- Neocities seems to go back to normal -
april 1st, 2022
a person has something that they'd well & truly rather not think about. naturally, though, this leads to
them periodically thinking about it within the framework of apprehending the risk that they might think
about it, & thinking about how they might avoid it. each of these thoughts about the thought constitutes
a quantitative increase in times that the thought has been thought. this makes the thought demonstrably
more real as one that they tend to think, & seems to heighten the severity of the matter. this doesn't
seem fair, but it carries on as a sort of runaway process of positive feedback, until a certain critical
point. at this point, the thought passes from being a thought that they think purely in the interest of
avoiding it, to being a thought that they additionally think on the grounds of it being something they
have thought so much. at this point it is thoroughly enshrined, becomes thoroughly diffuse in their
mentality. this process of enshrinement & diffusion is a drastic one, yet it seems to have arisen
from something as un-drastic & mundane as this logic which seems to have arisen from the
simple & unassuming process of trying to have avoided the thought in the first place
may 6th, 2022
i just instantly read every book ever written now i can post every existing written expression
of things i already believe without having to accept culpability for any of the statements
may 12th, 2022
sugar is such a quintessentially good sweet thing & it's sad to me that i can't really think about it in
good terms since nearly every substantial application of it in sight seems to be people stuffing
snacks with it so excessively that it just sickens me & makes me militant about my intake
may 15th, 2022
one of the worst things i can imagine doing is watching some kind of mundane footage or general documentation of a person who i know did
some atrocious thing at some point after the recording, then looking at a video or photo of myself from a time when i feel i was doing pretty
well & imagining it having the same quality of benignity lacking any superficial inconsistency but underscored by ominous external context
i think i type obvious social phenomena in big paragraphs that are bigger than how simple & recognizable the
phenomena are because i was socially reclusive during the life period where people acknowledge & relate around
these basic elements of alienation & now i have only reemerged when all that anyone ever says is things that
are like ninth-order derivations of those initial awarenesses so none of it ever becomes clearly
socially authenticated for me as real things that everyone else knows too
may 16th, 2022
personally formalizing a plethora of named emotional categories of music which are each occupied by perhaps
only one work, in the hope that at least one of those many categories will come to be one that more works
(perhaps unknown at the time of formalization) turn out to fit into, successfully establishing a precise
niche which is populated & would have otherwise been difficult to recognize & demarcate
may 19th, 2022
the way i engage with the internet can sometimes feel essentially like trying to derive information from noise, which is
questionable. but i often feel that way in conversations too, out of an insatiable want to grasp what everyone's riffing
& jokes & stuff "mean" on some greater scale. so it might just be a property of me & not of how i spend my time
sometimes i feel like i am grabbing life's shoulders & saying each second, in reply to each
second of it that goes on around me, "okay, okay, i get it! objects exist in spatial relation
to each other & create very diverse dynamics! can you please tell me something else now"
may 20th, 2022
people walking around having their perceptions affected by outdated psychological models of themselves
& others that they read on wikipedia & internalized at a young age because the articles weren't adequately
signposted as things to be taken more as records of the history of psychology than at face value
may 22nd, 2022
june 15th, 2022
a vast array of mundane & commonplace cynicisms, each juxtaposed against a notion that
a lack of imagination to envision any better way to be is the only thing preventing
any given one of its practitioners from starting to cry like a baby in grief
over the way they've been permitting themselves to operate
i paid for a lady's groceries... it was only about twenty-five dollars. she was broke, trying to get some provisional stuff & several
jugs of water because the plumbing in her house was messed up. the girl watching the self-checkouts told her coworkers about it &
said to me on my way out that it was very sweet. when i got home i found a gift card in one of my bags. i think someone slipped it in
helping people financially is a curious thing to me. it's inarguably a sacrifice for their well-being, but only in a kind of
artificial way imposed by our mutually having to deal with money. the opportunity to relegate all of one's kindness to
something quantitative is fully presented, & i wonder if that doesn't have some kind of emotionally deadening effect
maybe i'm overthinking. if i harvest ten apples from a tree & give a starving person three of them, am i
gonna say that's unemotional because it's a "quantitative decrease of apples?" no, it's just less abstract
well, ok, before i started typing i had it framed a different way in my head, & i just remembered:
enabling a person to be permitted to buy water is not something where you're on neutral ground from the
start & decide to do something positive & constructive for them. it's more like sparing them from a kind
of violence. the whole world is functioning negatively in relation to their well-being, & helping them
is only a compensatory double-negative act against the violence lingering over everyone
both framings apply to buying it for them, but only the latter applies to risking legal punishment in
stealing it for them... trying to negotiate with the staff, on the other hand, would be very clean. but
only insofar as it can go before it just transfers the sacrifice to them, in the form of managerial
reprimand. it can only be "clean" for as far as it can go up the chain of command
i declaratively type things people already know but it's like reaffirmative mantras, almost, i guess
june 18th, 2022
keeping a playlist of all the songs you find, drawing from it when sharing music with people, & having a condition on which you
delete a song from it, which is that the person expresses that they particularly love the song. this encourages all the music that
passes through you being made to actually find someone it's particularly meant to find, instead of languishing with people
it's not so much meant for, & pushes to maximize the productivity of that sifting & shifting of people's awareness of things
june 20th, 2022
i tend to imagine going to the places that lie ahead of me & being a good person there. or at least, that's what i think i'm
imagining, in the moment that i imagine it. what i'm really imagining is looking out through the eyes of an inevitably
good person who happens to be going to the same place i am, to do the same things i plan to do, in the manner of
a good person but acting entirely independent of my agency. because i feel so disconnected from my agency,
i want to see & feel the experience of being kind as though being carted through it in a theme park ride
when i do something nice for myself like take the time to swing on the hammock hearing birdsong i feel
like i am doing something "just" even though it's only for myself, i mean this in a sense like i see myself
largely from the outside & regard myself as something to take care of. it doesn't exactly make sense
june 24th, 2022
imagine adoring the "pre-communicative honesty" of a person who is asleep, in that they can't possibly be anything in that moment
beyond what they plainly are, which is asleep, & how this can only go hand in hand with the simplicity of that condition, & imagine
looking forward sort of glumly to the moment they wake up & all kinds of tortuously conscious pretenses can return
june 27th, 2022
bleak character concept that keeps returning to my head:
someone who wishes they were like... naive enough to be an exploitable person, as opposed to their
current state where they feel world-weary & jaded, & this manifests as them exploiting someone
so that they can vicariously experience the exploitation that they themselves are carrying out
this feels like one or another cluster b personality disorder. i imagine
some similar drive might underlie at least some poor parenting as well
counterpoint: person who wishes they were naive and manifests this as working to preserve the naivete
and innocence of a person or persons in whom it is native. keeping the cat inside instead of letting it out
the dumb idea of "hard times make hard men... hard men make soft times... soft times make soft men...
soft men make hard times" etc is bullshit. there's enough unavoidable unhappiness and frustration
in the world that unless you're like rich and derangedly removed from human experience you can
develop a functioning sense of empathy and hope that things are good for other people
does the saying have an implied preference for the hard men?
yeah. you have to be an unempathetic stoic jackass
to make sure the world is safe and secure for ingrates
oh. it seems nonsensical for it to have a preference for either type
when it establishes a cycle that makes them each kind of neutral
that's true but also it's fascism brain thinking. history is an inescapable cycle
and it's good and noble and glorious to be one of the ones who suffers etc
ohh
a house cat does not really generally have much direct experience of the potentialities of
life outside the house. it is innocent to the realities of killing birds, getting in fights with
strange cats, sleeping under cars, etc. but it's an act of benevolence not to let the cat out
"Sham dustbathing raises an interesting question in animal behaviour, motivation & welfare.
