Chronicling My Doom
I have this presentation tomorrow on Robinson Crusoe. It’s 20 minutes long, where I’m supposed to go over 10 annotated bibliography sources. Here’s the issue: I hate Robinson Crusoe. It’s so mind-numblingly boring I can’t read it. I’ve never made it past the first page. I’m doing everything I can to avoid working on it. It’s going to go terribly. I’ve had this coming down the pike for a long time.
I’m a helpless actor watching my life unfold in this horrible way. I’m not sure what I’m going to do tomorrow when my presentation goes badly. Maybe I’ll puke, maybe I’ll scream. I’m not one for historionics, though. In reality I’ll probably tuck it into a pit in my stomach and let it bake into an ulcer. That’s the other thing.
I’m perpetually afraid about my health. I sit around get panic attacks over it. Over if I’m having a heart attack or a hypertension crisis. That’s something nobody tells you about becoming an academic. It’s why so many academics are the only people on the planet who still wear masks. You start to obsess about your health. It becomes difficult to be alone with your thoughts.
I am afraid of tomorrow.
Both literally and metaphorically, I am afraid of tomorrow.
I don’t have anything to say about Crusoe. I don’t know what I’m going to tell my professor. “I’m sorry, can I still pass the class if I don’t do this?” “I can’t work on this presentation, it’s so boring it gives me insane thoughts.” I’m looking out the window now. What all do I have to live for, again? I wrack my brain and all I can come up with is “mom would be sad if I died.”
But even if tomorrow went well, the heart attack is still around the corner. Sure, it may not happen at 30, but 40, 50, we’re actually in the realm of possibility at that point. It can even happen during sex. Like, it becomes a non-remote possibility you croak when getting it on.
I wonder how many years it’s going to be before I need boner pills. The commercials always say “talk to your doctor.” What do I tell the doctor when I think I need boner pills? I don’t know what that conversation is going to look like. That’s the other thing. I wish I could know when my dick will stop working. I wish I could prepare for it, but I won’t know until it happens.
Millennials are now beginning to suffer from erectile dysfunction. Where the fuck did all the years go?
What all can I say about Robinson Crusoe? My assignment is to cover the “debate” around Crusoe as a spiritual autobiography. It’s some Puritan thing. I have gleaned no such debate. And I wouldn’t care what it is anyway.
The Puritans believed if you didn’t get a woman off when you nailed her, she wouldn’t get pregnant. So dudes were taught to be good enough at sex that they could get their wife off when the time came for children.
Moldbug is right, we are still Puritans. Look at that trend about how young gals wear skintight clothes to the gym, those pants that reshape their asses to look like they were meticuluosly scuplted by NYL2 or something. (Only look up that reference at your discretion. Seriously. Major NSFW warning on that one). Then they get mad when a dude looks over. Sex regarding the NYL2 Blender-ass chick is both implied, yet obscene. Americans are hard-wired for the Puritan mindset. “How dare you glance at my ginormous NYL2 Blender-ass, pervert!” Kinda trad, maybe? Is it based? I don’t know.
Does Crusoe ever eye up an NYL2 Blender-ass chick? Probably not. That would actually be interesting. Equiano called his book “The Interesting Narrative,” and the funniest part about it is that it’s the least interesting narrative you’ll ever read. Besides Crusoe, maybe. I actually made it like 40 pages in before I realized what was going on. I accidently became the world’s premier Olaudah Equiano scholar upon this realization. The realization being that everyone gets Equiano wrong. The text is an ancient shitpost, basically. It becomes the most hilarious book ever when you realize what he was actually doing. He wrote a bunch of intentionally boring bullshit and called it “the interesting narrative.” That’s actually funny as fuck when you think about it. It’s genius, like an 18th century Sam Hyde bit or something.
Robinson Crusoe has no such punchline. Neither do I.
Saint Jude Thaddeus is the Catholic Patron Saint of hopeless causes. Perhaps that sheds some light on where I’m writing from.
-et