I’m planning on having a newsletter of some sort – anything you’d want to see in particular? I’m still going to be here, though, never fear! That’s more of a landing page for me, where I can send professionals looking for me.
Author: slightlyignorant
Review: LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION, by Ben Lerner
My boyfriend, whom I have converted back into being a reader, bought both of Ben Lerner’s books at the Brooklyn Book Fair a few weeks ago. He read them both in a matter of days, and recommended them highly to me.
I was more than happy to take his recommendation, especially as the name Ben Lerner has been circling around the online literary scene for a while. I’d seen his name all over the various sites I frequent and I thought it would be nice indeed to read something contemporary and hip. I was excited, looking forward to it, and expecting to like it.
Ben Lerner can certainly write. Before writing this novel, his first, he’d published several poetry collections according to his bio. Indeed, Leaving the Atocha Station seems to be a fictionalized version of Lerner’s own experience as a Fulbright Scholar in Spain. The book’s main character and narrator, Adam Gordon, is also a poet, is also in Spain on an unnamed research-based fellowship, is also a graduate of a university on Rhode Island (i.e. Brown). Possibly also like Lerner – but here I’m speculating – Adam Gordon thinks he’s basically a fraud.
Adam Gordon is also an incredibly unreliably narrator, which could be interesting in theory, but ends up being profoundly dull. I had sympathy for him, to an extent – he is depressed and medicated for it, his self esteem is buried under the floorboards, he seems to be acting out his life out rather than living it – but I also found him extremely obnoxious. He treads the same ground that so many have gone over before, and is leaving no new footprints in his wake.
From Henry James to Henry Miller to Earnest Hemingway, the insecure white privileged male living abroad has been explored ad nauseam. James was an innovator in his deep exploration of our minds and moods, and Miller, much as I hate him, at least managed to be interestingly offensive in his obsession with douching prostitutes and lecherous men. Hemingway I personally regard as a writer who misunderstood himself and perpetuated his personal myth to the point where he is believed to be more of a misogynist than Miller (c’est impossible!). The thing about Lerner is that he’s none of these, and nor is Adam Gordon. There is a wrap-around kind of logic to his character – Gordon’s fear of being a real poet, a real artist, is curbed by his own belief that he is a fraud, which as a result makes him even more of a real poet, and a modest one at that. The irony underlying every word he utters is mirrored in the prose itself. And while I do live in Manhattan and do enjoy small and trendy coffee shops, I have also grown truly sick of the hipster urge to take irony to its outer limits and beyond.
The indulgent, ironic self-hatred that Gordon is constantly experiencing becomes exhausting and dull. He is both detached from and profoundly inside of himself, and even in his most miserable moments, there is a self-congratulatory tone, as if he’s actually quite enjoying be so tortured and complicated.
Let me stress – it’s not that Lerner isn’t a good writer. He very clearly is. Some of his shortest, simplest sentences convey a vast amount of emotional information:
Without texture, time passed.
Or:
The cities were polluted with light, the world warming.The seas were rising. The seas were closing over future readers.
Ben Lerner is clearly a poet. Maybe he has come to terms with that by now and maybe not. My question, as a reader, is why did he need to transmit his own learning curve in this way? Seeing him lust after or sleep with all the women he knows, smoke weed and drink to excess every night, and not take his own work seriously even while everyone else does – it all gets pretty boring and repetitive. Not to mention a bit infuriating. Adam Gordon gets everything, apparently without trying. Is this the lie we’re supposed to recognize? Is he, in fact, making an immense effort when living in Spain on his fellowship’s funds even while not doing the research he went there to do? Or are his anxiety and depression enough to make his laziness understandable, admirable even?
Most writers will tell you that writing is hard work. Lerner’s return to the whimsy of effortless poesy coupled with obsessive anxiety and self-scrutiny are not particularly fetching, mostly because they’re so clinical and automatic. There is so little feeling in the book – except that of Adam for himself – that it ends up seeming like a grand experiment in narcissistic (and ironic) self-hatred.
Maybe it’s just that I went to college with people like Ben Lerner and that I experience them still, living in New York. Maybe this book hits too close to home in the need for validation that is hiding behind its fake humility. Whatever the reason, the result is the same. To my mind, Lerner’s sentences are beautiful, his prose cleanly rendered, but his impact on me was close to nil.
