january 5th, 2022

in search of the truly irreconcilable spectra that leave us no choice but to settle on a point along them - so that,
having identified a maximal number of spectra, we might begin to determine the permutation of all these axes
which leaves us with the least regret... all while always, contrary to identifying those spectra, striving to
test their irreconcilability, to see if they can't be unified, eradicating as many binaries as possible
& thus imposing as little necessity for compromise on ourselves as possible

january 8th, 2022

perpetually reconcile a perpetual stress response to not being able to step in the same river twice

you can't reconcile the same stress response twice, wa ha ha hee hee!

january 13th, 2022

in my head subconsciously guiding my mannerisms i don't want moody movies but a silliness friendly thing. & not one of any
negatively "saccharine" "flavors" among the many negatively "saccharine" "flavors" which are in turn among all the other
equally incommunicable "flavors," for which providing examples of any of them only distracts from their incommunicability &
generality, entangling them in specifics. i know the correct incommunicable "flavor(s)" for me, & i am the only one who has to

january 14th, 2022

to feel like one "looks like oneself"

it is probably being exceedingly rare for anyone to really feel like they "look like themselves" from the get-go, with how varied
people are, & how little control they have about it... i imagine everyone having to "grow into" whatever intensely random appearance
they land with. it is a mistake to look at anyone & perceive an intrinsic "unity" between their mind & body, as if they're not "stuck"
to some extent, & making do with that. maybe i have failed to follow the standard course of "growing into" myself

but then, this all presupposes some concretized self that is present from the moment one is born, & then their body
can be evaluated in terms of its adherence to that self... when, in fact, that self can be conditioned by many many
things, many of those things themselves potentially stemming from the person's appearance in some way

& then one has to take into account the lack of objective meaning for any bodily trait & how vague "meanings" become
painted onto those traits, & an uncountable number of other aspects of life, with a very great degree of granularity

i should make boiling the water for my tea a mechanism for dispersing a kind of meditation throughout the day, i.e. i flick the
switch & stay in the kitchen instead of coming back to my laptop, & i try to close my eyes & not think, until i hear the click

-

i am about to make some honey vanilla chamomile tea, but i have doubts about whether the meditation aspect will be feasible
this time... it's tinny phone speaker nu metal in one room & late night with jimmy fallon in the other. not insurmountable,
but absolutely a test. even if it's not something i can accomplish tonight, it's a task to give some thought to

these are two things i really really do not like. & the negative instinctual pathways of thought which stem from them are very
well-established. & i feel like it would take a lot of focus to just... i don't know, have to take in the constant stream of
sounds while persistently denying them access to those avenues of interpretation, or trying to defamiliarize
myself with them & incorporate them into a host of undifferentiated sounds around me

in the past, i have likened forced exposure to this sort of stuff to having a giant shard of glass
representing "the absolute opposite of me in all conceivable respects" embedded in my
brain. that is subjecting my perspective to a sort of learned helplessness, though

i guess emptying one's head of internal verbal content is one thing, & then keeping it from being replaced with external verbal
content, is another entirely... i'm also examining how much i really... have a gut distrust for nearly any mainstream media, like
i kind of aggressively don't want to feel like abc news is filling my head with trash. that feeling is maybe a bit much on my part*

sometimes i wish i could switch off the section of my brain that processes or generates language for a little while

*nevermind i rescind this capitulation

january 19th, 2022

there is a bar i go to sometimes. the bathroom... so, obviously, there is a door to the bathroom. & this bathroom
has a single toilet in a "stall." the "stall" door is like a door you see in a house, with a doorknob that locks. the
"stall" is like a room, big enough to hold precisely a toilet & a person's legs. & it sticks out to me as a very
stimulating space for how enclosed it is, there being two doors between you & the rest of the bar

it tickles a sense of something i still need to articulate. like how the "stall" is still very near to the kitchen
& the bar & all, but feels so separate & shut off from the world. it makes me imagine sweeping the
bar to the ground & seeing the small blank stretch of terrain it takes up. it particularly elicits the
feeling of the world being a plane & meaning being created by sectioning & dividing spaces

it also makes me think of wandering a city & how this is both freeing & constraining, teasing a greedy hunger to see
all, because it exposes how you're essentially a dot moving on a grid, & whatever direction you go in is mildly
to the detriment of the angles adjacent to it, & maximally to the detriment of the opposite direction

i had an aunt Opal, & my dad told me that although she was very old, she was a young child of about four years old in her
head. & she did show that in her mannerisms & in the things she said. later in life, i would receive the notions, which
one could argue are reasonable, & with great medical utility, but could also argue are "contaminating" relative to my
child outlook, of this being a disorder like dementia or the aftermath of a stroke, or whatever her situation was

my child outlook was this: i naively had no thoughts of regarding Opal's qualities as a disorder, & simply felt that people
were very random constructions, & she was an exceptional example of that. being four in one's head forever was just
"an attribute." today, it is easy for me to feel riddled with such contaminations that can feel coldly rational, & are
often hidden in plain sight, like an excess of rigid boundaries & definitions have been drawn inside of me...
my trains of thought tend to wander into these boundaries, stick adhesively to them & follow along them
unexploratively. all i can do to remedy this is my best to process myself in light of that awareness

january 20th, 2022

i want to get lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood & lose my sense of direction, lose track of my
relation to landmarks, so that i can again face subjectively forward instead of objectively north

there are always limits present to break out of. it should be easy, since the walls seem so laced into life that
practically any situation might present the opportunity to break one. but it can, in fact, feel quite tiring...

enormous hulking philosophical construction that takes in the chaos of life & spits out consistent justifications for
positively processing & reacting to it all as a child would, with a simplicity that is totally at odds with the complexities
i first mentioned... ok now suppose that, by way of the construction's own self-realizing desire to possess miraculous
qualities, it effortlessly strips itself down to something as minimal & elegant as its end results

january 21st, 2022

everyday life vs. broad perspective

the sense of everyday life having a precious & beneficial sense of being in first-person, until, in an
experience of depersonalization, this sense is subsumed by one's acquisition of what feels to them like
a broader perspective... an experience akin to my experience of feeling that i am physically facing
"objectively north" rather than "subjectively forward," as a consequence of knowing too well where i am

but the pursuit of that broad perspective is ultimately just the act of interpreting what signals reach you in your
everyday life, signals from a vast totality that no one can fully grasp. that act of interpretation still takes
place in everyday life, because there is no escaping everyday life. it is like the central tension in Invisible
Cities, where even Kublai Khan with his total power can never really know the empire he rules

there is arguably no "greater picture" to attain, for which the "awareness" of it can infect everyday life & depersonalize
it. there's only an errant behavior within everyday life, through which it depersonalizes itself in an act of self-sabotage.
one may then mistake this for an engagement with the totality from which the signals come, & one's everyday
life being acted on by that totality... when there is no direct engagement with that totality,
& what is really happening is their everyday life acting on itself

january 23rd, 2022

learning everything from one thing, but without fanatically ascribing wisdom to it... since it is only one
outcropping of life's general act of portraying itself & yourself to you in only the most obvious terms

january 26th, 2022

stuffy dehydrated sickness incoherence. itd be nice to learn to draw good. i want to do a lot of things. i want to be a million
people. i want to occupy a sunny memory or a sunny vision collage of past sunniness & inarticulable desirable energies fragile
& lingering from youth, i want to be a runny liquid occupying all the cracks & crevices of what there is to feel & engage with
in the world, do things to construct real existence constantly, it has to be real unmoored mapless direct living unmediated by
the comfort of personal categories & identities & creeds, the most productive derivation from all discrete categories of thought
& books & genres & lessons is no categories or figureheads or subcultures or genres but the creativity & impulsivity underneath
& to act & construct with no guide & free of polluting influences, i think the best book or milieu or philosophy or genre will
only try to destroy itself in the mind of the reader, be the last category so that it can be the last, so that there can be no
more. to make them see the emptiness that was there before it & its kind arrived. i want to feel only what's
actually there & not what's been placed there, i want lots of memories

february 2nd, 2022

metaphorically, i would say i am perpetually forcing myself to stare straight into a flashlight, so as to prevent
myself from slavishly sleepwalking. i do this without acknowledging that i just materially lack what would
actually keep me awake, which would be the physical presence of anyone at all who i really get along with

i am terrified of not even knowing how little i know. i am terrified of letting undeath pass for life,
perhaps for lack of the perspective of having ever lived even a single second of life. i might have
my mind utterly blown by something that is still only halfway to counting as basic life

maybe i only get along with another flashlight starer

february 17th, 2022

finding awareness of one's own heartbeat uncomfortable because it confronts their intuitive sense of stable
& relatively unconditional being, unexposed to complex bodily processes, with the most constant &
obvious vital bodily process which reaffirms their existence itself as a constant persisting process

february 19th, 2022

run around run around a parking garage run down empty street at two am reframe commercial district as thing to run
around creating associations between every building & minute positive memories walk around woods walk down
one of those endless lanes cut through trees for telephone poles that you'll see from the highway usually

the feeling of indiscriminate sarcastic hatred emanating from a "smile!
you're on camera" sign is so familiar that i don't even process it

february 21st, 2022

a person you get along with so well that they are akin to a bowl of water at precisely your skin temperature. when you place
your hand in the water, you don't notice any difference. this leads you to fear that you are becoming tired of them, that
your compatibility is waning. but this is only a counterintuitive appearance brought about precisely by the substantial
degree of the compatibility itself, & it is the compatibility, clearly still there & still valued but acknowledged
on a less conscious level, which leads you to fear its supposed waning in the first place

february 25th, 2022

if you regard people who you find impudent or simple-minded as a mere resource for occasionally inciting in yourself a cathartic
anger or sense of superiority, rather than thinking every single day about how to potentially begin teaching or reasoning with
them, not just throwing your hands up & accepting a powerlessness against a general human impudence but genuinely
throwing yourself at the mountainous task of trying to construct some radical & unseen general method for
approaching others, of miraculously piercing through that impudence, well, what are you here for?

when people say their bodily functions are disgusting, to what extent are they expressing a widely relatable sense of our
bodies being arbitrary & alien things distinct from our minds, which can feel independent of them, versus implicitly
expressing something about the culture they're accustomed to & the way it regards the human body, versus
something more personal, versus just reflecting a natural evolutionary aversion to something?

