< - ii - >

much better.

there's something that sticks out to me about how when people touch each other as an expression of
intimacy, it's like an acknowledgment of the fact that people generally like to be touched. &
a placation of that. like, it's not a preference that anyone chooses to have, it's just the way
people are wired. like it's people aiding each other with the predicament of being in a human
body. they're acquiescing to a system. & it feels like i'm thinking about that in contrast
to something. but i don't know what that something is. the idea of hugging & cuddling
being expressions of intimacy in some way that's ordained, like it's intrinsic to
the universe? abiological? but that's not true. it's a product of people's bodies

it's all still valid as expressions of love, of course, there's just something about how the
love is expressed through features of people's bodies that are imposed on their minds. i
guess a comforting way you could read it is that sentient beings, or at least socially
wired ones, find comfort in connecting with each other. & with that in mind, it's
fortunate that we have a shorthand wired into us for expressing that. we'd have
to be more creative if we were just sentient clouds of gas floating in space

i think that being a human is unquestionably beautiful. death to cynicism

i need to get out of bed, drink water, & eat food. no more having my laptop on my bed.
having it on the cabinet has been a good policy. no giving myself the opportunity
to interact psychologically with the internet until i've had food & water

thought loops

the recurring phenomenon of randomly imposing an obligation on myself to talk about
a particular random thing i'm thinking about, instead of just keeping it to myself,
instead of just letting myself think about it in private. so i have to keep
thinking about it until i can phrase it elegantly, but i am not actually
in the position to be phrasing anything elegantly

when i haven't had enough sleep, or food, or water, or maybe some
other deficit triggers it, i feel like my personality changes, & i
can only phrase things & conceive of things in a very dry way,
& i can only think about things that are annoying & pretentious

either in the sense that: 1. i start feeling the need to try to come up with meaningful
conjectures about things that are always sufficiently "real" such that there is already
preexisting literature about them, that i haven't read. so it is outside of my capability
to say anything worthwhile about them. but i force it anyway, in a way that reeks of
someone masturbatorily pursuing the status of "having said something", rather
than trying to come up with things to say in a way that is done with actual
respect for the art of coming up with things that are worth saying

& i don't feel like in my heart i am a person who always wants to come up with stuff to
say about stuff. the above paragraph doesn't feel like me being critical of myself
because the impulse to type drivel just feels like a symptom of acute millness. it's
always accompanied by cognitive dissonance, "i'm making myself disgusting
by talking about what i don't know how to talk about, why can't i stop"

this usually comes with anger directed at the vague & unspecified "other" which i am
imagining to find me disgusting & pretentious, because on my end i do not want to
think that the things i'm saying are especially "smart", maybe just self-expression
that is written in a sort of technical way. i feel like the trait of "smartness" is
being imposed on it by that imagined other just so the "smartness" can be
rejected & i can be rightfully hated for trying to be "smart", when there
was no expectation on my part of "smartness" in the first place.
the imagined other feels so petty & cruel for doing this

OR, 2. the pretentiousness happens in a way where i feel incapable of thinking in ways
where i'm not framing things objectively / cosmically / detachedly in extremely obvious
ways because there is not anything "inaccessible" about framing things existentially.
everyone does it. but i get stuck in that mode & i start failing to adequately
signpost everything as "this is really obvious, don't read it as if i'm
typing it while thinking 'none of this is really 'obvious'"

& i have this narrative in my head where everyone is extremely hateful of that kind of obvious
thing, extremely guarded against taking it seriously, watching for it like hawks, ready to
tear me apart at any second in rightful punishment for it. it makes me just want to cry
& plead for whoever is watching me like a hawk to please stop being so militant &
taking everything so seriously ... i will reiterate that this is just me insanely
imagining people. wait, oh no, the trait of "insanity" is also twisted like
"smartness", where my casually (softly (non-seriously)) assigning it to
myself, in imagining people, is something i can be despised for.
someone will decide for me that i secretly think it's cool
that i called myself insane or something. in the same
way that "smartness" is assigned to stuff
just so it can be rejected

again, i feel incapable of thinking of anything but these pretentious things, & i
begin to feel a weird obligation to explicate them, & as i indulge it, if i do, the
cognitive dissonance of it gnaws at me, i know the whole time how foul it is

i also begin to feel like i phrase everything in very alienatingly dry ways that
specifically makes me feel like ... an insufferable male "tech guy",
i guess. one of those emotionally detached people who hides
behind cold, analytical thinking in an unpalatable way

it all feels like such an absurdly specific state to regress to when i haven't
slept or ate or whatever, which really bugs me in its own right. the state is
typically accompanied by the resurfacing of obsessive fears i have had since
childhood of there being an unbridgable gap between me & the entire rest of
humanity, that i might be disgusting by standards for which i would truly
be the only person on the planet not to adhere to them, & i would have
no one to argue for myself to, i would only be able to accept that i
am as canonically unpalatable as a person could be, & that my
subjective protest against it would count for nothing
against the entire body of human perception

the inhuman dryness of my expression, which i feel powerless to break
out of until i exit the state, plays into this. it feels so robotic & foul

i buy a book of crosswords & have the time of my life

i take a single step out of my front door & slash my leg on the edge of a little knee-
high glass tabletop that is chipped. the gash is about an inch long. blood! ow!

it could be fun to exchange .txt files with your friends, with the files containing long
& friendly letters so as to mimic the experience of being penpals who can't write to
one another so easily over instant nessaging. it could be done in tandem with your
normal communication, or maybe you could try entirely substituting instant messages

a passage from Cosmicomics, by Italo Calvino

Changed ... In what way changed? & the question, to explode or to implode: would one have to face it again?
Absorbed by the vortex of this galaxy, does one pop up again in other times & other firmaments? Here sink
away in cold silence, there express oneself in fiery shrieks of another tongue? Here soak up good & evil
like a sponge in the shadow, there gush forth like a dazzling jet, to spray & spend & lose oneself. To
what end then would the cycle repeat itself? I really don't know, I don't want to know, I don't want
to think about it: here, now, my choice is made: I shall implode, as if this centripetal plunge
might forever save me from doubt & error, from the time of ephemeral change, from
the slippery descent of before & after, bring me to a time of stability, still &
smooth, enable me to achieve the one condition that is homogeneous &
compact & definitive. You explode, if that's more to your taste, shoot
yourselves all around in endless darts, be prodigal, spendthrift,
reckless: I shall implode, collapse inside the abyss of
myself, towards my buried center, infinitely.