Hens that have been reared in captivity without ever having encountered litter will perform
sham dustbathing. Therefore, it can be questioned how these birds, which have never had
the possibility to dustbathe in a functional substrate, perceive sham dustbathing;
do they yearn for something that they have never had or known (i.e.
litter), or are they content to sham dustbathe?"
i imagine them content. they aren't smart enough to yearn for things like a human can probably. maybe the
cat yearns to kill birds but even so. the cat does not get to go outside because outdoor cats live like
a third as long on average and wreck the ecosystem. i am not making very coherent points maybe
you can just type words
words
a human is intelligent enough to at least theoretically refrain from fulfilling those desires which
have destructive or antisocial consequences. but a human is also intelligent enough to feel
chafed if restrained from such fulfillment by an outside force. a cat is not intelligent enough
to refrain from such. maybe the cat chafes at not getting to go outside. too bad
july 6th, 2022
in taking medications that spare me from ever having to reckon with myself as a being capable of sexual impulses, i am
presented with a somewhat interesting system where i am capable of enabling, through the inactivity of not taking the
medication, the resurfacing of what is ultimately just a chemically mediated compulsion that typically arises & makes
itself self-justifying through its physiological authority, but, being inhibited & thus incapable of enacting that
self-justification, can never make any case for its un-inhibition even though it is very possible
july 9th, 2022
i wish the range of people i find particularly pretty felt more "unconventional" so that i'd have an easier time telling myself
it was based on something "forgivable" like genetics or whatever, instead of what i tend to tell myself now, which is that it's
just diseased, alien fragments of cultural conventions on people's bodies that are stuck embedded in my head & instructing
me to perceptually elevate some people over others in accordance with some dominating aesthetic order
july 20th, 2022
i feel like "i'm sorry" was taught to me at a young age as what felt like an impersonal ritual & it took me a pretty
long time to grasp that it really is a verbal tool devised against empathetic pain & that people actually say it
under the duress of a personal drive to obtain relief from that pain by expressing that they are feeling it
july 22nd, 2022
when one person insults or harasses another, i don't think it really matters what they say... it could be the deepest cutting
thing or the flimsiest pathetic insult that elicits an effortless comeback, either way there's really nothing stopping the
aggressor from introducing negativity into the other's headspace & if they do that then the job is kind of done. there's
about as much nuance to it as jabbing someone with a syringe & leeching out a bit of their blood, you either do
it or you don't. it's a stressful little degree of power that people just unavoidably have over each other
a lingering aftertaste from the period of my life where:
i equated the amount of suffering in a person's life to their degree of perspective & real, meaningful personhood (taking some,
like, hedonistic frat guy with rich parents as the extreme negative example), while feeling like i myself had not suffered enough
this trapped me in a bind where i didn't feel like i was meaningfully a human being, like i was excluded
from the meaningful level of existence that some people are ultimately lucky enough to gain access
to through what on its face is hardship. like i was cut off from reality & wasting away inside
but i also did not feel remotely entitled to criticize that condition, because i couldn't justify to myself the idea of
complaining about a lack of suffering. my oversight being that maybe the condition was really harming me, & my lack
of material suffering didn't make up for this still-undeserved situation where i was doing such a thing to myself inside
unless it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy where the unpleasantness of the condition did make me more real to some extent?
july 29th, 2022
the happy camping trip in 2019 feels a little poignant in my memory now because some friends got to spend time with a version of
me who wouldn't last all that much longer, since a period would later come where i had tons of things adhere to my awareness
in a significant way, things i can't pry off now. it's like, at least someone got to see that simpler, trimmer, less weighed
down me that i can't be anymore. i was in a little fresh grace period where i had finally become generally
benevolent in spirit & also hadn't had all the stuff adhere to me yet. it was a one-of-a-kind visit...
august 3rd, 2022
the first two volumes of early computer animation that we watched were generally entertaining, then there was
a quick drop-off where they clearly got sort of grating in tandem with more people actually becoming adept at
the medium... they tended to ironically be less entertaining the more they felt like actual accurate reflections
of the creators' visions, rather than a balance between that vision & the limitations of the medium
the aspects of the medium's more hesitant applications which showcased its newness & experimentalism, the newfound feelings
that only it could evoke, were left behind in favor of just using it as a new host for preexisting aesthetic standards & trying to
regress it to a tool for streamlining the reproduction of visual techniques born out of the process of traditional animation
august 5th, 2022
once, as i was leaving the gas station, i passed a guy right outside the door who i glanced at for just the barest fraction
of a second that it took to process how he was missing an eye & walked around with that empty eye socket exposed,
how the side of that eye socket seemed to droop sadly, but that droop was exaggerated down the side of his
cheek, forming a ravine, & i feel like there are other similar things to describe about him that i am
forgetting. i feel like there may have been some gaping quality in the region of his nose
i was kind of shaken as i walked home & over the coming weeks i kept re-confronting this new idea of someone
looking a way that just unavoidably might cause me to start panicking if i looked for too long, trying to decide if
that was a cruel way to regard him or if it was just something viscerally unavoidable, & being forced to think
about how absurd my desire to feel beautiful is when that guy was just a version of me who looks like
him & every incredibly beautiful person is just a version of me who looks like them
august 9th, 2022
i never laugh at movies or tv shows because things are only funny to me if they are insane & this excludes nearly all
constructed jokes in media because the ability to produce them seems to be consigned almost exclusively to people
who are too boring to make their jokes actually insane... devising & acting out insane scenarios is boring
because that's just what people do to be entertaining which makes it normal & not insane
i think things which actually happen are more prone to be insane, by virtue of the insane thing happening without
direction or external interference, which is an inherent boost in its insanity. this makes the subset of things in
movies that i find funny almost entirely occupied by unintentional things because the accident of their
incorporation actually happened, at least when compared to the authoritative planning of the director
or, to frame it differently, you could say that it's only through a lapse in a boring
director's meddling that something actually insane can be unwittingly included
i encounter far more insane things on the internet & every great once in a while i find a miraculous thing
which is clearly constructed to be comically insane & actually executed in a satisfyingly insane way,
for instance the burning cgi dinosaur video. i think this subset has a high overlap with short
title-less videos that are basically impossible to find if you don't keep them somewhere
august 11th, 2022
a person hopes to relate to other human beings through shared affinities for various artworks,
& this is a ritual around which they have a pessimistic suspicion & an optimistic hope
the pessimistic suspicion is that they are simply playing a clannish game of appropriating artworks into
flags, buttons, costumes, with which to string together the improvisational boundary of a fetishized ingroup
the optimistic hope is that a shared appreciation for a certain texture, timbre, shade, pattern, rhythm,
voice, or juxtaposition may function (in a way sort of impossible to pin down or quantify) as
a genuine rebus for an underlying temperamental, philosophical, or spiritual similarity
august 12th, 2022
i love love shredding text up with markov chains & poetically interpreting the resulting linguistic froth, i love the
powerful unpredictability of using an online service to translate english to chinese, using markov chains to scramble
the characters, then translating the characters back to english. i love these things but i don't do them so often
because i get overwhelmed at just how simultaneously easy & rewarding it is, like i could sit & do it all day