february 27th, 2022

i am intensely acclimated to deriving my joy of closeness from
wholly idealized imaginary people, who do exactly what i'd
like them to do, as soon as i'd like them to do it

i think that deriving the same type of joy from actual people, who are
just people, is fundamentally a very different & unfamiliar terrain for me

i'm uncertain whether i'm still able to get crushes on people the way i used to

i do not like undeniably finding one person prettier than another. it is a demonic feeling

i think part of why i feel often feel depersonalized is that i have consumed too much media, & now
my head is sort of depressingly acclimated to taking experience as something i'm being railroaded
through deterministically, or as if it's coming to me with some defined goal of making me
feel a particular way, like art that tries to be packaged laughs or tears or poignancy

i feel like as a person i am very fixated on what feels like the stoic emptiness of life,
& the need to construct meaning. the sense that no meaning is inherent, but
life can become deeply rich with the meaning that one fills it with

it seems, though, that on some visceral level, i am disconnected from that emptiness. there is a discontinuity
between the act of trying to embrace an emptiness, versus the act of unconsciously projecting fetishized
meanings & authorial intents onto events that are just protrusions from the uncaring randomness

if i read a person's personal blog posts, or a twenty-message tangent a friend might send me as i sleep, or
the sweet letters my friend sent me, then on some visceral level i guess i feel like i am "consuming
content," primarily trying to get to the end, to unearth the "canonical feeling" that is to be
extracted from it so that i can move on to another task or avenue of consumption

it is a form of experience that i am in deep conscious opposition to. but it does
not feel like something i do consciously. it is like something in my brain stem

i think being immersed in quantified word counts & numbers of messages is a big part of this. i think the quantitative
is very frequently engaged in antagonism towards the qualitative. i do, of course, live in a sociohistorical context that
feels deeply oriented towards the quantitative, to the potential detriment of a vast breadth of authentic human experience

another possible overall reason for my depersonalization is that i frequently picture someone hugging
me, or holding my hand, etc, from an external perspective. like i am the viewer of a film about myself

then, if & when the actual time comes, i incongruously find myself as the person actually being
hugged, rather than the observer role i was always in before, the role i was accustomed to.
i was observing me, yes, but i wasn't the me me, or at best i was only halfway that me

additionally, if someone were to hold me, i think i would ping pong between four different perspectives: trying to
occupy only my own perspective & feel things for myself; versus primarily trying to empathize with them, to wonder
what they are thinking & feeling, & to revel in their presumed joy of holding me; versus trying to think about both
of us in tandem; versus conceiving of both of us from the external perspective, as if i'm an audience
who is regarding the reality of us holding each other, deciding what it means

i would like to do away with a feeling that has followed me for a long time, that in addition to my own perception there
is always an "audience" with a more objective frame of reference, ready to process things in a "sober" & "correct" way

i have to remind myself that i am just a single unique fragment of human awareness, & that there is no authority
to appeal to. i may feel like a disorienting jumble of introjected external perspectives, but i can still
remind myself that it is only me, alone, with those perspectives sloshing around

it seems like the best anyone can get in the direction of an "authority" to authenticate the way they feel is
mere consensus, but only when that consensus is situated in a context that permits them to find it cathartic

i am not even a fragment of perspective, really, because that implies being meaningfully separate from a human unity
that, in fact, never existed. i am just a self-contained world that exists for the time being & will never be again.
i can make intellectual appeals to the objective elements of life, outside of me, that will persist after
i die. but i can never actually escape my subjectivity. this whole affair is deeply singular

each person is a separate world, but in the purest first-person sense, that sense of it being a shared condition
doesn't seem to really count for anything. you are the world. it's you, it's "the reader." i don't mean this
solipsistically, because i accept that we are both real. but we are both subjective, & it is only in making
that appeal to the objective elements where i can say that "the reader," for you, is you, &, for me,
is me. like i said before, i can appeal to that objectivity but i can't escape the subjectivity

this is all very obvious, but to me it feels worth clearly spelling out to myself, because
i really have gotten so decentered from this perspective that emphasizes my singularity

- at this point, something happens to Neocities which causes any change i make to a page to display immediately for others, but with a
delay of about twenty-five minutes for me. this breaks my established workflow & forces me to abandoned the "centered paragaphs" formatting -

- Neocities seems to go back to normal -

march 25th, 2022

widespread cultural milieu which incessantly pushes to train me to regard things with
a pathetic banality instead of intuitive awe that can let my backyard feel like heaven

for a very long time i was really desperate for affection, then for a while in 2020 it went away & i felt good
about that, i really felt whole in a way where i didn't feel like i needed to be completed by another person.
then it came back & i felt like something had gone wrong, like i had fallen from an ideal state

now today i think i ultimately would fear not wanting or needing affection, because for some reason
maybe now i wouldn't regard it as a feeling of wholeness but as something boring like there are
no stakes like i should want or need something so that there is a direction to go in

2020 really does feel in my memory like a second childhood, but
i feel like maybe now i have exited it just like i exited the first

but that there was a second establishes it as a fluctuating property rather than a unique Eden, so i guess it
could happen again. maybe at a moment's notice i can just reoccupy whatever attitude permitted that
time to feel that way, as long as i remember how. & i am only failing myself by not simply doing it

cluttered head

all manner of pointless concerns & considerations that don't actually help me - these may be what bog me down. i need to take
care of my internal monologue's character. no automatic snideness or anything of the sort. nothing acerbic nothing sardonic.
the Tao Te Ching, learn by forgetting, orient self toward simplicity rather than density of content, become empty like a child

march 26th, 2022

i think i might represent a dynamic where i feel like i am coming off as good because i feel like i am devoting a lot
of thought to dissecting & combating bad things which feel omnipresent all around me, when, really, my persistent
feeling of being surrounded by bad things just seems to indicate that there is something wrong with me, &
my frequent reflection of them in my expressions just imparts an alienating direness to my character

telling a friend one good joke is probably better than a thousand overwrought written expressions
of protest against cynicism or conditioning or what-have-you. one joke has a lot more
direct relevance to everyday life, a lot more immediate positive effect on it

march 27th, 2022

it's a pretty morning & i can hear birds outside. i don't want things to feel dire. alone here, i am the situation's entire
awareness, & i don't want its awareness to be its conversion into direness, an immense perversion. i am crying in
pained sympathy for my setting & its tranquility - over the tragedy that, if i can't be happy, then i can't serve it
as its conscious apprehension & validation. relief is in the outside, in only the outside, in being the outside,
in self-dissolution. i don't want to be a feeling subject that can commit this sort of neglectful perversion,
i only want to be conscious, i want to be at most an impersonal locus where all things' sensory
signals of themselves which they radiate are taken in & compared to one another

march 29th, 2022

i find myself at an unanticipated moment where i am as empty as a child, viewing a stretch of grass, one like any other, the way
i did when i was young. the moment is pure practice without deliberation or articulation, wordless & immediate, solitary, pure

all the things which typically distract me from this delightful emptiness begin creeping to mind. to speak any
of their names would shatter the moment. they approach not with a manner of clear & obvious antagonistic
intrusion, but disguised, as things i feel an intuitive urge to benevolently diagnose & speak out against

i think of running home, of decrying these things, of delineating & dissecting them, dispatching
them, trying to warn everyone so that they can wave them away & feel this childlike feeling
too. i love this feeling. i love people. i want them to have access to this feeling i love

but i acknowledge that this would also shatter the moment. i consider the notion that there are
understandings which can only be meaningfully retained if i suppress the urge to run back & try
to share what i've found. in fact, the mere act of apprehending the distractions in my mind so
as to consider them on these terms makes them pollutants in the emptiness i've attained

i acknowledge that what i tend to project out onto the world, onto the stretches of grass & buildings & sky, what tends to blind me
to the world as i walk along the sidewalk, is not these various distractions in & of themselves, but the distractions as considered
within this framework of trying to develop the greatest means of snuffing them out, rationalizing them, doing away with them

it is my love for that empty feeling which blossoms into these overwrought considerations:
an overprotective mania which proceeds to overshadow the feeling, to distract from it. in this
way, the feeling negates itself unless i'm willing to reflect back to it its own total simplicity

in spite of everything, i sprint home to type all of this

Wittgenstein's ladder? think about the distracting ideas only for precisely the duration needed
to wield them in the process of annihilating any & all inclination to think about them further?

march 30th, 2022

this really does have to stop, i really do have to resolve this residual
contradiction that i am passively allowing in my manner of operation

the contradiction is this: prizing experiential immediacy,
& vouching for it through contradictorily diffuse &
mediated means of communication, like blog posts

i go to my blog & i clear off the "bad posts," implicitly framing the rest as "good
posts," implicitly vouching for this splitting of myself facilitated by social media,
this self-portrait which psychologically lingers after i walk away from the computer

my ideal of experiential immediacy sacrifices its authenticity in the process of attempting to
vouch for itself in some invested public manner. what compels me to make this sacrifice is
a residual concern for whoever may be at the other end of this diffuse communication

that is a reasonable concern, i guess, which owes to a general want to
try to do good by the means that are available to me - to at least
try to disperse humane ideas & manners of engagement

i don't know if i can in good conscience permit this central contradiction, though. it is a rough conundrum. i am sacrificing
my own experiential immediacy, & if anyone likes what i type, then i am incentivizing them to sacrifice theirs, perhaps

it seems like the ideal of experiential immediacy can only become real in obscurity. one must largely find it
for themselves. it is like the Tao: there are no words for it, it lives in the reality which words seek only to portray.
it gathers in unpopular places. it is everywhere, at all times, readily accessible & usable, yet it evades any search for it

Wittgenstein's ladder. the immediate & unarticulated practice of looking at the stretch of grass a day or two ago. text post

april 1st, 2022

an idea i think is kind of funny is that i think capitalism is really awesome in every alternate timeline where i don't
specifically live with my brother & become traumatized (jesting hyperbole) by an entire lifetime of having to watch
him present as someone who cares about nothing beyond money & gambling & clickbait videos about aliens etc.

april 4th, 2022

oh no i've caught myself unconsciously constructing & accepting vague & dire narratives about myself again. i've surely been doing
it for several weeks, at least. it's never a very complicated narrative, it is essentially always just "i grow more bleak" or "i grow
more cynical" or "inevitably i grow more frustrated & dry." none of this has to happen as long as i refuse the narrative

meandering in a stale space. no real forward motion. the "space" is a metaphorical space defined by
proximity to various concepts. this particular space is an aftermath that i haven't found the path out of

i can regulate myself, but i can't regulate others, nor do i want to. but this means that, in spite of
all the efforts i can make, once i come into proximity with someone i like then the degree to which
their nature is at odds with my regulation becomes the degree to which my regulation crumbles

i should have talked to the man in the bar last night who loudly said, in response to the
programming that was being played, "yer playing women's basketball?! hauhauhauhau!!!"

