i couldn't take it anymore. i grew too devoted to journaling. it was becoming a great burden to me. i wanted to be too thorough. i loved my
days, & i was afraid of losing any of them to the holes in my memory. i pored over photographs, instant messages, & scrobbles, trying to rescue
ephemeral moments. i felt like i was constantly choosing between living & remembering. i broke down. it hurt to let it all begin lapsing, but
i could only watch it happen. do i have, somewhere, a draft of a more fully realized January journal? yes, & maybe a February one too. but
i don't care. here begins a different form of journaling - only scattered portrayals of days, assembled out of whichever events
i bothered to write down as discrete "posts." it is, in fact, a regression back to the pre-2021 form of this exercise

january 1st. acquainted with:

having a hand placed on my shoulder & starting to cry because the mercy of that
gesture feels at odds with the sense of culpability i feel for my immutable true feelings

tearing a person apart emotionally & being torn apart emotionally in turn because there
is no boundary between me & my tearing & them & their being torn... a bilaterality in
spite of the unilaterality of my role, dispensing or withholding mercy with impunity

metaphorically having a gun placed in my hand against my will & being ordered by the voice of personal
truth to pull the trigger even though it will practically impose every pain that I myself ever wanted to escape

somehow becoming emotionally wrung out & weary of continuing to perform
the emotional character of the situation, despite the feelings of all three
preceding paragraphs being completely sincere. feeling absurd for this

new year! ok

i turned back on the most absolutely unparalleled certainty i had ever felt about romantic separation &
i did it not so much out of honesty or romance or love as much as i did it out of the absolutely narcotic
character of returning in the short term to conversational & temperamental normalcy, & these were
the mutually understood & accepted terms on which i would be in the relationship, & i typed them
here just to display to you how absurd they are like i am waving a flesh wound in your face

in the early morning i made two mixes of the songs i listened to the most
in 2022 & 2021 respectively, in strict descending playcount order

i had a stress dream where i saw a freshly laid chicken egg roll a short ways down a sort of wooden ramp & fall off.
when it hit the ground it cracked & a baby chicken tumbled out across the dirt into the proximity of an adult
chicken which uncaringly skewered it on one of its talons, then i started crying hysterically

a lady came outside & began calmly questioning me, with our conversation somehow progressively filling out a wordle-type game displayed on
a nearby tv until it was revealed by the solution that my crying had been functioning as a sort of environmental clue for the word "tantrum"

i've never thrown up from stress but i think new year's day was the only day i've had where i felt like it might have been possible

january 3rd. i felt like an animal on a leash waiting to see my friend again. i resented the passage of the past week of
unseasonably comfortable weather. i accidentally gouged my bottom lip with my thumbnail so hard that it bled a lot but once
i wiped the blood off there was no detectable wound or additional bleeding. i drunkenly cuddled my dachshund. i noted how my
involuntary response to recalling an embarrassing memory had mellowed out from pantomiming stabbing myself in the neck &
making squelching sound effects with my mouth to saying "blah" once & that's it. i had a set of about one hundred
words that i would immediately type back-to-back into each redactle as a standard test battery

i dreamed that i got out of bed & on the chair in my room was a big jar about halfway full with what i gathered was pomegranate
juice from the stray pomegranate pips floating in it. i picked up the jar & drank all of the juice. my pal woke up & dazedly said
something like, "what... posts...? notes...?" & i thought to myself something to the effect of, "what he just said will be
funny to report on tumblr." but then i woke up & felt that it wouldn't be as funny to recount as a dream

january 4th. my head felt like it had shifted into a noticeably "masculine" space as an effect of wearing that grey coat around everywhere.
i felt i'd have to start bringing, say, skirts back into rotation if i wanted to feel "normal" again, which is to say, if i wanted my
stream of thoughts to stop feeling endlessly "snarky" in a way that did in my heart feel attributable to the grey coat

one could call this negotiation a bit cool & fluid & queer but only insofar as it occurs with respect to a self-perception
that would seem in the first place to be gendered to a point of embarrassment, i mean, having my brain affected by a coat)

hmm well is it really that bad to be snarky sometimes, what's the problem

unrelated to that, i was trying not to swear today

it occurred to me as i was crossing a street that if i take my prior project of trying to to some extent effect
personal tranquility through cessation of swearing (i felt that a broad excision of "bite" from my expression
could ultimately be beneficial, maybe owing less to any 'harmfulness' of "bite" per se & more to the promotion
of the temperamental spaces that would develop as necessary alternatives for where "bite" would have gone prior),
& reverse the causality of it, then i get a person practicing a more general effort towards personal tranquility
while noting the frequency of their swearing as an indicator of how far they are falling short in
their efforts (for if one is tranquil then one is not always finding things to swear at)