so i cut it off quickly because i'm not sure that i want to allocate as much time to it as i easily could
you can hear a tacky, miserable song on the gas station p.a. & do a dopey little dance to it, a dance that seems to say, "hey,
look, this is all pre-decided & piped in regardless of how we really feel about it, but we can still make something of it in
a way that rejects the standard two options, of either... resorting to snide parody, or trying to take on & embody the
music's prescribed character. here i'm just blowing its character out of the picture & replacing it with mine, blindly
appropriating it as the host for an expression of desire for everyday frivolity that sports a childlike indifference
towards the alien prescription, that doesn't waste time articulating rejection but visibly takes it as its
fundamental premise & works from there," that's what you can say with the dopey little dance
august 17th, 2022
a guy sent me a random instagram message & it inexplicably caused my phone to notify me of the past two hundred messages
in that window consecutively, playing the notification sound over & over. when i turned the screen on & saw the messages
piling up in the push notification, i briefly thought, with earnest excitement, that he was using some kind of computer
script to carry out a socially experimental act of sending a gigantic deluge of questions in sequence
august 21st, 2022
the guy i met over coffee
i mentioned the randonaut app, & he mentioned something he'd read about a
guy who set up a script that automatically marked him as going to completely
random local events listed on facebook. he forced himself to go to them all
i have to introduce more randomness into my life. things can tend towards closed, cyclical systems
if nothing comes to break them up, shake them up. omegle has already done so much on occasion
in fact, omegle has done so very indirectly much that it essentially proves to me that separate
grains of randomness which each achieve consequence can multiply on themselves powerfully
everyone has the tools. even just random.org can be enough if you have a good set of rules in your head to link
to a website, a map, a calendar, anything. even just pen, paper, & a die can be enough if you use them right
but i have to be socially extant. what randomness i might introduce will only be
multiplied by how receptive i am. wherever i end up, i can't be a mechanism of the
nullification of randomness, of the negation of all potentials around me. it's scary
maybe, if i'm lucky, introducing randomness could be the mechanism by which i become receptive, by which
i find something, something, that might to some extent shred the filmy veil between me & the world, place
my avoidance in a nutcracker, act as spotlights from guard towers at last leaving nowhere to run
immature - demanding to have nowhere to run, rather than simply not running
august 26th, 2022
a recurring sensory chain:
i press a button. the same recording of the first four notes of the Westminster chimes plays. the door unlocks with
a small click. i go into a room that always smells the same. the phrase "everything still the same?" is said. the
quiet rushing of air conditioning & quiet, quiet informational speech from the television in the upper southeast
corner. after a varying delay, the sound of a door opening & one of two women says "Alex?" with a consistent
intonation. the rattling of a scale as i step on it. the question "how tall are you?" is said, always the same
the squeeze of a sphygmomanometer
the crux: the wetness of an alcohol swab on my arm. sometimes the phrase "big poke." a brief moment
of pain, which persists to a greater or less degree through the injection. holding my breath, or rather,
breathing shallowly with my stomach, wanting the expansion & contraction of my chest not to transfer
to the arm & jostle the needle in my skin. for this duration i am staring always at one of two things,
depending on which room we happen to be in: one is only blank wall, but the other is a calendar
a comment on the thickness of the medication
removal. her hand pressing & rubbing to work the medication in a bit. a band-aid. the "it's
over" feeling. the standard amiable "walking me to the front desk" comments. the standard
"scheduling the next appointment" banter: "would you like to do another friday," etc
the phrase "you are good to go." stepping outside to the
freedom of the remainder of a day, a two week lease renewed
august 29th, 2022
first i will use google maps to measure the distance of a specific walk route. then i will pick an album (whose runtime i know
would be greater than the typical length of that walk), & measure out what percentage of its runtime has elapsed at the end of
each song. then i will find find the corresponding percentages of the distance of the walk. i will go back to google maps &
increment the measuring line to each of these percentages, matching a landmark to the end of each song. i will write these
correspondences down so i don't forget them. then i will listen to the album & go on the walk, pacing myself to be
at each landmark at the end of its song, & the music will correspond to space in a certain different way
september 3rd, 2022
imagine if there was a person who was a convoluted tangle of interrelated
embraces or negations of various qualities & realities, that would be insane
september 7th, 2022
sometimes i will begin to express befuddlement or dismay about something a person has done, then realize midway
that i am just following a sort of routine that feels like how i would be expected to react, & that really i am
just ready to welcome so very much, simply on the grounds that it makes my day more memorable
i do not feel dismayed that a person apparently sat there patrolling omegle for who-knows-how-long, just
on the off chance that they might run into me & be ready to instantly type "may 2020" so as to impersonate
some vague person about whom i've on occasion publicly expressed an infatuated desire to reconnect
with. for the seeming purpose of drawing personal information out of me. that is a completely
absurd thing to happen & i truly feel nothing but a sense of experiential profit for that
september 8th, 2022
i write every essay for my sociology or communications classes thinking "if i put this on tumblr all
the coolest people there would probably find it really annoying & recitative of ideas that already
permeate but it will earnestly convince the teacher that i am really smart" & it works
september 9th, 2022
a bunch of my friends post thoughts & updates in a set of personal discord channels which both
provide extensive opportunity to keep up with how things are going for them & cause me to never
do so even though i'd like to because approaching the string of "unread" badges & processing
quantitative amounts of unread messages feels like such regimented work
there is a prophecy that i have to try elderberry wine at some point. the
reason it's a prophecy is that i started jokingly thinking of it as one, &
that was long enough ago now that i can't just not think of it as one
today i happened to ascertain where i could get some. it hit me that this jokey sense of it being a prophecy has accrued
a degree of internal validation that can be hard to come by. the result is that i can't just buy some & drink it as
soon as is feasible, for the sake of concluding the joke. i have to wait until a certain important time...
september 12th, 2022
amusing reading for class which made the case that a person's self-image is wholly derived from how they are reflected
by those around them, but that people are often wrong in their perceptions of us, & even when they're right about
their perceptions of us their words & actions often don't actually reflect that perception, & even when they're
right about us & their words & actions reflect that perception we're still prone to misinterpreting
those words & actions, sometimes to very radical extents for the sake of bending them into
reaffirmations of the self-image that was already there before they said or did anything
september 17th, 2022
it's often normalized on the internet that, if person A says something very smug presumptuous to person B, then if person B replies they are
being petty & ensnared by the provocation. this shoehorns person B's reply into an assumed confrontational demeanor, when the reality is that
person B can simply be an empathetic being that doesn't want to see another blatantly destroying themselves with cynical thought patterns that
coat their entire subjective reality in illusory self-servingness, peformativity, & negativity from every human being they might ever engage
with. so person B might attempt to collaboratively diagnose this with person A with neutral, dialectical replies. but the shoehorning process
makes the environment in which people might seek to level with each other, & instead sort out each other's cynicisms (as the foreign diseases
that they are), become incredibly suffocating & difficult to work in. there is only the constant driving urge to establish winners & losers,
& no room for the better angles on anyone's nature. i know it's "better angels of," i just wanted to type that variation. if it makes
sense for you, then it makes sense for you. i'm sick of trying to clarify subjective truths for universal understandability.
