The Pleasure of the Rant

I spent a good deal of the past few years ranting — out loud and in writing. And while it certainly served to alienate me from those around me, it did afford a certain pleasure, a certain visceral delight.

Ah, yes, the rant is beautiful — an invigorated possession, an intense focus, that summons words and ideas with an emphatic umph. The rant is a powerful meeting of body, language, and cosmic affect: it pours through our cells conjuring words and fomenting rage as it goes.

And it is so socially abhorrent. Just as the rise of the bourgeois marked a closing of the body — its nostrils, mouth, ass, and genitalia — it put prescriptions on the rant. For the rant is a streaming forth, an uncovered sneeze of words and emotion, a drool of language and invective. It is manic and effusive, terribly impolite and often quite comedic.

For the ranter, it is exquisite, vital, orgasmic: the words spew with concerted projection. There was a time — several years ago now — when I'd wake, head to the coffee shop, and with caffeine streaming through my veins, I'd summon the forces of rant. It often took a sort of davening, a rocking to and fro while feeling for the free floating invective in the air, that affective trajectory of mania, frenzy, and lucid anger.

As I was often quite angry at the time, I had little difficulty conjuring these forces. And then the words would flood the page as I entered a kind of delirious state of pissed off possession. This is not blind rage. On the contrary, this is incredibly perceptive rage.

Of course, it is exhausting and, after a while, unbecoming to rant. I do much less of it these days; I seek other kinds of glorious, lucid possession, ones more likely to end with a kiss rather than a punch.

But I still relish reading, or hearing, a good rant. Here is one I happened upon. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. And, for those not paying attention, it's not the ideas of this or that rant that I enjoy. It is the rant itself, its pulsing rhythms — watch the way punctuation can't keep up, the way the affect begins to break syntax while maintaining the utmost clarity.

A Sick Species

I am perpetually flabbergasted by the aching stupidity of people—to wit, a commenter on this very blog. Does this fucking idiot imagine that I believe men to be superior to women? Has this shit stick missed the point so completely? The species is sick—not men, not women, not children, the entire fucking species.

I'll give the fuckstick the benefit of the doubt and suggest that perhaps I've not made clear my disdain for masculinity. Women are vampires but men are doltish zombie fiends, exuding fear and loathing in every gesture, wearing watches and cologne and wagging their impotent cocks at nothing in particular.. What is more unsavory than the image of a man in his business suit, his watch, his cologne talking about the market or cars or a sports, his soul leaking out his ears?

Oh, I've seen the men at the playground. These new mothers may be a bastion of guilt, fear, and utterly depressing surrender to the vampires on their teet but the men are no fragrant flower. The men who rarely see the kids and then take them to the park on Saturday, their fucking Crackberries strapped to their belts, just where there chi should be—they've traded their vital energy for a corporate network and what, I ask, is sicker than that?—trying their darndest to seem like they give one ounce of shit about their kids—their maniacal jackass but at least playful kids—giving anxious glances at the other fathers as each tries to out-man the other with some sordid display of false paternal love, all the while texting their very lives away, no doubt selling out some old lady in Fresno who's just trying to make her mortgage payments, all the while delivering a shit eating laugh of mirth as they absent mindedly tickle their kid, all phoniness and fear. It is grotesque.

Am I going too fast for you, ass muffin? I am no misogynist. I'm a fucking misanthrope—not because I hate humanity but because I know humanity to be a virus, fundamentally vampiric, sucking the life from this planet without batting as much as an eye.