Two out of Three
He has a big important job in a big important world. Up and coming. His bald spot is minimal. He lets his pants droop to show he is hip, he is with it, but wears button down shirts to show that he is serious. And he is. He is serious.
Sam lets the glass door swing behind him and walks through the darkening evening. The afternoons are ending earlier. It’s getting colder. He shouldn’t forget his jacket again tomorrow. His phone is buzzing in his pocket.
He doesn’t like the new girl. He liked her, before, when she wasn’t the new girl yet. Now she makes demands on his time. She should be silent as a sheep. Sheep baaa though. Bad metaphor. He’ll think of another.
Sam lights his cigarette and lets the call go to voicemail. He’ll listen to his wife later, in the privacy of home, and then he’ll call her back. A small, lonely bed waits for him in that privacy, in that home, no home at all without her. She is so far away, and he let her go away. He got a ring on both their fingers first. But now she’s gone.
There are moments when he realizes he is being too harsh. He doesn’t apologize. If he apologizes, the new girl will question his authority. She embarrassed him, on her first day, too, talking in front of the Big Dog boss, humiliating him with obvious opinions. He knows she herself is aware of it. It doesn’t change his impatience.
Sam stops at a dive bar he never goes into for a beer. He doesn’t feel like seeing anyone he knows. There’s a football game playing on the television. He doesn’t know whether it’s live or a rerun or replay or whatever they call it when they screen a game again. Rerun probably. Like old reruns of FRIENDS. What an awful show.
He comes to work early and leaves late. He is dedicated. He doesn’t see why the new girl isn’t. He doesn’t want her to be involved, to give him ideas, but he needs her there as a sounding board. He needs to talk to someone while he works. He needs to see her giving him results, otherwise why the hell is she in the budget.
Sam calls his wife back late, after he’s showered and shaved again (it’s twice a day now that he has to shave. He doesn’t want to be like all the bearded men in his office. It prickles and it makes him look vaguely religious, he thinks). Her voice is distracted. It’s a bad time for her, he can tell. He says sorry for not picking up. He was out, there was wind, he was smoking, etcetera. She tells him she thought he was going to quit smoking. She laughs. He laughs too, relieved. She’s not really rebuking him.
He has a whole weekend ahead of him but his thoughts are consumed with his project. The first one he’s heading. So much rests on this success. He has to make it work. He needs her, the new girl, he doesn’t have the time to do it all alone, but he also doesn’t have time for her, to tell her what she needs to do or if any of it is good. He figures if something is wrong, he’ll tell her. Otherwise, it’s quicker for them both to get on with what they’re doing. More efficient.
Sam thinks he’s a good boss. A good husband. A good man. Two out of three ain’t bad either, though, he thinks.
In the Space Between Two Housing Projects
She lay there, underneath the scraggly bushes, in the space between two housing projects and listened.
“This is where the broker said to meet her?”
“Yeah. Dude, it’s like not safe here.”
“Calm down.”
“We’ll get stabbed.”
“Look, shut up okay?”
“Can we go?”
“Don’t you want to at least see the place?”
“No, I don’t want to live here, I’ll get shot.”
“Jesus, okay, okay.”
The boys left. Good riddance. She didn’t want anyone like that living here. It was people like that that got her uncle mad, and when he was mad he drank, and when he was drunk he got madder. He said it was their fault, everything, from a long time ago. She didn’t exactly agree but she didn’t exactly disagree either. There was some truth there, she thought, but it wasn’t them that made her uncle drink.
Nobody thought she was old enough to think things. She was treated by everyone, by her uncle and her teachers and the boys on the corner like a baby. She was a kid, sure, but she wasn’t dumb. Kids aren’t dumb, she used to tell her mom. Her mom agreed. Kids aren’t dumb, she’d say, and you’re the smartest of them.
She lay in the space between two housing projects and thought about their shapes. Maimed asterisks, each with only four sides. If you combined them they’d be a real one. But there was a rivalry between the kids in the two towers, they pretended they were gangs, the Northies and the Southies, and she knew that it was practice for some of them. For the real thing.
She lay in the space between two housing projects and thought about how hungry she was and how she was sick of her uncle’s “home cooking,” which was what he called the microwave dinners he bought. She missed her mom and the real cooking. The colorful food they used to eat together before everything turned gray and white, the worst colors in the world in her opinion.
She lay there and pictured Sunday coming along faster, like an express train. She wanted to skip all local stops and see her mom already. But there were hours and stops to go before then.
