i - >
suffice to say:
i have transient problems involving numbers
the numbers have driven me to strike a lot of words from a place
where i place words. it feels like a waste. here, where there are not
numbers to give me problems involving numbers, i will construct
a big mosaic of stricken words from the past six months
welcome to slices of a possible stranger's diary
or:
my egotic Words Museum
unless anyone happens to love me, such that for
them it might be a humbly worthwhile archive
everything here is from the year 2020
a lot of it might not be identical to how i originally wrote it.
maybe i'll tweak things, or expand things, or trim things,
or hide things, or reply to things ... a trip through my
own brain, revising, commenting, conversing
update: i never actually wound up doing this very much
some of it might be out of order, as i didn't always
redact things in the order i posted them, & i
didn't always save the original times & dates
this has absolutely nothing to do with your experience
of reading it here & now. so why am i telling you?
i will say this: patches of this page may end up as descriptions of
transient misery which aren't so composed or attemptedly constructive
as other parts of this site, like my page on innocence. like a leak
of personal entropy. but i guess it can be taken as a display that
everyone is unhappy or low or flippant sometimes. realism,
or no light without darkness, or whatever the heck. if you
relate to any of it, at least try your best to think
constructively about what to do about it
let's get this show on the road!!!
*
you could confess secrets about yourself, but hide them in a vigenere cipher with the secret itself as the key.
maybe you only omit a critical word or two. this idea interests me because the secret gets to stay hidden unless it
was something that someone could have guessed, & did guess anyway. i guess there's probably not many situations
where the word length wouldn't be too much of a giveaway, though. it's probably more interesting as a little
thing i'm imagining than as a thing for a person to really do
i could do something fun here, but ... haha, nooo! what if
someone just performs some kind of cryptographic attack on it?!
the nervousness surrounds me again. oh no! i feel so embarrassed, regretful, paranoid, &
apologetic. hey nervousness, i'm trying to sleep here, stupid! i'm literally tucked in,
here. can you imagine being such a peabrained neurotic aura that you decide to try to
surround someone, not even realizing they're in the process of getting some shut-eye?!
one of my favorite things to encounter is a stream of water lazily crawling down
the path of least resistance at less than a walking pace, like a gelatinous creature, a
new & amorphous branch from a stream which has been pooling & has recently
overflown onto the surrounding land, which is nearly flat
sometimes the white box that i'm prone to typing in burns my eyes
one night i typed this in my drafts & immediately fell asleep:
how many times i'll let empathy & concern condensate worthlessly inside me
for all the goodwill i follow through on, i may as well be a violent alcoholic
it sucks when i get invested in writing something, then once i'm done i notice how hungry
i am, & i think: "i'm way too hungry for my brain to be working well enough for anything
i just wrote to be remotely palatable or helpful, or for me to be able to sensibly evaluate it"
sometimes i'm in a bad mood where the way i naturally structure my sentences, if i'm not thinking
really hard about it, makes me feel revolted & ashamed. a constant underlying sense of narcissism
& lack of respect for anyone who might read it. the way i frame things feels so angular, mechanical,
& more precise than it deserves. i have to cram more & more comma-separated adjectives into the
sentence. i always feel like it's made perfectly clear that i value perfect, undistorted communication
of exactly what's inside of me more than i value making anything sound personable, or valuable,
or ... i have to include the word always in the previous sentence to ensure the person reading
knows what frequency i get the feeling at. forget the emotional core of what i'm talking about,
i have to put all the inhuman flakes of metal in perfect order to send a perfect aaaaaa
purificatory, reformative, guidelines, boundaries, & seeking cogent awareness of anything i was
prone to say or do that made me more like a grain of sand in the river of a spiritual sickness much
bigger than me. maybe i was always cogently aware, but the awareness was buried screaming
three unrelated thoughts:
when i was around them, i felt like my current personality, my current ideals & virtues, my current
temperament, all of which i'd like to uphold, would melt off. i started to feel like the version of
me who i was when they were primary elements of my life. i felt sort of nervous & skittish. was i
regressing to a past version of myself that i associated with them, which i felt a subconscious
obligation to uphold for consistency? or was the way my personality refracted off of theirs a
constant? was i nervous around them? did i feel that anything that would clearly reflect my
personality felt too risky? was i afraid of expressing myself? did they make me too nervous for it?
