2021 - pt iv
page six. this one was created on august third
cue dated entries
i'm doing a sweep of things that start back in mid-may, so note that numerous entries above
here may have come from any number of days among this new chronological section
may 13th
the park on the other side of town is the area that feels a little thrilling & alien for its relative
inaccessibility. if i lived near it instead, the places i live near now would be thrilling & alien.
i like to imagine that each place is augmented by the alien quality in a unique way, such that
everyone isn't surrounded by a distant ring of identical alien-ness, but each has their own roster
of alien places... such that even though people far away would have their own alien places (like
your house) & understand the quality, they couldn't know how exactly it affects the places near them
may 25th
may 27th
i've gone on about it time & time again but it sort of hurts how many weather circumstances there are
where as a child i might've just sat around & calmly listened to the rain but now i just overflow
with anxiety wondering if the rest of the day will pass without the tornado sirens going off
the best person i'll ever know of & the worst person i'll ever know of feel like different patterns in the
same tabula rasa. which makes me feel kind of fragile. i guess that's the problem with thinking of anyone
as a "good person" or "bad person" in the first place. literally no amount of good or bad actions ever
gives someone an essential trait of good or badness. there's only what they're doing in the present,
& the proportion of good to bad things they've done in the past, & the proportion of the bad things
they've accounted for, &/or been forgiven for. although it's fairly tempting to think bad people
could functionally exist as people who just haven't been forgiven for this or that
if there were no "good people" category, with nothing to do to be placed in it, but there were things
to be unforgiven for to be placed in a "bad people" category, i guess that would mean goodness is
a passive state of accumulating as many good acts as possible with no goals or thresholds. while
badness is a specific & active exclusion from goodness... well, whatever, it's more complicated
than that anyway. maybe a person could be bad by withholding deserved forgiveness!
may 28th
may 29th
may 31st
june 2nd
it's not so much the rudeness of what 4chan-y people say as much as it is the insolence of thinking
they're more "online" & "aware" & have some fundamental difference from like, thirty-five-year-old
redneck men. people who just caustically act as if they completely lack internal lives have no
business making themselves out to be all stratified & different from each other
it's about wanting life to feel bursting at the seams with human connection & having it shoved in my
face how many people are walking corpses instead. that's their entire offense. the words are secondary
across my lifetime i'm going to encounter 0.01% of humanity. 99.9% of the 0.01% (0.00999% of humanity at
large) is going to do its best to convince me that 99.9% of humanity at large is literally completely insane.
but it'll still only be a sample of 0.01% so i'll never know what is actually going on. this is why
it only seems more & more evident that 99.9% of humanity is completely insane yet
my head stubbornly insists that it'd be quirky & stupid to think that
june 6th
for all the time i've sat in the coffee shop, no one has ever sat down across from me & asked
how my day is going. & i'm not sitting there expecting them to! that'd be absurd. it just
illustrates that it's not a norm. but it's in my power to sit across from someone else. but
i don't know whether i'd be: 1. uncomfortably violating a social norm; 2. an absurd,
relieving, welcomed exception. surely it'd vary between people, but what are the rates?
& if it would violate a social norm, could that norm still be considered repulsively
isolating for everyone? where is the line between outgoing & aggressive, intrusive?
i really have no idea if/when i'm supposed to start feeling embarrassed about having never had a job.
i used to know this guy who seemed to base like ninety percent of his self worth on his being employed
& imposed that on everyone around him. he didn't seem that well adjusted about it. & you can make a case
like, screw it i might as well escape being exploited for as long as possible. but there's probably still
a valid opposite end of that. for instance, i'll be totally inexperienced should it come to pass that
i really really need a job. & i'm probably depriving myself of perspective too
june 13th
impulse to avoid being humorless vs. impulse to forever maintain straight-faced reverence
for the sentiment of a piece of art, never deciding it's passed some duration of
exposure where i can now treat it like a joke or meme or whatever
june 14th
wanting to comfort a person in a manner akin to a rodent giving another rodent indistinguishable
from itself a berry, but instead sometimes feeling burdened & paralyzed by identity, feeling like
i'm appending the action to the end of a lifelong queue of identity-constituting actions, having
it processed through some haughty & overcomplicated system that determines what exactly it
"means" socially in the special human way that i'm sure would be nice & socially stimulating
to read in a third-person novel about the same situation but aaahhh don't subject me to it
sort of anxious that my friendship with the person 170 miles away may just be petering out after
a week or so. maybe not, but i'm anxious that it's the case. i think i've been talking about myself
too much. i guess that would scan with so much of my talking being here, in this format. i have this
feeling hanging over me that's like if i drag myself to the rightmost .05% of the "encountering people"
bell curve, that's what waits there... a briefly exciting friendship that peters out is significantly
exceptional. meaningful friendship meanwhile waits in the rightmost .001%. it feels like
waiting one geological eon per tentative candidate of friendship
june 17th
ok, to reiterate: i think incessantly staging incredulous public reactions to absurd developments in
online culture can end up just slathering them all over you regardless of whether you've successfully
situated yourself above them in some clever way. in fact, people's incredulous processing of a thing
probably acts as the majority of its existence, far exceeding the actual thing everyone is supposedly
reacting to. it is like a feedback loop where every two reactions seems to count for another implied
million, exaggerating the attention that seems to be being paid to any thing. it is possible to simply
shut up & privately rationalize that a bunch of weirdness may be festering off somewhere
june 19th
i sort of think "i have to let myself experience at least some new music or literature or film every
day, or i am basically dead" but this doesn't consistently overcome my chronic avolition about
experiencing new media so i do spend a bunch of time thinking i am basically dead
june 20th
living in a way that's marked by explicit, abject opposition to ever coming off as threatening can never
be as authentic as just having a benign nature & occupying that nature without concerning oneself
about it. both are counter to the idea of being threatening but the former is defined by it
july 16th
sometimes confused & aimless thoughts & actions in the present seem to take on a more dignified appearance
once they're in the past. it's like once they're set in stone & offer no alternatives to exactly what they are,
they come to feel self-justifying. of course i went to that bar & stood around doing nothing that day. of
course i lied in bed & rolled around that one afternoon. it couldn't have been any other way now. the
actual moment could have been very freewheeling & ungraceful but now my hands are off, i can't go back
& bumble into a different decision, it's a comfortingly static story for me to analyze now. the pressure
of writing it in realtime is off of my shoulders. it's just something to have passively fed to me by my
memory now. it could have been a different story but it only could have been one. regardless of
the story chosen i am always left with one & can eventually take comfort in its fixedness
july 29th
what's deranged about tumblr is that. for example. i post an mp3 of recordings i did that morning. no one seems to care about
it. but then i infer, or at least assume, that it's not what i've shared overall that's uninteresting as much as it just being
mastered really quietly. & it might really be that, or it might not, but the point is that most people don't go out of
their way to provide particular feedback on things in that way. so even though the people seeing it are literally
just, peers who have decided they're kind of interested in what i share here, i end up playing this weird game
akin to the kind of speculative planning done by content creators or advertising agencies desperate to iron
out the right kinks based on very limited data. although, i only do this because, & i'm taking this
opportunity to reiterate this very explicitly here just as a display of humility: i care to an excessive
& entangled degree when i do things & share them there & no one seems to care about them.
