Vanessa Veselka

“I paid my bill. Save your fucking pennies for a gun and a history book...”

“Some things are so sad that they have no name. I have tried to name them and I can’t.”

“I tried to map the cultural trends leading up to it but as I did they grew, interconnecting and weaving backwards and sideways out to everything. Next to the megalithic institutionalized shredding of people's humanity, marked by tombstone malls and scabby hills, the Styrofoam gullets and flag-waving god-chatterers casting their votes for eternal paternity on the lap rapists - next to all of that, the intimacy between a terrorist and his target was almost a beautiful thing but I still couldn't solve that moment when they did it anyway so I grabbed more paper and widened my field of vision.”

“I looked at the woman crying over the doll and felt something else. I was sick of people acting against their own interests. Mooing about how to refinance the slaughterhouse. Putting skylights in the killing pen and pretending the bolt in the brain was a pathway to a better field. I paid my bill. Save your fucking pennies for a gun and a history book, I thought.”

“But I know what it means to crave what you're not. To want to sew up that rift because it's exhausting to hold it open. Sometimes you just need to be someone else, someone who doesn't care about anything at all. I know I do. I want emptiness but I can't have it.”

“The equation Bubble Tea = Something to Look Forward To depressurizes the misery of capitalism and is a Hello Kitty band-aid on the festering wound of Neo-Liberalism.”