sometimes i want to go sit in the other room & listen to the conversation that others are having, or
to just be around people who are there. it's normal. but i can't bring myself to do it. my presence
feels too imposing. i feel inhuman, unwanted, creepy, solicitous when i shamble into the room, in
dispassionate pursuit of the comfort of being in the same room as a person. even without speech,
even with nothing. i'm scared into a cruel inversion of the natural desire for companionship
i feel like i'm being crushed in the center of a venn diagram, & i want answers
i feel so confused. i'm happy, though. i'm going to be happy! earth is beautiful. love. sometimes
i'm freaked out & i feel like i don't deserve to be at the helm of a personhood or a personality.
it's ok, though. i think, realistically, i'm isolated beyond the standards of normality. but it's
ok, & i've found things & ways of being that i like. i'm drunk. one sentence won't stop
coming back: i feel like i'm being crushed in the middle of a venn diagram
i'm invited to join my dad & some others at a shooting range. i don't plan on firing
any guns if i go. i'd enjoy getting to visit & explore a new place. but i'm uneasy. if
it were just us there, that'd be ok. but if i went & there happened to be other people
there, i think being around strangers firing guns would freak me out a good deal
i
underlying systems. you know? i mgonna figure out the underlying systems. around me
i've been thinking about these three songs' lyrics semi-often for about five years
i like when sample-based music uses chipmunked vocals in a way that feels emotive or innocent
laundromat music
two ambiguously related sentiments
the right coincidence, happening to the right person, at the right time,
might drive them irreparably crazy! if it's a crazy enough coincidence, it
might feel impossible to reconcile, even if it really just is a coincidence
i almost anticipate such a coincidence, wishing it would happen, wishing life would
point in a direction or spontaneously weave itself into an ordered system around me
*
maybe people can drive themselves into corners of life with mutually reinforcing
factors that appear unrelated, disconnected ... then feel confused & surprised
when "unrelated & disconnected" factors start to reinforce each other
things that seem like unique islands can turn out to be
parts in a larger underlying system that might go unnoticed
someone brings a really pretty painting home! i try to hang it in my room. i
don't do it right. it hangs for minute or so, then falls behind the dresser in
a very loud & jarring way. it knocks stuff over. the frame is damaged! i
almost start to cry, because i do not like breaking things
despite the upset, it's a nice painting that
my dad found at a yard sale for fifty cents : )
"Celebration of Friendship", by Deborah Mayo
i teeter on the verge of a panic attack over a small spot on my leg. it is
probably a bruise. i'm somewhat convinced that it's amelanotic melanoma
this hypochondriacal feeling is sharpened by the feeling that i've only recently
removed some kind of burden from my soul that might've stayed there forever, &
i want to spend many decades experiencing love & compassion, & progressively
becoming more productive in my expression of those things. i want to grow &
further refine my identity, & ... simply put, i finally quite want to be alive!
being influenced is great because as time goes on
i can only become more of a mosaic of things i love
the relief of having received such a blatantly sinister series of messages
that i can reread them & think "okay, this instantly resolves my doubts.
i probably did not do anything wrong, because these could not have
conceivably preceded any genuine expressions of decent intent"
a car drives out of a church parking lot & pulls up near me as i'm walking home from
the store. one of the people in it throws a plastic bottle full of liquid at me. they
drive away hollering. about a minute later, another car comes down the next
street i'm on & someone tosses a firecracker out the window. what a nightmare!
i find myself going loony in my lousy sweltering room. i decide i'll go walk
around some jogging trails. i won't take any lousy photos there, or listen to
any lousy music there. there won't be any lousy stupid culture or art or
expression involved. it'll just be me & a bunch of grass. OK?
i look at this piece of decoration & actually read it for the first time, even though i'm
pretty sure it's been hung in every house i've lived in since as far back as i can remember
the temperature stays in the high eighties every day for at least four weeks.
