We are the broken ones. The worn down, crumpled up, torn to shreds people. Our hearts flood with blackened blood as we succumb to the seeping weeping caterwaul of the universal suck. Of giving in to the noise at our periphery—a noise that fiddles with our threads causing us to snap and pursue this thing called “same.” Wiggling our tired bodies into the form of fit, we rest for a moment in this, the unearned answer.
We break. We give up. We let go of ourselves.
For a moment.
Only for a moment do we allow that fast-food pattern to be drawn lifeless and flat in our work. It breaks us like a toy. Like a bone. Like a wild horse, fenced in a field beside a roaring motorway.
The pattern works—we’ve seen it, over and over and over. We imitate this pattern to secure our own success, sharply aware of the muffled thump of our heart’s inevitable slip-and-fall incident as we do. Deep inside the pattern, we see our futures held hostage by platform barons and served to the throngs of the tasteless. Scraps from a plate are force-fed to us all by some algorithmic monster, and we lay quietly fattening our livers for someone else’s pâté of influence empire.
“I’m tired,” you say, turning to face a pâté-mate. “I’m part of the pattern now—doing this like they do this. Do you like it?”
We are broken the moment we ask that question.
We are broken the moment we believe ourselves to be.
We must rephrase that question and ask it of ourselves.
“Do YOU like it? Do you like YOURSELF for doing it?”
Disrupt!
We flip that table and refuse to be eaten. Refuse to be heavily sauced and made palatable. To be salted and sweetened for this mass-market nation with its insatiable appetite for the dull. We examine the pattern but we don’t get lost in it. We lick with rough tongues and smack our lips to the flavor while rolling the simplicity of it around in our mouths.
This is a taste—but it is not our taste.
We are broken for as long as it takes to spit out those artificial flavors. To spit out that momentary doubt in ability, in vision, in direction. The doubt in ourselves.
Be not broken!
There’s no such thing as the right way or wrong way. Just our way. Else it’s watered down and broken. The recipe is incomplete, and it tastes bad because it’s not our cooking.
Disrupt! Throw the pots and pans out the window! Fire the meddling maître d's!
Ah. Now we are the unbroken broken ones. The ones who come back. The ones who stepped into that pool of slick oil to see how its smooth and pleasant surface would coat, cloak, and protect us. Weak in the moment and tired from so many forays into experimentation with no results, we applied the auto-tuned glaze of it to our work. Made everything pitch-perfect, spot-on, and exact.
No errors.
No flaws.
No life!
To be broken for a moment is good. Broken snaps us out of our uncertainty. Broken reaffirms our belief that modifying the core of our artistic expression for the purposes of disposable consumption is a potentially life-altering mistake. (Unless we figure out how to crack it without disturbing our ethical hubs—good luck everyone! See you at the meet and greet!) But overall, even after the broken, the center of our planet remains impenetrable. Impenetrable even as the head-scratching habits of the masses drill into our crust of confidence.
When we break, we slip effortlessly into the stream of sameness, allowing ourselves to be digested with ease. We unbreak with the realization that it’s better to be detested than digested.
To be detested is at least a blip on a heart monitor. Digested is forgotten. Pooped out in a bathroom stall and flushed away with all the other sewage. Never causing an ache, a headache, or the uncomfortable roil in the belly that signals the presence of something rich.
Break us all you want. Tear us apart. Rip us to pieces. Your can’t do is our must do, and our must do is to disturb, disrupt, and discombobulate. To work within the machine without becoming the machine itself. Without succumbing to the pattern—the steadily fading facsimile, photocopied into oblivion.
You are the broken ones.1
We are momentarily cracked and consistently applying our glues.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
“I don’t look past right now,” he said. “Now there’s this fame business. I know it’s going to go away. It has to. This so-called mass fame comes from people who get caught up in a thing for a while and buy the records. Then they stop. And when they stop, I won’t be famous anymore.”
- Bob Dylan, aged 23
This is from the NYer archives. An interview in 1964. He was… wrong about it going away.
I also like this:
“My background’s not all that important, though,” he said as we left the studio. “It’s what I am now that counts.”
Via The New Yorker.2
On Rotation: Ladies and gentlefolk, I give you, The Ramones, live in 1978.
It’s only 13 minutes long but it’s a blistering indictment of tight, to-the-pointedness songwriting. Shot on Super-8 Sound film at the Granada Theatre in KC, KS.
Via Eric Maierson’s Fave 5
Not sure what song to put on The Stream On Rotation playlist for this. I’m gonna choose Sheena over Judy.
Dig these street-style posers. Animal clay dolls by Russian artist Valentina Gekova. A bunch more here to look at.
Via John Freeborn
Unslicing a tomato ASMR. Mmmm. Relaxing. Sensual. Satisfying.
Via Kottke
I mean not YOU, obviously.
Just a reminder about 12ft ladder. If you’ve run out of articles in the NYer (and many other pay-walled sites) it sometimes works, though you lose a lot of formatting stuff. I get subs for NYer every couple of years, watch them pile up, then cancel. I’m about due another sub to assuage my free-article guilt. :)