< - vii - >

2021 - pt v

this page was created on october twenty-fourth

october 21st

i wonder if "pretentious" or "fake deep" can be rigorously defined, & if not then i think that sucks because without an
actual definition i really feel like when people use those labels they're just cynically stomping each other's senses
of wonder into the dirt for no decent reason - i say this in spite of the fact that i do viscerally see things as
pretentious or fake deep sometimes. i don't want it to be a "you just know it when you see it," though

november 1st

for me, being on social media too much feels like... ok, maybe this analogy will make sense. imagine you're in a
social setting with a bunch of people, but accompanying one person in particular, & the amount of people present
is enforcing a sort of socially lubricated normality to everything. maybe the other people are your family, or the
other person's family. & then the person you're with asks if they can speak in private with you, so you go out to
the patio. once you're there, it's like everything is free to switch to this totally different, unpleasant, stifling,
psychologically specific architecture. being online too much feels like being on that patio constantly

november 2nd

stuck with memories of being much younger & typing sentences so horrible that they're near-impossible to reconcile with my
current self & which people who knew me in the present day would probably have trouble even believing... not even
"longtime tumblr follower" things but truly secret ones for which there is no record. but now i'm very fixated on
numerous channels of attempting to amass the best sentences i can produce which is hopefully equalizing

am i naturally sweet, at least to the extent that i successfully express sweetness in the present day, or am i only a
calculated inversion of the inelegant & tainted isolation that came before? oh well. if pitch darkness is indisputably
there then it is more honest to have been in it & to have left it & to know it than to never have even seen it

it doesn't seem like anything could have been averted. past a certain threshold of time
passed, it's hard to feel in retrospect like i really truly had agency rather than just being
an expression of situational factors. many people have done far worse things anyway

Obscurity

in light of my daily refusal for the past six years to meaningfully communicate with either of the benign - even loving -
family members that i live with, i think anything i type about rejecting inhumanity is... well, either incredibly hypocritical
or especially justified. depends on how much choice in the matter i feel like ascribing to myself, i guess!!! or it
is just an unrelated caveat of me being autistic or emotionally stunted or with the wrong people or
something... bad, but with no particular bearing on my feelings about inhumanity

i really do have to do something, no guardian angel comes & stops one from simply coasting to age fifty
where they find themselves talking with a therapist about the pain their inner child is still in or some such

november 5th

wantonly sharing music on tumblr is very demoralizing for me because, from that perspective, the userbase is basically a machine
that performs the function of not expressing interest in embedded video & audio files. this is to be expected, given how much
of an attention commitment they are compared to the other forms of content, & i do expect it, i'm already very familiar with
the pattern. i do thoughtlessly try to share things, though, sometimes, & for some reason the expectation doesn't
make it any less depressing how all the people reading are kind of undignifiedly reduced to that consistent
binary outcome, & i'm undignifiedly reduced to a person feeling things based on it

just really nutty how much you can psychologically mutilate a person by instating a framework with which to casually switch
the normal & typically tolerable experience of people not caring about something from implicit to explicit. super crazy!

who is a musician whos discography i am curious about? umm dean blunt. ok i will come up with a regimen for getting
through dean blunt's discography. ok for each four philosophers bibliographies i read i can reward myself with one
dean blunt album. then, to motivate myself, for every three dean blunt albums i can watch a youtube video. & also
go through the discography of one other artist or band. but i have to read one fiction book for each song in
the second artist/band's discography. & i also have to alternate between albums by that artist/band &
albums by specifically umm uhh current 93. for each five current 93 albums i will also read
a backloggwd wikipedia page & watch a famous movie. this system will get
me up to speed with the important media in no time

november 9th

time is moving very quickly lately. i feel barely conscious, as a product of constantly flitting between different minor
tasks, or different things i'd like to read that are relevant to mountain-sized interests, never committing to one,
inhibited by the sense that it'd be a detriment to all the others, this sense stemming from a greed to have them
all resolved very promptly. i never mentally settle on any particular space to exist in & feel consequently left
in a void, like a ship repeatedly changing course to distant ports that surround it in a triangle shape. i set my
pill timer & forget to take the pill, fill a bottle with water & forget to drink it, note that the temperature
outside is tolerable & that the trees are gorgeous & that i should walk the neighborhood
& look at them, & before i know it all the daylight hours have been swallowed

if i can even put the book down, that suggests to me that i'm not reading it so much for the love of it...
& if i roll with that assumption, & examine many other things that i do or neglect to do, it suggests
to me that i don't really have a love for anything. which is upsetting to consider, for sure

i need to experiment, & i need to make time to dive into anything instead of staring at the water ripples, & i need
to pull a loose thread sticking out from comfortable repetitions & styles of thought & being, so that they unwind

i miss the fresh inspiration of the time in the semi-recent past when i felt like a child... in the wake of perhaps the
most significant instance of inspiration in my life - it makes sense to me that i felt again like a child: i was
practically a remade self! this self was new - still a child. still blissfully reeling. now i suppose all the
inspiration is sufficiently incorporated into my being that it's become the norm, the assumptions,
the axioms: the background against which more must take place - but what?

is the notion that more must take place the problem? is asking myself "but what"
the problem? it feels like a drive to identify & consume instead of to just be

maybe, to quietly beg to be in touch with [as good as i know everything can be] is to distract myself from the
true simplicity of that state - to create the notion that it is something to beg for instead of to simply occupy

i can't permit myself to believe that it's easy to be blind to the beauty of my bedroom. i can't permit
myself to believe that it's hard to see the beauty of my bedroom. i can't permit myself to believe
that it's hard to adhere to these two guidelines, or this third guideline. i don't even
have to feel stratified by them. they will be essential realities for me

nervous about potentially conflating

"love for an interest, hobby, or discipline doesn't always entail consistent visceral
enjoyment, but is shown through the commitment that is nevertheless put into it"

with

"i can't remember the last time i viscerally enjoyed something, so now i just constantly make myself do
boring things that i hate, because now i think putting in the 'discipline' to make myself 'commit' to
things is, not something with a time & a place, but all there is: the only activity from which
i might reap some reward, which turns out to also be totally stoic & unemotional"

