january 4th, 2022

spontaneously able to articulate a terror i feel sometimes, i think. i am not sure that the overall point really makes
sense, but i will still try to put it into words for the fun of it. i think i am trying to ascribe a quality to the
present that is not at all unique to the present. maybe it is sharpened in the present, at least. i will still
type. it probably makes no sense as a generalization, but it can be applied to contexts, i think

the idea is that i should ideally strive to do something benevolent with my life that is miraculous to accomplish. but
what i am convinced of, at times, is this: under better & less confusing sociohistorical conditions, the appearance of
accomplishing that miraculous thing would be locked into alignment with the actual process of accomplishing
it. the two couldn't be separated from each other. at times, i feel like this is not presently the case

the world feels very populated with narrative conventions & stereotypes, about life, & of ways that professions & identities develop
& progress. this might lead to one deluding themselves into feeling like they are authentically pursuing something, while just
replicating the beats that seem like they're supposed to happen... like a hackneyed writer who seems to indulge the stereotypes
of being a writer, to the detriment of their authenticity in what they say, because they have in their head too clear an image
of what a writer "is." the appearance & process can become dissociated, so things can tend to reduce to appearances

so, at times when i feel concerned about my own authenticity, & whether i might be inhabited by these kinds of shallow
conceptions about life & reality, it can feel like... it is, inanely, a miraculous act just to establish & maintain one's basic
connection to authentic living! & then it is only once a person is at that stage (akin to standing on the ground that
everyone once stood on, until they were all buried in the dirt) that they can even begin to pursue something actually
miraculous without fear of simply pantomiming the pursuit of it... & so the actual attainment of that miraculous
accomplishment has a doubly miraculous quality, like accomplishing it while wearing shoes made of lead

january 26th, 2022

community isn't walkable, cars become necessary element of life, cars are containing enclosed thing, transit becomes vector of
isolation taking the place of the potential encounters & events that can happen as people pass each other unenclosed, removing an
entire arena from which the diverse combinatorial results of unmediated human exchange of ideas & feeling could be produced,
& producing a chilling effect on these things, playing one part in the promotion of a general stagnation of ideas & feeling

diverse circumstances of isolation collude to semi-necessitate internet usage, which indeed mitigates
isolation but makes togetherness a vector of internet effects, which may include isolation to some degree

& of course one may come in looking for human connection in a mediated form, presuming the least obtrusive mediation, akin
to a phone call, but there are incentives for any glancing encounter with the internet to serve as a gateway to what is largely
an entire ecosystem of both naturally emergent & purposefully constructed psychologically manipulative systems
that tend to impose distortions & chilling effects on regions of consideration & discourse

february 17th, 2022

(quietly & impotently accepts the affirmation from nearly eighty thousand strangers - truly, eighty thousand distinctly enumerated
strangers - that the act of unfetteredly existing in the world is to be in any way taken as a kind of mark of superiority over anyone,
is to in any way possess any vaguely hostile or judgmental character defined in even the slightest part by the rhetorical
tone of a social media website, rather than to actually be done for nothing less than its own unfettered sake)

february 23rd, 2022

the same general emotion is felt by a person who feels stoic enough to handle the content of a tepid
"transgressive" netflix comedy special, vs. someone who feels stoic enough to handle going
through boot camp & all the proceeding disciplines of being in the military

that sort of content tries to pose its challenge, "to handle it," to as many people as possible. no one asks for it, which is
admittedly a natural quality of a challenge, but it is also doubtful that you could find anyone who would ever honestly claim
to have felt they needed it. regardless: should it arrive on their doorstep by way of mass media, inviting no reply, & play
a part in instilling that stoicism, they may inanely come to feel in retrospect that it was necessary or healthy

the content, & the mindset it aims to instill, is so viscerally annoying because of the understanding that its challenge is totally
inconsequential, suspended in a vacuum of general material comfort & a confabulated need for entertainment. the stoicism it
encourages is also likely to manifest only as complacent tolerance, by way of emotional repression, of other, more "necessary"
"challenges," suspended in other pointless vacuums. the harsh realities of the job market & defending the country & blah blah
blah - not that anyone has a choice in many of the challenges imposed on them, but this stoicism would encourage an
ideological alignment with the validity of the imposition of those challenges in the first place

the difference between the transgressive media & the other challenges is that the person is expected to congratulate
themselves for overcoming this trivial nothing presented to them in the comfort of their living room, yet once
they leave that room the same mindset is expected to contribute to a supplicating tolerance of the actual,
un-trivial conditions outside. (although, to be fair, this assumes their living room is actually
a place of comfort for them, rather than a prison if they're honest with themselves)

the ideal implicitly expressed by that sort of media is a loveless society of people constantly engaged in antagonistic
emotional one-upsmanship, striving to prove about themselves seemingly nothing in particular, yet employing
constant trial by fire in the service of endlessly approaching that non-end, hating themselves enough
to believe they deserve the dehumanizing aspects that are omnipresent in their lives

february 28th, 2022

i don't like lots of electronic music & i don't like ostentatious references to one's own gendered
qualities in place of just existing & i don't like even the most benign expressions of smugness

the electronic music that people flock to as "emotional" like boards of canada just feels like the emotional-posturing
section of a broader & fundamentally unemotional or emotionally shallow aesthetic sector, which probably extends
beyond music & maybe beyond art. it establishes its own lackluster criteria just so it can effortlessly
satisfy it. this is as best as i can put it. just an avoidant feeling in my gut about that stuff

pc music & its exponents are for if you want to go on a walk & not look at
your phone but still feel like you're reading twitter discourse regardless

edit. that last comment very well may have had an element of smugness. i said something & then blundered straight into hypocrisy
like a circus clown! laugh at me! ...ok, still though, pc music stuff gives me an antsy feeling. i don't know. it makes me feel like
i'm staring straight into a blaring neon sign, like i'm choking down two little debbie swiss rolls even though i've had my fill
of chocolate after the first bite. the lgbt associations also give me some convoluted & unverifiable uneasy feelings around
reduction of experience to artistic representation & the potential reification of narratives & temperaments around classes of people

- 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 26th, 2022

i think progressive messaging on social media, although it can take substantial forms, is often all about taking your principles - which are sincerely noble
& valid for their congruence with human dignity - & reducing them to things whose undignified role is to be pathetically disseminated through what is
essentially a personal micro-campaign of guerrilla propaganda, day in & day out. & this affords an illusory sense of potentially making a difference,
of swaying the tides, of being the cultural narrative, but that sense is only a mask over the real phenomenon of having incorporated into yourself,
as a structure in your mind, as a component of your ego, the reflection of culture at large which is offered to you by the website. this lives in
your conscience like a splinter, &, lacking any real sway over the overall climate of the site, being subject to the endless possibility of
unearthing some new & upsetting crack or cranny or crevice of regressive opinion, you are compelled to endlessly piss in the wind in
the pursuit of relief that will never come, like a nervous tic, neglecting to live for yourself, seeking relief from the outside due to
having mistaken it, or rather, this technologically mediated stand-in for it, for the irritation that is inside. you are subsumed
& swallowed by the website's offer of illusory immersion in the commonality of some shared narrative or
battle, maybe "transcending" the "podunk" locality of your immediately present life

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

think i may have accidentally generalized my anticapitalist sentiments to enough regions of life that they just resemble symptoms
of paranoid schizophrenia but on the other hand maybe capitalism's detrimental effects on a person's soul are genuinely omnipresent
& nuanced enough that a sufficiently thorough internal opposition to them would genuinely approach that resemblance. OH WELL!