i reach about three months of having a crush on a guy who i met twice on omegle, fourteen
months apart, & am seriously likely to never communicate with ever again. can i
meaningfully call it a crush even? i encountered a template for phantoms

i despise when obviously-4chan phenomena reaches a wider audience & people who
are outsiders to it bother indulging it with pragmatic analyses because they don't
have the familiarity & intuition to go "hmm i will just turn away from
this because it's obviously informed by horrific soul rot"

people are constantly sharing stupid & offensive things that others have said because they
want to feel commonality in disliking it. but this is untenable behavior on social media.
it's too common. people typically feel disrespected when strangers show them things
with the express purpose of upsetting them, but when it's done with an "i hate
this too" wink suddenly it's okay? people are collectively saying, "hmm,
instead of letting the experience of being aggravated by things that
people have said remain naturally contingent on having been in the
position to actually witness them saying those things, let's
deliberately broadcast every aggravating thing that
anyone ever says! i think being perpetually
inflamed would be good for people"

saying disarmingly quaint & childlike things to racists

goodness is literally so good

i do something charitable because i want to go for a ride
in the car to the place where i'll do the charitable thing

one day i don't feel so good. i feel like i am a p-zombie, & like i'd prefer to retract, stop
being seen by the outside world, stop narrativizing all the things i see & think & hear
into a house of cards that i call "my traits". i feel that i really don't feel or do
anything, or love anything either. i feel that don't know what love is, & i
could probably stop thinking entirely, too. the next day, i feel better

one night i drink & decide that i want to format thoughts as
bullet points. here, i'll just make them sentence (fragments)

too reticent. i'll never. i'll never. i'll never. i'll never. there's so much i'll never : (. i need
a space to develop. i need a sandbox. i'm feeling a complicated relationship with my higher
brain functions. this morning i was thinking:. i fundamentally do not understand how to
cultivate a meaningful relationship to another human being. (but maybe this was just
the false reinforcement of some narcissist who went on a rant critical of me this
morning). ((maybe my caffeine withdrawals made me take it a tiny bit more
to heart than if i was normal & would simply have said "this all seems
narcissistic")). & in the face of this lack of understanding my
wishes for affection simply make me feel like a sociopathic
oxytocin fetishist. oh gosh. ow i just tried to flop onto
a pillow & slammed my head into the headboard

i lie in the dark with sunglasses on listening to "Hymns", a compilation of bizarre,
often probably randomly generated MIDI compositions by Terry Davis, &
reel with amusement at the fact that i'm starting to actually enjoy it

people who get entrenched in callout stuff on tumblr assemble like voltron
to collectively portray a person with narcissistic personality disorder

i always arrive back at fear of things that might be very terrible but regarded as mundane & it cloaks
them. like it could just sound like i'm throwing a fit over subcultures i dislike. but that framing
is afforded by a history of maybe feeling embarrassed at something shallow & flat but you turn
away & maybe talk to someone who has nothing to do with it. meanwhile when i think about
2015 & 2016, feeling very alone, perpetually staring in the face of the most shallow dim
garbage slowly wearing at me & flattening all my perception to its level, & i want
to cry. i feel like the only person who really understands soul-sucking flatness

i'm going to stop thinking about mumble jumble, jibber jabber, & gibberish

inarticulably nervous, self-conscious, worried. blank vinyl crackle sound two hour

once again i spend about fifteen minutes feeling frantically driven to express nervous, worried,
self-conscious things that i've been failing to begin putting in order. something about poring
over all the transcripts & metadata of human culture instead of experiencing anything real.
something about my identity feeling subsumed by the internet, something about
the internet feeling like lots & lots of substance with no binding context, &
correspondingly i feel without context. i feel like whatever was before
my exposure to the internet has withered away, not that it's a total
loss because who wants to be molded by whatever dreck happens
to be festering where they are geographically? but. i feel
like i'm in a sensory deprivation tank

the stars align such that on the two occasions i bothered mentioning doing crosswords
on the internet, the posts happen to get no notes, & it happens to be at times
when i process that in the way that is symptomatic of the website-specific
illness i intermittently experience. in a quiet display of being like a zapped
rodent, i will probably not happen to mention crosswords anymore.
which is ok. this is just behind the scenes trivia. of my internet posts

yes, though. i do lots of crossword puzzles. they are fun, & help me feel grounded & normal

i would like more than anything to feel silly & to have an opportunity to be silly

i fantasize a lot & when i imagine myself speaking it requires a stronger suspension of disbelief

then i feel obligated to express some variant of "the internet can be extremely violating".
that's what my thoughts revolve around & around. they also revolve around the words
"privacy", "locality", "seclusion", the phrase "making an idiolectical way of
living in one's own head". these feel like fundamental parts of life. the
internet feels like it can be so terribly violating to them. not being
in touch with them should be seen the same flabbergasted way
that someone might see the total ignorance of society &
culture in a feral child they find in a cave ... maybe it's
just me! maybe i just went crazy over the internet

i remember chipmunks on 16 speed sludgefest & suddenly realized how much i
love it, although i've known about it for five years ... i go "hey, wait a
minute, this album really occupies a space in my heart, huh?"

i want to reaffirm to myself that i won't slip into cynical or affected thoughts
anymore, cling to a sense of optimism that pierces through everything & doesn't
make any concessions & reaffirm my commitment to calmness & gentility, let
everything be informed by stubbornly joyful awareness of my mortality &
the inherent pains of existing, & let my reality continuously define
itself & summon love for whatever it decides to be

i am scheduled to have my blood drawn for the first time in my life. i hope i don't pass out!

is the internet traumatically disruptive to the normal development of an
identity??? no, i am just an insane person who would see myself in art,
then see that art unrelatedly endorsed by people who i thought were
shallow, then unnecessarily map their shallowness onto the art,
& finally hate whatever aspect of myself i saw in the art

Reality

i find myself feeling like i have gradually opted out of a lot of what life has to
offer. i know why i have done this, but the reason is very helpless & painful
to acknowledge. so i don't question it, & i make myself comfy where i am

i find myself really wishing that i knew anyone in person, & that anything would happen.
i feel like i am on the path of a fear-paralyzed person who will stay cooped up forever,
thinking surely i can't remain in stasis for my whole life, that if i wait long
enough then something might happen, or i might come to know anyone,
somehow, as though anything happens without any stimulus

but wait, what if i've just randomly convinced myself that i am feeling these things,
& the above paragraph is essentially me imagining myself in that headspace &
writing a prose description of it? ok, i vow to stop feeling lonely &
bored by accepting the narrative of this second paragraph

i find myself believing that i'm too alexithymic & acclimated to solitude to even know
firsthand that the emotion of loneliness really exists. i've only read about it. will
i play along with a webpage telling me i have to feel sad about something?

