- Neocities seems to go back to normal -
march 26th, 2022
i want to confidently care about people. i want to viscerally care about people. i want to smile or tear up at lots of things people
do, i want to feel more invested in things people say & do. i don't want to feel detached. my entire lifetime thus far feels like
nothing at all in the way of a primer for viscerally caring about anyone. i want to care but it is not in my power, i don't
have a choice. i can put in effort, i can show care through my actions, but i can't acquire an essential "spark" of care
i want to care, not spend time ruminating over whether i really care at all about anyone in any capacity. i don't want
to go through spells of feeling that i don't really like or dislike anyone, that i am just here, & so are they,
& i can talk to them. i don't want to wonder if talking is essentially a prolonged habit for me
i don't want to wonder if i should feel deceptive in letting anyone become close to me when i'll inevitably start
to wonder again if someday i'll have to decide i really don't care about anyone, & have to tell them that. all this
time spent wondering that should instead be spent buzzing inside at sentimental acts & others' displays of care
it seems contradictory that i can intensely doubt my care for anyone, yet still value & desire the condition of caring
about people. it seems like a condition you only value if you have that condition in the first place. if you don't
care about something, there's no reason to care about or want it. so i think i must care about people, but
i want to feel viscerally instead of feeling persistently deeply uncontrollably detached
i think i worry about my empathy a lot. i am supposed to like giving a person a comforting hug because i can think back to times
when people hugged me, &, by recalling the goodness of that experience, i can relate to the good experience i am imparting to
the person i am hugging. but i don't know if i can recall ever feeling good while a person has hugged me. i only have hugs
i imagine, & which feel good because in my imagination i have the power to define them as hugs that feel good
i can't recall having ever had anyone in my life with whom, if they abruptly cut all ties with me, my reaction would
not predominantly be to just acclimate to that. i prefer to have people in my life but this fails to manifest as a
real inclination to keep them there. i have no inclination to reach out to anyone, to ask how anyone's day
going. i can't pretend to. never in my life have i ever felt the need to know how a person's day is going
april 6th, 2022
liking people on the basis that their qualities essentially permit me to exist, since by myself i am no one, while being
with them brings myself out of me. their qualities cause inexorable syntheses that change me into me's that i am not
capable of being otherwise - wholly sincere me's in spite of their transience, typically nested inside, wholly
hidden & inaccessible. there are me's that i simply can't be in these posts. to lose a certain person is to
lose a variety of myself, never to be her again - potentially a me who i was very comfortable being
april 9th, 2022
guy i talked to on omegle for one night on may thirty-first 2020 & was estranged from after we both dozed off & i woke up
to find the chat disconnected, & who now periodically returns to my thoughts as seemingly a soul mate who i will never talk
to again nor anyone similar to him, & in any case whether he is or is not actually a soul mate it seems the conviction
that he is will linger indefinitely given a lack of further communication to ever validate it or sully it
70000000 year search for one person who i think really understands the quality of benignity
may 8th, 2022
i read description of isolating conditions of modern life & think it is insightful since i feel very isolated
all the time even though it is simply because of a personal confluence of factors in my head that make
me generally unwilling to talk to people while everyone else is simply doing the modern life
capitalism stuff which was analyzed & then talking to each other about it without issue
may 11th, 2022
my social outlets are coming to feel like an endless stream of random pictures & jokes that were once appealing but are
not anymore because they have come to feel like this self-contained thing that doesn't acquire value from being rooted
in lives anymore. i do like incoherence for the sake of it but for me it's now meaningfully incoherent, i guess.