not that anything here is really hard to grasp, it's just something else i wanted to add
september 28th, 2022
when the car has arrived back outside of my apartment i want to remain in their company indefinitely but i dare not risk
being weird in transgressing the ritual that the car has arrived here & i must get out. it's on my verbal behalf that the car
is here, after all. & i wonder if proposing to drive me home was a mistake, if earlier in the big parking lot i could have
proposed some distant destination uncaring of the lateness in the day & that it would have been welcomed
a dynamic where you are with someone & you are likely to part at the very first junction
where you might part way, & even more likely at each successive junction, not because
you want to go but because you fear any given proposed extension will be overbearing
a degree of dissociation because i can't fully situate embed relax into the situation because
i don't want my body language & suggestions & so on to display the full extent of the sense
of connection that i feel because i fear it being imbalanced excessive. so i dissociate
september 29th, 2022
topic: heart/mind split
scenario: a person is sincerely complimented about an aspect of their body by someone they trust
pessimistic, mind-emphasis: it's good in a sense (at least for the person witnessing something they find beautiful, if no
one else) but ultimately just an observation of something happenstance & inessential to the subject of the compliment
optimistic, heart-emphasis: a portion of love is set aside for something that they couldn't change even if they
wanted to - it's permanent, not up for debate, & so that aspect, if nothing else, is at least unconditional in a
sense - one reprieve from a sense of endless presentation & performance that bubbles up out of their mind
it's also taken a part in molding them into who they are, whether by having a clear & radical influence on how
they've been treated or something more subtle, so not entirely happenstance relative to their mind, to an extent
getting "spirit of the stairway" after an in person interaction then just cancelling it out through instant messaging,
saving that piece of interpersonal substantiation, having it actually happen, it's like unlimited power, all bets are off...
(although i now have reason to think about things like, "should i refrain from talking about this on my phone so as
to avoid sacrificing it to a more impersonal medium, avoid exhausting it as a potential future topic in a walk?")
(&, "what if i never transmit images of my face, so as to experimentally retain for the sight of my
face (mediated or not) the value of being an exclusive sign of my actual physical presence?")
october 3rd, 2022
dropping out of high school to be a neet for four years under a comically naive illusion which operates on the
terms of the totally arbitrary & short-term system of compulsory schooling to suggest that that subversion
of the constraints imposed by it will feel genuinely liberating like an "indefinite weekend" or "indefinite
summer vacation" rather than easily becoming a period of profound psychological decay... yeowch!!!!
october 8th, 2022
randonaut one, attempt one, gave me a misty rainy memory of venturing significantly east of my house for
the first time, talking into a camcorder, the memory of the resulting monologue - in general, mental
images that paired with the album exeter & worked with it to strongly mark early 2020 - (associated
with: the original scented candle, nurse with wound's little dipper minus two & rock 'n roll
station (lost bottle mix), several misc. current 93 singles or eps (soon: cat's cradle))
randonaut two (particularly paired with ymo's xmultiplies (& air's moon safari)) gave me an early 2020 memory
of practically trespassing in a backyard but disappearing at the far edge into some lush green footpaths,
feeling i was maybe getting lost in the woods, but then unexpectedly emerging onto a familiar paved
trail - then, more significantly, it serendipitously caused (through them driving across a bridge at
just the right moment) the final night ever at my exes' house where we drank whiskey & did a tarot
reading for me & i explained randonauting & we got panda express & laughed at the phrase "moms for
coal" & ate the food under a park pavilion at night & on the drive home i victoriously expressed
how the randonaut had actually been a success by spiraling unexpectedly into such a night
randonaut two, attempt two (successful), gave me a very memorable view of the sun setting over a huge
empty field paired with various songs from slowdive's just for a day (& xiu xiu's knife play to some extent
but really that was my sole listen which i didn't memorize so great so i just picture the cover art in conjunction)
gotta get back on the grind
october 12th, 2022
one might not be willing to go as far as to say that having a regimented time that they have to fall asleep each
night is some kind of violence, but in any case it it still makes it way too easy for a person to inflict a kind of
violence on themselves that they might initially underestimate... sleep is just the freaking key to existence
sudden, odd little period in my life here defined extensively by the dual elements of... spending many evenings &
nights with M; what feels like a sort of ongoing collapse of many of my various routines & maintenances - my
bed is perpetually unmade, i have so much to read for my classes, i keep accidentally falling asleep without
brush my teeth, the point on my blog that i haven't "post-processed" yet is all the way back around page
seventy, i'm paying less attention to music-related routines, i'm knee-deep in caffeine dependency,
never drinking enough water, i'm skimping on my weekly parallel album listening days with my pal...
october 14th: another crucial ingredient here is that my dad has been temporarily living in a club his friend
owns to help him get sober, & my brother got a new job with hours from around five in the afternoon to one
in the morning. so on the occasions that i'm actually at home the apartment is almost always empty & quiet
something i do a lot is scrolling through my own camera roll or discord message histories for cues so
that i can remember my own memories so that i can write them out in the journal. i'm often shocked
at how much i'd seemingly be at risk of forgetting if i wasn't writing it all down. journaling has
become an irresistible eustress of memory-hoarding, i don't think i could stop now if i tried
it's important that i always at least jot things down quickly on discord or my notes app so i can expand them later. i
get sloppy about it sometimes. but that's less an expression of a momentarily diminished interest & more a thing that
stresses me out because it's me failing to serve the interest, undiminished, letting the events potentially slip away
october 15th, 2022
idly composing, in my head, in detail, the paragraph i might write here in the event of some horrible, horrible
occurrence, before asserting to myself that it's only a kind of morbid creative exercise done without meaningful
consideration, then conceding that at worst it might stem from some perverse sliver of my brain that identifies
with tragedy, while also asserting that that sliver still wouldn't be representative of me overall
when i was in Cedar Rapids & i was writing the notebook page of things to do around Cedar
Rapids the last entry in the event that we exhausted everything else was "SUCCUMB TO ENNUI"
october 17th, 2022
i guess my discomfort with my natural capacity to gauge & evaluate physical attractiveness is founded on the simple value that
to be stuck in a body, & a random & arbitrary one at that, is kind of an insulting condition for a mind that can conceive of
itself as separate from that body, of hypothetically not needing a body at all, but still needing its body all the same
& so... evaluating people in terms of their bodies, even in the most humble, personal, unjudgmental way, it isn't so much
an insult welling up from the depths who i am & how i would choose to consciously orient myself, as much as my guilty,
compulsory passing along of the insult that hangs over everyone - the force that is separate from us but which lives
through us. & i don't have to feel bad about that in the sense of culpability, but it's probably easy to understand
feeling bad about it as a condition - akin to a person who feels guilty about having to be taken care of in old age
it reminds me of the way a person systemically compelled to enact cruelties can always relieve their cognitive dissonance
by deferring blame to the system they operate in. i know there is no meaningful blame, but still, when i think one
person is prettier than another i feel like a bureaucrat refusing to make an exception in someone's case
i am putting effort into describing this discomfort, & i think several paragraphs about it could run the risk
of portraying it as a kind of pessimistic acknowledgment of a discomfort essential to living. but i think it is
important to note that it all can probably fall against a certain very clean & simple operation of self-acceptance
october 18th, 2022
listening to a certain song walking down a street staring at a radio tower can be the
most serious thing in the world alone but if sharing it with someone it's like there's a
pressure to bathetically go "hhaha yeah just think that song goes pretty well with the
in my dad's place of work there is a platform hanging from the ceiling on which sits a fake human skeleton,
which, through some bizarre & serendipitous series of transfers of ownership, is unintentionally wearing
the exact wedding dress that my half-sister's mother wore when she married my dad before i was born
october 19th, 2022
wish i didn't have to meet my friend right on the verge of fall... just a couple week glimpse of
cozy nature trail walks before it starts getting all cold, now we always need some building
to resort to... hopefully it at least gets snowy at some point, form snow memories...