i think the little collage i posted on tumblr twenty minutes ago is aesthetically shallow & insulting & a minor detriment to
anyone who has seen it by now. it's OK though because today i went to a nature trail & looked at all the pretty changing leaves
before they fall. standing in certain areas, the translucent yellow tinge all around me made me think of being frozen in amber.
the photos i took were pathetic... which is ok, but i felt it was the only outlet for my love for the leaves, periodically
reducing them to photos that weren't adequate representations at all. anyway this is a good justification for why i made
an aesthetically shallow collage when i got home, i had been walking all day & my brain didn't have the resources
to be good, & i was tragically supplied with access to my computer. i still feel very dehydrated

sorry, i'll order another pretty sweater so i can post a picture of it, instead of trying to be self-aware as a substitute for
putting in the care of making digital art that gives people reason to like it, if i am to make digital art in any capacity

increasingly elaborate introspective constructions that ultimately all stem from the same rotten
seed that is the inherent psychic death of existing adjacent to mass media in the year 2021

(this post is an expression of my tendency to retroactively & preemptively devalue & invalidate
all thoughts i could possibly have... devalued as a consequence of unknowable unknowns)

when i say "my thoughts are invalidated" what i mean is kind of... that i might relax & not feel the need to guard myself against
disenchanting societal influence any longer, & then, some point after that, i might find myself genuinely believing i have found
a sort of happiness, that in reality is... happiness according to rules, incredibly desaturated happiness, happiness with an audio
low-pass filter reducing it to muffled rumbles, something that would have been misery for people in the past... self-deceiving
happiness that a miserable middle-aged white christian married couple might insist to you that they have

in the fourth paragraph i want to acknowledge that i felt quite happy throughout a middle portion of 2020 in a way that
i am willing to wager, & i could be wrong, but i am willing to wager that it was, by some fair standard of measure, quite
real. & i think i am... doing permanently better as a dividend of that time. but i have also since forgotten what
mental & spiritual alignment i had allowed for myself that permitted me to feel so wonderful

maybe it was the comparative ecstasy of realizing, believing, that nothing had to be so fundamentally awful &
cynical & hopeless as i had obsessively observed for many years prior... now, today, well, it's like i said
several posts ago: that ecstasy has become the background against which i must further develop

(behind on sleep) oh, guess it's time to further develop the entire coherent identity, personality,
desires, sense of self, mindset, temperament, ideology, array of opinions, self-conception,
world view, philosophy, & spirituality that only exist while i am behind on sleep

^ i passed out with this sitting in the text post box. thank god.
i mean, i'm awake now though. but hopefully not for very long

Perspective

november 11th

i think somewhere deep in the back of my brain stem i haven't really convinced myself that God isn't going
to transplant my consciousness into a different body at some point. this gives me the energy to keep on!

some analogy between 1. the notion that the idea of a cube, as a relationship of six faces, exists in a logical way untethered
from physical cubes or people to think about them, & 2. the notion that thinking something very cruel or revolting,
even if unexpressed, is still a sort of inscription of it onto reality, like a canonization of it having happened

the latter is like... unnecessarily ceding ground to objectivity. like, since the subjective reality that thoughts, cruelty,
& disgust exist in is made of separate bubbles around each person, the thought exists in as limited a capacity as it
possibly can. but the ground is ceded in the act of appealing to an objective past for it to be enshrined in

you could say that the past, the body of permanently inscribed events, is like that cube... which is to say, you could take
the opposite position too, & say that cubes only exist when formed or represented, & you could say there is no past or
future, that one aspect of the present is just the potential formation of memories which are just representational
structures that continue to exist only in the present & create the mere impression of a past?

this is all very stupid, i think, because it's impossible to reconcile with umm a murder investigation for instance.
i just wanted to type it anyway. now you've read it even though it's stupid. it's too late! you can't go back
& not read it. you're stuck with it now. i knew this but i still typed it & put it here, causing you
to read it. i don't even care. i'm indifferent to your loss! i'm your enemy!

sitting down face-to-face, & every nozzle in my head that plays a part in my existence as a dynamic & outspoken human being
gets choked out so quickly & naturally that i can't maintain the coherence of thought to even notice. it's something i can
only acknowledge in retrospect... i display not even a banal facade of docile politeness but a fractured attempt at it. it
almost makes me feel guilty of complicity in some uh... um... uh... widespread humanity-deadening thing

but it's not even like that! because i'm proving not just complicit, but worse than the average person. sure, there's
like, bureaucracy & isolation everywhere, but on the trolley people are invariably chattering, & in the meetings
in people's claustrophobic offices there's still moments of frankness & honesty sometimes as people try
to punch through the "teacher-with-student" pageantry to create a welcoming atmosphere
right? i don't offer that type of thing anywhere, with anyone

the louis wain movie made me sob & tear up a bunch of times & the end made me cry

eww i'm not gonna come straight out of the theater & report this straight to my crowdsourced abusive spouse who threatens
to make me feel at risk in any enjoyment of anything that i divulge to it, hanging on by the thread of numerical validation

nothing is too good to be threatened with evisceration by my relation to this website. it's obviously not even anyone's fault
but my own. that it's something open to be spectated by tumblr users is incidental to the condition. is there any point
to being alive if i can't stop myself from degrading my experience to verbal representations that hurt me?

november 12th

masculinizing hrt wikiepdia page... "breast atrophy" under irreversible changes, so what does that mean for me... has
every spiro dose i've ever overslept past been an "irreversible change?" this is such a big joke. it's a giant formality.
a mental placebo. a white lie. i mean, i do like having... significantly less hairy legs. years ago i watched an old
camcorder video, the video was already at the time years old, & i zoomed in on one of my legs... &
when i watched this i thought "my god!!! blind to my fortune from over-familiarity"

& i like having less acne. &. ok. thats it i think. potentially more veils of over-familiarity? whatever. i will choose to
believe i am genetically fated toward um ironing board-ness. if i am momentarily humoring the insanity of caring. as
i have said: i do not have to regard my appearance masculinely, i simply look like Patti Smith. this is acceptable...
"Ah We're burdened with being sexually dimorphic But at least these chemicals offer A freeing
malleability of the flesh!!" ......Sure whatever you say. Knock yourself out.

