A precious thing so easily lost

Somebody is throwing things out of a window at the White House. That’s what the post said. Sure enough there was also a video of the very thing described. That is the opening line to a Frank O’Hara poem I’m certain of it someone else said and I thought that sounds about right but I’d better go investigate. To jog the memory as it were. 

I read a dozen or so of them in short succession and I suppose it’s close enough but not quite. Something that may later be revealed to us to have larger import has been introduced in media res but in real life we already have so much pitiful backstory to whatever it is that is transpiring here vis a vis the window. Not per se but roughly.

There is no picking up in the middle of anything anymore. Only the desperate longing for an end. 

I thought of something I had posted myself years ago. I was seventeen and having dinner at my new girlfriend’s home for the first time. I had to excuse myself to use the half bathroom adjacent to the dining room which was my first mistake and after some laboring the first flush didn’t take. Worried they would hear the sound of a second flush I panicked and retrieved the turd from the bowl and tossed it out of the window with my bare hands. 

A murderer disposing of the pistol halfway across a bridge. 

This was thirty years ago now. I still wonder from time to time what happened to that turd. If it was ever discovered. The girl’s father frowning with the full weight of his mustache while mowing the lawn perhaps. Maybe all of forty years old at the time. Some little puke busy trying to finger his daughter upstairs on a twin bed. 

I read the O’Hara poem about being fattened by our own feces and laughed but only a little and then the one about Lana Turner collapsing and had to look up the specifics of her biography. One often wants to know if a poem is true or not. Literally true I mean. Not true in the other sense. Which all of the good ones are.

She didn’t collapse for the final time until about thirty years after that one was written apparently and I felt relieved for some reason to learn that. Bonus decades awarded to someone I’d only just started to worry hadn’t gotten to experience them mere seconds before. 

The computer keeps trying to serve me artificial summaries of the meanings of his poems and it’s turning me off the concepts of both computers and meaning itself. 

What does it all mean though? 

I read that Turner died of throat cancer at seventy four which sounds like a very bad way to go. Not bad enough that I won’t smoke immediately when I step away from writing this but still very bad. 

Things only happen to other people. 

The studio used to airbrush the cigarettes out of her publicity photos I read. 

O’Hara was struck and killed by a car at the age of forty which also isn’t ideal. 

What does it matter one way or the other in the end? The only thing is to live your life in such a way that someone some years later might be curious about how it was that you passed and mourn briefly over it while water for the rice is boiling on a Sunday afternoon. A baseball game on in the background and the sound of the neighbor running his cursed leaf blower through the open window. 

To live so that no one wishes you gone.

Every single day now someone says I hope it happens soon and we all understand specifically what they mean. It simply must be able to happen.

How I hate disease
but not always.

Like what you read here? Do the right thing buddy.

The fine folks at Typebar Magazine were kind enough to interview me about We Had It Coming the other day.

On Civilizational Loss, Mourning, and Life’s Remaining Beauty: An Interview with Luke O’Neil - Typebar Magazine

Everything is as bad as O’Neil says it is. But do we deserve it? His latest fiction collection grasps for an answer.

Typebar MagazineTypebar_Admin

"Everything is as bad as O’Neil says it is. But do we deserve it?" Matt Wolfbridge writes. "And is there any chance at redemption, or even at snatching a glimmer of happiness from financialized despair?"

Here's a little chunk of our talk. Read the whole thing over there.

Typebar: To me, the deep pain of mourning pervades the entire book. I feel like every short, every poem, somehow is tied to mourning and particularly mourning of things that are still here but will be gone sooner than we like to admit. I’m curious how you managed to complete a project so emotionally taxing — and perhaps difficult to sell hah hah hah

O’Neil: Despite what I just said there is so much beauty in the world. Not to sound corny. There is so much love. But it’s a precious thing and so easily lost. Especially when some motherfucker is determined to steal it away from you. So many of them out there too. Living in America is like waking up in the supermarket from the Mist every morning. What new horrific bloodsucker at the window is this?

Most are not, but a few of the pieces in here, which will be obvious to people who have followed my whole deal for a while, are largely biographical. I have lost a couple of friends in the last year or two, like many of us have, to addiction, to suicide, including one to the latter this past year that really shook me. On top of that I’m starting to get to the age where everyone’s parents are dying, and more than that, your peers also just start to die more routinely and it’s not as big a deal you know? It is but you follow me. When people in their forties or fifties die it’s still tragic but it’s less earth-shattering than at any other point in your life previously. Death as a matter of course. I am pretty sure that’s only going to continue to get worse and worse if I am afforded the privilege of another couple decades! 

Chief among the losses though, and this sort of infests the book in a number of places, was not just losing my long estranged but suddenly newly reunited biological father a few years back, but also having to have to make the decision to let him die. Here’s your father back just in time to watch him waste away in a coma. Good luck! 

I didn’t ask for that shit. 

“Shaking the doctor’s hand like a salesman we were closing a deal with,” I wrote. 

I know it’s a cliche, the sad dad guy, but man it fucked me up so bad having to go through that. Wondering if he was still alive down in there somewhere screaming to be set free. 

My loving mother and dad (my step father who raised me) are getting old now too, as are my beloved in-laws. I can feel it all cresting on the horizon. 

