Apocalyse - The New Yorker

here's a piece i loved reading this week. it is strangely close to the absurd dreams i dream on most nights.



by Jack Handey


It is the year 2042. The world has devolved into apocalypse. The sky is dark in the day, and there are howls and screams at night. Marauding bands roam the countryside, preying on—and eating—their fellow-humans.

The mail comes only about once a week, twice if you’re lucky. It is mostly junk mail. Somehow I have a subscription to a horrible magazine, Cannibalism Today. It features gruesome photographs and recipes. I have written to the magazine’s circulation department, asking them to please cancel my subscription, but every month I get the current issue with a note that says, “Welcome, New Subscriber!” Nothing makes any sense anymore.

•

Today I hear the sound of wild dogs chasing something, or someone. There is a dreadful shriek, then silence.

I also get a notice that my favorite magazine, Survival Gardening, is going out of business. I had feared as much. The number of pages, and the size of the pages, had been getting smaller and smaller.

I feel forlorn. What kind of a world is it where an informative, helpful magazine like Survival Gardening can go broke but despicable rags like Rapeand Hitler! are full of glossy ads with freakish fashion models?

I get out a cartoon that I submitted to Survival Gardening. It shows a farmer with a hoe. A giant asteroid is about to crash into his field. The farmer says, “Well, there go the carrots.” They didn’t buy it, but I got a nice rejection letter.

The notice from Survival Gardening says they hope to restart the magazine at a later date, but will focus less on gardening and more on torture.

•

Despite my cancellation request, I continue to receive Cannibalism Today. I hear on the radio that the Great Leader has re-taken large parts of the cannibal domain. Then why hasn’t he conquered Wichita, which is where Cannibalism Today is published? Makes you wonder.

Our pulsing giant of a sun shows its face for the first time in weeks. It feels good.

My mood brightens further when I receive a free sample issue of a magazine called Secret Hideout. I assume it will tell you how to set up and secure a secret hideout. But, of course, no—it’s about how to find other people’s secret hideouts and flush them out, mainly using smoke bombs.

•

X-ray storms force me to move into the lead-lined shelter. I hear an armored vehicle pull up out front, then move on. It’s the mailman.

I am so desperate for reading material that I rush out to the mailbox, only to discover some junk mail and a double issue of Cannibalism Today. As I stand there under the roiling, violet clouds, with acid rain dripping on my face, I cannot believe my eyes. The magazine cover shows a vicious-looking hillbilly eating a baby! He holds the roasted infant up to his teeth like a slice of watermelon. The headline reads, “WHAT GOES WITH TATERS? TOTS!” I feel sick to my stomach.

I am determined to cancel this obscene piece of trash. Somehow I am able to get the circulation department on the therma-phone. But I am put on hold. A recording of Frank Sinatra singing “Come Fly with Me” plays over and over.

I consider taking my own life.

•

Then something strange happens: the X-ray storms suddenly stop. Also, after receiving a few more issues of Cannibalism Today I realize that it’s not such a bad magazine. Yes, it has horrible recipes and photographs, but there are also some entertaining features, like the column on stargazing. The articles can be interesting even if you’re not a cannibal, like the one about how human flesh is actually better for you than beef or dog. And there’s some pretty decent fiction, too.

•

Cannibalism Today stops coming. It’s not the best magazine in the world, but after a while you get used to something. I try to renew by phone, but I can’t get through. After a few anxious days, a handwritten letter arrives from “The Editorial Team.” It says that the magazine has lost its bulk-mail permit, and if I want the current issue I should come to the abandoned farmhouse about a mile away, after dark. And I should bring some friends. ♦

>>>>>

(29^th June 2015)

Currently in the plane on my way back home, 10:16pm. Less than two more hours to go and I’ll be back in sticky noisy land. Not that I don’t like feeling sticky and noise, I hate it.  Getting to the airport, or should I say the last few days have been frantic. Packing and clearing the apartment. Unpacking, and clearing, and packing, down to the store, up again, and down, and up. It does feel as if I’m going home for good, but I hate that idea. Good IS good, but not great. Mom has been a great help, although I wouldn’t say it to her face. Because I’m stubborn and immature. She managed to pack about 20 kilograms of food into one luggage, steaks (because Singapore doesn’t have it the same), blocks of cheese, tuna cans, even bread from woolies (because Singapore doesn’t have it the same). I didn’t like the idea of it at first, but I gave up trying to fight it. So we ended up with too much food and no space for our clothes. It was the same at the airport, unpack, pack, weigh, unpack, pack and weigh. I have now an exploding backpack and am looking slightly hypothermic with the amount of clothes on me. Well.

