< - iii - >

the jibber jabber marches on into 2021.

dim grey early morning rain instantly freezes on all the branches of
the big patch of overgrowth outside my room. it looks really crazy

i perch on a stool by my bedroom window & watch the snow

"invisible limits" by tangerine dream

i wonder if my recent experiences of feeling deeply soothed by low-pitch sounds in my environment
have anything to do with spending nearly a year listening to all my music on a laptop that
can't produce a sound below ninety hertz or so. do i have bass deprivation?

some days i feel like i'm in a waking nightmare, & reality is horrible, then i realize it's because i've
been incessantly doing dopaminergic things on my computer since i got out of bed, & i just need to give
myself a break to lie down & hug a pillow for like ten minutes. an embarrassing condition to fall into

CoMpUtErS, aM i RiGhT???

about two years ago i posted a picture of quagmire from family guy edited
to look like the npc meme. i'm normal now though. it's never too late ...

i would like everything i say & do to be sincere, which doesn't pair well with
periodically feeling like the only sincere action is sitting in a chair & staring
into space, or like i am a p-zombie, too wrapped up in webs of "i must be self-
aware' to unaffectedly hold any beliefs, engage in any behaviors, or enact the
slightest social movement of my face or limbs without feeling like a phony,
staring out of the eyes of a thing for which sincerity is a non-applicable quality,
following a shallow script that adapts its behavior to whatever it sees

do unaffected things alone & feel lonely but don't counter the loneliness by telling tumblr about
them because making the choice to put words to them would invert any & all unaffectedness
into performativeness & people would recognize that i'm trying to describe something
unaffected & hate me for turning such a nice unaffected thing performative

i feel chronically disconnected from my body. i guess the normal way to be is ... people like to sympathetically hug because
they can feel it? i mean, they like to hug because it's a display of comfort & sympathy, but it's a display of comfort &
sympathy because they can feel it. proximity & touch are a very fundamental channel of communication. because
people feel like their bodies? being touched is being Touched. i don't feel that way though. i feel more like
a soul than a combined soul & body. anything related to my body feels like a system that is separate from
me that i'd opt into very arbitrarily, like anything else in life. if someone hugged me i wouldn't think "i
can feel them hugging me" so much as "i can tell they are hugging my body"? i, the me behind my eyes,
am observing my body being hugged. i can tell my body is being hugged because of a sensation.
i can acknowledge it's there, it just has nothing to do with me

a hug feels like it's supposed to be the physical stand-in for a more metaphysical transaction. if i'm
disconnected from that, it's like ... what else is there to do? if someone hugs me i don't care. if
someone shoves me i don't care. there's no way to reach my past my body & "really" hug
the thing that is really me or "really" shove the thing that is really me

i'm still capable of imagining being hugged & crying limerently, i guess that's
me fantasizing about being capable of identifying with my body? i don't know

making tumblr posts is seriously an insidious act against myself, it makes my heart rate spike. i'm glad it's coming
to feel that viscerally unpleasant, 'cause that means i'm less inclined to do it. god forbid i ever again publicly
reduce my actual lived experience to an embedded youtube video, a photo, & a sentence. someone might've found
it to be a pretty juxtaposition of three things too, so maybe it is a little sad that i took it down! but. tough

bedroom, sometimes cozy sometimes purgatorial based on daily random mood fluctuations, time passing
very slowly, purgatorial, "i hope i'm meaningfully human" wraps into thoughts that are self referential to
the point of total semantic emptiness, feeling of lacking any context as a person with which to internalize
or process lots of my memories, having my mood affected by subconsciously imagining saying
vague things then being vaguely teased for them, yadda yadda you know the drill

for undisclosed reasons i have to scroll to the bottom of a big facebook album every day.
i avoid having to do that manually by having a little porcelain bunny sit on the end key

i mutter in my kitchen about concerns, then i mutter about how just muttering in my kitchen privately must mean the
concerns i'm muttering about are genuine & unperformative, then i be dumb & recount the muttering on tumblr as a
self-expressive display of my concern about performativity, while hoping i can still view the initial mutters
as genuine since the idea to recount them only came after the fact. unless the idea of recounting things is
always in the back of my head, & can never really come "after the fact" or be safely indulged. which
is fine, journaling on the internet is not a basic need, stopping is not some big sacrifice

oooh, wasn't that a really serpentine & meta paragraph?
really crazy & wacky & cool writing, huh? wow, amazing