here i'll examine why i did end up swearing today

i was having trouble logging into my bank account on my phone. but it wasn't about the bank account.
it was about being in the back room of the coffee shop & seeing the couches propped up on their sides

i didn't know if the couches were just being moved around or if they were being tossed, but i was rashly
assuming the worst, which was their being tossed. i was having a little emotional crisis over this

i was having a little emotional crisis over it because one of those couches features in a mundane moment that i have been looking
ahead to endlessly for short-term consolation, & when i saw them propped up on their sides i felt like everything was lost in a way

it was a very irrational, symbolic frustration, a kind where it feels a little like God is trying to send a message, make me
acknowledge some reality... & it was silly, because that moment i've been looking ahead to represents a general improvement
that will come whether or not the specific moment actually happens. but in that moment i felt cheated & robbed of it

it turned out that they were only moving the couches, though. so it's okay

january 5th. drunk listening to the 1977 record titled Charlie the Hamster Sings the Ten Commandments,
figuring out from cross-referencing the tracklist against the table of various versions of the Ten Commandments
on wikipedia (& the back cover saying "Old Testament" instead of "Torah") that Charlie the Hamster
is probably Presbyterian. a third amount of vodka would seem to be the amount where
i eat chocolate treats without having the thoughts of "now that this is on my teeth it
is disintegrating them in a realtime." just reporting this as trivia

january 6th. i cried laughing at nonsensical ai-generated image macros. i uploaded to
youtube a self-made compilation of songs recorded by a group called magnetique bleu

january 7th. during the drive home from seeing my pal off at the bus stop i was suddenly gripped by a completely random
& baseless fear that my friend had been killed in some kind of freak accident within the past twenty-four hours. there was
nothing whatsoever to suggest this beyond a mid-day grey discord status indicator, which is not even unusual. but for
whatever reason this worry grew intense enough that by the time we got home i was quietly kind of freaking out
about it & even googled their name & the city to make sure there was not any kind of news report. when
they randomly messaged me shortly after i breathed an audible sigh of relief & felt absurd

january 8th. at some point i moved the wind chimes out of my room because they smell weird. i sat them on
the dryer while i deliberated on where else to put them. they stayed there for several days. someone else,
my dad or brother, eventually took the initiative of hanging them from a chain of one of the ceiling
fans in the living room. many of the times that i walk past it i blow on the star to jingle them

a rubber eyeball mask slung over the top of a defunct air purifier & wearing
a stout top hat, stares straight up at the chimes constantly every day

january 9th. for the ten days that my pal was here i was kind of sullen & withdrawn at points. but whenever i wasn't, i was,
like, super quippy almost constantly every day. it might have been the most actively humorous i've been for any extended time
span in my life. wondering how i could reactivate that energy. today i was very cozy with my friend but not so funny

pomegranate pips in a cup of them that my dad got me had a noticeable burn that suggested to me that they'd started fermenting.
i considered quickly eating the whole cup out of curiosity on whether it'd make me drunk to any noticeable extent. but i did
not do this because they were not very pleasant to eat & i wasn't sure whether it'd be risking any other health effects

my dad sat drinking a cup of coffee & watching a youtube video called "one hundred famous people who committed
suicide." it was just a sleekly produced slideshow cycling about once each second to a different picture
of someone captioned with their name, with dark ambient playing over it & no commentary

i went outside & saw that the mailman was there & had done his rounds, so i checked my mailbox. there was
nothing there. while he was still getting in his truck & i was heading back to my door, a second mail truck
careened into the parking lot, pulled up right next to me, & this new mailman handed me a small box
through the window then drove away. the small box contained the coat button that i lost in Iowa

january 10th. i looked at the school i went to for kindergarten on google street view
& it exists on there exclusively in the year 2007 completely silhouetted by the sun

in the early morning, i thought: tonight felt like the most actually romantic night i've ever had... it
involved drawing this picture of my dog & then accidentally scaring her with my small plush bear that
i've discovered can be triggered to sing jesus loves me in the voice of a young child. i also drew a tree

we were in a place of "the weather is nice would you like to go somewhere in one
hour" as opposed to the hitherto established "do you want to hang out tomorrow"

i think the first big huge substantial protracted breakthrough in interpersonal engagement that i had years ago accustomed me a bit too
much to the idea of people sometimes becoming just neurochemically mean in a way that isn't exactly their fault & which i have to simply
cope with to my great tolerant discomfort. case in point my mild unease today at the mere hunch that my friend hadn't had any coffee
since waking, even though i'm pretty sure there wasn't much if anything to worry about, even in the way of benign irritability

