Shock Value
Something I’ve never seen before. Something I’ve never thought of before. Shock value is an originality competition for most electrifying input. Shock value stuns and paralyzes. Shocking information that acts like a taser; incapacitates the receiver. Shock value as punishment; negative stimulus reward. I’m electrified by terror. Shock value dulls the senses, makes everyday sensation cheap and unsatisfactory. Pornographic shock. The shock of witnessing pornography for the first time. Repetition of the shocking event. I’m putting all my worst fears on a loop, until even those dull, and I’m left all alone with my ravenous desperation for a higher voltage shock to get my heart rate up.
Physical suffering is the highest value currency. That’s why I exercise, struggle, endure violence, and survive. Moral discipline through agony. My violent aspirations. Shock is a pedagogy for suffering and cruelty. The more extreme, more violent, more shocking, the more I learn what to imitate and desire. Shocking desensitization. I’m shocked and awed by the extreme headline, the offensive reply, the extreme image on Instagram, the saturated colors no one is supposed to use on the internet anymore. I’m shocked by normalcy and politesse. I’m shocked by friendship. I’m shocked by photography and invention. I’m shocked — shocked I’m in a state of perpetual shock. I can’t get a grip. The shocks keep coming. Shock value hypnotizes by continually violating my previously set and accepted norms. I think I must not have had any to begin with, given how shocking everything has become.
I simply had no idea things could be so shocking. I had no idea reality could outdo my imagination — that the external world could frighten, surprise, and attack me, like a warzone. The world finds me where I’m most vulnerable. It locks onto the sweet, soft spot where I’m weakest; where I thought I was safe, where I thought there was no mystery, and it gives me a nice, violent shock. I’m shocked, it’s true, and I remain that way — eyes wide open, mouth agape. I’m watching the world stun me out of my mind, one shocking input at a time. I need the shock to feel alive.
“Culture is a shock delivery system to a necrotic body politic.
Attention is governed by novelty and violation.
Repeated exposure to shock produces desensitization.
Desensitization creates a self-reinforcing addiction for greater shocks.
This cycle reshapes desire and the will to survive (or die).”
Neglect and Maintenance
Envious of some things. Envious of the aristocracy. They’re selling rococo-style peasant garb at the fast fashion outlets now. I’ll buy it, and feel envious of someone else’s luxury price tag. I’m envious of their ability to be themselves — to buy themselves into being. I’m always hiding and trying to blend in with the crowd. Landfill mass: indistinct and useless. I’m envious of difference. I’m envious of people getting to be different. I’m envious of people who get what they want. I’m all refusal and denial. They’re acquisition. Where they always get what they want, I behave like a child, wanting and recoiling at the possibility of getting. I waver. I can’t commit. I’m 99th percentile of total ambivalence. I can’t get attached. I can’t keep still. Don’t let me get what I want, but let me want it, and suffer wanting it without ever getting it. I want that more than I want anything else.
I’m envious because I’m not opulent. I’m a peasant. I’m both average and underwhelming. I identify with basements, air ducts, substructures, chairs, semitrucks, pavement, litter, suspension. I’m the things you take for granted. The worthless nothingness you can’t even see, but which keeps everything running. I identify with vacuum sealed chambers, plastic, insulation, drainpipes, cobwebs, pollution, pharmaceuticals, mold, mildew, and humidity. I’m envious of people who evaporate because I’m heavy and stagnant. They get to move upwards, outwards, circulate, mix. I remain hermetically sealed; left to asphxiate on my own waste. They’re oxygen, I’m anaerobic. They’re muscle tissue, I’m fat. My electrical conductivity is average, unchanging, if anything. The electricity they conduct moves smooth and fast. I’m so bare minimum and hyper-exposed. They don’t bother to put security around something as cheap and worthless as this. The people I’m envious of… They’ve got all these decorations and accessories building them up. Like armor, they wear so much stuff. Meanwhile, I’m impoverished. Wearing my skin costs me too much.
I’m jealous because I’m downwards, behind, and beneath. My face is backwards. They get to look into the future. I’m upside down and my body feels inverted. I feel nothing inside, but the whole world outside is painfully bright — even in the night. I see from an odd position, and I can’t do anything with it.
I notice myself in contrasts. I see myself in light nail polish color on tan skin in the summer. The garbage bins always have my name written on them, somewhere. I see fertility in sterility and perfection in landfills. They see beauty in order and fertility in creation. My definitions are wrong and reversed. I normalize the shocking. I make the extreme mundane. I’m an operative of something dangerous and invisible, an agent of psychological-epigenetic warfare. I invert categories and disorient quietly. The people I’m jealous of give civilization its most noble ideals. I provide civilization with the justification for blood sacrifice and organized violence.
Who are “they”?
“They” are like “me,” since I’m “they,” to “you.” — Of course.
”They” are always the opposite. “They” are the negation of “you.” — Of course.
I know who I am because I know who I am not. — Of course.
I’d like to lie on the internet; become a fiction writer, and let my entire internet production be treated as a imaginary character — a splintered, replicable identity, who has nothing shared with the original. I want to be treated as a betrayal to the embodied organism who types and touches the keyboard. I want to betray people’s belief in authenticity. I want to betray their trust in me. I fetishize catfishing because I want people to have their hopes and dreams crushed. I want them to love what doesn’t exist in the flesh. I think it would be fun, and funny, to lure people in with a non-existent image, then trap them in despair for having clung to it. I could shock them with disappointment. I could make them terrified to trust another image. They’d log on and always feel suspect and surveilled. Eventually, they’d surrender to the lies. They’d come to need the lie more than reality, because there would simply be more lies than there is any reality… They’d look at every image, screenshot, and text wall, and remember the humiliation of having once believed what they saw. They’d come to prefer the fiction and refuse reality altogether. I’d trap them in the labyrinth, and take a sadistic pleasure in their pathetic defeat. I want to be that for them. My gift: their loss.
“Deception is more powerful than truth.”
I know we’re all God’s soul, dripping like honey through the honeycomb; wearing individuality to better comprehend the stifiling, suffocating unity of creation. It would be unbearably boring if we remembered that we are all the exact same — all of humanity — the same human body, thinking from the same human body for centuries. I have to answer to someone else. I invent the stranger because I need the unknown to confirm or deny who I think I am.
In the middle of the night, I wake up and wonder if I tied myself up that way, and merely hallucinated the other person. I was scared I dreamt up my whole life. Like Alice, I keep telling myself to wake up.
I wake up, and I’m still here, waiting for my body to betray me, break down, and disintegrate. I can’t trust my body. I can’t trust life. I’m decieved by existence. I’m praying to Christ; carrying his cross while I do the dishes and bleed over the sink. I’m asking strangers if they can see me. Can you feel me? Can you touch me? I feel like a magician and I’m my own magic trick. I’m alone pantomiming, concocting potions, creating poision, spellcasting the imaginary crowd, from dust, like puppets, from my hallucinated stage. Nothing could be worse than being responsible for my own life. Lonelier and loneliest, I’m no longer desperate for a shocking twist. I want the ancient and the frail; the curved spine, the prosthetic, and the cane. I want the unwanted — everything past its prime. Rotten and sweet; too much force weighing down on it; like sugar-syrup-putrefaction inside; the hidden contained beyond expiration, and still, it survives. I want a thousand years to pass by in a single afternoon. I want the waiting and the patience. I want what cannot be finished. I want to wait so much, I’ll invent time to keep me still and arrested in my place. I will wait.
This is neither average nor underwhelming and I’m jealous!