so i post the volume-boosted mp3 & find out if i really cracked the code!!! or if i didn't
crack the code but someone ends up validating it anyway because this giant paragraph
ends up having the effect of badgering them into doing so. i- i don't want that!!!
don't you dare click the button unless you think the noises are
ashshdhfhifohfoshisohoi5
traveled three hundred seventy miles alone to iowa & spent five days with my friend but that was
way back at the start of the month, now i just keep feeling crazy again. plenty of new memories
to cherish but it goes to show, it doesn't matter how well a person's doing or what refreshing
experiences they've had lately, they'll probably start having problems once they go three weeks
without a single engaging face-to-face conversation with anyone. or maybe i'm only having
problems because i'm thoughtlessly internalizing that theory, maybe if i configure my
head right & lie next to my dog i can be in Heaven every second of every day
august 1st
too many things on the internet are there to be engaged with at the cost of forfeiting the dignity of just
admitting to oneself that they're alone in a room & trying to either change that or work with it... probably
not every single stream or parasocial thing or whatever but a lot of things. collectively conjuring up garbage
to limply care about just for the illusion of being in league with all the other people forcing responses to it
august 2nd
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagueness < the normal way to think about an article like this seems like:
ok, this is just vagueness, a property that no one really gets into life without gaining an
intuitive grasp of. & people are trying to describe it in a philosophical framework
sometimes i wonder if somewhere there is a reclusive eight year old reading this article, or ones like it, & having
their conception of something like vagueness go the opposite way where it's wikipedia knowledge that then
shows itself in life... like how what are anyone's political beliefs right now but a bunch of stuff from da online
love to be good at tumblr & also an insane person putting active effort into doing the
opposite of it, viscerally repulsed by the act of compulsorily "satisfying content wants."
like posting a thing & having someone reblog it who then has a hundred people reblog it
from them, & i keep that person unblocked so that the reblogs from them show up & i can
methodically tip tap type all the urls into my block list so that no one will bother me
because so many of david tibet's lyrics deal with fear of mortality, at least on an album like of
ruine, i have this inkling of a feeling, or at least used to have it, regardless it's something that's
returned to my thoughts a lot but i've never bothered to articulate it, it's that somehow because he's
in league with me as afraid of death & has "done the work" of accruing such a significant artistic
expression of it, it's kind of like as long as he is still alive i'll never die. & each day is another
day that i don't hear of him dying, & i extrapolate that indefinitely without thinking
much about it. like a temporary irrational mental shortcut to lean on. i know
eventually he will pass away & i'll be like, aw rats
if there's any reason to keep posting on tumblr it's to workshop bodies of text that i inevitably fling over
to the website instead. i got an e-mail a few days ago expressing infinite gratitude. that's the way it needs
to be! just keep putting my heart out without the expectation of immediate feedback, without even
a channel for it, until it finds anyone it should find. not tumblr, not that dopaminergic nightmare
august 3rd
my feelings lately are that there are plenty of things to enjoy about life, lots of plainly obvious things
to do that make me actually feel human & alive, but they are all coated in slick oil, constantly at risk
of slipping out of my awareness, making me in a colorless, dazed rat in a cage, & even if i were to scrawl
reminders across every surface in sight they would eventually become too familiar & lose their meaning.
how can it be so frighteningly easy to "relax" into a total inversion of anything good & real? every fiber
of my being should be screaming & pulling me towards the inversion of that inversion, it shouldn't
even be possible for me to be that way, it should be a way you couldn't pay me a billion dollars to
be. still, it was a nice temperature out today, & i sat on a bench, read a book, & watched cats
if i accidentally embody a cartoon representation of something, is anyone really liable to think i
am that thing? & would it be because they saw that absurd cartoon, or because the representation
is justified in having those characteristics? i.e. did the cartoon create the association out of
nothing or is it just exaggerating an association that really exists? if i breathe raggedly
will someone think i'm a pervert? why should there be breathing etiquette?
i think i can finally neutralize my "zero notes illness" in part by just taking the
indignation i feel, when it feels like seven thousand people are unanimously apathetic
about whatever i said, & direct it towards the people who do like a post too, since
they're the people enabling the situation, providing the contrasting reward
it's already been abundantly clear to me for years that tumblr mirrors the overall population
proportion of people who are completely insane so any given instance of being ignored
there is a badge of honor if anything, & anything happening to connect with
a given person who doesn't seem insane is just a cherry on top
typing there still makes me feel the opposite of human though, i feel human while i'm on the bench reading the book
but then i go back home & start jotting stuff down. my face is completely flat as i type & the plain whiteness of
the text post box hurts my eyes, & it's like a scary hypnotic state of being, where i have no body, my awareness
is fully contained in that space. i don't know what i'm trying to say anymore. i just start prattling on, feeling
kind of hopeful about maybe being able to tolerate the, site then quickly realize how painful it is.
i think in the mid-2010s as a mushy-brained child i acquired a condition of feeling terrifyingly
at home in feelings of inhumanity that no one should feel remotely at home in. bye
it's not that i come home & impulsively rattle off a bunch of stuff there, then slap myself out of it & go
back to what i was doing before, good as new. once i stop & walk away from my computer i lastingly feel less
lucid than i was before, part of me entangled with whatever it is that the site represents for me. yet i still have
a compulsion to express, expose myself there, it's so deeply naturalized. there's always the potential of being
able to put out something there that's percolated in me enough that it might help anyone, or i can at
least feel proud of it. & on the flip side there is the constant risk of overexposing & stressing
myself. i just want to be at a happy medium with respect to how i use the site, or stop
ultimately if people care about each other it's sort of vital that they converse with each other, so
i shouldn't dupe myself into thinking i reeeally have the continued support of people on tumblr who
are familiar but who i never really interact with. i mean, maybe they do like me & want the best for
me from a distance, yes, & maybe i feel the same, but i shouldn't slip into thinking that anything
means more than it does. a person i've never really spoken to is a person i've never really spoken to
you could define categories like...