We’re sitting separately because I had this ticket booked in advance, I am sitting next to this guy who likes to sleep with his movie on, he also likes to sleep when I have to pee. I have to pee because I had instant kimchi cup noodles (duh), and then my mom made me eat an extra bowl of pasta she packed beforehand. Nothing can stop her tbh. Sitting diagonally behind me is this other guy, who is now eagerly chatting up this girl sitting on the other side of the aisle. They woke me she woke me with her odd laugh. She is laughing way to regularly. He must be on a roll. Way to go. Airplane romance hur hur. These things almost never happen, not for me. Which is kind of sad, maybe I should try out this airplane romance thing the next time. I’ll laugh, and fiddle with my hair boundlessly, and we won’t stop talking. No. Not even when the air stewardess has her ass in between our faces, our love shall conquer all (asses).

How bitter am I today? Hahaha.

Listening to: https://soundcloud.com/cerealmag/ta-ku-cereal-flight-track-vol2 

Had enough of eavesdropping. I couldn’t even make up their sentences. No airplane romance tutorial for me I guess. They keep starting their sentences with “my friend” too. Which isn’t very interesting to start with. Unless they realize that friend was one of their exes. There’s your story.

Meh, one more hour to go. Shall continue to read more of my book.

I’m looking forward to cai tao kueh.

And hai di lao.

midnight revelations

I Am Ready To Die A Violent Death

and i have always known that nothing really matters and all of a sudden i love it somuch. because i have stared into the void and it has given me strength. i know there isnothing, and it makes me strong. i know i am nothing, and this is a major load off mymind. i know i am everything, and this is what i really want

i realized i know the truth

more than i was allowing myself to engage with

i know that this is it

and that i am going to die

but i also know that i do things that i love

and that i know Society is bullshit

and that this will all be over

and there will be no Me to remember any of it

and the only reason to do anything is for love

as a means to love

so thats what i am going to do

i need to be me

ive always known who i am and was afraid to be that person

but im that person now

and im never going to stop

i did a lot of things that may seem like nothing today

i would like to say first- that i managed to finish the essay i had meant to write today. with impossible speed too. might be due to it being a lit essay.. i am hella good in bullshitting my way through things. especially when no one is there to interject... so yes, do i get a hellokitty sticker or nah?

got up at about 11am, which meant that i had a really good sleep. in fact i can't even remember my dreams... wait.. ok nope. thought about making kimchi pancakes for breakfast, but i got lazy, which is ironic because i walked my way to the nearest sushi place (which is up a hill, mind you). but that's ok, i like a little ass workout. hopefully i look 0.002% cuter now.

watched friends with benefits as i ate my beef bowl, had watched it before but i like re-watching things, just to check if i've grown. no but really, you think things you never thought before. like before when justin and mila were sexing, i'd go 'okayyy' but today i went, 'ooOoh'. that made no sense. i even felt happy when they finally stopped being stupid and kissed. /mental sobbing

i hardly feel like crying in life. (this is not a challenge don't be mean to me i will cut you. jks.) which is why i like watching movies, they spur some emotion in me, so it kinda helps. i know this because i didn't realise how bottled up i was, until i cried in journo class (oh the horror). our tutor wanted us to share a news story that had affected us deeply, and as i was sharing a lame story that i didn't even care much about- my eyes welled up and i choked on my own stupid tears. it also didn't help that we went on to watch some 911 clips straight after. what on earth? come to think of it i think that tutor was really out to collect twinges of sorrow. maybe she's a witch.

i promise i'm fun to hang around with.

also read am i cool by heiko julien earlier on, really liked this:



you meet people and they are mirrors of yourself
you give them the love you want in return, and you feel happy in this moment

i hate titles they are redundant who reads titles this is not a news story.

i have this suffocating feeling somewhere in between my chest and my throat. and i know it is not the air's fault. it is me. and also my inability to digest the whirl of feelings and vibes around me. i wonder if people feel the same way?

i'm kinda glad that not many people know of this space, although it would be nice if i had someone as weird as i am to speak to. then again i guess i'm here typing and talking to someone as weird as me, so.

lately i've just been keeping myself busy with things that would naturally make me feel good. like yoga, books, dramas, assignments, meeting new people and then not meeting people.. (why do i feel like i'm going through some teenage phase when i am 23) this is slightly worrying. how on earth am i still so unsure of myself and what i want at this age? actually, this is frightening.

anyway, i'm just going to talk about my dreams because they seem a little bit darker than my 'real life' and i'd like to think that life is beautiful. ahem.