i think if my life currently felt more substantiated then i could turn to my life for coherence & then
have a little social sector of contained incoherence but as it stands it seems like all i have
i feel i am not putting much else on offer socially, though, because in conversation i tend to reflexively suppress in myself all real thought
about me, the person i'm with, & the general situation. possibly because i do not want to swiftly reason & communicate anything socially
real because i am so used to the unconscious dynamics that inevitably arise from people's socialization becoming hideously unfair
to the poor conscious people involved. there has to be more than either arms-length or a helpless callousness
when tasked with trying to comfort anyone, i expect only opposition to whatever i might say. if i say, "that's no good,"
i anticipate "you're stating the obvious." if i say, "it'll be ok," i anticipate "how can you know that." if i say, "i'm
sorry," i anticipate "you have nothing to do with the problem." if i say, "i know, i understand," i anticipate "how
can you actually understand." are these platitudinous niceties, yes, but i'm not sure i'd mind hearing them at a
bad moment. nothing would drive me to poke holes in them, i'd just recognize them for what they are, i think
in lieu of these i feel compelled always to grasp for some actual emotional path forward which naturally
i cannot always do. this all leaves me grasping for words in a framework where silence tends to be
construed as absence, imposing a severe time restriction. i think 2017 made me like this, i am not sure
i wake up, make despondent blog posts about my capacity for socialization, go to class, come home, &
someone i've never encountered in my life adds me on discord & we promptly start talking about stagnation
& outlook & language & immediacy & authenticity like we already knew each other... endless comedy
may 15th, 2022
i feel like there are very few forms of unorthodox communication that i would really mind receiving
from anyone, so when i consult the "golden rule" it says "do basically anything at any time"
which seems untenable so i compensate for its untenability by not doing very much
may 16th, 2022
i do envision a certain range of physical appearance all the time with respect to idealized affection & feel a curious need for
affection from someone within that range however as i enter any realistic social setting i repress & forget all of that since it
continues to disturb me e.g. if i get along very well with anyone who doesn't so happen to exist within such a range then
observing it in any capacity feels like stomping their immortal soul into the mud over something they had no say in
may 20th, 2022
i picture myself having dramatic interactions with people, & then i figure that this is obviously unrealistic & doing
it habitually could make me inclined to think about life in the wrong ways. so i steer myself to imagine having
interactions with people that exhibit a kind of aimlessness that underlies life... then at this point in the post
i want to note that the most demonstrably realistic thing is not the aimless interactions but the
actual situation of me sitting in a chair imagining them, which is very aimless indeed
may 20th, 2022
i envision love as a kind of force which kind of exists beyond people, in a
sense, even though it exists only as a product of their feelings & behavior
i see this force as something which churns across continents & around the planet like a liquid
but this churning is not the generally predictable flow of a physical liquid, as much as an abstract flow utilizing
many vectors of movement such as... people. food. hugging arms. telecommunications systems. acts of rescue
this churning is comparable to the spread of a virus, which is also a kind of inexorable process which can be
modeled according to what is essentially a "flow" through physical space. a virus' flow is visibly abstract
for its dependence on the vector of human bodies, but, when setting aside its abstraction, it doesn't
doesn't seem fundamentally different from the intricate flow of water down a hillside
when a person internalizes love, comes to value it & successfully feel it when it is received, develops a proclivity for
showing it, the force of love has propagated... they may act as a decisive factor in a case where the success of another
person's internalization of love is hanging in the balance. while i think it is an oversimplification to sort people
into binary classes of who has & has not internalized love, i feel as if this holds water in some general sense
a long-standing cycle of intergenerational trauma can be seen as a kind of low-pressure zone within this abstract
global surface of love, where that surface's flows happen to resolve into a kind of ebb, which has as of yet failed
to destabilize in an event where the surrounding love finally overflows the barriers & retakes that voided space
-
lately i am back in the place where i do not believe that i am capable of feeling any drive to express love, nor
do i believe i am capable of feeling its reception. i believe that i came into existence in one of these ebbs.
i hardly see any stakes in anything. with this churning force being beyond any of us, i'm not sure there
is really anything that anyone could have done to prevent it, & i can only come to terms with it
i believe that a person's early life establishes a very fundamental system of valuation for the experiences
they can have, & that i was left objectively lacking internal structures which would have produced the
acclimation to love & subsequent valuation of it that acts as the motor of all social existence
it feels like a condition which denies a person any reason to move in any direction, leaves them having to
resort to absurdist conceptions of life, leaves them physically alive but motionless & having to process
this total stillness, ultimately finding little to think about it because it is so stark of a mode of being,
not something cruel but simply a thing which simply discloses, in full, from the outset, its absolute
value-neutrality & unwillingness to provide any forces that might push you in any direction at all
i would like to disappear from the lives of the people i am sufficiently close to, because i feel i have irresponsibly caused
people to value me by convincing myself that i am more elaborated than i really am, & on occasion even finding the drive
to pantomime that fabricated self. i do not feel like anyone deserves to be pointlessly misled in this way, led to stake
a part of themselves in a person who is only physically alive, not a social being but capable of being mistaken
for one, quietly containing the other person's inevitable despairing realization of their mistake
may 23rd, 2022
at times when i am convinced that i am incapable of experiencing love, i do not feel so much like a mere empathisably hindered
human being who another person could want to see overcome that problem & thrive, as much as i feel like a worse person for it
in some way, as if i'm expressing the prelude to me souring & becoming an overall terrible person through a progressive
succumbing to some kind of emotional desperation. that or i am providing a sort of grim revelation that no aspects
of my self can stem from love & therefore must all stem from grimly sub-optimal motives
may 25th, 2022
i want to be in a room with one or more people & to play a part in filling that room with warmth & life through my words &
actions. i hope i could do this in spite of my suspicion that i only function as an icon of stillness & ennui, my presence being like
an aimlessness which underlies all of life becoming corporeal & coming to stare everyone in the eye & make them acknowledge it
may 27th, 2022
i think i spend so little time with people in-person that i am not actually used to the fundamental everyday
vulnerability of physically existing in their presence. the result of this is that the prospect of first encountering
a person i know online leads a part of me to exaggerate human unpredictability into a paranoia that they
