september 29th, 2020
a preliminary conversation with my friend

i become very fixated on ... well, i walk past a building that looked tornado resistant, & imagine being
locked in it with people during a tornado. & if the mild drama of the situation might make anyone
subconsciously imitate movie characters, or if they were "normal" & i just delusionally thought
they sounded like characters. & art imitating life imitating art imitating life imitating art
imitating life imitating art, & it either tries to portray things authentically or exaggerated,
as in maybe a movie will exaggerate the ways of its time to be parodic & appealing.
but what if the movie is popular & affects people's vernacular? maybe there can
be feedback, but it's not like a linear cycle, there can be all this interplay.
demented chaotic stew of traits & imitation & artistic license. it's so
fucked. in the end, there doesn't seem to be any meaningful distinction
between reality & fiction, because fiction is embedded in reality

my friend has these things to say:

i've been reading borges and. a recurring thing in the stories has been the idea of a person or people basically
imagining things so hard they become real /// and it's not possible to exist as a pure unaffected human ///
tlon, uqbar, orbius tertius suggests a vast conspiracy that intends to remake earth into an imagined
world by gradually introducing created artifacts from this alternate world into reality, and
they're real as long as people believe they're real /// when the derecho hit and i was out
walking around afterwards, there was a feeling that like. obviously this was a historical
event, but the extent of the damage, and all the uprooted trees etc, made it feel
like... sort of like a stage-managed "disaster", like this is something you see
on tv on a weather channel special about natural disasters. cliches have
currency because they recur and resonate with real-life happenings,
but then you find yourself in the catastrophic situation where
your sincere unfiltered emotional/behavioral response to
a scenario aligns perfectly with a cliche, and you
have retroactively become a cartoon

i say:

there's always ambiguity whether someone feels obliged to follow a
routine or if they just don't know how to channel sentiments better

he says:

what if the optimal expression of sentiment happens to
match precisely with something in art. what could
be more cliche than to say "i love you"? and
what better way is there to express that?

may 28th, 2021

as anything happens to me, i'm already thinking about how i would describe it in writing, what it
would mean to publish it while withholding some other event. sometimes i think about what could
happen in the near future, & how i'd describe it if it happened. sometimes i imagine if i began
crying at a certain time, & what it might mean that i'd cried at that time, if it'd seem petulant or
passionate, & if i could believe that i hadn't induced myself to cry just to report it, & what the
discrepancies would be between the meaning of the act of crying & the meaning of the writing
about the act of crying. it's like there's no delay between any event & it feeling like the
story of itself, or the report of itself, whatever the difference may be

incidental music & studio audience laughter/awws/etc. & just third-person omniscient narrators
are so, so creepy. the way it... like, it's like it codes every aspect of reality in the show but
there's no one doing it, it's just the reality of the little world until your brain develops enough
to confront the style of the show as the ideas of the people who made it. the idea of an abstract
viewership sneering at me with objective authority followed me through my adolescence

may 29th, 2021

the idea of it being too easy to be biologically alive for ninety years & never exist. existing outside but
but not inside. existing inside but not outside. existing neither inside nor outside. needing to brute force
a pattern of aligned thoughts that i would surely agree constituted really existing, once i found them

july 13th, 2021

maybe part of why i feel derealized is being naturalized to constant access
to an audience for whom i can format the things that actually happen to me
into descriptions that walk an uncertain line between accounts & stories

august 27th, 2021

waiting waiting waiting scanning crowds waiting for my as-of-yet-unknown future
best friend to walk around every corner i approach straining to filter signals of
synergistic identity out from the noise waiting waiting waiting waiting

all while actually hiding desperately from anyone of the barest interest, so as to by any means negate the
perceived sinister qualities of seeking to approach, encroach, impose, god forbid "possess," this extending
to the barest "possession" that even the most glancing friendship entails, basic conversation perceptually
exaggerated to each sentence being a demand for a reply rather than just a prompt

august 28th, 2021

in addition to straining to filter signals of synergistic identity out from the noise, there is also the activity which
kicks in if & when someone does speak to me, which is straining to detect any signal that their way of engaging with me
is in any way informed by e.g. tv shows, or even if not tv shows, other people who in turn were informed by tv shows,
or other people representing a third link in the chain, & so on. at the slightest hint of this i will just emotionally
shut down & invisibly retract like a turtle. sometimes i wonder if it is too sensitive, if i am not giving people
enough time. it is also based on the questionable assumption that whatever i see invariably originates in tv
shows, rather than originating in the people & then being portrayed or exaggerated in the tv shows so
that they are relatable. like i already said before though, i'm sure there's fuzzy feedback

something here was moved to "Perspective"

"i hope this is something that's just idiosyncratically wrong with me as a person rather
than me specifically being affected by some insidious pattern of social control!"

september 2nd, 2021

this general distrust of everything is to an excessive, debilitating extent. i'm sitting in the back room of the
coffee shop where this art show is taking place, & i hear a guy complimenting aspects of one of the paintings, & my
immediate thought is that he is just insincerely doing what he thinks people are supposed to be doing at art shows.
i overhear conversations in the bar & think the participants are unconsciously modeling them after what it seems
like "bar conversations" are supposed to be. my dad speaks to me, i just stare because i feel like he's following a
compulsion to act out some image of a dad speaking to his child, or maybe subverting it, but ultimately referring
back to it regardless. i can't convince myself that anything is "really happening." it's not delusional to the
extent that i think i'm in some "truman show" type setup with actors, but i'm obsessed with the notion
of everything being an imitation of some pointless model of itself, i can't connect with anything

september 3rd, 2021

taking a trait that one actually possesses & co-opting it into an identity that is a separate entity from the trait itself,
& not realizing that it is an identity open to rejection because it so resembles the objective trait it's built off of?