i've been in a weird space for years where i'm very afraid of being hated, but i don't generally feel socially enmeshed
enough with anyone for being hated to really mean that much, like in the end all i'm afraid of is signals i might
receive in physical isolation from people i'm not that close to. but i feel very conditioned to fear them

my life isn't very fleshed out. i don't know anyone in-person at all. i don't feel like i compensate for that by
over-prioritizing social media, though? i want this to feel like as much of a footnote as it would if my
life were fuller. but i'm still just kind of here, fearing it a bit, in the absence of anything else

sometimes internal pressure to reach a state of being miraculously good in that i escape the need to even think
or talk about it, since thinking or talking about it too much feels like taking myself too seriously, which is
a mark against what i'm trying to do. want to have perfect effortless flow & mark the last time i ever slip
into saying anything overwrought or embarrassing or internet grime. sometimes worried about the potential
of having to always surpass a handicap of being unavoidably affected by too much exposure to pathetic
annoying cultural garbage or gendered socialization or yoo hoo woo doo moo moo hoo hfhefu
hauhfu iehuaihuiehwuaifhauh iueh uegfiiueaer ih uh 9i0thj904w309ih9j0a hj09ih j09h hungry

gnawing fear all week that i might be "backsliding," "souring," "sagging," "succumbing,"
"becoming labile & suggestible to entropic cultural phenomena," or whatever

i feel like if i make subpar art or jokes i'm concretely harming "something." can't go on autopilot. gotta
put things in order. effort times time. i just um want to feel inspired & committed to originality. where
originality is like graceful order. while repetition & memetic variants of jokes are like autonomous decay

this links to age-old anxieties like fatalistic questions of "do i have
anything inside of me to give" & "how much of a say do i have in that"

it's not totally an "i have to make good art!" thing. i generally want to feel safe from being
"polluted," "globalized," i feel like the me behind my eyes is in danger of being replaced
by slightly different versions until it's unrecognizable, if i'm not on guard, if i take too
many things into me because i don't care enough. social media is bad bad bad bad

social media isn't even a normal source of distress. it makes itself look like a normal, modern
source of distress, but i only see people complain about it because they're on it & i'm
looking at it. the model people who don't use social media are comparatively invisible

i think everything will be sweet & wonderful again in spring. i'll hear birds & go on walks. as
long as i'm not killed or made homeless by a tornado. that's a gamble each year. i can't keep
opening myself to the risk of going nuts every winter. cooped up in my house, gravitating
around my laptop. but i don't know what to do! i don't know where else to go

the library? i need to restore my ability to sit down & watch a movie or read a large amount
of text. i know i have the classic information age attention span inhibition, i know i'm in
that kind of pit. the idea of talking about it forever & never overcoming it is scary

these feel like such putrid concerns. i wish i could not be someone who at any point
in my life has ever had any reason to think about overcoming any of this. i
don't want to have been naturalized to such stupid things. computers are bad
computers are bad. this makes me feel gross like a jim gaffigan routine

thunder startled me awake last night. first storm of the year. i fell back asleep thinking blearily
about the twenty-two years of knick-knacks, heirlooms, clothes, papers, & toys i've accrued. there
are lots of nice & familiar things. i should appreciate the time i have left to be surrounded by
them, since every year there's a slight chance that a tornado blows my house away

thoughts such as "if a person hugged me for an indefinite amount of time, it'd initially be ok to hug
them back on a basis such as 'it feels good to hug people, & the good feeling of hugging this person
is 'endorsed' by me thinking they're a good person.' (if it wasn't 'endorsed' it'd be deceptive &
harmful.) however, there'd be a vague amount of seconds past which the hug couldn't go without
it being necessary to soberly interrogate myself on whether i Love the person (a word which
paradoxically is supposed to have both the frivolity of engendering the initial random
hug, but also the gravity of necessitating that it not go on too long). if i let the the
hug go past that threshold, without having confidently determined that i Love
person, then my cosigning of the duration of the hug, by not withdrawing from
it, would be deceptive & harmful. with all this in mind i am ultimately
probably alexithymic enough that allowing anyone to touch me would
always constitute a risk of harming them so i should not allow it"

my self, the me that i am behind my eyes, feels abnormally malleable. it's a problem. i'm afraid of
reading social media posts by bad people. it feels like there's no boundary between me & them. i'll
start automatically feeling the way they feel about everything & slipping into their thought
patterns unless i put effort into sanitizing myself of them. i'm a ball of placeholder mush