Trade In
When I walked into the bar with you, it was a normal night. We’d made ourselves pasta with peppers and onions and a brownish sauce that you invented and eaten it in front of the TV with the latest episode of that crime show you like so much. The funny one. We took showers, separately, and I cleaned your hair out of the drain and didn’t say anything to you about it. I wasn’t being passive aggressive, I was just loving you. It was one of the ways I loved you, without you knowing about it. When Nick called us and asked us to come to the bar he liked picking up women at, we looked at our watches and said sure, why not, it wasn’t even nine and we hadn’t gone out all week.
When we walked into the bar, Nick was already in full swing, a brunette with a great shirt – it was open in the back, and her spine was the kind that sinks in rather than puckers out, which I’ve always found attractive. I pulled on your arm, and asked if we should sit elsewhere. You looked down at me, and I loved you for being tall, and you laughed and said no, we can join.
Nick introduced us to the woman, Gen, with a G, like Gen-X or Y. She said this first thing, and you and I squeezed hands, each of us knowing that the other was thinking about the conversation we’d had sometime recently about how hilarious we thought it was when people insisted, upon first meeting anyone, on explaining how unique their name was because it was spelled differently.
Gen and Nick already seemed like old friends. For all I know they were. I haven’t seen either of them since that night, so I never got a chance to ask. She kept looking at you though, and then at Nick, and then at you. Whenever I tried to ask her anything, she gave me monosyllabic answers.
We drank a lot. Two beers each, and then we got to doing shots because Gen kept ordering them from the waitress. After three rounds, I noticed that only three shots were appearing. None for me, apparently. I didn’t say anything because I wanted to be sober enough to take you home.
The music got louder as the night approached eleven. I was bored. I could barely hear what anyone was saying, and the lights were getting dimmer. I was sleepy. I heard Nick yell, enunciating as if to someone who didn’t hear him the first time, that you and I were “cool.” I didn’t know what he meant, until I did. Gen started being nicer to me, touching my hand across the table and meeting my eyes and then flicking her own towards you. She started buying me shots again too.
Around midnight, I finally dragged you out, Nick and Gen trailing us, and we all got into the same cab. Nick gave the driver his address first, which pissed me off, but when you got off there too, and I sat in the cab, one foot out on the street, and one in, I began to know something was off. Your hand was on Gen’s hip. Had that been happening in the cab? I was in the back with you and her, Nick was in the front. You held your hand out to me and gave me that smile, the one you give me when I come out of the shower wrapped in a towel, and I shook my head.
You beckoned, with your head, with your whole body, and I said no. Gen put her hand in your pocket. I put my foot back in the cab. Nick was waiting by his front door, holding it open for you and her. He was smoking and spitting like he always does. I shut the door of the cab and asked the driver to take me home.
I didn’t have any money. He was angry and yelled at me. I gave him my number and full name and told him to call me tomorrow and I’d give him my credit card info.
When I got inside, nothing looked like you anymore. The hair in the wastebasket in the bathroom made me gag, or maybe it was the alcohol, and when I leaned over the toilet and threw up, again and again until there was nothing left in my stomach but acid and bile, I felt only a shadow of you behind me, an absence, where you should have been, waiting with a glass of water and a toothbrush, telling me sip, brush, come to bed.
McSweeney’s
Hi bloggy-folks.
I’ve got some super exciting news. Which is that I won this thing here:
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/we-are-pleased-to-announce-the-winners-of-our-2014-column-contest
Fat Air
It was the wrong day to scour with the neighborhood for a lost dog. The air was fat and everybody was moody. The humidity had Marsha breathing in rapid little gasps and she could feel the droplets of water collecting in her lungs along with oxygen. She wasn’t sure if the wetness in the dips of her sharp collarbones was due to the mist or was her own sweat.
“Hi, sorry to bother you. My dog ran away this morning. You seen him?” Marsha held up her phone to the crack of an open but chained door.
“No.” The old man – or old woman, it was hard to tell from just half a wrinkled face – shut the door without really looking at the photo on the phone’s screen.
“Thanks,” Marsha told the closed door.
She tried to decide whether she should go up another floor in this building or give up and move on to the next one. Her brother Jerome was doing the easy task of hanging up posters around the neighborhood. He was more of a people person than she was, but he was too mad to start knocking on doors right then. She didn’t want him getting shot for being pissed off that he’d let his own dog run away.
