Is life covertly good?

It may very well be, and our perspective being what it is we may never be able to find out. This shabby room, its peeling paint, the curtains tattered and gray with dust — it may be happily sheltering us from a dark storm raging outside, but we can’t tell; the yellowing blinds are drawn.

Our friends may love us, we don’t know; all we know is that we hate them.

There may be hope for everything: are dreams might be still intact. We see the crack that runs through them. There’s no way of telling how deep it goes.

And love might just be lurking happily around that corner, but what face will it assume once get there? How will we know, with all the faces staring blankly just around each corner of each city, which of them was sent for us? And if it is indeed the right corner? We are all like packages sent for each other, but all our post labels fell; now we wander aimlessly, bump like atoms, and we can’t even ask: excuse me, am I for you? Are you for me?

Ah, Sh. We never met, and already I think you hate me. I tried to tell you something but got a little tongue-tied, and you hushed me brusquely and turned away; I stood there after for a while and stared at nothing. I couldn’t tell you how ripe my love for you was already, because you could never agree to understand. No honest woman ever will. But that, often times, is love: a man looking at a woman through a window, and while he is struck, falling, wounded, she never sees his shadow on the floor.

Now I heard you went with a man from the top floors, and I am glad; for suffering things no honest woman should ever suffer, you are now better than honest men. We’ll meet some day, maybe waiting for the elevator. I’ll be the man looking down and trying not to cast a shadow.

1. A forsaken thing hides sadly where it used to be; but you can go back there again.

2. There’s no place for you to rest your head. You can test this anytime: close your eyes and wait.

3. The road gets ever steeper: no step will be easier than the last.

4. There’s glass on the floor and you can’t help being barefoot; and broken hearts never heal.

5. These rules won’t help you.

They were jumping out of every window when the fire got bad, high story windows too. I’m almost sure I see them through thick billows of smoke. Others were climbing down from bottom story windows, clawing their way out of doorways through half-ajar doors. The air was full of screams. It was eighteen eighty two. We were ten men from the Fourty-Ninth Fire Brigade, in hard hats and tar-covered jackets. It was a summer day and it was beutiful. We had two horse-drawn fire carriages but no horses.
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What do you want. What do you want, what do you want waddaya want what do you want. You go outside, but it’s the same pressure in the chest. You go back inside, then, and the smells of the house crowd you. Wood and plaster and maybe dust, perhaps the smell of the sheets in the bedroom, unchanged from the last sex.

Outside there were pretty women but you took no pleasure in looking at them. You were looking nonetheless — hunting them with your eyes. You forgot to take your sunglasses with you. You looked, very aware of their fashionable clothes and the way their breasts moved within their shirts as they walked. What do you want? Nothing stirred in you, seeing these women, no low rumble in the pit of your stomach, in your dick, just a sense of regret. And more pressure in the chest.

Your neck hurts. You sit by the typewriter you bought in the market, then found a special shop that still repairs those and took by bus to be repaired in. And then back by bus, and here it is, what do you want? You move your fingers on the old keyboard but nothing stamps itself on the page. The part of you that should be swollen and heavy with words feels empty and aching. Looking at the blank paper you feel the same sense of regret as outside. You write, then, just so the page won’t be empty. It’s awful and it’s strained and you take the sheet of paper to your computer and you type it and you post it online.

“One flip,” Donnovan said. He laid his palm on the table, pulled it away — revealing an old, shiny quarter.
Rammy agreed behind him, the humming wordless way he used to agree with Donnovan — “hmahm”.
“If it’s a head you go back to your cell no fuss, that’s it, and we say goodbye and we part ways, adios.” “hmahah,” said Rammy. “If it’s not we look away for a couple of minutes with the door open and your handcuffs — oops! Gone”.
“One flip,” said the prisoner, whose name they now knew was Johnson. His hands were handcuffed to the chair behind him, and he looked chained and broken, like on some scene from a hardcore porno movie. His hair was disheveled, like his shirt, and he was talking to them through it. “Let’s make it interesting, ha? Boss? Kinda boring like you said it”.
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* It was a cold bright day in April and all the clocks were striking eleven-thirty.

* Call me Mike.

* It was an okay time.

* In the beginning, God created Yahtzee.

* Happy families are all alike; unhappy families are also alike.

* Howard Roark picked his nose.

* Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—- Fuck this fucking shit.

As of now, September first, 2008, I’m the first me in Google. This is a great honor.

I’m also the second, third, fourth and fifth. All the first five Jonathan Silbers, Google says they’re me. It feels great. If you ask Google, there is no denying who, in this entire world, is Jonathan Silber. (It’s me.)

The Google results are as follows: the first is my Linkedin page, in which you can read my entire resume, and also find out where I work, so you could come over late in the afternoon with a shotgun under your coat. The second result is my other blog, a digitalist, where you can find reasons you’d want use this shotgun on me. On the third link you get my Facebook page, where you can make sure you know what I look like, and so avoid the embarrassment of shooting strangers.

My resume, my blog, my Facebook page: indeed, these all prove that I am here, that je suis, that j’existe, that I posses life and history and friends — I can’t fade away, I will never disappear from memory, not entirely. As long as there is Google there is proof, firm, solid, that I was here. On those interminable nights where I feel myself fading away into nothing, all I have to do to remain alive is Google myself.

Well, George Orwell has a blog.

(via Tomer Lichtash)