2021 - pt iii
here we start off somewhere around june 15th
wanting to have experiences & process them, file them, preserve what is needed, be like a sieve straining
all the incommunicably dense stimuli of the day-to-day into exactly what should best be taken from it,
collated, shared, incorporate reports of events into records & journals of only precisely what needs
to be there, catalog & sort thoughts, revisit, reevaluate, self-consume, juxtapose, crystallize
a statement of my anxieties that i find very obvious but have never plainly phrased in my head until today: my
preoccupation with not being remotely masculine might be excessive, but i think i am at least succeeding with
it. but all my introspection & personality development is happening in total social isolation. my anxiety is
that if i meaningfully breach into having face-to-face relationships, a whole different set of abstract
dynamics may emerge & catch me off guard. maybe i will unexpectedly fall into patterns
& routines, & effectively, at least by my judgment, become, function as, a man
once again, the self-injury of expressing anything about myself here through phrasing that's
any more abstract than like, my height in centimeters, despite knowing it's going to be
received as fucking gibberish as if no attempt can even be made. willing someone to burn
my house down if i don't go the next week without making any non-automated posts
^
i type this. then someone clicks a button. the entire sentiment vanishes from my head without
a trace. i can't overstate how absurd it has been to spend years impersonally witnessing my
psyche as it functions like a turing machine any time i go lax & misuse tumblr. truly, truly
skinner boxed to the most surreal degree. it's been happening too much lately. i really
need to generally regroup about it. ok. time to do things that are absolutely not tumblr
i have no idea what behavioral term this phenomenon would fall under. or maybe what
mental illness it would fall under. surely at its peak it could have been considered to be
a particular manifestation of... something. maybe if i play my cards right i can get it
registered as a special new mental illness of the online & have it named after me
i feel like a speck of dust in a breeze looking at a random smattering of its atoms & going
"well, it's very helpless & insignificant that these are being carried by a breeze, but
that's just acceptable & natural," then looking at the rest of them & going "but
it's not okay for these!!! how could i be so lax about these?!?!"
i stopped agonizingly overexposing myself on this site for a pretty long time, but now i keep doing it again.
again. is it just a lack of self discipline inside me? are there external factors making me more prone
to it? is my diet not so good lately, which makes me think less straight & slip into it more? is it
a slow fluctuation in my brain chemistry? i mean, i've gone on & on & on about how agonizing
i find it, so obviously my plain desire to not experience it isn't enough to actually prevent it.
what needs to change to make sure this stops happening? do i have to think the right thoughts that
jolt me back into being responsible, or do i have to change something about my environment, or both?
here is how absurd & pavlovian & visual my weird tumblr illness is:
i can post ten paragraphs, get no notes, & feel completely disgusting & hideous for how every single choice of
phrasing must surely & un-self-awarely expose some unspeakably disgusting or embarrassing quality about me
or i can post one sentence & get one like on it, then edit that post & write ten more paragraphs.
& i won't feel insecure about the paragraphs because the white rectangle is "vouched for,"
it's not about feeling validated for the actual dynamic content of the posts, it's just
this horrible irrational entanglement with the structure of the site
i also really hate the idea that this could create a drive in anyone to be scrolling & see i've
posted something & that it has zero notes & be like. okay i need to click this to disrupt alex's
weird illness. even though that totally could be happening & it totally could make me stop feeling
very bad. just a horrible dynamic that no one can ever reasonably be seen as complicit in, i mean,
there can be times when everyone who might happen to care about a given post is just asleep
thinking media outlets can compel people to act like cartoon characters & resenting that, also thinking
if i let the wrong attitudes or sentiments flow through me i can essentially be a media outlet that
can compel people to act like cartoon characters maybe even in one-on-one conversation
i hope no one can tell by me deleting posts & reposting them with revisions instead of just editing
them that i am being swallowed by internet-centric mentally ill emotions in the back of a coffee shop
christ almighty is it upsetting to use tumblr again. i seriously seriously need to put my foot down about it.
i guess the issue is that i've felt really confident about writing for the past week or two, brimming with
description constantly. so i want to share anything that might be worth sharing. & a lot of it has seemed
to be worth sharing, which encourages me, encourages me to traipse onto the inevitable land mine of
something that doesn't seem to have been worth sharing, & god do i feel humiliated & shunned every
single time. the acknowledgment feels so piercing & fickle, like i'm always hanging onto
acceptability by a thread. it's just as limbically taxing as ever, constantly striving
with earnest intent to express anything of any value & being jerked harshly
between perceptions of being rewarded or shunned
every time i stop in an air conditioned building to cool off, i wonder if the a/c creates a sufficiently dense
heat island around the building that i'll reaccumulate every drop of heat as i walk back out through that radius...