people who don't care
people who do care some amount, as displayed by a persistent modicum of attention (people who are
familiar in the likes), but maybe not enough that they would ask how i'm doing if i ever stopped
persistently providing the information of how i'm doing without them having to initiate that social
exchange. they care to know if the knowledge is set out for them but won't seek it out. which is fine
people who do care more than that, who might ask how i'm doing but are perhaps too
nervous, & that prohibitive nervousness is enabled by me displaying how i am
doing anyway. if i stopped, maybe some would reach out & some wouldn't
august 8th
flopped haphazardly across the bed, jaw ajar, digging my eyes into a spot on the ceiling,
gravely & dramatically thinking "it's too late to be normal, all the critical structures in
my brain are already formed around typing stuff instead of talking & being normal"
august 10th
almost a comically absurd dynamic how i like typing thoughts on the internet & plenty of
people seem to like reading them but then also (here's the kicker) i don't like typing them
august 11th
lying in bed just staring at the ceiling because i watched a buzzfeed video that opened with
generic synthwave playing over a literal slideshow of dead bodies & i'm doing all this weird
hasty extrapolation in my head building a web of causation that starts at the video, passes all
sorts of similar media it may imply the existence of, & arrives at the lived circumstance where
i can sit & swipe left on tinder for an hour straight & nearly every person seems literally insane
august 13th
i think paying attention to philosophical writing can either help with thinking about things or actually do the
opposite, be hazardous, permanently gunk up the ability to think about stuff unimpededly because as a line of
thought approaches anything i heard about in a philosophical context i start to worry about who really owns
the thought & if i'm just idiotically trying to reinvent ideas because the perception of them being "influential"
makes the thoughts "cool" or something. it creates danger zones. i permanently lose the ability to know if i would
have ever thought a given thing unaffectedly. can i convergently arrive at some conclusion that is in some famous
book & have that not be special or anything. maybe it would only be because i consumed art that unspokenly had
the book somewhere in its inspirational lineage. i'm grateful for every thought i've ever had that is already in a book
that i've never heard of & thus have no idea. making areas of consideration seem kind of "special" by attributing
them to influential works of writing makes things feel all fraught & unequal. life sure is full of infohazards!
august 15th
the first thing clipping my wings is that my barest independent encroachment on anyone else's existence
makes me feel like a monster... i feel incapable of getting my "foot in the door" socially because... it's like how
you need job experience to get job experience. i feel like a freak approaching anyone i don't know, even
though that's how i get to know anyone thus making them feel more appropriate to approach
there is a clearly petulant quality to this, in that the lynchpin of it all is just an incredible discomfort
with reaching out. there is no practical hindrance, only my own neglect to confront the discomfort. & it's
like... well, the consequence of not confronting that discomfort is lifelong isolation, really. that's a pretty
major one. & i feel like... my not budging in the face of that consequence only goes to show
what an outright contemptible capacity i have for refusing to confront discomfort
i guess if there is any justification, it is that i'm gambling not just with my own discomfort
& embarrassment but that of others too. i just can't stand the thought of imposing myself
on anyone in any way without absolute unambiguous affirmation that they welcome it
you can imagine the broad implications of this, which have already been playing out for a long
time: thousands of realtime days of nothing in place of potential somethings, each day step-for-step
concurrent with each corresponding day of your own life, of your friends' lives, of my friends' lives
& none of this is even to speak of flinging myself into the social complexities that
harass even the most social people. i am so unacclimated, i feel i would have to start
from scratch, grasping at the most basic aspects of the endless, complex, relative language
the language of learning what quirks & customs a given person loves or hates, & why, &
whether they're "justified" in hating a given thing, of wondering if it's really their feeling or
a culturally ingrained judgment being expressed at my expense. the language of learning to
recognize & abide the most nuanced & situational dynamics, of having to suppress my over-
reaching private theories in favor of simply asking questions. without being nosy or strange
the language of having to decide for myself which social customs i believe are disgusting, & which ones
i believe are necessary compromises. the endless theorizing of customs & dynamics that may be having
dramatic effects without plainly showing themselves. wondering if emphatic social acceptance
can still be patronizing, or aimless in a certain intolerable way, or misguided, or harmful
the fear of slipping in the moment & playing a role, a caricature of myself with the things i
say, or following a pre-scripted way that it feels like the situation is "supposed" to play out
moral relativity. locking up, failing to find simple words. having to speak up when it's not easy to.
having to learn lessons painfully, embarrassingly. worrying about the moment-to-moment thoughts of
others. telling myself that anything i may ever consider saying might, just might not inherently be one
or many of any negative adjectives, might not get me chewed out, might not cause a dead silence
(& the corresponding self-defensive thought: "am i in the wrong or are these just weird morons?!
(or do i not even realize how incoherent i am, speaking with context that's only in my head...?)")
here they are: the sorts of things that fade into the background from over-familiarity. the most basic,
elementary, unconfronted anxieties that you might find in a relatable calarts animation on youtube
-
the second thing clipping my wings is one of two candidates
the first candidate is a stumbling, fractured, healing, wobbly attention span & capacity for consuming literature,
film, music, to invite what important insight & perspective i may be lucky enough to find, even in the face of the
absence of an articulated social life that might provide insights in more dynamic & concrete ways... & besides,
art is such a vast & deep collection of human perspective that it contains its own wealth of lessons that
will probably never emanate from the random happenstance of even the busiest social life
a lack of discipline in this respect
the second candidate is... maybe not my inadequacy in consuming art, but the idea of there being an inadequacy
in the first place. the second candidate is that frantic drive to consume, to strip mine acres of media, less taking
things as they come & more desperate for insight, meaning, to be taught, god forbid to "receive the answers"
as if there are any. a perception that i am lesser than a great many people, maybe lesser to
the degree that i'm really not even conscious, even if i feel conscious
it is a bit of a despicable automatic thought process, but i tend to positively compare myself to my brother.
i don't hate my brother, in fact he is a pretty nice guy, but he doesn't seem to care about anything, really.
he likes money, gambling, slot machines. he likes top ten videos about ancient aliens. he likes america's
funniest home videos-type things. he likes commercial, hyper-masculine heavy metal. i am not going to
try to coherently defend these value judgments, i am just being an elitist dickhead, i think. maybe it
doesn't have to be specifically about my brother, maybe you can generalize him as a representation
of some very apathetic & lethargic attitude that exists in others, & i can dislike that, not
him. i just hardly have anyone else in my life as basis for comparison
(although of course you could go off on tangents about all of these things trying to justify the
judgment in relation to them being weird fucking capitalist media that normalizes ranges
of thought & expression & wonder based on how well they perform etc. etc. etc.)
but here is my point: the situation is that, while i tend to view myself a good deal further along than him
on some nameless scale (which by the standard of the last italics i guess could be "psychological victimization"),
i consistently fear that i am just a midpoint on that scale, & any really decent person, of which there are so many,
is further along than me at the same ratio that i am further along than my brother, it not a greater ratio. i am
consistently afraid of not even realizing that by some fair standard of measure i may be like a walking corpse
i have been trying to remind myself to consider instead that maybe i just have
a different specialization from any given person that i happen to feel lesser than
not having a depressive birthday or anything, i just like to write
everything is relative yet the imagined humiliation of conducting or presenting myself in this-or-that, i guess,
undercooked way feels so real & grounded in something. & i guess each judgment is grounded in a set of values that
follow their own reasonably consistent internal logic, but then those sets are ultimately unmoored too. like, i'm
gonna try to reach for a moderately universal example here: wouldn't you think it's so silly & dumb to see an
audio post of mambo no. 5 with a million reaction gifs of people dancing under it? doesn't that feel real?? & then
you can drill down to all your special interests & fondnesses that are native to 2021, not 2012. it's all just insane
& this is basically me going "durr hurr everything is just subatomic particles we're just monkeys on a speck
of space dust fighitng over green pieces of paper!" (which, god, feels so groundedly repulsive but is still
only subjectively repulsive), but the feeling feels so fresh for me right now, using it as a frame around
my endless frantic desire for self-improvement toward some standard that i would like to be
truly true & good, sidestepping all pitfalls, but it's always drifting
do i have to just let go? let my psychology carry me along?
