My Brother's Foot [Revised]

That summer, the heat sat on us like a second skin. We had moved to the Fields for the peace and quiet my father missed in the City, and for the fresh air my mother hoped would whisk the quickly establishing staleness out of our adolescent minds. To our collective surprise, a three story house out here still cost more than our apartment in the City had, and my mother, who disliked cars but whose feet would only carry her so far, declared this an outrage. “They should be the ones paying us to live this far from the post office.” My mother liked to accompany her correspondence on its way to the stamp and seal, and believed it would only arrive where it was headed if she personally told the cashier how and when it was meant to get there. Another extravagance the increase in rent cost us was our habit of dining in restaurants, and within the first week we were bored out of our skulls.

Like an island, the Fields were surrounded by the ebbing and tiding of fog. Every night, the fog rolled down from the hills enclosing the valley, and every morning at sunrise it rolled back up, uncovering a crawling heat as if someone had lifted a doormat. It radiated from beneath the grass, fed by the sunlight the valley caught like a funnel. In the midst of it all, my brother and I, relieved from our scholarly duties for the summer, lounged like washed up corpses amidst the clusters of furniture that seemed out of proportion in the vastness of the new house. The house itself was relatively cool, my parents kept it dark until sunset, and while this shut out the heat, the lethargy summer brought with it found a way in nonetheless. Like an unwelcome guest it sat between us on the couch, spread its glaze on our eyeballs as we were watching TV, and laid its fingers between the pages of our books, blurring the lines we were trying to read.

After weeks of our sighing and moaning demonstrations of boredom, our parents pulled a tent from one of the boxes in the garage and exiled us to the edge of the Fields so they could finish unpacking in peace. Being our parents, this impromptu camping trip came with a set of rules: access to the house was denied, except in the case of emergencies and uncontainable bowel movements. “Emergencies are for people who can’t deal with the pace of life,” said my brother and during our three days of exile I saw him occasionally emerging from behind a bush, wiping his ass with a fern.

I went back into the house once during our three days, while my brother was snoring at the wall of the tent. I had to flush twice and tried to muffle the sound of it the best I could. When I got back into our tent, the night’s cold had crawled under my clothes. I slipped into my sleeping bag, pulled my legs to my chest and held my wet feet with my hands.

On the last morning, I woke up to my brother sitting up in his sleeping bag. “I’m so bored,” he said, rubbing his palms on his knees.

“What time is it?” I plucked sleep crumbs from between my lashes. The fog was still clinging to the tent and the fabric hung low over our heads, heavy with moisture. From below, I could feel the heat gathering in the grass.

My brother shrugged.

“There’ll be breakfast inside,” I said, but he flicked a finger at the wall of the tent, sending drops rattling back into the morning air.

“Too early,” he said.

“I thought you didn’t know what time it was.”

He reached into his bag, pulled out his wristwatch and without looking at it, threw it into my lap. “It’s too early,” he said again.

I patted around the tent for my socks. When I had unraveled and pulled the left one up to my ankles, he said: “How do people live like this?”

I shrugged and said: “So leave.”

He nodded, then he reached out and slapped the back of my head.

Outside, the fog started rolling up the hill, nestling in the treetops like clouds of bats, and the sun that had climbed the sky behind a screen of moisture threw itself into the valley with full force. My brother opened our tent to let some air in and started packing up his sleeping bag. I knelt down to shake dust and potential spiders out of my pillow.

“I’ve got it,” he said, and sat on the fat roll he had turned his sleeping bag into.

“You’ve got what?”

“Give me your towel.”

“What for?”

He grabbed my bag and threw its contents on the floor of the tent. I quickly reached into my unraveled sleeping bag and pulled out my towel. “Here.”

He took it and frowned. “What’s it doing in there?”

“Keeps it warm,” I said, gathering the things he had scattered and put them back into my bag.

He sat cross-legged and put the towel on his lap. He watched me collect my things for a while, then pulled his right foot up to his face and examined the sole, the nails, the few black hairs growing out of each knuckle. Then he rubbed it vigorously between the toes with my towel.

“Hey,” I said, “you’re going to wash that.”

He pulled out some dark grime from under his nails with the towel.

“You’re definitely washing that.”

“Shut up,” he said, and examined the foot some more, turning it in his hands. Then, pulling his calf up to his face with both hands, he gently started to nibble his toe.

I made a retching noise. “You’re gross,” I said, but got no reaction.

He took his toe out of his mouth and wiped his spit off it.

