The Trouble With Being Based (Excerpt from Ch. 72 of "Femoid")

Savoy Matviyenko tries philosophy in the style of Emil Cioran

Context: After losing everything (including her slugs, her job, and her relationship with Avery), staying up for three days straight on Dexedrine and shrooms, and trying to off herself in the roiling waters of the Burrard Inlet, Savoy, our protagonist, who has recently developed an appreciation for turbo-pessimist Emil Cioran, takes a(n) (semi-)ironic stab at writing some philosophical aphorisms of her own.

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Some would be born into the bile of Western society. Others, its tears.

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Erect I make a resolution; flaccid I revoke it. Sitting, I merely overthink it.

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That we might better compare ourselves to the apple in the Garden of Eden.

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Alexa, call our bull. My wife’s ready to be fucked again.

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The overtly racist, the deathly sardonic, the maliciously anti-government, the anti-celebrity, the cybernetically ruthless… In brief: I trust no man except one who is willing to risk jail time to post a poorly worded rant on Facebook.

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The greatest cure for superficial extremism (the internet variety) is not merely love, but sustained, uncompromising interpersonal gummy-bear eating.

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Of the tortured souls I’ve encountered, my fellow insomniacs remain the dearest. Every night brings a private mutiny, a capsize not worth discussing. So, we might say—any person who can’t sleep at night is still redeemable.

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When I speak of authenticity or integrity in thought or action, I mean thought or action that does not come packaged from a source, is not clarified or reified through the consumption of propaganda, forced opinion, or religious dictums; is not spurred from collective psychosis, cognitive dissonance, or similar poisoned streams (dead grandparents) we allow to flow into us. I mean, independent thought that exists tangentially to influence and that which is derived from the self in accordance with the will.

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The ironist makes the worst kind of lover. Even the seriousness of penetration is rife with melancholic disdain, a hidden resignation. (I miss you! Aw, fuck, do I miss you…)

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Anonymous, unmoderated online forums are the id of humanity. Anonymous, moderated forums are the ego. Moderated, identity-based forums are the superego.

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The Revolution will be fought in slides and bucket hats.

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Ours is a deeply ironic age. A pathologically sarcastic age. For this reason, it now benefits everyone to become a student of this eupeptic art!

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A burnt-out society can’t manage proper hedonism any more than a gall stone can grow wings.

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You are the sin you acknowledge.

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The greater your degree of removal from society, the greater your longing for its destruction. To think I could have been saved by a weekly meet-and-greet…a welcoming farmers’ market…

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For the contrarian: a natural revulsion to the status quo. Easier to dry out your own entrails than offer the consensus.

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We deserve that which we are apathetic toward. More, we hyperstitize it.

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Some hide from The Void, some laugh into it, some would fluoride-stare into it.

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19th century: a hum

20th century: a burp

21st century: a yawn

If the 20th century was spent under Satan’s heel, the 21st will be spent in his lap.

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I find no greater fidelity than with those who have suffered monstrous, ineffable torments. Like two bait worms asking after family.

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Every so often, truth (factuality applied honestly—a storybook impossibility) must be made to wear its livery, or else it risks being a bore.

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Everyone thinks the satirist is always on the lookout for the next thing to ridicule, when really she’s hoping with every part of herself that the day will come when she finds nothing.

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Ebonics dun goin’ be da lingua franca of da tweeny-firf century, big dawg. It should come as no surprise that we no longer have the words to express divinity. And on that note—where will you fit into the post-industrial racial democracy? How about the supra-industrial melanin monarchy? A spectre is haunting the West—the spectre of gay mulatto globalist neo-feudal technocracy.

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I try not to picture things so boring as end goals, so fanciful as utopias. We’ve never come so close as the starting line.

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Nothing more fashionable than being dead inside. My theory: Our world demands emotional responses at every turn—advertising, interpersonal relationships, social media. Those who have grown cold, barring significant mental illness, are those who have hit the threshold for emotional output and have been willed past it.

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One trip to the core of any major city (or bus commute through it to a terrible workplace) is enough to convince you of end-of-days notions.

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Add onto the everyman’s plate the need to dictate his own fate in the absence of divine mandate. He will place it next to the need to buy milk from 7-Eleven.

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In the Perfect World of Control (i.e., this), grassroots movements are grown in greenhouses.

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If he’s a cat dad, he’s probably infertile. Likewise if he eats Hot Pockets.

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Strength will be supplanted in the name of Stamina (the nu-serf/neo-slave will be prized for her ability to carry out menial tasks ad infinitum). Intelligence will find its rival in Cunning (a clear, healthy mind isn’t needed—but an adaptive mind, capable of invention new ways of acquiring currency and optimizing current infrastructure is always in demand!). Self-determination will erode until it takes on the flavour of complacency in civic and personal matters. In every way, we will see the emergence of a new Homo Sapien. First: Homo Dedecus. Then, many years later: Homo Humiliatus.

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A million tweets aren’t worth the gunpowder of one well-aimed cartridge.

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The state of any society may be judged upon the state of its average citizen’s capacity to draw Shrek porn.

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The non-Avery art of today has inverted the time-honoured process for the discernment of its value. Instead of vying for your interest, your judgment, art now presupposes that you rise to it. Avoid this art. It is an unpollinated rose, a vacuous craft wherein meaning may be freely attributed to inferior works by those in positions of power (the pundits—those risible pricks, those vendors of sophistry and confusion), or, in the worst cases, those who transparently wish to profit. (Something in the human spirit lusts after beauty, but more than anything, it wishes to masticate upon beauty.)