global warming, the idea of the planet becoming a closed system of heat, how there's no escape, once the heat is here
it "only" matters how it's distributed, how surface temperatures can climb to three hundred if everyone can have
magic sixty degree bubbles around their bodies. not really, obviously, & everything i just said is a barrage
of oversimplification, but you see the nightmarish trains of thought i'm gesturing at. it's on the
micro level, it's venting from the back of my refrigerator, it's here
during the camping trip meetup in 2019, while we were driving to a state park, a really silly-looking
old rusty jeep came barreling down the road in the wrong lane. we had to swerve to avoid it. E said
something like, "can you imagine if that stupid ass car just barreled around the corner & killed
us," & i started scream laughing, & went "ITS HORN GOES 'DUDDLA DUDDLA DA-DA-DA
DA-DA-DA DAA!!& IT CRASHES INTO US HEAD ON!! & WE'RE ALL JUST DEAD!!"
one night i have an episode where, again, i fucking hate tumblr. i know i'm getting into weird moods where i post
things then incessantly check them, expecting a number to appear long before anyone is likely to have read it.
i know the post could be acknowledged by the time i finish writing this! but i fucking despise it, because
every single drop of acknowledgment from the site is the result of me traipsing unknowingly into
some topic or demeanor that has like, mass appeal on a microscopic scale. that's the price for bare
acknowledgment, then the very next thing i say could zip me right back into seeming fundamentally
unrelatable, albeit exactly as sincere in whatever i'm saying. & it's all retracted in a snap!
& no one is facilitating this, no one is judging me, no one is trying to corral me towards
being a supplier of "accessible relatable content." the acknowledgment is performed
simply because i have published something they enjoy! that is a good thing in
a vacuum! it's a positive relationship! but the structure of the site makes
their innocent & independent support function as a carrot in
league with a stick. i fucking despise it
i hope i don't have some kind of complex as a result of this stuff when the
time comes for me to start really making real-life friends, god willing
the 2017 alex experience: "i overwhelmingly consider myself to have male privilege & despise
myself for this enough that i am going to see if i can offset it even a little bit by going
on omegle, where i 'pass,' & experiencing a very highly concentrated degree of
aggressive sexualization for like six hours or more every night"
i really worry sometimes that if i say & do the right things i might successfully serve as a good example
of avoiding pitfalls of internet-exposed identity formation but then one day i might totally & openly
fall for some totally garbage thing & consequently cause anyone else to think it's okay...
maybe this is just kind of a silly &, like, manichaean line of thought
during a car ride home, i wonder what it is exactly that always seems to separate me from the present
moment, make me feel detached, lost in my head, lost in the incessant context around myself, never
viscerally living. this feels like the only thing separating me from the blissful feeling of being a
child. i feel like there had to have been some violent shift demarcating childhood versus now.
i tried to identify what it was. i supposed it had to have been related to the internet
there was certainly a time around the age of sixteen when i allotted quite a lot of people telling
me i was a horrible, evil person, telling me to kill myself & the like. & i had essentially no
other social interaction in my life to offset this. i was anything but unaffected by it!
but i wasn't confident that this counted as a traumatic event or anything
i supposed it could have been several years of having been steeped in other people's relentless, contagious
cynicism, their puerile online cultural artifacts. i considered that this might have had some kind of soul-
scarring effect that i am still having to process. this during years of social isolation, & the alienated
feeling of identifying that although there were so many different, complex, multifaceted things being
said on the internet, they all seemed to have the same hideous currents under them which i couldn't
begin to articulate. i hadn't yet met anyone who could display to me just by existing that
everything, the "good" & the "bad," wasn't a big, shallow, pathetic joke
maybe it is a product of years of feeling steeped in performativity... a want to be good enough,
whether it's coming up with funny jokes for attention, or aesthetic cultivation, or feeling
intellectually responsible. maybe this is a source of constant stress & rumination
or maybe it all happened earlier than i am considering, maybe it really was just some inappropriate
sexual thing i was exposed to, maybe the feeling of demarcating my life into my presentation
to my family & my secret activity online at such a young age had some effect
i really can't handle being seen as gross or annoying in any way by anyone... it happens very
infrequently but if i am called out about either of these things i will immediately do everything in
my power to alleviate it. & if it's egregious enough i may overall feel like a red x instead of a green
check mark for a bit, like everything is very wrong & i could just blink out of existence...
the situation is like. i want to think normal real thoughts instead of absurd distorted thoughts that have nothing
to do with anything. & i feel like i live in a society actively devoted to forcing people to become fucking insane.
