunt, so I built Duncan as a character around the premise, so he still seemed genuine rather than doing something erratic and random for the sake of the workshop exercise. Also thanks for letting me know about the tense shift, I believe I must have bled myself into the story by accident, I should have had Susan remark about the 12:16 bit rather than me pointing it out. You've been a great help user.

Great voice in these paragraphs. I've not read Cioran, so I can't judge your imitation of him, but the writing is definitely distinctive. Great work.

The authorial presence here seems resentful of "the impaired." At least, this is the vibe I got from the subtext. I think, unintentionally, the passage reads as an average guy complaining because, while he can do much better than handicapped people, he gets no recognition for it. for it. It's hard to take his insights seriously when he sounds so petty. I would probably purge this petty jealousy before revising anything else. There seems to be a lot of in in the first paragraph, whether or not that was your intention.

Think about dignifying the impaired (while avoiding condescension). Tweak the passage so that you're not portraying them as inept children who get a pass on everything. It's worth acknowledging that being disabled is not a luxurious cakewalk.

The subtext of this passage should not be that disabled people have it easy. Rather, you want to emphasize that, like the disabled, we are all limited in what we can achieve, and these limitations function the same way as a disability does.
You should play up this essential kinship a little bit more, to clearly connect your last line to what precedes it.

Hope this is helpful.

Very helpful, thanks. If I were to write like this again, I think I would probably try to make it the voice of a character like Raskolnikov or a character who is sharp but misguided.

Equality. What purpose does it serve? To limit your potential for others less deserving? Perhaps it's to help those who can't reach the same limits to those who are far superior? Maybe its to give them a false sense of hope that everything could change if they work hard enough? Its nothing more than a illusion from a modern society who rewards mediocrity at the expense of excellent.

No one person is equal to one another and no race are alike. Simply look around and you will see the charade for what it is. Mockery, a total mockery, that what it is. And what's worse is that we allow it, out of simple desire of not being ostracized by our own communities. That's Racist. That's Ableist. That's Sexist. Words that are all to common in our society now. Any person who are accused of those three words will have their lives destroyed with their family members being threaten simply due to them being related.

With that in mind, Racial tension are in all time high. With one group of people commenting on the issue on how this effect them. "Every day we are assaulted due to the color of our skin. The police won't help us, our government no longer care for us, what are we supposed to do to survive?" A problem in which they've face since the early 2020's. If we continue this path unabated, The United States will undergo a Gender War while Europe will have a racial war.

Critique my travesty, Veeky Forums

The tone is too formal and grave for such topical issues.

Here's an excerpt my latest work:

>Paul drank a mouthful of his beer and said no more about the matter. Uncomfortably, Henry meanwhile tried to conceal his copy of Gravity’s Rainbow away from the prying eyes of all those ‘plebs’ who were now arriving; partly on account of his own paranoia, and partly out of some smug impression that they were unfit to even know about the things he read. With a quiet heave, displaying his utter lack of fitness, he hid the tome away within his bag again; a garish, blue rucksack that looked like a schoolbag more than anything else. Something, most likely autism, compelled him to bring it with him almost every day; and to its credit, it had more space than its appearance would suggest.

Didn't you post something like this in another thread?

Any pointers on how to improve on this?

If you're gonna try to be profound, I guess start by at least being honest with yourself as much as you possibly can and write about the things you could never speak of in real life.

What a bunch of psuedo intellectuall bullshit. Your first paragraph is so obvious and trite that an edgy tenth grader might have come up with it, yet you write in this ridiculous formal tone.

Your second paragraph is even worse because it's the same thing but also a conspiracy theory, get your head out of your ass and lighten up a bit, OP.

Even if you parody us, no one outside of Veeky Forums is going to get it.

>a conspiracy theory

>get your head out of your ass and lighten up a bit

Yeah, lighten up and just swallow our PC propaganda already.

I mean, GOSH.

>1st chapter of my Sci-fi Novel intended for a kid's audience. CRITICIZE PLEASE

The sun began its descent back down yet again. Filling the skies with streaks of gold and tinges of scarlet in its absence as the last light of the world sank behind the horizons, beyond the shifting shadowed hills of the Dunes.

There are three distinct sounds you need to look out for when the moon rises and darkness descends upon the lands.

The first of course was the whooshing of the desert’s sand; gusting to the night winds as the sunken earth breathed a cold respite from the fiery scorch of the everyday sun. Rare is this cool mercy in the blithering daytime; but come nightfall you’ll be wishing its presence be gone.

The second was of the pitter-patter of footsteps. A certain Stranger was making his way to a nearby Inn stationed atop a large banking hill in the valley of Duncan’s Drift. The fine establishment he eyed was built atop a small underground wellspring; which often mean one thing... Clean water.

So what will be his intention? To rob? To protect? Is he a Bandit; the common denizens that scour the unprotected wastes of opportunity? Or is he a Lawman; the last tinge of order and restraint in a world of lawlessness and vice? That was unsure. The only thing about him you knew was sure; was the sound of his earnest footsteps as he made his way towards you. A living soul in the land of the dead; one can only pray that he’s on your side.

The last distinct sound was the strange clinking-clanking sound of metal. The Stranger had always walked carrying what may have been a large tool around his waist, or perhaps it was a weapon. The Dunes can be a dangerous place; untapped by civilization, untamed by order, and unrestrained by the laws of man. There are no rules here, no law except for the gun in your holster or the blade by your sheath. In the Dunes; the true law is written by whoever walked with that clinking-clanking sound of metal.

The year is 3089. Welcome to the Dunes; the vast ever sinking desert filled by the fallen ruins of man after his wars and his technology had gotten the best of him. His blind strive for a better future, ultimately became his own well deserved downfall.

But for all his stupidity; man lived. He wanders aimlessly, from one wellspring to another. His only purpose is to live the next day, or die trying. And so life goes on...

Sundown. Night has fallen.

The Stranger made his way up the dusty path towards the Inn on top of the rocky hill. It was a welcoming sight after his long journey from the East. He'd been trekking for months; how many? He no longer cared. Now the only journey he cared for would be from the bottom of that hill and into the waiting arms of a sparkling glass of fresh water at the bar atop.

The Stranger loosened the burdensome straps of his weighty satchel, gave a tiresome groan, and took the advance.

The Inn was two stories tall, made up of wooden walls and pieces of scavenged metal for roofing. A little half-broken sign dangled above the head of the front door, with the weathered words “The Lucky Dog Inn” inscribed on it; smoothly swaying to the nightly gust.

To the Stranger's luck; the Inn was obviously in business that evening as evidenced by the light shining through the windows, and as the Stranger got further up the hill; he could faintly hear the sound of rambunctious activity and musical mayhem from within. But what really sold it, was the smell. A grimy whiff of dried spit, cheap beers, and the foulest tonics that gave off such a strong aroma that one could swear you tasted the drink without having to put it into your mouth. You’d soon find cleaner company in a Shar’lak’s pen than inside a rentable one-hundred-nugget gold- by-the-hour bathtub at an Inn... And the Stranger loved it.

