Process

august 13th, 2021

i want to type a bunch of pretentious incoherent paragraphs again about the cars in grand theft auto
four & a rabbit i saw on an early morning walk. this is a tumblr post that i basically already made
& deleted a few months ago, but i wanted to try to refresh it & articulate it better by getting
it all out again from scratch. i think i got it all clearer than i did last time:

i have had this feeling for a while that i have trouble articulating.
there are two memories it always brings to my mind's eye

the first is a time that i was playing grand theft auto four. i noticed that if you went to
the top of a very tall building & looked closely down at the street, it continued to appear
to simulate the presence of the traffic below with less detail by having a static image
of the streets, with small, blank, indistinct rectangular prisms sliding around

the other memory is when i was on an early morning walk, approached a rabbit close enough to spur it
to hop away, & considered that you could try to model the rabbit's behavior if you wanted to portray it
in a video game like those basic cars. just like people actually do, in some games that feature rabbits

define some average radius around a rabbit, past which any big unfamiliar thing begins to make it
uncomfortable, with some rate of variation between those radii, & then... a statistical distribution
of angles that it's liable to take away from that thing, which may tend toward "directly away" (i.e.
along a line that traces from the scary thing at the perimeter, straight to & through through
the rabbit in the middle, & straight past it to the other side), accounting for things in
the environment it might see as good routes of escape or hiding spots

& the point is that i don't think it's remotely "cool" or "insightful" to frame anything in this way.
& i think the only reason i thought about all those considerations for modeling the rabbit that morning,
is because i had played so many video games, seen so many things like those rectangular "cars." & it made
me think of a time when i was a much angrier person, when i didn't really have any friends, when i was
immersed in digital escapism much of the time, when (maybe as a consequence of never really having
any conversations with anyone, never accessing the complexity of any given person) i felt
misanthropic & angry at the apparent simplicity of the world around me

i wondered if my exposure to something like those rectangular "cars" set me up to see the movement
of actual cars as an insultingly simple aggregate thing, since it could be modeled in the game so
easily. & i wondered if maybe i was misanthropically projecting that onto the drivers too?

when the reality is that those rectangles are incredible simplifications of iron & gasoline & electricity &
momentum & plastic & combustion & lubricant & metalworking & rubber & aerodynamics, & the central
nervous systems & muscles & skeletons & respiration & mitochondria of the people driving, & the logic
dictating the construction of roads, & the social patterns dictating what roads a person takes, & the biggest
crime of that misanthropic projection was to minimize maybe the most complex thing of all of it, the thing
most simplified thing by the rectangles, which is the consciousnesses, the souls of the people driving the cars

so what happens to my experience of the world around me if every time a rabbit flees from me
i automatically ponder it as a process that could be modeled? it elicits in me a feeling that
every individual instance of a rabbit fleeing from me would carry absolutely no meaning,
it would meld into the "infinite" possible expressions of that process of a fleeing rabbit

a feeling like: if you sit at a computer & code a little simulation of some blocks falling onto a table,
which fall the exact same way every time, does every instance of clicking "play" not feel devalued? & then
couldn't i model a bird flying away from me as well? just like traffic? how far does it go? i fear i could
become sick by generalizing this to everything, that life could lose all meaning because every event
would come to feel like arbitrary expressions of theories & models underlying them

of course, the world isn't actually a free sandbox for processes to wantonly be expressed in, they're expressed exactly as many
times as is appropriate. i mean, between the event of birds evolving, & the event of the sun boiling the seas away, there is
a set number of times that birds will flee from anything they flee from. in fact, not even the apparent infinite repeatability
of that block simulation is real, as each run is a minute subtraction from the amount of computational energy available to
expend on it. & this is what i'm trying to affirm to myself. the repetitive nature of any relationship between things, like
the sheer number of times people commute to work, the sheer number of times lions chase gazelles, the sheer number
of times it rains, i cannot let it detract from the uniqueness of every last one. if you meet with the same group
of friends at a coffee shop every monday for forty years, you will meet with them once on
Monday, August 16th, 2021, & never again en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichi-go_ichi-e