september 29th, 2021

sometimes it almost feels less about the experience of walking around in sunlight or the woods & more about knowing
that that's what i did. which sounds like i am doing things just to narrativize or romanticize them in my head. but
it's not like that. i think. i don't know, it just feels like i'm making a definitional adjustment to myself - "did
do this on this day" - that makes me feel better. i'm not sure that that has to make it feel unreal.
unreality presents itself more if i start writing things or taking pictures, i think

this also feels relevant to a way i might carry myself as i walk, a posture i might sit with

corny as it is, the reality is i am going to have to simply continue doing things i enjoy & be
strong about the fact that i am going to be doing them in isolation for the indefinite future

september 30th, 2021

i think part of the reason i can't stop, can't disconnect, is that if i can't get to know anyone here in this city then
disconnecting would be the death of me for someone, some people, somewhere, without also compensatorily
being the introduction of me for someone, some people, here in this city. a net loss in the degree
to which i exist. still, i guess it would probably be better to stow away in the "dark web."
isn't it funny that a discord server is definitionally the dark web?

october 3rd, 2021

a tumblr or an instagram can be an artistic medium, i think. not just that you create art in mediums like painting or digital
collage, & post them there, & the page is merely a container, but that the vertical or grid arrangement, the chronology, the
juxtaposition can be its own medium, like a collage. so i think, in my habit of viewing them solely as expressions of "social-
media-ness," separate from art, containers of art at best, i'm too quick to demonize what artistic satisfaction i might derive
from the arrangements of things i put on these sites, & also what meaning i retrospectively project onto certain juxtapositions
of content. with that in mind, maybe it's not that strange or abnormal that i can get so attached to that stuff, in & of itself.
the problem is just that each site feels entangled with all these additional dynamics that make me feel judged, insincere, etc.

could Munch & Van Gogh & Magritte be seen as insincere? were they creating the impression that the feelings elicited by their
paintings had anything to do with them really? i guess not. the feelings of the paintings seem like they're supposed to echo
forward in time, & to know them you don't need to know the names, the biographies, the creators. so what's different in the
case of me using social media? i guess there's the instantaneity with which i can publish things. my contemporaneity with
the audience. maybe the presence of textual expression leaves more room for my ego to get entangled with the accounts

ideally, the background color of my website communicates only that i like that color. can it deceptively suggest an
inherent association between me & that color? ...is me liking that color an inherent association between me & it?

october 4th, 2021

again, i can't seem to stop broadcasting myself online even though i feel it harms me in various ways.
or maybe to have this kind of medium that i can at the very least be passively known through is
the best of a bad situation, & i should count my blessings. but my feelings for the moment:

get tumblr out of my head, get the concept of a post out of my head, get digital photographs out of my head, get the
general peer out of my head. let my private thought stop being populated with landmines which cause the priming
of dopamine, waiting to fire, "that's a sentence to put on the internet." let me think & introspect for myself
instead of feeling obligated to concretize it as words to build an endless introspective sand castle

(can i not just enjoy writing? & is it not better to have a channel which
with to share it with people who have, after all, opted in to see it?)

taking photos is too beautiful of an exercise for how easy it is. my pictures from early 2020 are beautiful to me,
the mental flavors they capture only in retrospect like recalling a dream, & so i'm very attached to them, the same
feeling when i have trouble throwing away a certain piece of trash because of a past event it represents,
more & more to attach to, more & more to back up, fearing its annihilation in a hard drive failure

more & more types of structure to see my past crystallized in: posts, juxtapositions of adjacent posts, photos, juxtapositions
of photos, juxtapositions of photos with posts, art, ms paint scribbles, chatlogs... if i keep linking all combinations of these
things with the word "juxtaposition," we'll be here a while. i have to live in an age of wantonly crystallizing the present, a
camera for every hand. it feels almost inconceivable to stop, but i know i need to be analog, untethered, itinerant, nomadic,
not concerned with the preservation of a hard drive or the particular aesthetic quality of my bedroom with all its mementos,
but free, all my possessions fitting in a suitcase, unburdened, unattached, unentangled, comfortable with painstakingly
painting a picture & then setting it on fire just for the freedom of it, comfortable even with tossing a certain straw wrapper

maybe it'll be good for me if a tornado does destroy my apartment

i've given up on the idea of trying to feel truly authentic in any online expression. i believe that video
i watched, which asserted that it's not quite possible to be authentic here, that it's incompatible with
this channel of expression, that typing a single letter in the box, taking any photo, is the creation of a
frame, the donning of a mask, & to use the language of authenticity in reference to something that has
nothing to do with it is a fool's errand. authenticity happens in private. i get it, this is a handshake
with the devil, i've resigned myself to that. diminishing it is the only way out

the classic conclusion: well, i guess it is a consequence of my social isolation, resorting to
this channel & having it rob me of realness & pile all this self-imposed obligation onto me

additional conclusion: "haha, okay, surely the post
where i dissect my condition counts, right?! right?!?!"