april 3rd, 2022

for a little while now, the idea that has been most affecting my thoughts on a day-to-day basis is of myself being in
alignment with the general act of actually living, despite acknowledging the possibility, which is sort of empirically
unverifiable & thus essentially a matter of faith, that i genuinely have absolutely no conception of what it is like
to actually live, nor does anyone around me, & that everything which appears to constitute actual living could be
a deception - this mentality being a consequence of having been born several generations deep into a historical
process that tends to universally mitigate & redefine reasonable standards for what can be considered living
(this process basically being the extremely complex & multifaceted process of culture tending to be
appropriated by the economic forces that tend to wholly dictate society under capitalism)

being born several generations deep into the process introduces the fearful consideration that, by virtue of the process having
been maintained for multiple generations, actual firsthand experience & conceptual grasp of true living has actually been
generationally swept away & forgotten, & is now a thing that is effectively completely alien to humanity. it's the anxious
consideration that even very devoted attempts at understanding & reattaining actual standards for living could still fall
under the purview of some horrible unexamined concession & that i will never find anything which is sufficient,
that i'll always be employing some cognitive dissonance that "justifies" not recognizing very simple
means, sitting right under my nose, that i could employ to go further, to be more honest

april 4th, 2022

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

april 5th, 2022

today i experienced a good example of what i mean when i say i feel colonized by media

i went out to the nature trail. i found a rock that someone had painted. i picked up the rock. this naturally led to the
phrase "pick up a rock' passing through my head. this traced through my memory to a line in shake that by eminem & nate
dogg, & that song began to loop in my head in a not-totally-conscious way, instating itself as an element of my outing

all i had wanted to do was go out & be surrounded by trees & stuff

maybe it seems odd to try to paint something so mundane as a meaningful problem. but i think
there is something healthy in... considering how specific of a digression that experience is
from a walk unfettered by something so insipid, & seeing something very offensive in that

i think there is something deeply offensive about the establishment of mainstream cultural currents & the wanton broadcast of
them, too, when juxtaposed with the fact that people are incapable of voluntarily forgetting most things that they experience

who is to blame? i don't know. no one. it is just a kind of nightmarish thing. one song colonizes the act of picking up a rock &
a million other pieces of media colonize a million other mundane experiences, establish a million routes from life experiences
to memories of media. so much of that media is so repulsive, adds repulsive tints to my thinking. everything everywhere
just seems to always be trying to play a part in strengthening an endless feedback loop of cynicism & misery

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

april 10th, 2022

i need to communicate to my family members my humble preference that they used things like headphones

lately i try to stay either in my room or outside, & return to either of those places as fast as possible once i leave them

whenever i'm in earshot of a godforsaken computer or television, i am tending to frame it in my head
in these unnecessarily resentful terms, like these people's standards of living & making use of
their time are so pathetic that they don't even consider the perspective i'm employing

that perspective being the one where i try to extensively defamiliarize myself to these sorts of things, where i
feel like i am schizophrenically hallucinating every time i leave my room. i mean, really: unless i communicate
the need, then i am realistically denied the option of a home that isn't filled with incessant speech
& sounds of stuff like gunfire that has no connection to the actual space i'm in

all i want is to hear the birds & the wind but this phantasmagoric garbage can be piped in through wires day in
& day out because these people seem to have no interest in engaging or living in their free time in any way

i wouldn't care so much if i wasn't so hesitant to communicate the need. it's just the hesitance
that makes me feel pinned & trapped in the situation & gnash my teeth angrily in private

even still, it's just so unfetteredly repulsive to me & i refuse to
see any of it as normal regardless of how standard it is for people

human voices as experiences which are contingent on the presence of human beings & their willingness to
speak are completely devalued & no one seems to give a damn about the psychic weight they still possess
& which makes them really inappropriate to just shower everywhere as if out of yard sprinklers

immense disappointment. just immense disappointment, at how much infrastructure is in place for the sake of polluting & drowning
out settings that are just there unconditionally, able to be so easily appreciated & loved but instead have a million holes put
through them like swiss cheese, attention deficit psychic trips to this & that & this & that & this & that, geopolitical
narratives ninety percent of which will likely never mean anything real to ninety percent of the people viewing
them. & so on. irredeemably disappointing & perverse & disgusting. it'd all be so easy to stop

anyway like i said before i think i need to ask my family membrsiroeu tuio eanfio wear asdfgfgshsd earbu,sds

i would like to systematically walk into & thoroughly explore every house in my neighborhood without regard
for property or privacy, just to discover all the various perspectives & styles & little worlds that are hidden
away. i tend to forget this desire since it's so obviously impractical. i think everyone else is this way too

it feels so wrong that the landscape has an outward appearance of endless dead barren streets
when really it is in fact genuinely dense with lively & expressive facets compactly locked
away in buildings which line every one of those streets. what's the alternative though

april 13th, 2022
before i fall asleep i feel convicted & bitter

anyone who plays a part in the production & broadcast of that form of humor which propagandizes some conventionalized narrative of
inevitable destruction & subversion of childhood (e.g. "when people are kids they play with toy cars but when they're adults they
'play' with sex toys!") are in my eyes some of the absolute lowest people, just some of the most repulsive & malignant & despicable
actors in society, just my avowed nemeses, barely even functioning as human beings anymore insofar as they carry out that role.
not that i really hate the human beings underneath that cultural function, just the function itself. all i ask is that the human beings
stop... also there's obviously all kinds of people who do far more direct, obvious, indisputable harm to others but. you know

april 28th, 2022

when i feel like something didn't really meaningfully happen, because i was the only one who witnessed it, because i
had no one to share it with, i really have no idea whether i am exhibiting normal social characteristics, or if it
reaches a certain level where i am failing to live for myself, forever dependent on endless communal reception
of each experience - maybe, in failing to consciously validate my immediate experience to myself, "precisely
functioning as the new subspecies of person that 'the system' would prefer to see," or something dramatic
like that. incapable of a first-person life, incapable of living a story for its own sake, dependent on
mediation, dependent on things which remove me from the life that's right there to touch with my hands

i do touch my laptop with my hands. what a scary observation

if i feel like i am in opposition to a system that has an aim of spurring me to focus on abstract ideas that are
removed from my life that is right there in front of my eyes, thus dissociating me from that life, then is being
in opposition to that system in the first place just playing into its hands? or is it the only valid dissociation,
the one necessary concession, the dissociation which prevents all other dissociations

could it be that conscious opposition to the system is the problem, since it keeps one conscious of the
system & thus removed from their life? could that conscious opposition instead be dissolved into a set of
unconscious automatic policies that gracefully reject all the abstract ideas that the system promotes?