“Do we have a – “

I followed his gaze to the tent wall. “Do we have a what?”

He shook his head and pulled his eyes from the wall. He looked at the foot he was still holding with both hands, then lowered his face toward it and bit into his toe.

It came off with greater ease than either of us expected. There was the sound of someone stepping on a twig, and my brother’s head flung back with a toe between his teeth. We both stared at his foot and saw no blood, no broken bone, no carnage of any sort. The toe had simply come loose, and in its stead was a smooth flat surface crowned with a minuscule flesh-coloured cylinder. My brother coughed with surprise and the toe landed in his lap.

It just lay there on my grey bath towel, and where my brother’s teeth had snapped it off the foot, we saw a round opening the size of the cylinder. Finally, he picked up the toe and held it over his foot, pressed it down onto the cylinder. It fit, but there was no clicking noise, which, somehow, I had expected. It just sat on its former place a bit loosely, and when my brother flexed his toes toward the ground, it slipped off and fell to the ground.

From the house, we could hear our father call us for breakfast.

“Tell them I don’t want any,” he said, picking up the toe and holding it up at eye-level.

“You tell them,” I said. My spine was so tense it itched. The hand I was sitting on was falling asleep.

He shrugged and closed his fist around the toe.

“Does it hurt?”

He looked at me. “Does what?”

“Your foot,” I said, “does it hurt?”

“No. Doesn’t feel like anything, actually.”

“What about your toe, does it – you know, can you feel anything?”

He opened his fist. The toenail had turned dark brown and looked like velvet, or maybe mould. The skin around it was taut and pink.

“It looks like a mushroom,” I said.

He nodded and threw the toe into his open mouth like a peanut. In my head a voice yelled “What are you doing” but it didn’t quite reach my mouth, and he bit down. It sounded exactly like biting on a peanut, and the tightness in his eyes gave way to a glint of excitement. He opened his mouth wide and bared his teeth at me. Large strands of pink were sticking to his teeth, stretching between his jaws like taffy. He closed his mouth again with a satisfied smacking sound.

“What does it taste like?”

He grinned, and the bright pink made his teeth look whiter, and somehow bigger than usual.

“Just as expected,” he said.

On our way back, he made me carry both our backpacks and the bag I kept my towel and spare clothes in. “We’ll get it later,” he said when I tried to pack the tent into its sleeve. The straps of the backpacks cut into my shoulders and the extra weight pulled me backwards. He walked next to me, slowly, balancing on the heel and side of his foot and occasionally holding on to my shoulder for stability. When we reached the house, the skin around my ribcage felt tight as a stocking.

At the breakfast table, my mother poured us each a glass of orange juice and made us eggs and toast. After three days of water and salted crackers, I was licking my plate within a couple of minutes. My brother sat there, looking past us all, with what appeared to be simultaneously a frown and a grin. Occasionally, he took a sip from his orange juice. “Eat your food,” my mother said, and he just nodded without touching it. I drained my glass of juice and asked for another one, which my mother poured me with a smile. “Well at least someone’s hungry.” My brother into the distance and said: “Can I have some coffee?” My mother looked at my father and raised her eyebrows. Then she smiled. She reached into the cupboard, pulled out a mug and placed it on the table in front of my brother. My father poured coffee into it. They both watched him drink and smiled at each other. I sipped my orange juice loudly, and the acid felt like sandpaper on my gums.

Now that we were back in the house everyday rules once again applied, so when our mother sent us upstairs to brush our teeth, we did so. The mid-day air came into the bathroom through a crack in the window and ricocheted sluggishly off the tiles like the bubble in a lava lamp. In the mirror, my brother’s chin twitched with the back and forth of his toothbrush. Right next to it, my forehead crumpled with each stab the bristles of my toothbrush took at my sore gums.

For the next twenty-four hours, the toe travelled through my brother’s intestines, big and small, and came out at the other end looking no different than any other piece of meat consumed and digested by a human body. And then there it was, in the toilet bowl in front of him, and he called me into the bathroom and said: “Look.” I looked and said “what?” “Look,” he said again, “that’s it.” I held my breath and moved closer, worried for a moment this was a practical joke at my expense. “How can you tell?” He grinned and flushed with one hand in his pocket, like a man about to close a deal.