my assumption is that untangling all of the problems in one fell swoop really would be astonishingly simple, that all the
mental structures holding me back are incredibly, absurdly specific & meticulous in comparison to what it would be
like to just fluidly be, that the untangling wouldn't be equivalent to lifting a great weight but to letting go
of one, letting go of the absurdity of voluntarily carrying it... that i am akin to a well-trained dog

october 9th, 2021

people in media aren't even people, yet i guess we... have to put marginalized people in
media to sway people to recognize that they're people, but the people watching derive
the personhood from non-person media people. nuke the entire country, start over

october 10th, 2021

"the addictive nature of publishing: i could try to transition to journaling entirely in private, but it would seem that the
moment i began would have to also be the moment that i took on a considerable oath to never publish any of it. because
what if some kernel of intent to publish still remains inside me? what i'm quietly telling myself, 'i'll at least wait a
year before i share any of it, or two years, four, eight, but i'll get the release of publication in the end...' &
what if this affects me, what i choose to write, & how i write it? how long could i last, keeping it
all strictly private? a constant struggle. it is probably worth a try, at least

," said the persona who exists in tumblr posts, nervously proposing its own annihilation

october 12th, 2021

disturbed by how the actual conscious motions of my body have to percolate up from
thoughts (about what i want to do), which can in turn be reflections of societal patterns

i fear the idea that i live in a world which is persistently pushing & shoving for me to be inhuman. that, in a
world that wasn't like that, i might simply be human with no issues, never even considering the idea of being
anything but entirely human. but as it stands, i am obligated to struggle for it, & at times i feel like:

to be human, i have to bring myself to some sufficient understanding, which counteracts the background
influence of the world. i have to put in work to attain that, & if i don't, it is absolutely one hundred percent
possible for me to simply reach the end of my lifespan having persistently neglected to be human

or, rather than harshly separating my life into one huge binary, "a life lived in a human or inhuman way," it feels like
life is segmented into lots & lots of binary outcomes, with all of these binaries being humanity vs inhumanity. aspects
of myself, or contexts, or situations, or lasting attitudes, or hobbies, or tendencies, words spoken, actions taken, each
with the potential to end up in states that either generally express humanity or fail to. & for each of these there is
some explicit understanding that i have to put in the work for if i want to be human in that particular respect

in Invisible Cities there is a phrase that sort of haunts me - "the special dignity of images"

sometimes i like to try to take my visual field as if it's not a direct visual field but the frame of a
camera, displaying a film that's very honest in its uneventful-ness. this is me trying to renew my
surroundings, break them out of their mundane-ness, give them the special dignity of images

the ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake, with houses all verandas one above the other, & high streets whose railed
parapets look out over the water. thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, & the other reflected,
upside-down. nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was
so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror, & the Valdrada down in the water contains not
only all the flutings & juttings of the facades that rise above the lake, but also the rooms' interiors
with ceilings & floors, the perspective of the halls, the mirrors of the wardrobes

Valdrada's inhabitants know that each of their actions is, at once, that action & its mirror-image, which possesses the special
dignity of images, & this awareness prevents them from forgetfulness. even when lovers twist their naked bodies, skin against
skin, seeking the position that will give one the most pleasure in the other, even when murderers plunge the knife into the
black veins of the neck & more clotted blood pours out the more they press the blade that slips between the tendons, it is not
so much their copulating or murdering that matters as the copulating or murdering of the images, limpid & cold in the mirror

at times the mirror increases a thing's value, at times denies it. not everything that seems valuable above the mirror maintains
its force when mirrored. the twin cities are not equal, because nothing that exists or happens in Valdrada is symmetrical:
every face & gesture is answered, from the mirror, by a face & gesture inverted, point by point. the two Valdradas
live for each other, their eyes interlocked; but there is no love between them

october 14th, 2021

keeping in mind that tumblr permits only solid colors to be associated with blogs, & not patterns, gradients, or textures:
within that limited room to work with, faded colors are as skeuomorphic as it gets. they gesture towards being un-digital
by suggesting that the color might have been worn down from a prior state, & maybe on close examination one would
find un-digital irregularities that are smoothed out at a distance. it's contrary to a bold tone which announces that it
requires a constant supply of power to charge the pixels to push out such a strong wavelength... it is a lie,
though. each pixel is charged & dedicated to producing the particular faded tone & no others,
the surface is as smooth & sleek as #ff0000, #00ff00, #0000ff

things as basic as simple positions my body can assume seem to get forgotten & removed from my repertoire.
i might go a year without lying on the floor of my shower, just because i forget i can. & places i can walk to. etc

october 16th, 2021

i feel like am either doing my best to refine my ability to put out humanity instead of inhumanity over
the internet, which is good, or i am doing my best to refine my ability to mold the inherently inhuman
internet into the shape of a human, which only makes it progressively more deceptive & is bad

october 18th, 2021

it's about being embarrassingly & realistically ineloquent. it's about finally realizing a dreamed-of situation & finding one
has nothing to think about it at all, in that moment, staring with the expressionless eyes of a fish, wondering if anyone
else on the planet would be thinking more if they were in your shoes. it's about deadened instincts & impulses. it's
about two people sitting in a room with absolutely nothing to say to each other but maybe wishing there was
anything at all to be said about anything. it's about starting a sentence & quickly trailing off as i identify
& reject what i feel was a contrived social role or nameless character that i had assembled at
that moment & started to portray. it's about neural pathways clogged with tar

