Mature Themes Read Online Free PDF

the country beyond me, in monsoon time, perhaps the forest of bliss will be a film that plays its demise then turns to ash, which we will stuff in our mouths. My death will reach everyone who has met me, whether they remember me or not. And my death will walk across the plains to the city of the dead to meet me in the forest of bliss, and together we will cork the void that is this mysterious landscape it demands.

    In black swan theory, the event that disproportionately redistributes the weight of our attention—scales on your eyes, etc.—is always within a range of predictable options for the present but is usually unavailable to thinking before the event occurs. The new philosophers will spend their last days locked in their cars. It shouldn’t come as surprise. It should come in Kansas, the ripple in the wheat of an ideology made of recycled paper. It should come when we make plans to meet on Saturday for a drink but cancel because neither of us wants to bother meeting in real life. It is easier to text than to upend the present situation, despite its roving paradoxes. There are clouds in my windowless bedroom. If I mention semio-capitalism, what kind of poet does that make you? Doze at the sight of its flowering, wear what is available, wherever you find it. Mercenary delight has already invaded the next world and is finally pushing back into this one. These signs point to the future but to nothing else, and therefore what do they mean? That when I finally bought a mirror I smashed it within minutes? Palms freeze, the world is covered in ice, aliens come from space. The future is traveling furiously toward you at incredible speed and will beat you to your destination to surprise you by its resemblance to what you have already seen. This is how the world works itself into a groove. This is why I chartered a plane, piloted by aliens, to see the city covered in ice. It was, after all, just behind a curtain I could easily part.

SIGHING FROM ABOVE
    One winter, I bought a Tamagotchi angel in a Chinatown market. The angel lived in a little plastic cloud made somewhere in an industrial zone in Southeast Asia, quite far from the Chinatown I found it in. There was a two-dimensional floor over which my two-dimensional angel floated in front of a dark star on a camouflage-green screen. It was made of seventy or so pixels that seldom changed except to animate a bounce, a smile or frown, or a teardrop over its forehead, which signified that it was sick and dying. It wore a flowing robe, like the angels of all the garage sale paintings my grandmother collects, and had a small halo and two wings. My angel moved around its inch by inch screen, hopping, shitting, and begging for angel food. I gave it a shot whenever it was sick (it was always sick). When the little teardrop appeared at the corner of its head, I had to toggle one of the three buttons on my plastic cloud to retrieve the shot. After I would administer the medicine, my angel would quickly be restored to good health, to holiness, and so the small imperfection of my universe—the declining health of my angel—was corrected until it shit on the floor once again, and I had to clean it up using a separate but similarly enacted function.
    After a few weeks, I started to think my angel had mixed feelings about being my angel despite my faithful attention to its every need. I had mixed feelings about it too, especially as my life became increasingly consumed with its care. I began to feel that my days feeding and tending to such a simple computer program of so few actions (sleep, eat, shit, get sick, die) were being wasted. If computers don’t eat, why should a Tamagotchi? Moreover, I wasn’t sure this was “appropriate behavior” for an adult. I had supposed at the time that it was a theological question, what’s appropriate with regard to interfacing with angels, and therefore beyond me. I had very little knowledge of religion, but what I did