"my god!!! even someone all the way over on the other entire biological
axis of appearance has internalized the cisnormative feminine beauty
standards!!! truly these standards have gone too far!!!"

it's unpleasant how failing to find joy in anything, which is quite bad enough of a condition on its own,
seems to also necessarily come with a sense of alienation in witnessing joy being found in things by others

"they're going to carry on with the welcoming, dignified, elegant simplicity of deriving & sharing in joy
from things. i am going to stay behind & languish & die if i fail to live up to the responsibility of
turning off my sources of over-thought or joy-invalidation, & simply inhabiting that simplicity too"

"their simple joy is an unspoken mark of supremacy over me
because my cognitive & emotional patterns are tainted"

(continued on the 13th)

constant feeling of stress caused by adhering to the notion that i basically don't exist until i have read x more books than
i presently have while simultaneously acknowledging that i am really not very good at regimentedly taking in information

PRogressing life into yet another set of systems & routines to manage as a further abstracted insulation
of oneself from the perceived unattainability of the state that is the primary reason for being
alive (meaningfully having the direct company of other human beings) are .. we .. ??

maybe freedom is embarrassing except when it's miraculous but it has to be embarrassing to open the door to being
miraculous... unless it's so miraculous that it doesn't even have to be embarrassing first but that's just crazy!!!

having one's personal expression numerically rated one single time in their whole life is completely
reasonable cause for blowing their brains out with a gun, however i have experienced it hundreds
of times now & i am still around, i guess it is because i am very powerful & strong. yay!

cynicism in me is stoked by the cynicism of others, & i irrationally perceive even the absence of comment from tumblr as an
expression of cynicism, let alone the presence of comment. without the website there is just my bedroom populated by some
books & perhaps music & things like that. so that website stands in the way of me being pure of cynicism & thus might be the
single most corrupting toxic presence in my life at the moment. here is something i could on tumblr type cynically: "if you're
a person reading this post i hope you burn alive in an oil fire for enabling this system through your willing passive spectation"

it's time to let go of any notion of doing even minor good through my expressions on tumblr, that is just the
trap that lets it install itself as a presence which can only have the effect of ruining me. it's time to let
go of reciprocating the experience of what public expressions have positively affected me before

there is no state of being a good person while isolated from all contexts in which anything is meaningfully good or bad;
contexts where there are any (good) paths to take; contexts where there is anything to respond to positively, rather than
negatively. so being prolongedly cooped up & isolated really does entail the destruction of notions of meaningfully
being a good person - not that they're replaced with relent to being a bad one, either, just that one has to let
go of hoping to adhere to any standards if there is nothing for the standards to be applied to in the
first place. living on standby, without stakes, means accepting the tiring neutrality

today has been a type of day with just sitting on a rocking chair & staring, & feeling very out of it - really feeling
an inclination to just sit & stare, & a sense of detachment in line with that inclination. almost like a state of
zen - incapable of boredom, just being. but only almost, because it's like an insulation from a grievous
lack of something, or a rebelling of my cognition against a grievous lack - inhibiting itself in protest

it can't be my fault, because if i really had a say, there's no way i'd let the reclusion persist to the
degrees that it does - i would break, & cease it, cut it out, for i could not be that masochistic, right?

well, no, i can't let myself think that. because if, in actuality, i am responsible, then once i had
surpassed an unreasonable degree of reclusion, i would be compelled to take that as a sign to
refute my responsibility, to let go of it forever, & from there possibly never be repaired

i feel i have witnessed truly virtuous attitudes

i feel a bit nervously suspicious that i have been ruined by a confluence of life factors that have failed to
establish in me a cognitive framework for the meaningful valuation of certain outcomes & relationships, &, from
there, behavior motivated by those valuations. i fear this excludes me from true virtuousness, as well as sincerity, etc.

today i seem to be hungry no matter how much cereal i eat!

november 13th

perceived corruption of self doesn't have to be directly expressed (in cynicism, etc. (if it did, this would entail an awfully
depressing inherent supremacy & personability of the uncorrupted over the corrupted.)) perceived corruption of self must be
sublimated into positive or benign forms rather than directly expressed, & to stray from this policy should entail a shame
so great that i should burst into tears & plead for mercy at the mere thought of it, but my emotions are not so rooted

when one is bad, it seems to create a frame around them where they & their badness are in a vacuum, a stage to
itself, without comparison to any particular alternative outcome of goodness, which remains as only an unspoken
potentiality. but to compare the bad outcome to... not just a particular good outcome, but the purity of how
that good outcome would also be in a vacuum without even comparison to the bad outcome which
is now the unspoken potentiality... yes, i feel like that is something that should incite tears

this post has received an invisible ghost-note. it is haunted!

i can only attribute a lapse in positivity to a lapse in my rational evaluation of the degree of direct control i have of the
overall tone of my own thoughts, which hopefully would be total as long as i try hard enough. i can only attribute it to
that, because how is one to rationalize the stark irrationality of voluntary misery? once it's already happened, once,
against all odds & all reason, it has become an occurrence that is incontestably there to rationalize?

i guess exhibiting flaws promotes health in others. appearing too proficient in the constant struggle to be good may
create the impression that it is one's nature, leading others to misconstrue that there are natures, & so covet
a good nature so as to not have to deal with the constant struggle, & this may engender a feeling of
helplessness, that to have to struggle to be good is, in not being uniform, not even a fair burden

legitimately soothing myself by sitting in front of my mirror & maintaining eye contact & saying "hi" a lot & waving
& kind of baby babbling to myself. it helped me reestablish a really important & grounding emotional perception
of social interaction as the stage on which incredibly purifying frivolity & silliness can happen. even if i'm not
having those social interactions, the emotional perception of that quality is important. just briefly tricking
myself into thinking i was visually witnessing a person who was affirming that they shared those principles
& smiling at me with the exact same intensity that i was willing to smile at them with. & reminding myself
what i look like instead of the image of myself i'm free to feel i inhabit when i'm restricted to first-person

