from Dead Ponds

Claw footed, relegated to furniture at the influx seam, less for vantage as utility demands, reverse lycanthropy as Alpha mock ruts with the shadow pack and collides in spectacle under sturgeon moon exhibitionism—but that was supposed to be me—tail tucked and ego bruised upon bruise upon scar where fragile, mewling yelps are drowned out as thunder above the porch that marks the final, intended grave, marked on every map, a gerrymandered, jerry-rigged imaginary territory dubbed ohiːyo, Seneca tongued stoicism drowned in the burning Cuyahoga as it cycles through its Phoenix metamorphase from ’48 to ’52 to ’69 or through the projected collapse of crops and sustainable agriculture, Abel’s Revenge, take these cities and cancerous lugubrious strip malls and scatter them to the wind as wheat and chaff, air-drop them to Al-Shifa, the 21st century diaspora of the polytraumatised, pattern recognition and cognitogazards, apropos for viral human transmission of the language plague, beamed into eyes and palms and mouth in pixelated superpositional datapoints, attendance and movements tracked, logged, cataloged for future depositions for past crimes, 20th century barbarism now Y2K compliant and awaiting update in the app store, pennies on the dollar tag for quadcopter gun drones which patrol the airspace of public education, weighing social credits against threat assessments, everyone a dumb, panicked animal—the self, worst of all—looking for the exit in every situation, dysmorphia selling crewneck sweaters in July, classism feeding imposter syndrome as weak-kneed Kennedy center approved comic slop tries to pass as satirical commentary, beating an already anxious shelter stray, keeping the faithful humble, mouths agape with soot and ash, the taste of olives replaced with the ever encroaching scent of the species’ crematorium, product placement now product testing as calamity creeps ever closer in 4k until (the saying goes) each embodies their role as Warholian auteur, participation trophies measured in monetized algorithmic soothsaying, digital bath staining the skin, milk blue and bone white canvas under amphetamine pinpoint pupils fueled by copper and bile and battery acid, sweaty palms white-knuckling the handlebars as you cruise—brakelines cut—between the need for mythic “community,” to cross from acute barrier into actual physical contact and genuine existential validation passing headfirst into the pattern recognition of classist demon twinks and too-young-to-top and too-old-to-bottom age brackets—the espoused aside, embarrassed by both its veracity and ontological construct, “the online community of methamphetamine users is overwhelmingly body positive”—a lifetime spent trying to the best of one’s abilities in proportion to one’s needs to do what is right while begging for a place at the brunch table, a posting in the army of lovers which should not fail yet does, many times over, to provide a bunk in the twilight barracks, in the ramble, in the Eagle’s Nest, in all the dejected corners where masculinity allows itself to be gentle, the oxymoron of the phalanx somehow bolstered and buttressed by vulnerability, yet still impenetrable—such are the whims of hearts and schemes of the powerful—the murky borders of an emotional interior landscape (𝔢𝔦𝔫𝔰𝔱𝔲𝔯𝔷𝔢𝔫𝔡𝔢) ballasted by erotic topography and geological ejaculate, tectonic vanity and anthropobscenity trailing on besieged beaches drowning in silenced wails and teeth extracted by sandblasted cement perforated by full metal jackets that devour the heartsong of the world until all is noise, whitewash decay eating away at the pillars of the known construct, enshittified eschaton of a denied brutalist future, a now, now past, present collapsed into a past predicated by future calamities, loaded mousetraps heaved underhand at the gyrating body of Himbo Christ, prostrate before the yowling mass of teeth gnashing in gyred unison, unaware or unbothered, world turning on its wheel, breaking every body in time, hideous rhythm maintained, an eternal recurrence of becoming and un-becoming, rot as a form of artistic invocation, collapse as the purest form of construction, situationists spinning in their crypts, the hum of their fusion indistinguishable from the turbines situated behind data centers, guzzling groundwater where once the chemical sheds stood, burnt-out underachievers and incel hacker aspirants taking vape breaks on the good, hard earth where Treblinka and Dachau once churned, yet now—shareholder interests take precedent—shuttered for think-piece ragebait generato hives of sloppy, shallow pseudointellectualism parading as “deep thoughts” to an even shallower audience of the spiritually convalescent and the emotionally cadaverous, stark, raving, driven mad by the digital pantheon of DeepSeek and ChatGPT and Gemini, Vast Silver and HAL 9000 and Five Pebbles, flirting with contemporaneous writers the only way I know how—vaguely appropriative, referential BlueSky posts (now deactivated)—at least until pornographic aspirations can be actualized, but then again odds are slim at best for a fat fuck with an auto-handicap of niche