october 22nd, 2022
indivisibility boundaries people events borders elements
memories dynamics perspectives exchange conversations
serendipity influence signals boundaries information
mundaneness catharsis companionship aaaahhhh
october 23rd, 2022
it finally happened... someone came & turned the orange streetlight on the
corner that i've been staring at for over a decade now into a white streetlight
how to move beyond "checklist" living which progresses inexorably towards the full exhaustion of all discrete local
attractions... it might last a good while, & it does still serve to generate shared memories as we refract even the
stupidest events & places through ourselves into things worth a little more, but still, time is running out...
october 24th, 2022
life sure has no qualms with imbuing a person with love for various probably
carcinogenic smells... cigarette smoke, diesel exhaust, blacktop on a real hot day
october 27th, 2022
deciding not to revisit a musician i used to listen to a lot out of concern that it
might cause some kinda odd temperamental cross-contamination in my life timeline
i have to stop automatically agreeing with people, it's boring to not be discursive... it's super burned
in though, i think a lot of the time i barely notice myself doing it. i'm too good at setting up little
cognitive dissonances on the fly like second nature. even over tiny little minor discrepancies
today i will be chipper & not sleepy & talk about real things
i will try persistently jotting events down in a notebook, so that i don't have to recede into my
phone all the time if i want to write notes on the day for descriptive expansion later on. i may
also review the playlists i've been working through, or maybe through my last fm log, to see if
this helps me reconstruct the sequence of a given day & recall things i might have forgotten
october 31st, 2022
i really want to feel seen & known right now but i'm really drowsy too so i can just go
to sleep & then wake up & go to school instead of fretting about being seen & known
it will probably take weeks for me to catch up with this post in my "blog post-processing"
process & clear it off (assuming i am still inclined to clear it off when the time comes)
^ thats what i look like
typing
bye
it ultimately took about twenty-seven weeks
ok yeah the last fm trick just restored for me the memory of an entire park i forgot
we'd visited on the fifteenth, & it was a unique-feeling occasion too, one i'm glad
to remember... freaks me out how much of my life can just leak out of my head
november 5th, 2022
book that says "the tension was so palpable someone walked in & cut it with a knife"
november 6th, 2022
this is the first year that my age is bothering me a little. i don't really feel like i am twenty-four, like
whatever vague thing it is that i picture when i think of twenty-four. & when i think about the fact that
i am indeed twenty-four i feel a little ponderous & strange. & a bit like i've officially trapped myself
in the company of a sense of having wasted most of my early life. i don't think about it a lot though
november 7th, 2022
i've encountered a fair amount of art that has felt earnestly life changing in certain ways but, somehow, that display by it
of its potential all-important power never really knocks over that first domino in my head that gets me vigorously exploring
that endless burdensome sense of "what? this list of musicians does not feel like a cornucopia
of experiences to be had, i just feel like it's gonna take me way too long to work through it"
i think it's important to just get tiny little tastes of as much as possible &
chase in the direction of the intuitions you find in that more diverse cloud
november 10th, 2022
i keep being late to class out of inability to get out of bed. not from
tiredness but inability to will myself to stop envisioning affection
november 15th, 2022
sometimes i'm not sure i know how to not regress into endless rumination on the same, like, five or so topics... (un)reality,
originality, authenticity, intelligence, loneliness, "how pronounced is my capacity for malice," something like that...
it's like, i'm sort of convinced i don't know how to start thinking of some new, wholly perpendicular thing
that i wasn't thinking about before, unless something from outside comes & strikes me with the inclination
to. i feel like a closed system of finite elements, reliant on the stirring of the world to come & reach
in & stir my head up, plant new elements to mix & match & synthesize into new things. they
can't be self-creating, they can't just spontaneously generate like bacteria & grow...
& then i alllways want to try to generalize things & feel like i'm getting at truths which might underlie
them so whatever new elements i do acquire have finite lifespans as this generalization process works like
acid to try to melt them down & incorporate them into the preexisting topics of rumination that i try
to make sense of things with. i think i feel threatened by things unless i am doing that to them
november 16th, 2022
book that opens with a description of a relatively short exchange between two people that is at most marginally
eventful & constitutes the entire "action," the rest of the book is spent combing through each of their lives
up to that point & attempting to retrospectively describe everything that contributed in any way to
the absolute specificity of the character of their exchange, with the quality of specificity
being prioritized over anything like drama, poignancy, catharsis, or realism
november 21st, 2022
(walking around) there-is-always-an-ideal-outcome-that-i-could-pluck-out-of-the-digital-infinity-of-language-there-is-always-
a-most-humane-idea-that-i-could-be-reasonably-expected-to-express-i-have-a-very-real-part-to-potentially-play-in-all-of-
this-i-am-an-agent-within-the-ecosystem-of-feelings-what-do-i-do-what-should-i-do-what-should-i-express-there-is-alw
november 22nd, 2022
one of the strangest dreams of my life last night, it involved lots of pomegranate pips & a bathtub, that's all i'll say
ok it just occurred to me how to succinctly describe a very pervasive quality of dreams. real life consists
of interactions of matter that we psychologically organize into discrete events. in dreams this is precisely
reversed, where events take precedence & the dream more-or-less simulates interactions of matter to portray
them. this is how a dream can have an aspect of its "storyline" that you just "know" even though it doesn't
actually manifest in any way, because instead of matter underlying events the events underlie matter
& their authority persists even when the material expression deviates from its target
november 24th, 2022
job's tears by the incredible string band abruptly diverting into the audio stuttering of a blue screen of
death making me feel a little like i just got stabbed & having to spend a moment sort of collecting myself
going through a list of over two hundred & fifty movies that i mostly don't know much of anything about, which i have
indiscriminately collated for maybe watching with my friend, & reading about each so as to filter out ones that might
just make for a depressing experience or contain scenes that might be really uncomfortable to watch together
november 25th, 2022
transitioned spontaneously from clutching a pillow on the futon into beginning to cry uncontrollably & roll around on the
floor & curl up & lie on my stomach & wail formlessly & then place my forearms on the futon & scream all for no apparent
reason. felt blessed by the sincerity with which i got to do such a thing then sat catatonically on a rolly chair mentally
typing out a tumblr post describing the preceding events in various iterated & rearranged forms over & over, repeatedly
adding & removing potential extraneous observations until i finally walked into my room & just typed out the paragraph
enjoyed, as it was happening, how little i thought about it, but only enjoyed that to the extent that i did think about
it so as to hold it in my mind as something to enjoy. this interplay, at once self-reinforcing & self-mitigating,
found an equilibrium in the back of my head which rounded out to successfully not thinking very much.