i type & delete & type & delete in an endless loop. i have no reason to say
anything there. so this is all i say, to feel resolved for at least having
said something, & i know i can get rid of it later, if i so choose

i'll feel normal tomorrow. i'll wear short sleeves & gets lots of sunshine

the song "rmx cncn2" by vektroid is so tender & warm
it makes me want to cry. there's nothing else like it

i'll try to feel better

it's silly essentialist thinking, but oh how i want to idealistically believe that a
litany of things are "soul-rotting", that anyone can acknowledge that a soul-
rotting thing is soul-rotting as long as they're sufficiently honest with
themselves, & that no one can be fully truly "acclimated" to insidious
things, for frankness & honesty are all that's needed

one night my "i am less than human" feelings get a vigorous reprise

i buy a tarot deck & stare at the 2 of swords

i realize that whether a person finds something i do cute is often based on whether
they're willing to lend me that way of being interpreted, & it's very easy
to just take that lens & view myself through it whenever i want

i see bitcoin atms popping up everywhere. they make me feel
like the outside world is being transmogrified into a podcast

expressing myself on that is consistently mortifying
to me for about five years but there. i. am. against. all.
reason. acclimated. still. going. going. going.

when i was fourteen & my perception of floral shoppe was still completely uninfluenced
by the internet, the title track made me picture empty glass shelves lightly coated
in pink dust like makeup, with sparse frames made of brass pipes. & you could
say, "well, you're stressing how it was an original & uncorrupted visual in
your mind's eye, but you can tie these things to certain internet 'aesthetic'
outlets. blogs on tumblr that post charming pictures. maybe the
aesthetic movement that the album spawned went on
to influence something you saw, & that thing
contaminated your mind's eye." but it
wasn't like that! it was something
so private & i loved it a lot

i reach a grand total of about nine months from the time i came
within a hair's breadth of accepting an offer, from a person
with narcissistic personality disorder, of a plane ticket
to a place that is one thousand, two hundred & fifty
miles from my house! can you imagine?

i feel so cozy when i listen to the album "amazing nature
songs from texas" by doug dalglish. i do crosswords

i wake up thinking about something that gets me in "i must formulate a
post about this before i can move on from thinking about it" mode. but
i don't have to make a tumblr post about it. i just type this instead

something nameless & beautiful that can only be described
with thousands of comparisons that are insultingly flat
compared to it itself & collectively trace an
outline of it but don't fill the outline in

usually i'm in a normal mood where i share things on the internet
sometimes. at other times i'm in an anxious mood where i fervently
hope that no one on earth is thinking about me. the second mood
is irate about what the first mood has done in its absence

i strive to have as positive of a relationship as i can with a platform that, at the end of
the day, can, on occasion, effortlessly make me feel disgusted & ashamed of anything
about myself that i might ever choose to share, should a number, even a number
as low as one, fail (due to random chance) to appear underneath it

i vow to add to this tumblr post if i have any more to say, rather than making
any new ones, because talking about it through posts feels so solicitous, & if
it's in the same post then i don't need reaffirmation because literally this is
conditioning based solely on being able to see a number under the words

it's like someone turns levers in my brain, opening & closing steam valves. sometimes i
just feel the self-consciousness welling & welling, as i form in my head a completely
plausible explanation for why it was such a disgusting thing to express, then i see
"1" & all my reason floods back, & i sit there & perfectly comprehend how silly
& fickle & irrational & transparent & unstoppable it was, & how silly &
fickle & irrational & transparent & unstoppable it was every other
time, so familiar, never any less transparently ridiculous. okay,
it's over, so shut up. you're just having fun trying to put it
into prose now. it barely even happens nowadays. well,
maybe a little, maybe even a little & frequently. but
i'm way way better at managing it, or making sure
it doesn't happen in the first place

i lie under a weighted blanket. it feels physically equivalent
to someone saying "shut up, dummy", & i humbly agree to

when i write something & feel disgusted by it for reasons i can't articulate, i tend to
imagine that my disgust is a normal response to what i wrote because it has some
quality that would annoy or perturb any reasonable person, & it almost makes
me want to scream & cry because the idea of people being so uniform, having
such a blurry yet consistent set of criteria for what harmless things to hate,
always being ready to mildly punish anyone who crosses that line ...
it's completely psychotic, it's not something that anyone should have
to live under, & in the moment i feel like no one is there to tell
me if it's real or not. it feels like it might be so easy to make
myself an enemy of the whole rest of humankind over
something very petty & inconsequential

a person who makes it impossible for you to be a solipsist

i don't want to bury my head in the sand & be a totally uninformed buffoon but good god
do i feel tired sometimes of having my computer try to appeal to the attractive idea that
i confidently have any god damn idea what is happening outside my neighborhood

i reach day one hundred & thirty-nine of crushing on a guy i ran
into on omegle on two occasions that were fifteen months apart
& who i may never end up communicating with again. that's fine

sometimes people on the internet fixate on something frivolous, like the fly in mik pence's
hair, & it feels like something that's actually happening, for what it's worth. then minor
headlines with a repulsive air of forced whimsicality get written about the same event,
& "the internet" in the headline feels like a whimsical character who's existed since
the early 2010s to be amused by whimsical things in minor headlines. it's annoying

a local theater shows Coraline. i go & see it. it's maybe my sixth time seeing it. it's so, so good

i think morbidity & sexuality & violence are always occupying the
back of my head to some extent & part of why i have trouble talking
to people is that i feel like a shameful evocation of those things

i start re-listening to a series of videos called shallow rewards

i feel kind of crazy over a trend where every time i put moisturizer on
my face i get the impulse to trim my bangs a little, once i've forgotten
it's there, & i end up with hair trimmings adhered all over my face,
always in disbelief that i've let the two actions coincide again

why do i want to consume as much art as possible, & at the same
time feel earnestly frustrated that there is too much of it, & sit
there consuming very little? & while i'm at it, why do i
hardly feel anything when i hear about tragedies?!

i wake up, yawn, & glacially progress along my stupid deterministic trajectory
of gradual personality change that i could read from a bird's eye view like a
clearly labeled blueprint but i am not a bird, merely a dumb ant marching along

it's like i'm waiting for some cosmically ordained excuse to speak to
anyone ever. but i think really the absence of cosmically ordained
excuses to speak to anyone is itself the excuse to speak to anyone

i can just type stuff here. whatever sentences i want. then i will fret over how the post clutters up my blog more,
& delete it? for weeks & weeks i've been feeling like i hit a very good stride a while ago, & every post i make
just divorces the present from it more. even if i made one post per week, it'd happen eventually. so it's an
expression of general anxieties about change or the passage of time? or about filtering myself? i can always
say whatever i want, so i have to be selective, have to wait until there's something i really want to say.
sometimes i fail myself. then again, you can pull back to a broader anxiety: do i filter myself or not?
do i tailor myself to things i feel particularly good about, or let myself exist & exist & exist,
spouting, reporting everything for whatever it's worth, giving things opportunities to find
worth, even if i feel pessimistic about them & don't expect them to? i keep poring over
the last twenty pages of my blog, looking for things to delete. it always feels like
murder, though. every thought could find some value for someone, & once i delete
it, maybe decades will pass before anyone thinks that exact thing again. or
not! seven billion people on earth. wut did you read on the internet
today? sometimes i wonder, since my fingernails are long, if, if i
were careless around a ceiling fan & threw my hands up, if one
of the blades caught them, could it tear them clean off the
nail beds? maybe they'd just break. i don't know. sometimes
they hit fabric at an awkward angle & briefly bend ninety
degrees without breaking. it's not very painful, but
it sure doesn't feel good, & just knowing
it happened is deeply unpleasant

i'm in a room. so much can happen in
the room & in my brain & the fact
of the matter is that i'm in a room

one day "la femme chinoise" by yellow magic orchestra keeps intermittently
playing in my head & giving everything funny, sinister, manic undertones

i read a bunch of blog posts from about a year ago. they all have a distinct voice that feels
like i wrote them when i was fourteen, not twenty or twenty-one. it's kind of eerie, how
they all feel like that in such a distinct way. have i actually made progress now, or
will everything i've posted over the past six months start to feel that way too?