me for the past week --> i am going to crush my head with a rock if i see a single internet joke, image
macro, 4chan screenshot, funny juxtaposition of spongebob with current social climate, reddit screenshot,
weird joke about penises, ironic reference to porn, vicariously satisfying reply to commonly disliked
opinion, person making fun of fandoms, screenshot of person i'm supposed to laugh at for lacking
self-awareness, source game footage or screenshot, deep fried meme, wojak variant, sincere
invocation of 4chan culture, ironic or mocking invocation of 4chan culture, forced
two-person skit performed through reblogging a post back & forth,

i really disliked the idea of body language throughout middle school. i wanted to be private & inert.
i didn't want anyone to know a thing about me unless i told them. the idea of them extracting
information from my posture etc felt like being ripped open & having my innards sucked
out by everyone near me. i tried to be as stiff & unemotive as i could. today i think this
only manifests with eye contact. i have no idea what information people can get through
my eyes. i feel like if i make eye contact with anyone they'll discern something very ugly

i sort of lose my mind over the course of a year in a way i keep quiet about even with respect
to the anguished text posts i might make & then delete every once in a while. i try to
alleviate it by firmly halting my public online self-expression for a good while. no
more whinging about how it's a double-edged sword & yadda yadda. it seems to help.
i drift back into it sooner than i would have liked, though. maybe i need to try again

sometimes i remember that i can freely envision stuff that approaches the aesthetic ideal
of anything i could see, & i get overwhelmed. like, not fantasizing about situations, just
composing the perfect street corner, etc. i'm sure i do it all the time, but i don't
focus on it so much anymore. it's sad that my imagination has waned like that

i think it relates to loneliness. "if i can't share this with someone by making it
real, or finding it preexisting out in the world, i'm just trapped with it." (not
that i think anyone i showed it to could really mirror my appreciation for it
anyway. i think each experience of appreciation a person has for each
individual thing they appreciate is as unique as they are as a person)

so, it comes to feel less stressful to not imagine things so much, & preferable to
find comfort in preexisting media that hits just the right aesthetic mark ... that's
why hunting for pretty pictures on tumblr is fun. i like curating things

it can be hard to find the boundary of "i really feel a kinship with something about this
photo & not this one," & then actually respect it ... to have something that's "ninety-
nine percent" there & maybe toss it aside for the sake of maintaining consistency

"funny things" & "humorous things" are totally different categories with totally different objectives
& they only occasionally intersect by accident. i don't think ninety five percent of humor on the
internet is intended to make anyone laugh. it's just incessantly filling dead air with garbage.
if i'm wrong about this then the internet is substantially worse than i thought

it's actually really insane & anomalous how crushingly disappointing an overwhelming majority
of the expression on the public internet is. i will not ever lower my standards enough for it to
seem remotely normal. i'm getting good at filtering it from my awareness though. just not caring

being obligated to hear nu metal through a wall makes me feel very infected on a fundamental level. something
completely opposed to everything i want to be, embedded in me like a giant shard of glass. there's no point
striving for any inner peace during a span of time that it's constantly augmented by electric guitars seeping
through, making me feel like it's 2016. i consider going into the living room with scissors while no one is
home & snipping the power cord to the new speakers my brother bought. i can't think about anything but
it being forced into my awareness, i don't have any choice, having to think about dim completely two-
dimensional hypermasculine non-humans pretending to actually express emotions. in a limbo of their
endless freaking hostility & rebellion directed at nothing. i can't try to do or feel anything
if it's being infected by that. i don't want to look at anything i like for fear of creating an
association between it & the music. if any conditions of my situation were different in ways
that made me more confined with the music, like we were in a studio apartment or we lived in
alaska & it was never going to get warm again, i would need to structure my life around not
being here to hear the music. if i couldn't do that i would kill myself i guess

i play with my dog & listen to all the tracks on disc one of
"recordings of shortwave numbers stations" play over each other