It took him almost two months, but eventually, piece by piece, limb by limb, my brother ate himself. The majority of that time he spent in the bedroom we shared. Our parents were apprehensive at first, but with a characteristic stubbornness, he quickly won them over. His investment in what they came to call his “project” was reason enough for them to leave him be. Occasionally, my mother would attempt to lure him to the dinner table with dishes that had been his favourite, but after the consumption of both his feet and his right leg up to his knee made using the stairs difficult, she allowed him to stay in his room during meals. The bedroom was on the second floor, and while the use of stairs was out of the question, I still wanted my brother to be able to move around. I offered him my old skateboard, so that he could use his hands to pull himself forward, but he refused. My father, who had overheard the conversation, told me not to treat my brother like an invalid. “At least he’s working on something. You would do well to do the same.” He took my skateboard away and locked it in his closet. The same night, my brother ate both his hands, making the skateboard useless anyway.

From then on, my parents decided I was in my brother’s way. They took my few belongings out of our room, leaving behind only my unmade bed, and put them in a cupboard in the living room. One of the downstairs sofas could be turned into a bed, and I was to spend my nights there, so that my brother could work undisturbed on his project, and perhaps complete it should he choose to do so. The house was big, but we’d been used to a small apartment, and my parents weren’t quite used to the freedom occupying the upper floor of the house had given us kids. They could have allowed me to stay in the small guest room next to theirs, but they insisted the living room was a more suitable place for me. They said it would do me good to rise and retire with the natural flux of the household, and that being more aware of other people’s daily routine would remedy what my mother called my “constant attention-seeking.”

The nights in the living room were brighter than what I was used to. At night, my parents turned off the light in the living room and went upstairs, and I laid down on the makeshift bed shaded my eyes with a hand. The room upstairs had heavy curtains allowing us to sleep in near total darkness, but downstairs, the room was flooded with the yellow light of the porch, and until the embers in the fireplace expired, their glow served as an unnecessary nightlight.

While everything else in the house was changing, the Fields didn’t become any less boring.

Upstairs, my brother had now eaten both his arms to his elbows, and was experiencing difficulty holding on to things. He found it almost impossible to read his novels about people lost at sea. On most nights, I could hear my mother make her way to his room to read to him, and in the beginning he let her, but more and more he started chasing her away, and sometimes his refusal extended into a shout that came tumbling down the staircase and slid underneath the door into my ears. I would lie awake then, with a hand behind my head and think about the voices he had used to read me stories that would keep me awake at night when I was still too young to make out the words on the pages.

My brother’s project continued in this manner until nothing was left of him but his head. He had been all head for three days when he called me into his room.

I sat on the bed next to him. His hair was greasy, but he didn’t look tired. His skin was rosy and clear, and his eyes were gleaming.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

He grinned. “Pretty good.”

“You look different.”

“That’s because I feel different. I’m so close now.”

I nodded and looked away. “What are you going to do now?” I asked.

He bit his lip. He sucked it in as far as he could, then let it slide back out.

“I don’t know,” he said, “I’m not sure how to finish this.”

He furrowed his brow and his pupils widened like they had in the tent when he first bit off his toe.

“Do what you just did, and pull,” I said.

He looked at me. I shrugged and raised my palms. “I don’t know. It’s your project.”

“Damn right,” he said.

He bit his lip again, and instead of pulling it into his mouth through suction, he bit further and further, until his lower lip had disappeared and his teeth were biting down on his chin. It looked very strange. He kept biting and biting until his head folded back in on itself and disappeared between his teeth.

It took him ten minutes, and when he was done, I hadn’t moved a muscle. The only thing that was left on his pillow was some of his hair, which he somehow hadn’t managed to eat, and his teeth, white and hard and smeared with pink.

I got up and walked out of the room to call my mother.

When he had been gone for a week, my mother cleaned out my brother’s room, burnt incense to scare away the moths, and put a lock on the door. She mounted his teeth and what remained of his hair onto a styrofoam head and put it on display on the mantlepiece. “Where’s your boy,” guests would ask, ignoring my presence in the room, and my mother would point to the mantlepiece and say “This is what he left us.” My father, sitting in his chair would add: “Went out there and made something of himself. He’s making us proud.” And my mother would nod as the guests said “Aaah” and admired the faceless grin above our fire. If they had brought their own children with them, the story of how my brother had gone out there and made something of himself was repeated to them in a tone caught between pride and bitterness. My brother’s teeth grinned over the scene from above a spitting and cracking fire.