Reaching the top of the hill, the Stranger stood face to face with a laser-ridden half-swung front door, with just the promise of rest and water at the other end; truly the sign of a welcoming Western Styled Saloon. A few more blown up windows, a blasted wall or two, and some ravenous wildlife and they would’ve nailed the part one hundred percent. The Stranger smiled himself silly; it was a warm sign that he was finally right-at-home, and that the East was nothing but a distant memory behind him.

But before going in; the Stranger couldn't help but notice a group of parked Hover Bikes to his right periphery. Eight in all and every one of them with that rusty paint of grey and dark green, adorned with bone spikes or old buffalo skulls in unnecessary places. And then of course there were flags attached to their back antennas; a common fashion with Bandit Clansmen. This time it was the symbol of a red scarred Bobcat roaring in a background of black.

“Sand Catz” The Stranger grumbled then slowly proceeded through the swing of the front door with utmost caution.

The Inn was like any other Inn you'd come across in the West; a big open space filled with wooden tables and chairs, a few potted plants, a chandelier or two, perhaps the occasional jukebox, and if they were fancy enough; they'd have a stage upfront for singers or musicians. And last but not least; the crowning jewel of any inn; there must always be a serviceable bar by the wayside. Whether it was Cactus Juice, Wheeler Wine, or even Scorpion Scotch; a bar just isn’t a bar if it doesn’t cater to the worst kind of try-hard guzzling scumbags in the Dunes. And if the taste didn’t kill you; then the kick afterwards certainly will. And then they wander why something simple like Water is wanted everywhere and by everyone.

But as for meeting the expected Western Saloon criteria’s; this place had the bar and jukebox thing checked off the list no problemo. But everything else was a total mess...

The tables were bent or broken, the potted plants smashed, the chandeliers on the floor, and a rather fancy piano was hacked to pieces on the stage; its strings and keys strewn like spaghetti all over the place. And standing atop this choppy pile was a group of rather ecstatic gruff Men in torn leathers who spiked their hair in weird shapes and wore white makeup that imitated the look of a Bobcat. But what caught the Stranger’s attention most; were the strange tubes injected into their necks; each tube connected to a small pair of canister tanks strapped to a vest tucked underneath their leathers yet visible enough to create noticeable creases through their undershirts.

Just like the Hover Bikes, there were eight of them in all; two chilling next to the jukebox drinking beverages while listening to Gun’s and Roses’ ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ (The Stranger had a common knowledge of these things), three of them playing darts by the west corner wall with what looked like a rather reluctant tied-up Bartender; using his head as a target for their little game (who they thankfully didn't managed to hit yet), two by the Bar's drink shelf; busting open various taps and spilling all kinds of drinks onto the floor, and lastly was one particularly large tanned man with a golden Mohawk sitting by a lone surviving table at the east corner of the Inn, with what may have been a frightened young Waitress sitting on his lap; who seemed like she was constantly trying to escape his grabby hold.

“Come’on babes! Let me take ya out fo’a drive! It'll be fun!” Said the Mohawk Man rather sloppily with his big flabby gums; mocking air kisses towards the girl. “What'daya say huh? Jus me-you and the good’ol blue moon! My Hover Bike goes pretty fast you know... Vroom, Vroom, Vroom, VROOM!!!” He laughed.

The Waitress on his lap pushed and shoved him as far away as she could; keeping as much sanely distance from his kissy face as she could. But with his hands firmly wrapped around her waist; it was downright impossible to escape his grasp. She kicked and she cried, but there was no way someone fragile like her could break free from the grips of this burly deviant.

“If you be a good girl... I just might let daddy live.” Said the Mohawk man as he grabbed her face and forced her to look at the Bartender by the corner. “Don't cha want that? Dear'ol daddy is getting pretty grey for his age. Don't cha think he's suffered enough?” He mocked pity.

The Bartender looked back at his girl. His entire body was strapped by ropes and metal wires that the bandits had wrapped around him with and nailed to the wall. His mouth was tied by a cloth; but he still tried his hardest to call out to her from all the muffling he made as a means to let her know that everything was going to be fine.

“I can let him down if ya want... But you've got to do somethin for me first.” At that he forced the girl’s face back towards him. Her eyes and cheeks already swollen red from all the frightened tears she’s shed.

“You marry me, and we're square.” He scantly smiled; revealing a dodgy row of half-broken teeth along his gums, save for a loose gold tooth on his upper jaw.

The Bartender screamed “No!” as best he could alongside the muffle; shaking his head like a Maraca as if desperately trying to tell her it wasn't a deal worth making.

The Mohawk Man turned the Waitress’ face back towards himself. “You-me, we'll be heading beyond Duncan’s Drift; out to Surfer's Rock where you'll become my number seven. The other six kept getting away before I could land the ring because of them pesky New Valley thugs along the Eighty-Eight Highway. But lucky for us; this area’s been kinda empty for the past few weeks eh? I reckons the New Valley boys have moved on; the Eighty Eight’s been picked clean and there ain’t no more reason for them to hold it anymore...”

The girl’s eyes widened to shock; she had an idea exactly where this was all heading – not only for her, but for the future of her and her father’s Inn.

“That’s right; from now on nothin’s gonna stop us from takin the rest of Duncan’s Drift – which means my sweet; there’s gonna be no more interruptions from here to Surfacer’s Rock....”

He delightfully rubbed his whirly stubble on her prim rosy cheeks as she reeled herself away “We square and I let your Daddeo fly outta here before the rest of the boys show up to take house tomorrow. You'll never see your daddy again, but he'll be alive... More or less.” Mohawk Man chuckled.

The frightened Waitress paused awhile in troubled thought; this isn't what she wanted, but there was nothing else she could do. She took another long glance at her father strapped to the wall, who continued shaking his head towards her; his opinion unchanged, no matter what it'd mean for his own safety.

Looking back at him she realized that this was the only way she could save herself and her father from the grim situation – they were cornered, there was no doubt about that. Any more resistance would’ve been futile; a stupid waste of life for both her and her father. In the end, there was going to be no happy ending to this; one had to suffer for the other.

To her, the choice had never been clearer...

And so with great reluctance; with as strong a will as she’ll ever muster in the short cruel life she’s lived in the unforgiving world of the Dunes; she closed her eyes, dropped one final tear of regret... and nodded to his offer.

“That's a good girl.” Said the Mohawk Man, rather satisfied with himself “Now giv'us a kiss.”

He slowly leaned his dirty chapped lips towards her...

The Stranger dropped his satchel. A great muffled thud hit the floor.

Every air-breathing inhabitant of that large, smoke-filled, drink-spilled, smell-tainted Inn; shot their immediate attention to the swinging door.

There he was; standing in-between them and the exit outside. A bolt of lightning struck the landscape, filling the room with the flash of god for a brief second.