the point where i sat on the rolly chair was where thought inevitably broke through & claimed it all
how can i pretend to regard myself as being attracted primarily to "men" or "women" while also contradictorily
holding the viewpoint that there are no sets of characteristics by which to justifiedly define either of these
categories? there is nothing left but to submit myself to the interpretative oblivion which scathes everything
& leaves behind only the cruel objectivity of our bodies which we sought to escape in the first place
november 27th, 2022
going through the aged amassed browser tabs on my phone & closing only the ones that don't, through
whatever page they are on, serve as reminders of the days or time periods in which i opened them
november 28th, 2022
in last fm shoutboxes you'll see like a four year significant decrease or total gap in activity, during this
interim the omnipresent horrors set in across earth & then people start coming back around 2017 who can
often be visibly more irony poisoned or at least express their earnest enjoyment in a more detached way
spent the whole night queueing songs on tumblr & listening to them & drinking a ton of water
a ton of the november journal is still just notes, memory cues, & i'm not sure of the last day i even wrote notes on
writing everything down has come to feel more frenetic than it used to, more burdensome. i feel less inclined, even
though i want to, want to keep everything, keep things from slipping away into time, now more than ever really
november 29th, 2022
stream of thoughts while walking home:
viscerality. incineration cool weird. incineration is life. incineration fanatic who says stuff like "incineration is life."
dip is life. dip boys. dip is life. dip is life. dip is life. dip boys. dip is life. people forging their identity out of a
substance they consume. i don't want to forge an identity from the medications i take, the way my acquaintance
might have alluded to in the college discord. (deprivation of consequences in life) people who have
literally nothing to construct identities from beyond- (perhaps distracted by a license plate)
dip boys. my friend taking off their hat in the parking lot in front of a museum & saying "no hat" & i laugh & say "no cap!"
...i am offended by the idea of sharing something pretty on tumblr & having it appreciated by someone who then scrolls past
it & appreciates something else in the same way, framing it as just one element of the site's aesthetic "roster." it offends
me because what things i might i share as something pretty are practically all that i see a sense of reality in
(i see a squirrel dash across a fenced-in area for dogs & through the space in the wire fence) what if a dog had been in
there & it had chased it & crashed into the fence? (picturing my dachshund preparing to jump through the sliding
door then instantly bumping into the unnoticed screen) you laugh because it's cute. or because it's failure? or
because the failure is cute. my mass comm theory teacher claimed that until the nineteenth century pretty
much all humor was negative, rooted in ridicule. but now it's so natural to laugh out of benevolence?
"now give the donkey a drink of pure wine to wash down the figs!" (smiling about it again, laughing)
fight to remember as much of this chain as possible so i can write it down as an exercise
wanting things to remember so badly that i get intimidated by completely non-compulsory
opportunities because just the opportunity of forming memories makes it feel compulsory
as imposed on me by me & i get freaked out by a perceived effective lack of choice
intermittently considering sharing a cool photo i took of my friend on tumblr then thinking "oh no
no i like them enough that i couldn't stomach incorporating them into this vanity, this feeling that
drives me to abstain from sharing this picture truly verifies that this is all a project of vanity"
november 30th, 2022
feeling shredded in half by the inexplicable borderline
psychological impossibility of deciding whether to
see my pal & his grandparents over christmas
the compulsion to go: i can put words to it, it's that it feels psychologically impossible to turn away
from the sense of family that i pre-emptively associate with the potential memory that would be formed
the compulsion to not go: i cannot articulate it. but i feel like it must be very substantive if it can
counter what i just described. purchasing the bus ticket, making the financial commitment
to go several weeks in advance, it feels like i can barely imagine making myself do it
why do i feel sick
maybe i just need sleep
due to a kind of digital hoarding drive i cannot imagine voluntarily deleting my account on this tumblr & due to this
i am subject to a bizarre condition of being obliged to know in the back of my head that idiotic jokes i typed out
years in the past are circulating eternally &, crucially, that people are probably clicking onto my blog all the
time through those posts & being transported back in time to their publication dates where they blindly proceed
into archived streams of thought from dead versions of myself who now live on in that way as frozen
echoes of someone i no longer quite am, & even idiotically mistake it for my present expression
december 1st, 2022
experiential poetics are forming
december 3rd, 2022
thinking about how much i could do to cease effectively having a name or conceiving of myself as something with a name.
people would have to refer to me in relational terms to themselves & maybe refer to my appearance. it'd be easiest with new
people who i could just tell from the start that i have no name. the memory of my former name would always be a burden,
tempting me to admit to it, & upon admitting it it might become like my identity in others' minds, lying beneath the
namelessness which, upon learning my old name, would feel like a schtick painted over the name hiding under it
society wouldn't permit me to function in it without a name, without conceding to it on paperwork etc. i wouldn't even
be able to mark college assignments as mine. maybe it'd be enough to think "this is only a word i have to tolerate
writing for the sake of doing business with this thing larger than myself" but if that wasn't enough then maybe i
could legally change my name to something like "Person" where i could genuinely think of it as just a placeholder.
unless after enough time i did come to start regarding Person as my name like any other, since i probably
wouldn't know of anyone else doing the same thing & so it would carry specificity & identity
neither for or against traveling but out of this ambivalence comes a second-level resistance
to it on the grounds that my will is sufficiently weak in either direction that, in opting
by default to travel, i'd find it hard not to feel like luggage being transported
december 5th, 2022
when i get a sore throat i keep putting hand sanitizer on my hands like it's gonna avert it retroactively
i recurringly imagine being verbally permitted to not think
i get this real sense of mild dread & almost guilt when i don't know where to suggest that my friend drive us to next, it's like now
someone else is shouldering a burden, making the evasion of ennui a collective endeavor, ennui i could have solemnly tolerated
while alone but now it's for their sake too & i'm not doing anything for them in that respect. if i can just spin together some idea
then we're not made to both stare into it... i figure they very well might have a more mild perspective on it but in my head
it just feels like something cynical & authoritative is saying "now both of you have to acknowledge your listless sadness"
& then, at the same time, even when we've found a little restaurant or hit a new antique shop a part of
me is still cursing the fact that we have had to indulge the game of running down the finite list of
discrete attractions put on offer by the system of local business, failing to just make something out
of all the tools around us that can never be taken away. conversation & objects & just the world
& then, still, even with the previous two paragraphs in mind: i shouldn't fall into
the natural temptation to blame the city entirely for my own deficit of creativity
my friend remarked that by around this time next year they might be relocated to somewhere less miserable
several hours away. this hit me in the heart & then i was very caught off guard by how unexpectedly
rational the idea of also moving there felt, even if the idea feels almost impossible
i mean, i'm hesitant in making the presumption that being able to interact with each other is mutually a valuable enough thing
that it could factor into such a decision. it might all be in my head because they're my only real friend, while they might have a
fuller social life... but something does feel very real & unique & they reaffirm a lot that they enjoy my company very very much
so, under that presumption: the second-best outcome, where our proximity is a real
factor & they don't move, is still trapping one another here. or really i see myself
more as the one doing the trapping since clearly they're not so inclined to sessility...
