The Beginning of Understanding Is the Wish to Die

I’ve got this one profound thought in me but I don’t think you would understand.

I barely understand it myself.

I never understood what was so great about cheekbones.

I still don’t understand cairns.

Roko’s Basilisk can’t ruin your life if you don’t understand it.

I want an artist to try to “understand the shape of my mouth.”

1. Nobody understands it as well as I do. 2. I don’t understand it.

I don’t understand why pilots tell you the cruising altitude. Like, what’s that got to do with me?

I’m not trying to be rhetorical, I really don’t understand.

I didn’t understand classic movies at all until I had a martini with vermouth in it.

I don’t understand people who say they “love pie.”

I’m inclined to think good news is really bad news. It’s like I don’t trust the news unless I can’t understand it.

I read that in physics you have to publish results before you understand them.

I don’t understand how people remember what happened this year versus last year versus some other time in the past or future.

Other scientific concepts that “must die”: continuity of time, the self, the universe.

I understand almost nothing about your life. I don’t understand the mentality.

“God is faithful even when I don’t understand.”

I have high confidence that I will never understand.

Jealousy Is the Gin

Once in my lifetime I heard someone say, Envy is vermouth, jealousy is gin.

For years I have pondered, and not understood, what this meant.

Envy is but what we rinse the glass with?

Wanting what others have makes their wanting what you have more delicious?

Vermouth is aged wine, and envy is jealousy plus the dimension of time—

Jealousy is envy remembered, or—

Envy is jealousy pre-remembered, in the future, when we get what we desire.

Envy is not admiration—I want what they have instead of them.

I only envy who I despise.

When I totaled my car, my father advised me to buy a new one outright.

I had the money to do it, but I didn’t want to do it.

What I thought was, Maybe, before the car is paid off . . . I’ll die.

It’s like I like the idea of my corpse having debts.

It’s like I like the idea of death as a form of general revenge.

I envy the brave—I want someone to be brave—and am glad when they fail.

The failure of others does not interfere with my futurish gaze.

Nietzsche called envy “a slave morality,” or ressentiment—

Resentment—that is, refeeling.

Your feeling, but now it’s mine.

Do you ever get that feeling like something bad just happened but you forgot what it was?

I want to say something negative about it.