i become kind of desperate to be able to go on long walks to a nature trail
again. i just want to walk four miles to a park pavilion & sit under it
i can't believe how many days & nights i let be ruined by a dumb mental illness(?) that revolved solely
around the experience of making a tumblr post, seeing a blank space under it, & being assailed by
embarrassment & self-disgust in a totally illogical & pavlovian way. years spent compelled to
keep posting on that freaking site while constantly afraid of "upsetting" it! this was such
a large presence nearly every day! that whole portion of my life was sort of wasted. i had
no filter, so it was hard to keep my thoughts offline, so i hardly felt like i could think
without being afraid! my life is so much better now just 'cause i alleviated this. jeez
thinking about the versions of me from 2015, 2016, 2017, & 2018 makes me
want to cry. the mundanity of my existence back then then sort of feels like it
frustratingly rejects being cried about. but i despise that mundane ugliness
in april & may of 2020 i sincerely felt "i love earth & life", while in
june & july of 2020 i could only sincerely think "i love earth & life"
"false hard truths" are my enemy. i've been trying to be vigilant about identifying & rejecting them. one day
i try to decide that i don't have to feel sad just because i've been awake for a long time. i think it works
i consider that my personality growth this year might in part be a response to someone saying
something hideous to me in the early months, & my response being a tepid "wow, ok, haha!" ...
i evaluate this later, & i think, "hmm, something is wrong! i should completely overhaul myself"
i don't think i've ever been hugged without sort of mentally blanking out during it. some part of
me viscerally rejects sentimentality by default. i'd love to know what circumstances have made
me so emotionally flat. part of it might have been the way my family had a weirdly self-aware,
parodical attitude toward familial roles & "standard" interactions like wishing someone a
happy birthday, or a merry christmas, or generally displaying love. it was like everyone
was deathly afraid of sounding like a sitcom character, & everything about being a family
ran that risk. everything was implicitly dumb & had to be done with a veneer of irony
maybe i'm erroneously ascribing emotional flatness to myself because i don't know
many people & i don't have regular social interactions that'd bring emotions &
personality out of me. if i had comfortable interactions, i'd probably be going
wild! i used to be very sad & self-pitying about never interacting with anyone,
but lately i've felt very accustomed to it, just perfectly ok about it
still, it's scaring me that i almost never join voice calls
anymore. i need to start joining voice calls again ...
this all feels like "awake too long thinking", i don't think i'll really care at
all about it after eight hours of sleep. so i decide not to buy coffee or try
to become diurnal. maybe when i wake up i'll even be done typing so much
the idea of telling or suggesting to another person that i love them seems to be treated with
simultaneous lightness & gravity that i find extremely paradoxical & confusing & impossible
to reconcile. i identify with the idea of frequently telling friends that i love them but i
can't do it, it feels like such a grave & solemn thing for me to flippantly say
ok, no more typing. it's a freakin' mistake! ok, ok, no it's not. i'll type more.
actually, nevermind, i'm not gonna freakin' type stuff anymore. i'm through being
exposed to you freaking people, it's a mistake! i don't know, on the other hand,
i guess i'll type more stuff. i'm in my bedroom. bedroom bedroom bedroom. until
further notice i am in my bedroom. things are being so stupid. blah blah blah.
i've had a huge spider trapped under a glass on the floor for two days because
i haven't found the initiative to slide a paper under it. i'm scared! unrelated
to the spider, i kind of hate myself & it's a sinister sort of self hatred that
intertwines itself among all the reasoning that could be used to dispel it or
something. i am deeply repentant. blah blah blah. i feel metaphysically
surrounded by the general other that is the internet all the time
the pressure of wanting someone anyone to know how a certain piece of art
makes me feel, but putting it into words would only degrade it. besides,
i feel like a pretentious narcissist for even entertaining the idea that
someone might be interested in the kind of unprompted word soup that
you can only nod at, & think, "well, obviously i don't understand,
but it clearly does mean something to them ..." okay even this
detached description of it all is making the box burn my eyes
i make a list of songs with my favorite lyrics. lots of
them keep making me sob, aaag aaahhh it's too concentrated
i reread my mannerisms & overall way of communicating in 2017. i think, "good god, this
person was not ready to enter a 'normal' relationship, let alone dive into polyamory for
her first in-person one & immediately go on a two-thousand-mile road trip for two months"
a fearful rant where i say a bunch of basic facts for no reason
i stare at trees & grass blowing in the field by my house, listen to birds, & imagine everything
as dead & barren as i've already accepted it'll be in the far future. i think about feeling
uncertain about just how far that future is, & people i've known of who i'd love to meet, &
musicians i like starving to death. i also think about how many happy children there
might be on earth currently, & how their real happiness now could be debated to be
more important than the hypothetical happiness of a hypothetical number of
hypothetical unborn children, whose number feels unprecedentedly uncertain
even if i've already accepted that it is finite, & that children can only be
happy until the heat death of the universe. but i will be happy regardless
the heat coming out of my fridge feels like a microcosm of impending potential global ecological
disaster. aspects of modern life like refrigerators approximate a natural desire to be in a safe
physics sandbox where the stories of people's lives are free to play out as safe narratives
that exist unconditionally, instead of in a hostile reality where all energy is on a budget.
