Fuck Everyone But Us

We revise

2010-06-28T18:29:28Z

What you see below are the raw bits of novel as they began to form. Read the entire work, in pocket-sized book form by clicking here: Fuck Everyone But Us

We find each other.

2009-09-15T04:00:26Z

We find each other on the Internet, friends turned strangers made friends again through photos of lives we don’t recognize, portraits in strings of secret code and song lyrics. We need these archives. Or else cannot destroy them. We will find the people we are surprised we don’t remember, who a decade or more ago seemed like the most important thing. When we remember you, we type you in and look you up, and we discover that there are thousands of other people with your name, that sound that made you you is shared by even less familiar strangers, with families with children with jobs with the same Ikea furniture. We can peek into living rooms of doppelgangers, a portal we have opened and cannot close. Bridget Harris married a dentist. Dave Dent is still alive. These are people not meant to exist in the realm of the still-possible. These are phantom names, like limbs, that ring in our ears after they are gone, that when spoken after vows of silence will fit right back in their old spots in the hollows of our ears, that have been moving through the same world just so much as we have been — and so what phantoms have our names created, where are our fates that end in dentist, On Kowara incantations met with surprise at how people who are more names than people are people after all.

We ask for fortunes instead of facts.

2009-05-24T06:16:50Z

We ask for fortunes instead of facts, a way to chart imaginary progress. We visit machines and wait for our futures to spill out. This penny arcade unfurls paper as slick as a fax machine's; each becomes antique before our eyes. Here's your future hand-me-downed. Feel for its holes, for the days that will slip through it.

We are starting to worry about you.

2009-05-24T06:14:09Z

We are starting to worry about you. We think you should be dating again, get out there, play the field, or at least visit the field, admire the smooth flat surface of possibilities, admit that there is a field, that you have arms and legs and a vested interest in who wins this game, that you like sports — or at least you once did. We are starting to wonder if maybe you are not sure which team to play for. We are starting to wonder if maybe you don't understand our sports metaphors, or if they are insulting to all involved.

We were skeptical.

2009-05-24T06:06:15Z

We were skeptical, or perhaps we had altogether too much optimism, but tomorrow the world could change. Tomorrow ballots would be cast and we could feel the sea change of a new era. The last shift we had not seen coming, with the century coiling around us. With this shift we pray for unknotting, with our breath already held in advance of what will strangle us, what will let us breathe out. Tomorrow, long time coming — the air tingled with it. We didn't know if the world would go ever back to the thing that we remembered. We didn't know then how unlike the world we knew the world would become in a few slow instants, how much worse it could get (because it couldn't get any worse, could it? We kept saying this. We kept saying this).

We let the universe go, but nothing else.

2009-05-24T05:50:02Z

We let the universe go, but nothing else, let it pass away from us, one day at a time rotating around ourselves and revolving around the sun. And so what is there to do except throw ourselves against one another — make ourselves into the hurtling objects we recognize only from images taken by the Hubble Telescope? We set our trajectories and launch ourselves at foreign objects — in an interpersonal warfare that has no diplomacy. We have to ignore the fact that other people are people, too, in order to make war or infatuation work.

We speak only in ironic meta comments

2009-05-24T05:47:06Z

We speak only in ironic meta comments, even though we have declared irony dead, at least nine times. Declaring irony dead is dead, we have decided. And there cannot be an un-ironic comment about irony.

We gather.

2009-05-24T05:42:38Z

We gather to be made into thankful creatures; if it works for a day we are lucky. We make pilgrimages to homelands past, foreign territories of the mind distorted by years of absence and the way things change while we are gone. Or we decide that these pilgrimages are not enough, that they do not satisfy the nostalgia that commands them, that these false pilgrimages hurt more than they help, dragging out the disconnect between what was and what is into something monstrous. Still, we are talked into visits. We are talked into being the people that we once were, flip of a switch, wear the discarded clothing of our childhood, adults made altogether small. We surround ourselves with those who have loved us and abused us. We will eat dinner with these people.

We made circles to cure you.

2009-05-15T23:54:06Z

We made circles to cure you, a pilgrimage to the medicine wheel, tangling ourselves in a myth we could not believe with our minds. We found faith in the way our skin tingled when standing on that spot. We were never sure what cured you, how or if you'd been cured. Circles returned us, circles knotted up our conversations, age and relativity and a refrain of refraining from speaking of it, because even a whisper sounds like a circle.

We talk over each others heads.