it might go without saying that i felt no need to actually condone or confront the sexism, or anything like that, because
it seemed far more straightforward to identify that this comment could have in the first place only come from a living
cartoon character who i couldn't see myself ever relating to or meaningfully engaging with. where do you even start?

so my imperative to talk to the man was not rooted in anything resembling "establishing frank dialogue with the 'other side'"
or anything like that. no "other side" was meaningfully present here, for the particular view that the man expressed was
only an irrelevant footnote to the comment's apparent suspension in a vacuum of separation from any frank engagement
with reality, populated only by the kinds of values & standards & tensions found in Hallmark greeting cards. it felt
less like he was meaningfully stereotyping women & more like he was reflecting his place in a personal reality
where women were not specially exempt from the fundamental stereotyping of absolutely everything

this is why i should have talked to him, to remind myself that i really can talk to the most inane-seeming people, & try to engage
with them as honestly as i possibly can, for the exercise if nothing else. i can always at least try to approach & participate in
anything, anything at all, & just experiment. it is very easy for me to forget in all situations that i can speak or act in any way.
the entire breadth of independent action beyond walking from place to place is a thing that i am not very acclimated to

i should have sat down & mildly prompted him to elaborate on his opinion, just to open up conversational
potentials. life really can be active & bleeding & dynamic constantly if i am just willing to exist & be an agent

i'm supposed to break the habit of trying to make sense of the world purely through passive spectation.
things become fact for me & are never challenged. it was vital that i leave the bar with there having
at least been an opportunity for the "cartoon character" evaluation to have been challenged firsthand

insofar as there really was an "other side" to confront, it was the entire unspoken unreality propagated by society which
underlied the man's superficial claims. if i were really ambitious, i could seek to confront that. i don't think it would be
easy, though. it might be an unanticipated leap in the conversation's abstraction & degree of commitment to real dialogue

i'll reiterate that my present belief is that there is a general social system at play which, by way of cultural currents that
present severely handicapped standards for general consideration & activity & dialogue, essentially reduces people to cartoon
characters in their social presentation. & that the result of this is people coming to unconsciously resent one another for being
alienating cartoon characters putting so little dynamic humanity on offer. the resentment develops on this unconscious basis,
& is attributed to conscious bases - petty & superficial disagreements & differences, often political oppositions

i don't see this as a consciously maintained system in any way, but insofar as an "aim" can be ascribed to
it, i believe it is that state of meaningless social fragmentation whose survival depends on a general
continuous failure to identify that actual source of resentment, to make it conscious & eliminate it

if my creativity wanes, then i cannot employ it towards being nice to people, & things will move towards stagnation. if i can
employ a constant creativity towards being nice to people, then things will generally become happier & better. there is no
surefire way of maintaining real creativity, because routine & ritual are antithetical to the spontaneity of creativity.
there is a constant war to wage against entropy, & no tactics to be found, only discrete sums of ingenuity, each
unique, to be summoned in acts of constant improvisation. & a bottomless hole to toss them into

april 6th, 2022

i think a problem of mine is that i think that everything essentially has a childhood. for instance
i think all of my social relationships have childhoods & then each begins succumbing to
entropy. this provides everything with a prophecy that risks becoming self-fulfilling

the rush to scrutinize any dynamic phenomenon's inevitable dissimilarity to some
fixed ideal becomes most tricky with memory, where the outcomes of all dynamic
phenomena continuously become the fixed ideals on which further scrutiny is based

april 7th, 2022

when i show someone a song i like, i create an opportunity for them to casually make comments on it
& those comments risk adhering to the song & making it cease to be what it was when i first heard it

[link] < i don't know what to feel when i see those pictures. the things described in the picture are all good things to
do, but they usually reach me in a context where i "should" think the picture is dumb cause i'm supposed to recognize
that it circulates on facebook or something. i "should" think the picture is dumb, but not the things it describes
doing. but why should i think the picture is dumb if it promotes things i don't think are dumb?

i think i am supposed to dislike the trite & impersonal quality, particularly how it is replacing any actual unique interpersonal
formation & communication of the sentiments with merely the circulation of a picture. certainly representations of communication
in place of actual communication are a very sickening disease. or maybe, because of the feeling it gives off, i'm supposed
to imagine it circulating among lots of people who don't know how to really see any magic in life & have some
shallow imitation of it in mind when they share the picture maybe. who knows?!?!?!

"every situation is a song" < maybe the most trite statement ever unless i juxtapose it with how you can replace the
notes in maple leaf rag with atonal samples & still retain the underlying juxtapositions that are essential to the
composition in some way, & from there generalize to the idea that every life situation is a juxtaposition
of elements that can be taken like abstracted sets of chords & melodies, or anything else

& then, i originally typed this in a discord channel, & the unprompted verbosity of the messages is kind of in-my-own-head, in
a way that's kind of open to a defusingly irreverent reply. & that has a similar bent to the picture i linked. irreverent replies
kind of regroup the tone back at something. but it's questionable if there's really anything to regroup back at. it's weird.
what is that "baseline" that irreverence takes things back to? maybe there is none, maybe there is nothing to really grip onto

it's not quite in my nature to treat things bathetically, i think. bathos is a comedic reduction, but for
the thing that's treated bathetically to be "reduced," it has to be "more" in some way, implicitly,
in the first place. what is it more than? does it have to be more? can't it just be what it is?

april 8th, 2022

i'm getting way too prone to trying to make sense of things in relation to general models that aren't flexible
enough, like referring to perceived cultural currents & flows of cultural attention & obscurity & economic
incentives & cultural cheapening & stuff like that. dogmatic i guess. once i stop applying the
models things just become inarticulably horrible instead of articulably horrible though

yesterday during my car ride to school i considered that the larger your scope when trying to think about society,
the more consistently bad it is. then the more you narrow your scope down to an individual life, the more it
becomes a chaotic mixture of good & bad things congealing out of the overall badness, like microscopic fuzz

i can just think about the small & big scales at different times, i don't always have to keep
one in mind as i think about the other. they have different standards which don't mesh

the endless tension: i want to restrict myself to cares that are wholly local, individual, & private, because that seems like
the most thorough way of rejecting all the grand-scale nonsense that mentally tears me away from my actual life & leaves
me stuck in abstractions. but i feel like doing that & maintaining no attempts to understand very wide-scale social currents
& means of social control ironically leaves me more vulnerable to becoming nothing more than a reflection
of those currents & possibly failing to really live, since i neglected to negate them in myself

april 7th, 2022
the difference is that they can regard bizarre activities, that are totally removed from reality, as mediums - very unusual
mediums, but essentially mediums like any other - on which an indomitable & playful human spirit can nonetheless play
out in stark contrast to the alienated environment that hosts it. while i fear that the medium could twist the spirit itself into
a bizarre thing totally removed from reality, duped out of even wanting to really live. & i very well may be worse off

is simply having as much fun as possible regardless of any cheapening of life
that may or may not be present ultimately the most human thing one can do?

can accepting that position & throwing oneself headlong into that style of
engagement open one to the risk of accepting degraded standards of "fun?"

if i'm going to keep using websites, i think i need to start ublocking things until i'm exposed to little
enough weird accelerated geographically untethered culture that i don't have an urge to confront it anymore

on youtube, i've already removed all view counts, recommended content, & amounts of
likes on videos or comments. i might remove comment sections entirely. maybe
i'll remove reviews, comments, & average ratings from rateyourmusic too

i'm usually confronting elements of culture that have come to live in my head more than
they live in front of my eyes anyway. i need to try harder to simply keep my mind
on things i actually like. i need to try harder to put intrusions out of mind

april 11th, 2022

i think when i send people bad things like screenshots of websites or pictures involving internet
personalities then the things they subsequently say to me feel marginally more acceptant of
cynicism & then i have to send them enough good things like paintings to make it okay again

april 13th, 2022

everything is crowded with garbage so i put a bunch of concentration into isolating myself from all that garbage
so that all the neural pathways between my daily life & various hunks of garbage would eventually decay & my
trains of thought wouldn't feel burdened anymore, derailing into recitations of garbage & subsequent needs
to spit at that garbage, cynically parody it, or do whatever seems called for just to feel for a moment
that i've coped with the existence of all that garbage that i can't voluntarily forget

tired of the ritual of paying attention to plainly detestable things seemingly
out of just a bored lack of having found anything actually worth appreciating

why is trying to just focus on what one actually in their heart likes seemingly so foreign

i've been circling around the notion that one can in a sense "hate everything" without really being cynical because
that "everything" is such a vast & generally repulsive singular body that never should have intruded into one's
headspace & is worth hating on that basis alone. i should be able to just walk somewhere nice & feel connected
to my surroundings & have things i love without persistently having at the ready some entire trashy
psychic world in my memory to lose myself in at some random & unfortunate cue

i can't... reverse on anything. each of my "maybe i'm taking it too seriously"s quickly becomes a "no, to
take it any less seriously would be an acquiescence of some kind." & in this way things generally continue
to feel progressively more fraught. i am convinced some kind of transcendent (really just once-normal)
happiness lies at the horizon that is "a sufficiently thorough rejection"

i've been circling around the notion...

maybe i should disavow this approach & vow to try to see the good in all media that i might find bad as a whole - this
in the interest of ceding no ground, of making no exceptions in consistently trying to see good. don't know what to do

"the skeleton is the relatively dead part of an organism, & because of this it is also the part relatively immune to dissolution. which is another way of saying that the
hard parts of an organic body are those most isolated from the communicative general-economic flows of its metabolism, but also the parts it most faithfully
transmits into the future. the residues of life follow upon a pre-emptive compromise with death; what remains of life is only the disloyal part of itself"

april 15th, 2022

i think a problem of mine is that i think that everything essentially has a childhood. for instance i think all of my social relationships
have childhoods & then each begins succumbing to entropy. this provides everything with a prophecy that risks becoming self-fulfilling

lately i think i am suffering for a neglect in ironing out my relationship to death. i don't want to align myself with death, i do want to align myself with
life in the end, but i... with everything following the general rule of destabilization, one can only prioritize preservation so much before... well, as one
progressively assigns more priority to preservation, progressively sets their sights higher, the chance of that preservation's general success would
continuously diminish. & a person ultimately has to negotiate with themselves where a certain threshold of prioritization is, a threshold past which
all they can do is constantly worry, to begin worrying from the moment the tiniest grains of entropy make their way into anything, grains they might
have truly stood no chance of keeping away - this is why it would be a maddening commitment to want to see the most miraculous outcome of any
situation... the practice of creating pockets of reduced entropy & trying to push the reduction within those pockets to its limit. shelters

april 25th, 2022

the dusk light is just as calm as it was when i was a child, it's just rhythms in
my head that make it frantic. it's my own feet that produce the constant motion

april 27th, 2022

someone who used to think they were a broken person because they felt so empty, until they came to believe
that their emptiness was the stoic & real emptiness of nature & life, visible when not obfuscated by the world's
urgings to fill it, & they were a fool to follow those urgings & strive so intently to negate the gift they had

april 29th, 2022

tending to see only undeath, whether this was due to a real & happenstance concentration of undeath around them or an illusory film
of dead skin that had grown over their eyes, they wished to instead witness life so that they would find it easier when thinking
about the world to consistently start from the axiom that it was a place where life still existed. additionally, there was the
chance that, upon spectating life, they would find themselves unable to live it. what can a thing that cannot live qualify as
beyond "dead?" & what can one call a dead thing that might aim to maximize its proximity to life? a vampire! a zombie!