so like, it seems like my hand is forced, in that i'll succumb if i'm not devoted to untangling the effects of that,
like, being obligated to untangle those effects is part of the cruel victimization of there being active processes
devoted to making me & others insane. so there's this tension between either... doing that, or just throwing my hands
up & trying to do my best as whatever i am, taking, as a model, plenty of people i know who don't obsess over the
world actively trying to make them insane & untangling that, & while not obsessing over that also manage to not seem
like bad repugnant people. but i worry that if i throw my hands up i'll go crazy while willfully blind to my going crazy
what if in the middle of a conversation with someone you're just getting to know, they say something that you
quickly run speculative diagnostics on in your head & you decide to just fling both parties into uncharted
territory by confidently going "no. we have to quickly define & abolish this particular interpersonal
dynamic before it becomes a problem. other people might overlook it, but i'm deciding
not to." that'd be so crazy. that's just something a person could really do
my relationship to vaporwave felt very weird & pure. like, sort of growing up with this, listening to it in ninth grade,
having it be part of what music is for me, what i'm acclimated to, not needing more than these little loops & vignettes,
being familiar with the personality of each one & that's the experience of an album. listening to a track like this
& thinking "ok, that audio is what 'Information' is. 'Information' can't be anything but that audio. i can build
meaning from that juxtaposition in a vacuum." & not being like "oh repurposed samples" or "capitalism" or
"irony" or whatever its just new dreams ltd by laserdisc visions... it's all completely diluted now, of course,
it's largely just an incredibly stupid internet thing to me now. i could've interpreted any music so purely
but i landed on... vaporwave, just an adolescence of having my brain basically filled with
garbage masterminded by internet music journalists
i'll have this whole nice rational line of thought like "ok if i'm gonna be feminine i shouldn't be
compulsorily feminine because that's just standard suffering from the gender binary, & there is nothing
'authenticating' about it, it should always be a choice. so, i inherently kind of had to choose it, against
the grain of much of society, by virtue of being trans, but having it be a choice is something that
has already placed me in the most justifiable permutation of feminine expression," then i'll go
& spoil it by being a lunatic who is like "y- yeah, well!!! it just shoulda been compulsory
for a little while then i shoulda thought all that stuff!!!"
tell me not to pointlessly post this big risky half-baked paragraph on
tumblr about why i feel disconcerted when i see any of the queer flags
perhaps this would be an unwise move...
ok iwont do it
you can send it to me if you'd like.
i can't remember the last time i actually saw any queer flag & didn't feel explicitly revolted. i think it's because
i feel like an effect of being online is that pretty much any explicit identity signifier quickly becomes awful in
a majority of its usage, like they're just a privilege that can't endure on the internet. it's like. is this not just
the metadata that surrounds, that shapes, the particular experiences that actually make up the content of
who you are. why would you let a pre-decided icon of that take up even a single space that could be used
to actually define yourself better. the more of it i see someone adorned with the more it just reads like
ingroup signification to fill a void. even if someone's profile is like "i'm a goth," like, jeez, at least
that's still kind of a comparatively narrow aesthetic demarcation. not that i would have people just
stop using the flags if i had my way or whatever. because they have the actual counterbalancing
purpose of like. solidarity & visibility among disenfranchised people. i just think that positive
usage exists in spite of its inherently revolting nature. i mean. i am pretty sure elderly
conservative lawmaker men do not like me but regardless i will be six
feet under before i indulge in that stuff myself
i think it's probably not coincidental that the people who you see get the most into pride flags are the
same people you see getting heavy into astrology or fandom or whatever. that is, teenagers and young
adults with weak senses of self-identity. the notional purpose of the flags is class solidarity, but
that isn't how they're used online, really... like i feel like 90% of pride flag use online is
entirely within spaces that are already lgbt-friendly if not lgbt-dominated
yeah. thats actually the reason not to post it right there. its like. if i posted something railing against the
weak sense of self-identity communicated by astrology or fandom itd be like why am i humoring
this as something to rant about lol. & its ultimatelythe same people really i think
it's more upsetting in that there's a legitimate good cause behind the pride flags that doesn't exist
behind astrology or mbti types or anything. you get the same thing with political ideologies.