(continued from the 12th)

when i see people show off things they've done, & others congratulate them for it, or when i see
people announce their plans, & others enthusiastically wish them a good time, i imagine if
i had show off something i'd done, or announced a plan, & received the same response

this isn't an envious coveting of others' praise & encouragement. it's a morose awareness of how
absolutely indifferent i would be to it, & how much less human i feel than those who can exchange
these sentiments & feel meaning in them, the flippancy of their sociality, positively leaking humanity

november 14th

i've really really been sleeping on frank zappa's we're only in it for the money

i should kill myself instead of tainting my discovery of it with a report to this completely listless
apathetic website but really i should delete the text post because i shouldn't actually kill myself

i should put a rope around my neck and hang myself instead of risking corrupting my positive experiences
by receiving the apathy of a web site. i'm kidding. it simply feels mildly cathartic to say something so gr

my laptop touchpad did an errant click on the quick reblog button, truncating the caption

no one has to care about me listening to an album but see, the album bypasses the logic by turning the absence of "not caring" into
the perceived presence of "Not Caring," the implicit to the perceived explicit, i should let the wheels of a train decapitate me

if someone thinks i am pretty &/or nice picture my severed blank-stare head on train tracks
with ants swarming it like Hereditary, that's tumblr, that's the website you’re using presently

i think i've done irreversible conceptual damage to myself by typing this. it's
sad that i had the impulse to, & it's additionally sad that i followed it

this is the fruit of fortuitously finding something positive, art
i connect with, while having access to such a detrimental platform

an hour or two ago i was calm in dim candlelight & i can be again

when i feel totally decentered from any & all context for myself, any cognitive or philosophical or moral framing for myself,
other people tend not to understand how their attempts at being "frank" or "incisive" or things like that may come off as
intensely repugnant attempts to establish their subjective normality in me, while seeming as if they think they're only
re-establishing an objective normality. but, for me, it's like they're trying to force a framework of being onto me

when i don't feel totally decentered, all of the different subjective normalities kind of blend together into an average
normality. & i guess the idea is that the imposition of any person's particular subjective normality will spur me to
observe the average normality & thus use it as a referent to reacquaint myself with my particular normality

that's not how it works, though. all the particularities of the normality
possessed by the particular person addressing me feel very
glaring & intrusive & like i said, it's very repugnant

OK here is a clinical description

i was really enjoying listening to a frank zappa album. an uncommon sort of engagement with a work of art! a kind of thing i really
do cherish. in my excitement, i made the mistake of reporting that enjoyment to tumblr. as usual, i then irrationally projected
a sense of very disheartening apathy from "the userbase" as if it's a monolith, which then caused this very rapid, weird,
upset mental process that kind of folded in on itself to the point that it ceased to really mean anything

but the end result was just a very strong emotional whiplash from the refreshment of the musical discovery to, um,
the curious way i felt last night, where i felt like i was just staring blankly for hours & disconnected from my
surroundings. & things just feel very corrupted, & as always, i find any sense of corruption to be heartbreaking

i feel heartbroken by how isolated i am, & by my imperfection, any & all entropic tendencies, patterns i neglect to
modify, & by how inhuman i tend to convince myself i am, & by how easy it is to conceptually injure oneself,
& by the idea that i should feel any drive to so so, & by my tendency toward petulant extremes, & by
pointless & avoidable deviation from a model of decency, & by my apathy toward social rituals

all the seriousness here is nothing, manifested out of thin air, akin to a cube made of one-way mirrors with the reflective sides on
the interior, a self-serious joke, something kind of cyclical & self-sustaining, something to be slapped out of. not that that's
an invitation, because deciding one should take that liberty as an untrusted stranger, who opted in at some point to be an
impersonal spectator, is kind of sick, in my opinion. curingly sardonic comments belong only in a very trusting space

now i am publishing this because i feel like i am in a bad state & i feel like i have no one, & i
have been appropriating this place as a general "Other" for so long that it's very hard to quit

i just type, divorced from context. people read it, yet it isn't a social act. this isn't
a social story playing out. it's just verbalization, it's something yet it's nothing

i want to go back to feeling comfortable alone with my music
instead of seeking the relief of feeling known or whatever

for any lapse in humanity, any lapse into inhumanity, it should feel as if, a moment prior, i were
living my most human life possible, with such a drive & capacity for beauty, & i were suddenly
transplanted into the present inhumanity. & i should take a look around & begin to cry

failure to express humanity should hurt! bad, like a bleeding, gaping gash! the further i slip from humanity, the more i should
cry! because that pain is enabled by keeping my eyes trained on humanity. if inhumanity starts to not hurt, that means my gaze
is slipping. inhumanity should never feel like a slow descent, over the course of which it inscribes itself as a standard
of the life that it's populating. never like it's defining its own story for itself, like it's taking place on its own
stage. it should exist in stark contrast to the fleshed-out details of an alternative human outcome

typing things here is not going to cause a nice person to come & disrupt the overwhelming stillness
& silence of this room. the setting will remain as it is regardless of anything. the drive to go
on about things here has no real relief on offer, so it is something i can let go of

many hours pass

one of my friends died. on the thirteenth, & i found out this afternoon. i don't think we were near as close as we could have
been. but she considered me a friend, & she was a beloved presence in the server i started, & a good friend of many of my
friends, & i liked her. here at twenty-three, i think she is the peerest of a peer that i have ever had pass away

this started as a decently linear set of paragraphs. as i kept adding things, i lost track of what connections i was supposed to
maintain from one sentence to the next, or one paragraph to the next, & it turned into like, a palimpsest. i feel i've grown
overfamiliar with the content & can't meaningfully make edits to it anymore, i'm just shuffling things around

i'm not sure how i feel. i haven't cried, but the knowledge has certainly been haunting me all day. a lot of my friends are
in profoundly greater pain. which i mean in a "my friends are in pain" way, a lament, not a self-focused way trained
on the disparity in reaction. my thoughts are, of course, hovering around that "disparity" stuff. my head
tells me that because people i know are vocally in a state of intense grief, that i should be too