i never want to lean on the comfort of "next Monday" or "next August" ever again. each Monday is
completely alien from every other Monday before & after. every single instance of a bird deciding
on a whim to fly from one branch to another should feel like one inexorable step forward in the
march of history, not objects moving around in some ideal space with no cost or stakes

addendum, november 3rd, 2021

& one thing i think is important to point out here is that none of this framing, in terms of processes, was actually
present in that sense of disenchantment as it was occurring! the disenchantmant was wholly intuitive, & only
in retrospect can i try to make the case that it was underpinned by this sort of... philosophical illness?

june 10th, 2019

a familiar coffee shop goes out of business, leaving an empty building, or a building
now occupied by some niche sort of business that, alienatingly, there is no reason
for you to ever enter. only in a circumstance that you never really encounter

i guess the people who lease out buildings must necessarily have a detached stance toward
the fact that any public space may become drenched in the random, potentially sentimental
memories of many strangers, yet it will often be destroyed after enough time has passed

employees of a surviving coffee shop rotate to an entirely different cast, such that the spirit of the
shop is different, alienating to you. no other people will experience or empathize with your attachment
to that single combination of the, in practice, infinite combinations that can be obtained from:

this is like hoarding

the most apt example: digital hoarding. writing an app that generates a 12x12 grid of random black &
white dots. feeling like you must save each generated grid to your hard drive, because, in spite
of it being generic & indistinguishable, you know it'll probably never be generated again!

(there are ~22,300,745,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations. even if
you could use a single bit of data to represent each grid, you would need ~278,759,315,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 terabytes of disk space to store every grid)

all in relation to the prospect of Earth becoming uninhabitable in my lifetime!

it's comforting to think of all culture as something that'll keep
evolving forever. but, maybe, despite the infinite branches
it could take, it'll be solidified sooner than i imagined

no one to modify it. or consume it

there's still infinite things that can be done, but only one enormous
permutation of all culture will actually pan out & be what gets made

even private things like chatlogs, contributing to a giant,
worldwide, brain-smooshingly big canon that might sit on
surviving hard drives with no one to look at them

september 23rd, 2021

i keep having these thoughts about routine & tradition which are like... there should be total freedom & creativity, right? which
you can visualize as a sheet of paper with living pencil scrawlings & doodles crawling all over it, forming random noise or
arranging into impressionistic pictures & patterns, photorealistic portrayals, appearing & disappearing. & if a thick
circle were to appear on the paper, into which no scribbles could pass, it would be sort of antithetical to that,
imposing a rigid rule among the scribbles. that's when you want to establish a section of your life that is
pristine in some way, or free of some particular thing, or which always follows a certain routine. it has
a rule, a filter, a censor. so that seems antithetical to the total freedom & creativity. but why should
a blank circle be exempt from the infinite shapes & patterns? the scribbles should be forming all
sorts of polygons, whether pristine or full of scribbles. there has to be room for rules if the
anarchy is to be complete. it seems like there has to be a compromise, periods where
percentages of the paper go blank for the sake of exploring blankness

this compromise presents no issue if we imagine an endless sheet of paper, where these scribbles dance & live isotropically
& endlessly, but our "sheets of paper" are constrained by our lifespans, obliging us to seek the balance we least regret

december 7th, 2021

you know when you're blessed with an utter delineation of the present from the past? like you find some aggregate of music that
signposts the present very strongly, the aggregate being so utterly itself, each song its own special confluence of inspiration
& circumstance, & all of this is multiplied factorially by the final juxtaposition of the songs? & it's a thoroughly different
space to be in, putting a strong barrier between today & yesterday, keeping things moving, where they might not
have. then there is combinatorially mixing an aggregate of songs with the other senses, infinity...