& then the third-best outcome is that... well, maybe they'd make the drive back here sometimes, but for the most part i
suppose neither of us would have each other's company anymore & i'd be stuck here on my own again after a whole lifetime
leading up to this little time period where for once i think, "this actually is an exception to all that's come before"
as rational as it feels, though, it just seems crazy & excessive to consider
december 9th, 2022
now feeling nostalgic about the feeling of walking home from the nature trail through a neighborhood at night while
specifically feeling immersed in the familiar & encompassing sense of intense doubt that i will spend any meaningful
time with a single other person in the next six months minimum. now that i feel shielded from that feeling by regular
fulfilling company & thus it is inaccessible i can comedically feel nostalgic about it. inevitable effect of contrast
i think one of the most prevalent emotional themes in my life is generally "i want to go back." & i could expand that
to, "i don't care how far back i go. i want to go back to anything at all. further is probably better but even a week
might wholly suffice. everything i go through becomes a fixed memory the moment it's over & thus instantly an
unchangeable model against which to negatively compare the uncertain meandering of the present. it's only
in retrospect that a time or event's mental 'flavor' becomes detectable & each one is valuable in its
unmistakability like an irreplaceable work of art. i want to 'taste' it again, i want to go back"
december 10th, 2022
internet drama looks so silly because often there is a lopsided perspective
which everyone involved both possesses & is themselves subject to
each person naturally regards their own total online activity as one subset of their being, & then each
concern they devote some time & attention to through that activity is in turn only a subset of a subset
each outside observer, however, naturally possesses a limited perspective wherein they cannot know
this person beyond the signs of their online activity, & so they kind of have no choice but to
perceive a version of that person whose being in its entirety is made up of those signs
surely everyone knows that there is more going on which they can only infer, but i postulate that, at least
for some, it can be difficult to entirely prevent the accrual of a cognitive bias that goes against reason
this is all well-known, i am kind of just describing the same phenomenon behind the curated lifestyles of
influencers & so on, but sometimes it feels good to just build up from the ground in writing something
that i already know, to prevent my thought patterns about it from becoming too automatic
& also this isn't really about egoistically curated self-images as much as it's
about this specific relevance i think it has to online arguments in particular:
the end result is that each thing a person denotes as worthy of concern can come off as a momentary
dedication of their whole being to it. & so all the time it seems like people are taking things really
seriously! & then people can make fun of each other for taking things so seriously, all while
no one is taking it all all that seriously, until they do. & stuff like that. that's all
even if someone uses a website every single day, i mean, think about how long a day is relative
to how long it takes to type maybe several paragraphs, even if they're a bit involved!
december 13th, 2022
winter doesn't cause insanity because no daylight it's because even when i'm really happy with my friend
we're having to resort to go to Home Depot & walk around instead of just the nature trail over & over
among the verbs i want are "clutch" & "rehabilitate"
december 14th, 2022
had an almost comically blatant revelatory stress dream... well, not revelatory, because i already knew, but it's
more like the dream was saying... "i am going to take this set of tensions that you already know & portray them
so explicitly, to the point of borderline parody of the idea of a stress dream, that you are going to have to
wake up staring them in the face now that their reality has been so plainly set on the table in front
of you, simply by the fact that you would have such a comically blatant dream about them"
december 15th, 2022
what does it mean if you have plenty of time in which to do fun things with your friend over a school
break, but do also have a prohibitive fifteen day commitment in the middle, & the mere inability to
simply allocate the whooole greedy span of that break to at least the open potential to do things
with them makes your heart hurt so much that you just pace back & forth thinking about it
it was amazingly prescient when i thought to myself in middle school or perhaps elementary school that,
paraphrasing, "i could never be in a romantic relationship with anyone because, in the event that it
didn't sustain its suitability, i would probably be empathetically incapacitated from ever subjecting
anyone to the emotional experience of a breakup so i would just be in it forever"
i have cumulatively written what i would estimate to be at least ten thousand words over the course of
various intermittent convoluted attempts to rhetorically justify the idea that a person's entire lifetime
potential of romantic exploration shouldn't be foreclosed at age twenty under very uncertain
& affection-starved terms that are scantly understood in the present day
december 17th, 2022
i have to turn off my wholesale addiction to the explanatory power of theories as applied to my everyday surroundings
i wholesale embrace the potential that i may have an excessive ego problem, the reason i embrace it is the
experience of relating to my friend during a car ride conversation about feeling isolated our whole lives
& resorting to fraternizing with people we did not really actually relate to & potentially developing kind
of egoistic superiority defense mechanism as an effect of this... the crux of this post follows: i embrace
it due to this actual breathing human occurrence & not due to the substitute experience of a faceless
anonymous internet user merely sending me the sentence "Your ego is huge." several days ago
december 18th, 2022
disordered. haven't written about a single day of december in the journal so far. having a lot of trouble
remembering any dreams i have, even at the fresh moment of waking up. point of my blog that i haven't yet
"post-processed" may be past page one hundred now. restarted my effort of logging how many caffeinated
drinks i have each day, because i lost track of too many for my liking. not expressing myself
through discord very much. not trawling tumblr for beautiful things very much
[at the time of finally "post-processing" this post, on june 18th 2023, it is on page 170]
it's not so much that i feel too afraid or too lazy to approach things like obtaining a driver's license, finding a more
substantial job, obtaining a car, traveling on my own, maybe even moving away, it is just that all these things still lie
beyond the exact same veil of unthinkable otherness that they did during childhood, it still seems like it all takes place
in a different world from me, that beginning to think of all these things in real & practical terms isn't even... on the table,
such that there would even be a framework of reasoning in which to regard not thinking about them as a kind of deficit
for the past three years or so i have felt like i will never die in the eternal present of this bedroom.
entire phases of life with their music discovery signposts & broad mental flavors have passed in here now
i am, in many small ways, in a different "phase" of my friendship with my friend than we were in before, i feel, & this
already makes me nostalgic for the prior phase, the one of sitting in the car in the parking lot for a long time because
it wasn't so normalized to spend time in my house yet, & the constant high fives ritual was a bit different
i am inspired by my friend's drive, will, motivation. for all i know, it could be a very average degree of such things, but
seeing it all right in front of me, in someone i really relate to, makes it stand out sharply against my sessility & avoidance...
for example, their proclivity to simply identify that it'd be good & enriching to travel somewhere, do very practical planning about
it in advance, & go there. or how they plan to possibly not even be living here anymore in a year's time. they speak about
it all like foregone conclusions, things they just ontologically lack the option to flake or give up on
i need to find more hobbies because i feel pretty bad when all i can think of to do with someone
at the end of the day, after every other option is exhausted, is to find things to watch, even
if i can sniff out something particularly niche or interesting or earnestly funny
i cannot blame my friend for not wanting to live here what with this growing intimacy with the encircling
dread of a dwindling itinerary of discrete things to investigate around the area, our options further
narrowed by the cold to a roster of buildings to flit between, reeling at even the short walk across
each parking lot, barred from the trails & parks which we gladly took as our default options
while we could, & barred from even the mundane pleasure of walking down an alleyway
in general, in conclusion, basically, to sum up, in short, i feel like something is hanging over
me saying "your eternal present has to come to an end & you have to start chipping at the
veil mentioned prior & start acquainting yourself with even the most basic precarities"
bold of me to assume that some other, bigger, more active city wouldn't just be a provisional staving-off of that growing
intimacy with the encircling dread of a dwindling itinerary of discrete things to investigate around the area, to be fair
december 19th, 2022
progressive rock is like white noise to me because all i really care about in music is a specific unity between the
composition & what niche timbral characteristics a song might have, with any given song's particular display of
unity between those two characteristics probably being unique to it. compositional novelty means nothing to me
except insofar as it is in service of that unity. music that consciously prioritizes compositional novelty
only interests me insofar as it might accidentally blunder into the timbral thing by coincidence.
