i fear my fav genre to read is insane people

i sat down to think what to write. perhaps about the books i've been reading and watching recently? let's see: a narrow shouldered man who eventually turns into a mass killer because of rejections, a feminist-just-for-validation turned incel due to his inability to understand women, a woman who turned into a teeth-first stalker after one night that meant different things to different people, a man joining a cult to speak to his dead husband & more books. the ed gein show, shirilla crash docu, worst exes ever & more shows.

it is summer, after all. and i like scaring myself with real people rather than the supernatural. mostly. (reading hill house has been fun too).

here is the thing about summer: it is the season when insanity completes its transition from a state of mind into a ritual. there is something about the heat that does it, melts down the membrane between wanting and doing.

so to rephrase: my favorite genre is not horror. it is not true crime. it is longing. specifically, longing gone bad. longing whose only available exits were apathy and violence. the kind of longing that doesn't announce itself. it just quietly acquires a knife, or a mailing list, or a reason.

come in. the water's warm, inviting, & dangerous.

let's do a study of one of the deranged persons i have collected. he comes from tony tulathimutte's rejections. he doesn't have a name. he's just the feminist, who has never been loved, is a gender studies major, always has had a female friendship circle who (mostly) like him only platonically, and he has a qpoc agender friend (the label is important). he really really wants to have a girlfriend.

this story reads more like a case study conducted by someone who loves their subject the way an entomologist loves a particularly evolved parasite. he has narrow shoulders and a feminist vocabulary and a growing dossier of unfairness. he keeps a sense of humor about it. he tips well. he is thirty-five years old when he walks into a restaurant and follows a woman in.

what makes him a perfect specimen of longing-gone-wrong is that he can diagnose himself and it makes no difference. the framework became the problem. every rejection gets filed, annotated, cross-referenced. he is building something. he doesn't know what it is until it's done. let's see what i mean by him being a 'perfect specimen', three things come to mind:

he knows all the right words. consent, entitlement, projection, emotional labor, the friend zone as sexist canard. of course he has read butler and hooks and dworkin. which means, he has the vocabulary, he lives inside that vocabulary, but he withholds himself from the capacity to use it. worse, his vocabulary has the negative definitions. every time self-knowledge gets close, he routes it through the framework and comes out the other side more certain he's the wronged party. it's longing that has eaten its own antidote.

he is a ledger, keeps dangerously meticulous accounts. every rejection is filed, annotated, cross-referenced against other rejections. footnoted and cited. every instance of a worse man getting loved anyway. a worse man with broader shoulders (it is always the shoulders). he's doing more than wanting, he's building a case. and the case is, of course, irrefutable. longing that becomes accounting can never be satisfied, because satisfaction would mean closing the books, and the books are the only place he lives.

his end was already in the beginning. the whole man was in the first paragraph. the high school rejection he felt justified in making, the narrow shoulders (it is always the shoulders), the feminism – all used to explain why women should want him. even need someone like him. by the time he walks into that restaurant at the end, nothing has changed except the direction of the wanting. he wanted to be chosen, now he wants to be impossible to ignore.

the feminist, then, finds the incel forums. the moment he does, he dives into them nose first. not reluctantly. but with the relief of someone who has finally found the right genre for all of his vocabulary. transition here isn't a rupture but a completion. we don't see him abandon his feminist identity. rather, he utilizes the community membership to validate the same logic from the other side.

he becomes a moderator of the NSOM - narrow shoulders/open minds (it is always the shoulders). his suffering is prestigious now. his martyrdom is the currency. he's the most articulate, wronged man in the world. the word he uses, androcide, is the tell. he coined his own term for what was done to him. that's not adoption. that's authorship.

the ending is fucking delicious. the reader is implicated. we are insane too. our longing is to close the chapter. the feminist's chapter.

we are presented with a very simple, everyday, mundane image. the feminist holds the door of a restaurant open for a woman in a yellow dress. she thanks him. he smiles. it is a small but final vindication.

this is the horror genre, for me it is the summer whimsy genre. the courtesy he's showing is genuine. of course it is genuine. he's not performing because he is still the man who valued consent and read feminist theory. then, he follows her in and puts on a mask. he has a backpack. we know what is happening, what will happen. but the ending refuses to name what happens. the violence is not written, it is simply approached. the story was never about the act but about the accumulation.

that's the thing about longing-gone-wrong as a genre. it doesn't scare you with the monster. it scares you with the grammar. the way the logic coheres, the way you can follow it all the way down, the way you recognize the wanting even when you don't recognize the conclusion. you read this man. you were never not implicated in the massacre that follows after the ending line.

words by themselves have no substance, he realizes, they are only ever meant to underscore acts.

the particular type of heat in syracuse during summer is part-forgiving. there's nowhere to be. i have developed a taste for the pink buldak ramen, the black cat i am cat-sitting, and recess' roasted dark coffee. i watered huge plants. i wrote while it thundered outside and the black cat hid. i made creamy tomato basil soup. i collected deranged people in little jars and held them up to the light.

the water's still warm.