Here's a Thing from the Book

 Imagine Toad of Toad Hall escapes from prison disguised not as a washerwoman but as a jazz-funk bass guitarist. Hang on. Don't. No one wants to imagine that. 

I freakin love this. And it was the first thing that summon the Grief, who (it is a who, I feel), the being I call "The Inner Bodyworker" in The Stuff of Life. 

So much that it's made it into my memoir with humans in it, Escape from the Morgue. I've written 55,000 words in six days! 

See, if you want to cry, always use the major key like the medievals say. 

By the time Barbara holds up the sign that says "MUSIC" I belong hopelessly to this video with the ocean coming out of my eyes. Erm, that's in the first frame :))))

Just to make it much "worse" listen to the albeit bad recording of Allan Holdsworth does to this when he's their guitarist for a couple of glorious years (below). 

If you want to add to crying thing, just play that keyboard riff so that it's now in the major. Nice one Allan, understated Tim. Then slide it Latin-ly under the tune, a gentle caress. Really really nice one, Allan. 

Which enables him and King to have the most wonderful conversation in the last chorus and a new coda...Good Grief indeed.

Here Is the Stuff in The Stuff of Life

Concealer

Secret Door

Grief

Teddy Bear

Cowboy Costume

Antidepressants

Train Station

CPAP

Sound file

The brain

Afterimages

Power Station

Small Blue

 

Epigraphs (Beginning and Ending) of Escape from The Morgue

 Beginning; 

End: 

Description of Escape from The Morgue

[redacted]

So writes Timothy Morton in this courageous, intense, passionate, funny and heartbreaking memoir about how his father shaped him. Here at last is the book Morton has been working tirelessly on his whole adult life, pouring countless hours of research and lecturing and writing into never ever imagining it, let alone writing it. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll realize everything in this blurb is accurate. If you have a pulse slash Complex PTSD slash care about mental health, race and gender activism, ecology or how to resist fascism both inside and outside your head, this book is for you. 

Get Me an Agent

 I mean it. Lovely crew, help get me an agent. Help me publish Escape from The Morgue. If you believe in my work then this is the one. Drama too, and Hell and The Stuff of Life, all of them happening now, all related because they're so personal. But this one is...

Drama was intense. But I wrote that in 20 hours over a couple of weeks. This was 40 plus hours over five continuous days. I need to do more, but I have it now, another totally unscheduled book. It's 45,000 words. I wrote 10,000 since yesterday afternoon. 

Demon is leaving. I can feel my brain falling asleep and jerking awake.

It was like Contact, downloading instructions for building a ship, in my case a bathysphere, made of music on rotation. It’s now 45,000 words.

I want an agent or a crowd of loving fans to get this published good and proper with a heavy duty press when I’m done. 

This is the first book I’ve shared before I’ve finished and what a doozy … it’s because finally I’m in my being totally and really enjoying it, no need to fabricate some cute persona to be lovable or whatever. Just being open. Realizing I have pals.

Book will be of huge benefit to trauma sufferers and it’s a death ray to the anti-w*** people (refuse to say or spell it). 

At the end are maxims and tips and how-tos. Book goes from dark to light. 

I also have a short book of of those maxims which will cause Peterson’s to collapse like metal helmet of Witch King of Angmar and that fraud Harari to blow away like ashes.

The Even Later Latest Book

 See immediately below. I've written 9000 words a day for five days. I won't stop, like the hip hop song. 

This Often Happens Part 2

 The trouble is if you have an original idea, it hasn't been published yet, and that's already scary because it doesn't come in the form of a pre-existing shiny book that costs something. And you sometimes can hardly explain it even to yourself: that's the joy of it, really. 

This Often Happens

 Happened in New York City, 2019. Author of New Yorker piece about me? "Never heard of him." (Manager having been to Ivy X too (I assume, why they know this agent) takes note and will eventually drop me.) Plans for new books? "Everyone's writing that book." Other proposal? "I don't really see what this book is about." Thank you Mitchell and Webb for helping me to process...

Hip Hop's Proof of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem

 Have you seen the film? Deep Cover I mean. This song belongs to the closing credits. 

Haunting, this song is. That LA feeling of quiet suburbia laced with absolute menace. The single piano chord with semitones, the augmented fourth bass line. 

I studiously avoid anything that sounds like acting Black. Frat boys with sideways baseball caps at CU Boulder helped. My stepdad Maurice being from Jamaica helped. But, I have strong feelings about Deep Cover, because it reminds me of parts of my childhood. The drugs and the criminal gangs part of my childhood. Nothing scares you once you've met a Kray Twins assassin. In your dad's living room. At age 12. I'm coming for you De Sadist. And this is the song for the closing credits.

