Top 10 Bleakest Unpublished Blog Posts of 2009
By Tao Lin
8. “Underlyingly Bleak” (April 9)
Seems difficult to not view this blog post as the work of person who feels near-crippled by bleakness and is earnestly attempting to direct their almost-physical feelings of bleakness into the creation of a readable essay. Enduring the bleakness by typing readable sentences about anything. Seems emotional to view it in this manner.
Movie Review: Where The Wild Things Are by Dave Eggers (screenplay) and Spike Jonze (director)
Not sure why I “suddenly” felt like doing this. I saw the trailer on Hipster Runoff and commented: “damn, they just run around without jobs but also without, like, ‘ennui’ / seems so good / jet li would be cool for the boy, so he could like jump around better or something.” I think after seeing WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE I will feel like emailing people (even people I don’t want to communicate with at all, but who I know would be happy to get a long email from me) to say that I appreciate them a lot. But I will “censor myself” from emailing people because doing that would “actually” maybe increase long-term pain and suffering in the world. I think after censoring myself from a “seemingly” “honest, non-manipulative, ‘positive’ impulse” I will feel confused to some degree. I will think about the answers to existential questions like “should I ‘seize the day’ all the time” or “only sometimes”; “does death make everything temporary, causing ‘temporary’ solutions to be actually ‘permanent’ solutions, causing it to be ‘valid’ to ‘just “use” some kind of drug or irrational behavioral’ to ‘delay it,’ to such a degree that the ‘problem’ then exists ‘beyond your death,’ meaning ‘whatever problem’ doesn’t exist anymore?”
In this way WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE will affect me on my “deepest level,” in that I will feel “some kind of confusion,” perhaps my “truest” feeling, with “truth” being defined as “comprehensiveness” or “largeness of context + inclusiveness of perspective.”
I think a lot of people will see WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE then go home and be nice to their family for 2-4 hours. Instead of saying “fuck off” to their dogs or cats or hitting their dogs or children they will approach them with kind facial expressions. Their dogs or children will “cower” in fear probably. The family member will ignore that their dog or child looks afraid and hug the dog or child. The next day everyone will feel embarrassed that WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE affected them to be nice but that it only “lasted” 2-4 hours, about the same amount of time it “took” to watch the movie. “Actually” I feel most people will not realize that they had been affected in that way, even if the situation was explained to them in an objective manner by a trained professional. Most people will probably blame their dogs or children for not being nice enough “in return” to sustain their 2-4 hours of being nice. This blog post is weird. It isn’t consistent with my blog. I feel weird, like I’m lost. Right now I’m lost. I know I am looking at the computer screen but I just feel really lost. Just kidding sort of. I’m not lost at all. I’m in my room.
When I see them running around in the movie I feel like it should culminate in someone getting tired. The person should then maybe “stand there without moving,” causing the people who “aren’t tired yet” to imply, in “body-language” if not indirect language, that they are “ruining their day” by “not forcing themselves to be energetic” so “the other people don’t have to stop or ‘deal with’ the tired person’s ‘problems.'” I think the plot of the book version is that (1) the parents of a small child are “having problems” causing (2) the small child to enter into “an alternate universe” that could be described as “the opposite of marital problems” where he or she (3) “realizes” that “it’s ‘worth it’ to live with humans that “have marital problems” because then you get to have a bed, a room, a TV, stuffed animals that don’t move unless you move them, an amount of ‘alone-time,’ and 2-5 other things like ‘having someone tell you what to do sometimes so you don’t feel bored’ and ‘having something to imagine about that doesn’t exist so you don’t feel bored.'” I think that is also to some degree the plots of CORALINE (the Tim Burton movie, I think), WASTED (the bulimia memoir by Marya Hornbacher), and some stories in BED (if you end delete the last 500-1500 words maybe) which can be purchased in the Tao Lin store.
Seems like after I typed that I went directly to my bed and lay stomachdown and for the next 5-15 minutes experienced the sensation of being alive as only [repeatedly thinking “zombielike facial expression” in a slow monotone].