may 3rd, 2022

september fifth, 2021 felt like one of the only nights of my life that's actually mattered in the past year & i made it that
way with without any company or any tools, just with myself, i was just being & it was more than enough. it feels like
something desperately in need of a reprise but it was such an effortlessly honest experience that i fear i'll be unable
to avoid using it as a model & this causing any further attempts to become strained & affected... to at least
try would obviously be better than reasoning about the risks of trying, though. i wish i could identify
what precipitated all of it, if there was something up with my brain chemistry, or...

may 4th, 2022

when i postpone interaction with a friend for the sake of seeing to outstanding classwork, it's not so much that i'm incapable
of imagining any outcome where i am happy past a hypothetical point of blowing all that work off (or, to be more succinct:
that i need to do the work), but that i have quietly made an agreement with myself - one that is advantageous to isolation,
which is questionable - that the structure afforded to my life by being a student is sufficiently valuable to some
idle & momentum-oriented part of me that i am willing to sacrifice a piece of my social life to honor
the sort of self-contained requirements for maintaining that structure

i feel a lot like attendance & prioritization of my grades has metastasized in my mentality into a code that is never examined
& which i tend to lean on for a sense of stability, on the merit of its being unexamined & thus feeling like something constant

may 6th, 2022

all that can intuitively come out of my hands onto a piece of paper seems to explicitly be stuff that looks like
Newgrounds to me & it freaks me out. like genuinely it feels like the casual drawing part of my brain having
not been nourished & made to develop so that it's like a preserved fragment of my ten year old self, & shows it

aside from that, i think my visual art process succumbs to carrying out angular-minded software processes - creating
process art - way too easily, & that it speaks to what i see as a kind of personal weakness. when i do this it can feel
like an element opposite to art nestled in the art, like shucking dynamic variations & applications of the given elements
in favor of determining a routine to carry out, routine in place of dynamics, that's just a microcosm of death to me

if i have any excuse, it would be... well, for instance, i don't think i've really had a face-to-face conversation
in about four months. when the human element that naturally abrades stagnant patterns - love - is absent then
it's only natural that the stagnant & unfeeling elements residing around me will close in trying to fill
the empty space. or maybe thinking about it in those terms is what makes it happen

have to learn to be my own humanity?

may 8th, 2022

my advice is don't attach to pursuits that turn good things into bad things, i.e. if your window
is open & the wind is blowing peacefully through your room don't decide you must have
something propped up which keeps getting blown over & making you dislike the wind

may 9th, 2022

i think materialism isn't disenchanting, because the material plane is so insanely broad & complex as to have
produced all the phenomena that were sufficiently chaotic & secretive to be regarded as supernatural in
the first place... the world is so rich that living in it can be indistinguishable from spirituality

may 18th, 2022

things have to be allowed to be more subjective & dreamy than is permitted by exposure to the stark portrayal by tv shows harassing
me when i leave my room, or people's endless pathetic cycle of performatively tired Reaction to Culture on e.g. twitter. people turn
into dead bodies by replacing their insides with the world at large. or rather, futile attempts at scale models of a world at large that
they'll never grasp. regardless of what comes out of a screen, i lose at the moment when it makes me feel locked into my place on
some common plane of cultural referents that i get to try to make sense of in tandem with a spectral "everyone else" left merely
implied by the piece of media, people to hypothetically relate to on the basis of having been confronted with it without
any choice. the primary means of commonality just feels like endless self-abuse. nothing beyond individuals

"nothing beyond individuals" can be read in two senses, one an optimistic affirmation & the other a pessimistic observation

i primarily mean it in the optimistic sense, as an allusion to marx's the german ideology, in which communism is at one point characterized
as "rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals." so, in affirming this, i mean to encourage the idea
of exterminating all in a person's life that dwells beyond their individual scope of existence, causing them to become lost
in distant abstractions & thus have a corresponding degree of abstraction imparted to their thoughts & behavior

the pessimistic sense i only noticed upon rereading, & i think it would have been a shallow way to end the post. it would simply be an observation of
"nothing existing beyond individuals," presently, in a sense of isolation, of people being excessively "individualized," "individualistic" - gesturing
towards the current dominance of the aforementioned abstractions & the part they play in keeping people separated, atomized, & distracted

may 18th, 2022

alone you can walk a long distance in the night to some immense object & stare up at it uncritically like it's having
some kind of sacred effect on you... in someone else's company you can do this too, but there is also the risk that
they will ground things by frankly saying something like, "well, we're here at the object." & then you may feel
pressured to reply with something correspondingly grounded & laconic, even though it would have been just as
valid to stare in awe. & this may be disappointing, but can you ask them to play along with something which
would have been valid alone but may suddenly function as an affectation when in company?

may 22nd, 2022

i moved the chair that my lamp is on to the northwest corner of my room, to make the
room feel different. it was a relieving change. it is easy to forget to do things like that

i haven't had the lamp in that corner since the time around june of last year, with the elderly
couple's yard sale, the random hilltop ecstasy, & tracey trance's fountain. & i can feel
distinctly that i haven't had it in that corner since specifically that time

having the lamp in that corner has the utility of reprising a feeling of that time,
but the longer i keep it there, the more its roots will shift to this present time

this is part of how i think about memory & evocation of memory

one strives to populate their present with things that scatter, through the past that those presents
continually become, as adequate crystallizations of the irreplaceable feelings of those times

they serve the utility of letting those feelings echo forward, & this creates a kind of richness that feels
like its own reward. nostalgia. but that utility cannot be actualized without diluting a thing's place in
time each time it is done, shifting it forward in time a bit, reappropriating its association to the present

at the extreme ends of this practice are time periods flawlessly preserved but never serving their purpose, like an unused guest
room of plastic-wrapped furniture, or things which are burned out as quickly as they can be expected to become nostalgic

so despite the preservative tendency of the practice, the forward motion is still inexorable. & it is a kind of game of selective
preservation, sparing recall, making decisions about the restrained rationing of investments in memory that have been made

june 24th, 2022

it just clicked for me that systematically voicing gratitude for everything one eats as in the style of a table prayer is actually
a pretty romantic thing & the idea just got knocked out of my head at an early age since all my exposure to it was really stiff,
awkward, externally prescribed ritual oriented around a being i'd quickly decided didn't exist... every humanistic quality that
i could've taken away from childhood exposure to religion just got overrode by my dissatisfaction with the phoniness of the
supernatural justifications, in tandem with having never bothered to think about it harder due to privilege i guess

june 28th, 2022

i like "poetry is chance defeated word by word," more than that though i like that you can generalize it to
all life experiences & say they are chance defeated with each & every circumstantial factor, big or small

july 5th, 2022

i have a problem where whatever is happening around me tends to only feel like the idea of that situation, with its current
realization being just an insignificant & arbitrary footnote to its ideal character, a label: "happening." & all the ideas
of all the possible situations that i can imagine feel like they make up the primary plane of reality. i could mark any
one of them as "the currently actually happening one" & it'd feel as meaningful as ticking a box with no label

i guess what makes it meaningful is that there are other conscious people who have to experience & react to whatever
reality i take part in making happen. but i still feel this way regardless. maybe that makes it kind of a solipsistic
thing to feel. i don't believe in solipsism, but maybe i unbelievingly practice it by feeling this way. it's like
other people's responses will still succumb to feeling like merely the realized ideas of those responses

need some good old mortal peril to shock me awake or something! :(

-

actually: i just randomly imagined pulling a pin on a grenade & throwing it onto a random
person's balcony, & in particular i imagined the kind of unimaginable horror i'd feel at
the greatly unfortunate & consequential occurrence i'd just irreversibly set into motion

i think this indicates that... it's not so much that i anticipate feeling detached from anything consequential that i could
do, as much as i've hindered myself from anything consequential for so long that i don't remember what it's like

life isn't mere reconfigurations of ideas, but i am unconsciously restricting myself to potentials so
interminably polite & sterile as to be simplistic enough to be regarded as mere reconfigurations
of a totally impoverished number of elements. fencing myself in, establishing a realm of
"unthinkable" potentials that i eventually don't even bother to imagine, let alone consider...