caffeine withdrawal gives me an awful feeling where i'll lie down & still wish i was lying down

night signals two by vektroid is so, so beautiful

upset message from me now to me yesterday: hi, i'm in one of those bad moods
where my thoughts are prone to overdramatically veer into questioning whether
i can be meaningfully considered human. i hope that coffee was worth it!!

for all my ostensible focus on being human & local & normal & private
i sure find myself prone to splaying my half-baked guts before a bunch
of strangers the second i feel a little transiently depressed! how about
i go lie down, do crosswords, & at least try to engage in minor
introspection instead of marching into the same idiot fever
dream i've become so acclimated to over the past five years? yes

i'd like to stop periodically remembering something unequivocally hideous that i typed in
2016. i'm not remotely willing to type anything unequivocally hideous now, so that is good

i find myself really feeling like just a person-shaped whirlpool of matter all of a sudden,
if i can be permitted to use that phrase as an approximation of my emotional state & not
masturbatorily describing something in a CRAZY, WACKY, DETACHED way like someone
pointing at the pale blue dot photo & going "we're just a SPECK in SPACE bro!!!"

transient mandelbrot fractal of repressed embarrassment & guilt

caffeine withdrawal, low vitamin d, sleep debt, & hunger tend to make me afraid of being irreparably
broken because i grew up with insufficient human contact, & now i can't think in a normal, cogent,
unfiltered way, or be honest with myself, etc. well, if i really am broken in some way, with
sunlight & sleep & food i don't think i have to try much to cope with it ...

the internet presents all of history & culture in a
flattened form, everything is adjacent to everything else

lately i feel like none of my thoughts have any context : (

i probably gloss over so much of my inner voice that i don't realize how bad things are, i
bet if i could candidly & infallibly record everything & review it i'd cry. maybe anyone
embedded in the world, with context as a person, would review it & cry even more!

its funny & absurd that my first & only significant in-person romantic relationship thus
far was basically a fear-drenched polyamorous month-long cross-country road trip

all my friendships are with people who take the initiative to reach out & speak to me over & over
& over because i can't conceive of anything that'd feel like a justification for me ever intruding
on anyone's life even slightly. all my romantic relationships have been people essentially
taking the one-sided action of starting a relationship with me because i didn't realize i was
automatically reciprocating whatever affection anyone showed me. i don't do that now

vaporwave is such a specific strain of dumb brain virus. i really wish i could
put it into words. i hope if someone liked vaporwave like five years ago &
isn't that crazy about it now they at least know what i'm talking about

i've called it a fever dream several times. like. a whole movement based on just never honestly
examining it, for seemingly no reason. how seriously can you take a genre while a little voice
in your head observes that it is all blatantly stupid & vapid? & not in a freeing, "ooh
this is silly but i'll pay attention to it "cause i just want to!!!" way, just. constant
embarrassment in the back of your head. lending it more & more credibility
& being more & more embarrassed ... at least, that is my experience

i write the arseny tarkovsky poem from async on a coffee shop chalkboard & take a photo. i don't
share it on the internet because it'd look like a wacky generic artsy tumblr picture. i'd try really
hard to pad it & de-emphasize its "tackiness" with the caption somehow, but it would get zero
notes anyway, which is generally fine, but it'd activated the hardwired circuit in my brain
that makes me hate myself. it's good that i'm showing restraint & averting all of that!!!

everyone in my writing class slowly disappears over the course of the semester.
it comes down to just me & a guy named john who watches project veritas

behind-the-scenes info: i didn't know what project veritas was before he talked about it, but
i referred to it as just "project veritas" instead of "a disinformation outlet called project
veritas" because i unconsciously default to not qualifying things i just learned about
with descriptions, because if people who already know about the thing read it
it'll sound like i already knew about it too & i'm informed & stuff

i find myself feeling like a terribly stupid person with no sincere interest in rigorously
pursuing knowledge, & that to openly or privately consider myself Smart at all would just
be un-self-awarely glorifying my basic common sense (why am i talking about "considering
myself smart" in the first place? i must have a complex around it. the "people
unrealistically called me a genius when i was a child" syndrome)

i think this usually isn't much of a problem until i get too behind on sleep & start going
"hehe wow i can just say stuff!!! maybe i can make some statements!!!" otherwise i just
try to. like. express myself in ways that are worthily idiosyncratic or cute. or try
to rigorously bind myself to "normal, unpolluted" thinking & come up with fresh
ways to publicly reiterate it. all my energy goes into trying to heuristically
come up with new spins on these things instead of accruing knowledge

i really don't like the gross, grimy, neurotic, layer of existence that ninety percent
of stuff on the internet makes me feel like i'm on for the duration that i look at it.
the stuff that encourages all those states. i don't like self-deprecatory humor

i vow to do everything i can to not indulge the pathetic twenty-first century trope of
someone lamenting how stuff about digital media & culture makes them upset, then just.
continuing to wantonly expose themselves to it all because the contradiction seems
wacky? like it's just the wacky character of existing on the internet? i don't know

i sit in a room & hope i somehow know if anyone ends up anywhere
near me who i feel is not on the other side of the unbridgeable
metaphysical rift that i think is between me & all other people?

