Things I’m Tired Of

Cal Moore
Cal Moore
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read

Modern man. Homo economicus. A life sentence. The Beginning and the End. John Nash twitching in his grave, poked and provoked by the algorithm. Awakened Leviathan. Pandora warned you; now she’s dragging her heels dirty and delicate through the scorched city of plastic and numbers and foreclosure. The city of glass and speculation, the city of gutters and certainty.

Now you turn around and tell me you’re a writer and you sign my copy and say “you’re welcome”. You can barely stand to look at me, as a wizened sage you’ve been to the mountain top of human elation and you laughed. You’ve walked through the dust and the swarm, navigating the crowd until you found the young boy with the twinkle in his eye meet with the stillness and the deadness of your own, and you laughed. You’ve walked through the valleys of the forgotten and seen the swelling bodies threatening to breach the wire on the banks and drown the living in the dead, and yet still, you laugh. You’ve travelled through the lines of an old woman’s face, through her pleading hands, along a broken will that you shattered across your knee, with a laugh. You’ve howled and tittered and sneered with your teeth bared and your pen unsheathed. These are things I am tired of.

I am tired of the cult of the cynic. The cult of the patrician millstone, dragging irony and satire like a dull blade through quicksand. The burden not on the originators but the aspirants, the preening cynic legionnaires riding ridicule upon the stalking-horse of “humour”, betrayed by the shadows of their blades. Nothing worse than an imitator with blood on his hands, howling and baying at the dead grey disk hanging in the Nihilist’s ether. You tell me you’re a writer and you sign the copy we never asked for; wiping the guts of small insects from your hands and mouth. Tell me again, tell me what you think, spit it out. The remains are spilling from your lips. I scatter them amongst the ashes of the rotten earth as you look down on me aswirl in mirth emanating from the deepening darkening blackening hole of your soul. Dripping saliva, slick, white, thick with the bits and the twitch. You tell me you’re a writer.

Give me the pen, let me have a turn. If all I sketch is candy floss clouds and the face of a doll, what harm will it do? Are you afraid I dream of gods with clay ankles and synthetic angels? Will I pitch emotion at the plate of logic, grin in the limelight like a shit-brained starlet? Does truth exist in its own right, propelled by its own force, instantiated on its own terms? Is it found in the wells of the heart, in the light through the bars of the prison, in the songs of the slave? For you: the bottoms of bottles or the barrel of a gun. Now it’s loaded. Four in six. There’s the trigger. Pull it. Dashed hopes or dashed brains. Die in style. Die ironic.

These are the things I am tired of.

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Cal Moore

Written by

Cal Moore

Poetry, fiction, essays, cognitive philosophy, anarchism. A cathartic romp through a data dance hall of neuroticism, dodgy syntax and ego wrangling. Enjoy.

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