i don't want to feel like i am focusing on myself, but ultimately it is probably reasonable to take time to analyze my
own reaction. so, to make myself comfortable, i will disclaim that the overarching reality which wholly permeates
& defines the situation is that she shouldn't have passed away. my processing is secondary. beyond secondary

i could go on about "mutedness" or a sense of "disconnect," things that "don't seem to yield even in the wake of death." an urge to
demonize myself for unemotionality & detachment. how earnestly disturbing the news is, how absurd it feels, yet how within
my capacity it is to not think about it. how i returned a nonfunctional Bluetooth transmitter to a Kohl's today, & a set of two
lightbulbs to a Target. business seemed to just carry on. when my dad came into my room to console me, i just smiled slightly,
flatly, uncontrollably, & silently wanted him to leave because i had no investment in the ritual of consolation. & so on

the potential reality, i suppose, which is uncomfortable but still something i have to acknowledge, is that for all our social
proximity, all her familiarity, all our latent goodwill, we just never grew close enough for my heart to be broken at the
moment. but even if that's the case, i don't know if it really makes an absence of tears sensible. there are lots of
variables to consider, & it's too hard to evaluate them & determine whether they square to an absence of tears

is my heart really not broken? to actually state: "_ is gone, & my heart is not broken," would feel
deeply sickening. but looking at others makes me feel incapable of committing to the inverse

as if i'm supposed to quantify "closeness" & define thresholds, tiers, past
each of which a death is meant to be progressively more impacting

i think my processing is sort of confounded by past events in my life, like my un-emotionality
around my mom's death. i feel i have to process this in light of those past events, have
to interrogate myself for signs of detachment instead of just letting it be

i can't rule out that this "should" warrant hysterics in me, or that it "should" warrant some lesser-but-present
degree of sorrow that i am nonetheless still not reaching, or... that tears should come, if not in direct response
to the tragedy itself, then, at the very least, in empathy for those i care about who are more impacted

(every little segment of reasoning comes with its own
grain of uncertainty: "those i care about" ... "have i only
deluded myself into thinking i care about anyone?")

maybe there is a circle, which surrounds one socially, & the death of anyone within that circle is
supposed to be quite grieving. & that circle is actually considerably, considerably wide. wide
enough that everything preceding this paragraph has actually been monstrous, actually been
beyond consideration, the idea that we could have been remotely, remotely distant enough to-

i arrive again & again at "in any case, in any case, it's death. it's death. it's death. it's
death. it's death. it's death. it's death. it's death. it's death. it's death. it's death. it's
death. it's death. it's death. it's death. it's death. it's death. it's not something to
carry on with your day about. it's not something to feel a little strange about"

or, or, or. there are just... a lot of variables. there is a lot of uncertainty. every sentence comes with five more questions, it
seems. was i even close enough for her death to spur me to reckon with these things? does my uniform emotional distance
from people makes me essentially a spectator, prattling on about some poor person's passing? am i akin to a "lurker"
mistaking myself for a member of a friend group because i incidentally spurred its creation & am now
permitted to spectate it? i don't know what i am. i don't know what to make of anything

i could even be wracked with grief, too alexithymic to notice, sublimating it out of my emotions & then masochistically portraying
myself here as someone completely unconcerned. i don't know anything. hyperspecific mental illness that makes me think i don't
care enough about people's deaths in response to their deaths. anything could be anything. factorial considerations, this multiplied
through this multiplied through closeness multiplied through numerous nuances of closeness multiplied through numerous
nuances of empathy multiplied through numerous nuances or justification or lack of justification or approvability
or condemnability, multiplied through other things. i do not know anything

or the palimpsest is a product of semi-parasocially misconstruing that i know
anyone when i am only witnessing them. no one-on-one conversations

or i'm only too dehydrated or something for it to be worth trying to analyze i nthe first place

making mountains out of molehills i think. or rather, there is a mountain, & i am making mountains out of the molehills
on the mountain. i think she earned the degree of grief her passing has warranted, & that all that all of this says,
is, at minimum, that i let someone's existence slip at arm's length past my own who i shouldn't have

my fundamental fear is some kind of developmental corruption in me that makes
infeasible any notion of a sincere propensity in me for kindness or passion

the terror is abstract, because it relies on the very drives for which their possible lack of existence is the source of
terror: one cannot fear an incapacity to be loving, unless they do possess the capacity to value the idea of being loving

if their capacity to care about being loving is disabled, then they do not
care about being loving, & so cannot fear the incapacity to be loving

& i do have that fear, but i cannot remember the last time i loved someone either, i think

imagine it like this: suppose that a person is exclusively material & entirely defined by the nuanced physical
structures in their brain that define their cognition & behavior. imagine that their loving qualities are physically
nullified. but now introduce something transcendental, & suppose that they have a loving soul, irreconcilable
with their condition. the coexistence of the condition with the soul is difficult to comprehend
as an idea, let alone rationalize as the one who would be experiencing it

i don't actually believe in souls, though, so it's clear that it's just, um. an innate inclination towards love & kindness, which
i have to admit exists. but at odds with pretty much all other aspects of self being turned against it, suppressive, probably
all subconsciously. inversion of oneself. living as an inversion of oneself, with the act of inversion having metastasized
beyond conscious control, so that it doesn't feel like the emotions & the bleeding connection can be reacquired,
they don't feel like an option anymore. the inversion is now disguised as my "nature," & it fools me
even as i write about it. assuming i'm right. assuming there even is "right"

with respect to the fear of having an inherent lack of propensity toward good things, a lack of the ability to value certain
outcomes & attitudes enough for my nature to... i don't know, it's not like i want to be strapped to a railroad car that
inevitably rolls me past scenes of me doing good, like, your "superego," or whatever, you, does have to take the
responsibility of placing foot in front of foot to get to the soup kitchen & then, the care to... cook the
food, & do this & that, & rise to whatever occasion, & be brave in all sorts of situations,
& put in the care of reaching out to people, & all that...