temperature as an arbitrary quality that you freely adjust with a dial, based on mundane
necessity or desire to freeze food or have a cold drink. life invoking the satisfaction
of increasing the size of a box in a 3d modeling program. my refrigerator & my faucet
suggest it is that way, & they let it be that way, locally, but turning a dial up is
inherently costly, & turning it down isn't (in a sense. intentional refrigeration
is costly, but, ultimately, everything is always cooling)
everything comes at a price. i have body heat because of chemical reactions inside of me
that break down the food i eat. the heat comes out of the back of the refrigerator &
incrementally warms the air, justifies turning on the AC, the AC unit pumps the hot
air outside. my laptop is like a miraculous, freeing thing that brings me so near
to the sandbox, lets me exist in a bubble of ideas & art & stuff, but it spews
hot air. burning coals hundreds of miles away drive turbines & generate
electricity & it zips here & turns into heat, incrementally warms my room
every infinitesimal increase in the CO2 concentration, every infinitesimal decrease in the albedo,
every infinitesimal increase in the surface temperature, & the average refrigerator has to do
infinitesimally more, the average AC unit has to do infinitesimally more. we can move &
redistribute the heat, but the debt grows & grows, the net increase becomes impossible to
ignore, local sandboxes are maintained until the climate puts its foot down on everyone's necks
i ride to the bank. for the whole ride i feel fearful of nearly everyone & everything in my field
of vision as either having been systematically made evil or being instrumental in systematically
making people evil. it's an unhealthy thought pattern. i constantly remind myself with irritation
that i know nothing about anyone i see. i think i woke up mid-sleep-cycle & it's making me feel off
i spend six years typing every album or set of songs that people download
from me on soulseek into notepad. then i randomly stop, & that's that
nine comments from strangers appear at the exact same time on one of my youtube videos. they
are enthusiastic about the music i upload, & specifically very supportive about something
i published to warn people about someone. i think that person orchestrated it through
a network of fake youtube accounts. i'm not sure what the point of a flurry of fake
supportive comments is. maybe just to perplex me. or an attempt to undermine my
confidence in positive anonymous online interactions. or they just want attention. i
delete the comments. the following night, the same batch of nine comments reappears,
simultaneously, on the same video, from the same "people". i just don't get it
my personality regresses again. i try to resume withdrawing from
the public internet until i can be human & good & not bad again
i'll say it again: it's not significantly impeding my happiness on a near-daily basis
anymore, but wow, i still can't believe i devoted so much attention to blogging in
the mid-2010s that i gave myself number conditioning that felt impossible to
rationalize away. i've felt better about it since one morning when i tried to
walk around my neighborhood & listen to a carly rae jepsen album, but
i had to sit down on a curb & cry because i was just so tired of the
imagined hatred of hundreds of people weighing on me. i think that
was a turning point, letting myself cry over it. it's mostly gone
now, but it still lurks, waiting for me to not get enough sleep
my main feeling for months has been constant "i was severely corrupted in the latter half of
the 2010s but now it's the 2020s so i'm not", oh god i'm so. anticipating the rest of my life!
going from endless despondency & feeling totally soulless, sterilized of any human spark,
incapable of, resistant, even, to feeling hope, to not an ounce of cynicism inside me oh my god!