a person saying "haha kinda weird but" before hesitantly stating an incredibly
basic expression of some fundamental tenet of basic unrepressed human
connection, whim, or minor deviation from strictly practical routine

may 1st, 2022

basically my line of thinking is that art which is made in a wholesome but flippant manner acceptably "does not say anything," while the music playing
in a mall alternatively "says nothing," i.e. is essentially there for the express purpose of doing anything so long as it doesn't say anything at all. &
then i observe a terrifying corollary of this, which is that the "artistic gene" of "saying nothing" is fully capable of propagating into independent
works, flippant or otherwise, so long as they are not fruits of a successful philosophical engagement with the culture that they are embedded
in & subsequent negation of the cheapening elements of that culture. if this seems like unnecessarily strict criteria, it is because i see it
as a necessity unjustly imposed on creators by a culture which largely has an actively predatory nature which entails avoidance of it

also: a phrase like "actively predatory" may create an unnecessarily conspiratorial impression, but it is meant less as a literal
description & more as a shorthand for the impersonal emergent tendencies of the economy, used to frame them in terms of how
they essentially manifest to actual people (akin to speaking in teleological terms about biology, e.g. "the hand is 'meant' for grasping")

may 6th, 2022

time for alex to read literature written expressly for the sole practical purpose of engendering revolt against capitalism
through the provision of insights & perspectives that make clear the problems it presents & how they could hypothetically
be overcome - but only so i can further articulate & refine my efforts to remain as minimally psychologically mutilated
by it as possible as i continue to willfully live under it, essentially reinforcing the literature as a failure
in my repurposing of it as a mere band-aid on the overall problem rather than its solution

may 8th, 2022

the awesome cool timeline where everyone in america has kindergarten level political awareness & just promptly brutalizes & deposes
every conservative politician & instates progressive social practices all just as a second-nature preliminary act that no one thinks
twice about & there is no opportunity for it to be propagandized as a radical tipping point in the manufactured opposition
between liberals & conservatives because the relevant voter bases have evaporated & no one cares about tv

may 8th, 2022

i read description of isolating conditions of modern life & think it is insightful since i feel very isolated
all the time even though it is simply because of a personal confluence of factors in my head that make
me generally unwilling to talk to people while everyone else is simply doing the modern life
capitalism stuff which was analyzed & then talking to each other about it without issue

may 10th, 2022

a disorienting loss of one's anchoring presuppositions about life, followed by fear
of letting those anchors reconstitute around modes of life that are manufactured

but then that opposition to "manufacture" is at odds with the awareness that any cultural standard is
only as manufactured as a space shuttle, which is to say, only as manufactured as a snail shell, or
dna itself, which is to say that none of this total movement was ever conscious in the first place

so the opposition to manufacture would really seem to be a kind of scalpel-precise disagreement with a certain variety of
currents in the overall process of the human species - precisely the ones which seem to have a kind of economic inevitability
& are thus analogous to the species "playing out" with the same inexorable forward motion of a ball rolling down a hill...

analogous to a thing coming to rest, to dust settling, to relaxing to a lower-energy state, to dissipation of a
concentration of energy which was once held together, to entropy, to death, to the patches of human life that
are occupied by grains of the inevitable death which hasn't yet fully taken hold of anything which is still alive

for me, as a thing which will inevitably die, is it more meaningful to live in line with the inevitably of that death, to take
things as they come, to fully be the flow that i am - or to do everything to live counter to that flow, to strive to be a thing as
minimally occupied by death as any living thing can be? if everything physical tends inexorably towards its most entropic
state, then, although that condition of being physical can never be decisively defied, is being as scantly entropic
of an entropic thing as one can be the closest a person can come to being something "transcendent?"

what does the "economically entropic," or "entropically economic" side of life have to offer? at its limit, just consolidation
& centralization of experience in accordance with being as manipulable as possible, i.e. the minimization of instability in its
functioning, dust settling... does relaxing & fully being the flow that one inevitably is have to necessitate being subject
to this? can one turn out to be a particular flow that carries them around that fate, escaping it? is this whole series
of paragraphs just an attempt at subjectively coming to terms with an objective powerlessness that will
continue to guide me regardless of the comforting terms in which i think about it?

hi

may 13th, 2022

where things have gone astray is that my foremost inclination about posting things on the internet was that i wanted in various
ways to be a passive example, in ways that were merely implicit in the unspoken exclusion from myself of things that appeared
to me to be commonplace but bad - rather than an active example defined by explicit elaborated opposition to those things

but then i acknowledged to myself that anything i could do in the way of serving as that passive example, no matter what it
was, naturally would have been mediated over the internet & thus introduced a risk of implicitly affirming the legitimacy
of... possibly excluding negative tendencies from oneself, sure, but also consigning one's signs of that exclusion to
being mediated, & thus leaving that exclusion to find its meaning off somewhere beyond their actual life

unfortunately i am also in a bind where i do not really know or connect with anyone in the area
where i live, i have no one to exist to in the first place & it seems so difficult to find anyone. hmm

may 15th, 2022

slowly goes off my rocker due to losing my ability to fully regard literally any events
in my life as merely incidental to & neutral relative to the entirety of capitalism

why does my engagement with my interests tend to be paired so substantially with a repressed dread about capitalism
having provided something, or at least the prerequisites for something, that i enjoy? (or, at least, something i feel
like i enjoy, since repression of actual desires & acclimation to compensations for them is such a big part of it all)

i know people who seem to dislike capitalism as much as i do, but they simply... have interests! & seem way better at also
grasping the whole emotional ambiguity of it all - assessing how un-ideal the conditions are from which nearly all their
options for spending their time arise. & they may not be comfortable with it, but they seem to come to terms with it
in a way that i fail to! they adeptly make the best of the situation, in recognition of the inevitable inclination of
any person to live regardless of the conditions, beyond their direct control, under which that living may take
place. there is no point in smothering one's own life, or dying, over things that won't even change either way

i never seem to fully arrive at that mental process. i truly don't feel capable of fully relaxing, settling into appreciation for
any of the incidental results of capitalism that i do feel love for - not without the visceral feeling that to relax fully counts
as implicit approval of all the implications stemming from the existence of that thing, which feels like basically the
society in full, & everything i despise that i feel has been instrumental in making me feel very isolated my whole life

each time i feel irritated by the unsolicited sound of a tv show or a radio ad, it is as if the weight of
twenty-three years lies behind that little everyday feeling. so much loneliness & sense of disconnect from
so many people who i feel i just cannot engage with for their having internalized the values & standards
implicit in all the things which are made the most visible & attention-grabbing about life

& now, in a development that i find cruel to myself, that sense of visceral opposition has developed to a point that i do not
even feel totally comfortable with other people who are explicitly in opposition to the same system that makes me uncomfortable
around so many others! because i feel as if i, being the direct product of my own agency, am the only one who i can trust to
be vigilant enough about not internalizing things that will contribute to the dilution of my standards for living!

everything feels like a distraction. i have not yet even had to have ever had a job, or substantial responsibilities in general,
for everything to feel like a distraction from. but everything feels like a distraction. things which neglect to oppose all that
obfuscates reality (by instead articulating it) feel about as worthy of anyone's time as all that commits active obfuscation

each day i cannot stop assessing everything in terms of whether i feel like it could in any way count as part of
a current that just happens to be nestled within capitalism but goes against its general cognitive & cultural
effects in some way, or if it instead reinforces & justifies those effects, if subtly & perhaps even innocently

or, & this is a crazy idea, but imagine this... imagine something just existing incidentally to the
system it happens to exist within! neutrally! my god, what a relieving idea! could it really be?!?!

my suspicion is that some people turn into caustic, misanthropic cretins because they uncritically immerse themselves in confabulated
systems of meaning like "what comedians get to say without being 'cancelled,'" never confronting the fact that their chosen system
as a whole is suspended in an inconsequential vacuum over the surface of life on which anything meaningful happens, &
everything it presents as "at stake" is similarly rootless. this produces unexamined tension in the part of them that
yearns for an actual life, & they are enraged by their life's circumstantial deprivation of consequence while
mistaking that deprivation for something inherent to life. this is why i do not like escapism

i keep calling things "suspended in vacuums" where i could just say "this thing doesn't really matter." it makes
more sense the way it feels geometrically in my head than it does written out i think. a few minutes ago
i had a good way of phrasing it that i think communicated what makes it feel meaningfully distinct
from just "it doesn't matter." i lost it though. i have been so fatigued for the past two days

may 16th, 2022

when i was about seventeen, i was sort of literally losing my mind due to my perception that cultural development, being
untethered from geography by the internet, was accelerated & free to generally follow paths of least resistance to forms
that i felt would uniformly alienate me. i felt like i was watching the earth become homogenized & at the same time kind
of inhospitable, like all spaces were convening so even if there might have been anyone i could connect with before there
may have been far fewer now. i was blind to what diversity there is, i guess. i would occasionally send people on tumblr
who i didn't really know these schizo pleas to please take control of their own personal development instead
of just being defined passively by cultural currents that had gone out of control

now i feel like i am a lot more coherent, calm, & personable, & i understand myself a lot better.
a lot of my considerations still contain grains of that time period though, like a lot of my
thinking is kind of just a mellowing & refining of those same general sentiments

now i attribute things a lot more to like the culture industry, & the economically incentivized structuring
of communication platforms, & the economic system that gives rise to it all. instead of... mere cynical
fixation on what i saw as pervasive weakness & apathy that always left me with a sense of being
othered that i had to bear because no one cared enough... naturally this bred resentment

with my current thinking, i at least feel like there is something outside of me to oppose that i am generally
unified with other people against, even if they are the very same people who can make me feel othered

but, preceding all of this, i still want only to be simple & to simply live.
i have not securely attained the state of simplicity that is counter to all of this

don't aestheticize your own cyber addiction...