a nice sweater arrived in the mail. as long as i don't take a picture of myself wearing it, i can rest assured that
i purchased it to enjoy wearing it & not to take a picture of myself wearing it. if i do take a picture of myself
wearing it, it can still be the case that i purchased it to enjoy wearing it & that taking the picture was
only incidental to that, but the room for doubt will be permanently introduced

october 24th, 2021

a common thread between lots of naive & socially awkward conversation styles seems to be when the offender
prompts a person to play the other part in a particular rigid conversational format that they haven't consented to yet

or, actually, more generally, i think it's the imposition of any kind of structure, often one-sided, to the
interaction. like expecting another to "play along" with a dynamic you've spontaneously assembled in
your head, or trying to segment off a span of time in which the offender will do something, maybe
raising both hands in a "quiet!" gesture to signal this... theatrics are a structure

i think it'd make perfect sense with an actual example, but i'm finding it really hard to come up with one. it
feels really general & also fine-tuned to whatever the particular conversation is... i need lots of examples,
i guess. i feel like this is real, but that i need to interact with people a lot more so that i can collect examples
of it in action so that i could better strain out the common elements from all the particular occasions

expecting another to "play along," for instance, could be when you can tell the offender has some information they
want to relay which they would find particularly gratifying to relay in, like... a certain brief back-&-forth form,
that they put together in their head & then try to shackle their prompts & the other person's responses to

in any case it's not about the particulars of how it's done as much as the sudden imposition of
a structure. it might have a tendency to give the impression that the offender is kind of in their
own head, in the conversation more as an exercise for themselves than as a dialogue

a common thread between lots of things online that people will gawk at, just to indulge in secondhand
embarrassment, seems to be that the offender is kind of out of touch with reality - in a way for which it
can be assumed there exists some population of people who will also recognize the particular way that
they're out of touch with reality, opening the door for it as something for them to socialize around

maybe the offender is indulging in a very forced & performative display of emotion without even seeming to register how
insincere & ritualistic it is. maybe they are clearly subduing their own individuality for the sake of expressing the styles
of expression that have emerged within a silly ingroup. not that anyone can actually peer in & know how sincere
any other person's behavior is, but from the perspective of the gawker it definitely seems kind of deluded

not in a way that anyone would contest is really delusional or psychotic, obviously, just insulated - often, i feel, in
a way that involves the introjection of how characters interact in fictional media (or, troublingly, how people might
interact after having already performed the original media-introjection) - imagine, i guess, an embarrassing viral
video of someone reciting a speech from a movie to their classmates before a difficult test... or a blogger
gushing ostentatiously over an unreal-feeling interaction between characters in a tv show like Supernatural

or gushing over a celebrity in a way that fetishizes them - in the sense of ascribing traits to them that aren't really
there. there seems to be a tendency toward secondhand embarrassment when anyone imposes more structure
& sense on reality than there really is: like the idea that a person could really have such a contrived quality,
innately, something that seems special... often this seems to be the case because the person has accepted
a sense of sense & structure to reality that was offered to them by a larger force - thus the
embarrassment is maybe a rerouted expression of disdain for the larger force?

& it all just seems to be an issue of maturity, really, it's just an endless flow of people coming into life, still
settling into it, & thus being vulnerable to being laughed at by people who are probably more mature, but still not
matured out of particularly caring about the less mature, needing the catharsis of mocking them... this may also be an
artifact of the strange way that all the age groups coexist online in a common space, sometimes without their ages specified

or maybe you can make a case that the phenomenon is, to a greater or lesser degree, detached from being an issue of maturity,
& has actually become kind of a systemic issue stemming from the omnipresence of unreal media paired with socially isolating
conditions of modern life, separating people from reality, in which case... well, one should probably be thinking about how they
can at least try to have anything to say to anyone, or to at least publish into the world, that could perhaps... knock anyone
back into reality. it's tough, but they should at least think about it, otherwise... well, they should admit to themselves
their own powerlessness over the situation & accept that what they are doing is just that: gawking. worthless.

october 25th, 2021

the absence of a class of people in mainstream tv shows is an active attribute, displaying an active suppression of
the portrayal & mainstream acknowledgment of them, right? right, yes, & that's unnerving. so then lgbt people start
showing up on tv. mainstream culture is becoming more progressive, & that's good, right? kind of, i guess. i am still just
very unnerved because that "validation" was completely at the mercy of tv executives who seem to be interacting
with an agreement that was apparently made at some point, between the public & the media, that the
fictional multiverse of tv shows is going to be a field of public discourse where whatever
varieties of people are permitted to occupy it are the ones that are validated

there's no agreement ever made, really, but the initial absence of the class of people sets up this standard,
& after the absence is rectified, & everyone is nice & happy, the agreement that the media's gatekeeping has
any actual meaning remains, & the power stays in their hands - people are, to some degree, less focused on the
empowerment of simply existing on their own terms in reality & more focused on clamoring for the mercy
of seeing representations of themselves. everything here is oriented towards the media's validity