if everyone's perspective & awareness is like being in a slowly growing fish bowl, & it's impossible for me to
think anything real because my fish bowl is still a pathetically small one, i at least want to always be at the
threshold, biting & clawing at the advancing glass, like the border of the universe expanding into nothing,
hungry for every single new scrap of clarity or perspective instead of milling around in the center
i will spend months totally apathetic about the presence of a cardboard box in my room but be
filled with intense sadness as i go to throw it away & sometimes not be able to go through with it
august 16th
typing something is active on my part. then it just sits there & it being received by anyone is passive on my
part. i might put a bunch of consideration into something then forget about it nonetheless. there might be
a time that i'm lying in bed sort of catatonically while someone is reading a concentrated series of
things i typed, & i'm practically existing in their head more than i'm existing in my own
before i go on a date with someone i would have them smash a big rock on my head so
that my brain wouldn't work right & i would be able to emotionally experience the
experience instead of obsessively intellectualizing every aspect of it
august 19th
on tumblr, over the course of about half a day, i post thirty-two uncomposed
photographs of floors, corners, walls, shelves, stairwells, & the like. then this:
the swarm of photos was an expression of contempt for the idea of "presenting tailored or relatable content"
that i've been absurdly indulging for so long. so i incessantly took the blandest & most impulsive pictures
of wherever i happened to be & posted them just so i could sneer at & spit on any given numerically
expressed lack of interest. yes, you may have thought i was just posting a bunch of random pictures
but, characteristically, i have several paragraphs of explanatory text at the ready
you may be wondering "alex how can a person be faulted for not finding interest in photos you deliberately
took to be uninteresting." the answer is: i don't know, i guess there's something funny going on in my head
where i find nothing wrong with any one hypothetical person's lack of interest, but the unintentional collective
agreement manifesting about some things but not others makes me want to throw up. it just disappoints me
when an audience fails to contain a single exception to an apparent rule of interest, i guess
unsure where i place the irrational disgust: in myself, for unwisely presenting the opportunity for people
to accidentally suggest a hierarchy for my surroundings, suggest that, say, my stove is better than a
chair in a room somewhere, perverting those things; or in those people, for taking the opportunity
i guess it's also worth noting that this is all absurd to care about, & i know that,
so i am trying to violate the rituals i have around this website & take away
some of the power that sharing things here seems to hold over me
i typed this early in the morning & i'm just going to post it exactly as is later in the day. maybe i'm
actually in a bizarro world where every photo will receive an outpouring of enthusiasm or something,
& i will just look silly. maybe not even in spite of them being boring, but because of a rift between my
intent for them to be boring & how they're actually received. can't rule anything out... i typed this all while
kind of hangry, honestly, with no food in the apartment. this whole exercise may have just been a hangry impulse
this all could also be interpreted in an inverse way where at times i successfully adhere to a positive principle
of censoring myself unless i really have anything to say, & today was essentially just a big masochistic violation
of that. but maybe the lack of restraint ended up producing a photo someone particularly liked? competing reads:
impulsively good freedom vs the failure of letting my expression be overrun by ordinarily suppressed noise
- - - typing this later in the day: over time i just started finding it
really funny. in a simple way unrelated to these weird paragraphs
i've felt a strange internal contradiction where i honestly feel very repulsed by what feels like a strong
majority of people yet i'm deeply opposed to cynicism in myself, enough that it's hard to admit that
that repulsion is real. truthfully though i think probably i am distinctly very culturally
alienated, so the feeling is only fair, & i am just failing to acknowledge that
framing things in terms of a thinking/feeling dichotomy makes it easier to think about a persistent fear, the
fear is the idea of one day having some intimate interaction with a person, essentially a prompt to simply feel,
i believe, & then they will prompt me for an analysis or justification of it in a way that is logical to the point
of incongruence with the feeling-nature of it, & when i fail to do this it will somehow constitute "betraying"
or "using" them, they will be able to make a case for me having been evil. would it be true? surely some
logic is called for, but how far can it go? well, i would believe them regardless, i would assume i am
severely unsocialized & thus blundered into a far-too-sensitive realm i have no place
in, where it is far too easy to cause harm to people
august 20th
increasingly thinking about myself in these coherent "thought vs. feeling," "head strangling my heart
of its own malignant accord" terms, even romanticizing the thought of being permitted not to think
august 22nd
something (i'll say "american culture" as a placeholder) is constantly having twenty
different structures in your head that are essentially frogs at different stages
of being boiled to death slowly enough that they don't notice i think
august 21st
i think it would be nice if i cried more than once or twice a year. oh
well. maybe the rarity makes the cries special. or it doesn't, who knows
august 22nd
i feel anaesthetized, divorced from all impulse to seek or experience love
whether romantic or platonic, or to even cry about the previous condition
i don't feel constantly discomfited, but at the same time i'm not sure i can come up with any
scenarios i feel wholly comfortable with, even in my imagination. i think my imagination has
waned. it feels stopped up. all trains of thought seem to arrive back at sources of cognitive
dissonance or compromise. i feel very diluted, very contaminated by external ideas
i think long ago i ceased to really have any "comfort activities," which seem normal for
people to turn to. i don't feel pulled along by gravity-aided downhill motion toward comfort,
my motions feel like neurotic digging at everything around, digging at ideas, ruminating, tense,
feeling removed from myself, fearfully examining my identity & the like. it feels very easy
to forget what i like. i fear i could forget how to sleep comfortably, or how to feel
grounded for even a second per day. things tend not to feel casual
i don't envy people's lives cause i think if i swapped places with anyone i would just
stand & stare blankly instead of doing anything akin to whatever things would
constitute the role they play in their life as it is with them in that place
august 26th
having a rough day, i log onto a computer in the library intending to just indefinitely password
protect my blog, so that it won't show up in the sidebar view or anywhere, but i guess it's not
an option for a tumblr account's primary blog, for some reason. i am disappointed by this
august 28th
i love the two percent of statements of positivity on the internet that feel grounded in reality instead
of having an uncanny cloying quality like being psychically force fed lemon-scented window cleaner
i keep feeling like my heart is actually gnarling from endless
persistent disappointment. i hope it's really just lack of sleep
august 29th
on a depressive night, i post to tumblr: "the things you people proportionally fail to
find resonance in tell me all i need to know. i am a hundred percent disengaged"
august 30th
media access as a floating point instead of a binary? i.e. a binary of who is permitted to get their shot on
TV & Radio(!!!) & who isn't, vs. what proportion of attention a person is allotted by their follower
count. (really it's still a binary, wrt who can get sufficient access to internet-enabled devices.
so it's just far more inclusive, & individual cases of it are correspondingly devalued?)
i think a simple social media account can be seen as a responsibility! it's not so
casual. you have access at this very second, & putting out watered-down things
can reinforce overall watered-down-ness, & harm being done to everyone
it can only be a tool for making the world better insofar as the ideas available to transmit, or to inform what
is transmitted, are mature, consistent, pure! nuanced, which is contrary to the mob-rule-type thinking that the
structure of social media makes things trend toward. the greatly expanded ability to spread ideas counts for
nothing in & of itself. in fact, if an idea ostensibly meant to effect change is even capable of receiving
spread on social media, that may be a direct marker of it having been watered down & scrubbed of
nuance such that it has that mob appeal & thus can't really do anything worthwhile!