Strongly identify with some of it, overlap in the region of 12-year-old Tim walking through his dad’s neighborhood, “Fairyland” aka Maryland, "an island of lost children," as he said with characteristic sinister poetry. Roy the junkie lives over here, who one Christmas Day showed up on Dad's doorstep and died on the spot in his doorway, Dennis over there, similarly addicted, keep walking Tim, through a bombed out post-WW2 misery space on the edge of Hell. Then, far worse—arriving at Dad's house where on any given day the police might show up and arrest his partner for possession of 1000 tabs of acid and a lot of speed, everyone from off the street and worse piled in his living room. A place where the worst thing you could be was not a murderer or a thief or ... but a snitch. 

That LA noir feeling of quiet suburbia right up next to not-suburbia (but what is it...what), laced with absolute menace. The sound of a car rounding the corner two blocks away. The single piano chord. Snoop Dog like a cartoon mouse on a 1920s Disney loop, “Creep with me as I crawl through the hood…” His utterly strange and uncanny intonation of “187…” like a teenage ghost descending from a broken traffic light. That incredible line that slips over the bar like a kid slipping down an alleyway to avoid the cop cars and the not-cop cars: “But I got the hook up with somebody who knows how to get in contact with him.” 

This song and the film are the most wonderful noir loop, anti-racism’s proof of Monty Python’s proof of Turing’s proof of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Mathematical objects (numbers) in deep cover as logical propositions sticking it to the bad guys then sticking it to the really bad guys, the cops, and then the really really bad guys, the government (logic). How you have to be ridiculously smart just to cope…how much RAM that takes up. How badly I feel for anyone who has to calculate just to get across the street without being shot. 

The Monty Python version, called "Argument Clinic," is handy and also comes laced with its own kind of genius menacing grin: 

For every sketch, there can never be a police officer with enough authority to arrest everyone in it for violating the Strange Sketches Act, since every time an officer enters the sketch they are in the sketch. 

Change "sketch" to Dad's house. 

This Book Kills Fascists

 I've been working really hard all my life on never writing a book. This book. But I appear to have developed a bad case of blocked block. 

It's called Escape from The Morgue. 

Big publishers keep asking me for stuff then dangling the carrot further away. "Write something like Hyperobjects...I mean, not that, but like that." You ever see the agent skits on Mitchell and Webb? Where one of them draws a smiley on the Mona Lisa and says "Do something more like that...not THAT, of course, but you know, that."

I don't have an agent for that reason. Agents never get what I say. It's from the future and they're dealing with reliable money makers with identifiable record store labels. 

When I send the publishers things, they say ooh, that's too strange. 

It't not too strange. It's just not published yet. Hyperobjects is published, giving you the impression that it's okay to support it. 

Been running into this all my life. Hasn't stopped me. 

But this book is about child abuse. And it's coming for the whole crew of "anti-w***" sadists, whose very use of that mockery of Black dialect and allies implies they already know too much. They themselves do. The cat is most assuredly out of the bag. And they don't scare me. And in particular, the transphobic everything going on right now? They chose the wrong thing to attack there, in terms of activating me. I am coming for them. 

Publishers, if you're reading this, you really ought to consider this one. I will get someone to publish this and then I will get on TV with my lovely new Bernie speaking agent person. 

The De Sadists of this world don't scare me, because from day one on this Earth I have had to deal with the fact that my father was a psychopath. They're pathetic little clowns by comparison. 

This Really Got to Me

 I'm injured. I've had a three-hour operation. I hurt. I'm not in a good mood. It's going to be two months before I'm allowed to lift anything fifteen pounds or heavier. I can't walk more than a few feet outside my house. 

I posted something anti-racist about structural racism on Instagram. As sometimes happens, someone took it upon themselves to tell me how to do my job. They told me that they "used to understand" what I said (a suspicious remark in itself in the context), and why didn't I get back  to writing amazing books and doing amazing lectures (where have they been? There's a new one every couple of weeks these days, counting the translations). And they rounded it off by calling me "Timothy." 

I blocked them. I wanted to tell them "Don't ever call me by my first name unless you know me, in which case, tell me who you really are." As is often the case, the most aggressive people hide behind a pseudonym. 