now, these representations do serve as affirmations that the viewers are not so wrong to go out & exist in reality,
that they will not be isolated aberrations... but i guess i just find it strange that it always ends in eyes trained
on fictional worlds, & that, rather than directly affirming the reality, which is already there, that there are
others like the viewer, the fictional representation affirms it only through the implication that
the producers wouldn't have included these people unless it were the case

i guess all of this is also kind of parallel to the notion that the oppressors of a class create that class by delineating certain
behaviors or traits which were previously uncategorized, & then if the oppressed want to organize as that class against the
oppression, they have to affirm the label that is used to define them as an other that is there to oppress... & of course, you
can make cases for the introduction of an identity into the media (as more than a subject of ridicule) representing
a transition of a class from being excluded & overtly oppressed to being officiated only because the
behaviors delineated by the label have been rendered harmless & safe, even cooperative

here is the point: i don't think anyone actually has to care. no one has to pay attention, no one has to care if dave
chappelle says something transphobic. the world would be just as rotten & misogynistic & regressive in the case that
people were actually meaningfully talking about it on the street. chappelle & co just wrest discourse away from people's
actual local lives & turn everything into this impersonal interplay of symbols for people to react to, searching
for the youtuber that puts everything just the way one would like to put it if their phrasing wasn't so
quivering & larval & uncertain as a result of this exact practice of just taking in takes

no one has to care, but i think the problem is that everyone has to realize they don't have to care,
because as long as some contingent remains who think they have to care, then their polluting effect
on policy & discourse, as they respond to the media & form perceptions under its guidance,
can't just be ignored. something like that. it all makes itself compulsory, i guess

-

cultural phenomena, which i would expect to exist precisely to the degree that they're actually organically spoken
of, often don't exist to that degree, i think. each thing's existence is made of self-amplifying vague notions that a
substantial number of people may be thinking & talking about it. i think each treatment of a thing as extant & valid,
whether on a public platform or just in face-to-face small talk, can be poison to anyone who unquestioningly takes
it in, because that hesitant reference to it, as some larger thing off somewhere that you're only trying to grasp the
mystery & chaos of, (like the crazy, wacky, judgmental whirlwind of "cancel culture") is basically the entire
medium it exists in, & you've just actually participated in making it more real. i find this problematic because
the degree to which it exists is only the degree to which it is successfully lying that it exists - implications that
would follow from it existing are being erroneously realized. these sorts of landmines are everywhere

i am very happy to have no idea what the hell is going on. i'm happy to not entertain the notion that any social
media platform's attempt to produce any meaningful digest of public discussion can in any way produce
even the barest glimpse into the tiniest microscopic scratch on the surface of what is happening at my
city, state, country, continent, or planet. if i am incredibly sheltered, if i am not talking with anyone
about any particular thing, i'm at least not going to make myself out to be anything more than that

ideally, i should... i didn't drive out & see a george floyd protest with my own eyes, you know? i certainly respect anyone
who did! so, ideally, i should... believe that the george floyd protests, for the love of god, did happen. & i do. i don't mean
to suggest that i've ever even doubed it. but maybe i should also acknowledge my own shelteredness, & let it take a
little ritualistic self-coaxing into believing it. just to remind myself i have no visceral connection to the world
at large, that i'm living through screens... you can see how conspiracy theorists end up denying
the moon landing & many other more severe things. our trust is so abused!

wanting to be like a person in a photograph vs. wanting to possess the general simplicity of a photograph.
mistaking the latter for the former. or this isn't actually a meaningful distinction. i just type sentences

october 26th, 2021

media that's designed to create a sense of inferiority in the viewer vs. ordinary people creating a sense of
inferiority in one another as just a side effect of trying to portray themselves in ways they find satisfying

october 28th, 2021

there is far far too much unreality & i love artists who express things that feel real (proceeds to
confine all of my reality to art that feels real, neglecting to just let it be the reality that it is)

november 2nd, 2021

i think when people act inhuman (i.e. reflect the alien inhumanity latent in many aspects
of life (i.e. play a part in propagating it, but only in tandem with being victimized by
it themselves)) it acts as lubricant for someone else to internally dehumanize them

conversely you could say that everyone could hypothetically be made to constantly behave & appear so searingly
human that it'd be impossible for anyone to dehumanize anyone. not that that is actually possible, but i think
that extreme of the human direction illustrates the effect & potential mitigation of the inhuman direction

it's way easier to hate someone when you think they act like a brainless pig, even if it is in a way that the culture
they live in has partly led them to. which means that, if that kind of mutual resentment is beneficial to that
culture, & i mean the self-sustaining propagation of that culture even if is a hostile one to the people
living under it, then the inhumanity latent in it will probably become more prevalent & reflectable

november 6th, 2021

my dislike of capitalism is viscerally rooted only in the sense of social alienation i have felt for my entire life & how,
although it could stem from all sorts of factors, i have come to attribute it a fair amount to capitalism based on the
general notions of like, the omnipresence of mass media & the inexorable slant of everything in mass media towards
marketability or control, which are directly at odds with the humanity of a given work. & that when someone is
born into & taught to live by these things it basically guts them of their soul like coring an apple & makes
them fundamentally removed from me. so i feel like i am living in a world that, in like, being guided by
capital, is basically completely oriented & straining toward what under ideal conditions would just be
my complete & total isolation with no escape except death... all the other stuff like pollution
& economic inequality & exploitation is just, like, oh crap it does that too

plz shriek like a caveman & smash this flimsy worldview to bits with a rock so i can consruct
a better one from the rubble O_O ... rebuttal 1: alex you don't voluntarily speak to anyone