i think something i tend to assume in the back of my head is that if a person expressing anticapitalist sentiment or activity
isn't directly at risk of being imprisoned or shot then whatever they're doing probably does not exist beyond the purview
of what is now the fully automatic recuperation of those things. those are the risks of even the least substantial things
to escape that purview. this is why everything i type on the internet feels meaningless to me - like it can only strive
to minimize its meaninglessness, veering infinitely close to a central axis which it never actually crosses,
at which point it would now have a positive value & thus be striving to maximize its meaning

do "situationist" perspectives have
a meaningful place in 2022 ??

ctrl-f "dream-realm" on this page for something preliminary to the mindset of this post

it's like they said: once an intuitive perception of wonder is diminished, it is in a sense still lost if
it has to be re-taught through aesthetic convention or theory. expressions of this sad dynamic feel
in some way like the atom of life experience in the form promoted by dominant cultural forces

if people had all the wonder that they need to feel towards life already contained within themselves, then they
would not need to turn to the things placed on offer to compensate for that lost wonder. this feels perfectly
in line with the tendency of consumerism to minimize interest in all in life all that it cannot offer
(because it is simply there for us intrinsically) & maximize interest in what it can offer

it's not like it can crawl into everyone's brains & make them uniformly stop liking an actual walk in the woods, but obviously
there are currents wherein it either strives to reduce things to mediated forms which it can regulate access to for profit,
or at the very least co-opt truly unmediated activities into vehicles for associated consumption... &, most relevantly,
diminish the qualitative enjoyment of them to a dishonest parody of itself so as to keep needs simple & easily met

i imagine the disenchantment being so scathingly & pervasively diffuse that the extent of that diffusion
is itself difficult to fully grasp, even with all the most earnest benevolent opposition in one's heart

i feel that one can start out buying into a particular system of reasoning that has been offered, realize it is holding them
back, & dismantle it. but to mark oneself satisfied with how far they have gone in this respect may always constitute
willful ignorance of the system that they rejected having merely been one of many possible constructions which
could have been based on a still more fundamental system of reasoning that holds them back all the same

this feeling that the disenchantment can be diffuse to a point that one is always missing something,
always making a concession, can naturally become a pretense for endless debilitating suspicion. does
this debilitating suspicion have to happen, or is it only a natural risk involved in acknowledging that
severe diffusion, in the interest of acknowledging reasonable standards for living? i don't know

it is not just that the materials for enchantment are manufactured in the form of escapist entertainment & so on, but
that the prescribed conditions for enchantment are manufactured in precisely the shape of those materials, preemptively
ensuring their success. those who try to "break the fourth wall" by examining the qualities of the stage on which the
entertainment plays out forget that it too is manufactured, whether to be performed on or to be seen. those who
leave the theater & run down the street forget that the street is manufactured. this framing feels shallow

i do not mean that one physically tries to literally run away from society & keeps running into
businesses & recoiling at those superficial expressions of the problem, i mean a sort of infinite
regression in reasoning that naturally collides with some concession before it reaches infinity

what i mean is that it seems to take so much work to find a platform of reasoning (on which one tries to move back towards some
genuine visceral engagement with life) that is not (as a consequence of some concession to disenchantment) actually just
situated on a larger platform manufactured for one to reason on, something on which one can expand their standards
of living in a way that is unknowingly choreographed to stay within acceptable limits. the ideal is that they
never confront this larger platform, but in case they do, there is another one beneath it, & so on

the fundamental axioms for everyday processing of life can be concessions, & the reasoning which one
may perform to eliminate those concessions may itself be based on axioms which are concessions

each time a new set of standards to work from is established & prescribed, it also becomes the
surface on which the next set of standards will be built, & that will in turn become the next surface

every paragraph is a dart thrown at the board never hitting the bullseye, trying to
get across what i had in mind before i started typing - which has since escaped me

i think lots of the escapist things provided happen to kill love & i think this is because if everyone truly knew & acted on love then
they would stop doing a lot of things they do (that are advantageous to the system). maybe i am unreasonably trying to codify my own
taste here but there is so much that i cannot feel an ounce of love in. has anyone ever felt an ounce of love from an addictive mobile
mobile game? i pose this as an extreme from which whoever is reading must decide for themselves how far from that extreme
the cutoff point is, past which a thing can seem to contain an ounce of love. & whether that point is a concession. it is
stressful because there are clear extremes but no science to consult about it, just an abstract dialogue with oneself

everything has to be more :(

there will never be a story of you defying disenchanting forces to reclaim
your sense of wonder. there will only ever be the reality. reducing things
to stories is how you damage your consciousness & lose your wonder

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 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 21st, 2022

Desire

may 26th, 2022

actually discovers transformative ultimate truths about reality that no one has ever discovered before but only
does so as an expression of my having unconsciously preconceived for myself the identity of "new-transformative
-ultimate-truths-about-reality-discoverer" & subsequently consumed the experience of occupying that identity

-

the internet sells content. but on a more fundamental level it sells a sense of being unified around shared political & cultural narratives,
& getting drunk on the pathetic & hubristic notion of actually having some kind of grasp on how the whole of life is generally going. this
process of being sold that intoxicating sense may go unnoticed, because that sense is only empty space which draws no attention - the empty
playing field which becomes filled with the content that is sold more obviously. this playing field registers to one as "the world," the
abstract scale model of the world that is held in their mind, possibly to offer some kind of explanation for the intimidatingly
random events that actually surround them in the immediate world - the only world they can be sure of

this little scale model can be populated with anything, from Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, to the comfortingly still "rock" that is
the sense of general artistic canonicity suggested by their awards ceremony, to grand interplays of abstract dynamics, such as the
"white race" which one must "save" by massacring innocent people. i think this is all deserving of disgust. in fact, if you're
going to accept the former, why not just accept the latter too? i'd wager that it only comes with the playing field

it is all completely at odds with the supreme reality that life is generally pretty boring. every time you go out & encounter some member of
a social class subject to online discourse, they are typically just walking past you on a sidewalk. there are so many engines fueled by tiny,
pathetic, confused, blind beings with no hope of grasping the full intricacy of their world but stupid enough to be filled with abstractions
that suggest to them that life is anything but pretty boring. so much is fueled by the simple replacement of one's connection to their
immediate life with connection to some abstracted "elsewhere" that imparts similarly abstracted rationales for behavior

-

it's obviously kind of extreme to say something like "if we accept attention concentrated on things as banal as celebrity interactions, then
why not just accept white supremacist mass shootings too, since they're both founded on the same kind of inane form of abstraction in life?"