this is why JAR's let the music play is one of my favorite songs i found this year
i always have these nervous concerns about how, to say something to another person that maybe makes them really feel seen, or
offers some kind of perspective, or just presents a grounding reaffirmation of reality, any of this in a way that's beyond just
the typical utilitarian conversational routines, i feel like it all requires a degree of creativity &, in turn, inspiration. &
inspiration is just inherently impossible to tame into a routine or procedure, it's like a wave you have to ride & balance
on for as long as you can without caving in to the temptation to try to intellectually dissect it apart. i have to imagine
it typically comes with a place of just... physical nutrition, & nurturing with a flow of stimulating ideas that one
is open to, & just a willingness to feel a sense of well being. it's like something i'm at the mercy of, & if it has
mercy on me then i can experience it & talk & act real-ly, but if it doesn't then i can't totally be a person
december 22nd, 2022
i think i get to be in love
i have a mild headache but i think now is the time to curl up in bed & face the task of belatedly writing out the
whole month of december thus far. & also face the reality of how little it seems to sufficiently capture my days
anymore. it's become like writing out dreams, the entries are only shadows of the actual days, just the broad
outlines, the sequences of molar events to note down for my personal utility of unfolding them later into
the sights & sounds & just all the minutiae & moments & ephemeral sentences that aren't so feasible
to record. it was easier when i started, when whole months were largely sort of empty
my lights are flickering a little as the winter storm currently blanketing the entire midwest audibly
begins to roll in outside. i hope i do not lose power. will bus travel even remain feasible? we will see
that the transition from a block of marble to a statue is a process of subtraction is both one of my favorite little dynamics
to think about & also in a roundabout way the engine of some of my most prominent anxieties over the last several years
what does it mean to be veering in on the outcome of romantic separation but then receive a piece of communication expressing
that you make someone feel warm, present, real, uninhibited, observant, curious, & childish like nothing else in their life
& that they want to grow old but still feel childlike with you & that separation would be the foreclosure of a life path
of infinite utility for a gain of nothing, & this piece of communication is intensely meaningful but it is this meaning
which reins the notion of separation back into the realm of borderline empathic impossibility which suppresses
all other angles of consideration... how can everything matter so much & at the same time evidently
matter so little if removed from the specific & nuanced realm of romantic involvement
december 23rd, 2022
it can hurt so much to be valued! it can hurt so much to represent indefinite qualitative worth to someone.
to represent the potential for goodness, for a good outcome. it hurts to have the objective capacity to
bring someone happiness but not the subjective capacity to find personal happiness in doing so. it hurts
to be only halfway there in that way, to have such an ironic deficiency - to be everything for someone
yet still have it amount to nothing, on the grounds of what one just... is & how they feel
it hurts to want to see goodness & to see every bubble of circumstance in life arrive at its good
outcome, & to think existence should have every drop of goodness that can be spared for it, but
to have to watch the goodness that one represents (& what fortune to represent such a thing) go
unrealized & wasted because they're only half of that being that would be able to realize it
december 24th, 2022
just a couple instances of being messed with through alt accounts can instill such a small but lasting paranoia... was kind of
passive aggressive to someone who added me, based on confident assumption about who they really were, before realizing i'd
interacted with them before & that it was kinda undeniable by their tone & thoughts that they're just some benign person
what's nutty is that, to the uncertain extent that that stuff even happened, i think it largely
or even entirely was not carried out by the person i was upset with about it for so long, it
was really some guy pretending to be them or acting like he was doing stuff on their behalf
none of it is even really of any consequence, but it can still get a little worrying,
simply because it's weirdly easy to start thinking about it like it does have consequence?
i guess it's just that, for all the problems with the internet, lots of people do abide by a kind of integrity
of identity. even if it has a fair degree of anonymity, there's often some degree of consistency. & one
hardly notices that it establishes a kind of trust that masks how fleeting & tenuous connections
over the internet really are, how we can often get a decent picture of things happening at the
other end but on a fundamental level it really is like tapping people's shoulders in pitch darkness
the point being that when someone goes & very intently disrupts & toys with that system,
& exposes that fragility, even in an ultimately benign way, it's still kinda disarming
just hit me how i tend to find it a little strange when i encounter james ferraro fans who are like fifteen but
i have never consciously connected this to the fact that i was quite literally fifteen when i put like twenty
plus of his albums on youtube before there were even like far side virtual topic videos to turn to (it was
a project undertaken during my breaks from pretending i was dril with absolutely no self awareness)
i want to be curatorial, un-entropic, directed, organized, tactful, sparse, with restraint, to only speak here
if i have something distinctly beautiful to report, to show how crystalline something can be, to prove the
possibility of crystallinity, to show the positive potential of any medium, a blog or a book or some
miraculously inspiring piece of trash on the ground. & i'm faltering in it here by posting too much
& being blithe unless that's actually the "right" thing to do but i imagine it having more discipline
december 25th, 2022
thinking about how the objective character of one's body can produce both
a distressing sense of entrapment & a comforting sense of undeniability
maybe i've only really existed for the fifteen or so cumulative
minutes in my life where someone has been trying to tickle me
standing in the living room & abruptly thinking "for a hypothetical person who vestedly knows me only through my blog
this is the secret realtime mundane-ness which i am so intimate with that only periodically crystallizes into tumblr posts"
december 28th, 2022
not really consciously acquainting until my twenties with the fact
that people naturally smell uniquely distinct from each other
people can end up hating age groups below them because the category of people who can be said to be
in need of some kind of personal growth is a cyclical one that sustains itself on a constant inflow
& outflow of individuals, & in selecting any particular immaturity as a symptom of some "disease
of the present day" one sets themselves up to be presented with illusory "evidence" of it forever
december 29th, 2022
any time i write a long post i will start adding: "if this post doesn't make
sense just read it as prose poetry instead of flatly communicative paragraphs"
i think after years of willful acclimation to how it is a little stressful to put oneself out there on the internet in writing
i am kind of freshly realizing how it is a little stressful to put oneself out there on the internet in writing & that it's
kind of unpleasant to walk away from the computer & feel a little fragment of my ego still sitting there at the desk
if i am consciously mean or passive aggressive or rude then klaxons start going off in my head & scalding water starts
running over my brain but unfortunately this fails to always inherently enact self-corrective tendencies because earlier
periods of my life made me acclimated to stoically tolerating those sensations, as if i have no drive to alleviate
them, as if for lack of any personal investment in how i feel on a moment-to-moment basis
it's like, um, i wish i could rely on my empathy to have a greater chokehold so that it'd always just emotionally
jab me in a harsh way away from transgressing it, but it doesn't do that so it always comes down to making the
choice to be nicer in a very conscious way. or else spectating myself saying or doing things that really
hurt me to witness. not that that happens regularly, but it's a feeling i am familiar with
it can feel coldly businesslike because it's the expression of truths that reveal
themselves in quick & decisive operations, like business but only incidentally
december 30th, 2022
i think i rely psychologically on the coffee shop as a stable thing that i can return to, because i have had probably
at least twenty dreams about it shutting down or changing radically & it has never shown any sign of doing either
in my experience one of the nastiest dichotomies that the internet hosts could be summarized with a dynamic wherein people end up
associating with what i will term "4chan users" (though they need not necessarily "use 4chan") who seem to at least express their
abuse articulately as opposed to expressing their kindness flatly. & i will stress that in my eyes the expression of flat kindness
is obviously as much the engine of that system as the expression of articulate abuse. articulate your kindness. try your best