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 11th, 2021

my vague tentative theory is that a feedback loop has to be maintained, through systems like:
expressions of humanity being watered down & perhaps coming through in art, which then
teaches the audience its watered-down standard & perhaps inspires further works of art

the dual end results, i suspect, are: 1. the diminishing of unfiltered humanity within people who buy into watered-down standards;
2. the generation of unproductive resentment & separation & misanthropy among people who don't buy in, as they know this
is all absurd but find a deficit of counterexamples to it... this is why i think the slant towards the concentration of
attention on mainstream media is not just "tasteless" or "bland" or whatever snobbish judgment but pure evil

i don't want to fetishize old art & say it has some deep fundamental mystical connection to reality but i think there's something to be
said about uhh. like ongoing, worsening, multiplicative refraction of people's processing of their own lives as it becomes informed
by their reflection on art whose artistic lineage is being refracted through increasing layers of increasingly marketable art &
sterile alienated bureaucratized ways of life, right, like, is it not worth trying to theorize about "cringe" relationships to
tv shows or whatever, embarrassing fandom culture, is there not something, like, hyperreal about it, i just don't see
anyone else typing anything like this, if someone refers me to the already-existing book i can just shut up

i really truly may not be thinking straight at every little junction of reasoning in these paragraphs, i am just having a careless
sleep debt typing-a-lot day, i'm not concerning myself too much about it. i HOPE you are cringing SO MUCH. (actually
i don't, i am embarrassed to make anyone cringe, i am just telling myself it's my goal as a coping mechanism)

ok ok ok ok ok here's a REAL justification for being stupid: even if i am being incredibly naive & u[p my own ass & making
obnoxious attempts at being self-aware it's like, uh, something in place of where a void could be, like if someone can
feel my fleshy real other-person thoughts writhing around behind what i type then that has some value even
if on some other layer of processing it is just annoying. okay. i will stick with this.

november 24th, 2021

oh i can finally articulate the dread i felt when i saw generic posts
that'd generally express that the author often found men obnoxious

i felt like i was seeing another person recognize that everyone on earth is currently insane. (i have a tendency
to state this in a very absolute way as kind of humorous hyperbole.) but the post falls totally short of really
acknowledging it, because they made the insanity contingent on a trait that'd earn them some cheap
relatability. instead of pressing it more & trying to further generalize what they were seeing

which meant the post was just feeding back into an endless self-sustaining fiction of a social landscape,
which they had the "reasonable perspective" on, the "reasonable perspective" just being the guise
under which they were feeding back into it. so it felt very dishonest & treacherous

i think i try too hard to find some objective-feeling framing for my own sense of social alienation so let's say i basically
just religiously believe in a giant horrifying nameless inhuman presence that perpetually strains to cheapen & deaden
all social interaction as far as it can dig its tendrils, & the deadened states are then prone to find expression in more
recognizable forms like the detestable varieties of "masculinity" & "femininity." & to engage with the states solely
on the terms of their convenient facades is just playing the horrifying nameless inhuman presence's
game instead of doing anything in the direction of meaningfully confronting it

in my mind, admitting how horrifyingly alone one can be as a consequence of the inhuman presence, instead
of just trying to rebound into the safety net of yet another constructed ingroup, feels like the first step i guess

-

basically, i look at tinder, facebook, & omegle, & a strong majority of the people seem insane. i have no reason
to suspect that these are tainted as randomly selected samples of the population. if i feel like i'm a reasonable
person, & i expose myself to people who are naturally in line with all the mainstream cultural currents,
& i feel like i have to really, really, really try to sift out anyone i can remotely grasp or get along
with, i feel like something about the world is currently making people insane

i have to acknowledge the possibility that i am becoming entirely a product of a distorted perspective, restricting myself to
trying to gain an understanding through platforms that people are uniformly not interested in portraying their humanity through,
while i am distinctly interested in trying to do that. i'm not sure just how much water this holds. it is absolutely worth taking
into account the distorting effects of these awful profit-driven mediums... & maybe the, in actuality, very small
proportion of humanity that is insane is compelled toward them, & the rest are repelled

but it feels like there has to be a point where, if you boil it down enough, these do have to be expressions of the people
behind the monitors, to some extent! that some grain of this has to persist face-to-face... &, you know, there's probably
something to be said for the idea that the refraction of socialization through profit-driven mediums would
just play a part in making everyone insane & is thus just more strength for my hunch

i cannot convince myself that sincerity is permitted to survive adjacent to mass media & the cultural slant toward the
leisure, the absolute normalization of the endless intake of fiction, the screens installed in every last home, the
odd motivational speech on youtube that only serves to propagandize, the x-to-y pipelines, the...