but, in this, what i feel is a fractured relationship to my own sense of agency,
i can't shake this feeling of propensities taking precedent to some degree

whenever i feel like the "inherent lack" is real, part of me also feels like if i dig at it enough i'll uncover some
kind of generalized inescapable supremacy of the good over the bad - some horrible, tragic... fascistic hierarchy
woven into everyday life. which would put into perspective the incredible blessing that is the propensity to be
good & to then know that one is good, even if it comes with a struggle, as long as one is blessed with
an inclination for it to manifest in the end. just a blessing not to be taken for granted

oh wait, this doesn't even have to be a hypothetical system because dangerous sociopaths exist, right? unless i'm buying
into something caustic by accepting the notion of the existence of dangerous sociopaths as a class. but, if dangerous
sociopaths do exist, then... like, i'm not a dangerous sociopath, but their existence establishes that fine gradient

a gradient that starts at, like, people who were "raised right," burdened with few bad teachings to overcome, now resting easy
with the freedom of the capacity to be good. & at the other end is sociopathy, a fatalistic slide into uncaring sadism. &
along the middle of the spectrum you have the generally okay, & the banal, & the struggling, &, &, &...

like, with it as a gradient, it's not some insane, manichaean, like actually conceivably genocide-"justifying"
deal where everyone is just sorted into good & evil, but, uhh. but i am afraid of being an edge case
to some degree, an anomaly because i can't make myself care enough about anything

(coming back to this post later: well, actually, is the relative decency of the "gradient" i made up here not a total cop-out? is
a sufficiently smooth gradient not just a hierarchy with a trillion categories? either way, this is nothing i advocate for, it's
like a hypothetical horrifying discovery that i felt neurotically afraid of making in some of my worst moments. nonsense.
taking my irrational fear of it being "impossible for me to be good" & trying to rationalize it by generalizing it into a system)

okay, it's very simple. i would like to know why i can't make myself feel like i would care if everyone
died & disappeared... care, instead of just resigning myself to everyone dying & disappearing. & why my
lack of ability to make myself care should make me feel deprived of any cognitive justification to
be loving & sweet even though i want to, even though it's the only reason to live, really

the thing is, i can't attribute this to anything. but let's pretend, for a moment, that i can trace it to something. let's
insert a fictional instance of child abuse into my past, & pretend as a thought experiment that i can trace this to that
incident. now i can say that my child abuse has exempted me from the capacity to be loving, & placed me in a league
beneath those with a drive to be kind. my league is not necessarily resented, because i am not necessarily cruel,
but i am not favored. but it's not my fault. so it has to be fixable, right? because it being fixable is
the only way for life to not have this like, incredibly depressing hierarchy built into it

i just dropped to my knees sobbing in my bathroom with a bottle of mustard in my hand, which is good,
because i think a capacity to cry over my general condition & not just over any particular thing,
is a sign of health, that i'm observing standards, even if i'm not living up to them

there's only a doorway between the kitchen & the bathroom, & i had gotten the mustard
out because i was making a sandwich, but i was also thinking & pacing too, & the
sobbing simply happened to hit while the pacing had me in the bathroom

november 15th

i think i've created a mistaken impression by posting two things concerning my friend's passing, before separately going on
about generally feeling broken in a way which precedes that tragedy. & not presenting a clear barrier between these topics.
the crying was simply a genuine response to the feeling of brokenness. i guess i could be fooling myself that the
two strains of thought aren't entwined to whatever degree... what you've said is fair, though

god i keep coming back to this feeling over & over, it's hard to articulate. i've made a fair
amount of posts in the past few days that all contained traces of this same feeling

these are all sentiments that trace the outline of this feeling:

4. "when one is bad, it seems to create a frame around them where they & their badness
are in a vacuum, a stage to itself, without comparison to any particular alternative
outcome of goodness, which remains as only an unspoken potentiality"

5. "but to compare the bad outcome to... not just a particular good outcome, but the purity of how that
good outcome would also be in a vacuum without even comparison to the bad outcome which is
now the unspoken potentiality... yes, i feel like that is something that should incite tears"

12. "oh please please please don't take this what-really-is for what really is"

the idea is that i still at least make it impossible for someone somewhere to be a solipsist even
in the unfortunate case that i end up being really pretentious or obnoxious or disconcerting

i have a self who stands at this laptop & acts all weird through written text then i have another self who
i regard as more valid & who is willing to find anything silly & who lies on my bed & talks in an airy
voice & with a non-covetous tone about how good love is & how good it would be to be loved

basically i need to be a ray of light starting immediately but i am also convinced that i need to finally feel loved
so that i can finally let go of the self-interested obsessive need to feel loved, & thus move on to being a ray
of light in the service of others. it's a sense of having a lot of trouble wresting my gaze from myself, as
a consequence of feeling deprived. i guess also a sense that if i cannot see the light around me i cannot
take it & present it to others. i'm not sure what is different between now & a happier time in the past
year. maybe my degree of self-obsession. i don't know what governs my degree of self-obsession

i have been having a sort of breakdown over the past three or four days, if it isn't clear. reflected in my
rate of posts on this website. everything just acquiring a tendency to feel very silent & still & severe. no
discernible reason. maybe it's simply just that it started & nothing has really come in & halted it

if i suffer for too long i'll stop being the sweet person whose
suffering is empathy-inducing as a negation of my typical
sweetness, & start being the suffering person

november 20th

sharing art that you're enthusiastic about on a platform like tumblr really is just being mildly crushed over & over &
over & over & over by the inevitable comparative apathy of the people spectating, but you do it anyway, & endure
the repetitive feeling of being crushed so as to keep alive the lingering possibility of it paying off. yeah!

i now have eight thousand one hundred followers. i am trying to decide whether going through & rapidly,
indiscriminately blocking at least one hundred of them is bad, as over-investment in the mechanics of the
website, or good, as putting precise effort into subverting the way it functions as long as i am remaining on it

"well, i did it anyway, for better or for worse!" i say to the eight thousand remaining fucking people
who uniformly have no investment in any of this despite opting into spectating it like the soulless,
personality-void, content-hungry psychopaths they are. a plague upon every last one of them

in these relocations, i tend to do things like replace "this website" with "tumblr." for this one, it's
sort of unfeasible, so i'm copying it verbatim. just keep in mind that it was originally on tumblr!