december 17th, 2021

my feelings are that no one is the only one capable of writing "what needs to be written," but everyone is each,
themselves, the only one who they can conceivably trust to write it - insofar as they can trust themselves to make
themselves capable of doing so, & from there put in the effort to. this has the feeling of conferring onto myself
& everyone, on the basis that we are alive, a frightening obligation to try to read & grow & from
there to try to write with earnest & benevolent intent every day if possible

but then, as everyone does this, they come to fill & overflow the limited bandwidth of attention that any of us has to offer!
there is a deluge of signals & meanings & sentiments, packed like the atoms of a brick wall, impenetrable, each signal
a candidate seeking to carve out a space in our awareness, earnestly trying its best with good intent in its heart, ideally

there's no way to experience it all within a lifetime. it seems impossible to impose any order on what comes. the sheer
number of these neat, ordered crystallizations of life experience ironically causes them to become analogous to the
chaos that first produces life experience... sure, there is curation, & the establishment of literary canons,
but it feels kind of arbitrary in relation to the scope of all that is & can be written!

in the act of writing, one can never count on being heard, but it seems like the best they can offer is still to play a "drop
in the bucket" role, of inviting the possibility of being heard, so as to strive to maximize the goodness & honesty of that
chaotic totality of written work, to the minuscule extent that they are capable. no one person will ever grasp this totality
of work, but it must be made maximally good, so that each one person's limited perspective of it will be maximally good

one can count on chains of inspiration: the possibility that each occurrence of good & honest publication could set off
a cascade of them, which i guess would frame all of this as a self-reinforcing process, a pattern in the chaos, that each
would seek to accelerate, or accelerate the acceleration of, blah blah... that's what i'm trying to do with this post!
writing about writing, trying to articulate these rationales, for myself & for anyone who could experience
any benefit in taking them into mind, in the case that they make sense & are agreeable

Perspective

march 29th, 2021

my brother's guitar playing a room over urges me to grind my teeth. why? because i'm accepting
the invitation to project very specific human intent onto it. human intent is always brambles
to get caught in. because i associate him with nu metal, the sound of the guitar feels like
it invokes soulless masculinity. but, if the wind blew an object around outside, which
banged around & sounded identical, it'd take no effort to find it calming

or, i walk home through my neighborhood, & staring at the houses doesn't bring me any joy. why?
because i'm taking it as a neighborhood. my surroundings exist to me more as the internal idea
of a neighborhood than as the external sights, sounds, & textures all around me. it's all symbolic
of strangers, or being locked into routine, or socioeconomic privilege, or something else.
but, if i broaden the scope i'm defining my surroundings with, & think of them as
a patch of the earth, i can see things more visually, & they're so pretty

the reality is that in any given moment, we don't really experience life as it is; we experience our beliefs,
interpretations, & descriptions of life. we are, in a very real sense, hypnotized by our beliefs & ideologies
about everything, caught up in the web of our own descriptions, living inside a virtual world made of concepts,
not reality. we believe our descriptions, imagining they represent reality when, in fact, they are necessarily
crude approximations of this unfathomably rich, multidimensional complexity we call life
John Astin, This Extraordinary Mmoment

april 2nd, 2021

sometimes i'll stare at some tree limbs gently blowing in the wind etc. & only feel bored or
restless, but i pressure myself to keep watching regardless, as it's a sort of low-stimulation
activity i feel i have to set out time for on occasion. the bored feeling scares me. i attribute
it to psychological effects of using the internet, to being damaged. maybe that's only half
of it though. maybe the other half is that i've internalized the idea that it's in my
nature to always feel serene & content any time i stop & stare at some
branches which, while romantic, might not be true

august 28th, 2021

i imagine violating a social norm in a one-on-one interaction to feel like receiving the disapproval of not just them
but all the millions of people who would vouch for them in that situation... it makes sense to me, people establish
norms by expressing them en masse & then the full weight of all those expressions is supposed to weigh on you
if you threaten to violate one. it's like millions of people are spectrally present, judging. i feel that sharply
when i talk to people, i think. i can't feel alone with anyone, it's like i'm in a dialogue with all of
society. i don't know. it's hard to describe. it makes it feel impossible to have a pure conversation