but, if i discount all of that, & lend some credence to the idea that this all suggests everyone is insane, then: this is
where i'm supposed to conclude that i'm insane, because we all know the narrative that insane people often feel like
they're sane, & the whole world is against them, & stuff like that. & the statistics of me being insane are a lot more
reasonable. one person satisfying a condition vs. many many many many many many people satisfying that condition

although, you can also use that reasoning to argue that, if there really is some autonomous cultural Process that's making
people insane, then it's also very adapted to shaking the confidence of anyone who is less affected by it. because, in making
so many people insane & leaving anyone else less affected to rationally process that, the Process would precisely replicate
the narrative of being insane, for people who aren't insane, & lead them straight to the reasoning of that last paragraph.
& so the Process would naturally erode the confidence of any gaps in itself, anyone less affected. here, the
Process has... cooked the numbers, it has realized that statistically absurd situation

there is maybe a middle ground where the world is incredibly alienated & i am kind of insane too. where i'm just taking my
acknowledgment of the alienation too far, using it as the rationale for an impenetrable barrier between myself & everything
else, only letting myself get worse, in isolation, not inviting anyone to correct me, to reestablish my sense of normality,
to reassure me... it is easy for me at times to slip into mindsets where i feel like the entire planet is the
fundamental opposite of me in all ways, & there is no escape except to just wait for death

there is the perspective that... if most people are so alienating, then i really cherish the ones who aren't, right? & so i am
correspondingly intimidated by the deep value of those who aren't, & so, hesitant to interact, & so it makes perfect sense
where i am: connected to subcultures but still very isolated. in touch with somewhat of a "home" of a social sphere
but still hyperfixated on everything outside of it, the alienating landscape, staring at it miserably, silently

my feelings can maybe be summed up by one bolded word, expressed
by itself, not meant to imply anyone i'm particularly saying it to
or anything i'm particularly requesting with it. it is: please

please, for instance, let me solve the dumb rubik's cube in my skull which upon completion says "ok
you can walk up in the hallway & say 'hi' now, it's fine, there's nothing lurking under the situation"

november 25th, 2021

i will not reach my full potential if i keep engaging with tumblr & with any other attention-fracturing thing.
i regard a timeline where i don't heal & really utilize my attention span in the same way i regard a timeline where
i drop dead of a heart attack before i even finish typing this sentence. & i really truly am the only one who can
make the choices that are needed. publicly lamenting my diminished attention span while not healing it, even
if it comes off like at least speaking out against the phenomenon, is beyond worthless. harmful, even,
for the example it sets. the potential for failure is so very breathing-down-my-neck real

i only have, um, what, like, thirteen years of technology conditioning to undo? ok, pretty hefty, but i still have,
like, sixty-seven years left, ideally. plenty of time. this is practically my whole existence thus far, but, surely, i am
actually living in a teensy footnote that my fulfilled future self looks back on infrequently & cringes when doing so

this seriously isn't something that i can keep pondering & narrating on that kind of platform by the way, i'm not going to be
stupid & fold my process of healing into a narrative that's still under the thumb of the disease. it really, really does take
actually taking the measures that i don't want to take, because they will practically eliminate all that i know, they
will mangle so many of my frameworks of self-conception & processing of experience & all of that

the only thing that exists in this form of living is sources of suffering masquerading as antidotes to themselves, & as i wise up
to that deception, they simply become self-referential as an added layer of deception, & their additional layers of self-reference
can scale, without limit, in direct proportion to how much i think i've "wised up." posting this is an example of this process

to you, "the reader," i need to become a void, i think. i'm not even supposed to be telling you that i need to become a
void. becoming alone with myself is the only choice. i can't fill the void with solitary attention-fracturing things either

for the good of myself, i need a true justification for suicide. not literal suicide, but
the suicide of the me that i am as these words. To Finally Do It. To Put Into Practice.

i am not going far enough. i am not going a thousandth of far enough

to have a bark so practiced & loud it could blast the whole world to
shreds & no bite is simply perfect for the survival of malignant patterns

in one breath, it can feel like so much creativity is required just to experience one moment of casual
freedom... for instance, if i decide i want to physically express freedom, i might thoughtlessly
default to... running & dancing in a particular way that i quickly decide is really an action
foreign to me that i've been trained to adorn with the quality of being a symbol of freedom.
it wasn't freedom. it was a "cliche." i have to do something else, & it has to
be considered if i want it to really break patterns & bonds

in another breath, well, no, freedom doesn't really have to be considered, in fact it has to be kind of thoughtless. explicitly
deciding i want to "do some crazy gesture of freedom" isn't thoughtless, & it's that initial excess of intent that shunted
me into a cliche. & it's the following excess of analysis that lets me identify it as a cliche & devalue it for that

by coincidence, i could thoughtlessly run & dance in an identical way, & it could be freedom, because to not have the action bordered
by these excesses of thought seems like freedom. to be impulsive & sincere & not make one's actions so contrived seems like freedom

but then, what if it's in thoughtless freedom that i let my guard down & become totally inhabited by
foreign patterns without noticing? & as a result my life becomes sort of drab & prefabricated &
lifeless? what if i run & dance in cliche ways, & they're very much not coincidences?

or could it have been in the fictional world's initial act of portraying common human behaviors that it
redefined some of them as "cliches" & thus wholly claimed them for itself? "cliches" are things that
exist only in fiction's shadow, for its presence sets up the practice of comparing reality to it, &
the standard that one shouldn't let the two overlap too greatly, lest that person be "cliche"

the endless uncertainty: does fiction steal & appropriate real behaviors from life or does it
define & decree normative behaviors which then become the real behaviors populating life?

