Peel

For that matter, how do I know anything? A teacher of mine this semester told me that I'm the kind of writer that needs to tell us, the audience, how they should read me. From how she said it, it sounded like it should have been a compliment, but then, very much wasn't. Either way, apologies that it took me this long to explain myself. 

Ahem–I (sporadically) provide my loyal 5 ½ readers with tepid agitprop, padded with memes and a sassiness that is equal parts adorable and intolerable. 

In this way, I am the millennial condition: I’m so sorry for anything I've ever done, ever tumblered.

Please, allow me to make this easier on both of us. I hate the straight essay. And before you start, NO, this has nothing to do with my well-documented history of anti-straight sentiment (though it doesn't NOT have to do with that). 

What I mean is I can’t stand the Research Paper, the essay choked with definitives, the "logical" , the """""rational""""", the five-paragraph, the "does the author give so much ample supporting evidence (audience interjection: how much evidence is necessary?!?!?) SO much supple evidence that the essay was written in a bra!" (pause for crickets to stop trying to hang themselves) The Proof™.

I don't like these essays because I don't believe that’s how thought works. At least not my own. My thoughts are on tumble dry – a sleeve claws the porthole and then swept under. You know: healthy fun stuff. And YES, I'm doing fine, don't look at me like that. When I pull the clementine’s sinew off the inner flesh, I see the animal of it. The alive it used to be.

My answer to the straight essay is modular, such as this one. I won't be coy. I'll just tell you. I want more joy. Another way to say that is I want to make less sense. I don't want to tell you all the things about what I think because I am not now nor will I ever be an authority on anything, besides, you know, being 100% confident that I killed JFK.

Absolutely true statements aside (for real, I killed him you can look it up) the modular essay appeals to me purely because of the physical. It leaves blanks, transparent about the futility of the form, of "rational" though. 

Thoughts, as I like to think of them, are self-contained entities, like Gushers or coffins, that deserve autonomy as well as recognition for their reliance on context and the network of thoughts that give any one idea the space to exist (it's anarchy and cooperation, my comrades). Also, they are full of preserved flesh. So when you unburied it and bite into a well beveled corner, all the goo rushes out.

Think about the naked clementine now split in half, and, like ceremony, I pull its limp fish spine out of the middle.

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