i'm not sure that i could defend it, but i do like how completely opposed it is to that abstraction. it is
something purposefully written for the possibility that someone thinks "well, maybe not, but i get it"

the feeling that no one can ever experience anything beyond the everyday, so ultimately ideologies have
to play out in the same mental space as entertainment, & this is a mental space that gestures at being
sufficiently representative of the world at large to be acted on & to be a basis of socialization

it's a complicated issue. like certainly i think there is a lot outside of
immediate life that i don't want to necessarily vouch for writing off

it makes me think of experimental findings in particle physics, which laymen will never directly experience signs of at their everyday macro
level of existence, really. but we can still read about the experimental verification, & maybe if we value it it could affect our philosophies. like
a philosophy in reaction to the entropy of the universe, etc. but true as the data may be, it'll never be visceral, always kind of just a tale being
told in the abstract of a paper (unless it happens to produce technological advancements that reshape our lives? but even then, really,
since the knowledge's application will never visibly contain its underlying microscopic mechanics, only their macro results)

so the issue i think is just that regardless of the healthiness of this or that abstraction under ideal conditions,
the reality today is that they tend to be profoundly abused & thus are worth extensively calling into question

i think a worthwhile practice in this regard is that of trying to consistently repress reaction to the things one is presented with, in favor of endlessly
contesting the validity of their having been presented with it at all. the example that always comes to my mind for this practice is the celebrity that
was kind of forced onto chris-chan. no one seemed to have any criticism about the production of a public documentary series about some stranger.
by instilling in the viewers a sense of fascination that distracted from the terms on which they were made to feel it, it successfully instated
itself as a cultural force without question, despite the intrusion it was on so many lives which could have easily gone without it

the offense of many disagreeable things is not what they are but all they exist in lieu of

this makes the severity of the offense limited only by the extent of one's imagination,
& thus opens an unlimited capacity for the fervor with which it may be persecuted.
but it makes recognition of the offense in the first place a less accessible thing too

"the root of the prevailing lack of imagination cannot be grasped unless one is able to imagine
what is lacking - that is, what is missing, hidden, forbidden, & yet possible, in modern life"

may 31st, 2022

ok i'm writing in a notebook physically & i implore God to strike me dead if i ever digitize or
display any of it, as permitting any future possibility of sharing it will inevitably introduce
grains of performance into what i choose to write in the present, & corrupt the honesty of
the exercise. in fact i will try not to even mention the exercise again after typing this

june 2nd, 2022

the better things are, the more half of me wants to describe & share them here on a social basis while the other half fears
that to acquiesce to that urge would not be a social act but something private to me, in spite of its potentially global
visibility - a private reappropriation of the goodness into just another bounty of experience whose value i consign
to the act of reporting it. an act that only grows more tragic the better the thing that i report is, since it's just
a greater accumulation of goodness that could have been most deeply felt if i had opted not to invert it
into something that is instead beyond me. suffice to say, though, things are very good right now

june 4th, 2022

i think lots of people yearn for an internal toolset with which to reason through their emotions
& the latent contradictions in their lives & for some of them the world happens to bring that
their way while for others all the world happens to provide them with is like, buzzfeed
video that opens with synthwave playing over a slideshow of pictures of murder victims

june 7th, 2022

if anyone tries to tell me about any specific incidents involving celebrities, i am going to say "all celebrities
should be locked in cages & jabbed at with spears" & refuse to indulge further attempts at conversation. if
a person tells me they recently "read an article" or "watched a video" which imparted to them some piece
of trivial information that they proceed to share with me, i am going to tell them that i recently "read
an article" or "watched a video" which imparted to me the exact opposite of whatever they said

current thing i keep thinking over & over: "it is coming to feel like humans, despite being material things with material origins,
enjoy interacting with ideal, abstract dynamics rather than the material world per se. the material world plays a role which is merely
incidental to that desire, being the inevitable medium for the dynamics we enjoy. for much of our history, we were obliged to
appropriate only the most obvious & un-abstract of the world's self-expression towards this end, & now, in the information
age, we are in a stage of intensively streamlining the craft of physical constructions that are sufficiently abstracted to best
play host, with minimal interference from their inevitable physicality, to the dynamics that were all we ever wanted
in the first place (computers). this idea of the physical world having only ever been a 'stopgap' is making me sad"

i wantto Bleed :)

june 9th, 2022

i live with people who are so complacently deprived of any sense of creative agency that i have seen them get caught off guard by,
fascinated by, & drunk on things like putting a packet of taco bell sauce on an el monterey microwave burrito, mixing together
different flavors of celestial seasonings tea, improvising cartoonishly generic rap lyrics & writing tepid topical parodies of
ancient pop songs. as if these things are exceptional leaps into some higher "creative level" defined by the absolute
bare minimum of participating in anything instead of taking it exactly as it is initially presented

june 14th, 2022

people often assert or joke that interactions on the internet don't matter & have less validity than ones in real life, i.e. the
classic admonishment of a person for letting themselves get into a "twitter argument," "flame war," or something like that

i think the reason for this is that there are an enormous number of abstractions that are endemic to the internet, & which
tend to impose themselves on the character of interactions that take place on it. these interactions are made impure - mere
reflections of their communicative medium. since they are prevented from being carried out in a pure & undistorted
way, they are naturally seen as invalid to place personal stake in. the game is rigged. a "victory" would
be especially hard-won & each "failure" would largely be just an artifact of the medium

given that this is what we are confronted with, people's assertions & jokes certainly are reasonable. but: they lead
people to diminish the reality that the internet is not a sphere separate from "real life" but an enormously centralizing
& diversifying element contained in the whole of life, & it obviously bears & exhibits enormous potential (particularly
for productive reciprocal relationships with the "real life" that it was never separate from in the first place)

this potential can only be truly realized to the extent that there is generally an active drive among people to
investedly recognize & dispel the internet's abstractions so that it can be seen less as something second-rate
& embarrassing to engage with, & more as something which unabashedly presents its own set of enormous
potentials that can be freely explored through the standardly pure & undistorted communication that is
unlocked once it becomes extensively commonplace to strain out the effects of the medium

june 14th, 2022

people coming together but only to mutually reinforce their own cynicism is heartbreaking

& this isn't just a phenomenon to criticize from the outside. i think anyone who opposes cynicism &
evicts it from themselves still has an obligation to review their un-cynical expression & ensure that it's
not performative & facile, or they may play an instrumental role in driving people starved for reality
(even miserable reality) into the situation i've described - becoming its complementary inverse

june 17th, 2022

forms of culture that don't ultimately reduce down to being a more abstracted form of a cargo cult

june 18th, 2022

if someone doesn't feel like they can go out & wantonly talk to strangers on the street & public transport &
in grocery stores then their personal philosophy is probably a failure. my personal philosophy is a failure

june 20th, 2022

it's like the world doesn't even have to be completely coated in real violence, just enough of it to spur people fortunate
enough not to live under it to still make tv shows about it & gawk at it so as to kill their own emotions vicariously

june 21st, 2022

i personally suspect that life has a dignifiedly boring essence, but if this is true then i think it would also be extremely
important to separate the dignified & essential boredom from society's distinctly undignified & enforced boredom

day three thousand of persistent dread at no one else seeming to share my visceral perception
of severely depressing qualities of emotional flatness & spoonfedness & unengagingness in
nearly everything trafficked through the sections of the internet that i am exposed to

no one seems to understand how critical the difference is between the life where they let themselves be mundanely reminded of
some insufferable concept every day, sustaining its life inside of them in a very real way, versus the life where they just try a bit
to filter things sufficiently to let it die. everyone seems to wake up each day thrilled to basically feed some kind of giant gross
fucking cynical technocapitalist egregore made of things they simply choose to expose themselves to while pretending
it's all just new immutable cultural realities they have no choice but to react to. i can't take it anymore

