Benjamin McElroy > Recent Status Updates

It was a dissociation that he had never felt before; he knew that he ought to be troubled by it, but he was numb, and he could not convince himself that it mattered. He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.

Rather than tremble at the danger of the Trump presidency, we should have always feared the pernicious prevalence of the US political system

Some nights, too, I imagined her dead, of any disease, a disease that led not to a long, drawn-out death or to a death that was too sudden but to a reasonably prolonged death, one that gave her time to stop sucking dicks and retreat into her chrysalis, her own sorrows

Between his legs all of his red guts hung
With the heart, the lungs, the liver, the gall bladder
And the shriveled sac that passes shit to the bung

Embarrassment is contained by incidents, gets funny and small over time; shame runs gangrene through the entire past, makes the future impossible. You can’t own it or laugh it off, only try to bail it out in sloshing bucketfuls, drenching yourself in the process. Embarrassment is an event, shame a condition