i try to phrase things without putting too much regard for making it comprehensible. i want to have a "soul" or i want
"something inside me guiding me" or an "intrinsic drive or nature," implying that i sort of feel lacking of a soul or
a spark. the danger of this is that i might pace back & forth my entire life pining for a drivesoulspark instead of
simply acting. doing. as if i do have one. which will turn out to be all anyone else was doing maybe. unless: i
really am missing something: not a mystical essence, but seeds of behavior planted in people's childhoods which
sprout into natures. i feel like i cannot remember years of my childhood. i have a fear that, for being very
sheltered from the outside world & permitted to sit in a computer, escapistly, somewhat neglectedly,
that i've been afflicted with a lifelong lack of something. an absence of instilled virtues, aesthetic
inclinations, etc. the impossibility of experiencing passion. well, maybe there is a powerful
danger in submitting to this developmental perspective, where a lack of formative experiences
leaves me with nothing inside me & there's nothing i can do about it. rather than: trying to
take maybe a more spiritual perspective which simply leans into my desire to have these
things, & chooses to believe that it can be restored. i mean, if i am going to be so
clinical & calculated as the helpless developmental perspective, i might as well
go back to 2016: 1,000% nihilism, "nothing exists beyond the interactions
of fundamental particles & my humanity is not worth acknowledging"

posting sucks!

thoughts of a day i sleep eight hours --> :)

thoughts of a day i sleep seven hours --> authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity
authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity
authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity
authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity
authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity
authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity authenticity no context no context no
context no context no context no context no context no context no context no context no context no context no
context no context no context no context no context no context no context no context no context no context
no context no context no context no context no context no context no context no context no context no
context no context no context no context no context no context no context no context no context no
context no context no context no context no context no context no context no context no context
no context no context no context no context no context no context no context no context

i become increasingly convinced that i'm not supposed to read, that books are an extremely broad medium but the world
that's there to explore in them isn't one i can experience, & that i have to get the value in my life from elsewhere.
i grasp how depriving that is. i'd really really like to read lots of things. but i just don't feel able. i keep having
to read short, simple discord messages over & over to grasp what they mean. it takes so much mental effort

it feels like all my intuition wrt deriving meaning from writing is gone. i keep having to do relevant hand gestures
to meaningfully comprehend phrases like "that's good." i could define each word & how it relates to the ones adjacent
to it, or even paraphrase a sentence to show i know how all the concepts relate to each other. but my head feels
like a black hole swallowing all the things they signify, & what they're meant to make me think or feel.
it's like i have nothing to do with anything, so i can't think anything about anything

i try to read a paragraph. a sentence starts with "hopefully." i get hung up on it because i
understand that it means "the conditions outlined by the rest of the sentence are desired,"
but i can't pair that with the rest to produce meaning, i can't fit it into any context

thinking about minimal music feels like getting suffocatingly aware that sound is one-dimensional & trying to
thrash against it frustratedly. like the audio timeline in the daw being homogeneous & unquantized. to increase
the resolution you have to work with you have to, for better or for worse, decrease the spacing of all the
sounds relative to each other, leaving less room to breathe. or make everything much longer

daydreaming of fictional situations, then comparing myself to fictional portrayals of people
daydreaming of double-fictional situations. worrying that my fantasy isn't a "real" fantasy,
that it's informed by whatever artistic exaggeration or simplification of the act
of fantasizing caused the fictional fantasy to involve what it involved

constant dim worry about myself or others being infected with aspects of fiction, fear of
cultural interplay between fiction & reality, fear of learning to be human from people
who in turn learned to be human from media, always wanting to ascertain unexaggerated
real reality, cling to it, not be an embarrassing caricature, comb through my traits
& yank out fictional things, be real. fear of the situation being worse than i
could ever realize. fear of playing a character in this post, etc.

i sit under a pavilion. things i associate with it: looking at it & being able to remember something humiliatingly
abysmal i typed sitting under it five years prior /// watching a group of squirrels hop around & scrounge in
trash cans. charging my phone with my head on my backpack /// Puppies by The Incredible String Band ///
The Inmost Light Itself on rainy day /// Forever & Ever & Ever /// last section of Changeling by DJ
Shadow /// a group of recovering addicts having a bbq /// very unintentionally alienating girl
named Lucy /// bizarrely prophetic heart with names drawn on table /// saying i wish a
branching conversation could be visible as a tree diagram /// confession attempt/"huddle
like penguins" during first (?) meetup late at night. memory is like a bubble sectioned
off from the rest of time & space /// Panda Express late at night in april 2020,
saying i'm obsessed with pandemic statistics

for a while there's been a tiny voice in the back of my head trying to get it through to me that
i'm totally sick of electronic music & never want to hear a warp records artist ever again

idm, lopatin, post-fsv ferraro, anything within two degrees of separation from anything
related to vaporwave, anything that consciously aestheticizes nostalgia. all the soundtrack
to self- harmingly making the fact that i use the internet part of my identity

hello i am trendy modern internet user i like to identify cultural phenomenon that
i & my peers unanimously dislike & harp on it for eight years like i have stockholm
syndrome i love to stare at things i hate on purpose & not stare at things i like

the state of no longer being repulsive vs the state of having been repulsive
(they're the same thing through a good or bad emotional lens)

i would like to think of a very dumb joke, try to say it, crack up for a long time mid-
sentence, then laugh at how if i manage to say it, all the laughter will have been a
buildup to something so dumb, which in prolonging the laughter even further sends me
into an endless loop of helpless convulsing laughter having never said the joke. i
know this is something i'm prone to do, i just never talk to anyone really ...

if i'm in an interaction with two or more other people, & someone acts weird or mean, i recognize it because i
automatically borrow my perceptions from the other people present, & recognize the weirdness by their fair
standards. one-on-one, though, my whole frame of reference disappears without a trace. there is so much
i won't even bat an eye at, when ... i should. every fair judgment i witnessed in the past fails to
inform any of my responses to anything. why am i so dependent on the presence of others just
to have a grasp from moment to moment of what being a normal person is like?

people don't hug me enough for me to confidently assert that i feel nothing when people hug me. but i think it's
the case. if it's true, i think the reason is: i'm framing the reception of a hug as a gradient from 90 to 180 degrees.
90 is standing rigidly upright, dissociating from the situation so as to not really feel anything. 180 is metaphor-
-ically like tipping over 180 degrees physically off a steep drop, free falling into the emotional reception. there
should be a gradient between these, but i only feel a binary. 180 isn't appropriate for anyone. except, i guess,
any romantic partner with whom i arbitrarily constructed it being appropriate. ideally, it'd be ok with family
too, but family have never felt like an exception in the slightest to me. in fact, i think i might even
dimly associate the idea of falling too far into hugging a family member with ... i*****

i might have a lingering fear of sexuality being inappropriately projected onto any situation. sexuality, or like,
the notion of being overbearing, possessive, predatory, anything like that, in any conceivable way. this kind
of paralyzes me socially. but it's like a background hum, i don't notice it as a culprit. i'm not confident
about this, as i can't think back to any situations that feel markedly affected by it, enough that i can go,
"ok yes i can diagnose this as a thing inhibiting me." it's just a retrospective explanation i keep
settling on. i feel like a prince rupert's drop. will i be intact at the end of my life??

i'm always imagining feeling more affected by the world than i really am. in the back of my head, i'm always
imagining seeing things & thinking they're so pretty that i start crying, or that something could make me
upset enough that i cry hard enough that i throw up. it always causes me to dimly feel some unpleasant
emotion situated between "guilty," "melodramatic," "greedy for emotion," "performative," "dishonest,"
"juvenile," "embarrassed." it can't be enough to maturely cry & have it be over, it needs to be extreme ...

a depressive mood feels like being entirely different from the root. it doesn't feel so much like a
negative tint or bias to my thoughts as much as an entire fleshed-out alternative set of developed
feelings & opinions about my life, all terrible, replacing what is there normally. completely swapped

when i wake up it's like a swarm of marbles each representing a different influential person in my life roll
across a dimpled table, & the permutation of marbles that settle in dimples decide what personality i will
feel like that day. or maybe i decided it feels that way five seconds ago & went with it because i liked
putting together the marble metaphor. i guess i am in "second guessing my thoughts as dishonest" mode

it's hard to see myself forming romantic relationships because i am perpetually terrified of the idea that
i am physically & verbally capable of carrying out all the motions of a detailed relationship while actually
feeling nothing. basically a giant sociopathic deception! i guess it's kind of like being discomfited
by the intrusive idea that it's technically physically possible to just stab someone to death for
no reason, even though realistically you know it's an inconceivable intrusive thought. but
the relationship thing feels so much more subtle & possible. & i think i am prone to
be sufficiently alexithymic that being in any serious relationship situation could
give me "stage fright," completely forgetting everything i think, believe, or
feel. & that would be the moment i become thoroughly convinced
that i'm going through the motions

i would probably become convinced i am soulless & think, "oh, i think what has happened is that i
thought it would feel good to be touched, because that is a trait people tend to have regardless
of whether they have souls, then another person mistook me for a person with a soul & enabled
me to unthinkingly traipse into a section of life i have no business being in"

i imagine thinking that things are normal & ok at first, with conversations staying in
a boundary where i can earnestly respond to things in living, dynamic ways. until one
day they ask me a basic but unexpected question about myself that i don't know the
answer to, & some other day they ask another question i don't know the answer to,
& these holes keep adding up like a brain with dementia until i realize i'm not
a person & that the other person now has to realize i'm not a person

it feels indescribably crucial, necessary, virtuous to "believe in love," which i can't articulate any better. but i am
constantly accusing myself of the elemental building blocks of everything i think every day being shallow aesthetics
instead of lived experiences & mature realistic conceptions of things. i might have absolutely no idea what love
actually is. it feels like a very realistic concern because i haven't lived enough. but i already feel like an
observer of the world instead of a participant so it is very hard to break the cycle & compensate for all the
living i haven't done, the best time to plant a tree, etc ... i could end up never escaping from thinking in
aesthetics, never feeling like i reach reality, but i still have to think & think & think about stuff for
my whole lifespan, i don't want to feel like a bunch of churning superficial nonsense forever

bothering to at least try to self-awarely label all my thoughts as "at risk of being churning superficial nonsense
forever" feels like ... imagine i am playing Snake on a 10x10 board. maybe i put in the effort to eat so many
fruits that the snake inevitably eats its own tail. i won the game! maybe the average person playing
Snake on a 10x10 board wouldn't have bothered to get that far ... then the camera zooms out &
reveals people with life experiences playing Snake on 1000x1000 boards

-----

i just remembered that i really don't like taking myself too seriously. everything above the line feels too
serious. i might feel like i walk a billion trillion miles up a mountain & go "okay i think i've finally
found a decent & okay way of framing everything" then realize the mountain is on an entire
hemisphere of the planet labelled "too-serious thoughts" & everything that could ever
happen within a quadrillion miles of even the base of the mountain is invalid & gross

naturally there's then a temptation to waive everything above the line & go "no no that's all hideous i'm
sorry for trying to put together anything cogent or self-aware when i've lived so little & can't even
know how little i know" but that's still taking myself too seriously, thinking my anxiety
or embarrassment is important. i have to just stop talking, i have to completely
demolish everything & replace it with something completely non-serious that
gives absolutely no hint that i could've ever thought any of this, & then
i have to forget that there was even ever anything to demolish,
because demolishing was too serious of an action

typing is just a result of a chemical state of my brain. i'm always going to be in a loop of feeling
normal, then feeling weird & typing & feeling recursively humiliated, then going back to normal &
remembering that it's ok because all the too-serious nonsense really was nonsense that i
had no choice but to momentarily believe but i'm normal now & it's fine

it's so easy to just have a sense of levity & clarity & balance,
& i can't stand feeling like a betrayal toward those ideals

-----

of course no matter how many things i type then try to distance myself from & how many layers
i pile on i'm ultimately hoping there's sooooomething worthwhile to be found somewhere in it

i look through pages of my blog from early 2019. i wasn't utterly malignant by then, but
still, i didn't think my typing style / temperament / filter etc would be this uncomfortable
to read. some of it i read & think, "wow, if i'd said that today, i think i would've agonized
over it being or seeming performative. but here, i think i just did it in total earnest
without thinking about it." as time passes, & things clump & stick onto my awareness,
more things become at risk of feeling performative. the space i have left to occupy shrinks

or maybe there are things that would've felt performative back then, that i can now do sincerely.
& because they cycle, the space i have to occupy is stable. or maybe there are two coexisting
constants: 1. drifting through sets things i do & don't feel comfortable doing; 2. an increase
in feeling performative, as i irreversibly gain a clearer image of myself, temper my self-
expression in accordance with it, & feel more & more like i'm performing as myself ...

one night i tremble at the thought of a shot i believe i'll get the following day, & motivate myself
to read the last third of an ethnography by napoleon chagnon by listening to two songs from
a twenty-song residents album for each three percent of the document that i read

one day i walk around thinking "so many things i've seen in my life have taken part in irreversibly contaminating
me. i desperately want to know what i'd be thinking, saying, & doing if i hadn't been exposed to so many
things that are dramatized, artificial, or informed by things with either of those qualities. surely that
would be my true self, who i can never truly reclaim & understand. it feels like the only action
that isn't roleplay is sitting in a chair, staring at a wall. but what if i start aestheticizing the ascetic
stillness of that too? everything i can do in opposition to the feeling of distortion could be
an overcorrection, still something i never would've done had the distortion not existed.
oh no oh no oh no oh no. i want to just move like everyone else seems to do very simply
as i observe them. i'm accustomed to observation, unaccustomed to agency, participation.
all my macro bodily motions have to percolate up from micro impulses that i don't trust"