have meticulously presented an entire constructed personality just for the sake of killing me. the
more i know & trust them, the more meticulous i imagine their presentation to be
the reason i think this doesn't apply with strangers out & about is that i know that none of
them care about me. when i know someone, it means i occupy some psychological "position" for
them, which my irrationality can tell me is the... the "fuel" that would fuel the little equation in a
murderer's head that would evaluate me & output "this is a person who i, a murderer, must murder"
i feel like all agency for or against being in a romantic relationship with anyone at all or visiting with anyone at all has been
wrung out of me. i feel like i am in a place where i am operating only to avoid disappointing people. if someone asked me at this
moment if i love any given person in the world, i would not think "yes" or "no" but silent incomprehension. i don't know
what kinds of bonds i have with anyone, assuming i have bonds with any of them. i probably have a disorder
may 28th, 2022
burial, entombment, in the red tape around the extremely simple premise
of human beings being in proximity & partaking in the same activity
in light of the idea that chance is supposed to retroactively become destiny, maybe i neglect to
ever invite chance because if it entails involving another person in any sort of gamble then the sense of
accountability leads me to unreasonably demand that it have the full justification of destiny from the outset
alienation from home life of inane insane people incessantly absorbed in meaningless escapist entertainment & replacements for actual living giving rise
to desperation for memories & experimentation smothered by stochastic formation of social bonds which harden romantically over time impulsively & seem
to instate themselves as bonds constituting life going forward thus supplanting the grand missed chance of coming into my own to build my independent
experimental life & to invite chances so instead all aims are subject to review & arbitration & reconstituted around the presupposed aim of romantic
stability despite the diminishing of real & propulsive desire original to me to maintain it & that desire's replacement with a kind of flypaper inability
to separate in light of a stated inability to guarantee continued contact as mere friends but the bonds & memories & all are nonetheless valued
& real & i am desperate & so things seem to stretch into the suffocated future forever as today i insist & debate about seeing my friend
for the month of June out of a desire to feel like i'm still enacting unfettered agency & like i'm reclaiming the timeline where i can
just do such a thing without having to negotiate about it, which is the reality that feels "canonical" & meant-to-be & lost.
sense of empty powerlessness entrapment & uncertainty & i write this & then try to feel better for the moment
in the sun hearing birds, wondering if i love birds & sun more than i love anyone
may 29th, 2022
i almost feel like the practice of whispering comforting things to myself is what i really want, in lieu of having comparable things
said by others. it feels suited for me. i stand by what i said about it how it seems to serve essentially the same function as prayer,
wherein a person accesses their unclouded will, conscience, & realistically forgiving view of themselves by externalizing those things,
whereupon they feel more valid & clear... it's hard to imagine effectively receiving that from the actual externality of another person,
because it will always seem like just a reduction of my maximum intimacy with myself that is available to me in every moment.
i guess this is the definition of either self-centeredness or self-sufficiency. nothing to do but collapse inward, so i do
may 30th, 2022
it's not clear what to do when it seems like you find the person you love forever very suddenly & early, & it's
like something was cut short like you are not ready to accept yet that you're with who you love forever like there
was supposed to still be the possibility of many learning illuminating if ephemeral loves but you cannot
abandon your maybe forever love so there is the conflicted quality of intertwined fortune & tragedy
may 31st, 2022
the pessimistic side of my self-conception is that i missed formative experiences which would have established in me the
frameworks to relate to people & value relationships with them, & that i am prone to repressing this knowledge of myself for
long enough to become superficially close to people as a pursuit of some fantasy of being a social being, until that knowledge
crashes back into my awareness & makes me aware that i am like a demon in engaging with other people's social faculties
then unwillfully collapsing into detached nothingness like burdening them with my death while still alive
i periodically lapse into fearful convictions that i am incapable of loving anyone, yet if a succulent plant is the
product of a loving encounter then i develop some kind of persistent complex around it. great priorities...
i want the affection of someone who personally knows nothing about me. i want them to feel irresistibly compelled to be very nice
to me. i would like affection given specifically on the merits of external aspects of me that i could not even choose to do away with
if i wanted to, without those aspects being augmented by an awareness of my personality. i would like to be to someone merely
the character of those static guarantors. i think this is a deranged impulse but it is one of the realest-feeling ones i have
june 4th, 2022
i do so many things while really really having no idea why i'm doing them, if i even want anything at all, my motivations
feeling murky to the point that i feel like some kind of p-zombie just acting convincingly like a person with no internal
volition. but i have to assume i do want lots of things, because on some level i know that i don't want that awareness,
of their being done for seemingly no reason, to actually become a reason that they stop happening
june 7th, 2022
current thing i keep thinking over & over: "it is coming to feel like humans, despite being material things with material origins,
enjoy interacting with ideal, abstract dynamics rather than the material world per se. the material world plays a role which is merely
incidental to that desire, being the inevitable medium for the dynamics we enjoy. for much of our history, we were obliged to
appropriate only the most obvious & un-abstract of the world's self-expression towards this end, & now, in the information
age, we are in a stage of intensively streamlining the craft of physical constructions that are sufficiently abstracted to best
play host, with minimal interference from their inevitable physicality, to the dynamics that were all we ever wanted
in the first place (computers). this idea of the physical world having only ever been a 'stopgap' is making me sad"
june 9th, 2022
reviewing memories where i can't really discern if i was happy at the time, per se, but i feel a
gnawing urge to recreate them or find variations on them all the same - an urge that is possibly
stronger than even that general urge of "identify things that make me happy & do them"
i want to ride around New York again. car rides are like the heart of everything. maybe, on some perverse level, i would
like to stare out the window while someone else speeds me along a pre-decided path along roads that neither of us built
communicating my most abstract needs, even just for mere consideration, feels like being a burden. i want someone to read my
mind & know all that i want. i want to wait for someone whose nature happens to leads them to do all that i happen to want
barring myself from voicing even the softest invitations
i want to create meaning & life always but i want to know
ahead of time, without asking, that someone wants it
"don't acquiesce to forces that would have you forgo living in reality, or forgo real & true
dialogue with others!" i say, & what i seem to mean is, "don't let the world happen to forcibly
recreate in you what in me seems to be terribly innate! don't follow my bad example!"