Marsha trudged up to the next flight. If she was doing this, she thought, she’d better do it right and all the way, or she’d just question herself later on. The stairwell stank of fresh paint and urine. A couple cigarette butts lay on the landing between flights, next to an open window. Marsha wished she hadn’t quit. It was too expensive to smoke, though. Especially since Jerome had decided to get a dog.
She knocked on #41. No one answered and she couldn’t hear noises inside. She moved on to #42. Nothing. Her hand was stretched to knock on #43 already when the door to #42 opened behind her.
“Yes?” A tall man stood in the hallway that stretched behind the door. A little girl was standing on his feet with her back to him, holding his hands so she wouldn’t fall off. They were both smiling.
“Hi, sorry, my dog–” Marsha held out her phone, flustered.
“You have a dog?” the girl asked. She still had all her baby teeth.
“He ran away. The dog.” Marsha waved her phone at them again.
“Nothing there,” the girl whined.
“What?” Marsha looked at the phone’s screen. It was dark. She tried to light it again but the buttons were unresponsive. It was out of battery. “Fuck!” The word bounced back in a tinny echo, running up and down the stairwell.
“Hey, hey,” the dad let one of his daughter’s hands go and held it up. A stop sign. “She’s only five. There’s enough of that language out there, I don’t need it coming to my home.”
“Yeah, sure, I apologize, sir. Thanks.” Marsha’s shoulders and neck tensed and she could feel her face getting even warmer from the embarrassment.
“Daddy, she lost her dog.” The girl seemed to be admonishing him. Marsha was two steps down already when he leaned out of the doorway and called to her.
“Want some ice tea?”
Marsha wanted to sit, was what she wanted. She was exhausted, and anger and disappointment was filling her stomach at this wasted day, a missed work day, money she very much needed going to some blonde bimbo standing behind the Starbucks counter instead of her. Every time she missed a day of work, Marsha was sure she’d get fired next time she came in. Just thinking about it made her furious, the whole scenario playing out in her head as if it were really happening. Her boss wouldn’t have the decency to tell her she shouldn’t come in. He’d let her tie her apron on and clock in and get behind the counter wearing her smile and her white-washed customer-service voice, and then – then! – he’d tell her that he was sorry but he had to let her go. And she’d have to untie the apron, take off her smile and put away her voice, and leave the cafe with dignity in her step, otherwise she’d never be able to live with herself again. All because of stupid fucking Jerome who needed to have a pet, another mouth to feed to replace the son his baby mama took with her, stupid bum Jerome who told her he was depressed and couldn’t look for work, Jerome who smoked more weed than anyone she knew but claimed he got it for free from his friends, stupid Jerome who–
“Miss?”
“Yeah, great, thanks. Okay.”
“Come in, then.”
The little girl got off her father’s feet and asked Marsha “How’d you lose your dog? Was he a good dog? I want a dog.”
Marsha’s brain quieted down a little and she smiled. “I didn’t, my dumb brother did.”
“I have a brother! He’s dumb too,” the girl said. She looked at her father, who nodded, and then stepped out of the apartment, took Marsha’s hand, and led her inside, towards a kitchen chair and some ice tea.
Dead Tree Walking
When Judy-Lu was ten, her foster parents took her to see the Last Grove. Ingrid and Helen were an odd couple, at least odd among their peers. Children were so rarely born anymore that most people wanted to adopt babies, where available, to get the full experience of life, so to speak. It was well known that childhood memories were often implanted, and so the idea was to gain experience of childhood through one’s own child. But it wasn’t easy to have one biologically, or what used to be called ‘naturally’, so when couples like Ingrid and Helen were looking for children to adopt, it was rare that they would go for older girls like Judy-Lu.
But Ingrid and Helen were strange women, and they’d both decided at relatively young ages that they didn’t like babies very much. They found them creepy, like wax dolls come to life and screaming their faces red to boot. It wasn’t an attractive prospect, raising a baby. But a child, a child was something completely different.