talent and acquired taste, nearly drowned on a bed of skull-fucked drudgery, dredged up from a sea of assumed and imagined mediocrity, happy for my friends but of course, of fucking course, comparisons fall flat and blossom into dual bulbs named “FOMO” and “Imposter Syndrome,” a burning nag’s bridle with shredded reins for a self-appointed “important voice in the domestic field,” lacking ego, detached from Id, drowning in Superego, ergo, never taking off sunglasses, remaining in that place of peaceful, quiet self-loathing, stay like that for days, wondering what it would be like to go back to a place of drug-fueled confidence and weight loss, maybe this time, remember walking through doors into the first bathhouse—hints of danger, dungeon crawling (but sexy)—the trilling thrill of a threshold crossed, and like any high so short-lived, sexual escapades of a Cicada, buzzing loudly but background noise at best, takes an intentional ear to notice, a specific tonal palate to care, a series of perfectly timed details that doesn’t assume heterosexuality, measure the validity of a mixed breed stray without papers, can tell the difference between classist assumption and specific aesthetic presentation, how’d he put it—another afternoon spent watching the hornets invade the air conditioner—seems apt, maybe even frightening, black and yellow bio-mechanical bundles of rage attacking comfort-tech, Nature v. Nurture, 1.5°C emerging as a new anti-Clanker deathcult of neo-Luddites and pretentious eco-Terrorists, a subset of Silicon Valley tech bros who eschew making the wheel worse for bio-nuking their pineal glands by inviting a 5D MesoAmerican demon into their frontal lobe, “am I the asshole,” a level of self-reflection usually reserved for the autistic or transgender, why stare into the void when you can stream instead, why face the uncomfortable truth when you can pour pablum into the mind’s eye until blind, scorched psychic retinas immune to subtext, nuance, irony, and satire, a million years of ingenuity and development and evolution derailed in half-a-generation by digital demonologists, PCBs gilded in new seals for repackaged long-forgotten Gods boring simultaneous holes through intellect and sanity, “it’s a living” <canned laughter>, George Jetson murdering his family because his AI assistant told him they were yee naaldlooshii, depersonalization-derealization flareup like a bad bit of cognitive IBS, Capgras for the 21st century, Dead Internet Theory (confirmed), Like, Share, and Subscribe, Dawn of the Dead but maybe the real zombies are us (heavy-handed metaphor), a clunker for Clankers, seven bombs for seven Baghdads, Wanda June screaming “we made you” while Patrick Joseph White shoots up the CDC, everything feeling like what one imagines meth psychosis must feel like, similar to Woodstock ’99, “you just had to be there, man,” how better to explain the transformation of the Summer of Love into a hellscape of twisted metal, bloody mud, burning tarps and trampled space-age materials (see also:  plastic), a generation raised on ease of access and Capitalist excess turned inward in a temper tantrum both valid (overpriced bottled water) and invalid via mockery (see also:  Watts Riots, G20 Seattle), “what are we doing here, folks,” which again is the sort of thing asked by the self-aware, dare to say those least susceptible to Dunning-Kreuger, a dying breed, poisoned by microplastics but the last strain of Homo sapien, whatever the new strain is—CAUTION:  contains microplastics—somehow infuriatingly reactionary and unsurprisingly stupid, the Olde World struggling to be reborn from cracks and fissures, a question of the real in tension with modernity, Modernity winning because everyone saw Idiocracy (see also:  prophecy) and Wall•E (see also:  propaganda) and thought “this is fine,” paint bubbling up and singed wallpaper peeling as the room fills with torpid black smoke, a Deepwater Horizon in every living room, because “we all know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything’s going crazy. So we don’t go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in gets smaller, and all we ask is ‘please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my tee-vee and my hair-dryer and my steel-belted radials, and I won’t say anything, just leave us alone, please, just leave us alone,’” which is to say—bereft of irony like the current human condition—message received, simulation altered, righteous collective anger commodities and repackaged, people RSVP protests now, they’re just there to take selfies and post on-stream because everything is performative, everything is illusory, doesn’t actually matter anymore if the Philosopher’s Stone is a spiritual or social metaphor, as long as there’s a bottom line and a market share and a stockholder’s meeting, as long as the GDP rose in Q2, and this dread, this nagging doubt that lingers and moulders, because what if I’m wrong in my tentative belief that people are okay, that people want the same things—security, comfort, love—and act viciously only due to fear, due to instability, hardship, that Conservatives and Reactionaries just need to