june 24th, 2022

people are born at the complete & utter mercy of technological specialists. children are essentially at the mercy of uncaring adults in
the most detached ways conceivable. each individual human nature doesn't start out anticipating technology so technology naturally
gets the drop on human nature. people buy phones just to keep in touch & literally swipe left from the home screen & there's
purposefully addictive stuff like slot machine games pre-installed. sometimes i see jokes like "haha what the heck is gonna
happen with these kids being babysat by ipads all the time" & i think some of those kids are gonna look back on
that & resent our impotent, performative befuddlement about what will then be their present condition

warning: i am one of those people who is sheltered from having to spend so much time
concerning myself with basic survival that i have hours to spend developing my personal
illusion of having some kind of understanding of politics & society & the world

june 25th, 2022

i distrust lots of things as potentially being mere filtered & watered-down derivations of some
nebulous handful of things i've seen in my life that felt like they actually, truly, unabatedly existed

july 1st, 2022

my dad wants to make a rap album called white privilege under the name jung og (like carl jung). apparently he's been
writing lyrics, has an album cover ready, & people maybe making beats for it. the endeavor bleeds total drunkenness
on a perceived exotic eccentric quality of technically occupying the role of "rapper" as an old white guy,
but making absolutely no attempt to engage in any critical engagement with what he's making

i want to just say, "someone is being silly & having a good time." but i sort of can't? i think it's a fault, on my
behalf, that i can't seem to see anything like this in that relative & non-depressing way, where things are just
happening detached from weighty broader contexts. but i don't know if i can see anything that way anymore

to me, it bleeds symptoms of having to have grown up in a total media-cultivated vivarium, for one's standards to be so decayed
that even the barest notion of "ascending" to creative agency has this kind of exotic quality, just from doing literally anything.
it doesn't feel random. it's like something, a whole media complex, reached in & did to life. it feels so actively bleak

"maybe. but is it a worse situation than never exercising creative agency at all?"

i think it's equal. everything flattened to the same insulated equality

"so long as nobody's getting hurt, i don't think i have much grounds
to be upset with something, usually. or at least that's how i see it"

i'm in this place where i can agree that, yeah, under a ton of common sense standards plainly no one is being hurt.
in most situations no one is being hurt. but nowadays i see everything being constantly hurt, under more abstracted
definitions of hurt. everyone should be inspired & engaged & alive & it all gets taken away when people are
sideswiped & given totally neutered standards for their own engagement by enormous enveloping cultural
& technological complexes. this is what i mean by "the world is killing me by being dead"

july 5th, 2022

i would like for people to not react to pictures that are about cultural events that are products
of the mentalities of people who react to pictures of events in a never ending death spiral

july 6th, 2022

it's nightmarish that people had to develop an entire field of progressive activity whose name is a two-word phrase,
half of which is "representation," & basically no one blinks an eye at that, we basically lose on some fundamental
level no matter how successful that activity is, it's never going to be good, the best scenario is that it gets
"maximally less-bad," someone please make an unrealistically unstoppable computer worm that bricks smart
tvs & car radios so that there is no impetus for playing the unreality game anymore i am begging you

july 13th, 2022

i've become sort of afraid of movies & i've been wrestling a lot
with whether i should just try to undo being afraid of movies

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 17th, 2022

two guys at this event talking about american oligarchy & the two parties being a big distraction & republican
extension of how much of the population one media monopoly is permitted to reach! omg all these words exist
outside the internet i can stop going on about them in circles on the internet now that i',ve witnessed this!

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 19th, 2022

maybe every tv show acclimates people (especially at a young age) to the dissociative condition of feeling like there's
always an "audience" present to witness everything & process it in accordance with some preordained set of values, i.e.
what is & isn't funny, embarrassing, etc. then every spat over the good or harm done by the particular content of this or
that show would miss the fact that even the most benevolent show possible would still have this effect. in addition
to causing that dissociation & inscribing those values in people it'd also be like a pipeline straight to the
addictive gratification of social media where an actual audience is supplied. WHat do you think

i initially typed the above post & felt a visceral sense of embarrassment at what a baseline observation
i'd just published, but then saw signs of people taking it as a novel observation & the embarrassment
was replaced with a sense of creeping dread about how much attention people are paying

july 20th, 2022

the hyperpop ironic capitalism aesthetics thing is for people who "get disliking capitalism" but have
also consumed enough pandering hyperbolic media that they're content with dumbly confronting it as
a dramatized version of itself, like taking a relatively honest (if practically worthless) portrayal of
an evil corporation in a cartoon & reducing the actual real life consequences of capitalism to that

blatantly subjecting their dislike to the same old acts of worthlessly aestheticizing reality, acting like they're
living in the story of living under a bad economic system rather than just under a bad economic system, going
"omgg all the freaky glossy capitalist media, its hypntozing me to like stuff, thats so crazy how evil it
is @_@ aaaahhhhh," as if even all the non-ironic stuff is still there solely to give them a thrill,
just on their "secret, masochistic, reading between the lines, anticapitalist level"

i'm so ready for the highly grounding & heartwarming arc of my & everyone else's life where climate change causes
global communications collapse that forces me to stop using the internet forever & be utterly forced to learn to
sincerely enjoy the company of all sorts of alien demographics in my geographic area including like middle aged
guys who listen to music like rob zombie, without having to compromise my own sense of self & pretend to
like things i don't like etc. (it'll probably be a lot easier as everyone else is simultaneously forced to
actually develop their own sense of selves in the process of survival, independent of tv etc.)

july 23rd, 2022

watching a movie that aims to portray some essential human condition that one could expect to persist across
all forms of social organization but then feeling unable to think about it in a way separate from the production,
distribution, & social function of movies under capitalism in the twenty-first century & whether the expression
i just witnessed was refracted through numerous lenses of unreality that increase in number as chains of artistic
inspiration progressively accrue more & more conceded breaks with reality that then propagate down the
line all as a consequence of the most essential aspects of life becoming increasingly obscured

july 28th, 2022

the entire visible fabric of life as i know it consists exclusively of manifestations of a system that fundamentally has no
one's best interest in mind & tends towards corroding people's standards for living just so it has less to satisfy. i want
to love life but i can't count on anything i see or feel to really be an exception to this rule. that makes everything feel
hard to love. i need to understand again how to conceive of my love for things within the system as still being a love
for the unadorned world that still lies hidden beneath that system, the world that gave rise to the system i hate
but in doing so still gave rise to what happens to be the pervasive platform for things i could still love

person a feels like they're dumb enough to start enjoying things in a system where everything in sight is a highly abstracted
capillary of that system's core unjustness, all created under its same logic that underlies the absolute worst aspects of the
system all the same. they think treating anything as valid might as well be treating the entire system that way & giving
themselves up to the aspects of living in it that are personally corrosive, but less visibly so than others

person b feels like they're smart enough to recognize that they can't directly change that system & that it
is unavoidably going to be the inhuman platform for all human qualities, creativity & kindness, so they
at least grant themselves the mercy of enjoying the humanity embedded in the inhuman platform

july 31st, 2022

i feel like i hate too many things. but when i try to analyze & confront that feeling i just end up arriving back at the same
pragmatic-feeling earnest belief that an immense number of things right now are kind of cheapened & tainted & spoiled.
& not in some pissy way where i'm painting an essential cynicism over the nature of life but in a distinctly inessential
& historically specific way where i think the society i live in really does tend to try to ruin everything, throughout as
many little nooks & crannies of life as possible, the same way a central beating heart can finely reach every last cell
by progressively splitting down into tiny capillaries. i.e. you can't expect the relevant forces to just pass over
your little city because it's small, or over any other little minor aspect of living. & i only see it all getting
worse as the relevant forces progressively improve themselves. so it's like all i can say is, well
yes i guess i do just hate things extensively given what i feel like i'm dealing with