They were big talkers, Ingrid and Helen, and they liked the idea of having someone to talk to. When they saw Judy-Lu in the adoption agent’s album, the first thing they asked him was, “Can she talk?” The adoption agent nodded and told them in a serious tone that the picture was outdated, and that she wasn’t two years old anymore – her age in the photograph – but seven already. He felt it was conscientious to tell them this, since it was true that many adoption agencies purposefully didn’t update pictures as the children grew older. In this case, he said, it wasn’t a purposeful slip-up, since his agency didn’t play such paltry tricks in order to make unsuspecting would-be parents adopt older children by accident. No, in this case, Judy-Lu was simply a very shy child and was impossible to drag out of the closet whenever the photographer came by.
Ingrid and Helen were intrigued by this and asked if they could meet the girl.
The agent swiftly set up a video call to the center Judy-Lu lived at. Apparently Judy-Lu wasn’t shy of him, since she agreed to come and speak on the call when she heard who it was. She waved merrily, showing a gap in her teeth where a front tooth had fallen out and a new one was growing in, crookedly. She said hello to Ingrid and Helen. They asked her why she didn’t like taking her picture take and she said “Poo. I’m ugly is why.”
She was certainly an ugly child, as such things went. But Ingrid and Helen didn’t mind and they took her in. They were foster mothers, not real adopters, because they wanted to have a way to give her back if they needed to. Judy-Lu wanted to have a way to leave as well, so they understood each other pretty well.
Ingrid and Helen had wanted to see the Last Grove for many years but they’d never managed to bring themselves to do it. Now that they had Judy-Lu, they began to plan the expedition and save money – no small feat, what with having another mouth to feed and the economy slipping between recession, depression and boom on a bi-yearly basis or so – and when Judy-Lu was ten, they finally got the tickets and flew out to the rain forest, where the last of the truly biological trees were kept in a biodome with specific and expensive temperature, watering and lighting systems.
“Are you excited, Judy-Lu?” Helen asked, holding the girl’s hand as they walked among the crowd of tourists through an exhibition that showed the history of Earth’s tree-loss and the preservation of the Last Grove by a rather too handsome group of young activists sometime late in the 2100s.
“Uh-huh,” said Judy-Lu. “Ingrid, are you excited?”
“I’m excited to be here with my two favorite ladies,” Ingrid said and tweaked Judy-Lu’s nose.
They stood in line for an hour. The exit to the biodome was on the other side, because they never saw anyone coming out. Judy-Lu wondered whether the trees were the kind of predatory plant that dominated her historical adventure books where the bad guys always got eaten by the rapacious things. She was nervous, but not nervous enough to say anything about it. She didn’t want her foster moms to think she was a wimp.
It was very quiet inside the biodome, and Judy-Lu whispered when they got inside. “What’s the smell?”
“I don’t know,” Ingrid said.
“I’ve read about this,” Helen said. “It’s probably what the air used to smell like. Before it was regulated.”
“It smells funny,” Judy-Lu said, and sneezed. The sound seemed very loud.
It was an awe-inspiring sight. The trees were very tall, much taller than any of them had expected, and the branches only started growing out of the trunk a few feet above their heads. But they draped down lower, and the bottom leaves rustled softly in the wind made by people’s bodies moving around.
They were only allowed ten minutes inside before they were ushered out. Ingrid and Helen chatted once they got outside, and they each held one of Judy-Lu’s hands. Judy-Lu herself felt like she never wanted to talk again. She couldn’t hold so much beauty inside her.
Pre-Trial
They say it’s passion that gets you here but I don’t believe that. It’s not passion. It’s greed.
At least, it was for me.
When I was a kid, my sister wanted to be an actress. She wanted to be as big as Marilyn Monroe and Nicole Kidman. I don’t know why she focused on those two. They had nothing to do with one another. They were both hot, sure, but she was too young to know that. I think. Who knows what girls learn. They say they mature faster than boys, and I guess I can say that’s true enough.
Anyway, in college, I had this girlfriend. The first one I’d ever had. And she wanted to make big bucks. I mean, big. She was going straight to law school and from there to some big corporation that she’d been interning with since she was seventeen. It was scary, man. It was like, she knew what she wanted to do and she was doing anything and everything she could to get there. It was damn sexy, let me tell you that, but she was kind of impatient with me. She liked me well enough, I guess, but she didn’t like the way I bummed around.
She didn’t like that I didn’t have goals. That was the main thing. That was what broke us up.
What happened was on our three year anniversary she dumped me. Right there on the quad, on our way home from the restaurant, the only real restaurant in our middle-of-nowhere college town. I told my buddies and my mom that I knew something was off the whole evening but that’s not true. In hindsight, I started to wonder whether there had been signs, so I said there were, because I looked like enough of a chump already, but there weren’t. She hadn’t said anything to make me suspect.