“Howdy” the stranger spoke with a gruff leathery voice; almost as quiet as a whisper but as clear a word as can be that the entire Inn heard him say it; even amongst the swamped drenches of blasting Old Age rock music.

The Stranger wore a long torn-up poncho which draped all the way down to his padded knees topped by a long flowing head cowl wrapped around his head, that one could almost mistake as a turban. They were both roughly stitched together by many mysterious threaded materials though it seemed as if it was designed to blend him into the desert environment – even as shoddily as it looked with the intended effort. (It was pretty obvious he was no proper seamstress.)

The Stranger turned to the Bartender by the corner and gave a courteous tip of the cowl. “Evenin’” he grumbled then walked his way to the bar untouched; ebbing waves of creaking echo on the hollow wooden floors with those big black boots that tucked in the lower ends of his greyish cargo pants. Every ear held hostage by his steps. Every waking eye fixed upon his presence. Though a more careful listener would have picked up that all too familiar clinking-clanking sound of metal coming from his waist; which often meant one thing around the Dunes... He was armed.

The Stranger grabbed himself a stool and poured from the broken water tap a full glass of clear spring water drawn straight from the underground wellspring beneath the Inn, using only one of two glass cups left on the counter. He chugged his H20 with blissful delight as the bandits silently signalled to each other to surround him.

“You came to the wrong place, pal” The Mohawk Man threatened; his shadow looming over the Stranger’s back. He wanted to sit down and drink beside him but found no other cups on the counter for the pleasure.

“This fine establishment here belongs to the Sand Catz now, caphiche?” he asserted with a half-pegged face to intimidate him.

The Stranger ignored him and took another sip.

“That water you’re drinking ain't free ya know. Water is a hard commodity to come by these days, so you’ll excuse us if we charge big sharoonies for that glass you just took...”

The other bandits gave each other a knowing chuckle. Extorting money from innocent bystanders was one of those good’ol past times they loved to watch after a day’s hard work of plundering the homes and settlements of same said bystanders.

“Demand over supply you see? Everyone wants it, but there ain’t enough of it to go around...” The Mohawk Man jeered. “I'm afraid you ain't leavin' till you pay up proper for our precious water. I’d saaaay... Three silver nuggets outta’do it! These are trying times I can understand.” Again he spouted with that mocking sense of pity.

The Stranger finished his last chug. The water smoothly funnelled down his crispy throat; making that distinctive gulping sound as it ended its decent. Our hero savoured his water sweetly with a good exhale; signalling his satisfaction.

“Well? Hand it over buddy...” Mohawk Man extended out his palm; expecting the Stranger to drop something into the sweaty centre.

The Stranger refused to face him directly and instead stretched out his left arm behind himself; to the Mohawk Man he knew was facing his back (turns out shadows can easily rat out your position, go figure). He held out the glass in mid-air before dropping it smack-dab into the middle of the bandit's hand.

Mohawk Man and his boys looked at the object for a brief second then laughed themselves silly as Mohawk Man silently drew a Switchblade out of a pocket and held it behind his back; ready to slash out the Stranger’s throat at a moment's whim. “Well I guess if you can’t pay now-“

The Stranger quickly spun himself around on the stool and stared the Bandit face to face; his cowl flopped back from the momentum and betrayed the identity of the face beneath; revealing a rather young boy no more than eighteen to nineteen years of age. He had reddish-auburn hair and a surprisingly pale fair skin that made the red of his head stand out like fire in contrast. The Stranger gave a nervous laugh and scratched his head out of embarrassment.

“Ah... yeah... sorry about that...” he said with a voice that was so down-to-earth and boyishly simple in its nature; that it seemed like such a complete and drastic change from his earlier impression. Anything he had resembling an intimidating presence officially jumped out the window.

“What?” said Mohawk Man, the Jukebox crashed behind him.

The Stranger blushed; feeling so unsure of himself. “Ah - to be honest with you... I’m kind of strapped for nuggets at the moment but if I could leave you an I.O.U strictly F.Y.I that would do me the world of favours for my debts! Because truth be told...”

He anxiously looked both ways as if he was trying to cross the road looking for traffic, then leaned himself towards the Mohawk Man from his stool. “I’m not very good at dealing with money. Yeah... shocking I know.” He whispered rather embarrassed.

Mohawk Man stood quiet for a while; his face contorted from the absolute confusion, giving a quick glance to everyone else in the Inn to check out their reactions; both his mates and his victims were just as weirded out as he was. Is this guy for real? They were all probably thinking.

He turned back to now see the Stranger happily smiling to himself with a dimpled grin; almost like a child tasting candy for the first time.

“S-so can we just let this one go, just this one time oh Mr Bandit, sir?” The Stranger purred like a cat.

It didn’t take long for the silence to explode into absolute hilarity from both Mohawk Man and his buddies behind him. They laughed so loud that if they had any laughed louder; the windows would break from the frequency.

“Looks like we got a comedian'ere!” Chuckled one of the Bandits in the back.

“Where do freaks like him even come from?” Snorted another.

With the Stranger hogging all the Bandits' attention in the room; the Waitress was able to slither her way by to her father's side. She gave him a tap on the shoulder and quickly gestured him to hush when he almost bursted in tears of happiness, being with her again. She took out a wire cutter she'd managed to pickpocket from one of the Bandit's still laughing and began the work on his bindings.

Mohawk Man eventually calmed himself enough to put words back into his own mouth, but still found it hard to speak with the joyous tears welling up in his eyes. “Thats- thats not what I meant when I said-”

Out of nowhere the Stranger whipped out the other glass cup he had hidden up his right sleeve and smashed Mohawk Man's head with it.

The glass cried a million tears as it shattered on the bandit’s thick (and non-surprisingly hollow) head; knocking him out cold onto the floor in a sea of shards.

The whole room shot to dead silence, everyone’s mouth agape.

“Demand over supply” The Stranger smirked. That's one.

“Boss!” The Bandits cried as Mohawk Man thudded the floor. It didn't look like he was getting back up anytime soon.

The Sand Catz quickly drew their sledge hammers, machetes, mining picks, and pool cues; angrily turning themselves to the Stranger still sitting on the stool.

“You know who you’re messin’ with boy?” One of them threatened.

“A bunch of amateurs clearly” The Stranger casually leaned his back onto the counter.

“How did you not know there were only two glasses on the counter and both of them suddenly disappeared as soon as I sat next to’em? Tsk tsk tsk better pay attention when your boss gets too close to someone he doesn’t know well enough to predict. Had I pulled a knife out he may have been seriously hurt...” The Stranger jeered.

“Clearly you guys are one of the most fearsome Bandit clans in all the Dunes!” He joked. “All the rumours that hyped you up were indeed well-earned! Bravo! Just... Bravo!” He clapped like a monkey with a tambourine.