15 year olds describing themselves as hoxhaists or dengists or whatever
there has to be people who like never escape this into their twenties
"fandom mom" types. for lack of a better term or analogous concept. also the proliferation of increasingly
niche pride flags is absurd, and the dumb turf wars over them disrupts the point of expressing solidarity.
the rainbow flag is definitionally meant to be for and represent everyone. that's why it's a rainbow. but
it gets used or at least treated half the time by the sort of... pride flag-obsessed people. as meaning
just gay men. the "progress flag" which is the rainbow flag + trans colors + black + brown
is like. a copyrighted design by some guy who licenses it to target to make merch
omg when the sea levels rise... theyre gonna say its cause gay
people approrpriated gods message that hed never flood the world
they perverted it...
i think there's also a conceptual mismatch in that the rainbow pride flag is for people who are defined by what
they are not- that is, it's for the catchall category of people who are not straight, not cis, do not adhere to
heteronormative social expectations, etc. it doesn't express a positive identity, it expresses solidarity in the
face of oppression. whereas the neo-pride flags express positive identities. this isn't inherently negative,
but i think it means there's a problem in applying the concept of "pride flag" to both sorts of things
i think one of my most persistent fears is of being evaluated (by someone who really
knows what they're talking about) as someone whose overall behavior is just sort
of a manifestation of some malignant & understandable societal pattern
or as someone who is like, clearly trying their best to normally think, feel, & say things
but having it all consistently distorted by a distinct blind spot in my awareness, self-
awareness, or considerations, that's fairly identifiable to an outside observer
if a case can be made for me being either of these things then, unless i can then tear apart & subvert
whatever pattern it is inside of me that i've been made aware of, i won't really feel meaningfully human
i have a finite amount of time to be alive & so much love to potentially feel for the world.
what excuse is there to spend literally any time feeling like a bored restless empty irritable
schizo freak because i temporarily tipped my neurotransmitters out of wack by drinking
a stupid energy drink for no good reason? i truly really hate caffeine a lot
imagine this disclaimer above all my posts & the pages on this site: warning! nearly every day
i consider that maybe all i'm doing is my best to explore the extents to which a walking corpse
can convince itself that it's anything else! i cannot know how little i know! the things i type on
the internet sometimes, hoping maybe to make anything slightly better, may just be making
things slightly worse! this text may make you marginally more delusional about your
own existence if taken too seriously! proceed at your own risk! good luck!
a few weeks ago, when i bought a new phone charger, the girl there had a handheld reader that
she held out for me to place my debit card in, & i had to like... take the reader from her hand &
do it myself, specifically because on some level the action would have felt actively analogous
to, like. sex? the vague resemblance to sex was just very prominent in my mind & made
me really uncomfortable. i think there is something wrong with me
i don't know how to articulate my acquiring distaste for electronic music better than "it's cursed to
feel like a 'toy' no matter how good it is" or actually maybe something like "the appreciation of it
being perfectly quantized in a way that's sort of rigid & lifeless compared to live instrumentation,
yet still finding depth & emotionality there, still feels like it's celebrating that lifeless
aspect. i don't really want to be convinced to enjoy something that feels lifeless"
the second one is better but still only an approximation maybe
i get discomfited by card chip readers as transactional devices that feel a little bit physically
analogous to sex. i get scared that if i say the wrong benign things to perfectly sensible strangers
they'll think i want to kill them. these two things considered in isolation suggest to me that if my
stew of conditions that leaves me so socially isolated ever resolves it probably won't be without
professional intervention. it hurts to know how human i can actually be around the right,
but incredibly rare, people. how human i feel i almost never get to be
i try to value my experiences entirely for the sake of themselves & not, in the slightest, as sources
of numerically-expressed degrees of attention online. but i do make the mistake of wantonly sharing
things in the moment, in the interest of simply sharing them, thus unavoidably exposing myself to the
unavoidably toxic nature of how the primary method of engagement with whatever i share manifests
as a numerically-expressed degree of attention. sucks! sad that i can't engage in that form of
communication with all those nice people without driving nails into my head. oh well. this is
what relegating everything to monthly journals is for. i have to stop slipping on that
it's upsetting to look back & see, standing in my place, some rotten thing that barely feels like
a person. i don't dwell on it, i don't stew over it, i'm doing better, but why wasn't i a person?
i've relatively only just started being a person, & so it feels like surely i'll forever live on a
lag. aspects of personhood will be scrambled out of the ether in reaction to the alien thing
i was, not built on convictions i developed while young but still a person. it speaks to
a deep, years-persisting fear of having had something essential wrenched
out of me... oh well, the best time to plant a tree
oh, here is an anxious belief pertaining to my desire to be real, not fake: the drive to vigilantly
identify & reject absurd things only clears them out, creates empty space that still has to be filled
with something. that's where miraculous creativity & individuality comes in. rejecting things is an
asymptotic approach away from fakeness & towards realness, while never actually crossing the line
"do i have that spark?" or: "if everyone has that spark, but has it diluted, will i ever really undilute
my spark? i can't let myself believe i've already meaningfully undiluted it, surely i'm still living
in an onion of absurd delusions, probably an even thicker onion than everyone else"
when you like to listen to weird noises on occasion but the internet music stuff is in your head you
listen to them & go "I DONT THINK IM COOL FOR LISTENING TO THE NOISES I DONT THINK
IM COOL FOR LISTENING TO THE NOISES" eventually though you reestablish a normal relationship
with sounds instead of being literally insane & listen to the noises without thinking that
swivel from (feeling ok about social isolation (if i even bother thinking about it)) to (feeling like i am
decaying rotting in social isolation (& thinking about it a lot)), "ok i need to start thinking a better variety
of thoughts that are less self-serious. i need to think about the sorts of things i thought about when i
felt better, & in the sorts of tones with which i thought about them. assuming that anyone meaningfully
has control of the overall subject & tone of their thoughts. which i hope i do. otherwise what can i do!