Though my brother had, boredom never left. In his absence, his boredom was handed down to me like a heavy pair of shoes. When I complained, my mother would point to the mantelpiece and say, “Look at your brother. He went out there and made something of himself. All you ever do is complain. Maybe one day, when you’ve achieved what your brother has achieved, you’ll have something else to say.” Then she would turn off the light and close the living room door behind her. I would get up and tap my finger against my brother’s teeth, then against mine. While mine felt soft and porous, his sounded thick and full, and their corners were as sharp as a saw. I would turn around and sit back down on the couch, and pull my knees up under my chin.

Bones [Class Assignment]

The bone lay on the table between dishes and cutlery and clashed with the colour of the tablecloth. Sarah bent down and picked up a fork that the bone had pushed over the edge of the table. “I don’t see why,” she said, “I have to be the one to keep it.” 

“It was his favourite bone,” said Tom, who was leaning against the doorframe because his shoes were muddy and the kitchen floor was clean. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his coat and he was determined to leave them there. 

Sarah threw the fork into the sink. 

“Well, I can’t keep a bone around the house, it’s not sanitary.” 

Tom looked at the dishes that were piling up in the sink and said “Where’s Frank?” 

Sarah shrugged and started collecting the dishes around the bone. 

“Did he find a job?” 

“Look, can you just take that thing somewhere else?” Sarah pointed at the bone with her chin. “I don’t want it in the house.” 

“Dad said to give it to you.” 

“Well why doesn’t he take it?” 

Tom took a step into the kitchen and Sarah said “Tom, for God’s sake, I just cleaned.” 

He bent down and started fiddling with his shoelaces. “Mom doesn’t want it around, I guess.” 

“Well neither do I,” said Sarah and turned on the hot tap. The bone sat on the table and looked like a mushroom. Tom undid his shoes and stepped on the cold tiles in his socks; the floor was slippery and he went to sit down. “He’s been weird,” he said. 

“Who?” said Sarah and slipped on thick, green rubber gloves. 

“Dad. He’s been talking about the neighbours digging up the yard again, and on the phone he sometimes thinks I’m Leonard.” 

“That’s weird. What do you tell him?” 

“I say Leonard’s dead, Dad, this is your son, Tom.” 

“Don’t be cruel,” said Sarah. 

“I say it nicer than that.” 

Sarah looked out into the yard at the unfinished swing set. Moss was climbing up its limbs and the chain that held up one of the swings was starting to rust. “He’s doing fine,” she said, “he’s just tired.” 

“Tired from what? He’s not doing anything.” 

“Maybe that’s the problem, maybe he needs exercise. Mom keeps telling me he complains his shoulders are sore in the morning. He should really take some vitamins.”

 “What, vitamins and exercise? Don’t be crazy.” Tom reached out and touched the bone with two fingers. 

“You know what I was thinking,” Sarah said, “they should sell a part of their back yard. I mean, it’s too big for them now, they hardly go there anymore. They could sell that bit at the end, it’s mostly dirt anyway. Mom says she doesn’t like looking at it, she’d rather see someone actually do something with it.” 

“Why don’t they just hire a gardener?” 

“Not everybody makes as much a month as you, Tom,” said Sarah, and scrubbed a layer of grease off a dish. “If they sell it,” she continued, “they could use the money to travel, get out of the house a bit, you know?” 

“Where are they going to go? Dad gets nauseous when he travels, and Mom can’t let anyone pick up after her, ever. Remember when we stayed at that hotel in the Mediterranean and she wouldn’t let the maid into the room until we’d cleaned up beforehand? Remember that?” 

“Vaguely,” said Sarah. “Frankly, I’m surprised you do, weren’t you five at the time, or something?” 

“Yeah, well,” Tom and knocked against his temple with his knuckles “It’s served me well over the past, this thing.” 

Sarah put a few dishes aside with a clunk and looked out of the window again. A couple of crows had assembled on the crooked wooden beams. “Mom says another reason she wants to get rid of the rear part of the yard is because she says she can hear people digging there at night. She says she’s scared to get up and check, you never know what kind of people they are… But in the mornings the earth is all loose and kind of spread all over the place.” 

“That’s crazy,” said Tom and weighed the bone in his hand, “why would anyone do that?” 

“I don’t know.” Sarah leaned against the sink and started drying plates. “I told her she’s imagining things, but you know how she gets when you doubt what she says.” Tom nodded. “Maybe it’s Dad,” he said. 

Sarah sighed. “Maybe you’re watching too much TV. Dad’s fine, he’s just tired.” 

“We should get him a new dog,” said Tom, “maybe that would cheer him up.” 

“I don’t know, do you think he has the time to take care of a dog at this point?” 