“Why you...” One of them grumbled in anger. “Ok, screw it!”he yelled and then turned to his pals all around “Boss is out, looks like we'll have to deal with this little punk all by ourselves!”

“This should be interesting...” The Stranger grinned.

The Bandits began pressing a number of random buttons on the vests beneath their leathers; which then made a weird whizzing sound (which the Stranger assumed was pressure being let go) as the canister tanks released a strange green bubbling liquid into the tubes injected to their necks.

Soaking in the mysterious toxin; the men screamed in pain as their muscles grew themselves to a beefier figure and their bones extended their heights above the sizes of normal human beings. They grew strands of greyish-brown and black spotted fur across their skins which grew even heavier along their forearms, spines, ears, and legs as their faces and teeth contorted to a shape resembling that of a Bobcat.

And then it was that the pained screams of desperate men turned into the gurgled bestial cries of animals... They had literally become Bobcat Men.

“Oh...” The Stranger at a loss for words “So that’s why they’re called Sand Catz....”

> End of Chapter, whatcha think? :)

Truth be told. I was thinking on going subtle with my series.

sublime

Shame Thread Bump Here

For Maisie Williams:

Stuck in the hairy hothouse suite
Of your seeping lower crevice
My mission reclines incomplete
O damn my Secret Service!

Probing pubic parliaments of lice,
"How Nice!" You scream,
My tongue a-lapping at your cream.
Yes, how pleasant it can seem
A dream to this, my British Bitch!

They brought me to my British Bitch
My rancid witch,
My Queen of Litch
With mealy mouthed menstruation weeping
Me, O my!
A fucking pig sty!
My buxom British Bitch.

Cackling cock goblin,
How you thumb your greasy gash!
I lick around that salted rash
Gorging on your meaty mass,
Melting into you like glue
"Plug my honking hole," you say,
One eye on my member,
One eye on Eastenders;

My British bitch has caught an itch
O, my buxom British bitch.

Presently she makes to gyrate:
"Complicate my creaking crotch!"
Cry for poor old cuckold me!
Forty minutes on the sea!
Fish and chippy sauce for tea,
O miserable misshapen me!

Curse my bouncing British bitch
O, my buxom British Bitch!

Really grotesque - reminds me of an even more vulgar Rimbaud. Funny though. Hope that's what you were going for.

This is more of a prose poem than anything:
merci beaucoup! screams the man of ill repute and poor respite, screaming, laughing, chasing the end of night, robbing, shopping, sobbing all the way, cart trains spilling over, clothes racks so effay. Flamenco fandangos are lead out windows, a beat drops four stories, flying, dying, crying: merci beaucoup! Drips red, solarized, flush out glasses, necks are cut with piano strings. The buzzcut boy grins, thinks about trivial things, and drinks Port — truly, all is frivolity in the court. Bread, pork, he is fed, words grazed upon his head, they drip: merci beaucoup! sweating, drowning, gasping: merci beaucoup! Why, why — the carpet will not dry! Grenault dances, the jester prances, the golden chandelier drops, out of chances. The king is not present, in his throne sits a peasant, hacking, wisecracking: merci beaucoup! The tank advances, ironclad, torn plaid, drivers mad, mad: merci beaucoup!

Contentment, felicity, reposal
they’re all merely veils
sumptuous samel silk
glued with septic matter
to her necrosed face
embodiment of despair
She will never stand
before you
wearing nothing but
her naked truth
devoided of brume
nor will your eyes ever meet
She stands behind you
wailing silently
her fingers slender and pale
overlaying your eyes
spoiling each tear
that tries to come out
From there she kisses
out of your sight
leniently but vivacious
the nape of your neck
the print of her lips
smoldering mold green

Soneto Rápido (Antes do Curso)

Farei este soneto em meia-hora
No máximo, que eu quero um desafio,
Além de que no tempo eu não me fio
Pois dentro em breve eu tenho que ir embora.

Preciso tomar banho e, rua afora,
Correr atrás do bus, cheio de brio -
Não posso me atrasar, chegar tardio,
Terminem, pois, ó quadras, sem demora!

Agora aterrissemos sem perigo
No primeiro e penúltimo terceto,
Mas não estacionemos, que eu prossigo

Com outro, inda mais rápido verseto,
Aqui mais um e pronto, meu amigo,
Em tempo terminamos o soneto!

21/05/2016,
entre as 07:19 e 07:37, antes de ir à faculdade (sim, tenho aulas no sábado)

Not bad definitely went kids book with "bobcat men". Seemed almost mad max serious before then.

Artificer’s Death (Bright and Gleaming)

Shining spikes of Giza stripped of quarry edge,
Glory flayed as skin, skin a hoary casing.
As the quarry was left a gash, you a skeleton—
Mountainous bones housing bones housing nothing.

Timelessness brought to an abrupt
End. The four humors became misaligned
As blood wore down the mountains,
And as men of blood trod down the banks.

The Nile became of blood, both vein and artery.
That cardinal humor spread blackward.
Wroth wine spilled from the hand of Mars,
Fermented mythologies ache, aching to speak.

Artifex working in Corinthian brass, your cannon
A trumpet, sound off as I strain my ears,
Yet still I fear that I may not hear
The writhing of Philomela.

I like this, is there a certain context to the poem?

A potential part of a novel I'm half-heartedly working on. It is my first ever attempt at fiction and it's a historical novel about a Swedish Viking that goes to Greece and becomes a Varangian.

Kari walked nervously down the hallway, his heart pounded like a racehorse and he clenched his fists. Basil was not going to be happy with the news. First the the Paulicans seizing yet more forts in the Armeniacon and now he would have to contend with a blood-feud within his own bodyguard. "In a hurry?" Kari heard a high pitched sing-song voice, Ignacios. "What do you want dickless?" The eunuch faked shock and said, "fancy you should say that, you know what the usual punishment for mutiny within the Imperial bodyguard is, who knows maybe he will let you choose between your eyes and your cock, you don't seem like the type that's been using any of those things much anyway." Kari felt goosebumps crawl up his arms and neck, he had heard all about how the Greek kings often did not kill their enemies but merely burned out their eyes and cut off their manhood. A man with no cock and no eyes is not a threat to anyone and the Christian God is most displeased with murder although there had been plenty of that going on recently. "Don't you have something better to do than skulk around the hallway dickless?" Kari snapped. "Certainly but I wouldn't miss this afternoons entertainment for the world, hopefully for you Basil is not in one of his moods" The eunuch strode off, confident that this would be the last time they spoke, or at least the last time they spoke man to un-man.

I was told by a friend that it may be too "wordy" or "descriptive"

while another friend of mine was concerned that the tone was a little too dark for a kid's book. Too edgy, he says.