for a night everything becomes so dismal & scary for
me for seemingly no reason but i know it will be ok

that night i get in a very depressed mood for a few hours, sitting in endless stillness
thinking about why i really even want to be alive. it feels like it extends into the
past & future, like i had always felt so sad & always would. then i remember how
badly i do want to be happy, & how purifying & forgiving optimism is. i get
up & make myself smile & prance around my room giddily

that night the problem with numbers makes me feel that publishing a
sentence is ok but publishing a paragraph is shameful disgusting shame

that night i feel tired of being asked about my emotions & having no answer.
& it's not like having no answer translates to having no emotions. if i said
i didn't have emotions, that would not be accurate. but it's so horribly
nebulous & vague. there's just no answer to provide. i have no answer

that night i happen to cry over a lack of closure regarding my
infatuation with the man i spoke with on omegle five months ago

that night i feel insanely disoriented & scared. i don't know why. existential fear
stemming from transient convictions about the utter futility of connecting with
other people. & the simultaneous utter necessity. or that even to connect with
anyone would mean nothing. or the classic fear of being broken? everything
feels so different for me. i'm in a bubble of fear where nothing about
anything is the way it was outside of the bubble. i hope
that sleeping will make it go away. love

i want to be innervated

people like to frame the human body as "intrinsically gross when you get down to it", i guess to observe that the
construct of beauty is always draped over squelching pulsing guts or something like that. sure! but, i don't
know, it sort of feels like it wants to subvert the act of "playing the body's game"? but the basis for
our bodies being gross comes from our bodies in the first place! people are wired to be averse to
human viscera because it indicates dismemberment & death! people are averse to the smell of
sulfur so as to be averse to human waste because it causes disease! you can acknowledge
this stuff, but i think it's still playing the body's game. i'm happier when things are
cute, & it's in the eye of the beholder, you just have to be primed to take things
that way. not that i think blood, guts, & excrement should be cute, it's just ...

when i think about the morally questionable nature of having certain things on the internet, i try to
never think "what if a child sees this", but to actually take the nature of the internet into account
& think "this IS what we are showing a population of children. what does that mean?"

it feels like there's no middle ground between either 1. wanting some super rigid
authoritarian means of controlling what kids can access, or ridding the internet
of puerile things entirely (i mean, worth considering, maybe! ... ok, ok, no), or,
2. implying that you think children being exposed to hardcore pornography &
photos of corpses from time to time is a necessary price for the internet to exist?

i guess i am just being idealistic? obviously i would want the world to be a place where no
bad things happen! but that's a pipe dream, & the internet is just a part of the world. i can't
section it off, treat it as special, say "no bad things can happen here in particular, period."

for nearly my whole life i've felt residually upset by the line between reality & fiction feeling too blurry.
when i was very young i would get upset with my mom because she said things sincerely that i thought
sounded like tv show dialogue. i spend a lot of time worrying that i might eventually do significant
things, like make close friendships, & feel like i'm acting out a narrative, unable to break out of
doing it. but i don't actually do anything that would productively confirm or deny that worry.

literally all i have to do is hear the names of albums & click on whatever buttons i need to click on to
immediately hear them! i will find things that make me go "i am in love with this! it's hard to even
imagine that there was a time before i understood it! my life from here on will be at least slightly
augmented by my being aware of it!" ... but i'm like "what? forty minutes? are you insane??"

i eat cereal right before i go to sleep. it makes me have a nightmare. when i wake up, i think about how my
body must want to be awake & upright during the early part of digesting food, & there must something in
my brain that could be simplistically described as a circuit for waking up, which could activate if i fall
asleep after eating. but instead the brain manufactures nightmares to wake itself up? that feels like
a very strange interplay between unconscious bodily processes. with startled, yelping me caught in
the middle. it's so roundabout! if anything discredits teleological stuff in evolution, it's that ...

when i wake up more, i figure it would make more sense that being asleep during that stage of digestion
can just cause physical discomfort or something like anxiety, & it leaks into the dream like any stimuli
can. then being woken up by the nightmare is incidental/lucky/maybe evolutionarily advantageous

or the whole "digestion nightmare" thing is only a rumor

i start periodically flexing my bottom ribs in sort of a weird way. three
months later, i'm still doing it. so i guess it's just a part of my life now

i can use my laptop to make blog posts. i don't see why i would, though. i'm very acclimated to doing it.
i'd like to think that i am somewhere near being done with making blog posts. maybe not. what
am i thinking about right now? i feel very alone but not lonely. i don't want anything. if
i was hungry i would want food though. i feel like none of my thoughts have any
context. it's disorienting but maybe it's the purest way to be! i'm sitting in a room.
on all levels of existence i would classify myself as "sitting in a room". i'm not
bothering to want companionship because i'm afraid of it being impossible
for me to interact with anyone & not feel like a movie character

maybe there are people with whom i'd find engagement in talking about feeling like a movie character,
deconstructing it, ripping it apart, alternating between grinning uncontrollably, not sure at what,
& suppressing my facial expressions, while i talk about how i'm alternating between grinning
uncontrollably, not sure at what, & suppressing my facial expressions. the conversation
about feeling like a movie character has to be marked by feeling like one, & constantly
addressing it, trying to climb a dumb silly circle of ladder rungs of self-awareness

sometimes i am scared that i can't think or say anything that isn't symptomatic of me being alone,
& not feeling straightened into normality, like the way banter with people does that? like smooths
you out & reminds you what normal thought patterns are? & i'm constantly at the mercy of
anyone who wants to shock me back into humiliated normality by making fun of me or

thinking maybe i go in cycles of accruing things that i don't allow myself to think. i accrue
them until too many paths are blocked so i feel catatonic & nothing makes sense. i guess
it's because i sort of lack a private life to sort things out in. or i under-utilize it. i
must always be finding ways to be horribly ashamed of myself if i block enough
trains of thought that i feel so confused. i really feel guilty, inhuman, & hideous,
like an experiment gone wrong. i have one foot & a tentacle that i am using to
flop along unsettlingly for no discernible reason. it's unconscionable to
go & trick people into thinking i'm a human being!

ok, next i will go "it's better to find silly things to appreciate & laugh about instead of working
myself into a bunch of worry over boredom or my identity or whatever. i feel like i've just
completely betrayed that frivolous happy attitude", & i'll feel like that again & stay
quiet unless i have something funny or silly to say. then i'll end up feeling like this
again. then i'll focus on humor again. then i'll feel like this again. blah blah blah

trying to draw "eras" & "milestones" along one long
line since childhood of sitting alone in a room

the drastic & morally grey reshaping by the internet of the person i would have been without
the internet. with the internet you get kernels of 4chan soul diseases but here you fester & rot
with grunge & nu metal playing constantly? the internet can be deeply inspiring too, you
can be shown so much of what matters. but it only multiplies by the experiences
you live. unless internet sickness follows you into life & hurts your life

when i feel alienated from every other human in the world, is it that something about the
internet put up weird false barriers only i can see? or am i observing arguably fair
standards that were extraneously raised by the internet, since my exposure
to people isn't limited by geography & the difficulties of face-to-face
interaction? "i know who i generally want to talk to, there's
just none of them in this place". but that's how it is for
everyone now, the lack of geographic limitations & stuff

my automatic response to remembering things i've said or done that i feel embarrassed
by randomly shifts to pantomiming stabbing myself in the neck, sometimes going
shklhklhkh, & throwing myself backwards onto my bed. it's very ostentatious