otherwise i guess it's like i'm strapped into a little cart, moving on a rail past my own fluctuations
in attitude, having to passively watch them go by but also feeling them & having my whole
everything defined by them, being like a protagonist & an audience at the same time"
when i talk to any public-facing employee i imagine them like one synapse in a brain with
dementia... i assume the company is as dysfunctional as it could possibly be, just a horrible,
clattering, sparking thing & no one has any idea what the hell is going on. & i sympathize with
them accordingly & let myself be pleasantly surprised by however much they do end
up knowing... it is impossible to feel frustrated by anyone this way
if i had to describe what real, substantial guilt feels like:
the act is in the past, but i am still in a period where if i walk out in the early morning & watch
a very pretty sunrise, i am punitively disallowed from letting myself enjoy it. in fact, in acting
contrary to the goodness of something like that sunrise, i've removed myself from the class that
it is in. in that class, there is also plants & all the decent people who would still be permitted to
enjoy the sunrise. i feel temporarily exiled by all goodness in the world, booted out, standing
outside a locked door. behind the door is, not just the people who've done no wrong, all still
enjoying themselves, but love itself & nature itself & everything like that, personified, against
me, if even thinking of me. it is terrifying. on my side of the door, i do everything i typically
do day to day, & the humiliation is in the mundaneness of that, the absence of any drama to it
(i didn't type this because i am currently feeling real, substantial guilt. i just wanted to try to describe it)
a book store with no books at the front because the consolidation of what art is prone to have attention
paid to it is used really evilly. one long shelf at the back of the store & you walk across a bunch of empty
floor space to get to it. it also has a bunch of entrances along the opposite wall to make the distance one
walks to a given stretch of the shelf more equal so there's no incentive to have one's book placed around
the middle. or a big circular mechanical shelf taking up the whole middle of the store & it rotates
throughout the day. either at a constant slow rate or in intervals, ideally intervals with
a semi- random element so it's impossible to sync a particular section's proximity
to the entrance with the typical peak business hours
unrelated stream-of-consciousness paragraph: liquidity vs rigidity. cozy liquid slack lack of planning can seem
so virtuous natural normal. rigidity is routine order spreadsheet. or upward to schooling schedule or upward to
bureaucracy. i keep saying "order" is good but i need a better personal delineation of in what contexts it's
good. constructive vs destructive order + disorder. feelings of: order is good in the case of adherence to
a reasonable personal moral code. or making oneself not be unraveled by things & losing an identity etc.
& then destructive order can also reach into people's lives in millions of ways like little capillaries
of it little conditioned behaviors. self- vs other-imposed order or i think self-imposed order can be
destructive like a masochistic discipline or calculatedness. or an obsessive maintenance of something.
liquidity doesn't have to define my existence & make it sluglike aimless there just has to be times
of no plans nothing just whim improvisation. making this paragraph a white rectangle & putting
a number on it is what makes me dissociated. (& the resulting patterns of interest people
display as a consequence of it can feel really insufferable). my lists of albums sorted
by length might be comforts. they're also things i've put too much time into
to stop doing. maybe they make me dissociated too
i always want to minimize the visibility of brand logos in my room, as soon i'm done with
a bottle of soda etc. i'm like oh god this is my space this logo is contaminating my
space & my psychological relationship to my space get it out of here get out
when people call discord messages "posts" (or even channels "threads") i literally
feel like im in the crazy world. its clearly a chat client not a forum or a social media
posts are more instinctively discrete things than messages. they always have
their own rectangles. has this distinction really been lost in the today age...
alex trivia: i listened to Your Favorite Martian a lot around 2015 & 2016, it was like an
obsession. i didn't really like what i was hearing, but it didn't exactly feel ironic either.