i feel like the world is very populated by patterns right now, which makes it unsafe in these terms... i
feel i wouldn't have to do all of this overthought if the world hadn't been made unsafe in this way. it's sad

november 28th, 2021

i can never just relax anymore... like, during a drive home, my dad & brother are riffing on a beer ad on
the radio, & i'm just sitting there, in my head going, "Parodying mainstream media is living death..."

i don't know! it's just, it's like, someone throws you in a cell filled with human waste & doesn't even lock
the door & you comfort yourself by writing "this cell is stupid" on the wall with the waste instead of just
leaving. lending the beer ad even the crumb of legitimacy implied by the notion that you're finding
some higher degree of honesty by subverting its contents. instead of just turning it off

if you are techno-crazy, i think you will hear a song for the first time &, instead of respecting your own animal intake of novel
stimuli & approaching it on those terms, you will unconsciously use the high view count on youtube + the general tone of the
comments, perhaps uniformly nostalgic, to infer that it is "classic" or "widely recognized" music, & take to speaking about
it in a way that tends to emphasize acknowledging the "classic" quality that is alien to you over the novelty that you
actually experienced, so as to not sound naive. as if you instead possess the alternative to naivete, which would
seem to be an absolutely comprehensive grasp of its place in culture to the extent that you have been present for
every mp3 playback... when, really, each person has only their particular memories of the song, & all they
can do beyond that is fumble blindly at the metadata of its existence, the reviews & statistics & encyclopedic
info, & maybe feel like it all meaningfully represents some "commonality" around it with others

or maybe i am totally trash talking the freeing possibilities for one's
cultural perspective that are opened by technology! um who knows?
i just don't like feeling imprisoned in second-order observation

december 5th, 2021

expressing lgbt-supportive sentiments with earnest delight & pride at the category of living that one observes & occupies
(e.g. being gay) vs. expressing lgbt-supportive sentiments, still in earnest, but underscored by a simmering rage at the
perception that the category of living that you're supporting is made up of behaviors that are wholly undifferentiated
from the totality of human behaviors, & that their original reception of a name only served as a means of sectioning
them off as a target for oppression, & so, with your sentiment, who you really intend to address is a set of
undifferentiated people unified only by that shared oppression, & this leaves you with no option but
to resort to the accursed name & reinforce the differentiation, which now seems to be permanent

i would posit that K--- F---- & Pad Chennington both represent the same general phenomenon, as does pretty much every
clickbait outfit, & that there is a revealing honesty in K--- F----' extreme ugliness. what i mean is that, by this point, people
have probably churned out an essentially infinite amount of content devoted to narrativizing elements of the world we actually
live in, & refurbishing them into presentations that are dopaminergically appealing to consume. the world is treated by
this media as if it is not a happenstance collection of history & present circumstances, but there for the viewer to
take in. sincere emotional responses that one might be expected to have organically in response to these aspects of
the world are framed as things offered to the viewer, albeit watered down to the emotional depth of a movie trailer

a video of a sick child in a hospital bed may go viral with an attractive title that effectively advertises
the sadness that the viewer will get to feel. "creepy" stock music may play over a slideshow of wagons
piled with corpses. i imagine one can find numerous top ten lists counting down the most evil Nazis

a video about "the most disturbing albums" elevates those albums, distorts the reality of them as mere art that successfully
expresses its own disconcerting aesthetic, & suggests, in place of that reality, the tantalizing notion that they are...
legitimately disturbing artifacts, in a way that is sort of narrativized beyond the plainness of what they really are

with this kind of mindset encouraged, where any aspect of the world can be essentially packaged into pieces of
informational candy to gorge oneself on, it makes sense to me that people can start narrativizing & consuming
each other & their own interactions. anything that comes through the monitor is fair game. earlier, i typed a
post about people on tumblr reblogging exchanges where someone gets told off, & how those exchanges
are reduced to pre-packaged & reproducible narratives for people to experience vicariously

well, screw it, why wouldn't a community like K--- F---- come together, dedicated to systematically narrativizing
& mythologizing the perceived eccentricities of as many other people as possible, as though they were put
there just for the members of that community to unearth & discuss? people gotta have content!

i feel like this all also probably maps onto the moral satisfaction that people can get from circulating (or cataloging)
callout posts. all social media platforms act in the interest of all cognition that passes through them being extensively
defined by the experience of seeing a little red circle with a number in it. you already know that though

can i get a rousing "the tendency for social media platforms that exist under capitalism, to be structured in ways dictated
by a specialized logic that is perpendicular to the aim of cultivating healthy & undistorted forms of reasoning & cognition
(with any & all alignment with that aim being mere coincidence), stems from & is directly analogous to capital's presence
as an inhuman autonomous process that carries itself out perpendicularly to general human well-being (with any & all
alignment with that aim being mere coincidence), & so i would posit that the current ubiquity of technology with
which to access social media is in line with the notion that it is a very important development in the ceaseless
straining of capital to have absolutely all human cognition entirely defined by it" folks. you
already know the big run-on sentence but c- can i get a rousing one folks

december 21st, 2021

you ever feel like you are failing to be a person because a person in your vicinity is ("settling for") watching tv, which you
may attribute to your neglect to engender, to invite, to act as the other needed participant in, some real lived thing that
could fill that time instead (while considering that you may be being a bit dramatic - people can just like tv shows) - but
you're considering the notion that the capability is very within you to just create a circumstance of socialization where
the choice between it or the tv is an objective no-brainer... if you'd only wake yourself up to that capability