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Our age’s reincarnation of Buddha is too busy playing Valorant on Twitch to attain spiritual enlightenment.

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Meme posters are the new missionaries.

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Machiavelli could not have predicted the methods through with we are controlled now. We suckle at Sun Tzu’s wet dreams.

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Protesters—mobilized potatoes.

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Multi-racial children like yours truly—an Irish, Ukrainian, black slave squared—bear the burden of hoisting two (or more) flags that they can never lay full claim to. They then attach themselves to what they most closely resemble. But this inevitably turns out to be an infinitely small, amorphous collection of other confused multi-flag bearers. Why do this to someone willingly, least of all your own? (As a rule, then: Beware the parenthetical. Beware the hyphenated!)

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Bring us your crack-addicted; bring us your deadbeats. Let them dance and be merry and never marry and construct their foundations upon Stygian shores! Let them build castles of curls and heterochromia and then abandon them to time and whimsy.

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The average tribe is now a wine-infused book club or a car owners’ rally.

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To compensate for timeless goals, we try new types of hot sauces.

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Whenever you tire of others, seek the company of animals. It is precisely their inability to communicate their real thoughts and impulses that we find so rewarding. I fear if we were to know them well, they would become as intolerable as man. (My dear Sisyphuses…)

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In the West, religion has been reduced to a dating profile choice. (God is not merely dead—he is fossilized.)

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If multi-culturalism was a happy state of existence, why must we be reminded of its utility by potato chip companies at every possible juncture?

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So the elites say: The first thing to be built on Mars will be a Walmart!

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The Overton window isn’t shifting—it’s closing. (And so we are drawn to self-defenestration!)

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Even if a Caesar (me) were to exist among us, walking the same grungy streets, as embodiment of the Nietzschean ideal (the Dionysian, the will-to-power), they wouldn’t be able to ascend to a position of power. Too many restraints are placed upon the populace. The Rubicon is now miles wide, and no longer of water but quicksand. (Let me work, damnit!)

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Bring me digital assassination! For self-sabotage is the patrician way, and amicicide the divine.

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Hell is—the hoeless. (Get your shmoney up, pleighboi! 💰🤑)

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Ask the difficult questions. Ask the uncomfortable questions. Ask the questions that would go beyond the bone. (NOT sexual.)

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Living well is offered as sufficient opposition to disenfranchisement.

This somehow implies that being happy and productive might someway emancipate you from the conclusions you’ve reached. What could it be, though, but a dereliction of duty?

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There is a distinct difference between the villain and the virtuous villain.

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Even suicide, one of the great topics, has lost its significance. Experience has shown that when someone speaks of it now (especially the young), it’s out of a desire to avoid embarrassment or boredom (“Ugh, I wanna die!”)

To see suicide also enter the realm of the gimmick…

Either kill yourself over the big things or the hopelessly specific. Only the fool kills herself over something like a job. Take this life as yours, instead, and risk becoming a 21st-century Cassandra. Or else, founder as Ophelia.

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The over-examined life is not worth living, either.

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Is it not a surprise that a woman, a femoid (👾), is present at both a career’s inception and its ruination?

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A radical idea: no major medical intervention until a citizen has reached an age suitable for having children. Then, a comfortable life with the help of modern medicine. But not until then.

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Freedom has ever been a nebulous concept associated with theorems and ideals. But even this finds diminution in our discourse. We’re left to wonder what it excretes.

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One must only twist the doctrine, pull at its sleeve, and a new parasite is born. Behold: Institutional Science! System of the inculcated! (I will never be a botanist now! Haha!)

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“Strength restored by wounding.” The greatest of Roman notions since forgotten! What if we were to wound everyone? Every cell? Starting with ourselves?

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We see this moral code (forced on us) to be afflicted with a gangrene, yet we cling to it. As the great prophet Avery Bazin once declared, your task is to prick the dying beast so many times, and so often, that it succumbs to the death it longs for.

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When Savoy speaks, the Devil shivers. When Dax speaks, the Devil puts in his AirPods.

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BPD, mania, psychosis—I see a day in which we trade them like Pokémon cards.

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Love—tyrant of our inconsistencies. She who hasn’t walked the Champs Élysées (Kitsilano), lain outside her lover’s apartment, and vomited her ardour for concerned bystanders to marvel at!

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The way forward…

How one agonizes over this! What possible way forward is there in the fractured, hyper-concentrated, paradoxically diffuse quasi-reality of today…? I know—watch television show! Forget!

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And so, in the end, at the bitterest of lymphatic, thanatotic conclusions, we huddle, we heave together in a world of illusions. A clown world!

. . .

(Fr, though, I both love and loathe Cioran as a philosopher. He elevated the aphoristic form to the realm of poetry [All Gall Is Divided is particularly excellent], and we needed to see the logical extremes of Western nihilism and pessimism, but, in my opinion, Cioran’s work is ultimately meant to be overcome.)

. . .

For more of Savoy’s insanity, check out the full Femoid novel:

Physical form — https://www.amazon.com/Femoid-Aaron-Barry/dp/1738633942/

Convenient E-book/PDF form — https://mcbussypublishing.org/product/femoid-by-aaron-barry-ebook/

Cheers,

Jasper/Aaron