september 16th, 2021

when my brother drives me anywhere, i have to listen to Theory of a Deadman & The Pretty Reckless & The
Offspring & Metallica. with me generally being a shut-in with no friends, this repeated stimuli pairing
eventually broke me & i subtly began to think of these sorts of bands as basically "the outside world,"
"the 'zeitgeist,'" on some level. if you have heard any of these bands, i think you can imagine
what it is like to feel like one is on a planet that is like, defined in essence by them

i only realized how pronounced this was last night when i actually bothered to change the station for once & we
drove home listening to Johnny Angel by Shelley Fabares. i was sort of stunned by how different it could have
always been. this probably seems strangely disconnected from my awareness of all the other dynamics & aesthetic
diversity of life outside of the car rides. but the nu metal just felt like an essential aspect of them, something
i never thought to change because the situation had a well-trodden mental pathway for itself

although, i'm also kind of intimidated by having it suddenly appeal to me. thinking something like,
the ride home with ms. fabares was just as fake as the rides with all the aforementioned bands

october 12th, 2021

being at a heavenly nature trail but feeling sort of dissociated, as if i can mutedly recognize how gorgeous a thing is, but
it's incapable of really touching me emotionally. like i'm having trouble not focusing on the linear progression toward the
moment i leave & move on to the next segment of my day. unable to turn off a rhythm in my head quantizing the unquantized
tranquility that could be characterizing every moment, or rather, doing away with discrete moments entirely, just letting me
be, continuously. maybe a sense that fully emotionally attaching to each sight will be taking on the simultaneous pain
in its ephemerality, & this will drive me to push it to a greedy limit, impose a responsibility on myself to feel it all as
much as i can, a responsibility i don't want to rise to, instead preferring to recede into my head in banally
comfortable stasis & keep progressing linearly. the disenchanting authority in my head

what's funny is that going to the nature trail at all was a fortuitous escape from just
going back home on autopilot. but, regardless, all these feelings followed me there...

october 17th, 2021

i can indulge the formality of physically walking out to the nature trail, but i'm not really truly subjectively there until
i close my eyes & clear my mind for about a minute. the continuous stream of thoughts during the walk from A to B
is like a big strand of mucus adhered to my back, stretching back to my house. mentally, i'm still there. i have to
put a definite gap in my thoughts & segment them off to really be at the trail. it's very easy to forget to do

october 18th, 2021

i feel this, i don't know, metaphorical link between the visible
spectrum of light & the inane perception of beauty standards

like on the EM spectrum at large, radio at one end, gamma on the other, you have that specific range with
imaginary borders around it because of its incidental relevance to us biologically. & we treat it like this
subspectrum to show how it goes from red to violet as that specific patch of wavelength decreases

so then you scan your eyes across a beautiful natural landscape with a human being standing in it & the spectrum of
beauty flows cleanly from the beauty of the sky to the beauty of the leaf, to the tree trunk, the branches, the grass,
all beautiful, the gravel path, leading up to the person's feet & up their body, over their head, & any border
between them & the surrounding environment is imaginary but that's where the subspectrum is imposed

october 28th, 2021

"everything is tarot," i think to myself sometimes... self-reflection can feel like just learning to see how, because i'm
a subjective being, the whole world around me is constantly reflecting back to me exactly what i am, even the parts
of me i'm struggling to see. the constant stimuli of life is like blaring white noise that my self finely filters into a
portrait made out of a collage of the emphasized things that i'm prone to see patterns & meaning in. but identifying
the image of myself laced into my world is tough, because i only get one perspective, so i have no basis for comparison

october 29th, 2021

it's so disturbingly easy to be in a nice situation & not even notice because i'm lost in all
this mental architecture around it. i nearly didn't notice that i was sitting in a dimly
& warmly lit room surrounded by pleasing decorative objects, listening to one
of my favorite songs with a family member, because i was thinking about-

i don't know, i don't even remember, music maybe? like how the current song related more broadly to "culture" or
whatever, as if that really had any meaning, as if those thoughts are really an internal engagement with some
common space off in cyberspace or floating in the air or whatever & not just me tinkering like a fidget
toy with an incomplete little local copy in my head of some random sliver of "culture..."

or maybe i was thinking about the routines that take place immediately on either side of the actual broadcast. whatever,
regardless, i was... personally globalized, you could say? i wasn't home, i was off in some mental space that felt more
like an office or a bar full of cynics. it doesn't matter what goodness happens in the external world if all this stuff
is built inside beforehand, it doesn't matter if i'm lucky enough to have something re-enchanting come along...