gotta look somewhere past the border of the realm of unthinkable potentials but way,
way short of potentials as unthinkable as throwing grenades onto people's balconies

it feels like i would violate some kind of social convention of my present visit if i just left the house & walked several miles
downtown to wander this city i've never been in & that kind of social constriction on what would otherwise be an unfettered lease
to spontane is totally choking & something i distressedly watch myself become deadenedly acclimated to, settling for less

july 10th, 2022

when i was young, i felt like each day had me passing from one discrete
situation to another. & i think this was a better way to experience life

today, in comparison, i only feel like i am moving on an endless unbroken continuum through
time & space, & that trying to section portions of it off into "events" is fruitless. the spans
of time before, during, & after a concert don't feel psychologically demarcated anymore

similarly, i feel like the situation inside my head never changes very much, & it has qualities
of continuity & consistency that dominate whatever diversities & differences crop up outside
of me. it's like passing through various climates in a temperature-controlled sphere

july 13th, 2022

a person who likes cities & thinks they are beautiful. a person who likes cities functionally but
thinks they should look different. a person who hates cities functionally & thinks they are ugly too

a person who hates cities but is willing to find them beautiful so as to "reap" from them an enriching sensory experience dissociated
from their functions, because, being powerless to do anything else, that's the most human use of the city that is left. maybe they
strongly emphasize the visceral experience of taking in the sight of the towering buildings & overpasses over any more abstract
cultural engagement like trying to derive aesthetic satisfaction from the billboards or displays in shop windows

july 15th, 2022

i don't like checking my phone in places because when i move through the world i'm supposed to at least
feel the shifting character of my surroundings & let it color my experience, even if the character isn't ideal.
& checking my phone all the time blurs everything by constantly keeping it tinted with a consistent
set of attitudes that follow me around & remain detached from any relevance to where i am

plus a lot of culture on the internet is obsessed with being "weird" & doing "weird" mutations
of pop culture & just generally seeming "above" any sense of locality in the first place

i can't even smell anything on my phone or my computer, that might as well be being dead

july 16th, 2022

many life situations, even very mundane ones, seem to have this tragic quality: if i could transport myself
into the situation abruptly, from a previous circumstance of complete stagnation & boredom, then the new
circumstance would seem very fascinating in all of its simultaneous novelty. i would feel couched in it,
enveloped by it. but as it stands, everything is strung together, constantly appended to a smooth
continuity of events that seems to curse everything to feel like an extension of "the norm"

july 17th, 2022

a certain radical internal restructuring of myself to make
my current situation instead feel blissful exactly as it is

it's like my brain is completely bifurcated into the half that needs to freely recognize how inconsolably agonized it is,
& the other half that needs to drown it out with amazingly pure belief in the curative capacity of rain & flora & rainbows
& birds & the simple silent non-escapist tranquility of a room in a house & forgetting all deadening pop culture & curling
up on soft furniture & speaking softly & forcing my subjectivity to be self-justifyingly valid & real by sheer force of
will & just being all the human yearning for joy forcing itself to be real by way of its eternal confident justification
& the beauty that comes even with flaws if one can just let go of everything less than good & it just asserts
assertively for the good of everything that this all just can't not be real. & just & & &.

& neither of these halves wants to take no for an answer

i don't know how to phrase it it's like i just need to be ok because even just the idea of earthly Heaven is clenching
at me & it's itself (adjective) enough {bright, good, pure...} that i don't even have the option of denying it.
but i need to be ok to accept it. i can't let go of how good life could be even if i really want to

july 18th, 2022

if life isn't actually boring then i think any sense of it being boring is like an illusory webby film strung between all
the people who think it's boring & naturally reinforce that perception by sharing in boring excuses for pastimes...
& it can only become non-boring between people who mutually don't think it's boring. & naturally the
things that are quelling their boredom can't themselves be boring... i wish i was living up to this

july 24th, 2022

i believe in mental objects, i believe in objects that one can hold in one's mind & which no analogy to neither shape or texture, or
any sense. nor do they cater to verbal description. but an object can be there & be unmistakable as the object that it is. i believe
that holding the right object in my mind can make me a good person, & that will naturally bring me all-around contentment,
generally... & that an object has a quality of just sporadically inspiring words & actions in line with its particular character,
of realizing its character. i think that, while holding such an object, there is a risk of dropping it & losing it. right
now i feel like i've dropped & lost such an object. i want to reconstruct it but it feels difficult to

july 27th, 2022

i look at the room i'm in, & how it's real. i think about how it'll be a memory next. it won't feel real then. in fact,
it doesn't even feel fully real now. it already feels half-unreal, because i'm looking ahead to when it'll be a memory.
it'll be a memory for longer than i'm in it. so the memory already seems to overpower the present. i need to feel this
moment extra much, so that it feels extra real. that will make it feel like a little more than a memory for my future
self. a little less unreal. my future self will thank me for that. so i try to feel the present room a lot. but it's hard.
it still feels half-real. i can't feel a half-real thing extra real. how do i stop anticipating its reduction
to a memory? it's like my whole life is already a memory - so like i'm already dead

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

august 1st, 2022

i've said it before, but i'll say it again: i think there's a lot to be said for trying to apply cinematographic logic
just to one's vision. just standing in the right place to create a satisfying framing. letting something linger, letting
something pan as you walk, watching the monolithic rotation of a building as you pass. sometimes it can come down
just to the direction you point your eyes as you sit in a chair, one direction picturesque, the other not, or what
you train your eyes on... i guess it'd be more accurate to say that this is not a cinematographic approach
to experience as much as cinematography is a simulation of this activity that's always available

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 14th, 2022

it's as insanely simple as a cloudless sky, which is why one wispy cloud can disrupt
it. but really it's as simple as loving every form of weather without thinking about it

so it's as simple as loving everything? not judging? but becoming vulnerable in the process. i'm trying to have my cake
& eat it too - be accepting & uncritical but not vulnerable... if you are not critical of advertisements & propaganda,
that will be exploited, right? innumerable currents in life & culture are currently exploitative. you don't so much
even have to meet a bad person - it's everywhere, leaking from mediums... but i hated advertisements when i was
seven, so maybe everything works out? no advertisement-hating seven year old expects to nonetheless be made
to hate their own body though, so how much does it work out? there's so many conflicting qualities to sort out...

august 15th, 2022

girl who lives her life with absolute regularity, tires of this, makes her life consistently chaotic instead,
tires of the homogeneity of the chaos through time, organizes her life to oscillate between order & chaos,
tires of the regularity of that interval, reorganizes such that the interval between order & chaos is
irregular, feels this tilts it too far towards chaos, regresses to a still more abstracted level of
organization... (eventually arriving at maybe the ethos of minimal music composition)

august 18th, 2022

my sense of impulse is shaped like my entire body & for the duration that i use
my laptop i crush it down uncomfortably to the size & shape only of my hands

august 21st, 2022

going to keep an eye out for ways i can proactively embrace rather than
suppress the ritual-based character that i possess as a human being

august 26th, 2022

yesterday i felt, viscerally (it's not usually visceral) how i & a weird middle aged guy on his
phone on a bar patio were both equal protrusions of humanity as a globally particulate life
process. but i could only feel it briefly before visceral sensations of identity took hold again

"particulate" interests me as a way to frame it... it captures the sense of us being unified
as a life process, with our separateness being only a secondary aspect of that unity, but still
kind of glosses over the fact that essential to that process is the constant production of separate
subjectivity that's so essential to the crucial experiences of love & loneliness & dialogue & everything

& then, i guess there's a beautiful idea where we're not unified by humanity as a life process, where you could
abandon traditional taxonomy altogether & dispense with grouping us all under the life process "homo sapiens"
taken as a subset of the total life process, instead grouping us only as recognizably separate outcroppings of
the total life process, in tandem with every other organism. prioritizing each individual case of genetic
drift, the continuum between amoebas & people, over the attempts to generationally box in the process

each individual standing alone as a branch of the tree of life containing one individual precisely, bonding with
others over the superficial similarities that might for one person constitute homo sapiens but for another might be
regarded in an undifferentiated way. wholly unique organisms in each other's company, as wholly unique as people tend
to know themselves to be, but here without even the shadow of a monolithic conception of humanity looming over them...

an automotive shop fully prioritizes utility over aesthetics & in this process creates (as a byproduct) its own aesthetic that
might never have come together otherwise. a person sets up an easel in an automotive shop & paints it. a person's bedroom is
a painting of this-or-that fondness. another person's bedroom is an automotive shop. another person's bedroom is a painting
of an automotive shop. another person's utilitarian needs happen to coalesce in the form of a painting of an automotive shop

september 13th, 2022

a person reads about neurochemicals, & about a plethora of other things from which they infer thousands of years of human
beings falling in love. this leads them to make the unconscious mistake of branding love as a predefined "human experience"
placed on offer for them by reality, something repeating & commutative like the blueprint for the human hand, & something
they desire to be ushered through by a kind of natural momentum, a typified experience they would like to consume

in contrast, one can imagine their life playing out such that it simply happens, with a frame of reference all
to itself, not bogged down by the clumsy trivia of its history or its physical mechanisms, occupying its own
self-contained universe of personal particularities - unaware of its endless tessellation across human lives

(&, insofar as there even is a "tessellation," it is only the tessellation of "love"
as a ponderous general model used as shorthand for a boundless array of diversities &
particularities that might be, to some extent, inappropriate to reduce to one monolithic term)

september 15th, 2022

smoothness is the ideal, to inspect as close as one likes & never find jagged edges, no jagged edges hewn into
smoothness as seen from afar, i should be able to inspect any of my thoughts & feelings as close as i like

if i cross my eyes & spin around or as i walk around a small tree staring up at the irregularity
of its leaves criss crossing visually into an incomprehensible mess of stimuli, i feel like
i'm seeing without seeing anything, a self-contained seeing machine seeing for its own
sake, severed from sight's communicative relationship with the outside world

september 16th, 2022

the space between a person & the world is empty, it's an empty space that you only need to look across to see
the trees & water, there's nothing that needs to be developed there or anything lost that needs to be recovered

what's disgusting is that that is why the only thing that can disrupt that connection is for the space
to be filled, polluted, obscured in internal noise, & that can only be done as a kind of proactive
occupation. it's disgusting because it's psychological violence intruding from the outside

september 20th, 2022

when i was trying to take a picture of the three distant asynchronous radio towers
during the brief moment that all three were on i was engaging with a music composition

september 22nd, 2022

"there are some asides on the creativity of children which might be of interest to any teachers

first, a 'childish' approach is required to break convention & experience the cosmic (371). but on 379 we are told there
is an ambiguity in 'the modern valorization of children's drawings, texts by the mad, & concerts of noise', & that
this can lead to 'reproducing nothing but a scribble effacing all lines, a scramble effacing all sounds'