i see a "tweet" that renders me deathly afraid of the idea of sliding back
into the waking nightmare that was 2015, 2016, & 2017, so i go to sleep
i feel like the best thing i can strive to be as a person is a "fortunate discovery"
my brother opens my bedroom door while i'm asleep. i scream. i tell the
internet about it because i don't involuntarily display emotions very often
& it always stands out to me. then i try to go back to making posts less
i just want to keep drawing excitement & energy from the notion of being human in all the
best ways, & viciously identifying & rejecting inhumanity, & thinking of anything i could
say or do to drive anyone who has succumbed to inhumanity to also begin to do these things
my blog in 2017 was just "look, someone is saying something incredibly debased
about me on omegle, isn't this goofy? (self-debasingly allowing debased statements
to echo on my platform meant for personal expression) this is so goofy"
i really like this norbert wiener quote
our tissues change as we live: the food we eat & the air we breathe become flesh of our
flesh & bone of our bone, & the momentary elements of our flesh & bone pass out of
our body every day with our excreta. we are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing
water. we are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves
i feel bad that when i meet people, on some level i always try to sort them as fast as i
can into 'i could conceivably relate to you" or "i fundamentally can't really relate to
you". i really believe on some level that from the moment i meet them they're on one
side or the other, fatalistically, essentially! that i'm just waiting for life to bring
me into the company of people who it's simply impossible not to connect with
i also never want to rely on explicit labels for it. it's like trying to gauge whether they're
in the middle of a venn diagram with eight circles, none labeled, but if they're in the middle
i'll know. like dealing with subjective soup, wanting to know exactly where they lie in an
unquantized map of wordless qualities i feel in my gut & don't want to rely on any cultural
signposts for. like if i don't feel some primal soul alignment then i see no point in trying
to meaningfully interact with them at all. that's such a picky & isolating way to be, though
i learn that the ecclesiastes book of the bible is essentially a long, non-religious expression
of existential dread with some "oh but God gives life meaning!" stuff tacked on to make it
spiritual. it also opens with the wonderful "to every thing there is a season" verses
to every thing there is a season, & a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, & a time
to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted; a time to kill, & a time to heal; a time
to break down, & a time to build up; a time to weep, & a time to laugh; a time to mourn, & a time
to dance; a time to cast away stones, & a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, & a time
to refrain from embracing; a time to gain that which is to get, & a time to lose; a time to keep,
& a time to cast away; a time to rend, & a time to sew; a time to keep silence, & a time
to speak; a time of love, & a time of hate; a time of war, & a time of peace.
i'm sad because i truly do have a cogent, bleeding, mammalian understanding of the necessity & value of
closeness & connection with other people yet i can't realistically imagine anyone saying anything to
me with friendly/romantic sentiment without imagining me feeling absolutely nothing in response
part of the complex is "any engagement with others beyond the most glancing comes with the risk of causing
some sort of harm to them through my clumsy & malnourished & ignorant manner of interfacing with the
normal give & take structure of social relationships. the act of voluntarily interacting with any
new person might constitute me signing an imagined contract to maintain some sort of standards
that i don't know or understand. if i ever interact with anyone & they get mad at me, it will
also never be possible to truly know whether i've actually violated the contract or whether
they're trying to be emotionally manipulative by improvising a framing for the standards
of social relationships that squares to me having done something wrong. regardless, i
would rather die can cause harm to anyone, so keeping my distance seems like the
only safe bet. i cannot know how ignorant i am, i cannot know how many unknown
unknowns there might be. also this entire paragraph will now cause me
to irrationally believe that i am like all of the people i saw get
called out on tumblr over the years, that this is the same
ignorant trappings that preceded all of those situations
& the present could just be a prelude to me doing
something horrible & terrible out of ignorance"
i have a habit of finding two surfaces that sound like a kick & a snare
at least in comparison to each other & tapping the amen break on them
i think about the continuity between the difficulty of accurately simulating fluids with a
computer, & the difficulty of microscopically hewing the grids of software & music theory
to conform to the ideally fluid & unquantized shape that someone's musical imagination
