Adrian Gray

“I understood, too, what was upsetting my supposed benefactors. This wasn't about my work or my Instagram feed, or whatever uncomfortable email or phone call. Ryan and Seth had received this morning from whichever of their corporate partners was currently on edge. This was about the extent to which I would seem to be playing my role. Just as I had come to understand that in the world of Pict it wasn't enough simply to go to work and go home - that there was, in addition, and expectation of some deeper, human contribution - so too, in the context of this programme, this opportunity, it would never be enough simply to point to the material gains I had made. They needed me to be not only successful, but happy, evolved, gratefully aglow. It was my job to make them feel good about themselves and to help them package up that satisfaction for the consumption of others. In my mind, I saw their vision: me, on a podium or stage, perhaps giving a TED talk, gushing about the life in the change in my life they'd occasioned. (p.165)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“I came to understand that this truly was what it meant to go back to nature, that this was nature in its truest form. No forests and campfires, no rolling hills and reassuring rambles. Just rivers of shit and decay, a chamber in which we ate and shat and ate and shat and lived among the carcasses of all the things we didn't want and couldn't fully consume. The processes of the world were known to us. (p.235)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“I wanted to say to them: I don't even know what we're doing. There is no scheme. There's nothing we want or hope for. I felt as if everything was pressing in, as if my mind was a sludgy and toxic as the slurry that covered the floor, the walls, our skin. There is no difference anymore, I realised, between what we were taking in and what we were expelling, between what we were and what we might aspire to be, between what we consumed and expelled, and what we'd become. It was all shit. We were shit. Our world was shit. Everything was a single, flowing, un-dammed, undifferentiated river of filth, and within that river we were formless and liquid and horribly free, and all anyone wanted to do was to fashion new moulds into which we should pull the cooling and hardening putrescence of who we were, so they could force what was formless into a form that they could comfortably condemn.’ (p.290)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“Sometimes, looking back, I try to isolate a moment to change, a day or a night on either side of which things were demonstrably different. I never succeed. Partly, I think, is because it's simply not possible. Outside of sudden, violent events, changes is ongoing; we measure it only by holding what we've become against the memory of what we once were. But it's also because, in that space, at that particular time, We were so enmeshed in change, so completely caught up in it that singular, momentary factors became lost and blurred. Day and night slipped their boundaries. Our bodies ached, contorted, then were numbed with narcotics and went slack. My fingernails became sharp, then broken. In regular life, the life we'd left, we would have managed these processes, checked them, turned things back to how they were and how we liked them. There, in that concrete room, we surrendered ourselves to time and all its effects. The heat was unrelenting, pooling us in sweat and thickening the stink in which we lived. (p.271)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease