< - ix - >

2022

this page was created on february twenty-eighth

february 7th

i am very glad that ublock origin exists, because logging onto tumblr on a
computer that doesn't have it still risks immediately ruining my day genuinely

february 22nd

i am not crazy about a lot of stuff the internet exposed me to starting around age nine or ten. & how
secret i tried to keep my internet usage from everyone, for many years after, nearly a decade maybe

the feeling that i am looking at very scandalous things which no one would want me to be using the computer to look at.
but, lacking perspective, i don't realize how actually "scandalous" it is that i am around ten, looking at what i am looking
at. it is like an adult sense of scandal that i am regarding with a childlike sense of scandal, albeit one i take very seriously

the feeling of a sort of division arising between me & the people i live with, as i acquire a state of having seen
these things, a state which is ideally secret, & sort of abnormal, sort of ugly, something i don't fully grasp

this is how a protracted obsessive division arises around maintaining a very sharp divide between
my empty "real life" presence & my concealed "online" presence, which i regard as more real

but what would it have really meant, if that barrier had been broken? nothing truly productive could have come of it. the fact
of the matter was that i lived with a family of incredibly stupid people, immersed in shallow cultural norms, who could not
have been remotely prepared to account for the rising presence of the internet as a variable in the life of their youngest
family member. i don't think a single one of them would have barred me from all of this content in line with any actual
moral code that they had ever articulated to themselves, they would have just been emptily parroting vague
notions of what a child is & is not supposed to like at... very reasonable notions, but still

regrouping back at the central topic: yes, i had a lot of unquestioning exposure to very strange things, & i did
not want anyone to know i had been exposed to them. if nothing else, i understood that aim of hiding it all

it was very gnarly content. even synopses of it would be very gnarly. gore, extreme "shock site" type pornography,
"copypasta," & people on the newgrounds forums, especially this one guy (K.B.), writing these awful, extreme,
violent, fetishistic stories just for the sake of being gross. i am not sure what compelled me to march
through these, taking in one after another, but there was a clear drive to, certainly

i've wondered for a while if this all had a substantial negative effect on my childhood social
relationships in general, & whether that hindrance of engagement might carry into problems today

with parents, for instance: setting aside what insufficiences they might display as parents, there is still a tendency to
unfetteredly view those people as guardians, within the unaffected system of reasoning that one operates on as a child

if you read something like that, there is a kind of transition from that, to... well, a lot of disturbing physical potentialities
now exist in your head. potentialities which aren't realized, which never come within a hundred miles of being realized,
& which you don't anticipate ever being realized. but things can be conceived of that could not have been prior.
& something is just different because of that, i guess. nothing happens happens, but there is something about
e.g. confronting incest taboos at such a young age, with such graphic presentation, on one's own

once your head contains the prosaically-described template of, i don't know, (to whip up a genuinely tame example here), someone
sodomizing a cat's eye or something, you can envision anyone you interact with doing that. maybe without even feeling particularly
inclined to put it out of mind, because you don't sufficiently regard it as totally hideous, because it's too early in life to fit into
a framework that establishes it as hideous. it's just there. & it's not like you go around envisioning this stuff all the
time, but, an upbringing where it's possible to just seems decisively different from one where it's not at all

april 1st

there's a slant in my bangs that seems to stay there no matter how many times i try to gently trim them to be level.
often i can see the slant in my webcam preview, but not in my mirror. every time i trim them, i cease to see
the slant for several minutes, then it reappears. i can't keep going at this without making them shorter
& shorter. i just want relief. it's all i've been thinking about for at least half an hour

april 7th

if you're capable of feeling awed & delighted by the human capacities for love & creativity, i
implore you to cherish that feeling. i would desperately like to feel it, but my capacity to
feel it seems completely gummed up with irremediable overthought & learned detachment

i think there are lots of people who have been subsumed by cynicism, & i think an aspect of being subsumed
by cynicism is that one no longer feels that feeling, nor do they care anymore whether they feel it. i don't
think i am subsumed by cynicism. i see the feeling as an intense necessity, something unspeakably
good & pure, & naturally that is why i feel so pained by my seeming incapacity to feel it

in my heart i feel like the most hypothetically awestruck person you'll ever
ever see, only perversely non-awestruck in reality, manifesting as a
baffling inversion of myself. somehow, somehow, i feel nothing

april 16th

i don't make sense

i don't mean that my expressions are necessarily incoherent, but that as a human being i just feel that i don't make
any sense. my life has not been populated with enough contextualizing events for me to make any sense. my
evolution as a social being across most of my lifespan now has been a kind of autodidactic evolution of habits
in my usage of computers, & i guess insular wrestling with various philosophical positions hardly rooted in
any surrounding life context that would provide a context & meaning to the engagement with them

i have generally been alone for a very long time. i feel as if, whenever i do miraculously find myself
in the company of people i'm really comfortable with, i clearly & immediately remember the
value of engaging with people, the natural delight of it that doesn't need any justification

but when i go back to being alone, i... it's like i still make efforts to socialize, but it's all so mediated that i'm not prone to
directly remember the motivation anymore, that fun which needs no justification or explanation. i follow it only like some
half-remembered general directive, as if on blind faith or out of habit. i don't know why i'm doing what i'm doing. i do
not want to become close to anyone for fear that they put their own emotional stake in, for instance, what i think
of them, & i find myself too internally insubstantial to report that state, or too unfamiliar with myself

i want to take my brain out of my skull & soak it in bleach for an hour or two, or zap it like frying
a hard drive. i feel a yearning to be "reset." i want to cancel out all of my "momentums" & let new
ones stochastically form & replace them, i want to demolish my paltry self which has coagulated so
awkwardly out of all sorts of detritus & let something else form from scratch in the blank space

i am tired of being supplied with means for being a public entity while i don't make any sense.
i want to be private. i want to live in private, wholly alone, like a hermit if need be, so that
all my momentums can rot away & something entirely alien can begin to grow in their place

the greatest thing, to an unspeakable degree, might be a human being as an animal which means no harm lying their head on a pillow
& listening to birdsong, accompanied unawares by the unconsciously recognized comfort of having no basis for being despised

without any guilty conscience to psychically fracture the simplicity of the moment into a root
system of tangled & anfractuous considerations. able to care & love without any sense of the
resulting positive self-perception necessarily being a product of cognitive dissonance
on some level - such a perverse abstract addition to that care & love

the protocol for a guilty conscience would be to cease, atone, then, if all others' resultant feelings dissolve, permission is granted
to ideally forget & to again be an unassuming animal who means no harm - like a thing who themselves possesses the same
existential flavor as the love they might express, or at least isn't too dissimilar. a thing whose mouth the words belong in

cessation is a problem when it becomes unclear what exactly to cease, when the line separating benign activity from abstract
transgressions in some sector of activity blurs to the extent that the edges seem to wrap around to meet each other,
all benign or benevolent acts simultaneously crimes, all crimes simultaneously benevolent or benign acts

what do you do? cease everything? radically remove yourself from a substantial amount of what you know, so
as to leave no chance of any trace of crime? burn down the entire stage on which any crime might occur?

a hole which you are dug deeper into each time a synapse in your brain fires, even if the synapse
firing is a fraction of a thought which might constitute a fraction of a line of reasoning
which might constitute a fraction of a potential plan for getting out of the hole

there was a time when i was a very very despondent teenager & viewed myself as a tragically thorough inversion of the
child i felt i had once been. i would frantically post things as on-the-nose-antithetical to my current principles as, like,
"innocence cannot conceivably exist," or a paragraph consisting only of a long string of words for negative conditions

in 2020 something clicked into place & i experienced a blissful period that even at the time i regarded as something like the
miraculous gift of an additional period of childhood, & in this time i feel that i sorted out all the confusion & despondency
i had felt before. i grew in touch with fair standards for my expression & for what i voluntarily expose myself to. i removed
the self-conscious mental blocks that had strictly kept me from embracing the principles i had longed to embrace for so
long. i had the very fundamental & pivotal realization of innocence being a continually inhabitable state, a behavior

now i am indisputably doing better than that teenage phase, but i do feel like i have significantly destabilized again relative
to that second childhood, like a far milder version of the profoundly nightmarish sense of destabilization i felt as a teen

i feel that i have not done that period justice. on the justification of its readily apparent
merits, it posed itself as something to live by, to honor, to keep in line with, to not see
disgraced by my subsequent living. i want to honor it, i really do, but i haven't

april 23rd

it sure does suck how every sardonic dismissal of another human being that has ever been expressed has been totally
invalid, regardless of context. cause sardonic dismissals are a really useful tool for quickly relieving the kind of
psychological pressure that can build up from others' rudeness or thoughtlessness. you can't actually validly
say them, though, due to every person being unavoidably being as specific, complex, & irreducible as any other,
no matter how rude, thoughtless, or shallow they may appear. so like, when a person is super super obnoxious,
you can't actually sardonically reduce them & move on so as to make peace with it, & have to just grapple
with it as an equally valid & complicated being expressing things on the exact same singular level of
expression as anything you yourself could ever say. even if it's sooooo annoying & weird & dumb! man,
that sucks. ohh man that'd be so easy if everyone could just be sardonic but we can't, darn!!! darn!!!

april 29th

i feel like i am currently in the dead of winter, spiritually, specifically as opposed to a spring. i am being kind of a social recluse
even in the online sphere. i feel uncreative & numbed in conversation even with the people closest to me. my conscience
feels burdened a lot & it dissociates me from the simplicity i could occupy if i didn't feel like i was doing or had done
anything wrong. i feel double-colonized by metastasized outgrowths of all that had colonized me prior. my internal
self-criticism has metamorphosed into the form of an imaginary discord server where people make fun of me

may 10th

i periodically come to feel that i am far too wrapped up in various concepts & that i should at last drop them all at
once & go back to- &, well, the thing is that i fail to recall what i was doing prior, whatever i meant to end the
sentence with. my present feels like something self-contained, something defined by momentum, of perpetual
reaction & attempts to rationalize, less an ongoing construction & more a snowball growing & becoming dirtier

i would like to drop all the concepts regardless. it's unclear how one even successfully drops a concept when they
can think about it at any time. carefully, i guess. find activities to redirect my thoughts. i wish i could stop thinking

if i could drop all the concepts, there might not be much in the
space left. i would have to give things time to grow & replace them

beneath it all, everything feels deeply confusing & isolating. i feel a chronic timidity or disinterest. i
can't pretend to be interested. feigned interest is a feigned life. but consequently i feel as if the closer
i become to anyone the more i produce a social tension stemming from my unexamined insularity.
& what better way to display that insularity than a blog post, something diffuse & near-unilateral?

the feeling of being only meant to observe feels unshakably deep. i can't expect to autodidactically become
ok when whichever present i'm living is like the slow ongoing growth of a stalactite which has never
stopped being generally composed of a staggering lack of company, of dialogue, of relation,
of growth, of anyone accessible in which to really see myself in in the slightest

not that i don't see obvious value in recognizing & witnessing the differences between people & myself but for as long as
i can remember people have tended to feel so completely inane & i don't know if the perception is owed more to them or me

may 18th

its time to dismantle the cognitive dissonance which enables me to: 1. see something worthwhile in searching out relatively
inaccessible albums to put on youtube, while: 2. literally having a freakout in my room for like five minutes last night
slapping at the sides of my head in impotent frustration over the very negative & depressing qualities that i tend
to automatically see in the television shows i have to be exposed to (&: 3. typing & publishing this)

may 20th

tonight i saw everything, everywhere, all at once. it had a very grand message about... taking a sense
of angst about the infinite potential paths in life, & inverting it into a sense that, because nothing in
life "matters," one can use that lack of real gravity as a lease to act freely & without trepidation

i thought it was a very nice movie. but i felt kind of sad as i left the theater. this was because...
well, i won't say the film's message was an altogether new sentiment for me, but it was an
emphatic display of it, & i had taken it in but noticed an incapacity to really internalize it

what i mean is that even at the end of this line of thinking about the freeing inconsequentiality
of life, i still did not feel any more open to doing such brazen things as approaching strangers
with social intent, or engaging in experimental dialogue with members of my family

i feel like where i divert from the protagonists is that they achieved the ability to push through that angst & make
it into a reason to freely act in line with the ways they had already felt prior. so they started out already feeling
more than i tend to feel about most anything, & just needed to free themselves to act on it. i, on the other
hand, seem to lack... a feeling of there being any stakes in the first place, even tiny little personal ones

may 28th

i don't need the people i live with to constantly perform for me & provide me with ostentatious expressions of meaning.
but there is a level of inoffensively passive meaninglessness that one can't be blamed for, & nearly everything they
do seems to exist beneath that level, where it all has a constant, invasive, putrid stench of active, committed
meaninglessness. if i were to immolate myself in the living room of this apartment in protest of the things
they commit themselves to, & if even a fraction of my fair standards lived somewhere dormant sleeping in
their heads, then one could hardly expect them to blame me. but i know they lack even those dormant fractions

june 7th

basically there was a point at which i finally un-repressed a lot of good characteristics inside of me, & in the
wake of that i had a period which was very blissful & sincere. i felt i had sporadically inverted from being
intensely bad to intensely good... or at least good in some measure, which was more than enough for me

as time went on, though, a separate mechanism arose which led me to re-repress a lot of it by convincing
me that what i saw as the measure of that period's goodness was in fact the measure of its badness. its
method of convincing me of this was very meticulously particular to the context. this new repression
felt fairly conscious, while the original repression had, i think, been mostly unconscious. with
this i intend to say that it was regrettably insured with conscious commitment

so now, today, although i have not reverted back to badness, i am nonetheless in a kind of burnt-out & diminishedly-sincere
place. i feel like what results if the person i seemed to bloom into before has various arbitrary swathes cut out of them.
i'm a product of a compulsive subtraction process. i'm something pockmarked with conspicuous omissions

for a concrete example: what spurred me to type this post was my rediscovery of an old screenshot of a chatlog where i
was unconcernedly using various mundane & fairly commonplace words that i now feel very reluctant to type anywhere

maybe now i'm sincere & during the good time i was just blinded to my own performance of reformation - drunk on the idea

june 15th

i wish my memory was worse, i wish so many minor trivial pieces of knowledge didn't
adhere to me permanently & say "you'll never act in sincere ignorance of this ever again"

june 16th

when people feel that they've wronged me i almost never care about the actual thing they did but i get annoyed all
the same because it places on me the obligation to convincingly perform my genuine forgiveness after they apologize

supererogatory

supererogatory prevention of climate change induced mass death vs. neutral almost-everything-else

june 21st

thinking "the world is killing me by being dead" over & over for weeks

july 1st

i constantly imagine things like if the guys who offered me a ride instead chased me down the street in their car & i had to flee
up the steps to the apartment & slam & lock the door shut & hide somewhere. or being held captive in an apartment & using a laser
pointer to blink s-o-s out the window all night while they slept. or how exactly i might negotiate for my life if my friend came back
into my room & held a gun to my head. or if some guys hanging around one guy's work truck in the apartment complex parking
lot abducted me in that truck and yanked all my teeth out with pliers & generally disfigured me & i became intensely avoidant
of mirrors out of not wanting to see it. these aren't even fearful paranoid thoughts they just happen

july 11th

"i'm sorry for being the nexus of your blameless existential entrapment"

(imagining this as a reply to "i want (need) you to be happy" where the "you" in question doesn't feel
like they can feasibly be happy. but there may be a variety of situations that the sentence could fit into)

july 12th

it's probably not a good way to think, but turning twenty-four soon has me thinking about things i had a greater
option to not think about in the past, like the idea of really beginning to lose youth & thus perhaps missing
the boat entirely with respect to a lot of "youthful," perhaps "youth-exclusive" experiences that i feel
i am lacking, that my entire thus-far-young existence revolves around yearning for, to some extent

july 13th

i need people with senses of humor around otherwise i completely forget that it's even possible to
approach situations with humor, it's like i'm prepared to accept at any moment, like a nervous dog,
that life has no inherent levity at all & that things have to be tense-shoulders constantly forever

- posts may continue to appear in this lacuna -

july 16th

it's not that family guy is some dramatic agonizing thing to think about it's just that i watched so much of it when
i was young that it rooted a million different potential cues in my internal monologue to start replaying scenes in
my head for no reason. & it's impossible for me to voluntarily remove from my head all the things i recall from
it & replace them with something like plants. which is a kind of helpless feeling. & it's a really cynical
& miserable show so it's a personal nexus of that helpless feeling of being unable to undo exposures

july 18th

to endlessly bitch about things like tv shows because they are dumb (things that any decently intelligent person can
already plainly acknowledge are dumb) out of an inability to just fill the world with anything better instead of bitching

Do you do this, reader? Maybe i do sometimes

july 19th

picture me smacking my head into a brick wall until i die over these people taking the sense of
wonder they're trying to describe & appropriating it into this homogeneous cutesy internet demeanor

instead of the simple, unspoken whatever-it'd-be in a life where people weren't constantly having that wonder
stripped off by the same endless mediation that these people are now using to try to aggressively staple it back on

picturrre a person smacking their head into a brick wall until they die after years of trying & failing
to feel the sense of wonder these people are describing because the person fails to understand that
they're viewing a flat cutesy internet demeanor instead of the unspoken whatever-it'd-be

july 20th

i've noticed a pattern where i kind of resent people who i notice saying things that feel similar to stuff that i say but in a more
"personable" way, what i regard as a more "pop" way (pejorative), & consequently receive greater social engagement with
what they've said, precisely because of qualities that i regard as "watered down" ...maybe a kind of negative way to think

i feel like i am acclimated to nothing. i feel like i do not have a general framework of experience that all
of my pastimes & pursuits are supposed to be fit into so that i can know what they mean, if not "overall"
then just humbly for myself. i feel like sooner or later i am going to fold over myself & be able to see
nothing but the things i am already accustomed to thinking about, no matter what direction i look in

in the back of my head, i think i've kind of been starting to view the creation of expressive & sincere
art as a kind of ethical requirement for myself rather than a supererogatory one, & naturally that
doesn't feel good for as long as the duration persists in which i am not making anything

i haven't seized the feeling & interrogated it until just now, while i am typing this. & upon interrogating it i think it's a stupid
conviction to develop since i could instead put the exact same pressure on myself except relative to pursuits that might uhh
like assist in feeding & sheltering other human beings instead of deciding what "should" go on a piece of paper or what
i "should" take a picture of. oh, but that's all too far beyond the shore so at that point it conveniently dries up

i feel like a succulent plant that needs one drop of water per year to live, like i do not need to ask so much of the world, only
some things that meet what i see as a benchmark decency, & the problem is that most of the cultural inlets that i compulsively
pay attention to are like some comically nightmarish as-bad-as-possible scenario like a completely parched earth where
space aliens are mining the entire planet away so they can build as many water-annihilating robots as possible

i will agree to negotiate with life only on the condition that it brings me to the guy who told me the story about raccoons one night
slightly two years ago, or someone of sufficiently similar temperament. that was one moment of decency that slipped through

i should spend time on omegle again. sometimes i think to myself, as a kind of half-joke, "nothing happens
until i go on omegle." obviously an overwhelming number of chats are completely disappointing but then
there are just a few that were genuinely kind of life-transfiguring, each in their own way

july 28th

i need to undo & refurbish so much inside of myself to feel connected to my immediate life & effectively kind

i feel like a jaded version of myself is standing behind me constantly

i also feel tasked with blowing on a marble to guide it through a maze where it can't touch the walls

i also feel like the very fabric of reality wants me to be the opposite of myself, like it hates me, like
the air might as well be the scratchy side of velcro conforming to me skintight & scratching constantly

if i conceive of everything as a terribly stacked struggle, i am setting myself up to lose it. i can't be kind
myself unless i believe again in a world that has an essential kindness persisting under all of its flaws

july 29th

two brief transient (certainly negative) feelings

i despise being socially adjacent to as many people as i am who incessantly make puerile shows
out of what particular social categories they see themselves in, or otherwise clap at that form
of expression. i despise the notion of socially regarding oneself in terms of categories to such
superfluous extents. i mostly ignore it all or otherwise hold myself together & present as
despising it less than i do. it's not like i would demand that anyone change themselves,
but i am meant to be somewhere else, i am just not sure where

i feel like i am going to claw my eyes out & carpet bomb a million cities & incinerate God if the whole social fabric
of reality as i see it at the moment doesn't open up just a tiny little gap in its apparent devotion to being absolutely
nothing like me, to diverging on some really fundamental point that turns every less fundamental thing beneath
into a mess. the first twenty words were playfully over-dramatic, imagine them being said by some kind of wimpy
bug-eyed creature who obviously could not do any of these things, as opposed to like, an alternative rock vocalist

i'm not settling on conceiving of myself as someone with a lot of hate inside me. but, if i do,
then i am also a thing that, on a different level from being full of hate, is very scared of &
opposed to the idea of it, & hardly willing to comprehend myself as something full of hate

in contrast, i imagine someone else who is full of hate but feels like some forms
of it are good, that there are sectors of life & society that they need to hate, & that it
needs to be a really significant part of their headspace. & i imagine this going badly

(there are obviously prickly political implications, where i am veering near a kind of ignorant "everyone come together in
#love" kind of mentality that ignores real antagonistic relationships in society. i guess i am trying to say something like:
"oppose what one needs to oppose, without it dominating your headspace to a point that it ruins you, makes you cynical.
take care of what you need to take care of & don't forget to try to love life again the second that it is feasible.")

(i am not trying to talk about politics, though, just my personal
conception of myself as either being or not being full of hate)

(whether i can walk down the walking trail on an iffy
day & successfully find nothing in sight to hate)

i said before that if i am full of hate i am at least still afraid of it. but what if i do not
even really feel so antithetical to it, as much as i just need to believe that that's how i am
inclined, so that i can feel okay about myself? what if i am something worse than a person
who recognizes their hate & justifies it: a person who is full of hate & refuses to even see it

i feel like i am on the verge of being a broken person because i have introduced too many concepts into
my head that i cannot voluntarily remove & which impede totally neutral & casual thought about anything

- posts may continue to appear in this lacuna -

august 2nd

i feel like over the course of a fair number of months now i've been getting some pretty bleak ideas about myself in
my head. what i must not do is let go of the belief that i can just turn it all off as long as i... internally direct myself
in the right way. i don't know. i spend a lot of time afraid that, to be a good version of myself that i enjoy being,
i have to be loving, & that... that necessary presence or absence of love in a person could be some kind
of concrete environmental aspect of them that they have a dubious degree of control over

i shouldn't let myself believe all of that though. because, even if i can't be sure how much control i really have, i can still
be sure that i'll have none if i believe i have none. i have to have hope. i want to believe that i am hypothetically loving

i don't feel like i have much of a framework in my life to demonstrate love, though. i hardly know
anyone. it's like i've always been trying to simulate personal growth in a little echo chamber

maybe saying i have no framework would be using my deficit of close associations as an excuse for refusing to
open my eyes & recognize the myriad potentials for being loving that are present in literally every instance
of contact with the rest of humanity, close or not. not every act of love has to be earthshaking

but what if i don't feel it? i want to feel what i'm doing. i don't want to just produce nice sentences with nothing actually
going on inside. maybe looking out for opportunities to materially benefit people would help. that would feel less disputable

woke up & my first conscious experience was a sound effect leaking quietly through my bedroom door. it was the metallic
sound that reality shows use in an astonishingly limp & shallow attempt to signal that there is supposed to be some kind
of tension to what's currently happening. it treats the viewer in an extremely infantile way. it is aggressively bleak

it sounds kind of like someone struck a metal object, then took just the latter half of the recording where it's
decaying, & had that half play backwards & then forwards so it kind of swells, then goes back to fizzing out

or like they took an iron bar & rubbed it against another really long iron bar

my immediate response to this was to compose a short tumblr post in my head. it was what i
would write if the sound had just made me so disgusted that i vomited on my bedroom floor

there was no sense at all of this potentially happening. it just represents a frequent tendency of
preemptively writing tumblr posts in my head where i recount outlandish things that could happen

i try to phrase them very realistically. if it's a super outlandish event, i think about how i'd get
that across in a way that gives it the emphasis it deserves, but in a "mild" way, without sounding
irritatingly hyped up about it, or dramatic, as if i'm "cashing in" an emotional lease to sound that way

after describing what had happened, i imagined typing something to this effect: "i'm a little embarrassed to even report it.
i feel like i am trying to look all naturally cool & smart by being so viscerally averse to dumb pandering tv stuff that
i literally threw up at a sound effect. it feels cartoonish. but it's just what happened, so i can only report it. i really
doubt that i would have been able to make myself do that just to describe it performatively on the internet"

i also said i was very relieved because it'd probably make it real easy for me to finally ask that everyone wear headphones.
i'd cite the fact that i'd had such an absurd physiological response, & act a bit flabbergasted, i.e. "yeah i really don't
know, it's just, i guess the sounds of the tv shows did get to me to the point that i threw up. it's absurd to me,
but as you can see i've been having these really negative responses & at this point it leaves me
very compelled to bring it up, hesitant as i usually am to try to impose restrictions"

august 3rd

i don't really conceive of things in terms of earnest spiritual
belief, but this is maybe the best i can put how i generally feel:

i am willing to believe that i still have a good soul. but i feel like my psychology, insofar as it is a product of my
actual physical brain responding to an ongoing physical lifetime, often feels like some terrible, cracked, acidic,
arachnid thing living behind my eyes, & my good soul, forced to spectate that psychology, feels totally unwilling
to accept that it can really be that way, no matter how sagging & colorless it feels from having to bear its presence

here i guess "soul," & the rest of me in contrast, function as a stand-in for different levels
on which i think about myself, which i don't know how to put into words in any better way

i guess it'd be easy to just say that there are parts of me that want to happy, & other parts of me
that hurt, & that both of those are encapsulated in my head, without need for referring to a soul
somewhere else. but it feels like there is some aspect of it all that that fails to do justice to

it's like i need to feel like the good, conscientious part of me is the real & self-contained section, that it is just me,
& i stand separately & only observe the badness from a distance. that i don't inhabit the same continuum of grey
matter as all the rest of it, open to being subsumed, corrupted by proliferation of negative thinking... that
i still have a sturdy positive agency, that i'm not like people who are completely & utterly resigned

i feel intensely distant, colorless, suspicious, & drained

all the alternative, detailed, substantiated goodness that could be in place of those feelings has such overwhelming
self-evident authority that it's insane to me - insane - that i have to report the bad feelings as the reality &
leave the overwhelming validity of the goodness as a bunch of hypothetical, implicit possibilities

it should all be as real as it'd be if i was honestly recounting feelings of wholeness & wellness. the only
framing it could ever deserve is realization, of being truthfully reported, but i can't do that unless it's
real, & it's not. i love it too much to report it as unrealized, too much to do that to it, but i have to

i should be cushioned in the fabric of reality like a big,
half-deflated air mattress, & unafraid of everyone in the bus
station, living in a palpable haze of assumed togetherness

one could imagine it all feeling worth dying over - that is,
if death wasn't even further from goodness' realization

august 6th

at some point in july i sort of gave in to frequently clicking the "ublock origin" icon at the top of my browser &
clicking a "power button" to temporarily deactivate it for tumblr & look at note counts. i have now, at the very
least, "unpinned" it so that it is hidden behind one extra menu & would take about two more clicks to access...
not super prohibitive, but hopefully enough to just draw a little more mindfulness about it out of me

i enjoy having tumblr as a place to describe things. but when i think about regressing to that behavior of posting & then
spending the first ten minutes or so, before anyone has clicked "like" on it yet, feeling agonizingly ostracized, as if there's
something really hideous about what i've typed that i'm incapable of seeing, completely inverting my mild excitement over
having found something to say into a totally unreasonable degree of confused frustration, just to then receive one like & have
the feelings instantly dissipate as if i'd undergone some immutable neurochemical change, having the absurdity of the
feelings thrown in my face at that moment, somehow never able to see through the conditioning after going
through the same process a million times, i really feel like i would rather kill myself

i do not think there would be any conditions under which i would kill myself, but it doesn't feel meaningful to put it in any less
intense terms. that dynamic emotionally ruled me to a fair extent for multiple years, & in those years i had such a one-to-one
relationship with thinking thoughts & incessantly blathering them here that it was basically undermining any validity i could
see in my own constant internal voice. i am never ever living like that again, like living as a lab rat being
constantly electrocuted instead of the actual developed human being i could be

lying in bed with hunger pangs thinking about a kind of petulant-teenager-esque notion of
committing to slowly & painfully starving myself to death in lieu of having to hear jimmy
kimmel's voice for the one minute that it would take to retrieve some kind of food item

august 7th

i need to perform an internal act of scrubbing a general emotional pall off of myself, but it doesn't work
unless it's "definitive" enough & i don't know what i need to do to make it "definitive enough." this is
a reprise of what i said a few weeks ago about needing a "reset point." i need a certain time, place,
or occurrence that i can stop & gather myself at. & something about that time or place or
occurrence will make me fully believe that it really is where & when i restore myself

august 10th

sometimes i meet new people & feel like i am coming off as interpersonally interesting, & they
respond in kind, but i wonder if i don't just have a large stockpile of accumulated expressions,
ones not so interpersonal per se but self-obsessed, with which to attempt to dazzle people

august 13th

my feeling is again utterly gaunt & distant & fatigued, & i don't know why. i persistently hold on to the belief that being
happy really is a very simple operation, that really i only interfere with it by constructing complex & strenuous unconscious
operations. i want to be happy. i have to clean off my bed & lie down for things to have at least a chance of improving

i want to stop being addicted to consigning my experience to an elsewhere. i want to feel like sharing my
thoughts & life with some other particular person is all i need. i want to let go of broadcasting. i want
an experience to be enough in itself, for things to feel real even in isolation. i don't know what to do

i would like to feel like it is spring of 2020. it's not productive to idolize a frozen past era over the endless
potential of now, but: if i were to take some span of time as a model, what other time could i conceivably
pick? but a person can't expect to hold onto the radical joy of borderline spiritual rebirth forever

so many things generally feel "too late" but i think one of my most crucial developments in 2020 was to
never believe without absolute certainty that anything is too late, so i shouldn't go believing it here

i think i feel like a horrible person

i'm not going to hold onto any illusions that my subjectivity isn't kind of essentially tarnished in a kind of, uhh
attachment disorder umm, autism uhh, uhh schizoid umm, umm "lived in isolation until isolated way of living
formed its own fossilized internal logic," "set-in-stone idiosyncrasy," "palpably afraid of a majority of
contemporary mainstream culture," uhh, something type way. i have found moments of real delight
out in nature with music & in making jokes to other people though, so i am not going to stop
trying to make the best of it at moments where conditions align for it to be feasible

thinking, maybe sometimes my motivation to describe periods of misery here is that it inversely suggests
the possible existence of a reader who is the antithesis of the misery, of someone who is shy but would
like to see me happy. & this isn't a call for someone to reach out & verify, since as far as the
exercise is concerned, enabling myself to ponder that hypothetical person is enough, & their
vagueness leaves room for the potential presence of all kinds of qualities i need to see
in someone. i can type something out & think, "'they' want me to be ok"

august 14th

conversation between two imaginary people

a: i feel like things are trending downwards. i can see it happening. but there is no one present to mitigate it

b: well, you, who have the greatest power to stop it, are in fact present for yourself constantly. you can't rely so heavily on others

a: there is no one present, for whom i could trend upwards

b: yes, but why do it for anyone else? i know that "no one cares" is not really an essential aspect of
your concern. your problem is that you, subjectively, in isolation, do not like the feeling of trending
downwards. & trending upwards would make you feel better. can't you do that for yourself?

a: i am watching a movie alone. there is no one present with whom i could establish a kind of decentered eusocial perspective - yes,
i am saddled with feeling my own emotions & cognition, but it is only when seen through that perspective that the kind of "narrative"
(that is the up & down trending of my social, emotional, & mental functioning) would acquire meaning. lacking this, i feel... in too
great of mental disarray to even think of how a plan back towards wellness might look. i am constantly engaging in my head with
an array of insular & abstract pseudo-social systems that i don't know how to disentangle from. my activities through which i
seek contentment feel at constant risk of subjective reduction to mere realtime representations of themselves. i feel like i can
operate only on a kind of internally consistent logic which formed in prolonged isolation & is now fossilized in place. i need
some kind of reformation that cleanses down to the bone. i am only twenty-four. where is this to keep going from here?

feeling a need to maintain a clear perception of the qualities of childhood & take them
as a model, but having a persistent fear that one may be forgetting &/or developing an
essential disparity from them... this is an everyday fear that can become commonplace

on the other hand, one could propose a truly disarming & un-monotonous fear, something which digs
in at the roots: a fear of coming to a realization that that initial aim of pursuing clear perception of
childhood or taking it as a model cannot even be said to meaningfully be their aim, that they've
developed an essential disparity from not the goal but even operating with it as a goal

slept but still filled with an anguished sense that no subjective experience of mine is going to exist in a kind of
immediate, uncompared, uninterrogated vacuum ever again & having a sick feeling in my stomach over it

august 22nd

i would like to feel glum about leaving somewhere, simply because i really like being there &
want to stay longer. i don't think i have felt that way in a very long time, the way i did when i
was maybe running wildly as a child at some outdoor event until it was suddenly time to go

today, when i want to stay somewhere, it's only out of a kind of aimless attachment tinged with
obligation, a sense that i should witness some room or intersection in solitude for hours just
for that experience. or just wanting to stay with something familiar. something like that. today
i feel kind of resigned to an endless figurative subway ride between places i don't hate being at

maybe i feel desires to stay places at least every once in a while but i force them out of
feeling? i don't like trying to push anything, everyone else & every other procedure
gets right of way, gets authority, my presence can feel looming, skulking

august 24th

pretty sure my bangs have slowly developed incomprehensible structural problems that i cannot get a grasp of
topologically no matter how long i stare at them. & they are just not going to typically look normal no matter
what i do to them. the left side will always look strange or something like that. i imagine this persisting
indefinitely from here on out, unless i see a hair stylist at some point. the solution is probably some
kind of highly radical hair cutting that i could easily mess up if i did not plan it right. oh well

i haven't gotten a haircut in four years

august 28th

when i walk or otherwise travel somewhere, just for the sake of it, there is often a feeling that what
i'm doing is, in being a product of my own isolated & aimless agency, inferior to a sort of infallible
"canonicity" that seemed to characterize outings when i was young, when i was always just being
shepherded into vehicles to be transported here & there without any prior consultation

one could imagine, then, that i am very open to people's suggestions to go places & to
do things, since i only need to relax & let the other person's idea play out around me.
but the irony is that i can often feel very defensive & stingy about my free time

september 4th

on friday, during my walk home, i happened to have to follow along behind someone whose route overlapped with
mine for a significant distance. for a while they were joined by a friend, but at a certain junction they separated

past that junction, i felt, truly, like it was my honest subjective condition that i was consciously & maliciously following
them. now, this was not actually the case. the idea of maliciously following them had absolutely no bearing on my intent, my
desire, my demeanor, or my imminent behavior. i am not saying that it was my condition, i am saying that it felt like it was

it was like some non-dominant sliver of my mind was, for all intents & purposes, presenting itself as the mind
of a person maliciously following them. this should not be interpreted as a kind of repressed inclination,
which would seek to attain influence over my behavior, or anything like that. it is more like this:

there is a portion of my head that is mean to me, in that it will sort of paint over me with a subjective sense
of being something that i am not, a feeling intimately embedded within the general feeling of existing, like
a kind of forced internal roleplay. it is always plainly false, but it is still a kind of false tinge over my
very cognitive interior, & that is disarming. it does this simply because it wants me to feel intensely
uncomfortable, & afraid that the feeling will erroneously show through my body language, etc.

september 6th

years ago i listened to an audio recording from a reddit post where a lady's sleep tracker app supposedly picked up
an unremembered exchange where she abruptly said "what are you doing?" & an unknown guy replied "nothing."
after listening to it, i couldn't sleep with the lights off in my room for a good number of months, for some reason.
i feel that it wasn't even fully the idea of an intrusion that caused it, because it was the particular intonation
with which she said "what are you doing?" that would replay in my head so much & fill me with sharp
dread. i kind of got it again just typing this out, like i just got a chill down my legs

september 9th

coherence is very important

until i was at least basically coherent, the measure of numerous goodnesses inside me was
continuously & tragically transmuted into the measure of my undirected, nihilistic misanthropy

a lot of things that make me feel ok about myself today, i feel that their seeds were also distinctly present through the
time when i feel i was a deranged cretin. they were there, but so filtered through isolated incoherence as to become
such a completely tortured, tortuous mess. it's disturbing, the perverse degree of inversion they were subject to

i feel that i basically lost about five to six years of personal development, that i should have been the
person i am now when i was around twenty. but i feel i had no real guidance or love, i was left to expose
myself to a cesspool, without a conceptual tool set with which to start understanding & untangling it all

when i observed my family & resentfully felt that all the culture they consumed & regurgitated felt
like witnessing some horrible, mutated, forgotten science experiment that'd been set off in a lab
forty years ago & then abandoned & left to fester without supervision in the dark, it could only
produce a sense of being a rat in a cage, formless disgust, simmering cynical anger

now what is essentially still that same feeling, only given shape & something to point it at (in the sense of
a weapon), feels like it's done so much good for me, cleansed me, helped me sort myself out, helped me
pry aggressively intrusive cultural detritus out from my skull & refocus on what i actually love

september 16th

i think i got banned from yik yak, because they didn't like me posting hypothetical people like clockwork. it was
kind of a bleak platform, but i could have put my best into it, supplied it with as much positivity & potential as i could have
managed, as i should do with any communicative medium. like when i posted about the caterpillars instead, or the good sandwich

no one ever has to spectate the jaded content immediately apparent on a platform & take it as the essential character of
that platform as a pure medium. everything always has infinite potential, to realize just in the hope that someone might
multiply it instead of apathetically nullifying it. it was a gateway of potentials that is now closed for me i guess

september 23rd

weird dissociative day wherein i wrote about six hundred words of sincere argumentation on Yik Yak. now
i am confessing that to all of you people on this website. i do not feel like i was a "chill" person today

basically i shared a brief video of myself & this single handedly turned
the app into a strange blizzard of intermittent "transphobia" all day

(i am at a point where i do not even want to type "transphobia" outside of quotation marks because even the
preliminary mental categories that these people have to establish in order to conceive of a "trans" which
they may then impose "transphobia" on feels so rotten from its base that it makes no sense at any point
past that, it's just densely contaminated with the fixedness of identity & so on (not that i can say this
globally applies to people who conceive of "trans" so as to occupy the category... it's complicated))

as usual, i tried as best as i could, though imperfectly i think, to come at all the interactions less in any
interest of catharsis & "owning" the person & more in the interest of tearing apart their statements in frank
& personable terms that i felt might constructively serve as positive counterexamples to anyone spectating,
rather than destructively serving as negative rebuttals that reveled in the self-evidence of their positions.
it feels important to me to always diminish the snappy zingers & clapbacks & to always try to speak
to something beyond the preconceptions that even the anti-bigoted people might bring to the table

& it was somewhat addicting to do this because it was so easy, i was sort of animated by the assumption
that the people i were dealing with were like... completely standard issue Missouri guys that do not even
exist on my radar most of the time & here they were completely failing to present like they even had
anything going on behind the eyes, just voids that i could contrastingly occupy with personality

now i've gone & written three hundred words about the six hundred words, which i could construe as even more
entanglement. writing is so easy though so how much commitment can it really suggest... weird dissociative day

september 24th

i worry so much. i think i am blind to just how much i worry from day to day, because i am over-familiar with it. if
i simply heard a guy in one of my classes who had a certain air say he was going to go home & chill, the phrasing
might give me some brief & highly presumptuous low-level worry that, to speak in fuzzy terms, he approaches his
time like something to eat, & maybe eating all his time causes him to not really love anything... or something
like that. i'm not trying to describe something rational or sensible here, in fact i'm disclosing a
remarkably fundamental quality in other people to go making kneejerk assumptions about

november 8th

i think recurringly about the idea of devaluation of a gesture or phrase through overuse or misapplication

i.e. "if i never say this phrase more than once a day, or week, or month, it might retain something that'd otherwise be
irrevocably disrupted if i had even one crazy day where i said it fifty times in a row... whereupon i could then go back
to only saying it once per day, but it wouldn't quite possess something that it did before, that it might have retained
if i had respected the ritual. there's just a kind of unforgiving mathematical logic that governs this"

it doesn't feel so much like a punitive thing, with a risk of consequences if i breach it, as much as something i just should
think about, because only by catching an opportunity for it early on could i build an expression into something a little
"extracurricular," "above & beyond," "supererogatory..." i don't want to just do the bare minimum to socially
function, i want to really exist, i want to develop jokes & familiarities & things & be thoughtful...

(big words from someone who can barely remember certain basic social reciprocities like asking someone how their day went too)

((i think i'm gonna get better about that... for a long time i never even thought about how people tend to ask about my day
with a give-&-take in mind, how they want to be heard too. i just thought about it like people ask me questions sometimes,
& i would answer them, & i didn't think much beyond that. it's not like i felt flattered about it & could get the empathic
inclination of letting them share in that feeling - how could i feel flattered by what felt like such a demanding
rush to drum up some kind of answer out of an immediate onset of blankness in my head?))

another similar thing is the idea that the first time i do any new action it transitions me irrevocably out of
a lifetime where i can truthfully claim to have never done that particular thing - for whatever that means

november 17th

bad habit of telling myself "there are ways of being positive that would be irresistible to me if {something} was
{something}, if {unknown noun} was {unknown adjective}. i wouldn't have to rein myself in or hold myself together
or keep myself in line just to escape habitual regression to unnoticed beliefs that this or that situation has no
beauty to see or is even bad, containing some 'harsh truth' that isn't really there. i wouldn't have to strain for
it. i will never be as intuitively positive as i would be if {unknown event} hadn't occurred or maybe if
something else had occurred or if i hadn't exposed myself to {something} or if i was just {something}"

highly mockable but real part of my brain that feels very grated by tumblr-esque tumblr people caring to the
particular extent that they are about that huge music archive that i posted. i don't like the "flavor" of their
caring as i perceive it, i think it reeks of appropriation of something into what is distinctly "content" as
opposed to just sharing something around. the linear progression of the post across four reblogs, ending
in a success & a hyperlink, plays into it i think. very glad about having coordinated it in any case

really if i think too hard about this i think i'm just going to start feeling revolted by it as a successful project for the
type of mundane social media process it ultimately fed into. so i'm going to try to forget about the issue. i think i am
distinctly only feeling this way because of lack of sleep, like i can feel the lack-of-sleep ghost with its particular
personality asking my fingers to move around & type this paragraph. here is the link again, as incorporated
into a post that is verbally fortified against this phenomenon & doesn't make me sick

november 25th

i need to fade out of existence & let {all the people on earth who are {willing to explore & enrich
themselves with thoughtful media & then talk in elaborate terms about their aesthetic preferences}
& who are {capable of remotely finding contentment with their life as encased in whatever
their body's sex is, regardless of whether or not they "identify" with it}} do their living

november 30th

suppose i killed myself if one more person used the internet to transmit an image that had no element of
visceral funniness but presented enough of a tepidly frivolous demeanor to function as social lubricant

- posts may continue to appear in this lacuna -

december 3rd

sometimes if i think back to "first time i ever {fill in the blank}" & it falls within a certain time period then
it just doesn't feel real or like it "counts" because all i see of myself in the memory is a weird golem who
does things for no reason whatsoever beyond trying to appear to respond coherently to external stimuli

december 6th

it's really hard to believe that there is anyone who doesn't find having hard numerical valuations assigned
to the thoughts they share practically suicide-inducing, like if it doesn't hurt then it feels impossible
that that indicates anything but a kind of tragic & inhumane accustoming to the inherent pain of it

i am going to kill myself if i do not uninstall the tumblr phone app so i better do that action

if a person doesn't see the absolute fundamental degradation of a thought when subjected to a numerical value assessment,
as happens through the default format of the website & as opposed to that thought existing in itself & for itself only,
then whatever, they're a corpse & i'm probably just not going to relate to them about anything & that's the fact of
the matter. obviously i have no authority to make anyone regard themselves in any particular way but i'm gonna go
on with it being my truth that they are a corpse. i need to see & know & feel that i'm not effectively alone
in acknowledging even just incredibly basic humane approaches to engaging with life & with oneself

something that tumblr had made me think a lot of times is "please god let it be the case that this wordy post was
just pretentious & that's why it got passed over, that people knew better than to humor it. i can handle that
embarrassment better than i can handle the situation where people actually failed to understand the basic
idea communicated. i just don't know, there's no baseline to interpret these things in relation to"

december 7th

it's like, i'll see a person having a friendly & supportive chat with someone about their star wars fanart or something, &
i think day-to-day friendliness is good, i have self-awareness, i am not going to pretend to privately hold some prescriptive
ideological justification for them to not have their chat but at the same time there's complicated mix of emotions where i
feel genuinely incapable of capitulating to & endorsing what feels like a mediocrity that only hurts us both & then because
of that incapability i envy the person chatting about it for their self-lease to be friendly, it's like being caught immobile
between these different opposing forces i can't ignore, & there's like the sense of inability to relate to the
artist which feels at once like snobbery inside me & a tragedy brought on by things beyond me

december 10th

i gotta take the stuff i've already been typing for like three years & start couching it in wendy williams esque
sentences so it can possess the air of humorous detachment necessary for it to get significant traction on this
website so that people can comment things (even with it being in its denigratedly more digestible state)
like "how did twenty thousand people understand this" or "none of these words are in the bible"

my self-conception frequently arrives back at "the stupidest person of the subset
of human beings which consists of myself & all people who are smarter than me"

december 13th

i am very sad because i need a nap. it would be easy to mistake the feeling for wanting to kill myself out of a sense of having
been actively made to feel really understood, even remotely, by no one on the planet practically every day that i have been alive
but that is not actually how i am feeling, it is just that i need a nap because i only slept about four & a half hours before class

okay i'm a lot happier with my friend, amazingly happier but i think i also need another "reset point." my birthday was
very amazing, how i made it a "reset point," the way i just turned all the nonsense off like a light & felt light & free
& simple & good, all by believing, on the basis of the ritualistic authentification of a day as a "reset point," that
i could just feel those ways. & it lasted such a nice while. i feel bad that it's only lasted four months, because
i was so grateful for it that i wanted to honor it by letting it last forever. now i need another one though.
maybe christmas or new year's day will suffice. those, if nothing presents itself earlier

december 14th

connecting with a very simple & blameless & true side of myself for a while before abruptly knocking into a memory of myself doing
something that might not be a huge deal but which proves to me that i have a convoluted ugliness inside me. getting a feeling of
painful emotional whiplash from this, naturally. feeling like i removed any right to simplicity from myself. feeling like the
convoluted ugliness bubbled up as a perverse product of the blamelessness & overrode it in kind of a heartbreaking way...
acknowledging that i have insights from the memory that make me different from when it happened but still being stuck
with it, it exemplifying a tangled ugliness that probably hasn't fundamentally changed, even if i have in various ways

i would hesitantly estimate that i have been psychologically jabbed by the notion that
i might be to some extent "evil" at least six hundred times over the past two years

december 16th

no one even cares about the song sleep type summer by betelmire
like genuinely, i mean, genuinely what am i even doing on tumblr?

no one else will actually understand the sense of crucial microscopic tragedy around this & moreover it is
six in the morning so there is no one even to stare in incomprehension at my expression of it. i have not
even sat up in bed yet & this is the kind of thing i am worrying about, i cannot remotely be doing this

i think i am not thinking very straight due to malnourishment from there being little in my house right now
except ramen noodles & microwave burritos & i keep shying away from eating at all out of the sense that
"eating that stuff will make me feel sluggish & bad" as if it could be any worse than eating nothing

i'll make it explicit here that i am kind of relapsing on intermittent exposure to tumblr notes

i am lying in bed right now trying to even find words for how much i dislike the experience of approaching
the platform with any degree of sincerity & having anything i share receive an impersonal numerical grading

it's kind of absolutely horrifying to me how, when there is a disparity between two adjacent & equally sincere thoughts, there
is no way to attribute that disparity to the reasoning of any particular person who liked one post & not the other. yet the
collective activity of those people does still yield an assignment of higher "value" by some measure, by criteria
that no one will ever understand. the fact that everyone is acting independently, with no stake in producing
that disparity, yields an indisputable reality that "this one accrues ten" & "this one accrues four," for
whatever it means, but there is in any case a grading to obsess over & no explanation to be sought

i find it so unforgivably _______ sickening that i feel like there is little mystery around why i always wanted to
kill myself in the mid to late 2010s. & just the idea that other people approach the website with a similar degree
of sincerity but are able to stomach it makes me kind of want to feel an othered & disgusted rage at
the alien architecture their brains must be running on to think that it's even remotely okay

on the positive side the sincerity of all this disgust reaffirms to me my salient identity of hating unnecessarily quantified mindsets

december 19th

it hurts my heart how i exist in a relative void of stimuli & ideas because even upon successfully identifying promising works
of art, or just people who i really like what they say & do, i lack the ability to just focus & keep up with it all. & i don't
fill the time with much else, either, not even less rewarding escapist media or anything like that. & i know, to some extent,
how much i'm missing, & this little lamentation about it all that i'm typing here can never ever make up for the diverse
specificity that would otherwise be filling the empty space... an album that i have only read the title of a hundred
times. all i've done since i was fifteen is collate, for a future that i never finally bring about

december 20th

i reflexively plan lots of sentences in my head that, on examining any particular one, i can trace
back to a general interpersonal style that i learned from someone with a kind of intensely grating
"cutthroat" character that i gladly, willfully distanced myself from. but it echoes on in my
mannerisms sometimes, & i don't know why it stuck so hard or how to root it out. i hate it

december 21st

a name or word that upon any encounter with it causes you to experience, for reasons you may not understand,
a kind of wordless mental tic approximately equivalent in meaning to the sentence "That's that name."

december 24th

"i'm nervous even saying stuff like 'focus on your true passions' because it makes the assumption that true passions actually
functionally exist under late stage capitalism, which they might, like i might be exaggerating in my head the total-ness
of the soul-suckingness. but if they don't then what i've said, 'follow your true passions,' has implications
that kind of make it just me echoing some smiling superficially wholesome apologetics

but then it's like, what, killing my joyfulness for my whole life on the .001% chance that it contributes at least
one atom to like, honest internal opposition to like the spiritual effects of capitalism? there's no escape"

if God reached down & said "i can verify that no one else on earth could at least understand this particular feeling" i would
absolutely consider killing myself, fortunately i know other people can understand it but the reason this mobile app is really
bad for me is that i share a feeling & then spend some indefinite period with the app convincingly telling me, "dozens if not
several hundred & maybe up to several thousand people did not understand that feeling." so i am uninstalling the app again
& going to stare out the bus window. it's horrifying how much scenery whirs by unrecoverably even just typing a scant
paragraph like this. phone usage in vehicles kind of makes everything feel fragmented into a bunch of teleportations

it's not like i am some super serious uber-genius who is "above entertainment" but i do not use my blog as a Tumblr Content Outlet,
& it has received a constant inflow for years of hundreds & hundreds of apathetic wretches who silently pay attention to it on
those terms, without actually connecting to anything i say. yet consistently they are always ready to just come out of the
woodwork on a moment's notice, on the off chance that anything there just happens by coincidence to come into alignment
with the standards that define the brands of Tumblr Posts which fit best in their stinking gaping mouths. just always
watching & waiting for some exception worth Reblogging. same for anyone who thinks they relate to whatever i generally
express there but is incapable of recognizing that they process it all in the same cartoonish terms that they treat
everything else with, just from a more "serious" angle... i generally shield myself from this phenomenon & don't
really care about it much of the time but sometimes it does just really drive me up the wall to think
about too hard. accruing any kind of "platform" seems to just drive home how goddamn hard it is to
actually feel seen by anyone, it illuminates how stacked the odds seem to really be. sorry

december 25th

joke

where did chica-go

elephino

the wholesome context behind me writing this down is me coming up with it in realtime on an air mattress in a room with a cat
tree; & a giant print of a stock photo of a forest on the wall; & a motivational poster that's just a tree & the word "CHANGE;"
& tiger posters from a calendar all over one corner of the room; & baby blue walls; & glow in the dark stars adhered all
over the ceiling, right before i sleep & laughing uncontrollably at how stupid it is & reaching for my phone to
write it out & my pal calling me "goofball" before turning off the light & shutting the door

i write this context out to demonstrate how by assigning numerical grades to everything by default this website can take traces
of benign memories & connote them as active "failures," as evaluated as "posts," & it can make the default experience of
using it kind of violating if i use it that way & do not practice the mindfulness to suppress feeling that way from it

cf. my other post yesterday about the internet disemboweling traces of humor that it can't
contain the full human context of. the actual silliness of this was never going to carry.
but it was never supposed to manifest for me in the first place whether it "carried"

whenever i use the tumblr mobile app it tends to cause an active downturn in my mental health that i often end
up also broadcasting in realtime. but it is something i can practice restraint about... i affirm here right
now that i will not reinstall the app anymore, & that if i feel a need to write anything while i am
out & about i will do it in discord & just move it over to tumblr later on. i do not need the
instant gratification of publishing things. & it will let me think on them more

i will note here that, although the mobile app issue is not a very healthy relationship to the site, things have still
been much much better than the time prior to when i discovered the possibility of hiding notes in a web browser,
which was essentially one of those ephemeral downturns in mental health but lasting for five consecutive years

- posts may continue to appear in this lacuna -

december 31st

humanity, to me, for at least this moment, until some external stimuli comes around to renew my optimism, is a skinny bald
white guy in his mid-twenties sitting in an ergonomic computer chair as he encounters a completely unmanned automated youtube
channel that uploads one thirty-second video of tv static each minute. he puckers his lips, furrows his eyebrows, & places his
thumb & index finger on his chin in a kind of exaggerated "thinking" gesture before smirking, opening one of the videos
in a new browser tab, & leaving a comment which reads, "Can't really make heads or tails of your procedure with this
channel here! Care to elaborate on what exactly it is that you're aiming for?" like some kind of neanderthal lashing
out at the undulating shadow of a tree against a fire, before closing the relevant browser tabs & moving onto
something else, quietly nursing in his head a kind of budding pseudo-excitement at the idea that even these
absolute barest scraps of less-than-presentable human intent may, upon further investigation, turn out
to be just the surface of a whole array of thrilling eccentricities exhibited by whomever he
would then term a "cryptid" & experience a vague sense of pride at "unearthing"