what concessions have to be made to initially allocate attention? for instance, i typed some absolutely
garbage jokes several years ago. now i have eight thousand people who opted in to read this post on tumblr
i haven't drank any water between waking up & typing any of this, if reading it made your stomach turn that's why
not that i think that's the best writing in the world or anything, but i feel with curious intensity as
if a very spiteful apathy is being generally directed at it. i post: "this is fucking insufferable"
then i post that this is another "i didn't even really give
anyone time to take interest in & read what i posted" thing
i think a phenomenon contributing to these feelings is that, on one hand, i'm rationally very disgusted
with social media, & on the other hand, i have these very explicitly irrational emotional flares of disgust
toward it. & since these both arrive at the same general place (disgust) it can be hard to separate them
i'm never remotely so frustrated with actual people. my perceptions just get really weird when i feel like i'm
in confrontation with the weird abstraction that is "the people reading." i just really really really feel like
"no one cares," that in some way i am just prompting anyone to care, not about me in particular, just to
care & in general people just won't. i've built up a particular character of the tumblr userbase in my
head that i feel like i am yelling at like a brick wall. it's like, like, like, like i'm a boomer
august 31st
sharing aspects of my life to the online so that people can collectively participate in the unintentional
but psychopathic act of arranging them into a hierarchy without any commentary or explanation
i have a mental illness produced specifically by the way that the information-age structure of tumblr
meshes with my mind, i will sit & think "you people make me want to puke, it would be awesome
if you were all dead," in the absence of any problem, in a setting where i could otherwise be feeling
calm & normal, & literally be thinking this at nobody, & know as i am thinking it that i am literally
thinking it at nobody. because the binary presence or absence of a number has been abstractly
shoved into the space in my head that's normally only used for regarding other people!
september 2nd
i think i had like 9999999999999 thoughts about my identity that i would've just skipped to
the end of if i had thought "i have nothing to do with the repulsive cartoon that ninety five
percent of life seems to be portraying itself as." or maybe i did think that & it just made
me feel really isolated & crazy. i was supposed to think it with the right tone maybe
the immeasurable indignity of having a fandom blogger convince
themselves that they relate to me as a fellow human being!!!
september 4th
ok, all of this was, for a couple seconds, a totally sincere feeling. then i stopped feeling it, & typed this all after
the fact, & the sentiments felt sort of performative & embarrassing. like i am trying to write one of those comics
where the aliens describe familiar things in naive & unfamiliar ways because it is quirky. but i'm giving myself
the benefit of the doubt, assuming all of it could become sincere again under the right circumstances
breathing!
one could read it in a very organically hideous way, like a wobbling gelatinous living
thing growing on the wall of a sewer tunnel, a twitching alien sea anemone pustule
that one function where the human body needs intake every second. i am always
sucking air in, cycling it through, my torso is always swelling & pulsating
if one were in a weird, negative mindset about the human body they could read it like i myself am not greedy for
air but my type of body happens to be, so i'm kind of undignifiedly compelled to play along & express that greed
through the rate at which i must breathe, just like everyone else, & there is sort of a grotesque tragedy to it
there is typically an automatic counterbalancing attitude of normalization of breathing,
people quickly grasp that they breathe constantly, & that everyone else does too,
& there is that equalizing quality of absolutely all people breathing
i'm never ever close enough with others to directly observe the fact that others are constantly
breathing, or for anyone else to observe my breathing, even though this is all known
if i were close to a person, while in the wrong mindset, i sometimes wonder if that lack of acclimation might lead
me to become self-conscious of my breathing, to read it in that hideous way, maybe theirs too, maybe i assume
we're both reading both of our breathing that way, we actively are being helplessly grotesque every second
i can one hundred percent see romanticizing it too, though, seeing it like a puppy & not
a pustule, imagine a wrecking ball theatrically destroying all the above paragraphs, the
person's breathing can be normalized, normal, an afterthought, calming, soothing, regular
in timing, utilized for communication, cute, cute for its biological quality even,
appreciable as an irrefutable mark of their presence, each one appreciated
as a minute continuation of their life, "i love you, breathe & live"
i feel like so much might have gotten torpedoed at whatever point early in my life i thought
"people breathe differently when they are sexually excited. so breathing is used as a means
of communication, not just for getting oxygen. if i randomly breathed like that by accident,
someone might think that. i have to breathe all the time for oxygen, though. uh oh!"
you ever like, really process that fox news & seth meyers & insidious status-quo-reinforcing memes & clickbait content
all actually exist beyond being things to make fun of & rationalize & move on from. & you get a feeling like uhh
"oh my god all of the political back-&-forth is literally just playing out in this incredibly autonomous nihilistic
way between the most pig-brained propaganda-addled people with zero stakes in anything & i am simply hoping
the enormous juggernaut that it is randomly tilts in the direction that is to the favor of the narrow stratum
of people that i really honestly have any concern for the safety & comfort of, like concern that is
there for everyone else but only on the basis of a blanket disapproval of human suffering"
oh my god oh my god some of the funny screenshots of horny men saying dumb funny things
in chat apps might not be entirely falsified self-contained narratives playing out in little
pocket universes, some of the people involved in them might actually go outside of their
houses after they send the funny messages & vote on policies oh no oh no oh my god
might be good if everyone alive started living as if it would immediately cause the world to end if they ever
accepted anything less than [complete & total individuality (note "individuality" not "individualism")
without compromise] even once in any context. or it wouldn't be good! i dont know anything
september 5th
one way that i've never articulated it before is that i'll post something i love & upon seeing the lack of response
i'll start feeling this internal exaggeration of how much i think it reflects the overall population proportion of
what people will think about it, & i will get a genuine sense of dread & start thinking stuff like "if people on
average will look at something like this painting of a cat dancing with a mouse & feel nothing then no one is
even worth my time, like what even is there in the world for me to fight for, this is pointless, being in
a world where everyone is like this is just hell." alex has a complex around alienation!
misery.png
a discord server for my college sprang into existence & it's got me thinking about how i'd probably be thinking about killing
myself every day if i hadn't made a discord server in 2019 & stochastically attracted people to it. also if a guy hadn't messaged
me in tumblr dms that year. if i was still having to rationalize being stuck with. like. people. & having no one beyond this, no
sight of anyone beyond this even existing. or, if you dial it back to 2016 / 2017, having to rationalize that it's either being
stuck with these people or largely settling for the company of some 4chan-brain freaks, unfettered acceptance of
their qualities as "at least these are the real people," human brain in battery acid time lapse
september 9th
drags the persona i've unwittingly accumulated as a mosaic of all the disconnected "serious ruminations" i've
posted on tumblr (all sharing the bias of having forms, & patterns, of thought & expression that have over
time become associated with the act of composing a tumblr post), & for which a clear image of it exists
for others but remains outside my own perception, out behind a shed & blows its head off
i've been in a psychological backslide for like a month, i feel. it's very scary, i'm not sure what
to attribute it to, i hope greatly greatly greatly to disrupt it, like the world depends on it,
like disgracing the earnest jollity i tended to express months ago is near-unforgivable
i'm starting to have worrying suspicions about the temperatures where i live. i think
i need to acknowledge that the weather here is just miserable. it's either too hot
or too cold to just walk around casually, except for a tolerable month or two
& in those tolerable months i go outside & simply walk around without melting or freezing, & i need that so badly that...