an eternity of slowly drying up into a crumbly prune while humbly petitioning life to undo the process
by sparing as much as one restorative drop of genuine passion & reality. have to be my own humanity
june 15th, 2022
alone together?
can an empty room with someone else be filled with life? am i broken if i can't fill an empty room with
life? will the presence of technology inevitably cause everything to reconstitute around it? are abstract
dynamics humanity's true passion which precedes the physical world? is this only the inevitable reality?
or is it my failing? their failing? our failing? has an omnipresent suffocation of our standards for our
use of our time created a false impression of human nature as something silent & immobile & banal?
why can't i speak? why do all thoughts & actions lodge in my head as mere
considerations, feeling so much weightier than their realizations? why am
i content to fantasize conversations, even with someone i sit right next to?
if i am at least in the same room as someone, does that constitute love conceived as the simultaneous experience of that
room through the perspective of our inherent difference? or does mutual immersion in separate digital endeavors lead
to such an isolating fracture in our subjective experience that the room is effectively discarded & love is destroyed?
june 16th, 2022
"tends to share & reinforce excitement if there is something like chickens
or a goat, or just a squirrel" is a critical romantic prerequisite i think
i'm silent & blank which is why i want someone who
would find something endearing in witnessing
me simply performing a mundane action
the only actions that feel compulsory for me are forms of preservation & routine. there is nothing... projective?
or external? or constructive? which has ever felt compulsory for me. i have never felt a need to unfurl myself.
it feels so incredibly easy not to do any action of those sorts that to actually do any of them would feel like
some kind of lie. i am only interested in holding the arbitrary but familiar together, not constructing
or developing anything. i think it is unpleasant that this is how it is, but it feels true
-
i think this ties into the way that all of my actions stem from a wary, confused subjectivity, while everyone
else's actions seem to have a comfortingly objective & undeniable character, as if various forces guide them,
even if those "forces" are just their condition of being them, & even though "being them" is merely
something with no definition that they define exhaustively through each & every action
i know, of course, that everyone else's actions spring from their confused subjectivities too, that for them i
may be the one who appears comfortingly objective, that for every person there is the same solipsistic veil
but, entrenched in a lifetime of mere observation of those around me, it's like i cannot help but to demand to be moved
by the same "forces" that appear to guide others. in a situation that calls on me to "be myself," i demand that i get to
just relax while spectating through my own eyes as something pilots my limbs & my words in accordance with
who i am. in the absence of these things pushing me around, i do not act in any way. i am empty & blank
june 18th, 2022
if someone doesn't feel like they can go out & wantonly talk to strangers on the street & public transport &
in grocery stores then their personal philosophy is probably a failure. my personal philosophy is a failure
in december 2016 i made this picture in ms paint about the perceived over-saturation of the internet that occurred from
about the late 00s through mid 10s & the semi-traumatic effect i felt it had relative to my sense of perpetual social isolation
i'm going to die without the love of someone who can & must love animals without imposing human-centric abstractions
like hamfisted anthropomorphism or lenses of modernized aesthetic stylization over the single what's-actually-there
june 19th, 2022
eternity of self-imposed heartache from having so much to say (i believe) but feeling pathologically incapable of honestly.