Help me out senpai

I wrote it reacting to reading Metamorphoses and a lecture that mentioned some Egyptian ideas in passing.

pastebin.com/raw/q9GAVHn0

the opening to a short story of 10k~ words

>descent back down
not worth reading the rest

in all honesty, it's very purple and has far too many mistakes. It doesn't flow and the setting seems to be a mix of dune and generic fantasy land.

in the future, please just put a pastebin link, not 8 fucking posts of text

Your dialogue is awful. I imagine most people would have no interest in the subject, but don't let that stop you, I guess.

the ' in it's also has it's place
EMRGERRRRD PSUDE PLEB LELELELELELELE

Should I be doing something else right now? A generation's refrain. Ageneration. A friend would focus on the self - ironic? Apparently our posts, feeds, memes really just point to me, me. Me. No face. Book. Books. Not yet booked, luckily.
Luckily, he'd just moved into a large house in the country. To leave his childhood home behind. Away alone above the. Unatheltic, he'd never played on a team, no soccer, no football. No goals. A whole summer spent in waste, but not wasted. Now the summer he'd spent wasted was one to waste. How about this one? To waste, wasted or not? Or not to waste?
The wi-fi was shitty here, he thought, but maybe, he thought, the shitty wi-fi here was good. Helpful. He sat in a beautiful breakfast nook well before bedtime, drinking well. Tea. Well-tea? Well, tea, made from water from a well. Well water, ground water, Fiji water, what difference did it all make? A long time ago, in a state far, far away it made a big difference. Would medication have helped? Camped, he thought the water was delicious. Camping, it tasted different. Metallic, delicious, but iodized, disgusting. Natural, but deadly. Not safe. We put the tablets in our water to make it safe. Either forty pound bags or small pill bottles. As he got older he got the bottles, and the maps. No wifi in the country. The fifth year.
His counselor would make short phone calls with A bomb, that is, A-Bomm, his younger sister. His, not his. The counselor's. His counselor was a lady. His therapist. Was. A lady. Did she help? Could she? Since sophomore year his life got better. Sophomore year was when his life got worse. Different sophomores, different people. This is all so intimidating. What's the fucking point. This frustration, maybe with a tinge of anxiety, tasted to him of iodine: summer camp. How long can you define yourself by your summers? Wasted. Delete all this.
The tea. Long gone now, he'd drank alone by the window, looking out across his parents new property, pond, yard, trees, pond, field, and wished it all away into words. It helped.

It is quite wordy for your target audience but only slightly. It will end up being a long book (for the target audience) or notmuch story if the same level of description is used. Now that you have set the image of the world just skim the topic. Definitely not dark at all in my eyes. Having a ginger for the hero is definitely risky. Are you ginger? But in general could be a good kids book depends where it goes from here....

The "it is" also has "it is" place? WTF are saying?

*you saying

“Wot d’yew ‘appen to pontificate i’the origin of dung, Maximiwyon? It’s always been ‘round us, lookit! It’s on yoa walky-kickies all the way up into the knickerknackers yew call yoa idjit ‘ed. ‘Twere yew ‘ta ask me, Oi’d be postula’inerizin’ that there’s sumfin’ quite wrawng wif the buy-o-logicoal processes that ah commonplace wif the ewman body and God’s creachas. Wot wrawng could Oi possibly be doin’ to me body that would cause meself to expel fecool ma’er from me sodomite residence?” The inquisitive and lowly peasant dung farmer asked his son as the two of them aimlessly hauled wheelbarrows of feculence to and fro across their lord’s property.
His son produced guttural noises, similar to what one would expect if they were to vocalize with their mouth agape without using their tongue. He gesticulated that the subject in question might have originally been whatever they had eaten prior to having a bowel movement. The father had produced something similar to what may have been a stick and smacked his son on the head. “Th’ boy’s dumber than horseshit an’ ta make ma’ers worse, he can’t say a damn thing! If’n yew think that’s food, Oi’ve got a noice hot meal ready for ya, lad.”

The hero knocks them all out by slashing their canister tanks with a Katana (don't actually wanna kill anyone here)

Then he Escorts the folks to a nearby settlement ( getting attacked on the roads)

The. From there, one thing leads to another and he ends up going to a ruined city where he bumps into an android girl with a million-dollar power core.

The rest of the plot ( I planned of a series) is about getting that Android to th East, having fun adventures along the way.

Sorry famlam I'm kinda a newfag. How does one post a paste Bin?

Also how can one improve the flow of ones writing?

Well in that case definitely cut some details. Get the plot rolling quick from here. Posting it online anywhere else?

I've already written like five chapters already and each chapter is roughly around ten pages.

I wanna keep the story discreet and only post the first chapter, what you see here is pretty much what the other chapters are gonna be like.

Sorry if it's a little wordy, I wanted to immerse the reader into the world as opposed to rushing them to the next plot point. But clearly the effect has backfired on me, lol.

I write reviews of books and while articulate, I am not pompous about the way I write and am accessible. Here is an excerpt:

>ah, blood meridian, monsieur? that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shillelagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.

Best way to learn new vocab? I can never seem to remember new words I come across. It's putting a damper in my writing. Often I can't even think of a way to expreds what I want to say at all, so I end up writing nothing down to skip over it and return later.

It's like I can only think in language, but if I don't havr the words already, then I can't find what I want to say or how to say it. I probably sound like an idiot.

I use vocaulary.com

There's also an app. I play five rounds a day, very useful.

Comments are really welcome btw. I just started writing, so critique is really appreciated.

Go on the site and click on write a story section.

How do I decide what to write about?

"Write what you know", I know, but I only know guitar playing and movies. My life is relatively uninteresting.

no user could have written this

>pastebin.com/raw/q9GAVHn0

Nice. Reminds me of Musashi.

I write when I drink and it's all super shit. Please, make fun of this segment of a story I'm writing about a depressed youth in current day Philadelphia.

Every now and then Giles would go to concerts. Little shows held by local venues with local bands., He fucking hated them. Although they were the only excuse he had to leave the house. Plus he didn't really even actually feel the hatred. It was like an afterthought to an afterthought. Only something he could feel when he would actually reflect on the entire idea of feeling something at all. The whole “feeling” thing was still a pretty big point of contention for Giles, anyway. He liked thinking he moved past the whole “feeling thing”, ever since the belt snapped out of the wall and made the big hole and he had to decide to stick around in the bare room for a while. So he went to the shows. He liked the bands at least, the “scene” was varied in it’s complete stagnation. The venues where nice in their sort of structured punk-rock aesthetic. Which sort of undermined the whole punk-rock thing to begin with. A lot of white kids trying to be something they weren't. Or where, Giles wasn't a fucking judge. He would have the worst conversations at these things though. Something that really displayed how much of a joke of a shell of an automaton he was. Stuff like the following
“Yeah man, I really liked your set”
“Hey dude, Thanks”
“You know, stop me if I’m getting pretentious (a warning Giles knew was already sort of decayed by his own feeling of the necessity to say it.) but I really feel like you guys were sort of undermining the whole, like, icky post-post irony of performance art. Like the destruction of your instruments was sort of a tongue-in-cheek dismantling of the attempted dismantling destroying instruments is presenting. Like everyone filming it and, like, gawking at it. It was all a big sort of cyclical joke to you guys. A return to genuine expression through sort of goofing on the very idea of undermining established forms of expression?”
“Do you do drugs?”
And that's only ONE example of Giles pseud at work. Trying to apply the shit he thought he understood but knew he probably didn't understand to have a conversation no one wants to have at 11:30 P.M., three tall-boys in. So he went to shows and drank like it was any other, normal day, and he enjoyed himself he thought. He liked to film them. The bands, and sets and songs and melodies and keys and tones. Mainly because his memory was shot. Which was an entire other thing for another time for another thought.

