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The following scraps have languished in my Drafts folder for up to a year and no longer inspire me to revisit or improve them. So I’m bundling them together as part of a spring cleaning effort. Enjoy.

“I harbor talion hope—vengeful hope. Not that which rebounds from blows, bifurcates about difficulty . . it is not the dainty and feminine hope you expect of me. Mine is the hope of a wrongly convicted man, thirty years wronged, out on parole for blood. My hope is the clench of a kitchen knife and a judge’s address seared across the retina. My hope, John, will take what it was promised.”

The ubiquity of ”PLEASE LET US SERVE YOU ON ANOTHER CHECKOUT” signage implies the existence of a consumer who would have taken “CLOSED” as a personal rejection.

I am reflected: reflected, am I. All my virtues are exposed like nerves, live wires fibrillating with your passage by. I see myself in all of you—what I was and had but younger… more composed and Platonic. Wish I had been that cool. There's a bracing wind and I sneak a glance and as soon as I've congratulated myself on my steel, my practiced lean-in, I remember I'm trying to impress both of us while you're not and the world blows on through my empty ribs.

I see in you the weathered pass connecting valleys dry and fertile

I see in you the melaleucas tracing out ocean breeze as all else sleeps

I see in you the cluster and wet-cave marriage of stalagmite and stalacite

I see in you all that is of geological time: jetstream, tectonics, sequester & release

I see in you the earth; do you see it of yourself . . ?

There is a small black Dial on the left side of the toaster, and I attempt to eat it. My teeth get some purchase, I redouble my efforts, and yet I fail. The Dial loses my interest.

We stood there awhile, the debt enforcer and I, each unable to move. Me, $17,300 in the hole, a debt thrice sold and purchased till only the very nastiest of the collection agencies—so I'd heard—would touch it. And him, this 8’4” ogre, this Bad Upbringing ossified and sewn into a Politix suit jacket too large even for him, recognising now that beating the shit out of me would be so utterly redundant that it might even make things better, all things considered… might hand my futile tragedy of a life some kind of recovery-from-trauma framework to hang glide on, not up and out of my downward spiral, oh no, no chance of that, but at least in more of a gentle-albeit-doomed death spiral rather than the highway quadruple rollover that got me here.

He spent so much time telling others to be themselves that he, himself, formed no self to be.

I want to write about the appropriation of self-care for corporate interest. About the maddening arms race between the exponential demands of mere existence in our society, and our increasingly perfected and streamlined means of rehabilitating ourselves from them. I want to write about the thirty, forty goddamned healthy things we need to do per day just to not feel broken. I want to ask others about all this. Do you ever feel, I want to say, that you are always working off the clock in this mad logistic nightmare of self-help? Do you ever feel like they have tricked us, all of them, into thinking that these are things we do for us? The dieting and the stretching and the The Sleep Manifesto podcast and on and on and we tell ourselves we are struggling to adapt to life, but the truth is life was made harder, it was deliberately made harder, as hard as we could bear and then harder still so some would break, and when we do these healthy things we aren't returning to some idyllic state of natural being as though the Caveman Me would have walked around with beautiful posture and wonderfully hydrated skin, do you feel this way, too? Because I do. No, I know. I know that Caveman Me would have lounged, revelled in it, done fuck all and picked his teeth. Does a gorilla do pushups? Does a gorilla de-stress, unwiiind to better stay atop the pack? Fuck no. We are well beyond instinct, far out on the prairie past the reasonable and just. We are approaching psychotic self-care, no I mean it, I really do mean a complete break from reality. How many devices, okay think, you have your heart rate right there, yes? Some have blood glucose, diabetics. Sleep monitors, already a given, screen time, you know? Push it out, what's the trend, what's the implication? It's what it always has been, man as machine, happiness as some combinatorial state of all these little chemical levers and we're the fucking monkeys pulling them for treats, nono, I messed up, pulling them for the opportunity to work because we’ve been too fuckin' thick to even realise it’s a job, it's our labour all along. 40 hour work week plus 20 hours physical and psychological and spiritual repair, and guess what you get paid? Not fucking 60! Do you feel that? Is it anybody else? I'm not crazy. But if I were crazy, okay, ask you this, who wins the arms race? In the end. How much more shit can we cram into our free time before the diminishing returns go negative, before that extra sixty seconds chair yoga notification breaks my fucking back instead, before there's no more happiness to be squeezed out even from the full-time happy, or whatever you'd call us, mental health advocates, what a joke. Who wins? Your job gonna get easier? Fuck, no. They'll keep at it. And, I mean, happiness wasn't on the upward trend anyway, correct me if I'm wrong but we weren't even keeping up. Isn't that something. Billions of human hours crafting our precious gift-wrapped morning routines, cute little habit triggers and rewards systems all over, trying to engineer the thing and we couldn't even do it. Imagine how fucked up we'd be if we hadn't even tried. But for the best, mm? At SOME point, they'd drag it back, slow the pace a bit, if we really couldn't hack it. Oh, I don't know. That doesn't sound right, either, I'm being wishful, because we can't hack it now. I know I can't, hell I know you can't, whatever layer of denial you're on, you can't, you're not really satisfied with this fucked up state of affairs where you need a to-do list for all the things you gotta do to relax. Man. What happened to us?

I thanked him and left.