It’s hard to value yourself!
Still, Joan tries. She can’t conceive of herself as a guardian angel, per se, but she can picture herself as a kind of cyber knight, armed with chain mail and HTML, rescuing people from each other. This time, when Joan pictures the grievers, she sees her mother in a seafoam turtleneck sweater and a fresh perm, peering into a tin of smoked anchovies. The image does make Joan feel a little more protective of the dead and their living. She ties her sled to this emotion and waits for it to run, but it doesn’t.
On Wednesday, July seventeenth, she is merciless at work. She deletes eighty-one comments—a personal record. If pressed on the subject, she would say that the collective American subconscious is revealed in mean-spirited remarks about the deceased. In her final hour alone, she deletes the following:
im sorry 2 do this here but im 19 yo, just wrote my 1st album, would luv to see ppl engage with it, v proud of it, u will be 2, go to corey JAMAMBA dot com plz and thank u twitter @coreyjamamba instagram jamambaramba show sum luv u kno ill show luv back 2 u!!!!!!!!!
honestly this guy was my social studies teacher in middle school. we hated him. he was mean to everyone. especially kids of color. he pulled my friend’s hair once. she was wearing it natural for the first time. he was like ‘do you have to get this padded down at airport security.’ this racist wont be missed by me. im white btw.
best sex eber, you can’t even imagine
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“Neither a borrower nor a lender be, For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.” Let that be a lesson to you, Sharon.
hmm. “heart attack?” sounds like murder to me. wouldn’t put it past his wife.
The “Ukranians” “Americans” “Russians”—they are “all ENEMIES of the PEOPEL” (Profit) and we are watching us turn to sheep to assisting THE MAN on live tv . . . before long . . . before long . . . We Lose Liberty. we are hoarders on big scale. Whosoever resists is cuckhold—Confess!
My father was just diagnosed with the same evil disease that killed John. My family is trying to pay the bills. I work 2 jobs, my partner works 3. My mother is 76, and she had to reverse her retirement and take shifts at the grocery store where she worked all her life. But we still can’t cover the cost of treatment. Please consider donating to our FundGo. FundGo.com/HaroldGetsBetter.
we all know what it means when they omit cause of death. missing woman, body, lake, no signs of external trauma? this “accident” is spelled S-U-I-C-I-D-E. you think not talking about it is going to help? i get that families don’t want this dark personal thing out there, but people deserve the truth. especially people who have already lost a loved one to suicide. like me.
silly internet! the afterlife doesn’t have you . . . or.. . . . . . . IS the afterlife internet?????
i’m just a foot-lovin libertarian lookin for a good time 675-394-2849
obama is muslim
Listen to me. Honestly people, listen to me. There is nothing after this, ok? So don’t live like you have an Act III. There is no surprise footage after the credits roll. Same goes for everyone you love. I can’t reveal how I know this, I had to sign an NDA, you just have to trust me. These are your only minutes. What are you going to do with them?
Just Bored
It’s about half past six in the evening on Wednesday, July seventeenth. Blandine Watkins sits in her bedroom, contemplating a walk around the Valley. It has been an unusual day. In the morning, she took a shift at Ampersand, covering for a hungover coworker, which was not so unusual, but the shift was followed by a dog walk with Jack, and this was unusual. The feelings that asserted themselves inside her have not yet evacuated. She’s still pleasantly shaken from the conversation in Pinky’s loft, the ghost of Jack’s touch lingering on her skin. Her limbs move slowly, dreamily, as though the air is made of whipped cream. Jack and Blandine parted ways when he had to pick up a labradoodle in the luxurious, historic neighborhood by the river—a neighborhood that Blandine avoids. She headed to the final community hearing in the basement of a church, where she sat very still, said nothing, and felt a lot.
Spending time with her roommates felt unnatural for everyone involved, but she perceives some fuzzy moral obligation to do more of it. Todd sits on the couch in the next room, watching the most recent episode of Tough Love, which is set at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China. She can hear it through her wall.
To block out the sound of the grim show, Blandine puts on her headphones, which dispense Hildegard von Bingen’s “O eterne Deus.” It’s excellent, obviously. On her floor, Blandine plucks her leg hair. She received these headphones from her theater director at Philomena. She vowed to stop using them but couldn’t—they were too nice. Turning up the volume, she plucks because the tug on each follicle hurts well. The music is unpredictable, melancholy, celestial. A choir of female voices climbing and falling and climbing. In the most enchanting way, the music sounds like it was written by someone who had never heard music before.
The tweezers cast a mesmerizing spell over Blandine’s willpower, and she is addicted. Their ability to rid from the root. Their purgative capacity. She hates it. It inhabits her. She vows that each plucked leg hair will be her last—that she’ll relinquish the tweezers, go outside, and engage with the world. Instead of plucking her leg hair on a lovely Wednesday night, she could read a book, or go for a run, or improve her Latin so as to read Hildegard’s writing in its original language, or try to find an accurate definition of postmodernism, or research the specifics of fiduciary law, or investigate quantum mechanics—see what’s going on over there. She could work out her attitude toward college. If she arrives at a conclusion that refutes her current operating beliefs, she could study for the GED, then the SAT, then apply to universities. She could use a word like amaranthine in a conversation. She could try to contact the Divine. She could write a letter to Mayor Barrington protesting the egregious construction that’s about to demolish her Valley. She could write an op-ed and submit it to the Gazette. She could reach out to Paul Vanasomething, craft a plan to invade Pinky’s loft. Start building his voodoo replica.
She looks up from her plucking to admire the image printed above her bed.
After losing herself in it for several minutes, Blandine slaps her thigh, wrenching herself out of one self-inflicted pain with another—the only way she knows how to reroute her behavior. She removes the headphones, packs She-Mystics: An Anthology into her corduroy bag, and prepares to leave the apartment. If she’s not going to contact the Divine, she might as well go outside.
In the sticky living room, Todd faces the television, his body splayed in the heat.
Blandine watches the screen for a moment.
“Mind if I join you, for a second?”
Todd jolts, startled. “I didn’t even know you were here.”
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“Scaring you.”
“You didn’t. I just didn’t know you were here.”
Blandine shrugs. “Okay.”
Experimentally, she sits on the couch. Todd adjusts, darting hostile glances at her. They position themselves on opposite edges, conscious of the space between them. She and Todd have never done this before. The couch is his territory.
“All right if I watch for a second?” she asks.
“It’s a free country,” he replies moodily, not looking at her.
“Is it?” she asks.
He ignores her. They watch television with the stiff fraudulence of actors in a school play.