"at least a hundred people might find bitter hatred in their hearts for me if i use the word '&'
too much in this trivial self-expressive sentence instead of finding a way to restructure
it where it doesn't need as many '&'s. or at least it will feel that way, very very
convincingly" < i will actually think things like this with emotional urgency

radio static radio static radio static radio static radio static radio static radio static radio
static radio static radio static radio static radio static radio static i'm meeting someone
from the internet in person right now!!!! radio static radio static radio static radio
static radio static radio static radio static radio static radio static radio static
radio static radio static radio static i'm meeting someone from the internet
in person right now!!!! radio static radio static radio static radio static
radio static radio static radio static radio static radio static radio
static radio static radio static radio static radio static

the thing that could be described as "identifying running themes in my life that maybe
could be unified & explained in a cathartic manner by some kind of philosophical
or sociological framework" or "obsessively noting every concept that displays
any resonance in my life more than once like a crazy person"

more anxiety stemming from transient
fears of not being meaningfully human

sometimes i feel like i'm in a stalemate where i don't have enough personal relationships to display
to myself through my own words & actions that i'm meaningfully human, & in the absence of that
verification, i find myself so terrified of not being meaningfully human that i don't want to
try to become close with anyone for i am terrified that in becoming close to anyone i might
find that i am not meaningfully human, & i'd be obligated to profoundly betray them by
saying "i think i've just ascertained that i'm not human. i haven't been human for
the whole development of this interpersonal relationship. i am sorry that i
presented myself like a human". nothing is worth ever harming anyone ever

i mean, ok, i will say i am definitely human. but maybe if i become close to anyone then
all of this will happen simply because i experience another period of questioning my
humanity, become convinced i'm not human, & think i'm obligated to disclose it

when i was fourteen & my perception of floral shoppe was totally uninfluenced by the internet,
the title track made me picture empty glass shelves, lightly coated in pink dust like makeup,
with sparse frames made of brass pipes. & you could say, "ok, you're stressing how it was an
original & uncorrupted visual in your mind's eye. but you can tie this stuff to certain internet
'aesthetic' outlets. blogs that post charming pictures. maybe the aesthetic movement
the album spawned went on to influence something you saw, & it contaminated your
mind's eye." but it wasn't like that! it was something so private & i loved it a lot

i try to continue a movie i've been watching but get distracted
poring through the entire "sweet meals" category on wikimedia commons"

i move a lamp from the little table by my dresser to a perfectly sized circular space
that is on the corner of my bed if i take off a bedpost. because of the refreshed
lighting i now feel a thousand percent more sane about being in my room

it's crazy that people who haven't been followed me on tumblr for long enough
have no idea that i was deeply enamored with homestuck from about ten to
eighteen & followed it serially from the day it started to the day it ended

i'll accidentally fall asleep for ten minutes then wake up like "wow, i really needed
that, i can see now that i was totally insane ten minutes ago, everything is so clear now"

i can't stop falling asleep at dawn & waking up at dusk
: ( i'm gonna go lunatic (rhymes with "emphatic") like this

sometimes i painfully strain the muscles that turn my eyes by staring very hard into the
edge of my vision, at my chin in a hand mirror, trying to find & pluck a light-colored hair
that is less than a millimeter long, but i can feel it with my fingers so i need to get it

i have two subsequent dreams about having to lie on my bedroom floor in the space adjacent to my
bed, to hide from someone outside the window, & one where i'm immobilized in that same spot.
what does it mean? i bet it's a reflection of how after sunset i can't see out of my window, &
the idea of someone out there watching me occupies the back of my head constantly. but it
doesn't always compel me to close the curtains, so i have it nagging at me for hours

i think about bad pictures i saw on the internet when i was nine. hmm, i shouldn't have seen those pictures!
there are two possibilities: they chronically gummed my brain up in some way; or, i shouldn't have seen
them, & i did, but ultimately i just clicked away & that was that, it's something i don't remember
very often, & thinking about it now is just out of a desire to go "there's a messed up thing i
can point to as a thing that gummed my brain up! it is comforting to know what to point
to. secretly it also makes me feel a little more defined as a person, as if seeing the
pictures was to the benefit of the wholeness of my identity or something"
(actually children should not see bad pictures)

sometimes i feel like i'm barely holding my self-presentation together & at any moment i could crack & start
saying things that frame my life in all the dry, humorless, taking-self-very-seriously, pain-focused ways
that bubble in my head sometimes, the kind of thing i exclusively indulged about three years ago.
hideous. universally unpalatable. defaulting to four-syllable words instead of even trying to
sound remotely human or personable. whenever i feel like i have to suppress that, the feeling
in & of itself makes me feel like i am actually not a good or palatable person regardless,
since if it wasn't my natural mode of expression in the first place then i wouldn't need
to put so much energy into clamming up until i can talk & think decently again

a marsupial with an apple for a brain

nothing can make me laugh more than gibberish, specifically situations that are
permissible to laugh at where someone is confidently trying to communicate something
but all they're producing is complete & utter nonsense. especially if it's a lot of text

sweet pea, my dachsund, will start desperately trying to bite the little pendant hanging
from her collar but it's deeply impossible & it looks like she's having a seizure

my insecurities have arranged themselves in a way where on top of
irrationally feeling evil i also feel evil for feeling evil. ha ha very wacky ha

i compulsively make a post on tumblr about my internal state. the post is uninteresting, or at least
not inviting of the passive interaction that other posts typically garner. i irrationally feel absolutely
hideous & deeply ashamed of whatever i described in the post because i am convinced that it warranted
the unanimous silence of hundreds of people. i delete the post but the damage is done. i remind myself to try
to make tumblr posts less. it's a boring tale as old as time wooouuuooouuoou duuuuuuhh uuuuuuuooowwuuu!

several years ago i walked around a shopping mall, totally detached from my
surroundings, focusing on my phone making very angry posts full of cuss words
where i insisted that i didn't deserve to be "punished" for recounting such mundane
things. publicly calling no one in particular a bunch of sick sadistic fucks

i've always assumed the entire everything around the act of talking about sex (the standard
trepidation or embarrassment or whatever) is rooted in like a feeling of indignity in having
to reference the fact that people have to reproduce? like people are sentient & would like to
think that the sentient thing that they are in their heads is more unconditional than that.
but they have an animal material reason for existing & it's kind of disgraceful to look
it in the face. this might just be an unusual belief that's accumulated in my head

making posts about my actual life, feelings, or behavior is
almost always earnestly bad for me & representative of a
failure to exercise restraint with respect to my laptop.
the opportunity to compulsively hurt myself mentally &
emotionally is always waiting over in the corner of my room

the thing for me to understand & keep in mind is that if i am sitting alone
in my room, then i am sitting alone in my room. that state is not offset
by tumblr, like it's a diary to babble on & feel passively connected
to people who are interested. tumblr has a purpose for me, but
it's generally not that. if i use it for that, then it is probably
serving exclusively as a tool of self-harm. if i feel too lonely,
well, there is nothing for me in the corner of my room

i'll really really never understand people thinking absurd context-free jokes are funnier if
they point out it happens to sound like the plot of some preexisting media. i'm probably
taking it too seriously but if you have to deflate things into safe boring references
to communally get instead of like taking the original effect of it in a
vacuum then i don't trust you, i think you have a brain virus

i have a tendency to think "sooner or later everyone is going to realize how
terrible i actually am." the "everyone" refers to nobody, i don't think
i could name a single person who is implicitly included in it

woozy from hunger on a platform rocker i flatly mutter "little puppy. little
puppy. little puppy" as i play tug a war with my manic frantic dachsund

i still think really vulgar phrases are funny when
they hit right but i never say them anymore ...