january 11th. the day was overcast in the way that feels not drab but metallic & clean. i purchased
two aesthetically dissimilar plush toys after coming to an irrevocable conclusion in my heart for no
particular reason that they are a pair who must not be purchased by two different people & separated

january 12th. got lost in the woods on purpose & emerged onto some unknown autumnal blacktop street by a warehouse & made our way
blindly to the highway holding hands & then about a mile back to the car & got coffee & held hands on the couch there talking about
national socialist black metal & the distortion that image boards structurally impose on their users' communication & went to the thrift
store & strengthened mutual mental association between chicken tenders & a specific park & then HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

they have lived less than two miles from me for about seven years but i would not want
to have met them during earlier periods of my life, as any of the people i've been before

today was presumably the last day of the car that my friend has met since i met
them. goodbye to the era of the first car... there will never be another the first car

january 13th. i'd been carrying three tiny bibles around in my coat pocket on the off chance that i could do a bit, at some moment that is ripe
for it, where i start just handing someone bibles repeatedly... today i added a tin of mints so that at the coffee shop i could do a callback
& subversion for my friend that i thought would be pretty funny, as long as the tin didn't audibly rattle in my pocket & give itself away

the song kids by mgmt was taking over my brain. i was drafting a letter on my laptop but i planned to give
it to my friend handwritten at some point. or, well, i planned to maybe read it out loud, & then
give them it as a gift, a memento. the new car was a 1990 volvo 240... crazy car

ok, i didn't say it in its own post back when it happened, but i will report a piece of information originally to this
journal page, although i said at the top that that is no longer the format: tonight we kissed for the first time

it had been one hundred & twelve days of strictly walking always on the left
side except during the odd brief stint of walking on the right side as a joke

january 14th. i was very proud to continue to be among the vast minority of human beings who escape being murdered on each friday the
thirteenth. i laughed hysterically after my friend remarked that it had already been the new day for an hour & twenty-one minutes, & i said
"& part of the twenty-second minute," & they confusedly misconstrued this as me referring to a unit of time that exists adjacent to the minute,
called the "twenty-second minute," a minute that last twenty seconds, there being one hundred & eighty twenty-second minutes in an hour

january 15th. at some point my friend said they drove to the old art gallery, not realizing it'd been shut down when
the new one had opened, & then they'd had to drive to the new one. i was confused, i thought, "what do you mean? we
walked up to it & found it closed, then walked to the new one...," & it felt like a very unusual moment of amnesia
about what we'd done together. then i realized i was completely confusing which memories i've shared with
whom, like the boundary there was totally permeable, because i only ever have one person in
that singular position of companionship held above everyone else

january 17th. i felt that something was too delightful to make into just another thing for my brain to turn into posts

january 18th. both of the randomly generated songs from my queue that day had an amusing degree of
lyrical correspondence to many of the anxious feelings that i had been expressing over the past several days

today was mentally like a horrible nightmare & i wrote about it elaborately

after i slept i arrived at four simple observations that i could not prior due to being in the throes of madness:

1. last semester i was very nervous, feeling like i was slacking off bad on classwork &
unsure how things would pan out. but in the end i still pulled through with a's & b's

2. hypothetically, i would have to pull off some unthinkable doubly
egregious degree of semester-long slacking to earn straight d's

3. hypothetically, even in this extreme case, i think my gpa is currently high
enough that those two straight-d semesters wouldn't make it that bad

4. my primary anxiety about my gpa has always stemmed from the minimum that i need to
maintain to be eligible for pell grants, which i am nearing my maximum on anyway

the sum of all this was that i now felt... how do you say, "joker mode" about this semester, & all fear
had left me. i would try my best to the precise degree that it did not make me meaningfully anxious. i had no
impetus for perfectionism anymore. the department of education was going to be enabling me to do some living

january 19th. every few days i think i am ready to handwrite my letter to my friend
but then i think of something else to mention & am glad i did not commit earlier

i went to a sparsely attended "silent disco" event which elicited a feeling of bemused cynicism due to the sense that the Campus Activity
Board is a client of a certain category of unassociated companies who solicit the business of the campus activity boards at every college,
& this contributes to the sense of a more general principle that every enjoyment is trotted out from some kind of roster of enjoyments
while never having any reason to disclaim itself as such. when i got up there they were playing cupid shuffle...