I had just had to block an obsessive someone on Twitter whose incessant communications had unfortunately caused me to relax my boundary a little. In intense pain on Sunday, I remembered the Oscar Wildean reason why I had decided to stop talking with them a few months ago. Their name was an ungrammatical, fake-Latin one based on an idea of mine. Intimate with my work, yet weird and critical. I don't know who writes this stuff, but it says "I have borderline personality disorder." Says it. I'm not diagnosing someone. I'm reporting the effect of someone's rhetoric. 

Calling me by my first name is a form of abuse. You're reaching into my pocket and fiddling around. That's actually happened to me, you know. You'll find out more if you keep reading my stuff. I have absolutely zero time for it. If you want to me to block you, go right ahead and call me by my first name. 

Rhetorically this is the equivalent of psychopathic personality disorder. You are unaware of the suffering of others or worse. No matter how much you hurt them, you can't seem to get through. I have met several psychopaths, including my father, and this is the common trait. 

One was called Patrick. He lived with my schizophrenic brother in a house run by a very neglectful Catholic charity. Soon after I met him, he murdered his mother. Then he went to Broadmoor, the notorious psychiatric prison, where he soon stabbed Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer of the 1970s. Brady murdered girls sadistically. Patrick stabbed Brady in the eye with a plastic fork in order to show how hard he was. 

I'll repeat that. I  have met and spoken with on several occasions someone who stabbed one of the most notorious serial rapist-murderers in the UK, ever. In the eye. 

First thing Patrick did: he came right up to me. Right up. Within one inch of my face. He stared right into my eyes with his little tiny pupils. "Hi! I'm Patrick!" Real friendly like. Call me by my first name, I double dog dare you. 

I had met psychopaths before. My dad introduced me to a Kray Twins assassin when I was 13, he was sitting on the floor in dad's living room, He fixed me with his tiny pupils and my head immediately went "psycho killer." His amusing sadistic clown nickname ("Lofty") and his lack of a "real" name (see the similarity with the encounter on Instagram) was a symptom. I never felt his house was mine, but then again, he was also a psychopath. I thought I had a blind spot about them but really I was just in denial about how bad my dad was. 

Soon after, Lofty was in jail for doing a hit job on someone for the Twins. My dad used to love telling me the story over and over. "I sliced his face up like a pizza" Lofty would say to dad, in a thick cockney accent. Lofty murdered the police dog belonging to one of the officers who arrested him. So violently that the police officer broke down in front of him. 

I'm glad my memoir isn't about humans. If I were to write one, and believe me I will, you probably won't believe it. Probably the only way for  me to write a convincing one is to leave out the humans. Definitely the only way that doesn't trigger me beyond belief. It was hard enough writing about the humans by leaving them out, if you know what I mean. 

Don't ever call me by my first name if you don't know me. Whether or not you are a psychopath this is how your words are coming across. Be aware of that. The internet is very bad because people forget that manners are not just nice, they're essential. 

Right now, as you can tell, I am in the most I don't give a fuck mood I've been in, perhaps ever. So if you want to antagonize me, now would be a great time to do it. Go right ahead. See what happens. 

Cut Out and Keep

 Since when did “structural” mean “immutable”? 

You “have to” see it that way, you poor sad bigot people. You have to because you can’t. You can’t because you know. But you make like you don’t. The effort. 

So you have no room to cry. So you have no room to smile. So you have no room to really cry. So you have no room to laugh. So you have no room to really really cry. So…

You talk Jesus but you missed a spot. Right on the exit wound you don’t even know you have. Forgiveness. Mercy.  

Don’t you see? You’re creating the horrible rigid structure you’re aiming at. You’re creating it for yourself too. 

This

 

Earthly Things

 My friend Whitney Bauman is about to publish the most amazing book with karen Bray and Heather Eaton, and you should definitely get ahold of it. It blew my mind to read this collection of essays. Here's the endorsement I wrote on the back: 

Way to bring religion down to Earth! Humankind needs to get its act together, but we aren’t feeling it yet. Every essay in this book reframes ecological speech in the key of religious uplift, an affect that can achieve Earth magnitude. 

 

But wait, there’s more. I hold that religion is the phenomenology of the biosphere: how it is lived. Religion is too often essentialized and naturalized and displaced and kicked upstairs into a heaven where a mostly white mostly male cis psychopath who mostly wants to hurt you needs protection money. 

 

This wonderful book is part of making sure that can’t happen. 

Timothy Snyder Recently

 My lovely shoegaze sparkelcore band Rubyliquid featured me and Timothy's brother. He's very good, if you haven't already. 

And Here's Another One

 John Oliver is impeccable, I feel.