it's like i am suddenly amazed at how attractive life is!! i bring that feeling home with me. & i don't attribute it to the
weather but to nebulous fluctuations inside me, or a lifestyle change i have more control over than the weather
& the months pass, into the intolerable majority. i go back to weeks & weeks
in this cube, destined by that condition to start feeling miserable & unstable
& horrible. & the whole time i'm still holding in my head that mysterious
"rightness" that i should be striving for, failing to acknowledge what a
fated material minority that "rightness" is, how painful this climate is
maybe i'm wrong, maybe it's a lack of sunlight. maybe it's because i stopped
eating cereal for breakfast every day. it's all so hard to keep up with
i feel i am now failing badly to live up to... a mode that is deeply for
my own sake & one that i have demonstrated myself to be capable of
september 12th
i should probably talk to actual people about thoughts that i have, instead of publishing them & opening myself up to
a maddening lack of affirmation that i didn't just publicly humiliate myself through some totally blind expression of
naivety or failure to just carry a line of reasoning through to its conclusion, all of this happening because i am living
as some freakish inversion that treats public representation of myself as something very frequent & unthinking as
opposed to exceptional & only done when it seems like there is a definite reason to, that mode of living being what
opens me up to the perceived experience of "public humiliation" (something that people generally do not have to
deal with that often, if at all & especially not with regularity) in the first place. don't you think that's a correct
& rational assertion? woo hoo! i did it! i'm almost positive that this one isn't public humiliation!
i guess what's always gnawing at me is just an endless want to know what exactly i'm doing, even, with all this
accumulated online expression, & whether it's tasteful or distasteful in the end, overall, something that instills
appreciation or secondhand embarrassment. which is a futile want, since it assumes "the readers" can just be
a monolith & give me some kind of concise, final verdict. as if even that verdict wouldn't still be subjective
i mean, to be fair, even if they can't be a monolith, i'm sure there are still reasonably strong currents
of possible opinion & interpretation, & those are kind of what i'm afraid of embarrassing myself in
relation to. but still. ultimately those don't have to mean any more to me than... if there were
no currents & every single person was just completely different from everyone else
the reality is just that it can be kind of a maddening & unmoored & exposing mode of
living to put myself through, & no one else can really tell me anything about it for certain
september 13th
i constantly want to simultaneously work on my website, listen to music for my own consumption, listen to music
for ritualistic review before sharing it on youtube, collect more music for eventual listening, read in-progress
books, replenish my tumblr queue back to the maximum of 300 with "albums i like" songs, try to learn about
philosophy, perform top secret duties, read bookmarked wikipedia pages, think about what i want to do
in the future for the radio show, do miscellaneous classwork... well, at least i'm engaged
september 14th
am i going to just type posts about this over & over? it is like it is slowly killing me that i'm incapable of delivering
the compliment. it's like it is metastasizing, becoming symbolic... i am the sort of person to pine only to deliver a simple
comment, feel deeply incapable, become very sad about all the incapabilities it represents, often cope by retreating into
an imaginary scenario with the same non-existent unrealistically idealized romantic partner, as i do to cope with
various things... really, though, i think once i go home i will forget about this again. i think there
will be reoccurring moments of despair that i quickly forget each time
do i like telling social media strangers things like this about myself, in that it makes me feel seen or feel a sense of
connectedness to some degree, or am i just wholly naturalized to what is, no matter how you slice it, basically habituated
self-harm by means of intensely overexposing self-disclosure? either way it would be great if there wasn't the opportunity
for numbers to fail to appear under it after i type it, i would rather die than have anything like this receive a numerical ranking
it's getting real unfunny by this point, i'm just in, like, year five now of being publicly
mentally ill on the internet in the exact same way over & over, seemingly incapable of
learning, like watching a two-legged puppy dog trying to walk & just flopping around
september 17th
some people online think im pretty cool, maybe even very cool. i also have a tendency to do things like
sit alone late at night in the empty back room of a very crowded bar with my eyes closed, enclosing
myself as much as i can in an idealized romantic fantasy where i also am not male. im not being
self-deprecating, these two realities can coexist, i just think its funny that they do
september 21st
something i think is funny about the "feeling the resentment i'd feel if the people on tumblr were
trying to collaboratively gaslight me into hating specific thoughts i choose to share based on murky
criteria, even though i know that isn't really happening" thing is that it tends to set in when
i'm behind on sleep, so i can definitely attribute it to some cognitive deficit stemming
from sleep debt. but i have no way of knowing if it happens at:
the level of the posts (i tend to type more nonsensical trash that people are less likely to care about (or i
start typing an increased volume of the same sort of stuff, making me more likely to step on a landmine))
or at the level of the notes (i do things exactly the same as when i'm not sleep deprived, & it's received
about the same, but i start hyperanalyzing the notes & feeling really upset regardless of what happens)
or a combination where i start feeling more excited & hopeful about things (maybe in a transiently giddy
& naive way) then hyperanalyzing the notes, not seeing a corresponding enthusiasm, & feeling super
let down, wondering what is wrong with me to make me have been so confident about it
september 23rd
endless cycle of typing a thing & hoping dearly that if there is something wrong with it, invisible to my eye
but wrong enough that it provokes near-universal distaste, then i will be afforded the dignity of being
told. but not taking the extra step of expecting it because that's not the kind of relationship this is
september 26th
forever trying to crack the code regarding when & under what conditions im capable
of experiencing a physiological high through envisioning physical affection
if i reread oyasumi punpun i think it'd be such a potent nostalgic crystallization of my year 2013 that i'm actually
avoidant of ever doing it & knowing for sure. i would value that quality, & i worry that its potency would come from
me having never reread it. like if i pull it forward to the current year it might get contaminated, the preserved
memory/feeling associations might dissipate like melting ice with pockets of gas in it or um eurydice
2013
oyasumi punpun
the song "oyasumi punpun" by sealab 2012
various scattered sealab 2012 songs
"fly away" by lenny kravitz
"ego tripping at the gates of hell" by the flaming lips
the original version of cookie clicker
the most un-internet possible experience of floral shoppe
(^ i've harped on about this numerous times)
the band stepdad
blank banshee 0
the band cake
studio killers
pet sounds
vaervaf
off
whoops!!! all media
ok, non-media memories:
green wispy curtains over the window of this bedroom. the curtains are behind the cabinet now. i don't remember how
they got there ("me" lore: my bedroom for six years is basically my dead mom's bedroom with the same bed / dresser
/ cabinets / bedside table etc, which i have slowly bent into more of an expression of myself, i tend to go very
long stretches of time without remembering this but it's kind of weird i guess. actually i guess its
just a type of inheritance i dont think its that weird. unless it is)
uhh particular memory of snowy field which is paired with floral shoppe
i've lost the drive to keep typing about this
basically i think 2014 is the year where i felt like kind of a nutcase for the
first time so 2013 grabs me as worth salvaging & examining on occasion
september 28th
misery-ii.png
i playfully barraged a channel in my college discord server with a set of forty-two images that i really like. eventually this is how some people
responded, leading me to just say "this server is miserable & i am rotting away in this godforsaken nothing of a city. seeya," & leave, while some
of them tried to level with me & reassure me about how people just have different tastes in art, which just registered to me in a really nightmarish
way because their messages now irrevocably had the same tint as all of this other stuff & i didn't see any point in trying to be like "no look i
genuinely think you're innocent in having communicated the very fundamental sense of alienation that you just did, no one is at fault, there is
just a very unfortunate overall situation at hand, surrounding this exchange." so that is the internet-age absurdity i permitted myself to embody today
I sometimes really worry about you, even though we're merely acquaintances it's discomforting to see someone
I know have this perceived unhappiness or reliance on masks. I worry you're privy to self-isolation via
absurdity and performance and it definitely does hurt to watch at times, especially knowing how you
are a good and bright person, I think everyone wants to get to know you better. Normally I don't
discuss such things but I think it's pertinent to bring up. That post about that server worried
me because it reminded me how I was at my most manic, but inherently the parasociality
of reading a post on the internet leads to projection. I hope you're well.