january 20th. i couldn't find my earmuffs & couldn't retrace my steps with them because i couldn't remember when i last had
them on, or saw them, & for that matter i could barely remember where i'd been over the past week or two. sometimes it feels
like my memory could diminish entirely to the single needle-thin point of the current moment & i would take up residence in
an eternal present hopefully of hugging my friend a lot, cultivating happy times only to feel them not to store them

i made my whole social deviance class laugh cause the teacher was taking examples of taboos & i came out with "making a statue out of human
teeth that you stole from people." in class i drew a little portrait of a person with a pen i had borrowed from the guy who sits next to me.
i greatly enjoyed the way the pen wrote & would proceed to wonder for months exactly what kind of pen it was. at work i fell asleep on
the floor in the obscure space behind the equipment racks in the radio room with my head on my backpack to the classical music
til my instructor barged in for something. all i did at work that day was read the residents wiki with great investment

january 21st. in the early morning i ravenously read part of the book pop music & hip ennui by macon holt

january 22nd. i figured out how to whistle after thinking my whole life that my mouth just isn't capable of it. it happened in
the process of incessantly trying to replicate a water-drop sound my friend makes that i still haven't quite cracked the code of

it felt good to be writing a "love letter" as something that i felt was just happening as opposed to me ever sitting
down & deciding matter-of-factly that i am going to invoke & participate in "writing a love letter" taken as
some predefined reified action to be picked out from a roster of actions. this went in the letter

january 23rd. i stapled a thousand word reply onto an extremely corny environmentalist-posturing poem hanging
in a hallway in my building, an act which might risk being about as corny as the poem itself but i was having fun

january 24th. this might have been the night when we kept jokingly saying these chiding juxtapositions of Bible stories with technology & i made
us both laugh by saying "God said go forth & multiply, we said we'd obey but we lied, cause all we do is divide, the nation, with misinformation"

january 25th. this might have been the day when i frivolously said to my friend in the coffee shop that im gonna realize
a miraculous circumstance where i never have to be cynical again & all the flows just flow where they're supposed to flow
& i'm impervious to everything & just know what i like & what i don't like, at first they thought i was being sarcastic...

january 26th. my bangs were getting too long but i lost my hair-trimming scissors & i was too broke to afford
replacements. i felt like one of those pigs whose tusks curve around as they grow & end up piercing its own skull

january 27th. in the early morning i debated between sleeping or trying to marathon thirteen phil elvrum albums to make up for largely ignoring
his music for years despite a lingering hunch that it would be an important body of work to experience & maybe make the early morning of january
twenty- seventh feel important & singular in my memory (pfsh we all know alex ain't gonna actually devote committed time & attention to art)

it didn't end up happening but around seven i felt like i underwent some kind of minor spiritual healing relistening to
this for the first time after a little over nine years & reliving when vektroid & her friends would do shows on Tinychat

the chef i drew smiley faces on my meal tickets for for three years had quit...

january 29th. i laughed hysterically in the parking lot of an electronics store just over the way a computer
had been beeping near the checkout counter, each beep was two simultaneous beeps, a standard high
pitch one you might expect while the other was lower, i might write it out like "burnk"

we also laughed a lot during the drive at the song laugh of death

i finally replaced my hair scissors & spent about ten minutes in my room trimming off a crazy amount of split ends

then almost dozing off with my head on my friend's chest around noon with the window open & being
called back in the direction of consciousness with the periodic "hi" like submarine pings & then
drowzily flickery in my perception was getting up & out to the parking lot to see them off where
it felt unnaturally bright outside which added to the incoherence & they said i'm really cute

later i made a big collage of negative sentences. they're all first-person descriptions of maladaptive beliefs that a person could hold about
themselves or about the world. once it was assembled it transfixed me in an artistic capacity for its focus & its quality of being a kind of anti-
model. but i wasn't sure what to do with it, as it felt like something too negative on its face to personally justify shoving out into the world

january 30th. i tried putting together most of the first post-maladaptive-investment-in-recording monthly alex journal, but evidently
didn't finish it. i took a digitally proctored quiz & if my instructor actually watched the recording associated with it he would find
about fifteen minutes of constant humorously theatrical commentary on my progression through it. if he didn't watch it then it was
just something i did to keep myself amused during a quiz & in any case its precise character will be a mystery to the world...

i was worried about my friend's well-being as they drove a long distance back to town on potentially icy roads so
naturally this was also the night that i felt i must write out my letter to them so as to "prove" to the universe that
i wouldn't neglect to have a kind of carpe diem response to such moments of uncertainty & interpersonal concern

i had five hours to write out my two & a half thousand word love letter. this would require writing a consistent average
of eight words per minute. i wasn't totally sure that i'd really be able to get it done in time but i supposed i didn't
have to present it that day, as long as i at least put in a lot of effort towards getting it written out...

the word count sounds nice & dramatic to report but i would chalk it up as just the measure of my pointless verbosity & meandering

january 31st. i fell asleep in my friend's sweater