You sound like this cartoon.

Whats the name of your story? "Faster that the speed of love"? lol

Not mine, but morning-revivals.tumblr.com/tagged/my-writing

>I LET YOU OPEN ME LIKE A BOOK, SIFT THROUGH THE PAGES I’VE COLLECTED OVER THE YEARS AND YOU READ ME. YOU REACHED THE LAST PAGES, THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, SAW YOUR NAME, AND CHUCKLED. YOU CLOSED ME OFF AND PUT ME BACK ON THE SHELF. SO VAIN ARE YOU TO ONLY NOTICE THE BOLD LETTERING, COMPLETELY IGNORANT TOWARDS WHAT MAY LIE BETWEEN THE LINES. SURE YOU STAINED A FEW OF THE PAGES, BUT THIS IS MY FUCKING NOVEL. IT WAS WRITTEN FOR ME, NOT YOU.

also
"I KNOW YOU WERE HURT.
I KNOW YOU’RE AFRAID.
THEY SAY TIME HEALS ALL WOUNDS AND I’M WAITING.
WAITING FOR YOU TO DECIDE YOU’RE READY;
READY TO STOP HURTING SO YOU CAN LOVE ME.
AND ONCE YOU LOVE ME, I CAN STOP HURTING FOR YOU.
IT’S SELFISH, BUT I WANT TO BE WORTH THE HURT AND THE PAIN.
I WANT TO BE YOUR RISK.
I WANT YOU TO WANT TO BE HURT BY ME,
BECAUSE GOD KNOWS YOU’VE BEEN KILLING ME WITH YOUR RECREATIONAL LOVE SINCE THE DAY WE MET."

This shit actually gets notes lit, should we be worried? Writer goes to my school btw, been thinking bout smashing but then I read this shit and I don't know anymore.

Como todo el mundo sabe, mi nombre empezó a sonar en la comunidad luego de que ganase la competencia regional de privación voluntaria del sueño. Recuerdo que era apenas la segunda edición del torneo que se hacía en mi ciudad y me convertí en el campeón más joven a los dieciséis años −récord que aún mantengo. Antes de eso yo era un idiota normal que iba a una preparatoria normal. Digamos que así como ustedes.
La primera vez que escuché del torneo fue de boca de mi amiga Maui, la hija del tipo que lo organizaba. Maui fue lo más cercano que tuve a un amor de preparatoria. Me obsesioné con ella el día que dejó de usar shorts de lycra sobre la ropa interior y yo tuve la suerte de estar bajo la escalera y descubrirlo. Al cabo de tres días ya todos en la escuela lo sabían. Con el paso de los meses espiar bajo la falda de Maui se convirtió en algo rutinario para mis compañeros −el mismo oasis en el desierto de siempre−, mientras que yo conocía de memoria todos los calzones y trabajaba en un sistema estadístico que me permitiera obtener una confiable probabilidad de aparición. Creo que pasé demasiado tiempo observando a Maui y las nalgas y los calzones de Maui. Creo que si quisiera recordarla en este momento sólo podría entrar en detalles de la cintura hacia abajo y me detendría en los tobillos −no soy un hombre de pies. De la parte superior podría decir que recuerdo unos brazos demasiado delgados. Senos insignificantes en comparación con los senos de otras morras de la preparatoria. Recuerdo una pequeña cabeza redonda. Es posible que la cabeza sólo me pareciera pequeña y redonda gracias al cabello vertiginosamente sujetado. Es posible que el punto de perspectiva influyera también.
Hablaba poco con ella. Siempre en grupo, a por lo menos cinco metros de distancia. Siempre en los salones o en la cafetería, con la silla de plástico o el pupitre a un costado del óvalo formado por los compañeros de clase. Yo era amigo de alguno de ellos y por eso me atrevía a pegármeles. En una ocasión hablaban intermitentemente sobre las próximas vacaciones, las de semana santa o las de verano. En algún momento alguien mencionó a su padre y la conversación derivó en los padres y todos hablaron casi al unísono. Más tarde Maui dijo algo acerca de la semana santa o del verano y sobre ayudar a su padre y sobre una competencia de algún tipo. Un compañero preguntó por el tipo de competencia y por alguna razón sentí ganas de cerrar el óvalo y escuchar.

Maui dijo: básicamente se trata de ver quién puede resistir más noches despierto.
Recordé aquel nefasto año en que padecí de insomnio por primera vez. Tenía trece años y establecí un récord personal de ochenta y cuatro horas despierto. Viví el resto de ese año en compañía de las arañas en mi pared y otras estupideces que a veces me saludaban y a veces intentaban espantarme apareciendo de súbito desde mi vista periférica. Durante ese tiempo hice poco más que entrar y salir del hospital. Me recetaron píldoras para dormir. Vitaminas. Especialistas. Nuevas medicinas y luego más especialistas. Con el tiempo, el morbo −la curiosidad profesional− por mi caso se atenuó y me dieron de alta. Jamás recuperé un patrón de sueño convencional, las ocho horas diarias que la gente decente asegura dormir, pero gracias a las píldoras lograba descansar un poco todas las noches −hoy en día, les soy sincero, prefiero la cerveza.
Dije: yo, emm… podría ser bueno en eso.
Maui dijo: apúntense, tal vez ganen, el año pasado ganó un muchacho, un amigo de mi papá.
Yo dije: ¿Qué tengo que hacer?
Maui dijo: Mañana les traeré los volantes que mandó a imprimir mi papá.
Yo dije: ¿Hay algún premio?
Maui se giró hacia mí y me dijo: Un trofeo, horrible, un diploma y algo de dinero.
No respondí nada. Me giré de vuelta y dejé que la conversación recuperase su curso. Pensé que estaba bromeando o que el padre de Maui bromeaba con su hija o −era imposible, pero lo pensé− que bromeaba conmigo. Sin embargo, esa misma noche llegué a casa, fingí tomarme la dosis de píldoras y verifiqué que mi talento para el insomnio siguiese ahí. El siguiente lunes me presenté en casa de Maui a las siete de la mañana tal como indicaba el volante con la convocatoria.
¿Reglas? Las obvias, redactadas por el único juez, el padre de Maui:
• Si te quedas dormido durante más de tres segundos, pierdes.
• Si además del café que te doy usas algún tipo de estimulante o descubro que lo usaste, pierdes.
• Si interfieres con otro participante más allá de la conversación, pierdes.
• Si te vuelves loco y me molestas a mí o molestas a mi hija, te mato y además pierdes.
La casa estaba ubicada en la tercera planta de un complejo habitacional de interés social −una calca del próximo edificio y del próximo edificio. Subí las escaleras y me encontré con Maui de pie en el corredor. La vi y pensé que era la primera vez que me encontraba con ella afuera de la escuela. La primera vez que la veía con ropa casual. Pensé que los pantalones de mezclilla y el cabello suelto no le iban bien y que esa morra al final del corredor no podía ser Maui, pero era inevitable que lo fuera y decidí aceptarlo –o creí haberlo aceptado− fingiendo naturalidad.