i wasn't laughing with or at it. i didn't watch it in middle school or anything either, so
there was no nostalgia factor. there was just something strangely wrong with
me. i still remember every single song to this day. unfortunately
i should try pretending recorded music from the outside world doesn't exist & that producing
& recording music i want to hear is actually my only means of having music to listen to
on july 13th, i post this:
sweet people at odds with their conditioned-in shards of cynicism
i kind of feel like crap in the back of my head a lot of the time when i express anything like this that's
kind of, i guess sincere but humorless. or like, vague/humorless. even though i do it a lot anyway... like,
i imagine specifically the humorlessness coming off really miserable & stony & unlikable & there being
a general distaste for it even if the sentiment would be fine if i was just expressing it with any levity. but i
imagine no one ever outright expressing the distaste so i'm just floundering in embarrassing modes
of expression for years with no one like, knocking me out of it
it's like... i've been petrified of the adjective "self-serious" for years without ever remotely having a clear idea
of what falls in it or who dislikes it or how many people or how many are justified. but still having the feeling that
surely it's bad in some way. the most i ever feel made fun of about it is if someone uses it as a springboard for a joke
that's just an irreverent non sequitur where you can tell that what i said has an explicitly drab tone for anyone
who reads it, regardless of whether that's good or bad, cause otherwise the joke wouldn't work
non sequitur jokes like that always feel like they have "please stop voicing your thoughts like this, please keep
humor more at the forefront of your thoughts like i am doing with this reply" but in a package that is like.
fittingly not going to take itself seriously enough to be an imperative suggestion. i'm just supposed to
get it. it always feels a little sadistic on their part, like i've failed at something but it's not
worth it to the person to explain how, they just want me to know
post cool social-media-friendly content to have one's state of being alone in a bedroom illusorily obscured,
then post alienating contextless content (like visually harsh scans of text about albums no one cares about
(or four paragraphs about birth sex)) to have that reality emphasized through an absence of acknowledgment,
almost like a disciplinary measure emerging from the structure of the site to encourage its maintenance as
a host of engaging content. describe it in overly dry & technical words that makes people have their eyes
go out of focus & scroll past... or just have (& use & appreciate) actual social support, or
learn to tolerate (or appreciate) being alone in the bedroom
my appetite for escapist art feels really diminished i want something that threatens to alter me as a person
or if it's beautiful i want it to be done in the spirit of like reaffirmation that beauty exists even if it
doesn't appear to, just love for beauty or i need it to feel like it's actively keeping alive some proactive
attitude or virtue that might be in danger of totally falling out of people's consciousness, like it's
actively preserving something by existing & i want things that represent the real world & solemnly
offer no escape from the terror in it but might advocate for the beauty that could replace it
i know from rare experience that if i'm with a person i feel comfortable with i might skip around! & it's
not performative at all i'm just inclined to skip around! but i can't find anyone i feel able to become that
comfortable around. & just how much of an inversion from skipping around is my typical experience?
well, i've spent so much time torturing myself typing pretentious "paragraphs" on the "internet"
then regretting them! oh my god! just really think about how far from skipping around that is!
christ! oh my god! but i still really don't want to slip into thought patterns where i go
around thinking i have to be residually upset about this! i need to think, "anything
can always be okay." (sometimes it really can't), but if i don't believe that it
always can, then i'll miss a good deal of times that it can
it seems extremely common for people to have really beautifully simple & unentangled ways
of just processing the world around them moment to moment. in comparison, i feel like
i can't stop constantly dissecting & tearing everything apart in the most insufferable
& humorless voice, whether i externalize any of it or not
i can't just exist. i can't stop trying to theorize about things that don't need theorizing
about. i can't stop trying to identify subtle problems that might exist. i can't stop trying
to guess why other people have all the mannerisms that they do. i can't stop prying apart
the personalities of myself & others. i can't stop privately but pretentiously entertaining
theories about things that are beyond my possible scope of knowledge
i just kind of have to hope that everyone is like this, & that if there's anything wrong with me it's not
the way of thinking itself, just a confused relationship with the simplicity, the act of masking it
i think there is good in me but it feels totally encased & suffocated by what i metaphorically alluded to in a
post a while ago, the growing crystals of nonsensical thought going unchecked because i'm not talking to anyone
june 18th, the crystal metaphor
i'm now of the belief that the reason people can go crazy if they're too socially isolated is less that some
part of their brain atrophies from lack of stimulation & more that people constantly say things to which other
people immediately go "pfsh, what? that's dumb," & the person who said it goes, "oh, of course, you're right."
if there is no one around to go "pfsh, what? that's dumb," these thoughts go unchecked & harden & become logical
foundations for additional things to which people should also be saying "pfsh, what? that's dumb," &
the deluded thought patterns keep growing like a crystal in its own weird ecosystem
a thoughtful reply to the primary section
It doesn't sound like something terribly uncommon to me. I think it's something that happens
when you use your intellect as your primary vehicle to get through life, and you find many
things that are beyond the scope of the intellect in general, not even just your own intellect.
