THE NIGHTLY MIRROR

I’m watching You Will Live Forever, which is a very cute movie, and I just spontaneously did it again and it occurred to me it’s been such a long time since I had?

I’m not sure why. Toby was denied his weight loss shots by his insurance, because they said that they don’t cover stage 4 liver fibrosis, and he was like…. What?

But even before that we really haven’t been hanging out. It roughly coincided with the Kentucky Derby, and my boss being annoyed that his employees were friends outside work. I told him that Toby and Ricky were having homosexual sex together, and it was disgusting. His face was worth it.

I did mention that I was bisexual around that time as well. I don’t think he’s really down with hanging out with bros that are down with other bros. Unfortunately. Maybe he was just mad I didn’t go to the pottery class that one time. I don’t know.

Fawn, obviously.

I was just in a parking lot where a little girl belly-bumped into the back of her family’s sedan and said, “I got hit by a car, Daddy. You will remember me well. You will remember me all the time.”

Comrade, I am slightly drunk and listening to Lee “Scratch” Perry. I feel fucking good. I caved and installed my old AC unit and it feels like I’m being fucking poisoned and was pushed down a flight of stairs.

This is one of those thunderstorms where the rain sets on quick in random poweful bursts, and most of the lightning is very quick strobing flashes cloud to cloud. In my sleep, some strange anxiety came over me that my CPAP tube was beaming a radio signal directly into my head on a ray of electrons and it was some prelude to being electrocuted and I should take off the mask immediately, and maybe close the window to avoid a bolt of lightning from coming through.

To me, it is the perfect example of the kind of maudlin Adult Contemporary music that would make me sob when I was a little kid. Jesus Christ. I just find the whole delivery so funny.

So, this morning was the first time that the singer’s name popped into my head. (I remembered it as Tony Sedaca. Which is a funny deformation because I literally put my own name in there! But autocorrect just tipped me off, apparently there is someone named Neil Sedaka???? Who sang Breaking Up is Hard to Do??? I mean this guys name is literally Cicada???)

Anyways. I just looked at the lyrics, and I think this is very funny. Complete nonsense. Very disconnected thoughts, maybe a translation of something, I don’t know. The sentiments seem totally psychotic. Intense deep yearning, and I don’t believe lyrics have to make sense or read like conversation. I was just a little surprised.

It’s funny to try to remember what the music sounds like, because all I can remember is that Ashley’s Roachclip sample and maybe some keyboard piano stabs?

Which goes to show, I am drawn more and more to believing the Landian nightmare has something to it, that capital is the original artificial intelligence, and the more terrible possibility that it’s just Intelligence itself which is damned.

But that would have to ignore how stupid all this really is. It might take some kind of synthetic leap to factor caring about other people into your reasoning, but I think that’s the main hallmark of deep intelligence in our age.

And then I remembered Skinamarink.

Not sure if it matters to try to round off something as the end of an era while something new is beginning. I Saw the TV Glow sort of straddles the line too. Those are all young filmmakers, and the older two are more radical than the others. Not sure it’s ever been a substantial question to ask what constitutes a new generation. Wishful hype maybe.

There have been a lot of good horror films since The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, and Hereditary came out, oh, a few months ago. Get Out and House of the Devil in there too. Not sure what it would mean to have a new generation of horror immediately after that kind of golden age.

Elevated Horror is sort of the natural outgrowth of the “I appreciate the muppets on a much deeper level than you” generation. I’m not sure I can criticize that any other way than immanently. That is exactly me. I think to understand where that comes from, you have to watch a movie like Reality Bites, and see how much of culture was just inane references to Gilligan’s Island and quoting random commercials. “Lore” and “tropes” and academic slop of fandom studies is just all this refined by the internet. It makes me wonder about the way radio must have slopped people’s brains back in the day. That is how they talked about comic books once upon a time.

I feel like “the occult” generally is the backrooms of the radio age. All psychic forces are just radio. Television perfected this analogy.

I feel like “The Algorithm”, and intuiting what the Algorithm knows about you and what it wants you to know about the people around you and what it wants you to see and not see is the big occult force of our times.