Everything at Once
Rob Kardashian is getting so big and sympathetic & all of his plots are about that. In one, he locks the camera crew out & says “I’m sad, I’m sad, I’m sad!” while they film a shut door. More recently, he has designed a line of whimsical socks for the holiday season, which boast colorful messages like “YOLO” and “Fa-la-la-la.” A central, if unintended facet of the Kardashian sock campaign is a series of Instagram photos in which men & women lie face-up in colorful footwear. Due to their composition and the manner in which models are styled and positioned, these images invoke portraits of bodies in a morgue almost immediately, lending an additional eerie, curatorial presence to the warblings of a troubled son hawking novelty socks while attempting to reel himself in on a molecular level – so not to expand beyond forms welcomed by television audiences. Since everyone is scared of an irreversible thing happening to them at any moment, it is a relief to lose weight on accident without thinking about it - at least for insurance purposes. Then, if and when it happens later on, it is less bad. But, it isn’t just one thing.
I take pills and lie down for different reasons. Lazy is lazy, though. Either Rob Kardashian will keep expanding until he is big enough to hold more and more of our fears, or he will not. He may get smaller instead, while each of us grows a little bit large in our way. Maybe he will go on The Biggest Loser like his mom hopes, with the taught faced woman and strong men yelling cruel names up a hill. Or instead, he will go off like the others, in a ship or a jet - to see the whole sky & its weird & glimmering largess of size-fluctuant silence. He will chose that again, and again, forever. I do too. Everyone does.
Lucy Tiven is a poet & essayist living in Los Angeles. Recently, her work has appeared on Avidly, Vice, and in Two Serious Ladies, Lazy Fascist Review, The Quietus & The Scrambler. She is a Contributing Editor at The Fanzine & writes copy & editorial at LA Mother, a feminist-flavored marketing agency in Hollywood. She also writes a column on Real Pants about animals in literary life with help from her little cat Joey. He is a scamp.