It hurts and it's really frustrating because the one thing that feels like it would truly help
is an intellectual way out, but there isn't one, so you have to find a state of mind that doesn't
negate your intellect but is more felt and expressed than reasoned. Often times when you do this
you get new intellectual insights anyway, or a fresh and more deeply felt version of your old ones.
it used to be that i'd walk through the woods & take a million photos of trees, each
indistinguishable from any other photo of a tree. & i'd share them. as a surrogate for
someone being there with me, distributing the surrogacy across many people, many of them
strangers. but to them, the photos were not supplemented with pleasant memories of all the
additional stimuli of the woods. they were only judged as photos. the indistinguishability
of a tree doesn't rob it of its enjoyability in person, but it can in a photo. now i don't
share them. but i still take them just to sate that feeling, sometimes
if my circumstances lead to me record so many things just to offset my feelings of loneliness,
it almost feels like the most dignified thing to do is to actually find wonderful things to see
& do, the most wonderful i can find, & actualize them, & not record a scrap of them, not
even tell anyone about them, maybe not even friends. if i can't steel myself to do that, if
i can't orient myself toward existing for myself in that way, then what's the point? it's
natural to want to recount to a friend what interesting things have happened with
you, but this just seems like that taken to a weird point of excess
seems like a big step to take though. for instance i told you ("you")
this instead of just thinking & internalizing it & trying to act on it
tumblr came into my life so early, & it feels so fully, fully embedded, primordial, self-
justifying, un-websitelike. years of momentum pulling me along. i don't like that. i spend
so much time feeling like i am doing something very wrong there. i wonder if i can even
grasp how severe & absurd my naturalization to it is. i wonder if i can even grasp
how far removed i am from the normal perspective needed to grasp the first thing
i can say stuff like "every internet meme is irredeemably demonic satanic" & if anyone disagrees
with me i can say well of course people on the internet will like that stuff, so youre on its side...
but im deciding im an outsider whos just talking on it & i hate all that stuff, its evil...
fearing that i'd be a better person if the internet hadn't forced into
my awareness really stupid languages to think about things with
i'm thinking of something as simple & normal as eating an apple, & how i might have conceived
of that action as a child, vs. the present state of having seen a wacky ironic "chad honeydew vs
virgin red delicious," & a million other pictures about a million little topics. & every meme
format eventually starts taking its humor from focusing on increasingly specific, petty, minute
things to talk about. where the joke is just that there is a meme about that thing at all. so
it's naturally always trying to fill out every single freaking tiny aspect of life
it's not that i think about "chad honeydew" every time i eat an apple but i sure did a few minutes ago,
spurring me to type this. i don't think i deserved that, i think it's really kind of harmful & people
who think it's normal or mundane are just naturalized to it. everything filtered through some weird
refraction of irony or anti-irony or, or, or. & did i even see that specific variant of the meme or
spontaneously make it up? they are all sentiments that you can spontaneously apply to anything.
it's like people don't even have to do the work of making the pictures
sometimes i think i'm keeping my interpersonal tolerance of it too high, that instead
i should just stop talking to people on the spot if they ever, ever show me anything
like this, even if i've known them for a long time... cynicism, too
it's good to feel horribly, crushingly disappointed by lots & lots & lots of things instead of letting them
acquire a sense of normality, where they still make me sad but in a more dulled, subtle way. if i do the latter
thing, i'm losing touch with the completely reasonable & undiluted standards i intuitively had when i was eight,
becoming accustomed to all the things that sickeningly contradict them, taking on the colors of my surroundings.