“What else is he going to do?” said Tom, “he doesn’t do anything. Ever since that stupid dog died he barely even goes to the bathroom.” 

“What the hell is wrong with you? I thought you liked that dog?” 

“Yeah, well, it bit me once.” 

“Really? You never told me about that.”

“It wasn’t hard or anything, I think he just got mad. I think I was trying to take his toy away from him or something.” 

“Will you stop touching that bone, it’s creeping me out,” said Sarah, “it’s probably full of germs.” 

Tom let go of the bone. 

“It’s probably the bone you were trying to take away from him,” said Sarah and laughed through her nose a little. 

“Maybe. That would make sense.” Tom got up and leaned on the table. “I should go now.” 

“The kids will be home from school in an hour, don’t you want to stay and say hi?” 

Tom sat back down. “Okay,” he said. 

“Coffee?” 

“It’s a bit too late for that. For me anyway, you go ahead.” 

“That’s ok,” said Sarah, “I quit a while ago. I only really have coffee with Dad anymore.” 

“Yeah,” said Tom, “me too.” 

“It’s hard to say no to him.” Sarah smiled. 

“So what do I do with the bone? You really don’t want to keep it?” 

Sarah shook her head. “It gives me the creeps. Plus I never really knew that dog all that well.” 

“Well, apart from the biting incident we weren’t that tight either,” said Tom. 

“Why doesn’t Dad keep it?” 

“I don’t know. Mom says it depresses him. Apparently she caught him crying over it the other day and she decided it had to go.” 

“Poor Dad,” said Sarah. She got up and opened the cupboard and took out a silver can. 

“What are you doing?” 

“Making coffee.” 

Tom nodded and picked up the bone again. The porous surface felt like he could crush it if he wanted to. “It’s so light,” he said. 

“Will you put that down!” said Sarah and the coffee machine filled the room with its buzzing. 

“It’s just a bone.” 

“Well, keep it then, I don’t want it.” 

Tom put the bone in his coat pocket and watched his sister fill a steaming cup. “I’ll have one too,” he said. 

They sat over their steaming cups for a while, until the screams of children burst through the door. 

Tommy and Arlo [Writing Exercise]

I suffer, hey, says Arlo, look at that thing in the window. Have you ever seen one like it? Tommy says no, he hasn’t, and he doesn’t care, the gym is two blocks away and they have no money for the bus. You’re lazy, says Arlo, what we going to the gym for. For the ladies, says Tommy, and coughs up a fishbone. The woman next to them holds on to the lamppost as though it was an elbow, a gentleman, or a tree she built her nest in but has forgotten how to climb; her hair waves in the wind like the flag of some country whose outline doesn’t look like anything to you. Her hair is brown, but the streetlight puts some gratis highlights in, and she is grateful. Arlo says keep walking and so Tommy pulls the woman’s hair out of his nose and places it back onto the current of air that has been carrying it, and he follows Arlo around the corner like a sheepdog or a sheepish dog or something in a sheepskin. Hey man, says Tommy and points to his stomach growling, he can almost see the sound form bubbles under his skin. Fuck off, says Arlo, we ain’t got time for that. The gym is two blocks away, and God knows when closing time’ll be. It’s dark and the woman at the streetlight lets her head fall backwards and her lids fall shut. A half-eaten can of beans sits on the sidewalk, and Tommy kicks it and dripping beans rain all over the pavement, the walls, and Arlo’s back. Arlo doesn’t notice, his coat is thick as a wolf’s. Smells good, he says, smells hella good my stomach is aflame don’t you know? And Tommy nods and says the gym will take care of that. Nah, the gym’s not for eating at says Arlo and Tommy nods again, but this time he looks perturbed. Hey maybe a beer before we get there says Tommy and steps on the shoe of a bum. The bum says God will punish us all and Arlo says do you see any beer round here? The sign of the bar glows yellow and then blue and Tommy points at it and says it ain’t going to get no greener. The bar is empty and smells like dogfood, but food is food and they sit on stools half their size and stare into a candle in a glass and see the body of a moth coated in wax. What cann’eh getche? A beer says Arlo and looks up at the twitching moustache holding a towel. Yeah, says Tommy, a beer. The moustache disappears and reappears with bottles and pops the caps off them and says that’ll be five bucks. Money, you mean, says Arlo, and the moustache twitches again and the beefy knuckles choke the bottlenecks. Tommy slips off his stool. They leave the bar with growling stomachs and fiery lids and Arlo says nothing for a change. They walk through puddles of streetlight and Tommy’s nose swells up and deflates with the rushing by of low beams that cut through wet spots like a stone through a window. A woman staggers by and Arlo sucks in his stomach and says evenin’ mehdayme, and she peels open a halfway closed eyelid and a tear of drool rolls out the corner of her lips. Arlo releases his stomach and Tommy says hey, and grabs his elbow. Two blocks, says Arlo, and Tommy points there it is, and the sign is blue and says GYM and the next minute it is grey and the white light that floods through the glass doors is black as pitch. Tommy and Arlo stand on the sidewalk, the bags under their eyes carved deep by the streetlight. I need to sit says Arlo and keeps standing so Tommy sits down instead. A man in shiny silver shorts and a shiny silver shirt walks out of the glass door carrying a bag that looks like a pillow. Asshole, yells Arlo, and the man says fuck you and gets into his car. Then Arlo sits down too, and they lean their heavy foreheads against the streetlight and sit there for a while, until Tommy feels a bug crawl into his collar.