i am probably, finally, going to largely disappear from this website before too long. the general peer that you, the reader,
represent collectively in league with the other readers, can rot in hell. you, the reader, can not rot in hell, but you are
absolutely an element of something that can rot in hell. good fucking riddance. i have essentially felt nothing from
this platform for years & years but alienation & pointless hate & endless apathetic stamping of my attempts at
positivity into the dirt, over & over & over & over & over & over & over & over & over. i'm not even
really disliked! i think i might even be particularly liked. that's the tiny tragedy of it, huh?

november 21st

despite how many personal things i've said on tumblr, & how personal many of them have been, i have also thought
after pretty much every single one: "i hope that one didn't finalize the tracing of an outline of one of the remaining
undisclosed aspects of myself!" it's actually been maybe my most regular source of anxiety for at least a year

i've never knowingly met another person who has also cohabited with someone who openly blares sound effects from slot machine
flash games from their computer speakers & walks around with them tinnily playing from their phone. so i don't have much
of a point of reference for how justified i am in feeling at times that it feels like being forced to bear constant witness
to a genuinely horrifying existential-dread-inducing reduction of another human being to a state of living death

i guess there are inevitably people who have had to live with family who were actual drug users whose corresponding
addictions reduced them to actual literal states of catatonia so i really don't have it that bad but um uh you know

maybe i am the only human being available who can actually speak firsthand on having to hear these sound
effects! maybe there is no one else adjacent to my existence who fills this position! maybe i get to speak
on it & nobody else is permitted to directly weigh in because they're not going to grasp it!

i've been making posts about this since at least 2015 i think

if we're going to see eye-to-eye i'm afraid i need you to
regularly reckon with masculine nu metal & slot machine
flash game sound effects for seven consecutive years

i don't even want to go on about nu metal at this point, suffice to say it feels to me like it is a composed under circumstances
that are such a horrifying void of meaning, & channels temperaments that are such a horrifying void of meaning, that when i hear
it i feel like it's vacuuming the meaning from its surroundings. there was that one day i was just having this stomach-knotted
response & hitting my head against my closet door because it was cold outside & i had nowhere else to go & i felt like a caged
rat having to take in those kinds of signals. why didn't i ask him to turn it down or wear headphones, you ask? why do i not
to this day? i guess there is something wrong with me if my nonconfrontationality bends & bends & doesn't break even at
the point that i'm banging my head against a door in something akin to a state of panic because i have no escape from
a music genre. i am sorry for bottling myself up. i don't know who i'm sorry to for it, but, well, on principle

this is how i handle living with two people who provide for me, no questions asked. apparently. i am sorry for
being absurd. so much around me just feels so very very ethically sick & drained of life, even if the situation is stable

i need dynamic life

november 25th

"send me hateful anonymous messages telling me to kill myself for being pretentious enough to write & present a
self-indulgent poem instead of ignoring me," i type, before putting quotation marks around it to indicate that i
don't mean it as much as i just need to additionally type it to satiate some inarticulable urge. i stand in
my bedroom. the situation is ugly, in a very abstract, technologically mediated way

november 26th

i guess i consider the negative aspects of my current condition to be lasting injuries done by many years of
sustained total thoughtlessness. years i could have been developing & was instead something entirely null

a span of time that i was enabled to experience through... the circumstances of: 1. living with well-meaning but thoroughly
disenchanted family who were basically entirely inert as influences on me, aside from general examples of what i don't want
to be; &, critically, 2. the helpless misfortune of falling in with online social groups or milieus that typically served
to foster apathy or outright cynicism in me rather than nurturing any sense of curiosity or rationality

pretty much everything that i spend a lot of time today trying to verbalize & make sense of in positive
ways, was back then merely felt, wholly inarticulated, only manifesting in universally directed
rage in equal if not greater inverse proportion to the positivity that i am focused on now

& then you have, um... the isolation, & turning to tumblr for a vague "other," & the much-described over-valuation of acknowledgment
through notes, which, in the past, possibly had even greater distorting effects on my thought patterns than it sometimes does today,
if you can believe it - here was a hollow chamber in which the unabated cynicism & negative orientation of being could echo back
on itself. like, yeah, i was a psycho, i actually thought i was being purposefully (or "collectively subconsciously," at least)
conditioned out of talking about certain things, for reasons that i couldn't get anyone to explain to me. i would
spam desperate all-caps pleas for someone to just tell me what i had done wrong so i could be better,
or sometimes i would lash out at the sadism i perceived in the phenomenon

& then you have the universal damage that is done to many many human beings by literally any mainstream,
normative, mass-media-transmitted conception of literally any aspect of the world - & one tends to actually
receive conceptions of many many aspects... & i wasn't spurred to sort all of that out for myself
very much. living in a superficial fiction but with a buried horrified awareness of that

i had a bunch of positive realizations, & i thought i could then simply insta-purify & make
everything hunky dory. but... i feel like i can't undo any of this, it's still going to affect me

november 28th

all that stuff i typed on the fourteenth, while i was having a meltdown, about being irrationally afraid of having severe
permanently ingrained flaws that may inhibit my ability to be a nice person, & from there also being irrationally afraid
that if that is a reality for me, & might be a reality for anyone else, then it might imply a terrifying inescapable
hierarchy of the undamaged over the damaged, lurking under everyday life...