'people often have too much of a tendency to reterritorialize on the child, the mad, noise' there is no
point just making things fuzzy - instead we should think about how to represent what is already fuzzy

apparently, Klee used to get cross when people compared his work to the child's
work, since he was rendering visible the cosmic forces, & not just multiplying lines

i think about this so much, especially the last part about Paul Klee... not making childlike
art but developing the portrayal of a primality or directness or motion or something rather
that child art is seen as prone to capturing - conceptually detaching that quality
of the child art from child art as its typical & expected vehicle

the difference between pretending to still be young & being young in old age

the impossibility of entirely rejecting the reality of growing old, but the aim of determining
to exactly what extent the notion of growing old is a lie - what lies have been attached to it

september 23rd, 2022

so easy to slip into & work from a cathartic sense of superiority over the aggressor instead of taking the lower
position, of - even unwarranted - humility that costs nothing & that i believe can effect benevolent influence

i will not commit the self-own of beginning to believe that anyone is rotten truly to the core

i don't know if i'll ever get the grids out of my head, that i can be truly fluid. i fear i will always
see e.g. a hug as something with explicit temporal boundaries separating it from before & after,
something with an explicit duration, something labeled in the fabric of reality as "hug." & so on

people always seem to laud the ability to detach oneself from another person's weirdness & not get involved, to not
stress over it, & i'd like that to be my nature too, it's something i typically try to keep to, but i've always had to
strain myself to do it. it really feels like there's no boundary between me & the aggressor, like we're the same
blob of human consciousness that spans across bodies & i as that blob have an element of myself that
i need to correct, a patch of mold that i need to cure. i care. & i don't state that necessarily to valorize
myself but simply in contrast to the freedom of "i don't care," for better or for worse

september 24th, 2022

something i still can't quite find the right words for but i've been trying for a while:

you can look at a very arresting photograph of a place, just a corner of a room or a hallway, & then have the
opportunity to explore that place. & the photograph might irreversibly lose a kind of mystery. but it's not a
mystery in the sense that you had necessarily wondered what was past the borders of the photo. it's just that
the unspoken absence of everything else made the subject of the photo feel sort of self-contained & perfect

it's very similar to the way i can sometimes make my familiar environments (like a stretch of grass
in my neighborhood) look beautiful again if i pretend that i don't know what's past the horizon

in the distance there could be anything, but that potential isn't so much about particular
possibilities as much as it is about the vagueness of all possibility, about ignorance

it's not in the service of my imagination, letting it play across the potentials, as much
as it is in the service of granting an isolated simplicity to the location in front of me

it's why the empty field of dry hay in a circle of trees under a cloudless sky that i explored
in june felt so beautifully empty & self-contained, separate from the rest of the world

i don't want to lose myself idly tracing a line across a mental
map of the city, i want to face forward instead of northeast

september 25th, 2022

to describe the act of internalizing innocence as a kind of fundamental value that exhibits diverse
ways of informing a diverse range of processing & expression, & have someone critically jump
straight to the idea of sexual repression as if sexuality, out of a million billion options, is
the primary axis that the concept hinges on... aaaggghhh where do you even begin

i want everything to come from a wordless dynamic energy in me that feels so real to me, i want to feel connected to it
all the time, its direction feels so right to me. it'll never be written or said but its traces should be in anything i write or
say. & it's not some spiritual externality it's just the way all the signals come together in me but not in a way i could or
would want to "take credit for," i'm just happy with myself, i like this, i like the forgiving character to find in everything,
i like forgiving, i like trying to humbly deconstruct arguments rooted in concessions to pain. basically i love you "the
energy" & i hope you do not treacherously represent a kind of zealotry rooted in the insularity of myself only

you can say or do a thing for the most honest & unattached reasons & someone might still do their
absolute best to insist that it was informed by some underlying cynicism or self-servingness. but
it's not a problem, really, since in the first place it is a shortsighted undertaking to pursue approval
on someone's shortsighted terms, & there shouldn't even be the urge to. the best you can do might
be to neutrally work at showing someone how there really isn't a darkness underlying everything

september 29th, 2022

an idea that's kinda important to me is that, although everyone should probably read the cool books, you also have to know
when it might be good to try to just teach people instead of directing them to books... in opposition to any idea that it might be
silly or pretentious to repeat things from the books yourself, like you're trying to incorporate the wisdom into your own ego,
because no, it's valid to do since the books are dead & you are alive & you have to be the words' living expression, but
only insofar as you're not taking the books' death into yourself, clinging to the words as an image of truth, which
is to say, only to the extent that they give you true life that you can give back to them in turn

october 3rd, 2022

hatred is just a force of destruction or negation for when one needs to sweep away what's already there because they
have creative ideas about what should be in its place, creativity, force of creation, love. every ounce of hate is an
investment towards two, eight, or one thousand & twenty-four ounces of love in the future, it's an ugly implement
to drop & wash one's hands of the second it's no longer needed... to the extent that the space to build in is free
of intrusion, all one should do is build... if hatred is negation then keeping it around is how you live as
the mirror image of what you hate, instead of forging something wholly separate & original to be!

october 7th, 2022

every random minor foreign politician or athlete with some banal wikipedia page who you can barely place
into any contextual framework that has meaning relative to your life can be for instance the untold day-
to-day story of a five year old who one day heard one of that figure's few mentions on some local talk
radio station & made maybe some crass pun about their surname that they laughed about with their six-
year-old sister & this progressed intomore of the unrecordable fluidity of juvenile banter & then
they were ushered into a car to visit a relative's house filled with storied objects & so on

october 10th, 2022

blame doesn't exist, humanity is like a holistic machine of interrelated temperamental currents,
you just have to do your best to represent the forces in those currents that are associated
with the incremental process of our global self-correction, that's all there is...

october 12th, 2022

magical vs. clinical, vs. a clinical-magical standpoint? trying to work magic by understanding & intuitively working with forces,
but not "understand" in the sense of dissection, not itemizing & cataloging forces as much as maintaining visceral awareness of
the generalized system of forces & the diversity of forces. not something in need of a supernatural name, as if originating from
outside of reality, or from some alternate hidden layer, but something undeniably inextricable from reality as is - the most
fuzzy ideal relationships, where any labels applied for the sake of example ("closer?" "further?") have the consequence of
collapsing them into arbitrary linguistic examples of their underlying generality. it's magic so it'll only diminish as
you try to pin it down yet you can't suspend thought in the same way that e.g. a cult might try to program you

october 25th, 2022

i think lots of people are afraid or something to appreciate nature & animals in a completely... in a
way without anything between them & it. they want to jestingly make fun of them or filter them through
something, like, maybe aesthetics... i don't put anything between me & it i can't do anything but love frogs

october 29th, 2022

for most of my life i've had this automatic perception of live music as just playing out with the same inevitability of an mp3
file, not feeling special at all. i barely process that every cymbal crash in the other room is an actual impact happening

it's like it all just feels like an expression of an ideal system that can repeat forever
& no particular expression of it means anything more than the one before or after

november 4th, 2022

i keep coming back to thinking about "interfaces" & feeling like i need to write out a description of
"interfaces," which i'd maybe define as any complex, dynamic system (like a domain of (possibly
specialized) practice or knowledge), which is defined by very broad potential but whose broad
potentials become crystallized into a superficial appearance of a more fixed & ideal system

there's obviously a computer interface, probably the most common usage of the word
"interface," which freezes the complexities & possibilities of computer code into the
set of preset options that the developer hopes will be the most useful for the end user

i'd argue that the hot & cold knobs on a faucet would also count as an interface, plus the
microwave & refrigerator, for their presentation of an idealized manner of adjusting the
temperatures of objects, something more akin than not to a slider in a 3d modeling
program, with which you might directly adjust the size of an object...

temperature as abstracted from concerns of entropy, diminishing energy sources (which are powering the
computer that runs the 3d modeling program, incidentally), a planet losing its ability to do anything
but grow incrementally hotter leaving no choice but to spatially redistribute that heat, & so on

when traveling on a highway at night, i feel like the road signs would be an example of an interface
that i find particularly interesting for how viscerally stripped-back it is, like a vast stretch of
space refurbished into an experience that feels almost like responding to computer output

another example would be a list of local restaurants - obviously a list of restaurants in an app can be viewed
as an interface, but, beneath that: just the existence of a frozen set of restaurants presenting themselves for
selection [even just in the physical form of a series of them along the road] would, i think, constitute an interface

so then the list on one's phone, or even a physical flyer somewhere listing all the restaurants, might be a more
abstract interface for navigating a less abstract one. the restaurants themselves freeze the culinary world into
something more ideal, while the app presents something ideal in its correspondence to the actual restaurants

another example, which i feel there are probably some very good specific examples for, but they escape me
at the moment: one could also imagine some online storefront, or content curation service, which coalesces
its web of relationships to various suppliers into a tidy list of common desires on its homepage

i once encountered a button which read "GIVE ME GIRLS"

i'd argue that something like the "aesthetics wiki" is a kind of pathological proliferation of a
mentality that arises from engaging with things through interfaces - people at the receiving end of
most interfaces who then take it into their own hands to construct an interface for aesthetic exploration

it's closely related to the generic consumerist dynamic of trading in real variety for reliable access

it's not that these things have to be actively deceitful - (who has never thought about their home having
plumbing, a water heater etc., or criticized the functioning of a maps app? people aren't stupid) - but that
i regard them as interfaces more in terms of how they come to be automatically, viscerally processed
in day-to-day life, maybe as a person is worn down by repetitive engagement with them

an interface has the simultaneous qualities of being: 1. invariably man-made, but; 2. superficially
presenting as more idealized than that man-madeness would suggest. i feel like this pairing is
synergistic with the idea that "people can see nothing around them that is not their own
image; everything speaks to them of themselves. their very landscape is animated"

i think a thing serves as a better example of an interface the more abstract & subtle it is in its functioning as one. what
might be an interface? a suburb? the system of home ownership? the english language? a thought pattern? you decide

november 16th, 2022

the teacher talked about playing counter-strike when he was younger, & the dopaminergic link
that carried into real life where people's heads would sort of register to him in a certain
way, since you are trying to quickly shoot them in the game all the time for instant kills

i knew exactly what he was talking about, or at least felt a sense of intimate familiarity with that category of mental
phenomenon. i am glad that i don't play violent video games anymore, & i can hardly imagine resuming them, really

it's like when i "want" to pluck other people's facial hair because i pluck mine so much & it's so... repetitive-
discrete-tasks-y, so rewarding in a basic way, "find & resolve," like a neanderthal finding berries & eating them

i think there is a lot of potential diversity in the general phenomenon of... people having maps of impulses projected
over their world. our subjective worlds are very mushy & malleable. it's like an entire medium to work in, but one
with very personal, internal effects that we can't exactly represent in the outside or share with each other

something about just watching gameplay footage of a person going around looking in rooms, or just
holding some implement & it's there in the bottom right, announcing itself as the "tool," the
center of influence on the environment, perfectly ideal in that way. such basic things
but they all gives me this alluring tickle in my head that weirds me out