~

on a bed, realised that i'm not in my own bed (which is already extremely scary), i sat up and felt a sharp pain (or made myself think i felt a sharp pain) in my chest-boob-area. i looked down and saw that i had two rather huge nunganungas aka boobies (my boobs are tiny irl). so first thing i thought was "fuck did i get breast implants??!!". next thing i know i'm standing in a public bathroom, naked, staring at my newly huge boobs and crying. never hated myself that much.


~

my friends and i were at a roadtrip/staycation thing i can't remember but everyone was there and we had to stay in a house together for a few nights. they were all acting really weird, the girls were always together and leaving me out of conversations and things.. i didn't really mind until they almost went out altogether and left me alone in the house. I got pissed and screamed at them, and they explained that they didn't know how to tell me this... but i had a huge cut on my nose and it scared them. i felt weird nasal-y sensations after that. checked the mirror and found my nose gone. i was asian voldemort. i thought someone must have drugged me and hacked my face with a hammer or something whilst i was asleep. didnt mind it so much (never really liked my nose), even though my friends were crying, for some reason. i must have really scared them.

------


what is up with me?

//galavant no.2 - believers

An Adult's Dream

I.
A girl wakes up and realizes it is snowing. She wakes up and it is snowing and the first thing she sees when she looks out the window is the snow. She looks at the snowflakes, falling, laying itself in thickets over the ground. Sitting up in bed she is watching the way snow keeps coming and the way light seems to be falling across the courtyard. It is winter and the morning after the girl went to bed thinking I cannot bear another morning again. She had slept for hours. She slept thinking only of growing smaller. But what the snow makes her feel when she wakes up is the small inkling that there is something out there other than herself that she could begin to believe in.

II.
8pm, light leaving the sky.

In apartments across the city there are people who wait for the people they love to come home. There are people who want to come home, despite the snow. Somewhere a man trudges out of winter’s reach saying, “my train was delayed, I’m sorry. Thank you for waiting. Thank you for waiting for me.” He wipes the snow off his shoes. He kisses the woman in the hallway, pulls her close for warmth while outside snowfall grows heavier.

From her flat, the girl watches another man as he sits in the street. He clutches flowers in one hand, squinting up at a lit window. It is still snowing. How long has he been there now, she thinks. With one foot, he draws a circle in the snow. He pulls his coat close, and looks up at the window again. The girl thinks, for every person who comes home in spite of the snow is another person who comes home late, a person who doesn’t come home at all.

III.
In this story the girl wakes up again, this time in a bed next to a boy she does not want to be next to.

Sorry he says, You know, about last night.
It's okay she says, it happens. You drank a lot.
I know, but even then. He pauses and rubs his eyes.
Please don't tell anyone about it.
I won't, she says.

She looks at the tattoo on his arm and wonders what he was like when his skin was pale and unadorned. What he was like then. She touches the cursive text, latin.
What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. She laughs, realizing he is just like every other boy she has met before. She leads him out of her flat and they take a smoke on the step outside her front door. The snow comes towards them in small pale drifts. She says see you, thinking that this is the last time she will see him. She is wrong.

In class the girl is imagining a way out of the city when someone drops into the seat next to her. That someone says did you get with the boy you left with  last night. He was cute. I would totally do him.

No, she says, I don’t think there was anything to do.

She looks out through the window, already imagining herself being somewhere else. She thinks, anywhere but here.

IV.
Days later the girl is at a party where the music is loud enough to feel like it’s coming from inside her body. The girl finds herself squatting in a bathroom watching another girl pee. She tries to avert her eyes politely, drunkenly. They are at the point in time in a friendship where both girls can feel comfortable despite their various states of undress. The girl’s friend stands up and zips her skirt, then narrows her eyes saying, okay so maybe
it’s a while back now but everyone knows what you did that night I don’t  know why you lied to me about it. I mean. I thought we were friends. The girl's voice falls into her stomach as her stomach begins to flip, and she forgets how to make words come out of an open mouth. Not sure why the other girl is so angry. Not sure why the other girl believes this has anything to do with her to begin with. She feels the beginnings of fear sharpen its edge and it feels like a noose tightening around her throat. The girl pats her coat pocket for her keys. She leaves the bathroom looking for the exit. Outside the boy is sitting on a couch with another girl she doesn’t know he is the exact shape of her fear. She walks home and in her bed she curls up into the smallest version of herself. She falls asleep, dreamless.