2009-05-07T19:54:57Z

We talk over each others heads. We talk near each other, around each other, in an attempt to get attention from each other by ignoring each other. We are being fantastic, eccentric or intelligent in their presence in hopes that their ears will perk up when we are around, in hopes that they will be more interested in us than we appear interested in them. All of our efforts to appear fabulously disinterested belie altogether too much interest.

We are not our photographs.

2009-05-07T19:49:06Z

We are not our photographs, and afterward we are nothing but. We look through lenses instead of putting our naked eye against the air; this frame is where our lives will land regardless. Acid free paper staves off forgetfulness, but replaces memory with memorization. We have an unquenchable need to capture everything within the fluttering of a shutter, but a shutter must blink, must close off and finish to catch. We must blink. We must look away. It is the spaces in between gazes that catch up with us, that hold meaning or make it meaningful. We are those spaces, created in darkness, we are bookends and we are the gap between frames. We lose track of the edges, but it is all edges, almost all horizon, where the borders of the borders fade quickly into their own endings, the way all beginnings must.

We procrastinated.

2009-05-07T19:45:18Z

We procrastinated as much and as quickly as possible, like it was going out of style, like we were getting extra points for style, pushing the limits of the world's expectations for us. How much later could we arrive to work with no one batting an eye? How much later, in that case, could we arrive without getting a formal talking to? Deadlines were not suggestions but merely hurdles to avoid. We did not procrastinate out of laziness. We were thinking constantly of our responsibilities like little dark clouds hovering overhead and we were constantly checking the weather.We could feel in our bones the barometric shift of our shirked responsibilities until they were completed. Could it be that we put them off because we liked that feeling? The precarious tight rope walk of predicted panic waiting for a subtle breeze? It was a breeze that seemed never to come. We were strangers to falling. And so we kept testing the edges, pushing our procrastination harder and farther, as it was continually revealed just how much we could get away with. This baffled us, shamed us, the idea that we could have been getting away with this much more all along, could have been bare minimuming it and freeing up minutes and hours and months to do something more worthwhile. We had this idea that there was something more worthwhile, always out there, always hovering just out of reach of whatever it was we were doing. We could stretch all day but if we wouldn't know it when we saw it we would never find it. We would never find it. We always felt guilty for this, and we felt guilty that we were not doing more about our responsibilities, and that we were not doing more to get out of them.

We found each other's next of kin through numbers saved in cell phones.

2009-05-07T19:43:20Z

We found each other's next of kin through numbers saved in cell phones, the only parts spared from crashes, precious metals sent sputtering across sidewalks.

We ATM.

2009-05-07T19:40:55Z

We ATM, ATM, ATM, ATM. Another transaction. Food sustains us from paper, the feeling we get from (about to be) losing it, just before we have to plunk it down. We trade in guilt for cash each time, constant voice in our heads of how we could be scrimping more, how we really do not need this fill in the blank, but if we were really going to look at what we do not need we would not be here. We do not need to live in cities. We do not need to eat out. We do not need to own books or buy clothes when we could write our own and darn our own. None of this is sustainable. None of this is ever quite enough. We do it anyway.

We had dreams about strangers.

2009-05-07T19:38:52Z

We had dreams about strangers who for one night were not strangers, who returned to their own strange orbits the next day, without any more discussion than an awkward kiss goodbye, in a car or standing on the street beside one. Sometimes we would go out for drinks with them again, months or more in the future, and we would find out they had really cared, that they were just as confused as we were about the world, that none of us knows how to act or how to react in situations like these, that we, us, not they, had created the nothing of it through our assumption that it was only that, that we had created that awkward goodbye by doing what we thought they wanted, by saying see you later and meaning nothing by it at all. Sometimes we would get a second chance, which we would ruin. Sometimes we would never have that follow up conversation, they would date someone else, or we would, and in our sleeping selves that alternate plane of existence would blur until we were not sure if any of it had been real, or if all of it was. Our nights were lost this way. We would almost make a real connection. We would almost fuck this way. We would almost screw up everything. We would almost fix everything. We would make it almost home by some drunkard's miracle, and we would find ourselves the next morning the same people, with the same tightly knotted confusion pulled tighter still. We knew we could not return to the unknowing, though in our daily interactions it was as though we had never spilled too much of ourselves or a drink on you when we meant for it to seem like we could keep the liquid of our hearts inside the glass. We were a marvel of surface tension. We knew too much about density, which things would float and which would sink. We would drown ourselves, a witchhunt act of purification. The liquid would be let from the dam in a trickle, first a beer, then maybe a cocktail, getting the order all wrong of course, and before we knew it we would be strangers again.