for a while, using omegle just makes me feel like i'm going crazy. it used to be i'd trawl through sex
pests for a while & maybe run into someone actually cool & worth meeting, now it's like ... good
luck even finding a sex pest. literally everyone skips after three seconds. for me it starts to
psychologically add up. i think, "each individual skip means nothing, but the overwhelming
consistency seems to imply there's something fundamentally wrong or unsettling about
me." maybe nothing has changed & i'm just processing it differently

it's so clear-cut that cynicism & negativity are bad, & earnestness & positivity are good, that i'd like to think it's
free & invariably good to express the latter. like i shouldn't even have to think about it. but there are contaminating
affectations that i dislike. things that are clearly aligned with positive sincerity but in a way that comes off
or alienating. which is perverse. the idea of being reckless & coming off like an uwu face in a bad way
or whatever always kinda lingers. i have to be quiet, bide my time, & let things come when they're
ready. it's weird to feel, like, conservative about it? positivity seems to scream "i should be endless,
unrestrained, & free of consequences" but i can't convince myself that that really pans out ...
things probably have to be composed. conservative to me sort of means "i will modify my behavior
to compromise with a sub-ideal aspect of reality that i believe in but can't really confirm or deny"

everything is fine. i'm alone in a room, & i sort of wish i wasn't, but i am going to be private & find productive
or benign pastimes. instead of humiliating myself to strangers with pretentious paragraphs of nothing, or
opening myself to delusional feelings of being bitterly hated by lots of people. i don't even need to
make this post, it'd work just as well as a private affirmation. by typing it i've gotten
attached to the idea of anyone reading it. oh well. it will be fine

i'm very very afraid of backsliding. i don't want to be in 2018 again.
i'm very afraid of constructing a better conception of myself then
having it corrupted. corruption is horrifying to think about

experiencing transient pain is okay. i just typically become very afraid that if it doesn't stop then
i won't know what else to talk about & i'll become someone who only reflects pain. when i'm alone
in my room & i feel pain it's like each second is taking an hour, & i feel an urge to express it.
which is easiest to do here because i am generally afraid of talking to people. you can see
how the unhealthy behavioral pattern emerges. now that i've described it, i have to
alter it. describing an unhealthy pattern without altering it is despicable

feeling anything but happy or content usually makes me feel guilty. i don't think i
can feel unhappy or discontent unless i'm suppressing my self-awareness in a way
that is despicable & embarrassing. subscribing to the idea that i'm unhappy or
discontent when really i just need to close my eyes for ten seconds

i am going to stop opening myself up to the public internet in
ways that put me in a bad, guilty, simple, familiar mindset

it's normal & good that making blog posts can be mortifying & regret-inducing. deciding
to just say navel-gazing things to a crowd of strangers like they're waiting to listen is
narcissistic. i'm not even putting in the effort of holding a conversation with someone
& getting the nonsense out that way, it's just, "i am entitled to type here at absolutely
any time!" ... if indulging in displays of narcissism didn't make me feel revolted with myself
then something would be wrong with me & i wouldn't have any reason to work on doing it less

drunken typing

it's good to be
fragile
frank
dinc ere
normal
i cant see what im tpyping really. the laptop is too far. probably not too many tpos. its good to be normal. umm. level.
its good to be open . its good to be a perfect balance that is disgraceful to dissect & name & describe. it's good to
be nuanced. it's good to be specific. it's goodf to be careful. its good to be earnest & sincere. it is good to be
developed. it is good to be humble & accepting. it's goocd to adapt. it's good to be decen. decent. it's good to
be u,, silly & nnicoent, &. inocent. i see the red line again. innocet. innocent. there. & positive. & hopeful.
optimistic. it's good to be. mature. thoughtful. & honest. realistic. pragmatic. it's good to be experienced
& have perspective, & it is good to havea grasp of humanity, & to understand humanness & be humanm
to. & to be human. being human is good. & being unfiltered. undistorted is . undistorted . i seee
the red line under the word. undisrtoted. i think it'll do it even if i type it right. undistorted is
good. uncorrupted is good. lovey lobery lobe & humbleness is good. normality is good
love is good love is good love is good but i dnt wnat to be loved with my face & my vi uce so i simply wish to be secure that
in a lack of realistic pursuit of love my want of love is still an indicator of humanity. i want reincarnation to be real

dormant ingrained association between nu metal & chasmic hopelessness
pretentious string of non conversational words instead of something that is remotely human

i make another post where i affirm to myself that i have nothing worthwhile to say right now & that i
need to get off the notion of making a tumblr post because i am not the least bit interested in the pathetic
masochism i've been mercilessly inviting into my life for six years by habitually putting my untailored
personal expression on a public website that messes with my head really really badly

sometimes a stranger will say or do something that makes me smile, earnestly, involuntarily, & the smile
will usually give me a bad guilty feeling as if i'm faking it to seem likable so i can hit on them or manipulate
them or something. with a very sinister & insincere undertone. which is completely removed from the actual
reality of the situation, which is me smiling benignly. but i feel very uncomfortable & i try to stop smiling

i just need to affirm to myself that whenever i feel weird & impulsively make negative
tumblr posts that feel irresponsible, people probably read them & think "ok whatever" at
worst. they're probably not that bad. there is a lot of nonsense inside of me that i lace into
each word. but other people don't see it. it's ok. the outside world doesn't reflect my nonsense

no one thinks "it's unforgivable how alex is corrupting & betraying herself to such an
outrageous extent by backsliding into this feral, self-serious mode of self expression."
no one thinks "this is a total betrayal of the month of may." it's absurd to think
anyone would have a solid idea of the very personal amorphous way i think
about may, & be ready to reference it when they interpret things i say

hey alex you are getting such strong hunger pangs right now that they're becoming hard to
distinguish from nausea, maybe get a bowl of cereal instead of typing. & you're gonna
act confused about this episode of general dysphoria? you are neglecting your body

i just need to trust very very hard that i am not being completely, utterly corruptive
& repulsive. just uninteresting at worst. & that if i am being corruptive & repulsive
then someone will at least afford me the dignity of telling me. none of this
even matters because i am passing time alone in a room. pure nonsense

