Reposted by Existentialish
We used to have 3rd spaces until the 1994 Crime Bill caused all Foot Clan locations to shut down nationwide
Existentialish
@existentialish.bsky.social
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Writer "I'm...a dusty box of videogame cartridges sitting in an empty apartment." He/They
![I don’t know if O’Neil self-identifies as a poet (is that like self-identifying as a flight risk or fragile cargo…), but only a poet is capable of this sort of Seeing. The infinitesimally quotidian moments in one person’s life, and the wider lens on contemporary reality.
Such close attention, but also the kind that seems baffled, always, like it’s their first time being alive on earth… Waaiiit a minute.
It barely makes sense to us now, right? How can we metabolize a livestreamed genocide and keep doing whatever we’re doing? O’Neil writes, “Maybe if certain things go well just after the next election they might take action to save you. You who have already been burned.”
Here’s an exasperated, cuttingly funny observer reporting on a reality in which “[t]he most illiterate fascists alive were gassing themselves up because the computer had gotten some small degree better at producing dog shit that had the general production values of a circa 2004 video game cutscene. Delighting in the approach of a spiritually and culturally dead future devoid of art and meaning.”
What else? Everyone you love is dead or dying; middle age is strange: “Not old enough that the kids have come to the realization that they better ask you questions about your life for the first time ever before it’s too late and not young enough that everything you do is being recorded at all times.”
And beautiful and insistent, too, in saying look we’re alive. This book, in the wry vernacular of someone raised by the Internet (same here), had me all rattled about that. Necessarily.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4d7w4ylnasmg7oayamznsznp/bafkreihsmlhyl4vzn6ulcjkkzspyhruhxrc6iw72g3juboau6ilxcgefby)