Writer's Block

So about two weeks ago I started my MA in Writing – ever since, I've had complete and total writer's block. Stage fright, I guess, or maybe the realisation that I have to take it seriously now. Either way, the suffering got pretty intense, and I've been dragging myself through my everyday activities like a wounded animal; after a while, I got so sick of myself I decided I had to do something, so I picked up a "how to write every day" type book and went straight to the exercises. I started yesterday. I'm not sure how much shame there is in learning to write again and treating it like physical exercise, like jogging maybe (which was the suggestion in one of the books I read and which, incidentally, I should start doing again too) – either way, it seems to be what I need to do. 

Aspiration / And God is Empty [Poem]

The sitting softens with time
yet the focus on it hardens.
The gluteus has melted away until there is an impression of sitting on bone
softly
delicately
like cracking an egg.
Gentle hands sieve out the cracked shell
and what may have remained of a dead thing
Surrounding the roaring tube
that jitters like a vacuum
the hips are spread and from them ooze the protruding legs
with this insistency that bones have of remaining straight.
When the face falls sideward you half expect a tear rolling down its surface
slaloming through the beads of sweat
and burying itself on the floor. 

Recyclers

Though it is now more obvious than a few years ago, I (along with seemingly most of my generational peers) have spent my youth so far in a limbo, an ideological limbo in which any movement, any attempt at creation and at stuffing meaning into the more or less tactile carcasses of dress, of expression, of speech, of the use we make of our senses, seems doomed from the start to go up in smoke, as there is nothing it can adhere to, nothing it can rub against, and we twirl through the motions of spirit one failed, meaningless, utterly self-referential act after another, so postmodern it has become aware of nothing but itself, thinking that from its patch-worked bowels it can extract something, anything, of value if it only digs, squeezes, pulverises enough. But really, there is nothing, because there was nothing to begin with. We've exhausted the limited (but seemingly endless) heap of countercurrents and acts of rebellion, as well as the currents we chose to be rebellious against, so far even that we started assimilating parts of them in a desperate attempt at a new act of defiance; but the irony only got us so far, and distinguishing between what we meant and what we refused became increasingly muddy, until it became nothing at all. Now, we find ourselves stuck in a cycle of referentiality, all we are left with is the attempt to take over what has been, what used to make sense in the context of its own time, of its own place, and struggle to make it our own, to corrupt it according to our needs, and to do so while at all costs avoiding to let ourselves see that all we are doing is vulgarising it, contaminating with our own lack of meaning, of fulness, we are littering the streets and pages with empty concepts because, when ripped from their original context, their original propagators, they are nothing but shells we adorn ourselves with in an attempt to stand out in a mass that is adorned with the same shells, occasionally showing a very slight variation in shading or shape, but shells nonetheless. We all jingle the same, empty tune, and we're loving it because, hey, it's our generation's birthright to take and ruin, to colonise and misunderstand, to cut the filaments that fed the heart and dangle corpses from our ears, we are the recyclers and the conquistadores of the past, we are a band of toddlers obsessed with DIY and disgusted with history, in fact, we have no scruples about robbing signs, symbols, words of their context, we are a-contextual and the world better follow our lead, the past needs to be cut into pieces and distributed among us so that we may make use of what cannot be discarded without being recycled into an identity, so we don't let it sleep but take it with us into the future, we call it innovation, no, wait, we call it being unique.
We don't have a movement because movements are for suckers, for those whose aspirations are too linear, and, perhaps the one thing that sets us apart is this recycling of what used to be and fashion it into new identities. Our generation is circular.