& i may not even need something re-enchanting to come along because every location, sight, sound,
thought, it can be taken good or bad, i can have some neural pathway linking an experience
to something sweet from my childhood, or just, pathways to a million other little qualia,
pathways that really enrich that stimuli... or i can just sadly not have those pathways

the opportunities for enchantment are so granular that it's overwhelming, a constant uphill push, & i guess it
can be easier to not actualize any of that enchantment, to not have to burden oneself with a responsibility to
themselves that can be latent in every little thing they take in... to settle into the routines & narratives &
comfortably repetitious systems & a mutedness without the stakes of either pleasure or pain, for life
to not have all its burdensome depth present in each moment but for everything to feel the same

& then you have people who actually identify with & accustom themselves to the environment of these freaking
text boxes & dopaminergic social media loops & sardonic one-liners & all that, it's like, corresponding to
how granular those opportunities for enchantment are, it's correspondingly staggering just how much
everything can be totally opposite to what it should be... undeath is always presented as an option

october 31st, 2021

if i get coffee with someone, i want to feel like the situation is an expression only of the system of social exchange, which
deals in things like proximity & words & gifts & simple communicative touches. i want to feel, for a little while, like that
system is the bounds of all reality. imagine... a cartoon, imagine two cute chibi characters getting coffee & exchanging
dialogue. you know the bounds of what is generally possible in this style. as a viewer, you are supplied with
that assurance. nothing crazy can happen. it's a portrayal of the perfect ideal of social exchange

but life doesn't provide those guarantees, & so i feel burdened with this constant repressed awareness, that social exchange
is itself only embedded in the overall system of physical interactions, that it's only a carefully maintained pattern in
physics, that it's possible for me to reach over & physically hurt someone, that it's possible to have sex with
someone, that it's possible to depart entirely from coherent social exchange & speak in gibberish

& i'd like to think that there is a normal, healthy ability to limit oneself to only thinking in social
terms, that nothing like this ever crosses the other person's mind, but i'm quite afraid of the idea
that it does, that the wrong series of gestures could suggest outright threat. i don't want
all of this possibility to exist. i guess this is why fiction can be such a good escape

november 5th, 2021

today i automatically read some messages in a very insufferable & familiar voice. not any particular person's, but
a common tone that i feel i just know. but then i took the time to stop & imagine the words from a particular
idealized face instead. & they felt completely different. welcoming. it was kind of jarring. further verification
that, like anyone, i am living in a dream & it is possible to restructure that dream very radically, to my incredible
benefit. it's scary, how every aspect of my reality is open to diagnosis. how much can hide in plain sight. how
it's my responsibility to scrutinize every facet of my cognition & self so very deeply, to root these
kinds of things out, or i very well may not live all that great of a life

november 6th, 2021

sometimes i feel like, um... someone who has their pattern recognition go off the rails & gets obsessed with numerology, where they
can bake any meaning into the right mathematical process & thus feel like they are finding a coherent signal no matter what direction
they proceed in, ultimately losing touch with reality. except instead of numbers it's the ultimate total incoherence of all the signals
that might be represented by every sensory aspect of life that happens to be presented to me, every tiny microscopic outcropping
of the whole unknowable totality that ends up reaching me. just trying to settle on the barest interpretation that is remotely
reasonable. & instead of being out of touch with reality, maybe i am about as in touch as anyone
can be expected to be. which is stumbling through a pitch black room