there are plenty of things i don't hate, things i practically live for, but the degree of searching it takes to
fish them out is kind of demoralizing. & it's so hard to find any people to relate to on the basis that they...
strike me in remotely the same ways as any of those things? on the basis that to some extent they represent
the temperamental or aesthetic or cultural or what-have-you currents that are bundled up in such a thing

august 2nd, 2022
becoming delirious & sad from lack of sleep in a bus terminal

i am in the mood to block any stranger in a discord server who causes me to think about a celebrity in any capacity

i have just for the first time articulated a principle that has been guiding me for about six years which is:
"i might be doing something wrong if i don't potentially come off as an asshole to lots of people who actually
think the current internet is an informationally hygienic place whose characteristics don't have to be aggressively
compensated for on most levels of engagement (but i will treat this as something risky & wavery to follow
since it does involve a planned trajectory towards the vicinity of coming off as an asshole)"

i feel like it might be good to keep an eye out for systems in one's life that function analogously to an abusive relationship in
that they cyclically relieve the same pain that they create. i think it's like that for me with mediated, diffuse communication.
& maybe my anxiety about accepting & enjoying any aspects of a world excessively melded by economic forces out of the
belief that it must entail accepting all other interlinked aspects of it & thus can't be in line with bettering the world ?

the network of links & webs in my head has been under construction since i was born & what it all sums up to at this
present stage of my life is that, like, if i admit to myself that a suburb feels unfetteredly good & picturesque then
i might be endorsing my own lifetime of isolation that i've come to attribute to consumerism in some large ways

maybe some delusions are just very fair reactions to disarmingly abstract aspects of life, but generalized to excessive degrees of
intuition rather than reason... not to be armchair psychologist i swear, this conjecture just feels good to roll around in my head

continuously measuring the success of my blog by the ratio of descriptions of very specific
& charmingly essential internal human experiences versus marxism tinged fear rants

sometimes its not as simple as just doing something instead of watching something. because of all the doing-somethings
whose atomic building blocks, conceptually, are unspokenly watching-somethings. & those are like uncanny valley
versions of doing something. shakes you by the shoulders nightmare nightmare nightmare Hell Hell. drowzy

august 4th, 2022

for almost as long as i can remember, i've had periodic urges to do things like tape a piece of paper to
a wall in a public space that says something amusing, or invites responses in some way, or maybe has some
kind of code or riddle to solve. that kind of passive local communication, or attempt to engineer something
out-of-the-ordinary, has always been kind of stimulating to me. maybe even leaving flash drives or cd-roms

i can't deny that it's "stimulating" in a way, but it is not something i view all that positively. the thought of actually
doing it tends to instill in me a kind of dread. which is why i have done it a handful of times, but not often at all

it's the same kind of dread i get from a flash mob video... where it feels very paltry & corny & false, like an absolute moot point.
it just comes off as offensively consolatory to go out into a world that can feel so pervasively closed off & deficient in any actual
enchantment & spontaneity, & proceed to even suggest that that could really be in any way compensated for by some little
ritualized framework you've cooked up for injecting intrigue into someone's day for merely one out of a trillion other
dull moments, something that doesn't even constitute dynamic human presence but a rehearsed plan...

to blind oneself to the reality of just how hard every other aspect of society simply cancels
out the intent whatever it is that they've done. it just feels like pretending to do an
artistic thing. & i don't think is excessively self-critical, i really believe it

i guess there is a chance that maybe, because it's been such a longstanding thing, i only view it so
negatively because up to this point all my firsthand memories of it have been immature & unfocused
ideas from earlier in my life, & i just haven't thought of anything really interesting to do yet

regardless, i am going to do something like this at the start of the semester. i will print a stack of papers
& leave one or two in each building on campus. they will have my student e-mail address, & say:

in your own words & in only the most honest terms, tell me what you think of love as a concept. you
can be as brief or as descriptive as you please. think of this as an opportunity to express yourself
in an unguarded way & be seen in that capacity, without the stress of having your name attached.
responses will be collected & artistically utilized in some way (anonymously)

my current plan, if i get enough responses, is just to print out pamphlets for each building
which will open with an explanation of the concept & then present all of the responses

maybe i could try to include my own replies to them - or, more interestingly & placing the spotlight
less on me as the person facilitating, maybe i could close with an invitation to e-mail responses to the
responses presented. that might get even fewer responses though, it seems like a higher bar of effort

each day in middle school i woke up to my mom screaming at me to get up. the reason she would
scream was that she had been trying to get me to wake up for a long time, & i only became
meaningfully conscious fairly deep into the process, when she was already frustrated

the reason she got so frustrated was that she had to drop me off at school on her way to work. the longer
i took getting up, the more pressed she was for time, risking being late. my haste in getting up was thus
seen as partially responsible for her job security & thus the economic functioning of the household

it was a kind of adult responsibility that was systemically transferred onto my shoulders to an extent, but
in a way that neither of us clearly recognized, meaning there was never a chance for it to be thought of in
terms of reliance or cooperation, only rage towards an obstacle, towards a lack of smooth functioning

my circadian rhythm was thus the untamed element at the center of
this system, the faulty gear that impeded the functioning of the rest

i had to sequester in my room alone at ten pm each night, but i never fell asleep on time. i tended to
stay up at least past midnight, with only my tv for company, always tuned to adult swim. it flooded
my room with light & simulated a kind of one-sided social contact that kept me stimulated

it's possible that my circadian rhythm just never would have matched up right to this whole cycle, but it's also possible
that i ignorantly disrupted it with my tv. my tv was constructed generally as an outlet of pacifying entertainment that
happened to portray, as completely taken for granted, the dominant way of life under which my mom was dragged
to her grocery store cashier job every morning. the tv was installed in my room out of a general unquestioning
cultural acceptance that it was only a decent thing for a bedroom to be supplied with

this post has no thesis or particular implicit meaning, it is just
retrospectively exploring interlocking factors of a time in my life

august 7th, 2022

blockbuster movie encourages personal traits like honesty & generosity (which are otherwise implicitly discouraged by an
overwhelming proportion of the culture that is produced & disseminated under capitalism) without explicitly calling for the
destruction of the entire cultural framework through which the moral was delivered, leaving viewers with a cognitively
dissonant sense of there being wholesome voices in the dominant culture at the same time that it leaves its purported
values to be snuffed out by everything else that is allowed to continue existing beyond the walls of the theater -_-

august 9th, 2022

in my april diary, i said it seemed hypocritical that a guy who gave a speech about anarchism, mutual aid, & flat
organization was also president of the association he was representing. but really, i think it was inconsequential.
because... assuming it was a meaningful observation to any extent: still, in what conceivable situational
framework is the theoretical consistency of that association going to have any bearing on anything?

if they were actually organized in the way he praised, they would not overthrow capitalism or
have the fact that they were organized that way somehow transfer into a flatly organized
society. everything is detached from that kind of consequence, nothing is anything

any group's decision to hierarchically organize itself is just them doing play-hierarchy with
no relation to the actual hierarchy that defines the society they are suspended in. all that really
matters is whether their organization helps or hinders their functioning as one particular force of
humanitarianism - of compensation for that society's fundamental inhumanity - with a fancy name

maybe the worst that could be said about it was that it was symptomatic of a kind of sickness that people develop from being
constantly surrounded by hierarchy - a sign of a theoretical shift that should occur, but which would only be meaningful
against an as-yet absent backdrop where actually radical perspectives aren't so marginalized & declawed by default ?

august 10th, 2022

i can't conceive of ever deleting a social media account, due to a kind of irresistible drive to preserve. but that would be
the only way to reclaim a sense of sitting in my room & being truly alone. if i have potential access, i'm not safe from
self-inflicted disruption of my unfettered solitude. for as often as i feel alone in a bad way, this would seem like a good
way of being alone that i've been depriving myself of basically since i was around fifteen. it feels like a ship that has
long since sailed. here i have less companionship & more a kind of periodic awareness that someone, somewhere,
might be thinking something about me. my self, my me that i am in my own head, feels very refracted through this
medium, & also vulnerable. & i give that vulnerability a lot of fuel, what with how much effort i put
into trying to use the platform as an exercise in expressing myself as honestly as i can handle

crucial question: will i ever feel alone with someone??