And that’s not to mention the orgy of death and destruction going on all around us everywhere else and in Gaza in particular every second of the day. 

So how did I manage? Well I don’t know if I did yet. I’ve mostly been coping by drinking and smoking too much, another theme that isn’t exactly subtle in the book. And not in a funny haha gotta have my drink! way. A way that has become a bit dark. Like, hm, someone ought to look into this. 

Also by telling myself the lie that maybe the things I write could make some sort of change. A small one, of course, I’m not an asshole, but still something. 

My readers write to me often to tell me about how this or that piece helped them or made them feel less alone or put something they had been feeling into words that they could not find and if that’s all I ever get out of this then that’s something too. 

This piece by Anthony Moser I Am An AI Hater is really good.

I Am An AI Hater

I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.

moser’s frame shopmoser’s frame shop

And even as it consumes those who use it, even as the scammers become their own marks, even as it is sustained by exploited workers slotted in as human filters for algorithmic abuse – some people want to have a little, as a treat. As a joke. Just to make fun of it, just for the busywork, because it’s good enough, right? You understand.

I do understand: you want permission. There’s a machine in the corner wrapped in human skin that makes things out of shit and blood to look like whatever you want (as long as you don’t look too closely). You gave one to your teacher and they didn’t notice. Your boss told you to use it after they laid off half the team and it was fine. You fed one to your kids and they liked it. You want to know you can use it sometimes without me thinking less of you. You don’t need me to believe it’s useful, you just want me to be polite about it.

But I am a hater, and I will not be polite. The machine is disgusting and we should break it. The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.

I became a hater by doing precisely those things AI cannot do: reading and understanding human language; thinking and reasoning about ideas; considering the meaning of my words and their context; loving people, making art, living in my body with its flaws and feelings and life. AI cannot be a hater, because AI does not feel, or know, or care. Only humans can be haters. I celebrate my humanity.

I don't want to Fall For It Again but this dude Graham Platner running to unseat Susan Collins in Maine seems like he's saying the right things and picking up a pretty good head of steam.

Read more on him in The New Republic.

The Political Awakening of the Oyster Farmer Taking on Susan Collins

Graham Platner’s campaign launch has been a sudden sensation. But what he’s building now is rooted in the work of a lifetime.

The New RepublicAna Marie Cox

Amazing things are happening on Bluesky.

As far as I know he's never shared the actual lyrics before. Is that disappointing in a way though? I don't know. I wrote about this when we did the big R.E.M. thing.

Everyone likes to say that they have no idea what Michael Stipe is singing half of the time and especially so on the early records but that collaborative tension is and always has been part of the process of becoming an R.E.M. fan I believe. (I Believe! Now there’s a good song.) A symbiosis kind of deal. Participatory art if you will. In the way the film monster that is withheld (Monster!) is always scarier than the one you see upfront the lyrics you can’t immediately parse are always more fraught with meaning because now you are writing them on your own. You’ve been thrust on stage. How are you doing? ...

It doesn’t matter what he's saying. I consumed and digested and processed the general intent of that song instantly. No thinking just song no words just song just mandolin and sadness. And it nourished me and grew inside of me. Like an animal emotionally manipulating you with its eyes even though it cannot speak. Like a woman coming on to you in a language you don’t understand.

Maybe like going to the opera in Italian. I don’t know I never did that.

This is disgusting what they’re doing to us

We just want what’s right and fair and and what the company truly can afford

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

I wrote about the window turd before as well. And shitting in the White House. I guess I have written about everything at this point.

I've wondered what happened to that turd for like twenty years.

Anyway we’d go upstairs and do our sad little handjobs to each other and go swimming in the pool and things of that nature and then eventually she broke up with me when I was a junior in college I guess which doesn’t seem right but it must have been because it was when I was living in D.C. and interning at the White House lol. I hated working there very much and I hated wearing a suit in D.C. in the heat even more and I pretty much hated everything besides going to see shows at the 9:30 club. Most days I would fuck around on Lexus Nexus which was a magical thing to exist back then in the nineties you could look up so many magazine and newspaper articles on the computer holy shit. Then you could print them off and go take a shit for like thirty minutes or jerk off or whatever you had to do down the hall from Al Gore.

Thank you Stereogum for clearing this matter up.

All is not well in Wiggle world. The Wiggles, the long-running Australian children’s music band, are being sued by their former CEO Luke O’Neill, The Guardian reports. O’Neill (who is not the Hell World writer and one-time Stereogum Deftones reviewer Luke O’Neil — different spelling) is suing Wiggles Holdings Pty Ltd, as well as Anthony Field (the blue Wiggle, pictured above) and the group’s general counsel Matthew Salgo, for alleged financial misconduct.

No matter how many times they come right out and say that Palestinians don't count this is still tough to watch.

LUKE'S MOVIE CORNER

What a completely odd movie. Like very odd. It seems like bad pastiche at first but it is taking so many weird and confident swings. The sheer number of odd choices made in making this. The music alone is so specific. It's not A Good Movie but I think it might actually be pretty good. Bonus points if you like watching Nazis get fucking smoked.

Sorry to Morrissey post but I've had this one stuck in my head for a week now. You know why.

Love you goodbye.