speaking self-imposed silence with the irrationality of a learned-helpless laboratory dog, the unstoppable force of desire
for communication versus the unmovable object of a simple, causeless "no," the blame for which is laid solely at
my feet. i don't think it's even that i'm tucked into a shell, afraid to expose my true self, it's just that
i... will. not. speak, a condition without even justification, as if predestined
june 20th, 2022
to talk & to bring another with your words to a place which they could not see without your specific presence
as they do the same for you is not what life has made me meant for. through a cavity of experiential emptiness
that enclosed me for such a long, crucial, early time i think it has made me not meant for that
with all that emptiness, i naturally slid into a fittingly evil & hostile way of being. until i decided to subvert that by instead
aiming to build my heart into something for which... each little degree of betterment would really be just a higher degree of tragedy
in how that heart's prospects of seeing any social application, of being realized through any social character inside of me, were
all denied from the outset. i'm only working on an irrational project of trying to build a bigger flame to watch be smothered
june 24th, 2022
wake up & quickly become teary-eyed over the same old seven-hundred-&-fifty-four-day-old missed connection... i know
i'm doing a lot of perpetual extrapolation about the interaction, which can only grow more & more tenuous over time. but
so much seemed so unmistakably right. so much will never seem so right ever again. no one ever feels remotely so right
to me. everyone else is practically repulsive in comparison. i need whatever i can get, & briefly there seemed to be
not just "whatever i can get" but everything. no, we didn't see each other's selves to much depth, but the most
visible signs still seemed like an unmistakable constellation. i would like any closure about the night.
i would embrace disillusionment or rejection over "Stranger has disconnected."
june 30th, 2022
i don't feel apathetic about other people's emotional pain, but i do absolutely act apathetically about it. my nature if i
hear a person crying is to just stand there quietly torturing myself with the repression of my own empathy for literally no
reason, like a learned-helpless dog who was electrocuted after reaching out in that way numerous times & now cannot
conceive of doing it, in a way that precedes any pretense of reason or even any particular fear of doing it
i want to nurture
july 1st, 2022
i'll tell you a maybe embarrassing scenario that i idly envisioned last night: it was a person showering me in a kind of
perfect nurturing love like anything i've ever imagined, before succumbing to some kind of terminal illness & in their
final moments making me promise to reflect on all the ways i'd benefited, in my growth as a person, from the
presence of the love they'd shown. & also to reflect that love to the world in their stead. i was left with
an inexorable & permanent emotional impetus, rooted in that event, to do those things
what i think this illustrates about me is that i can't work out how to just grasp my own agency that sits right in front of me,
to grasp it so very simply, & use it to reform myself into exactly what i'd like to see. in place of doing that, i yearn for the
retroactive presence of some objective experience that would simply shape me inexorably into someone with the tendencies
of doing everything i'd presently like to do. i can't see any stakes in anything. nothing pushes me to take hold. i operate
on external forces & inertia. it feels like i can't be a source, only a link in a chain, & there is no such chain
concept: if just one generation of people could be entirely "harlow rhesus monkey'd" by some sufficiently pervasive
mechanism of control with effects that are particularly depriving in that way then everything would maybe be kind of
generationally screwed forever because no one would know how to teach each other to really take care of each other
july 8th, 2022
one of the things i fantasized today was someone asking why i was walking to the spare bathroom in a house instead of the main one,
& i said, "i like that there is a duality," & he said, "you like that there is a duality!" now with an exclamation point but a soft one
july 13th, 2022
i have a significant interpersonal memory that, to me, represents love akin to watching my cranky chihuahua meet another chihuahua
& undergo an immediate temperamental shift to a kind of silent, plucky interest & curiosity... two people of a same "type" who
can't recognize that "type" in themselves until they see its qualities assembled in another person, leading them to discover
an aspect of themselves in the same moment that they discover another person with which to relate about it
something that represents a really effortless sense of equality, neutrality, levelness, evenness, sameness, naturalness.
significant ease & relief on those terms. something that doesn't aim to be enrapturing but to express a tailored
& modest positivity that may ironically turn out to be enrapturing on the grounds of that modesty...
all much simpler in practice than the length of these two paragraphs suggests, basically
i have another significant interpersonal memory that, to me, represents love rooted
in a kind of perverse desire to feel possessed, & does aim to be enrapturing, maybe
july 27th, 2022
i feel too in love for that love to have been cut off at a "stranger has disconnected" over two years ago.
but the endurance of the love is probably just a positive feedback loop free to grow in the empty space
that would have otherwise been occupied by rejection or disillusionment or realization. pointless.