Maui notó mi presencia, pero no me miró.
Dijo: Viniste…
Intenté dejar de mirar sus pantalones como si se trataran de un parásito alienígeno, pero no lo conseguí.
Dije: ¿Qué hago?
Me dijo: Anótate aquí y firma esto. No ha llegado nadie.
No hablamos mucho. Yo por lo general no hablo mucho, tengo, claro, mis dos minutos de elocuencia, como todo el mundo, pero poco más.
Un hombre surgió de la puerta abierta al fondo del corredor. Un cuerpo ancho. Cabeza rasurada. Rostro lampiño, anormalmente redondo. El padre de Maui. Me prensó del brazo como si tuviese tenazas en lugar de manos y me condujo al interior de la casa. Me recitó las reglas.
Me dijo: ¿Eres de la escuela de la nena?
Asentí. Pensé en la palabra nena.
Me dijo: Mira, la sala está acondicionada para el evento.
Dos hileras de sillas de plástico frente a dos hileras de sillas de aluminio. En el centro, una mesa de plástico cubierta con un mantel donde estaban la cafetera, garrafones de agua, tazas de papel y los sándwiches en forma de triángulo de jamón con queso que Maui traía dos veces por día y que rara vez tocábamos. Tres puertas: la entrada – salida, el baño, y otra que supuse daba a la cocina y, más allá, al resto de la casa.
El registro de participantes se cerró a las ocho: quince personas, contándome.
Todos resistimos la primera noche. Ustedes deben saberlo, resistir una sola noche es demasiado fácil, todo el mundo lo ha hecho (por trabajo, por estudios, por curiosidad). Nadie bebió café hasta la tercera noche. Nadie quería ser el primero en levantarse y rondar la cafetera, el primero en servirse café. Cuando alguien por fin lo hizo fue imposible distinguir quién lo hizo después y quién lo hizo después −yo tomé café a la cuarta noche.
Desde la tercera noche había notado irregularidades en el comportamiento de dos amigos del padre de Maui, en especial en uno de ellos, el más viejo, que sufría de breves episodios gripales cada vez que volvía del baño. Me quedé callado porque pensé que era demasiado obvio y por lo tanto imposible. Además era mi primer torneo. Qué puedo saber, pensé. Tampoco me imaginaba que iba a ganar.
Para la quinta noche sólo quedábamos cinco. Dos amigos del padre de Maui, uno viejo y el otro joven –el campeón defensor. Un europeo del este llamado Bort, melenudo que apenas masticaba el español y que viajaba alrededor del mundo con el único propósito de competir –sigue activo en la escena, acaba de ganar un torneo importante en Rusia en el que estuvo despierto siete noches. Y un sujeto prieto, flaco, que no dio su nombre, cuyo rostro me recordó al de un cocodrilo bebé. Desde esa noche me refiero a él como Reptil.

Hasta esa noche todo había transcurrido más o menos de manera normal. En este tipo de competencias los desmayos son normales. También las convulsiones, los lamentos de desesperación. La paranoia. Principalmente la paranoia, que empieza a sentirse a partir de la tercera noche como una nube de gas inflamable en la atmósfera del lugar, un gas corrosivo con olor a cloro al que cada una de las horas que transcurren vuelve más denso y aumenta el potencial de su combustión. Y bueno, lo que los curiosos buscan: las arañas. Pero las arañas están en el lobby, te reciben y te acomodan –las he escuchado hacerlo−, después de un tiempo te familiarizas con ellas y te llaman por tu nombre, es algo predecible, sabes que van a estar ahí todas las veces; en cambio, después de las arañas hay un infinito de posibilidades, de eso se trata delirar realmente.

Means of Evil

There’s a break in the face
Of a many-minded man.
He says some words are dead before conception;
Some shapes are lost to angles.

False fictions are a language of their own,
In this foul cave;
A miasma of pain and vengeance hangs low
Over the heads of all surviving creatures.
A glowing stench of agony clings,
Like a parasite brother, to the bowels of their tomb.
And the sun births rays of terror,
To rain on this lascivious pit of waste.

The insects of the past play master
In a pandæmonium of midnight’s fire and sea.
They are locked in a cave of
Mental securities. Down here,
The light of God flames, a mess of heat and darkness;
An unseen box in the sky invades this prison
At its carrion source.

Sibilant mimicry, and clarion verses salute
A puppet parade of Memory and his emotions.
Though these sounds and feelings
(for that is all they can claim to be)
Stand adjacent their intersections,
A mirror reflects the crushing bodies around them;
A plateau of reflection and reaction,
Shows these eroding angels
Visions of the past.

Granite and lime colored bricks have constructed
Themselves low for the chambers
Of some conscious thing.
Colored spectacles of human remains crawl
Towards a dim entrance,
Entranced by worlds of exterior light.
If only these walls would break,

And let in some source of flesh and blood.
Not only the stress of a world left dripping,
But the prenatal prayer of a generation proceeding,
Screeching for the sun.

Self-Portrait as Grass

I

I am above those set against the Earth
And below the blue mountain;
Those who crawl struggle under the weightless,
Against the immovable,
All for Nothing.

They push, for I can feel their force, and it is
A tired force of the unfortunate and the dead;
Their bodies condense to fragments of former selves,
Existing in portions of past life pictures,
All forgotten, mono no aware.

I am named and a stranger, existing,
Set for Nothing, I am persisting;
Familiar and distant, speaking in common unknowns;
In the picture, silent and foreshadowing, wind-blown.
I am speaking and listening:
Eternal glistening,
In water from clouds and flame from stars.

Life of myself myself surround me:
The trees, the water, the mountains.
Variant structure; progress destroys
All we have labored for, the perfection of centuries.

Destruction dominates the current mind in nature,
Anything that may not be completed, that may not be perfect,
Must be destroyed, for it is sin against complacency;
Those who crawl believe this.

Permanence lives through myself,
It breeds against time (an illusion);
A cover of memory that protects from dreams of pleasure and pain.

Lasting forever, growing without thought,
Without feeling, desire, or emotion.

