Mattering
What would life be like if we did not want to matter? This question has been on my mind.
Many people choose small lives, rejecting the pursuit of power or fame. This is the burning ambition we conflate with mattering. But even the quietest life is built on a framework of necessity: to be missed, to be relied upon, to occupy a chair that would otherwise be empty. Mattering, then, is not ambition; it is being necessary to the algorithm of daily life. The true question is: What if we wished to remove ourselves from that algorithm entirely?
Could you love?
Can you consciously choose not to matter and circumvent the irony of making a choice that matters?
This is what I want to write next. I’ve just got to figure it out.
Unplanned Retirement
The realization that he wasn't living up to his potential hit him mid-performance.
He withdrew his head from the lion's mouth, tossed his whip aside, and walked out of the circus forever.
Gratitude
I was always a strong reader and writer. So much so that my school formed a special group of myself and 2 other kids that skipped a couple of years of instruction in these subjects.
However for the longest time I just wanted to draw. Looking back, I think I had (perfectly reasonable) doubts about anyone wanting to read things I wrote. Writing wasn’t cool. Drawing seemed more immediate. You can hand a picture to the girl you have a crush on and she can recognize it immediately.
I’ll say right here — I am monumentally bad at two things: cooking and drawing. Cooking mostly because I don’t have patience for it (seriously, why spend an hour cooking when you can order a pizza and use the time you saved working on getting all achievements in GTA5?) and drawing because…well…I just suck. No reason to try and sugarcoat it.
So yeah. In my misguided desire to become great at drawing I found one of those “Learn to Draw at the Art Institute!” things in a newspaper or something. These were basically scams - they asked you to draw a certain thing and send it to them, where they would evaluate it and decide if you were good enough to send them more money for their study-at-home course.
The picture was supposed to be a turtle. Mine was a lopsided circle with some sticks jutting out of it at odd angles. A head-like…thing…attached to the body through a crooked little line with a smiley face on it. If it’s true that drawing something causes it to manifest as reality in some other dimension, I certainly created a suffering impossibility whose only thought in its brief nanosecond of life was when will it end.
I sent it off, strangely confident that I’d be getting the call any day that I had thoroughly redefined the boundaries of the test through my technical brilliance. Strangely, this mirrors how I feel these days in those fleeting moments between the time that I submit poetry to a journal and get rejected.
You can guess how this goes. One thing I was surprised by, however, is that some unfortunate soul had to give detailed feedback on my drawing-blob-thing. They had done their job diligently and did not completely crush my spirit. Their feedback was a masterclass of letting someone down softly.
So, I just want to yell this into the void…if that was you that had to critique my drawing, I’m so sorry. You did a good job. You can rest easy at night knowing that I abandoned drawing and never aspire to anything more than stick figures.
You gave me enough softness to try again — just in another medium.
Macho Man Randy Savage Reviews: Entropy
Snap Into Thermodynamic Irreversibility!
Let me tell you somethin’, brother…
You can stack your particles,
you can order your systems,
you can alphabetize your molecules till the cows come home…
BUT GUESS WHAT?
ENTROPY'S COMIN’ FOR YA
And it don’t care how neat your little box is!
Everything wants to fall apart, dig it?
You try to fight it—
you pour your hot coffee, try to keep it warm,
but it cools, man.
It cools because entropy don’t respect your plans.
Entropy’s the UNDISPUTED HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMP
of chaos and decay!
And you can’t pin it!
You can’t body slam it!
It’s the slow elbow drop from the top rope of time itself
—landing on order
again…
and again…
and AGAIN.
Every universe is just a ring, and brother—entropy’s the ref who don’t count to three!
So you wanna cheat the clock?
Build your little perpetual motion machine?
GOOD LUCK, CHUMP.
'Cause the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the KING…
and it’s always undefeated!
SNAP INTO A HEAT DEATH. OHHH YEAHHHH.
there’s a time for love
but i just ate spaghetti
so it’s not right now
The first rule of hopelessness club is oh what does it even matter.
His crime was that he would find people having drinks with those little umbrellas in them and he would close them.
Then he’d run away laughing.
What I Should Have Known
Things were going well.
She ordered salmon.
I had beef wellington.
We were in orbit
feeding each other's
id
with history
and half-truths.
We got the check
and when I pulled out my wallet
she saw my
team hufflepuff logo.