so much of what i need to know, i determined very quickly. i think most things are the polar opposites of what
they should be, & i should notice that, keep it fresh, have it impaling me through the chest every day
on the 29th, i can't stand to type, can't stand to look at my laptop monitor for another second, but
i have all these thoughts rolling around. so i decide to try speaking into the sound recorder app on
my phone. i enjoy it. i get a lot of spontaneous thoughts out in a very natural, comfortable way. but
i aim to share it, too, & i find that the audio file somehow got corrupted. this makes me hot in my
face. it hurts so bad. i spend a little while feeling like i'm going to die. then i type all
of this in a discord dm, ultimately trying to reconstruct it all as best as i can
-
i tried to record a replacement one & it just felt like a train wreck of trying to rotely
recapture the points of the first & imitate the spontaneity with which i arrived at them
it's going to ruin my day if i don't let go of it
i'm also thinking that i'd probably rather throw myself in front of a train than experience any
given second of looking at my laptop monitor or existing in the inhuman quantized space
of an instant messaging program or just a text field regardless of the program it's in
not that i actually feel a visceral urge to flee from either of those things. i just think that's how
i'd feel about those two things if i wasn't naturalized, blind to the inhumanity of my daily life,
like a pavlov dog that just stands there waiting to get shocked again. so i have to tell myself
i'd rather jump in front of a train than do either of these things. as a counterbalance
i don't like feeling like i have to cling to my own humanity & always reaffirm to myself
what traits make me feel human, otherwise i could slip away from my own humanity
entirely, do endless loops of actions that make me feel dissociated
i guess i am trying to recreate it all here. i guess i'll take a second to lie down in bed with my laptop so i'm
not slouched on a stool, typing under the duress of getting to reassume a comfortable position at the end
to remind myself of the value of natural hobbies that feel physically grounded in the space around me. people
might romanticize baking something or gardening. sorts of things that are good & i should cultivate in
myself an appreciation of them. but it hurts to seem like i am so far beyond them being natural
& i guess those things being representative of a human quality is ultimately me taking on an external
set of values but with so many cultural things being so morally ambiguous & confusing & screwed
it's almost like what is there but the appreciation of food & dancing, & to go on a walk. pure
i talked about how i was talking into my phone because i couldn't take looking at my laptop screen anymore,
i couldn't take the quantized space of text, i couldn't do it. i'd get out of bed & foolishly expose myself to
it. it's a classic condition of the time we live in, no one needs another rote description of it, i'm burdening
the listener with a description of it simply because i'm lacking the self-control to avoid it in my life
& i said that talking seemed more natural, i was going to say something about how my vocal cords seemed fleshy
& real & direct but then had to admit my fingers are fleshy & real too. but i could still conclude my voice
was more natural, because both body parts applied themselves to the structure of the english language but
the fingers were additionally mediated by striking the keys in such specific patterns. so talking is more
natural. talking into a recorder isn't really that different to a silent person in the same room
but back to before, i get out of bed & foolishly default to looking at my laptop. the condition which i call
"dissociation" as an uncertain shorthand but maybe "overstimulation" or neither begins to set in as if all
the sensible reptilian most human aspects of myself are rebelling to a degree that they peel away my
connection to my physical surroundings, make all the lights overwhelming to look at, cause me to
process the things in my visual field so little that it's like an abstract form of blindness
& more than being forced to stare at a bright light, they are confined, restricted to the
environment of a computer, which operates on binary logic & thus the basic atoms of every
experience you can have on a computer are inhuman right angles, the atoms are right angles
assembled into molecules of rectangles, assembled into programs. everything is inhuman &
square & quantized no matter how abstracted & obscured that can be at times. stilted, rigid
& not to speak of the cultural aspect... suffice to day, i go on tumblr & i look at pretty pictures,
& each is in a rectangle, & each has its own thing to say, each J key, it's all too much
but again: rote descriptions of the familiar conditions of the information age
& i thought about my dependency on the internet, how so many of the thoughts & feelings
i've had in life that seemed to matter most seemed to have come through the internet
lots of harmful & time-wasting & caustic & distorting things too, but
there were all those diamonds in the rough that had mattered the most
through the too-bright monitor, practically everything
& i thought about what thoughts & feelings & memories of my physical life had mattered
the most. & i didn't indulge tabulating them, listing them, but although i was sure
there were a lot of them, overall it just feels like there is no one & nothing here
no interest in speaking to my family, no one, there's nothing in this place for me. & i wondered
if there truly is a desert of people i'm capable of relating to, something that can be fairly said
to exist as much as any qualitative thing can, something i'm justified in acknowledging. or
if it's just a self-fulfilling prophecy, that i have let myself become closed
if i could let myself engage in invested conversation with any of even the most
seemingly unrelatable old crusty strange man, no preconceptions, i am engaging,
allowed to connect with anyone, real, vivacious, operative, bleeding
sometimes i wonder if i will waste away if i don't move to a different city someday. or if
i am closed inside & the condition will only follow me there, but if i open myself i will
be okay anywhere. or maybe i am closed inside but moving somewhere would rectify that
trying to think if there was anything else. i remember the word "unpretentious," in my desire to
capture whatever i can remember of what i said i am now aimlessly cycling back to my description
of my intolerance of existing in the space of a text field, i particularly said that i couldn't
handle the expenditure of structuring everything readably & unpretentiously
& i remember the word "rituals," i used that to describe what every molecular action taken on a computer
is, even if there are so many of them that they become smoothed out, start to feel unthinking & normal