could take, & those marble statues of people wearing silk gowns, where it looks like
real silk, & they carve the marble into thin enough layers that it's translucent
& prescriptive vs descriptive music theory, prescriptive vs descriptive
genre, particularly with respect to things people would call outsider
or naive art. naive art has to be descriptive, prescriptive
doesn't work with the idea of naivete at all
the idea of creating naive art & eventually reading the wikipedia page on it, & idk maybe
you like it as a descriptor, & you like daniel johnston & from then on you could end
up having to fight to retain the purity of your expression, like not letting
yourself slip into thinking of "naive art" as prescriptive & having some
kind of inherent value such that you could bastardize the naivete you had
by artificially striving for it instead of just doing what you did before
prescriptive things kind of suck maybe
once, i post this:
i'm not finding myself daydreaming about romantic affection anymore. it's like
i just think earth is beautiful & wonderful now, & i'm happy because i live
there, & i don't have any sort of void that's supposed to be filled by affection
months later, i find myself not feeling that way anymore. i think it's a bad
indicator, & a sign that i need to think about what might've gone wrong
i think i've been in passive denial about the possible reality that i feel nothing when my friends &
acquaintances say sentimental & kind things to me, because it is too sad to acknowledge. several
hours ago i teared up daydreaming about being at a park pavilion with a nondescript person who
i imagined i was comfortable enough around, could relate to enough, that they had said
something kind to me & i had started crying & asking why that hadn't made me feel
anything, & how could i have a real connection with them if nothing they could
say could make me feel anything, & for that matter, how could i even have
reached the point of feeling comfortable enough to cry & ask these
questions in the first place if these are the questions i'm asking,
questions about things that preclude the connection
that would be a prerequisite for asking them
lyrics from "the hymn", by arthur brown's kingdom come
this is my body. hair sticking strangely through my skin make
me: oink, oink, oink! but when you stroke my fur: ow! miaow!
this is my body. it is a home for my mind. beating soft time, my clock pumps brain along
my skin. where five doorways bring strange travelers before the Father's judgment
this is my body. it is a temple for my soul, wherein seven stairways bring messengers of freedom to the
altar in my heart built on twin pillars of pain & joy. there burns the flame of love for my fellow beings
the opening credits of the 2019 movie "greener grass" by jocelyn deboer & dawn luebbe play over a
several minute long close-up shot of a ditzy soccer mom's smiling mouth. she has braces. her lips
are twitching the whole time, in that natural way where you can't keep your muscles perfectly
still. her husband is obsessed with drinking pool water for nearly the entire movie
a significant part of the reason that i post lots of passages from books on my blog
is that i always want to go through replacing the word "&" with ampersands one by
one, watching as the lines occasionally become a little more consolidated
when i upload albums to youtube
nowadays, i format the titles like this:
Artist - Title (year)
the albums i uploaded to youtube in the mid
2010s have their titles formatted like this:
Artist - Title [Full album]
it might sound really dumb but, remembering where i was & how i felt when i was undertaking the old
uploads, when i read the titles they feel very mechanistic & almost like they display as much of a
capitalistic affect as you could fit into something so simple. the brackets feel like steel girders.
the adherence to capitalizing the "F" is too prim & proper. "Full album" feels like an ad, like it's
clear what the video is & the title shouldn't bother to communicate it. it all feels bureaucratic
similarly, on tumblr i rarely use capital letters anymore, & i try
to always write out numbers instead of using their numeric symbols
i think it was a landmark early 2010s moment when allie brosh returned to Hyperbole & a Half after an
unexplained nineteen-month absence with a long post detailing the depression she'd experienced in
the interim & the story culminated with an incident where she saw a kernel of corn on the floor
of her kitchen & laughed hysterically at it. her moral was that if you are depressed maybe you
will have your moment where you laugh hysterically at a kernel of corn on the floor & not know why
one day my feeling all day is: if something really crazy happened right now, i think it would
feel like objects moving around around me. it'd feel like an aspect of, not an exception to,
the stillness that was there before it happened & would be there after it happened
i am sort of convinced that although people can love me & perform gestures of love
towards me, i am incapable of feeling loved in reaction to those gestures. nothing
feels especially different from anything else. objects & words can move around
around me. there's no contrast to define everything against everything else.