"gamer umwelt" or something

november 25th, 2022

i genuinely cannot imagine ever presenting a discrete romantic, sexual, or gender identity to another person in conversation, the
degree of torsion that would create in my mind like a fist digging in & clenching & twisting. if a person ever asks me directly
about any of these things i do not plan to do any more than stare blankly. i refuse the social utility of a discrete identity with
which i might respond with more than that blank stare. my explicit "identity" cannot be a concave thing wherein i enclose
a limited set of chosen qualities & then may sacrifice myself & the wordlessness of my being to that set in exchange for
becoming socially comprehensible in a convenient way. it has to be a convex thing which shines outward at the undivided
infinity of possible modes of being & can do nothing but stare blankly in an honest expression of its inability to capture
that infinity, & it wants you to shut up & stare blankly too. & just reach out & pick something out of it

november 26th, 2022

concept: refusing to mentally concatenate a stretch of highway into a single dull object (& thus guaranteeing that
pall over the entire distance), in favor of atomizing it into a thousand discrete individual sights (e.g. if you can
love e.g. tree branches spiderwebbing across cloud cover or floors of damp fallen leaves then things can be okay)

november 28th, 2022

i think there are some intuitions that turn out to be unfounded & can lead you to messed up places if you don't analyze them.
but then there are also more justified ones where you can end up in messed up places if you underutilize them based on
a conviction that it wouldn't be justified to rely on them until you've made sense of them & put them into words so that
you know you can trust them... which often you might just not be capable of doing yet, & this keeps forestalling their use

it is tough because you have to figure out a way of thinking about things just enough to
determine if they're worth thinking about so much... the balancing act of heuristics management

today my teacher cited a brain scan study which "proved" that laughter makes people happier & i thought
about the repugnantly obsequious & debased feeling that i associate with the idea of a person seeking
objective scientific verification for what they can already just gauge in themselves & treat that as enough

november 29th, 2022

don't shove internet-tinged "positivity" down people's throats scratch this post i will orient myself towards positivity (aka
construction (aka creativity (aka quiet presentation of a viable alternative))) instead of negativity (aka destruction (aka
negation (aka condonement))) which unlike a person who indulges in internet-tinged positivity i will acknowledge i might
just not always be ready to do (that it's not just a button you can incessantly press for the cheap reward of a cheap
sentence) because it has as a prerequisite the considerable task of reestablishing connection with long-neglected
creative aspects of myself so as to ideally create art as miraculous as i've ever seen - too unmistakable in its voice
to be chewed up & spat out now reappropriated, reconfigured in people's heads into just another expression
of the putrid cloying voice that proliferates in online spaces because that's all they know how to see. this
especially goes for words, which i view as particularly susceptible. lately i type things practically every
day in a frequently negative sense & if i want to reorient it to creativity it would be an act of restraining
myself from it again, nurturing in myself certain flavors & avenues of thought & waiting for certain
uncommon special assemblies of words to come, ones which have a way of protecting
themselves simply through their content, & keeping strictly only to publishing those

any discrete event that raises the benchmark for how real i can believe another person to feel (love, obviously) also
permanently lowers the benchmark of how much i'm capable of caring about online spaces. the awareness that there
might actually be some corner of the world & of thought & expression that feels like a home for me instills
simultaneous awarenesses of how little "they" really deserve* but also how much everyone deserves**

*(i have no time to put up with this anymore (to naively give social media
a treatment as some indiscriminately democratic discursive plane...))

**(...& maybe "they" would all feel the same if they felt what i felt)

december 3rd, 2022

when a bedroom is in disarray, its disarray is largely constituted by fabrics which are strung together in
anything but disarray. these orders & disorders coexist but lie on different levels of the situation, & then
there is a tragedy wherein all this intricacy collapses in one's head into a simple banality like "there
is a laptop on the bed." (& think about the infinity that the internet opens up in these terms!)

it's all suffused by the heuristics one has to rely on to navigate through life as a matter of practicality. this is what an
interface is, & why the concept applies to everything from the hot & cold knobs on the sink, to a local roster of restaurants,
to the self-contained logic of a workplace routine, to the internal drama among the faculty of a university english department,
to the discrete categories one holds in their mind to make sense of the world (gender categories, of course, for instance)

a wordless being forced to recreate itself in language the same way a starfish existing
in an asensory void begins recreating itself in the visible spectrum to sighted beings

december 6th, 2022

thinking about how if a person learns about physical determinism & it causes a change in how they think or act then through
the lens of determinism that inculcation of the idea in their mind was itself an inevitability & so the particles making up
their body have undergone a kind of recursive interaction with the idea of their own activity (not that ideas are special
& immaterial, being arrangements of matter & energy in their brain, but it's still a beautifully specific & intricate process)

december 8th, 2022

i like how all the cubic feet of space in a building are exactly the same whether they're outlined by the walls of
a building or, not persisting there implicity whether that coordinate of earth is a tundra in one millennium or
a rainforest in another, yet if there is a building there then just the right arrangement of walls can suffice
to define a subset of that space as, for instance, a thrillingly secret-feeling room, even if there's nothing in it...
it's like the knowledge that there was any kind of intention put into the space around me does so much, even
if the actual communication between the architect & myself is so tenuous & distant that i don't think about
any architect as i explore. but the implication of architects & inhabitants still does its job in the back of my
head. it can be a lonely feeling but conversely i think it showcases a human desire for closeness since it
displays such a sensitivity to the presence of intention. & there's something about walking through that
intention, inhabiting it, that feels so distinct from not being in a building in such a basic & wordless way

meaning created by the tactical division of a space, it's like how there's room on the paper to write any
sequence of words, including that the protagonist gets God powers & fixes everything without stakes,
but in a conventional narrative framework that's not a very engaging management of the ideas

it feels so perfect to characterize a sentence as only a shadow of the thoughts that one
tries to express through it, & i mean a shadow in the most general sense of the projection of
a higher-dimensional object onto a lower dimension, the way a 4d object could have a 3d shadow

i think it works because the feelings in a person's head are a multidimensional set of relationships between concepts
& situational factors, & while a sentence can represent that set in ways that could be characterized as semantically
multidimensional (i.e. analyzing the implications or nuances found in dialogue in a novel), i think it still
feels a lot like a mere projection of the whole set of relationships, [a slice, a cross-section of them,]
particularly because it's restricted to a one-dimensional linear progression across time

it's like each sentence has to scrape across the surface of the full set of relationships &
gather a subset of links, substantiating some at the extent of leaving others unspoken,
& each sentence presents its subset as one viewing angle on the whole set

december 10th, 2022

right now the primary dichotomy governing me feels like what i am fueled by at a given moment, which is either:

1. hatred (which i regard as a force oriented not necessarily towards anger
& malice but the neutral phenomenon of destruction, the need to destroy
what must be destroyed so as to make room for something better)

hatred typically for what i feel are sociohistorical conditions that have engendered immense
amounts of isolation in my life, & i can't shake the feeling that they continue to do so

(i express this hatred through doing whatever i can to stifle the ongoing reproduction of
those conditions, which is typically just trying to write about them as best as i can); or,

2. love (which i regard as, among other things, something which drives creation, drives people to
fill the world with original images, acts, & ideas, as long as there is space available to do so,
as long as that space isn't obstructed by what must be destroyed so that love can flourish)

love for, well, anything, really, although it will probably gravitate towards things that can feel to me like exemptions
to all that i hate. but, still: anything, as long as it leads me to express & create in ways that aren't exclusively critical,
ways that are just in themselves, & for themselves, & sometimes for what i hope will be the pleasure or inspiration
of someone else, anything intended just to put something where previously there was nothing

-

-

if & when my love is placed in a chokehold by my hatred it probably happens out of fear that even bothering to lovingly put
things into the world, without taking the time to also tear at the world i'm putting them into, might be pointless & just
lead to them being taken by that world & seen through its insufferable lens, & made into an implicit affirmation
of the validity of that world, as if to say, "it must be valid if it can have this loving thing among it"

it hurts that:

there are people who are "exceptions to the world." my friend & their family
feel like evidence of that, if no one else, although i do know of others

& it probably really isn't necessary to think of every sector of life in these consistent terms of
conflict, it is probably safe to take things more piecemeal in certain ways & acknowledge
that there are some sectors of my inner life that don't call for so much vigilance

but i feel incapable of really internalizing internalizing either these things, & i feel that it was
precisely the interminable absence in my life of people who felt like "exceptions to the world"
during such important years - something so circumstantial, that i can now recognize didn't have
to happen, but did - that led to conditions of such depriving loneliness through which
i have naturally grown into a mindset where this is all i really know how to see

i think i really do need my friend

december 12th, 2022

it's crazy how awareness of things just kind of worms around the world on its own terms, impossible to holistically sort or
apprehend, & basically all you can do is your best to be open & receptive & willing to pay attention to whatever does float
past you in its endless tumble through the conceptual space that makes up our collective psychological life & then just pray
that incidents of honest inspiration happen to find you & that you meet all kinds of people who make sense for you to meet

i need to remember (or at least believe) that it's not actually that hard to turn away from all the stuff that's so easy to
hate. if i took this idea to heart less than i currently do, i'd be, i don't know, watching reality tv shows all day just to feel
enraged at how vapid the people in them are. & if i took it to heart more i'd probably be better off than i currently am

december 13th, 2022

you mean im just gonna have to be a joyful ephemeral thinking feeling metabolic process & disappear without
a trace instead of writing down & photographing everything so as to insulate myself against my fear of
death through feeling like im eternalizing my experiences at least a little bit? no way get outta town...

here is one of my sentences where i don't know if i really believe it but i am just saying words recreationally & you can decide
how much they mean: being too immersed in funny pictures & videos might atrophy capacity for magical realist worldview because
they force you to consider & derive value from them only on the terms of exactly what they are over & over & over like a reward
training process while with real life experience there can kind of always be a dreaminess & uncertainty to everything as
long as you don't take suffocating frameworks into it that assign everything quick simple banal meanings

& seeing a funny picture is itself a real life experience that you can bring the
dreaminess to but it's more fraught since it's still proclaiming a framework

i have to learn to slow my brain down when i am with my friend, to how it can be when i'm alone, so that if we are at the nature
trail i can look at something & appreciate it there & just be there like i would alone except in their company, not feeling a
rushing worry from the moment to moment uncertainty of their thoughts & feelings, always the potential that they'd might
like to be moving along, or anything really. & the incessant drive to walk forward & progress linearly along the experience

it'd signal such an important shift in me if i could really uncaringly unthinkingly sincerely dance in front of another
person... there's this feeling like there are two steps to this. & the first step is making the specific movements one
makes not try to be performative. but you can still see that time span of unplanned unperformative movement
as a contiguous thing invoked for the performative character of uncaringness. & it's the second step
of removing this & just really really not thinking about it that i'm not sure i've done

december 14th, 2022

car ride talking about shared alienatingly paradoxical desire to feel
unity with others under umbrella of non-categorical ways of thinking

december 20th, 2022

when i jestingly told my friend that it might really be good for me if a tornado blew my apartment away &
i had to start over from scratch they sort of caught me off guard by saying, with conviction, something
to the effect of "no, that's awful! you shouldn't feel like you can only change when you have to!"