i just realized with shock how similar that was to the types of thinking that people fully subscribe to in incel spaces! just
goes to show what happens when you surrender yourself to "objective" systems that you can't actually verify to exist, i guess

november 30th

i would rather huddle up in a corner & focus very hard on never ever doing anything, than... be helplessly wielded by
patterns, regardless of what i "choose" to do & how "conscious" the choice feels... i'm not necessarily saying i
am wielded by patterns but i would definitely rather huddle in a corner than be wielded by patterns

february 14th, february 15th, march 8th, march 19th, april 3rd, april 20th, may 22nd, may 31st, july 4th, october
12th < calendar days that i can verify on which i feel i may have been permanently or significantly altered

three are unequivocally bad, the rest i am ambivalent on. there are four or five
that i were unequivocally positive about around the actual time. there are
four that i am willing to humor may have ultimately been good

i talked with someone, something happened, i met some people, i met someone, i met
someone, individuals died in two different years, a disaster happened, i met someone,
something happened in two different years, someone said something to me

five seconds on tumblr on a different computer that doesn't have the plugin that hides the note counts: ohh god oh god killmy
self kill myself oh godkil mysel fctrwl-wr-wlc-tlw ctrlw ctrl- w ctrl-w ctrl-wcrrtrlw no fucking way to live inhumane torture
barely made it out alive oh my fucking god the absolute deprivation of my humanity & dignirty oh my godim gonna throw up its
Hell i saw Hell i saw fucking Hell gouge eyes out still left with the images of torture imprited into my mind Nightmare Nightmare

someone edit the funny garfield sign so it says "the total psychological & spiritual rape of having the
qualitative characteristics of even your private personal expression supplanted by quantitative measures"
instead of popaganda. big notes for you if you execute this. you dont have to credit me even

during my bus ride i did not shield myself with the feeling
of a broader perspective than i felt was being employed
in the small talk of the people on the bus

in my head i leap to sentences like "i would rather kill myself than experience being quantified in the way tumblr quantifies me."
but i wouldn't actually rather kill myself. i just don't know how else to express my absolute maximal discomfort & disgust. or
i don't see the point of granting it any more nuance. but for any period of time that i let this site have effects on me, i
am just trapped alive in a life where i am being implicitly quantified by the people reading. when i think of the most
qualitative & human things i could do, for the sake of comparison, it doesn't feel remotely overdramatic to call the
feeling Hell. i already feel at risk of adapting to the extra step in obsessively checking notes, where i first disable
the browser plugin's cosmetic filtering. it is coming to feel like an addiction. if i could let you directly
feel how much i hate it, you would agree, you would say, ok, yes, someone cannot hate something
this much & still do it without it being an addiction. you are currently consuming the product of
another person's addiction. just an interesting thing to note, i think. it is not meant to make
you feel bad but maybe there is the chance that it will. (speaking to the "general peer"
instead of the individual reader again) i wish you would suffer very very badly
in retribution for sitting there & willingly acting as a fulcrum
on which i have hurt myself so very much

i hurt myself so so bad with tumblr so so very much & i've been doing it so so very long, & it's so so very normal to me after
so very long, & it's so so very real, & i have hurt very very much so very many times. you are feeling empathy as you read
these words in my text post, & you exist. you are looking at posts. i'm telling you about how i'm sitting in a coffee shop
amid social people & using a device to make myself completely detached from my surroundings & flat-faced, devoid of
any emotion except for a frantic yet numb pain for which i would posit there is no longer any specific name for, the
way you can call the different shades of distress things like "guilt" or "embarrassment" or "alienation," this one
feels like it has no name. imagine me laughing instead but i'm not, that's not what i'm doing, i'm typing

i never would have expected to be conditioned like a dog, i never would have expected for sufficient repetition of a stimuli
to actually erode any appeal to reason so thoroughly, i never would have expected the confiscation of my ability to
reason that a sentence without a number under it isn't necessarily reprehensible, i never would have expected

what i find most disturbing about me being in a bad state is that i feel like it's the same exact me as when
i'm in a maximally level & kind state, except sufficiently refracted through cracked lenses that it looks
so very different. in fact, i tentatively extend this reasoning even to the me of years ago, when
i thoroughly presented as a radically different person who i feel was incredibly repulsive

sigh... can it be a coincidence that i have such persistent fears around, like, collapsing into ugliness,
& then... i get so weird & ugly & in-my-own-head publicly online with the regularity that i do?

there's kind of a chicken-or-the-egg thing to it. the simpler option is that the fear originates in the habit: i know i have the
habit & so i am naturally afraid of expressing it & tarnishing myself yet again. the weirder option is that the tendency
originates in the fear: that i am subjecting myself to the realization of my fear, as self-harm or something like that

or maybe it really is a coincidence where various factors just have me unfortunately at odds with myself

i'm going to mop up all of these posts & sleep, ok?

i was going to sleep as soon as i brushed my teeth, but i made the mistake of opening my laptop. the original intent was
just to type approximately this: "poor poor silliness folded down to a wimpy ideal." it's a reference to a post i made
a day or two ago. i was going to post it & then immediately go to sleep. but i got sucked into various things

anyway, i'm going to mop up all of these posts & sleep, ok?

i feel that social media is founded on each person's reality of being sadly alone in a room, & on turning that reality
into something to inflict... it's like frustratedly wiggling the antennas on a tv, trying to get a good signal. &
whenever the picture is clear, you are successfully ensconced in the delusion that you are not sitting alone
in a room. but it's very finicky, & each wave of static that creeps in tears you back into the reality & the
reality is like someone beating you with a stick & berating you to get the antennas right again

i genuinely can't tell if i'm moderately popular in some online spaces or if i'm, like... at most, just popular enough that some
people can playfully reference the vague notion of me being popular, & then that justifies the next playful reference
a bit more, & it just sort of carries on that way... either way, i truly don't have any investment in the matter

-

is this repugnant, i've never referenced the notion of popularity in reference to myself before & i don't know if i talked about
it right. i don't want to be disgusting & that is the only reason i am typing this caption, that is the entire rationale that my
typing this is rooted in & i want that to be known, that i only want in earnest to be acceptable & not obnoxious & that
i act & speak on behalf of that drive, so i'm trying right now to be granted the opportunity to account for having
potentially been obnoxious. that's all that i want, if i misspeak & make a fool of myself i want to make it
right, i just have to be permitted to know. there are some things we can't do autodidactically, where
i have to ask for help or there is nothing that i can do. i can't know my own unknown unknowns

-

it made me incredibly sad to realize as i was typing the previous caption that i was regressing to the kind of
borderline psychotic appeals to no one in particular that i would type years ago, that i thought i was done with.
it made me sadder that i just kept typing even after that realization. i feel like i am wanting so very badly
for nothing to be wrong but the experience of being quantified by this website is briefly ruining
me & all i can do is sit & feel myself be ruined. this is breaking my heart