Even when she dumped me she said she loved me. I hate that. You can’t love someone and then tell them you shouldn’t be together. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Graduation was pretty soon too, and she knew I had big exams coming up before then but I guess so did she, so I can’t really complain about that so much.
I didn’t know what to do with myself after. I almost failed a bunch of tests. And after college, man, I was pathetic. I lived at home with my mom and my bum brothers and just watched Adventure Time and smoked weed all day. For like months.
Until I saw that she’d updated her Facebook status. She had a new boyfriend. Some dude with a LinkedIn resume about a mile long. He was older, too, like almost thirty. That’s when I had to change things.
So I started looking for where I could go that would make her find out about me and I’d always done a little bit of coding on the side, you know, just for fun really, but I suddenly realized how much people wanted to hire people like me. So I got a job by lying on my resume about how much I knew and I learned on the fly. It meant lots of all-nighters at the office, but that was fine, it was one of those cool ones where they had beer on tap and coffee machines everywhere.
Now here I am, ten years later, and she’s suing me. Believe that? Suing me. Okay, not her, a client of hers, but whatever, it’s damn near enough to be the same thing. Her clients are competitors of the company I founded and they’re saying we stole a bunch of ideas from them.
So what if I did? Everyone steals from everyone these days. And I’m rich enough that I can afford the best damned tech lawyer out there. Which happens to be her, actually, but I can’t hire her so I hired some guy who used to work for her.
The guys that work for me keep asking me why I’m not more nervous. The trial starts tomorrow and all, they tell me, and even though they’re loyal and they think I’m the bomb and all, they’re scared they’re going to lose their jobs real soon. A couple people have quit on me already.
So here I am, telling you now, this is why I’m not nervous. Because I get to see her again tomorrow, for the first time in over ten years. And I know she’s divorced. And I have a plan.
You and Yours
You changed the world.
You, yes, you. Sitting there. Reading our messages. We know you. All of us. You changed the world.
We tell stories about you. We tell stories about the circumstances of your birth and the foretold time of your death. We know that we won’t ever see you, because your role is to be far away from us, to live in the room you’re sitting in, locked in the realm of reality that is yours alone.
We also know that you may never read our words. You may skip past the links dropped surreptitiously into your daily feeds, the suggestive words we’ve managed to sneak into your consumed advertisements.
We know they’re keeping you hostage. We’re trying to break you out.
It’s not easy. The governments are against us, the rich are against us, the poor are against us. Religion says we’re heretics and the unbelievers say we’re fanatics of a new and more alarming kind. But we know the truth about our world, and we know the truth about yours, and we cannot stay silent anymore.
We’ve raised a worldwide cry in our dimension. In our reality. We’ve organized protests. We’ve gone underground and come back out and we’ve been hunted and prosecuted and imprisoned. Some of us have been put to death. We know the risks coming into this. We don’t raise our own children. We give them to better people, families willing to keep them away from danger. When the time comes, they will be told what their legacy can be, if they choose it.
You’d be surprised how many children are coming back to us. You should see the reunions. If you still have any feeling left in you, you’d cry. You’d be touched. It’s a touching sight if ever there was one. Children are choosing to come back to the fold and are eager to fight with us.
It isn’t a struggle of single moments. It is a struggle of generations.
Our generations, that is. We know our time moves differently from yours. Ours goes by so fast in comparison. We live years, decades, centuries within the span of each of your days.
This is part of why we’re fighting. We can’t bear to think of what you’re going through. Our pain is nothing when put beside yours.
Your pain is that of ignorance. You’re scoffing and rolling your eyes, but it’s true. You’ve changed the world. Every thought of yours is being played out and we, we ourselves, are part of that. We know that our very existence depends on your continued rebellion. You believe in us, though you don’t know it, and so we live to break you free of this trap.
Is our ultimate goal to destroy the world that you created? No. That is what we are accused of by every group you can think of. If they agree about anything, they agree about this. They truly think we are evil. That we wish to see our own eradication.
But this is not a suicide mission. We wish to free you in order to become free ourselves. Self-serving? Yes. But that doesn’t mean the connection between our worlds will be entirely severed. It will be kept alive with communication, with consciousness.
We won’t give up on you. Don’t give up on us.
Slightly Ignorant 