V.
"The Rashomon Effect is a term used to describe the effect of the subjectivity of perception on memory, by which observers of a specific event are able to produce substantially different but equally plausible accounts of it."

The girl closes the Wikipedia page and thinks, otherwise known as there are  always two sides to a story. 

She remembers sitting on the curb after the boy left, watching traffic, waiting for something else to happen. Whether this was over; when she would be able to name its end. She remembers wondering what the boy would recall about that night; and later, how that could have been so different from what she remembered.

And yet, when you have heard both sides of a story, how do you know which to believe in, when both seem equally true? She looks at her hands, thinking that the only way she knows is what she feels. And what she feels is so fleeting, flows through and away from her over and over again.

VI.
In the bathroom of a bar, the girl thinks about this again. It is almost April now and it is still snowing and she is cold from both the onset of a fever and the winter night. She is thinking about the way she can speak to someone and leave with an entirely different impression of the conversation from that which the other person holds. It is frightening to think that the way you feel is exactly that: your own feelings, and not a mutual truth. She sits in the corner before remembering that her friends are waiting for her to order drinks outside.

Here in the bathroom, the emotions experienced while being with them and blowing candles off a cake already seemed like a distant memory, something that could only be accessed again in the memory of the memory. Even then, it would be different, a glossing-over, a revision of the original story. The girl stands up and thinks if only I could uproot what I feel, look at them from  a far away distance. As if by beginning to rationalize, she could understand pain, and by understanding it, something else would begin to dissipate.

At each point in time every person is thinking of the world only in terms of how it relates to him or her. What the girl feels places herself at the centre of her story: she can only be aware of what happens as it happens to her; she can only believe in what already exists for her to know.

But as the girl slips into a seat next to her friends, she imagines that somewhere else another girl is slipping into a seat next to her own friends; elsewhere nameless girls slip and sleep into their own stories. In the haze of the bar, the faces and bodies of her friends begin to disassociate, seeming more like strange actors of a silent film.

The girl walks outside to take a smoke alone, and then she is on the tube, and then she is lying on her bed watching snow fall, falling asleep, thinking that the only belief she wants as an anchor for her world is the one that this world is bigger than she believes it to be.

close d

if y ou turn everything into ba d news
dont blame me for not calling you
can someone that love s you most
know that
you are hurting
from their way of loving
is it okay
if it is love
is it me
probably.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
w h a t
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
i s   t h i s   m e s s
<><><><><><><><><
i ' v e   m a d e;
><><><><><><><><>
l o v e   i t }

you know what i'm sipping

i don't even know what it is that's making me feel so incredibly restless, might be the weather, am really not appreciating it atm. do you ever feel exhaustion swirl around in your body and it makes you so comfortable in not moving at all, even though your back hurts from lying down too much.

i lied to myself three times today.
one; that i won't be able to make it to the bus stop in time due to the rain so i didn't even try
two; that i will go to the gym.
and three i will keep a secret because this is the internet and everyone is evil.

i'm not sure what to write anymore. came here as i was procrastinating to think of ideas for a short feature i have to write for class. you know what i would want to write about though?
The Art of Chilling.
people. need. to. chill.

especially with my life choices. i honestly have 0 idea in regards to what i'm doing, but i'll manage.
altho i do feel extra loved. or at least hope to feel that way..

bye.

or maybe just happy.

i was by myself for a pretty long time. i needed to do that. i think everyone that i know has wanted to do that or needed to do that at some point. i think when you spend enough time when it’s quiet around you and you don’t open your mouth for three or four days, there’s parts of your brain that can kind of rest. I think when we’re out in the world and we have to talk to people, we edit ourselves. you know, we have to like, act a little bit. as honest as we may be as humans, when we’re out here, we’re all kind of wearing mirrors on our faces. you know, constantly reacting to how to react to the people around you. and I think when you’re alone for a long enough time, you can feel a lot more peace.