Private Citizens

It's not that I have a way with words; it's that I have no way without them.

He wrote arguments for and against life; he began to think the slowest and most painful form of suicide was living, running the whole decathlon of suffering, no breather or bottled water. Fear of dying was irrational. Death was utilitarian. Decrease in net resource consumption and planetary suffering. Increase in net comedy. There was no afterlife but there was a right-before-death, and medical research said it was loopy and nice, all white lights and gentle voices. With booze it wasn't even scary. Some people with terrible lives didn't kill themselves, but that didn't mean they shouldn't. Most people weren't alive and didn't mind. You couldn't regret it.

She turned to enter a stall, lowered to her knees, and made the familiar pattern of motions, hair pushed back and three fingers snaked into her mouth, repeating nothing in her head as she sang out her stomach. As it splashed and clouded out below her, she remembered how virtuous and light it felt to have done thing. Thought not while you did it. Then you were alone and it always hurt.

You think every functioning couple knows themselves and expresses what they want and hears what the other is saying perfectly? That we're not pumping everyone else full of prejudices and fantasies with no connection to reality? The only thing holding relationships together is intention. It's not a matter of fact or reason. We get to say what happened because we're the only ones who care.

The ironic, too-cool meta satire, the sneering and mocking? Is actually just a contemporary version of the bourgeois sentimentality it's trying to mock. It is not new. Really it's almost quaint. The backlash has already outlasted it.

Cultures of permission valorized bad taste as liberation.

Everyone had very uncreased necks, which meant no prolonged inclining of the head, which meant no reading. Linda's own neck looked like a finger, but she reassured herself that the creases were like tree rings marking her substance.

And learning any fact, he was annoyed not to have known it already, because whenever anything happened, the conversation around it had already trended and backlashed and been reexamined and swalloed and shat and reswallowed and reshat in a thousand places onlines, until all thinking felt redundant

Her generation’s failure was not of comprehension but of compassion, of splitting the indifference; its juvenile taste for making a mess; its indignant reluctance to clean it up; its limitless capacity for giving itself a break; its tendency to understand its privilege as vindication. And they weren’t even happy.

Porn was obviously art: it just had weak criticism

He'd been a regular everywhere, and made lots of friends, but only the kind he ran into at other parties, who were glad to chit-chat in a group setting, but would never spare you individual time, and would be sad for maybe 5 seconds if they heard you'd been tortured to death. Which was to say, online friends.

Reality took forever — the underwater way people walked and sent their voices wobbling through the air, how printed words lay inert like bugsplat, all manifesting the basic DUH of the physical plane. By the time he decided to go anywhere he wondered why he wasn't there already. As soon as he sent an email he felt he should already have the reply. And learning any fact, he was annoyed not to have known it already, because whenever anything happened, the conversation around it had already trended and backlashed and been reexamined and swallowed and shat and reswallowed and reshat in a thousand places online, until all thinking felt redundant. We needed brain-to-brain; only then would we catch up to real time. Right now everything progressed so slowly that by the time we arrived at the future it was the present again.

The worst thing about pills was that they worked. Without them, you might just adapt; medical optimism suspended you in a maintenance reality. He'd never known how sick he was until he'd gotten health insurance. The pill that really wanted inventing was the bitter one that cured you of optimism and made time go faster.

Men can be feminists, but I don't know if straight guys can avoid being creeps.