i am sleepwalking
i have hundreds of jokes, cutaways, events, & songs from family guy stored away in my memory
permanently, & there's nothing i can do about it. i wouldn't wish this malady on my worst enemy!
if something was evil & bad, i would say "no way! get it away from me right now." but
if there was something that was pure & good, i would say, "wow, okay, sign me up!"
it's nightmarish that experiences can make someone develop really niche & alien aesthetic
associations with stuff like their own voice & face, not like "this stuff is bad/ugly",
like ultra-specific character, probably inarticulable for any individual case of it
"If, of two arcades, one continues to seem more joyous, it is because thirty years ago a
girl went by there, with broad, embroidered sleeves, or else it is only because that arcade
catches the light at a certain hour like that other arcade, you cannot recall where."
this except it's my lips "looking" like some disembodied aesthetic that was displayed
to me early in life. there are people who like korn & limp bizkit *has panic attack*
also theory of a deadman. "korn is bad but also it's a sincere response to american suburbia
culture, theory of a deadman is like awful twisted alienated posturing" - my friend nik
i listen to about two & a half hours of music i made in 2015 & 2016. it is kind of exhausting. i feel like
it'll refresh my neuron pathways pertaining to the time period where i was feral & evil, & mess my brain up
when i lie in bed muttering to myself & trying to stretch my voice into something that doesn't pain
me to hear, not as an activity meant from the ground up to be a vocal exercise but as muttering
to myself for its own sake, with the stipulated necessity of stretching my voice, i feel like
a person whose consciousness has been transferred into a malfunctioning robot arm
in a factory that bangs into a girder over & over
Lane Bryant takes down a sign i've been staring at in awe every time i've walked past it for three
years. it says "EARN REAL WOMEN DOLLARS". in its place now are a bunch of signs about the virus
when i was seventeen or eighteen i was disgusted by my own humanity. when i heard anyone describe
a particular food as "good", it felt pathetic, barbaric, self-debasing. i think lifelong exposure to
advertisements had naturalized me toward viewing my emotions as just an inlet through which
i could be controlled by forces larger than me, if i allowed it. i made the nihilistic
observation that happiness, despite all the varied & personalized forms it can take,
could be reductively compared to the score counter in a video game, that it
was just an abstraction produced by my evolutionary history, ultimately
serving only to lead me towards things that generally indicated
survival & reproduction, whether they really represented
those two aims or just appeared to
now, i suppose there's not anything necessarily wrong with acknowledging that in some way, but i made
the mistake of ... embracing it. happiness disgusted me. i devalued happiness itself, valued nothing
in its place but a strive for total inertness, total lack of desire, total lack of humanity. this
peaked with a period of time where i'd wake up each day, initially feeling normal, then it felt
like i'd bifurcate into a distinct human animal self, that just wanted to be happy & pursue
happiness in whatever way it knew, & a self that represented "consciousness" & the "virtue"
of total self-denial & inertness. the conflict between these felt irreconcilable & i felt
incapable of doing anything but sitting & pacing & staring in near catatonia
worst of all, everything i said on the internet was annoying
literally thinking about Family Guy & sincerely feeling like it's some kind of infohazard, & feeling
like a nervous wreck because i feel like i'm in 2016, immersed in the commonplace & mundane
toxicity of the internet, but for all the fear i feel, it's not a singular outstanding misfortune that
can elicit sympathy & understanding, just a terrible mundane patina glazed over a span of time,
facilitated by cultural artifacts so mundane & soulless & flat that they feel like
infohazards, like any reasonable person would be drained of emotion & passion if
spoke of them. i would like to exit this bubble of things i am thinking about &
feel normal & not like i am staring into the eye of a spiritual black hole
i make my room pitch black & listen to music. i walk back & forth, seeing phosphenes.
i dance around for about forty-five minutes. i've otherwise never really bothered to
make my room so dark. after this, it seems that i can sleep without a nightlight, &
not imagine that a ghoul is about to shriek & grab me! great!