but the reality of that growth still produces the condition described in the first sentence
the irrationality is laid bare in the two facts that i never saw his face & that
i tend to imagine him looking generally like what i'd like him to look like
the system where i kind of reflect whoever i am around so i want
to be around people who cause me to be someone i want to be
Eraserhead (the fear of settling)
synthesis of the above two: if who i'm with is entangled with who i feel like, then the personal
tragedy of missing the person i'm supposed to be with is entangled with the even more personal
tragedy of missing the ability to feel like i can be who i myself am supposed to be
july 28th, 2022
painful psychosomatic pressure inside my skull from the compulsive daydreaming being paired with the estrangement
i know it's so unwarranted given the fleetingness & tenuousness of the conversation, & just how long ago it was
by now. but then, that gets countered with: "nobody had ever spoken to me in that particular way prior, & i doubt
anyone will again." & that makes it seem warranted somehow. it was singular, the only example of itself
suggestive of a way that i've always needed to relate to someone, but never had anyone with whom i could, nor could i even
notice i needed to relate to anyone in such a way until such a person appeared. & now i have the conversation serving as
the single example of itself, & only retrospectively... it illuminated something but left me alone with it at the same time
july 31st, 2022
i feel like the only person in the world who is as devoted as i feel
to the inherent value of something like the shadow of a window
frame cast on a ceiling by a streetlight in a dark, quiet room
like i should be allowed to spend as much time as i want in any building i want,
because i'm the only person who'd really get the value of that! (joking a bit)
if my friend hadn't booked that particular airbnb at the end of june, i wouldn't even know the way that that orange light
streamed in through those blinds, across that arrangement of walls. i'm still thinking about that. it was important to me
it's like... i keep thinking i've found someone, but then they can't even appreciate this. or worse,
reflexively do some kind of bathetic distancing from the idea that something as mundane as
a room could actually mean something to them. & to me that speaks to some kind of divide
being around people is draining, & unpleasantly distances me from myself, insofar as it obliges
me to temporarily forget all of this in favor of some gratingly mundane, mercenary, "casual"
(above all else everything has to be so "casual") style of processing events & spaces
having to exist as a social being. having to have all the true, wordless qualities
of events & spaces supplanted by their constant refraction through language
for as lonely as i tend to feel, i guess i really really do relish solitude. & what i want with respect to my
loneliness is at least one person i am... similar enough to that i could share solitude with them, in a sense
but not in the sense of mutual escapism in the same room, i think!
that doesn't feel like shared solitude, it feels like shared isolation
& it's not that, if we were in that room with the shadow of the window frame, that we would have to stay
quiet, as much as whatever we said would feel like the preservation of the solitude... because, well, it
would just be "right," in the real "love" way that is useless to bother trying to articulate
i feel like i hate too many things. but when i try to analyze & confront that feeling i just end up arriving back at the same
pragmatic-feeling earnest belief that an immense number of things right now are kind of cheapened & tainted & spoiled.
& not in some pissy way where i'm painting an essential cynicism over the nature of life but in a distinctly inessential
& historically specific way where i think the society i live in really does tend to try to ruin everything, throughout as
many little nooks & crannies of life as possible, the same way a central beating heart can finely reach every last cell
by progressively splitting down into tiny capillaries. i.e. you can't expect the relevant forces to just pass over
your little city because it's small, or over any other little minor aspect of living. & i only see it all getting
worse as the relevant forces progressively improve themselves. so it's like all i can say is, well
yes i guess i do just hate things extensively given what i feel like i'm dealing with
there are plenty of things i don't hate, things i practically live for, but the degree of searching it takes to
fish them out is kind of demoralizing. & it's so hard to find any people to relate to on the basis that they...
strike me in remotely the same ways as any of those things? on the basis that to some extent they represent
the temperamental or aesthetic or cultural or what-have-you currents that are bundled up in such a thing
- posts may continue to appear in this lacuna -
august 2nd, 2022
becoming delirious & sad from lack of sleep in a bus terminal
i constantly think that nearly anyone in this bus station might want to steal one of my belongings or hurt me,
that's my type of mindset. i wish i didn't have it. i don't know what it's like to stand in the bus station &
feel like there's a kind of philadelphic atmosphere, or unspoken camaraderie about being stuck in a bus
station, or if nothing explicitly positive then at least just fully & unquestioningly casual coexistence.
i don't know how to adjust this facet of myself, to see everyone in their actual comforting mundane
normality. i wish i knew how. it is like being chipped at & chipped at. living in a bad world
that isn't actually there. inferring the existence of a full good world that i am not occupying
i've been telling myself for years that hugs are something that i need, however i received about seven thousand hugs in
the past month & felt very blank. there are at least three potential conclusions i could draw from this. the first is that
whatever i need doesn't actually include hugs. the second is that i need hugs but they have a positive "background
effect" that isn't as visceral as i expected. the third is that i felt blank during the hugs because i am acquiescing to
a somewhat one sided romantic relationship for the sake of preserving my closest friendship which may be the only
friendship in my life which has even approximately approached its degree of ease, duration, substantiated companionship
(& that i'd potentially have to gruesomely sever it in the event that someone appeared whose hugs were visceral)
i like spending two years sitting in my room & trying to assure myself that i'm nice but just can't see it directly because i have
no one to be nice to, & trying to derive a kind of satisfaction from the idea that if the right person can somehow just discover me
socially then they might think i'm nice & draw my unrealized niceness out of me. choosing to believe that i'm something meant to
be a fortunate discovery for someone, & teasing myself along for eternity with such a flattering but continually postponed promise
august 4th, 2022
memories of being intensely affected by the affection of people i didn't really know leave the gnawing unresolved
question of whether i was affected more because of their particular qualities or because i didn't really know them
august 5th, 2022
wondering if spending so much of my life envisioning affection could have led me to a place where i'm
conceiving of it in terms of some awful gnarled tangle of a self where there's a me-me, a me-them,
a them-me, & a them-them involved & i variously would like to feel like one, some, or all of them
august 7th, 2022
i don't live in an especially big city, & it can make me sort of pessimistic about my prospects of finding a close friend.
