What is 'The World'? / The Potty-Monster is Afraid of the Toilet

Looking through jobs, I think of all the things I could’ve done with my life. All the things I never did and never will do. I feel like a child who once had all these dreams, all at once now in retrospect, a child who became a bigger child who never really learned anything.

I scroll down the listings on all the job sites. I see things that look interesting, some things I think I’m ‘too good’ for, other things I know I’m not at all qualified for.

I scroll the listings and think, “Yeah, I could be a neurosurgeon. An engineer. I could teach biochemistry.” Or, I could have, years ago, before considering the possibility that years later I’d be sitting at a computer, desperately looking for things to do to survive. 

And what does that mean? Survive? To be ‘financially stable’? Is that all? How can having money be the only way to ‘survive’ in the world? What is ‘the world’?

I can’t stop watching the original Predator movie. I want to write an essay on its ‘relevance’. How it’s so mythic in scale. In Predator 2, Danny Glover calls the Predator "pussy-face." More and more I feel I relate things that happen in real life to books or movies. Quotes from books and movies pop into my head in place of anything original I might have to say on the subject. My life seems to exist in between art forms. I’m thinking of going through all my rejections from the past 10 years and posting them online. They would need their own website. I’m thinking of donating plasma for money.

Ken Sparling is quickly becoming my favorite author. I’ve read three of his books and I want to read more. I’m at a loss for how to get people to read my stuff. It feels impossible. As if I make no sound. My daughter won’t stop saying “The Potty-Monster is afraid of the toilet.” I miss being a family with her and her mom. She’s seven.

I’m thirty. It’s time I post something on Facebook and wait for someone to like it. Factory Sleep Shoppe is following me on Twitter because I tweeted something about skydiving onto a mattress. Last week I tweeted something about my third eye being a malfunctioning breast implant, and some breast enhancement place started following me. I need new glasses. The arm is being held on by a band-aid, and one of the little plastic nose-guard pieces fell off last week. I’m writing a classical piano piece. When I’m finished it will be fifteen minutes long. I will play it alone, to myself.

I have all these pictures I want to take but they’d all involve me. There’s that Jeffrey McDaniel line: “I’m a narcissist trapped in the third-person.” I like that. Is it possible for something to not make a sound? Is the possibility that some things don’t make a sound the reason we don’t listen to them? Are we not listening to some things simply because they might not make a sound?