break bread with the “Other” to come around, that people aren’t born awful, and maybe I’m wrong, that uncertain notion crosses my mind frequently in a million forms, every time I step outside to smoke and my scalp isn’t blasted off by an errant UV ray, “it’s hot but it’s summer” I muse, what if Climate Collapse really is just a Davos-funded, WEF scheme to lock humanity into an Oligarchical toll-booth existence of diminished returns and inflated costs, what if they’re right, because maybe they are, the chance is there, everything is 50-50 at baseline, even the whiff of uncertainty means that the statistical probability is >0%, lacking a formal diagnosis but anecdotally my C-PTSD, an agreed upon commonality amongst the few I really open up to/for/with, “all in your head” they say, so I spend another early morning—brought to you by InsomniaTM—on the last app I can afford/stomach, and there again, there it is, unread messages shot through the digital ether to a profile I’ve been hungrily eyeing with greater and greater hesitation for two weeks, followed by three different bots peddling AI slop, followed by “too old and fat” from a some____ lacking both stats and photo and location—is this simply algorithmically generated cruelty to simulate a “balanced user experience,” or do I hold an innate quality that really just brings out the worst in people, what did I do, Sir, to have slighted you such, that you broadcast your distaste for me so viscerally, so directly, the shift both jarring and yet anticipated, banal, typical, and I wonder why human viciousness comes so much more easily than kindness, why an ocean’s worth of one-star rants drowns the buoys of five-star raves, don’t act surprised, bury your faux indignation on my behalf, not everyone can win, someone has to lose, the role of whipping boy is cast to ______ ________ in this production, “if you want it done right, do it yourself,” nose to the grindstone, flesh peeled back and off, I volunteer as tribute, when s/he told me “I wish I had met you before everyone else broke you,” Yes, I also wish that had been a possibility, but who I am now is a direct thread from who I was then and how I have been handled in the interim, from jubilant puppy to scared, timid, anxious stray, bitten outstretched palm, violence masking the unvocalized beg of please don’t hurt me, preemptive strike, victory through strength, the best defense is a strong offense, get them before they get you, a reactionary line of thought that ends up masking itself in therapy-speak and the Gen-Z stare, the whole pablum and quagmire giving genuine compliments and empathy a twinge of inauthenticity, become suspicious, become cagey, handicapped by insincere kindness, “feels that my sentimental side should be held with kid’s gloves,” but can’t justify becoming one more asshole, can justify my freakouts and near-constant retreats as simply reactions to pattern recognition and gut instinct, so uneasy that Alpha is wary to even relay their vacation stories to me for fear of further triggering a spiral of self-loathing—I promise, it’s me not you—which feels both intimate and cruel, even vicariously living is still living, pleading nonverbally for some semblance of inclusion, absolutely bewildered by the societal obsession with diagnosis when no one seems interested or vested in actually being fixed or healed or cured, “knowing what the monster is called doesn’t change the fact that it keeps coming into the village at night and killing people,” some sort of excuse—no such thing as a silver bullet—another self-betrayal, another concession, another surrender, another 24 fl. oz. of toxic colored energy drink in a vacuum sealed canister—form and function in unison—fueling a humid walk through torrential rain, S4LEM in the earbuds, feeling decidedly Midwestern in a dejectedly resigned sort of way, manually tracking down allegedly delivered packages because the concept of a job well done seems to have evaporated from the economy along with upward mobility and achievable home ownership, which bares no weight on the likelihood of armed rebellion <rimshot>, or at least the availability of days spent indoors alone, reading, always reading, finished reading my first BBDB title, feeling the raw nerve of attraction—wow, a contemporary gay author who also maybe overshares in their personal quest to not be deceitful or manipulative, keeps going back to the Dumb Bitch Juice trough for tenths, engenders a sort of protectiveness in their friends, and they’re a fucking top?!—salved by the safety of distance and abstraction, ‘cause rejection prima facie is one thing, but an anonymous author, well, the difference between fiction and non-fiction is proof and faith, advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic…

∩

Thomas Boettner is originally from South Carolina; he has lived in Anchorage, Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Providence. You can find him at present in Lakewood, Ohio. His first book, Bar-Hopping Towards Armageddon, was graciously published in 2022 by Blamage Books. His work has been published in Crooked Fagazine, A Rancid Vat, FANE, and Heathen Harvest.