i think it's significant to note: the people i went on an immensely significant road trip with in 2017 also live in my city,
& i never ever run into them. this is both pessimistic & optimistic to note, because: 1. (optimistic) god knows who else
i haven't run into yet, possibly some very significant people; 2. (pessimistic) despite these hypothetical people
living here, it's clear from my previous example that i may just never run into any of them
august 8th, 2022
i feel like i have to train myself to stop automatically envisioning affection when i lie on my bed. lying on my
bed is a mundane thing, & life is mostly composed of mundane things, so they should be allowed to feel good
whenever they can. lying on my bed can't feel good in & of itself if it's always paired with the habitual
introduction of a gnawing idea about how it could be improved, always saying, "this isn't good enough"
august 9th, 2022
maybe someone i encountered years ago whose i don't even remember existing still repeats my
name the same way i repeat the name of the guy i encountered on omegle several years ago
august 10th, 2022
owls raccoons chats memories missed connection eternity... simple as!
a deconstruction of envisioning affection:
A is me. B is the other person
i envision B holding me. or rather, i envision B holding me
if this situation is conceived of in the third-person, & i
envision being held by B if it is in the first-person
i then utilize the imaginary quality of the scenario to dart my consciousness over to
B. as B, i hold myself (A) with a certain indescribable form of internal sentiment
that i, as A, know that i would like a person to have in mind as they hold me
then i dart my consciousness back to myself, to A, & feel very rewarded by knowing that B is holding me with such
an ideal sentiment in mind. despite being A again, i have such an intuitive awareness of B's sentiment thanks to
a third party, the me who resides on a higher level, who is envisioning this scenario & is thus both A & B
a problem:
this is obviously not possible in real life. i will never be able to directly experience another
person's perception of holding me, & will always have to take their word, to guess & second
guess at what's really happ-ening on the other side of the infinite expanse that exists between
us as it exists between any two, three, or x people. to naturally be only half of the scenario
by envisioning affecting so frequently, i am sort of conditioning myself with expectations that reality
will never live up to, staking my feeling of contentment on an operation that will never happen
"except, it's not half. it's overlaid maps"
august 14th, 2022
telling myself "i've seen so little of myself in so many people i've encountered in this life that all i need is to
really truly see myself in someone just once & then after that i'll be more content with navigating the inevitable
& plentiful dissimilarities of typical & less star-crossed associations" but not being sure how truthful i'm being
i enacted numerous private policies which could be exemplified as a genre by a behavior of saying "silly" in my head
instead of "stupid" if i do something wrong that isn't very consequential. i think this substantially improved my
experience of being in a room & of walking down empty streets. but it is beginning to reassert itself that ultimately
i have been calling things silly in a room & on empty streets for long enough that it is becoming a problem
august 15th, 2022
at five-thirty am i hope to go on a very long nighttime-sunrise walk across town to the coffee shop & arrive
around when they open. i will hope the entire time that some new important person will anomalously round
a corner & become an element in my life, this will not happen however. but i will like going on the walk
august 18th, 2021
april 18th, 2021
when i feel lonely in a certain way, i automatically picture a view of the
southern side of a certain dormitory from a certain point along a certain side of
a certain road near my house, at night. nothing in the view has any particular
significance to me, so i'm not sure why it got linked with that feeling
there are now two locations like this. the newer one is as precise a point as the first. it is still at night. it is a point on
the sidewalk on the north side of a street, slightly west of a bridge over a creek. north of the sidewalk is a stretch of empty
space occupied by a gravel lot & a field of grass. i tend to imagine being able to see a radio tower blinking to the north. but
i tend to imagine facing more east-southeast. i do not imagine anything in particular happening at either of these places
august 20th, 2022
turned away to escape a near sense of romantic tension with a person who
was essentially a literal silhouette on the horizon who looked like they
might have been turning & looking at me standing on a hilltop
august 24th, 2022
the bewildering acknowledgment that what happened in April of 2021 on Omegle.com
possibly may have counted as the most emotionally gratifying experience of my life
august 25th, 2022
this is where i want to stand with a person who is not insane. now you know that
boring alienating stand-up comedy night forced into my head the classic awareness of nearly the entire fabric of
social reality seeming wholly devoted to being completely opposite to me at some fundamental junction, this
awareness was paired with the contrasting reality that i will almost certainly never talk to raccoon guy again
august 26th, 2022
maintaining faith that somehow at some point i will go on an approximately six mile nighttime walk
with a person (& with a bluetooth speaker) across town to a radio tower that is visible from my house
august 27th, 2022
if the isolation is damaging then each day still only raises the payoff
of the coming momentous isolation-inversion (matter of faith)
august 31st, 2022
enumerating my mannerisms & wanly regarding each one in terms of
having not located people to whom it is simply "right" to express it
september 7th, 2022
thinking about the difference that might have been made by even one person in my childhood who
wasn't deeply alienated & stupid then avoiding thinking about that because it's unproductive
i might be caught in a vicious cycle where, the more time i spend as a general social recluse, the
my entire firsthand experience of social interactions will become dominated by ones i have only more
spectated, which seem to have an illusory objectivity & inevitability, granted by my being shielded from
the participants' subjective thought processes. & my visceral conception of social relationships
will only continue to become increasingly informed by those illusory qualities, which will
always crumble as soon as i find myself actually acting as half of an interaction
nine perspectives
one: i feel like i am making a lot of progress but i am
still addicted to producing mediated representations
of my own experience, & i do not like that
two: no, don't spit on those. they're just a kind of
multifaceted art project. people have been expressing
themselves through art for thousands of years
three: i agree with two. don't spit on them. you should
appreciate them as all you have. without them you'd just
be losing your mind in a tiny, empty geographic space
four: i disagree with three. you'd still be alone, but i think you'd
be better off without the representations because you'd feel more
secluded & zen in doing similar things to what you already do
five: i agree with four that it'd be good for you, but i disagree on the point that you
would remain alone. abstracted & indirect socialization is just enabling you to remain
isolated. without it, you would start to go insane, & this would act as an impetus that
would finally force you into becoming socially proactive & finding the people around you
six: but what if i would go insane because my social avoidance is rooted in
something deeper than just being enabled by abstracted & indirect socialization?