art that makes it feel possible & desirable to act on an inhibited desire to act out of love because,
whatever good nebulous thing it is, it shows you by existing that it isn't a thing that's excluded
from the world, & you think a world which has that thing represented deserves love in a way
that a world that didn't have that thing represented maybe wouldn't. i mean, the art isn't
what makes the world worthy of love, the world deserves love from the start because
of inextricable things about it that the art makes a point of displaying. art thaaat
preserves good intentions to assure people that at least at some point
they have existed. art that repairs you

tonight in alex's ongoing desire to appeal to the humanity of edgelord internet
strangers. the context is that the other mod produced a bunch of screenshots of
this person calling people on the server (& ferraro himself??) tr..s, fa..s, & ni..s

there are situations where i am kinda like, why am i even granting this
person this much generosity? but. i always feel a need to make an initial
attempt to appeal to the humanity of people who act very rotten

i think, ok, if this were a freak timeline where, somehow, i could look back on how i once called
people in the james ferraro discord server trs, fas, & nis. & then years later i was normal, like
the me who actually exists now. then um. well, i guess i am trying to say to this person exactly
what that regretful version of me would probably wish she had received & heeded

"this stuff sucks." i always want to phrase things like that. & articulate some reason why it sucks. really
i should get to say: this is racist. this is homophobic. this is transphobic. & that should be the end
of it. but calling things what they are anymore feels like twitter vernacular. i don't think anything
productive ever happens through anything that feels like twitter vernacular to the recipient. if
they're at that point of causticity, they're probably used to being called those words & they
revel in spitting in the face of it. everything has to feel relatively colloquial instead

i want to believe that disgracing oneself with this stuff is masochistic & has to come with like, buried self-
hatred, ignoring a little voice saying "stop." i need to present the exact reason that embracing sardonic
bigotry is bad beyond the inherent badness of the bigotry. like why it's bad for they who are doing it. it
is bad to voluntarily remove oneself from decency because indecency is a bad state to be in independently
of other people's judgment! if you can't appeal to the empathy for others that is absent when they call
people slurs, then the empathy for themselves that might still exist is all there is to appeal to!

also that crazy timeline isn't even that hard to imagine since i went around omegle showing people a picture of a
mutilated penis when i was thirteen. plenty of other things too. lately i keep finding myself wishing i could
say that i've always had like, an inherent moral drive that i really understood & acted on from a young age.
but i didn't. it really doesn't matter in the present, i'm just fantasizing about an ideal version of myself.
"i wish i could've not even had to have been taught right from wrong, that i could've just been that good ..."

addendum to this thing i typed a while ago:

here is an alienatingly subjective description of how i try to think about going from a bad mood to a good one.
elementally ineradicable smiling sunny smiley faces are always right behind me, calmly perplexed by my strange
graveness, patiently waiting to step into view & welcome me back so that i remember things so deeply familiar
& pure that it will astound me that i forgot them even briefly, as if i had anterograde amnesia. i apologize
to them. it's completely insane that i forgot to smile when the cost is nil & the benefit is infinite

-

god, this is paragraphs of word salad. oh well. i don't care. if i'm indulging the urge to try to
communicate something that i think might be good, & it can only be a bunch of word salad, then
fine. i guess that's the best i can do. here is the word salad that is analogous to the actual thing i
want to communicate. this is as good as it gets. whatever it gets across is as good as it gets

-

new metaphor: i'm stranded in the ocean, miles from land. i have anterograde amnesia. i have
no choice but to struggle to stay afloat. it's tiring, but i'm not afforded even the slightest break.
there is something unspeakably beautiful floating in the sky. when my head is above the
water i stare up at it, going "oh my god oh my god oh my god." when i'm under the
water, i forget it's there. each time i breach the surface i rediscover it

i want to believe that the beauty of life is so unbelievably pure, & cleansing, & can't be
tainted in any way, & doesn't cede any ground, & that fixing it in words is a disgrace
to it, to the extent that even calling it "pure" with no elaboration is a disgrace
because it risks evoking your idea of purity instead of the pure it really is

or, well, maybe it's not that it risks evoking your idea of purity (implying that it's
been made flawed or shallow.) on a good day, i think both of us probably grasp
the unbelievable purity. the problem is that it feels really difficult to deliver
to each other, to affirm to one another. if one of us tries to express it, it
introduces a risk where we each have to trust that the other has that sense of purity

i want it to be something i have to find or build for myself, & be frustratingly alone with if
need be. i want it to be so pure that it'd be a mistake to try to deliver it to anyone, even if my
empathy would urge me to. i want it to be so pure that it'd be a mistake to try to point
the direction with a bunch of pretentious wordplay about how i can't describe it

ok, i'm not actually pointing the direction toward a particular thing. i'm not a total narcissist who thinks i know the
meaning of life. i just think finding happiness might require a sense of privacy & sanctity that feels absent in people
i interact with sometimes. & i often have to remind myself, harshly, that it's a requirement for me too. there's a
really frustrating sense that everyone has this vague thing burning inside, & might want to express it, deliver
it to others, but it's inexpressible. expressions of it are compromises. frankensteins. & then i want to find
that burning thing outside of myself & i see frankenstein after frankenstein until i'm totally deluded &
couldn't identify it even if i saw it. i am trying to find a way to prosaically approximate these feelings

bad things (cynicism, social media, mass media, individuals' sadomasochistic expressions of negativity, self-
dissective thoughts when isolated, earnest attempts to portray or aestheticize love that end up making a
shallow mockery of it) can feel so disgraceful that they make me feel separate from the goodness,
& ignorant of it. if the goodness is incorruptible, seeing all these bad things in its presence is
still so striking & insulting in comparison to it that it almost makes them feel like they present
any competition. then, when i regain my view of the beauty, it feels insane that i could've forgotten it

this whole piece of writing is a mistake. it's a compromise. i already said i'm not supposed to fix
"it" in words, & the more i try to pad that, the more words it takes. it's like. having to delve
into making the mistake, having to pay that price, make that compromise, so i can end with: this
whole thing is an attempt to define why it itself is what leading by example doesn't look like?
or maybe it's not breaking its own rules, because, like i said, it's a compromise?

it's just. [the thing "purity" fails to signify]. that's it. getting caught up in all this nonsense is
masochistic, it's actively removing me from [that thing that "purity" fails to signify]. that's it

two of my goals are to stop swearing & to avoid becoming obsessed with my own isolation

too often when i listen to music it doesn't feel like a dialog with the musician but with an imagined
agglomeration of everyone else who has listened to it. the feeling i imagine them imposing on me is
that because there are so many of us, they are angrily demanding a justification for why the music
is worth the attention of so many people. really, it's just me sitting alone in a room with it playing,
& that's all the attention on the music that i can be sure of with my own two eyes. but the feeling is
totally removed from that reality. i'm sick of imaginary anger being laced into my consumption of art

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