i try to guess a guy's name for like three hours

a dreamed-of category of sentences is actually spoken, with surreal precision

i anxiously scratch my nails on the loud scratchy fabric of my backpack strap, aka "stridulation"

i think about gut feelings in an irreconcilably black-&-white way. trust my gut, & i may have it exploited, be recruited
into a cult or something ... forsake my gut, & well, i liken it to someone who can clinically suppress their humanity
enough to stir up the cognitive dissonance necessary to feel ok participating in something very evil, thinking
"this feels awful but i really don't know better, i'm sure it's for the best." trust my gut, & maybe i
overthink a situation & break into a paranoid dead sprint away from a normal, well-intended
person ... rationally considering situations is hard! my inductive reasoning feels broken. it
always, always feels too hasty to conclude that any situation is what it seems to be indicating
it is, no matter how clear the indication. i can never know all the variables, i can never
know how out of my element i may be. uncertain stumbling around in fog forever

i wake up & type words immediately without refining: like a thousand microscopic layers of mutually reenforcing variants of
learned helplessness. like begin an interaction & not even notice self thinking "it must be impossible here to joke around
& be funny & thats just some of lifes difficulty..." or like big subconscious blinders on my perception of the situation
that inhibit ability to communicate plainly, frankly, perceptively. like it feels so good to find myself saying what's
plainly there instead of it bubbling around. as if conditioned to wholly embody a character who knows far less than
i do. conditioned that when i come to painful or uncomfortable but real conclusions i immediately censor them
from my thoughts, "no no i can't possibly say that" & from there forward it's like a gap forever, i don't
notice this basic awareness that's been blotted out, & get more & more confused as more friction &
importance accrues around where the observation should be. like being corraled by blocked off
avenues into one tiny catatonic spot. never calling any behavior weird or uncomfortable
because im too wrapped up in my little subjective reality which seems to reflect so
plainly that x is weird/uncomfortable that i never even consider expressing it

i find myself once again compelled to express that there is a vague set of unfortunate experiences the absence of which
in my life i see as a painful affirmation of having been born in a wrong body, with the basic fact of their absence hardly
seeming to act as a silver lining if the tradeoff might have been such lessened feelings of being tarnished in such a deep
way, with this whole feeling being paired with, sharpened by, a second feeling of mortifying guilt at the first one
essentially being a fetishization of others' misfortune & a complete disregard of my own comparative fortune

i bang my head on my closet door in an expression of impotent frustration, because the music my brother is playing feels so
hideous, intolerabe, horrible, to the point of it not being rational. & i am too humiliatingly avoidant to communicate with
him about it instead of taking this route, maybe because my revulsion is so amplified that there's no way to communicate
it that doesn't either understate the problem or come off as totally histrionic. the music's revolting cynicism having to
coexist with the total benignity of the natural sounds outside my bedroom window honestly makes me want to cry.
i decide to stop dawdling & just leave the apartment. i opt to broadcast this experience for some reason, even
though i might as well be fourteen years old, crytyping this paragraph. surely it must say something about
the way i process this music, that i'm so different from how i was in, say, 2018, yet feeling stuck
in this particular situation for any amount of time still just destroys me

there's nothing wrong with liking to type paragraphs about little internal situations that satisfy me by having very
specific conditions that might leave them sort of tied up in neat knots unable to resolve themselves. but i have to
stop unproductively framing my earnest thoughts in that way just for the sake of it. here is me nearly doing this:

it feels absolutely critical to not take myself too seriously, like i might as well be
dead if i'm taking myself too seriously. & that seems like a self-sabotaging level of
severity with which to approach not taking myself too seriously, so it's like, i
don't want the effort i put into it to be equal to how important it actually
feels. it has to be something i trick myself into & don't notice

this is horseshit! i typed this out for some reason before i reminded myself i literally can just tell myself
throughout the day to tend towards ways of thinking that aren't overly serious, & not worry about it that
much. there is no tricky little catch-22 thing to overcome. there are probably never any of those

it's just very simple. & when things are simple, i have to let them be simple! letting
myself stray away from normal-feeling productive simplicity makes me feel so hideous...