people try to be friendly with me & i just take it like the world has insidiously rendered friendliness, in ninety nine
percent of cases, into a sort of deceptive poison... like they in their hearts are sincere but the world has uniformly put
kernels of its deception in them. it is a perception that is slowly killing me but also one i feel incapable of blinding
myself to. it has total authority on who i can remotely get along with. i hope... that i find a way to reconcile it!
september 29th
the transient sensation that nothing in life has any context
the sensation that life is actively ecstatic as long as i yank a bunch of squeezing chains & locks off of
my thought patterns. but also that the chains & locks are inclined to crawl back in if i don't consistently
practice techniques for removing them, or maybe i have to develop new & better ones over time. & having
to contend with that is a really difficult thing to live with. but the ecstasy of being alive that they obscure
is always there so it's always worth trying to reestablish & maintain connection with it
the sensation that i may begin to drift in & out of the state of being that good of a person with little control or
understanding of why, the sensation that it's very possible to be infected by a free-floating demeanor, aesthetic,
attitude, to display the behavior of a nameless character that's never been written or portrayed
i think it is about seizing the real thoughts, which are direct expressions of an eternal benevolent flame
(that i would like to believe is) inside me, as opposed to seizing the crappy sublimations of the real thoughts
doing things that risk being pretentious is opposite to being someone completely dead in the eyes who like,
listens to "i have a special plan for this world" by current 93 & goes "wow thats so edgy" so just try to be as
pretentious as possible, invite anyone & everyone to despise you for it, that just makes it more virtuous
that you're going through with it even at the risk of being scorned, be extremely insufferable, you
are completely & utterly in the right, cringe culture is/was basically fascism
september 30th
to simplify things going forward i will just type the same post over & over, it will say "*grapples with something*," this
will considerately leave the people reading with less to process & will save me from getting my feelings hurt all the time
october 2nd
reading a person's assertion that some fifty-year-old album was really ahead of its time & influential, & thinking i can
kinda see how it was, as if i really have any idea what the hell is going on with my flattened-time internet perspective
october 7th
rereading my september fifth entry... i think everything i did that night was good for me! but i feel like i can easily imagine
a person who would find it really bizarre & disconcerting... in just the most boring way they could feel those things. someone
could judgmentally frame it all as totally crazy & it really would seem pretty crazy in comparison to their lifestyle, i think,
which i'd see as really pedigreed & drab. like, "you think it's all spastic & unhinged to run down a street late at night
dancing & hollering just to revel in the ability to do that? you seriously can't imagine making time for that?"
but it really would seem authentically crazy relative to them! if i looked at them doing their things
that seem so uniformly mundane, then looked at me running around yelping, i would agree,
while trying to inhabit their perspective, that i'd be acting totally crazy in comparison
& then you could frame it in terms of spontaneity-opposed cultural standards that they're reflecting, conformity, grids,
the image of normality that's projected, blah blah blah, so then, it really does seem like a craziness which hates all
of that, exists in conflict with all of that... which feels like an archetypical narrative of someone being all crazy.
"i in my zaniness am right & going against a whole system that's just trying to suppress how right i am"
but that narrative, where the crazy person always seems to ultimately be wrong, can be produced & promulgated by
the system that all the crazy spontaneity is contrary to. it's like, one doesn't expect to really find themselves in that
narrative, but with a mindset that's too erratically in opposition to the encouraged normality & conformity
it's like it'd "dawn on them," they'd have the narrative to start seeing themselves in & start going
"i guess i really must be going crazy like that..." it feels like stochastic gaslighting
there's just no objectivity to the cultural standards, so it's like, you don't know exactly where they stop being some reasonable
guidelines people have developed for just conducting themselves stably & start being a hindrance... this is just what being very
lonely & trying to have as few assumptions about reality as i can feels like. or something. this whole post might just
be me slotting into a cartoonish "nOrMaL vS. cRaZy" narrative that isn't really there. see, it's just total
unmooredness. i have nothing better to do than needle in on all these maybes
i'll take myself way too seriously, then realize i'm taking myself too seriously, & go "oh, ok! phew!
good to know that's all that's going on!" then the too-serious thoughts will rein me back in by
going "wait, so there's an entire branch of thought that's just bad? that's a really suspicious
notion, you can't just take that at face value, you need to investigate that"
i'm not a humorless person but i definitely tend to be humorless when i talk about myself on tumblr because making jokes
there feels like something i do with a loaded gun to my head. just like talking about myself does, really. but humor feels like
it has "falling flat" as a more definite failure state, while talking about myself is more amorphous & blurry with respect
to value judgments... this means that talking about myself there is, at the very least, inherently bad insofar as it
is time spent unnecessarily being humorless. oh, i guess also in that it makes me feel like i have
a loaded gun to my head, that's definitely something i also typed up there
i've spent cumulative days & days & days there in that form of passive communication where my self is
completely utterly deformed. & what's funny is that it's not even a slow, permanent damage or anything.
