myasthenia gravis
Message from Bear: I decided to check out The Sluts on your recommendation, and ended up reading it all in one go. I agree with your thoughts on the way everything is described in it, and honestly it made me think a lot about earlier parts of my life, from before I transitioned, and the effect it's had on my life going forward. It was... a lot, in a way that's probably some sort of painfully beneficial reflection. I don't really know why I decided to tell you all of this, other than to say thanks, I guess, and maybe you'd appreciate hearing that it was a helpful recommendation.
im really glad you enjoyed it. i relate to it in a pretty similar way. amygdalatropolis by e.r. yeager is a similar thing, but i didn't like it nearly as much as the sluts. i think dennis cooper has such an intensely accurate hold on what these queer communities are like and it's amazing. his other novels, the george miles cycle, are also good-- but you can tell a lot of what they are, is what the sluts' dna is. it's the culmination of the vaguely plotless Closer, all of the great parts of that novel but with a throughline. idk who you are ofc, but id love to know what you thought of the section inbetween site 1 and site 2. it's the only part of the novel that is explicitly not epistolary, they are actual conversations with real people. i have an idea in my head of what it is, but i'd rather hear it from you first.
wanted to check my asks, so i'm writing another one. my reading has slowed down a bit, but i finished Serious Weakness.
i read low kill shelter, and i really enjoyed it. very short, very succinct look into disability, ocd, being a gay boy. i loved it, a lot, it's a really great book. serious weakness is everything. it's all of that and it's more, it's about the effects of grooming on people that could easily live a normal life, it's about how the world pushes us to be something, to aspire constantly. we need to keep going up in the world, new job, promotion, new house, new new new new new. we need to be something. you need to be a man. you need to be a woman. you need to be neither. you need to be both. if you don't quantify it, or you can't quantify it, someone will do it for you. if you won't live for yourself, someone stronger than you will decide what you are. oenone wants a man, insul wants a woman, or his idea of a woman, a "bullet wife" that you deafen with guns and torture and who is a servant to you, even if said bullet-wife is an autistic neuro-scribe who's also a boy. trianon has feelings on this, he's not empty, but in the end he defers. if you can't be something, you will be made into something.
if you were empty i'd have blown straight through you you'd just be gone
even insul knows this. trianon is something. insul wouldn't want trianon if he were nothing. in a lot of ways, i think insul is using trianon as a stand-in for some gay nerd he can torture, where if insul did what he thought blake wanted, and blake had his way, he would've shot him in the head. he can't do that. he knows that trianon is a person. he wants trianon. trianon is the only person who has ever seen insul as someone. to everyone else, he's nobody. trianon stands out, trianon is easy to see in a crowd and make fun of. but nobody really does, at least, not to the degree that Insul does. bright green highlights he "did on a dare", persistent myasthenia gravis that makes him look like a retard if he doesn't take his pills constantly. and you have to excuse my language here, but i'm not saying that to be edgy, but rather that "being retarded" is a central theme in this book. he's able to mask it normally, but the second that trianon is forced to exist as he would be naturally, the mask slips. there's nothing he can really do to hide that he is a gay autistic nerd. i think part of what leads tria to imprint on insul so hard is that insul doesn't pretend. he doesn't dance around this. if anything, i think it's what endears insul to tria so much. insul wants tria. he wants what tria is. even if he's making insul dress in girl clothes, he doesn't view tria as a woman. by the end of the novel, even insul is willing to change for tria. it PAINS him, so fucking badly, to have to pretend to be normal, for his "acting out" to be reduced from murder to pissing on a laptop in an empty room. but he wants tria, he's desperate for how tria treats him. he wants someone who will fight back and show him they want him.
really insul is the victim.
im kind of rambling, but this novel is. something. to me. and the worst part about it all, is that maybe if i read it and i related to trianon, everything would be okay. trianon is a guy who is doing his best to mask his invisible disability (autism) and his very visible disability (mysathenia graves) and try to be normal. is he happy? no. i don't think he's happy. if he were, he would not end up with Insul, and, i guess up to interpretation, oenone as well? i saw someone say "i don't think trianon can choose both" but, honestly? by the end of the novel? i believe he can, and does. with all of the bullshit going on with the ARkstorm, being stranded in the cabin, self actualizing as a fag with a power drill.
but i don't relate to trianon.
i relate to insul. i relate to the emotionally stunted murderer who idolized his school shooter groomer and believes in a school shooter caste system of shooters, bullet wives, and meat. i relate to the guy who thinks that 'gay' isn't a real concept. it's who gives the pain and who takes it. i relate to the guy who says that he has no identity. i relate to the guy who hurts to show his love, because he was never taught anything else and the people he looked up to as a kid believed that killing or hurting was the ultimate goal of a life and the best way to show your love. multiple times while reading this book, i broke into tears or had a panic attack, because reading the things insul would say, or the sections where insul and blake are talking, i saw myself too much in him, and it's distressing because he's the least defendable character in this book by your average person's standards. but i don't believe insul is an irredeemable evil, i think insul is a mentally ill guy ruined by the older people around him into justifying and being okay with hurting others. i think he deserves love. and i think the love he finds in trianon is real. i think that the love between the two is beautiful. i think serious weakness is an amazing look into autism. into illness. into the ways the people around us can shape us and how we can grow from what they want but shouldn't give into it fully.
trianon, by the end of this novel, is not what insul wants. he's what he needs. trianon, by the end of this novel, is not what oenone wants. i don't even know if he's what she needs. oenone does her best to help trianon and maybe even does love him but it never feels like they should be together. trianon is a canvas that by the end of the novel is a beautiful mix of everyone's paint with a big X in the center. i love you, trianon.
“If I hurt you, it isn’t because I’m mad. It’s because I like doing it.”