cognitive dissonance is so normalized that the words "good" & "bad", which deserve great
respect, feel like meaningless labels assigned to different actions arbitrarily, without any
pretense of affecting anyone's behavior, because the pain of doing evil things fuzzes
out into background noise that can't be distinguished from the joy of doing good things
after i make this post, i go a little crazy & self-dissective:
"i typed something about cognitive dissonance, but in posting it i was actually ignoring
a source of cognitive dissonance for myself. sometimes i say things that are phrased
in ways that make me sound like an inhuman machine, because i haven't ironed out
a better way to put it, & it makes me like myself less, & i know that it
makes me like myself less, but i shove it to the back of my mind"
a passage from Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut:
I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. "The sun was
risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar", I read. "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom &
upon Gomorrah brimstone & fire from the Lord out of Heaven; & He overthrew those cities, &
all the plain, & all the inhabitants of the cities, & that which grew upon the ground."
So it goes.
Those were vile people in both those cities, as is
well known. The world was better off without them.
& Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look
back where all those people & their homes had
been. But she did look back, & I love her
fot that, because it was so human.
She was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.
People aren't supposed to look back. I'm
certainly not going to do it anymore.
I've finished my war book now. The
next one I write is going to be fun.
This one is a failure, & had to be, since it was
written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this:
Don't think twice love Cat vs. Animal Sleepwalking on a flat circle my brains exploded They laugh & blow kisses at the moon
Let's Build a Campfire There Anxiety in a Year of Perfect Vision Temporomandibular jaw disorder So Close Together
Celebration of Friendship Insulation from transience Sacred Tapestry Surf Washing on Spring Marble Burn Box
Greener Grass Synechdoche, New York Soggy doggy Red barn at night Red light Inverted cross The smell of
air-conditioned cool air Hay on the ground Mind-body dichotomy Circumstantial simultaneity Don't Worry
A Return to Innocence Sunny funny bunny Two of Swords A Lot's Gonna Change Starry Eyes Childishly
Fresh Eyes "SHE IS HERE" Stuff moving around around me Intensity Stories, narratives Stillness
& thoughtlessness Radio towers Dark streets Streetlights Inhumanity Curse Dark corners Cruelty
Automization Blankness Performative Collapse Relief Gifts with strings attached Insular
Pre-existing cultured cultures Older or bigger than you Subsumation of identity
Distillation of identity Perversion of nature Diseased Discord server
Cultivation of sickness Memetic aerodynamicity "Wow! Such vibrant
color! I'm going to cry." Bodysongs Goodwill Laundry Laundromat
The sun setting as I write The room darkening The blue light
The calm music A rest stop in Indiana Missing the solar
eclipse of 2017 Yelled at for getting a haircut The
hologram seems to have failed here for the most
part Happy the Box Silly dummy buddy Starry
Night Entropy people Anonymity Untangling
Dissipation of suffering Placation of
malice Heaven Watching Roaratorio Run
scream laugh smile dance Almost too
dark Quiet Internal Rebellions
Cognitive dissonance I turn on
the lamp Life is a wonder of
wonders & to wonder I
dedicate myself on my
knees like an orphan
Primary holding
pattern Primary
falling pattern
Under my skin I
am laughing
Funny Baby
Hee hee
moo moo
milk
Kurt
Vonnegut
Humanism
Symbols emblems
image Pathetic fallacy
Conversations Critical
thinking Discourse Philosophy
Fractured attention span Frankness
& honesty Positive psychology Concealment
Retraction Guthrow the Stuffed Rabbit Scary
maze game Website background colors Nature trail
Reduced to words Sincerity Omegle Self-dissection
Silence Fear Confusion Random Kindness Calmness I am
afraid of being hated Disorganized words & phrases in
notebook Mosaic Self-actualization "I'll share all nine
when I'm done" Anxiety near the end Red face Eight of nine
Optimism It will be alright Limited space Collapse into self-reference
Turn Into Something "TURNS INTO" Lumiere Be like a baby, the Bible
say Adam & Eve Valleanenowe I'm eating cereal Funny Bear freaky
toys Coziness Exeter Things That are Beautiful & Transient
* * *
this page is occupying about six hundred & fifty lines in
to Neocities text editor, which is causing it to have a very
aggravating lag when i try to move the cursor, highlight
text, etc. so i'm going to take this to a second page