once i have a normal context to exist in i feel like i just spring back into myself, my normal
shape. but that outlet is always there regardless, so days & days i spend deformed
television is just an outlet, which is disgusting, then the internet has a give-&-take that's supposed to make it
a total dismantling of television with so much inherent potential to just clear through so much cultural garbage,
which obviously entails that the entities with the most influence over it, albeit being unable to fully control it,
would seek to guide & tilt & predispose it as much as possible toward being an inversion explicitly away from
the potential & toward the garbage, just being an outlet, just being television again, & that's the logic
i want to stress, "so much inherent potential that it has to be twisted into the opposite of it"
again, with no total control, all the good potential-realizing uses are there but it has to be ensured that they're
left as dry as possible in the distribution of attention that's set up to occur. television, again, albeit with every
single person welcomed with open arms to have Input & a Take & engage in Discourse which to me just signals
a foregone conclusion that all of that has to be structurally inclined to count for nothing. the internet as
exclusively an outlet is one of the most repugnant phenomena i can imagine
people circulating garbage platitudes as if they at least understand the potential for self-improvement,
of people being conduits of temperaments & traits, but have absolutely no ambition or imagination about
it. anyway, banksy banksy banksy boomer cell phone comic Moby music video banksy banksy
i don't know, i don't know, i don't know, there's cute things, there's benign things for it to serve as an outlet for,
they're out there, they're there, i'm trying to get at something, i'm overgeneralizing. or maybe the first paragraph
can coexist with the cute things. maybe any real, decent, un-watered-down, like, goddamn... un-capitalist-
aesthetic cute thing inherently falls generally outside of the probable distribution of attention
after you read a post picture me like begging on my knees at your feet going "please please please restore my self-awareness
by precisely outlining each & every way in which that was repugnant, i am becoming too stupid in my isolation to identify it
myself & if you don't tear apart my mode of thinking right now i'm just going to think it's valid & use it as a foundation
for thinking other things. i won't become combative about it i swear. also do it unanonymously!!! you don't really care
unless you place the weight of an identity behind the words!!!" also if you think the post is ok you can just
imagine it's me being weird & crazy. but if you don't like the post it's normal & real words
taking oneself too seriously is a funny dynamic because, while it's something i really don't want to feel like i'm doing,
the only way i can even meaningfully register to someone else in that way is if they're already taking me seriously enough
for there to even be... like, a context for that to count for anything in, like, if someone is even "keeping score" instead
of thinking "hehe oh alex" then they're already playing the other half that makes the whole thing possible. so how could
they look down on me for it? i pray that no one at all takes me seriously enough for all this to occur
i typed 2,521 words' worth of posts today
october 15th
i am always bartering with myself with how much loneliness is okay, or "can really be okay if i just stop
taking it as so much of a problem" ... if i set the threshold very high, then i may be resigning myself to
a very severe degree of isolation but it also comes with a pact with myself to deal with that & make
an effort to not pathologize my day-to-day experience. if i set it very low... i guess i feel very
distressed but also like i am setting my sights high & not internally settling for less
october 17th
no matter how bored i get i have a pact with myself to never channel it into actively disliking any of
whatever the current roster of cultural things are that are used as the butt of jokes like rick & morty or
cryptocurrencies or any other thing where i consider devoting substantial time to willingly thinking
about it to just be synonymous with horrible choking depression just so i have something to think
about. god just referencing any of it like this makes me feel like i'm living in family guy
consider the notion that it's actually cooler to be some like, haggard, goateed, misogynistic white man in his thirties who only
has a mostly untouched facebook account & listens to nothing but pantera & runs a meth lab in some middle-of-nowhere
city in the american midwest, than it is to react to an endless treadmill of new cultural artifacts as they get incorporated
by the milieu of cool & aware internet users as the new thing worth uniformly having some reaction to or take
on or making fun of. i'm not saying i necessarily think this, but do consider this notion
my thoughts are really focusing on my ages ~16 to ~20.5 right now & i'm not sure what it is that i'm trying to articulate to myself about them. an impression
i have of the public internet is that there are regrets you can express where the only people who care will be ones who are the same & they will come to sort
of reframe the experience as a local standard. then i feel like i am simply jutting a standard experience out more prominently than everyone else's same
experience & expecting it to receive some particular consideration. those four & a half years are largely a blur involving the same spot on my couch &
being wholly unconcerned with little interest in introspection or learning & being steeped in what i retroactively view as intense inhumanity. making
myself a far far far more parasocial entity than a social one. i am incredibly more naturalized to sequestering myself than to step out & to have
anything to say. just because i am doing better now doesn't mean i can expect a four & a half year deficit to not affect me. i didn't have to have
a period of my life overnaturalizing toward over-self-analysis at the expense of sincerity but i did, i have to expect that to affect me too. the
mental texture of the general vague memory that those years are compressed into feels like an important aspect. the consistency of an unchanging
angle from which the living room is viewed, the texture of the couch, the crumpling of the corner of the cushion that i put most of my weight on.
consistent glowing rectangle brightness. having no filter for what cultural artifacts i take in, what i let pass through me, what i express. having
not remotely found myself, & little room for spoken-out-loud words, & little room for authenticity. no friendly presences, no eye contact, no postures,
no relative positions to one another in the room. & information age isolation is so standard that it's like i'm not supposed to emphasize that or i'm
whining, making a special case among the local standard. & taking in cynical & entropic & infuriating & painful & absurd garbage endlessly having
not yet remotely acquired the language to describe it all, only the animal-like unarticulated sensations of fundamental alienation each thing evokes. my
rent is paid, my needs are seen to, & there is absolutely nothing to press me out of my house beside my own periodic desire to wander. there are no
role models, reasonable friends, wise voices, sane figures, pragmatic suggestions, maybe at best the only thing pushing me is impersonal guilting
sentiments or impersonal patronizing words of encouragement which drift around the internet, which i have no reason to respect. there are no stakes
to anything. being young, i feel as if the circumstances will persist to the end of my life, at least as far as i care. so i try to establish some of
the most long-lasting &, i guess autistically menial hobbies that i can, making lists of things, that sort of thing. for each impersonal caustic
cultural artifact i took in i wish there had been a sane voice to help me internalize & make sense of it, as best as i could reasonably expect from my
age group i suppose, rather than having things accumulate on me like algae & seaweed & fish nets. i can't be confident that each thing i've said
is necessarily an appropriate response really because i feel a lot like the entire span of time is flattened to only a vague feeling for me to
interpret, i don't have all that much coherency around it. flashes of particular moments in the tumblr user interface. the concept of 4chan &
the general emotions around it. assessments of generalized dynamics of public online socialization. what cliques whose general temperaments
i can recall. maybe it's just an exaggeration, but my impression is of having been curled up in a room for four & a half years. a deprivation
of memories that could have better formed my self. i wasn't locked in the room per se but i feel like it takes a "locking" confluence of
circumstances to keep one in a room for four & a half years. i consider myself to have basically not been human & to have not meaningfully
had agency for the entire time frame. it seems like a circumstance & a duration that can't meet without consequences. the situation is that
i am now doing better but i am probably also living the consequences & kind of duped myself into thinking i'm not. throughout all of this
i feel i have failed to give maybe a sort of poetic description needed to capture the degree & quantity of poison, & the degree of
susceptibility to poison. & self-debasement, an endless stream of clownish noise, segueing gradually into my nebulous mental illness
around notes, a frenzied animal afraid of judgment, seeking frantically with zero resources to construct a self worth anything, worth
not being judged, desiring axioms & ideals to grow from like a stretch of tilled dirt, not wanting to be a thing of pure happenstance
inertia. all in all, maybe a sort of crowdsourced initial smothering of childhood, partly by an extremely diverse fraction of the electronically
interconnected global community, partly by a room. i say "initial" because i believe in childhood as a wave between active & inactive