I am perfect, yet
Perfection craves more, I beg for Nothing;
I have no needs and lack desire,
I exist to exist; I am grow the erosion.

Dead, alive, and rotting, covering all and spreading
With indifference and life, I am;
I am resurrection, insurrection, and oblivion,
Nothing and eternal, permeated over canvases of white,
like Nirvana.

I am born from myself,
Originating from ideas thoughtless and grave.
Correct, in essence; incorruptible, in action.

Dead, I am not returning.
Eternal darkening consumes my presence, for
I know what hides in the mysterious abodes of
Shifting Silence.

I am made of many and one,
I surround and condense.
I see all and nothing:
I am a blind man and a mystic.

Being and not, I grow and I rot,
I am sucking the blood of the Earth
And living off of eternal breath, give;
Grounded, I am free;
Severed I am released from one oblivion to another;
Words define me, yet I exist in forms without the linguistic tautology of metal bars, I exist
Experiencing only bliss and an enlightening
Lack of conflict and pedagogy known to those below as ignorance,
Known to those less fortunate ones, crawling with burden, as a curse, and
I inflict no blame upon them, as they are creatures of the Waste.

I am rising;
I am falling.
I am beginning,
and ending.
I am authentic,
and artificial.
I am indifferent,
passionate.
I am free,
for I am bound;
Above all I reign,
I am.

II
The wind blows and I blow with it:
I do not myself move.
I may choose to grow, but the choice of motion is not my own.

My choice is neither controlled nor free,
I am an object of will: both my own, and that of the careless, the Nothing.

Stillness breeds within myself, waiting, waiting,
Waiting for Nothing;
Oblivion waiting on oblivion- and some insist on difference, in the
Face of continuity.
We are all but flashes in our eternal lives, and
Our lives are filled with darkness; we are but
Flashes of color that must be embraced, treasured for their rarity.
The rarity of finding life in an ocean expanding through time in space to numbers infinite,
And come on life, little lights in the midst of Aura’s recession:
Events arising on their own,
No previous actions inspiring them,
Equally Chaotic and beautiful.

I am waiting and I choose patience,
A choice I make my own,
That no other shall take:
My possession.
I hold no regard for the material, it is the jagged fuel of those below.
My immaterial gatherings must be treasured,
As they assist in my waiting.

I was not made defiant, I am not the one who has changed.
I am the natural one, the right one, I know this
Without confirmation, I know this because it is be.
My transgressions are made so by perception,
The state of nature new, of perfection, is not such claim:
Nature cannot change.

I am not evil,
I am not holy,
I am rooted, not in morality, but dirt;
Percentages of action do not define my Self; I come across as
Being, encompassing all and rejecting none.
To define my Self would be pointless, description deceives being, and
Being is all.

Time is nothing to me,
I see no past, present, or future, only
Now; now is all and all is put into now, a
Vehement burst of light so astonishing that
Meaning must seem an intricate part of the system.
The meaning that is searched for cannot be found, for,
There is no where I may search to find it,
I am in all; I am meaning; I am Nothing with everything.

I am moral,
yet I am natural.
I am past,
and future.
I am awareness,
and Nothing.
I am caring,
and cruel.
I am free,
for I am bound;
Above all I reign,
I am.

As knowledge piles up in the mind like a catalogue of sand
I wonder now if I can conjure up the meaningfulness of it all
So many books, so many articles, videos of late night talk show interviews
Shapes noticed in marble tiles while waiting in hospitals and dentist offices
Where does it all congregate and dance and reconcile itself?
Surely not beneath the skull alone
Deeper in space it meets and gains supra-significance
There the matrices of experience and memory and data sit at a table
And indulge in the same bitter stimulant
And laugh about it all
And here is significance gained? The question itself is laughed away
As an interstellar breeze grazes the skin of our star spangled astral bodies
In the cafe of Jung's darkest abstraction

Footprints in Tanzania

Why the huge brain babe?
Let's communicate.
Pumpkin, you have a pelvis,
a power grip,
a precision grip,
in your hands hun,
and it is remarkable
when all that adaptation
backs up to the arboreal
and your chromosomal
knowledge is forgotten.

But hey, let's get back,
back to the pelvis.
Where it sits,
its significance.

My pop tart
and pickle pie,

my bipedal babe.

...

Not interested in my mother

Neither was Freud

I'm alone again, with a six-pack as my best friend; I've done this to myself.

It's no wonder I feel distant from everything, it's not what could or should, it's what is. And what is cannot be evaded. Who you are cannot be avoided, no matter how many drinks are drunk or messages replied to or statuses updated; the truth worms it's way from underneath even the most well-thought deception.

I wish I had some insight upon the loneliness I feel now and the human condition, I should have some right to know, but only questions remain; even as humble doubt nags away on each waking hour to diminish my resolve to understand.

Maybe there's no resolution, and that's the laugh. Just minutes ticking away on the eternal clock, watching, waiting; lusting for se sort of emotion to be admitted upon the cosmic waves, one, two, three...

The magnitude of what is real and percieved is too vast to question as we sit alone on our tiny islands, waiting for a chance to be discovered. But that's the joke, the one that has the penultimate punchline; that ship on the horizon cod save you, if they weren't so tired to care.

Endlessness, circling onwards, plummeting towards itself with no ambition but the desire to experience what has not yet happened. U.S. Vessels lay in wait to achieve our mourning across that river Styxx; a hopeless end yet an end none-the-less.

So we are pawns, what of it? Is it so bad to not be in control? To go against the Queen and foresee failure on every cast of the dice, is that truth? Free will mocks with a knowing grin as we struggle against the tide of what will be.

You're a great writer.

When I said "You're a great writer," I was addressing the commentator who began with "I'm alone again, with a six-pack as my best friend."

I hope this isn't sarcasm, because it made me feel good about myself. Thank you if true, fuck you if not.

Heroes of old rejoice, there are none to usurp your place upon the mantle of destiny. Today recruits no desire of the heart, only that of the mind, and in this your place is secured. Homer, you doubt with intrepid doom what is, now, this forlorn world. A place without great deeds, lessened hereto against the need to be so, our humanity lost.

Glimpse into the fog, peer into the state of what will be and see nothing but base desire reflected upon a higher form. If I had then I would, if I could then I would, the ideas of respectable human nature fall away in the face of unrelenting reality.

Trials seem too harsh, now, to face. The lessons learned fade from memory as quickly as they are taught, what world did we inherit than one of vice.

The demons have overrun us, and the light of the future da against the wanton need for ease. For submission of a higher will, nothing remains.

You great poets lived when the world was something to understand, yet you could never envision a world understood; and then we come to the end.

Who cares and why? Give us a reason to see the problems so illumined before us, yet you cannot. Need is no more, only desire remains; and with that notion there is nothing left to hold dear.

Pure genius.

youtube.com/watch?v=HFVenEz54D0

She won the third place nigga

THIS is one of the worst posts I've ever seen here

(Jklol)