i feel like it's always very enlightening to reveal to oneself the
specificity of some existing circumstance or set of circumstances

the problematic nature of a social institution or a personal behavioral pattern or whatever just feels a lot easier to
grasp in a visceral way once i really recognize it as something that exists to the exclusion of all other possibilities

daily task of trying to think anything without feeling like i'm trying to
further some internal project of becoming the opposite of something or other

when someone explained the idea of God to me as a child i probably asked Him, It, to make a cloud of
sparkles appear in the air or something as fantastical proof, & when this didn't happen i sort of huffed
& quietly rejected the "deal" that was being proposed, of unlimited faith in exchange for nil feedback

i obviously didn't understand "faith" at the time since it demands nothing in return, entailing
no "deal" in the first place, but in any case i decided that even if It did exist i would carry on
living as if It did not, until any time that It might decide to stop being so gratingly recalcitrant

i went on never really thinking about it, not thinking of myself as "atheist" or "(a)gnostic,"
rather just not consulting that series of tick boxes as a component of my identity in
the first place, & defaulting to strictly materialist reasoning about things

then there is the whole natural arc of horrified despondent nihilism born out of an unloved lack of
self-love & culturally tilted towards some place of insufferably "rational" "logic" that winds up
only really mirroring the specific rationality of the society it takes shape in & you wind up
totally killing your own subjective life in what seems to you like inevitably pragmatic
concession to objectivity but it's really just a self-hating act of killing your self in
favor of a pathetic prostrateness to a sense of cold calculated fact that streamlines so
many people either into unimaginative dead conservative mindsets with no qualms about
their "wisened" scientific reduction to a meek animal, or else self-hating suppression of their
own progressive inclinations that they'd embrace if they loved themselves & blah blah blah

until finally everything reconvenes at your renewed desire for beauty & wonder & you learn
this desperate task of now reconstructing those happy things out of all those strictly materialist
perspectives, a task you thought impossible but wow look what's happening, & accept that your
sopping brain is made out of atoms too & it doesn't really matter whether God exists because you
don't really care to verify anything beyond your own consciousness & it seems like something
pretty God-like can emerge at times, if you let it, just from the interplay between your head
& the totally un-graspable un-understandable churning of matter & signals

how can people believe in God & still be all drab & dull ? like come on they didn't even have to go through that whole
detour, they had the whole world personified for them from the outset, the whole world gets to be like a harmonious song
constantly singing to them that they'll never be alone, they had that grand excuse for wonder handed to them & look what
they're doing with it... maybe it is good that i wasn't inclined to have it all handed to me from the start or one day
i might have said, "oh, you mean i only get to keep all of this if gay people have to go to Hell?" blah blah blah

december 21st, 2022

i am in this moment filled with unshakeable confidence that i possess an underlying darkness which
ultimately has input on anything i might do, regardless of how benign it may appear, with those
times of benign appearance being precisely just compensatory efforts to appear as such

so, here's what i was initially trying to tell myself, to alleviate this feeling:

this is just the kind of mental pit that a person can fall into if
they orient themselves towards being, to the detriment of doing

to be clear, this analysis hinges on a fundamental being/doing
dichotomy, where doing is the preferred mode of existence

which is to say: i am only what i do. if i do things which exhibit a lack of some 'darkness' guiding
me, then that darkness effectively does not exist, regardless of how convinced i might be that it does

it's only through fixating on being, which is to say, the supposed condition of 'being' something
inhabited by a darkness, that i can think of things in these terms. a thing can only be 'tainted'
under the purview of being, for being is where all these labeling adjectives live

it's like trying to impose forecasts & rule-sets on the disorganized disarray of realtime
behavior - trying to isolate & dissect some fixed identity that might have prescient explanatory
power. & then i can tell myself, "i can be good, just as long as i assuage that darkness"

& it's comforting to perceive a "way out" that i can take on the condition that i fulfill that task. but the reality is that i don't
need a "way out!" because all that needs to be done is realtime modification of behavior, which really doesn't require
any modification to some underlying governing being, just a will to act, unimpeded by all of these false conceptions

again, that's what i was trying to tell myself, but it was all stopped up by this concern:

"well, it's awful difficult to think of myself as just some doing-thing, with no component of being, when
i sure can feel the permanence & discreteness & being of this coiled thing behind my eyes that tinges my
interpretation of everything i see & hear & think & do & feel! i'm supposed to believe i'm not marked by
that, that that consistent mental object inside me doesn't have some governing effect? what do i do
about this continuity of awareness, that experiences this worry about 'darkness' in the first place?"

so i wondered if that might not be a total invalidation of the therapeutic potential of that being/doing dichotomy...
but in spite of it all i decided that i do still think doing is a very freeing principle, & that a transition from being
to doing is necessary, & that it's just me, with the fixedness of the nonsense in my head, obstructing that transition

this is where a book that my friend happened to send me last night comes in, particularly a
stimulating idea which is quickly presented in its introduction, which is essentially this:

if i feel like i have misgivings about myself, then it suggests that there are two of me, the 'i'
& the 'myself' that 'i' have misgivings with, & i must choose to see that only 'i' really exist

the implications are clear! that coiled thing in me, that corrupting trace of being, is
just the 'myself' described here. 'i' corresponds to doing & 'myself' corresponds to being

at first i had been thinking of that coiled thing as an objective element of me that i simply had to contend with,
while it forever barred me from true acquaintance with a state of doing. but now it's clear that the task is really
to question & reject that objectivity, thus permitting me to destroy that burdensome false conception of 'myself'

for a long time, i thought of a person's ego as just part of the reality of their being, & that
a person could become happier as they diminished their ego, even if it would always be there

that passage of the book, though, has gone a long way towards helping me really feel that it is not
some inherent component of a person's psyche, as defined by some tripartite 'id/ego/supergo' model

really, it is just a mental object that they hold in themselves, the same way they might picture in their mind's eye a cube,
or a dog, or a whole daydreamed situation. it is not one of the fundamental tripartite components that constitutes their
mind's eye, it just lives in their mind's eye. it's just another mental object, a formless one that they designate as
a representation of themselves, the most intimate representation, & then adorn with all sorts of qualities

but the interior perspective from which they observe that object, from which that
recurring act of adornment is carried out, is all that really exists! that's 'i'

december 22nd, 2022

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

december 24th, 2022

walking around with obscure unexamined assumptions like that surely everyone else loves nostalgia & knows what the
fibonacci sequence is... the more of these assumptions i identify in myself the more exciting it gets how diverse everyone is

ok, for this post picture that illustration of two guys on a bus &
one is sad staring at a wall & the other is happy staring at a vista

if i saw that picture while spending time face to face with my friend & they laughed at it in isolation,
i'd see a kind of beautiful silly sense that it made when filtered through their head in particular

if i saw it on tumblr, where everyone's nuances of brain filtering are hidden away, it'd just
contribute to the nightmarish feeling here where it often feels like people are just humor-
processing machines circulating pictures around for no reason, like it's an end in itself

this is how the website, when taken in isolation, presents a completely disemboweled
& upsetting image of "humor" removed from any relation to all the little nuanced
incidents it may incite, like how that picture would feel refracted through my friend

the internet's flatness, when not overcome on a case by case basis through creativity, makes
too many attempts to transmit levity through it feel really cold & meaningless & silent

december 25th, 2022

i think a major aspect of why i feel dissociated a lot of the time is that i fail
to mentally segregate life into an integration of various little ideal systems

for instance, if i'm rolling dice in a party game, moving them around the table, it doesn't feel like... enclosing
my awareness in the simple system of dice for a little while, like the coziness of a little Pixar animation

instead, everything just feels like one single big unified mishmash arising from the most general & objective system of
physical interactions. nothing ever exists for me in its own safe little conceptual universe. dice have to perceptually
coexist with sex & death & fire & birds & dogs & cats & cars & factories & continents & everything always

i think that that segregation is an ability that i lost some time between my preadolescence & now. it is exhausting.
exhausting indivisibility. maybe everyone is this way & i am just trying to delineate the norm as a disease.
but in any case i wish i could feel for one second of my life like i am just playing with dice

december 27th, 2022

we were talking about how they use sunscreen on their face & how i was ambivalent about blocking all the effects of uv light
whether good or bad. they remarked how we have to choose between getting the benefits of unfiltered sun or having good skin.
then i felt this moment where i think both of us might have been reflecting on an unintentional implication that was made,
that i was on a track to "bad skin." & to me it highlighted a taoist kind of dynamic where one can't recognize "good skin"
on themselves or anyone else without necessarily also imposing some definition of "bad skin" on the skin of everyone...
& that thinking does have its hooks in me too, of course, i'd have trouble saying i don't want smooth & clear skin

december 29th, 2022

concept: there are shades of interpersonal niceness that will never have anything to do with "this place" or
anywhere adjacent, for even if they were described here in detail it would produce only separate variations on
them, as refracted through the condition of being described here, as taken through "this place's" endemic lenses.
there are kindnesses that feel like the decors of rooms that will never be photographed & that you will never
see even if you step away from all secondhand experience & thoroughly explore the world for yourself

nostalgic connection to cigarette smoke is questionable but ultimately it's like ultraviolet light stimulating vitamin
d production at the same time that it breaks down my dna, very concise display of the cyclical character of
of life, unity of life & death, everything that sustains me is entwined with my destruction too, part &
parcel, i still plan to die without having ever smoked a cigarette or consumed nicotine though

december 31st, 2022

not the hottest take in the world or anything here but processing life through the just-world fallacy is one of the
most unspeakably spineless & pathetic things that i can imagine a person doing, the phenomenological orientation of
their entire universe around the single central all-hallowed principle that they must be void of any responsibility
whatsoever for the well-being of anyone they share life with. they should be absolutely ashamed & in a way that
should cut much deeper than the guilt for any particular actions or words that their belief might take them to

ok, well, i don't think it's productive for people to just be ashamed, really everyone is just supposed to
learn & improve. here i am just putting in unmistakable terms one aspect of what i think is a right course
for self-development. but i guess this is also how i would feel as a hypothetical person's indulgence of just-
world mentality approached conscious embrace rather than just knee-jerk coping that they had yet to correct

new standard: a blog posts is automatically pretentious if you can't imagine it earning the approval
of a charmingly unconcerned old woman working the counter in a bus depot. it's possible that she
may just find it silly that you even bother pecking out stuff on your computer or your phone
whatsoever, in which case all posts are pretentious without exception. which is ok but
still something that must be just acknowledged & accepted if observing this standard

love for the arbitrary patch of earth that happens to be
very very convincingly disguised as a repulsive city but
love for all the other arbitrary patches of earth too