november 9th, 2021

oh, i just realized, the idealized nonexistent loved one who i tend to imagine speaking to me is literally God at times...
ok i will explain: i appreciate the idea of belief in God in a way that, at heart, entails nothing supernatural but is like,
a secular cajoling of oneself into involving "God" in their considerations, because, & this is the important central idea:
i think it can feel easier for one to abide by their own unfaltering conscience if they personify it, let it feel secondhand in
the form of reminders & directives & encouragements, instead of feeling like it's them alone with the burden of sticking
to their personal principles... you don't even have to call it "God," i think this is a more general concept that "God" is
a specific expression of... just a separate voice, with the authority of merely being something separate, to provide the
encouragements & reaffirmations of self, reaffirmations of personal benevolence, that one truly needs, that no one
else could perfectly express maybe, the gentle terms of consideration that one otherwise may not admit they
need... which are ultimately all just essential aspects of oneself that they are keeping themselves
in touch with, keeping from withering, through this solitary exercise

december 4th, 2021

i would posit that some people think that the internet lets them transcend the random garbage being discussed in their lonely
cities & connect with the real discourses or whatever. & there is certainly something to be said for the way the internet
can break geographical restrictions & open all sorts of potentialities without being entirely under the thumbs of
the overseers of one-way channels like tv & radio (albeit still subject to its own convoluted forms of
purposeful control, or incidental distortion, inflicted on currents of thought & opinion)

so, yeah, something to be said for it. but over & over again people just fall into these pits where they delude themselves
into thinking there's real meaning to be found in their engagement with, like, Natalie Wynn as a concept. this isn't about
Natalie Wynn or anything adjacent to her. she's on my mind at this single second but she is a grain of sand on the
purgatorial beach... also, i don't think i've found the "real discourses" either, i am just stumbling around
these different things to anchor myself to, hoping i can at least stumble in the least
dumb way... same as everyone else, i would imagine

it's like an endless game of falling back to increasingly general-feeling, increasingly pure-feeling binaries to frame
life with & maybe find some utility in. knowing all the while that there's probably no relief to find in binaries, that
i have to just beat that into my skull once & for all, & inhabit the baffling chaos that's actually in front of me,
on its own terms, instead of filtering it through the explanatory structures in my head

december 7th, 2021

you can pretend that a post on the internet is actually fifty years old, so that you can read it with a sense of dignity
& validity that might not have been there before. you can also read an old book & pretend it was written & published
on the internet two days ago, which may seem to expose how stupid & petty it is. neither of these actions can be
said to really expose any truth though. but neither can not doing either of them. you know what i mean?

december 10th, 2021

Heaven is real (on Earth, in my mind), but it stops being real if i let myself become convinced that i am embroiled in
a grand struggle to consistently remember & believe, for the good of myself, that Heaven is real. i must possess the
true ease of sustaining that belief. & yet, does that not just reframe the whole situation as a tightrope walk,
balancing to avoid falling into the belief in that grand struggle, & losing that true ease?

well, here is what i think: it never really has to be a tightrope walk, no matter how many times this logic
regresses to a broader framing that takes the form of one. what i have to do is take a rock & simply bash
the logic to pieces. happiness will come for no reason, & this will not be analyzed further. happiness will
come from escaping reason, from simply inhabiting & realizing my desire for happiness, without the
obligation to consult reason, & to revel in the power that i have to do that. & Heaven is real

december 29th, 2021

missing the bus, causing the breakdown of the structure imposed by the time limits imposed by the hotel checkout time &
bus schedule - causing also the retroactive anticlimax & subsequent breakdown of the structure that is the narrative of
a dramatic goodbye - leading to an exceptional state of affairs, which gives the impression of just existing, outside
of time, sheltered for a time from the most immediately imposing bureaucracies, if not the larger & more abstract
ones... foresaking structures in the interest of simply taking in moments, if not simply time divorced
from discrete moments. is a "moment" simply any occurrence that forms a memory?

positive censorship which entails the filtration & remixing of the signals that one takes in into a
maximally productive output vs. negative censorship which is internal boundaries that oppose
radical honesty (which i would posit is the state in which things are really free to happen)