seven: hi. you felt an instinctive kinship with me when we talked about raccoons on omegle in may of 2020.
that feeling is real, you can feel it, & you should feel that way with lots of people, all the time. you're just
picky. your nature has thus far displayed an extensive incompatibility with all the local people you have
access to. that's just happenstance. no one is going to blame you for it. you don't deserve it
eight: you are picky, & i'm not going to be so generous about it. i can read your mind, & i know your internal
citation for that "incompatibility" is some vague snapshot, of a vague memory, of some vague night, lingering
at the bar, listening to some drunken idiot, a bad egg. you have to broaden your horizons. learn to converse with
everyone & anyone, no matter how far "off your "radar"" they feel. you should have talked with the drunken idiot
nine: to hell with everyone in the bar! you're completely right, they're all insane. you should talk to all of them,
but not for all of them, just do it because otherwise you'll never sift out the miracles, the people who don't
feel totally poisoned by concentrated & centralized temperamental currents that have infected society
september 9th, 2022
on the rare occasions that i get to talk face-to-face with someone about something that
interests me it feels sufficiently out of the ordinary that i feel like i'm living through
a movie scene where the dialogue is written to pander to me & i get uncomfortable
september 18th, 2022
when i'm supplied with a social framework in which i can be recognizedly mischievous that's when i get to occupy
my actual brain, all the other times (the vast majority of the past nine years) are just weird alternate social
isolation brain (it still gets to be the "weird alternate" one despite owning a vast majority of nine years)
september 20th, 2022
i'm convinced that it would be important in some way for me to articulate to myself why exactly it feels so crucial for me to strictly suppress
a smile as i talk to my boss or approach the cook for my food, why i have to keep things perfectly sterile of sentiment if i stop by my teacher's
office to discuss something, why i have to get out of any interaction at the first moment that hints at conclusion, lest it come to feel like
i want to be there independently of the practical aim of the interaction... why i wanted to walk a mile on a moment's notice to buy that
stranger a gatorade & bring it to her but dreaded the inevitable sentiment of our interaction at the door, despite that sentiment being
inherent in the task... but i cannot articulate it. part of me is convinced that it might be rooted in some kind of trauma (which
i would imagine to probably be rooted in exposure to some kind of media rather than direct experience)
oh also this all exists in conjunction with a self-sabotaged need to fall face first limply into another human being's soul like a swimming pool
an instant irrational sense of just laughing at a joke being some highly preliminary seed of a romantic prelude, which is in most cases not appropriate?
something my thoughts have been periodically returning to lately unrelated to this, something i imagine many people possibly
feeling, is a sense of having an ultimatum seemingly imposed on one by reality, somehow - that being: "either romantic
love or no love. if there is to be any form of love at all then its vehicle will be romantic love, that's the only way"
here one can see it neatly packaged in the situation that if there was someone i loved who loved me then it would be an easy way out
where naturally i would feel wholly comfortable, for instance, just laughing at a joke, because nothing could be inappropriate
september 21st, 2022
stared blankly like a reptile as my dad openly wept & said he was going to move in with a friend for a week as a means of
getting himself to stop drinking alcohol, said that he loves me & my brother, that he doesn't want to be seen as a loser
or live in a cloud or have his brains turn mushy. all i am thinking about... is my total lack of inclination to say anything,
to offer any consolation or support, to even move a muscle. & i feel little hope of ever being more than comatose
in this way. all i can say is in the opposite direction is that i at least recognize the deficiency
september 22nd, 2022
not sure if i'm afraid of people or afraid of a kind of essential cruelty inflicted autonomously on
even the most well-intended people by the system of social interaction, by interaction personified,
like an emergent property of interaction that arises separate from the participants - not
something that forces them to be cruel but something that is cruel to both of them
september 23rd, 2022
(drunk)