Without a word
she got up and out
of my life
forever.
Donate to my GoFundMe to ban drum sets because hand percussion is far superior
This Poem Was Written By an LLM Trained on Eurodance*
Take Me
Energy
Higher
Pressure
Move Your Body
Energy
Tonight
Pump
Moving
Energy—
Forever.
Rocketry
As a kid, for a while I was into model rockets.
Kind of.
There are different model rocket engine sizes and I think engines like “D” were the big ones.
Designed for big rockets. But in my mind, for fun rockets.
I became interested in trying to shove D engines into tiny A rocket bodies. This took duct tape and an acceptance of the fact that you will never see the rocket again after you launch it.
But this was the only way. The fun way.
I knocked on heaven’s door, but only before I saw the “No Soliciting” sign. My bad.
Continuing your travels across the plains, you will come to the city of Juro. The architects of Juro took advantage of the local resources and sculpted a city made of donkeys. Passing beneath the ornately designed gate of donkeys, stepping carefully on the backs of donkeys below you, you will come to a wide plaza where a central fountain of donkeys commands your attention in the center. At night, you enter your house of donkeys where the walls are made of donkeys standing on the back of other donkeys. You find yourself mesmerized by the twitch of their ears and the slow swish of their tails.
Your donkey bed is soft. It brays once, gently, and you drift to sleep.
Turbo Simile, Volume 1
“…like the feeling when a friend has tickets to a concert but can’t go so they offer them to you and you accept but decide to skip it and the next day your friend asks how the concert was and you wonder… do they know”
They said they’d give me a hundred dollars when I reached the horizon and I took them up on it.
Bad Jokes Deluxe
Yesterday I was trying to eat some ice cream, but the kid I stole it from wouldn’t stop crying.
I went to a fancy dinner that had multiple sets of silverware and I panicked because I didn’t know what course the little fork was for. I shouldn’t have worried though, I got arrested for trespassing before anything was served.
One time I was bitten by a vampire. It gagged and ran away screaming.
One day I almost had sex. She took off her hair and put it on the nightstand. I was wearing some of those underwear that make your butt really big and I couldn’t get my pants off. She put her hair back on and left.
I've got a dad body. That's why you shouldn't go down to the basement.
Dog Judge: The court hereby finds you the most amazing and best person that ever lived!
Today I changed my mind. The new one isn’t very good either.
What do I have more of, concerns or money? Concerns.
If doing things was as easy as undoing things, I’d be way more productive.
I watched a lot of bad stand-up comedy and I wanted to offer these Jeff-approved lines for people that want to steal them:
- I had this girlfriend once (this is the whole joke)
- I cannot bear the weight of this guilt because I skipped leg day
- Yesterday I went to this store. Today I went to this other store. OMG SO MANY STORES RIGHT?!
- What about hats, amirite?!
- As a kid I wanted to be an astronaut. My dad said “Jeff, you’re too dumb to be an astronaut”. I said “Okay” and decided to be something else.
- I thought about auditioning for America’s Got Talent but the routine I developed where I demonstrate I’m double-jointed in both thumbs only lasted 3 seconds.
- As a kid I had a really good friend down the street named Joey. His family moved really far away but they came back years later for a visit. Joey and I sat there silently, not knowing what to say anymore. Applause, please.
- Last week I started stacking a bunch of cardboard boxes in my backyard. My neighbor asked what I was doing and I looked at him and nodded while tapping my temples, implying I had a genius plan. There's no genius plan. I'm just stacking boxes here.
- I've been practicing my Jack Nicholson impression. I went to the bank and said I'm Jack Nicholson and I'd like to withdraw a million dollars. They asked me to fill out a withdrawal slip and present some ID. Cool, my impression must have totally worked.
- I had a teacher in high school say I wouldn't amount to anything. I have this blog, I showed them.
Seven Visions of Kevin Stevens
i saw a squirrel
his name was kevin stevens
that’s what he told me
spring light, waking earth
the sky whispers all around
“it’s kevin stevens”
paying my taxes
a porsche almost hit my car
it’s kevin stevens
kevin stevens, man
he came up into the club
left with all the girls
we need a hero
oh look there’s kevin stevens
he said he’s busy
in our final days
we curse the name of the one -
it’s kevin stevens
a ballad is heard
fire-lit inns across the land
“it’s kevin stevens”
All of my brilliant musings will go here.