over many things i'd like to say or do, something in my head imposes a fake & completely absurd veneer of me being
threatening or domineering. for instance, if i asked someone if they'd like to sit at a table with me, i'd feel
like i'm sternly telling them to sit with me, veiling it as a question. as if we have some kind of, like,
established abusive dynamic, even if i don't even know them. even though i have no bad intentions,
no conceivable reason to have any bad intentions, & all i'd like to do is invite them to sit with me,
something completely benign & mundane. "forced" to "mean" it that way, like the suggestion
of it being hostile is draped over my words like a cloth only i can see. & i'd be
petrified that the fake meaning might leak into some minuscule aspect of
my body language. then, if they said "no thank you," & i said "okay,
that's fine," truly completely in my heart taking no offense &
minding my own business, it'd impose that as being like a
sarcastic veiled something to the effect of "i'm subtly
letting you know there will be some consequence
for not sitting with me" ... i feel deprived of a
social existence without the constant ghostly
suggestion of violence & cruelty. i feel like
a shameful invocation of these things. i
have no ill intent, i just want to feel
comfortable & normal

i keep thinking about if i saw a squirrel & my expression of adoration for it was the word "squirrel" with no further
embellishments ... it feels emblematic of my desire to exist without any aspect of me being taken to a point of excess.
also my desire to take in the world around me through as thin of a glaze of human-imposed affectation as possible

i want each thing to feel beautiful on the merits of exactly what it is, & nothing else

"what would x think if they were here?" can be useful for evaluating situations but it sort of prevents any
feeling of privacy ... one is allowed to have a private life, & they can't really act like they're under the
constant observation of people they know ... i guess you have to decide where to draw the line
... i think there's some saying about the person you are in an empty room?

i just need to be indulging my love for birdsong constantly

wanting to be prettier is a completely normal & generic pitfall, & these labels for it are intended to be a source
of comfort. it is just that when i am open to attribute some fluctuating proportion of the insecurity to an
outright sexually binary removal from the entire scale i am rating myself on, the increase of a y value
that shouldn't even exist, (& i must stress that the sexually binary factor may truly have had no
effect, & i would have looked basically identical, but there is no way to be sure of this), then
this normal feeling can be a gateway to a chasmic feeling of metaphysical disfigurement

one day i receive a very, very painful anonymous message. i don't want to go into it, but it basically guilt
trips me over something that has no more relevance to the present day, a closed loop into which nothing
meaningful or productive can be introduced anymore. a loop that has been closed for years now.
the message amounts to smug, sadistic cruelty & nothing else. i publish the following:

i'm not going to directly answer that ask, but if you happen to read this, i think you have
a hideously malformed sense of culpability/morality that can drive you to say things that
might feel good because they seem like they'll instill remorse in people who "need" it,
but are just really cruel if you actually consider situations in realistic ways that
respect the passage of time & the complexities & life courses of other people

then i decide to to just delete it because it makes me feel really hideous. or rather, what someone said to me is
making me feel extremely hideous, & i am indulging the idea that trying to say something back to them
will alleviate that feeling. which it never does, it's a trap that just makes you feel more hideous for
indulging that kind of humiliating expression of public conflict with another person online

i would like them to know what is wrong about what they said, because it could be productive, could help
them not say terrible things, but i don't owe them an attempt at that. no one should be burdened with
reading anything like any of this. a problem like this doesn't have to exist to a single additional
human being. it's on me to find my own private catharsis about what they said

the only thing worse than indulging the temptation to negatively express pain on my blog, is: doing it right
after i post about a cute dream i had. it's the same as that horrible cynical music having to perversely
coexist with the birds outside my window. each good thing i post acts as greater deterrent against
being negative, because i feel a greater responsibility to not betray those things. but, you know,
that comes with the price of it having to hurt a lot more if i do express anything bad, it
has to feel much worse, more perverse in comparison to all that came before

this is a photograph of me

sometimes i viscerally read male qualities into the very limited space around my eyes in a photo like this, & it's kind of the
maximal example of my uncertainty over whether there is some like, proportion of features that's communicating with my
reptile brain or if i just have gender binary illness ... years ago i settled into a really dismal outlook, which i guess is still
lingering today, that i am sort of fighting an uphill fight against millions of years of evolutionary selective pressure
for. you know. people to be able to recognize at a glance who they could or could not possibly have offspring with.
like, people are then under no obligation to care about it, they don't have to have a gender binary, of course.
but. evolution can still be a sadistic weirdo who'd prefer that everyone's bodies send the signals in one
way or another ... still, it might be the latter option i said before, that there is just something wrong
with my brain becauze i live in a sociudtuy50u9rfugwuuirfiubi9hnuidnc. the experience of feeling
tainted ... oh well. this causes me discomfort all the time, but no matter how much stuff
like this i express, the times that i feel happy aren't very infrequent

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