& maybe my internal life will wither to the extent that i neglect to write truly hidden things at times. for example:

i typed a stream-of-consciousness paragraph to no one last night, & it served as evidence for my hypothesis that trying to
conduct an ongoing exercise of maximal honesty over a social media platform carries a risk of leading one to observe the
maximum degree of honesty that they can realistically handle expressing on that platform, & beginning to mistake it for
their maximum degree of honesty overall. & i don't think one can really grow & change if all their dialogues with
themselves are on an inhibited level of honesty, they'll just run in circles until they begin to fold in on themselves

it's hard to drill into my head how, relative to that website, things are maybe only going well as long as no one has any idea
that they are. & also that it's debatable whether i should be even saying this here in this post right now, that maybe it just
belongs in my head for my own acknowledgment. but it feels like it doesn't even really "happen" unless i share it

august 11th, 2022

i was supposed to live with nice engaging people so that i would develop my exterior self-recognition
in terms of them, & then its general model would have been shaped like a hominid instead of a rectangle

august 18th, 2022

the minimum possible number of words which when put in the right order will successfully destroy themselves

a person's work or school schedule implicitly defining a subset of the strangers in their city who they
will likely never encounter in any of the coffee shops due to an incompatibility in their free time

august 22nd, 2022

being alive at the right time to process {a world that can feel completely entombed in {perceptual
abstraction that digs down to {points so fundamental that even bothering to talk about {any of its
infinite superficial manifestations} feels totally meaningless}}} does not feel fun but it does feel special

august 25th, 2022

encounters for the first time in my life a person speaking impassionedly about
a particular element of a superficial diversity that masks an underlying
homogeneity & begins immediately shaking & vomiting until i die

august 27th, 2022

media exists to dig a person as fast as possible into a hole (ideally prior to the formation of any memories of
sunlight) so deep that they dig out a little cavity in the dirt & start deliberating on a moral level about how
it should be furnished (the burial symbolizes microscopic concessions in the idealism of their worldview)

stand-up comedy is characterized by a disease in which a spirit of play, which even the stupidest person
should be expected to plainly recognize as a spirit which perfectly matches the medium, is instead beaten
to a pulp & replaced with the endless repetition of a joyless predefined social identity (comedian,
"provocateur," etc. (sometimes molded into the superficial patterns of play ("improv"))), the
replacement of something potentially fluid & modest with something rigid & unyielding

september 7th, 2022

nine perspectives

one: i feel like i am making a lot of progress but i am
still addicted to producing mediated representations
of my own experience, & i do not like that

two: no, don't spit on those. they're just a kind of
multifaceted art project. people have been expressing
themselves through art for thousands of years

three: i agree with two. don't spit on them. you should
appreciate them as all you have. without them you'd just
be losing your mind in a tiny, empty geographic space

four: i disagree with three. you'd still be alone, but i think you'd
be better off without the representations because you'd feel more
secluded & zen in doing similar things to what you already do

five: i agree with four that it'd be good for you, but i disagree on the point that you
would remain alone. abstracted & indirect socialization is just enabling you to remain
isolated. without it, you would start to go insane, & this would act as an impetus that
would finally force you into becoming socially proactive & finding the people around you

six: but what if i would go insane because my social avoidance is rooted in
something deeper than just being enabled by abstracted & indirect socialization?

seven: hi. you felt an instinctive kinship with me when we talked about raccoons on omegle in may of 2020.
that feeling is real, you can feel it, & you should feel that way with lots of people, all the time. you're just
picky. your nature has thus far displayed an extensive incompatibility with all the local people you have
access to. that's just happenstance. no one is going to blame you for it. you don't deserve it

eight: you are picky, & i'm not going to be so generous about it. i can read your mind, & i know your internal
citation for that "incompatibility" is some vague snapshot, of a vague memory, of some vague night, lingering
at the bar, listening to some drunken idiot, a bad egg. you have to broaden your horizons. learn to converse with
everyone & anyone, no matter how far "off your "radar"" they feel. you should have talked with the drunken idiot

nine: to hell with everyone in the bar! you're completely right, they're all insane. you should talk to all of them,
but not for all of them, just do it because otherwise you'll never sift out the miracles, the people who don't
feel totally poisoned by concentrated & centralized temperamental currents that have infected society

september 9th, 2022

there is a culturally pervasive vicious cycle at play which pertains to a quality
of "cartoonishness" & i genuinely think that not contributing to it is one of the
absolute most important social imperatives that anyone could observe right now

what it boils down to is this:

as many people choke in a haze of the innumerable inherent abstractions of the internet, of communicative distortion, of
experiential centralization, of prefabricated or virally fit identities & temperaments, of rigid aesthetic categorization,
of deprivation of any kind of magic, of platformed obscurity & manufactured sincerity, of confinement to second-order
observation, of the fossilization of activities like "art" or "music" into stereotyped identities like "artist" or "musician,"
of parasociality, of temperamental currents that feed the most bitter or weak fragments of people's psyches
under a guise of relatability, of cultural milieus that become cut off from a bigger picture by way of their
ensconcement in general material comfort (?), consequently developing their own insular standards &
internal logics separated from various fundamental aspects of living by numerous layers of abstraction,

the dynamic that it all culminates in, for me, is this:

fully honest engagement with others is pervasively suffocated in this haze, so that many people become at risk of becoming
"cartoonish," insular, superficial, performative, defined by the abstraction, attempting to freely construct their selves under
its dooming laws, distracted from their own gorgeously hyperspecific desires by their most visible replacements
& consequently blinded to themselves. & things begin to generally tend towards that cartoonish character

the crucial part: i think people tend to recognize this, but often on an insufficiently conscious level. i think they are
often compelled to confront cartoonishness, but to do so on its own terms, as opposed to confronting it as something
cartoonish. this is like trying to pick a fistfight with quicksand, only becoming more immersed the more they struggle.
confronting a superficial manifestation of cartoonishness only causes one to become cartoonish in equal measure.
yet the phenomenon can seem so pervasive, present itself so convincingly as the social playing field,
that this self-sabotage can feel like the only means of relief & engagement

the crucial part: i think people tend to resent each other on the basis of their cartoonishness. people in the presence
of cartoonishess are starved. they resent the human beings around them for putting so little reality on offer. but
they consciously experience this resentment on the basis of superficial & cartoonish discrepancies & divisions
(getting into an argument in the comments under an incredibly tepid & boring antifeminist image macro),
while leaving the actual basis of their resentment unconscious & perpetually unresolved

the only way (?) to disrupt this cycle of unproductive resentment is to tear the whole game to shreds without
even addressing that that's what you're doing, to sidestep everything, to do your best to give every human
being you have access to as much unfiltered humanity as can be contained in every instance of expression
that you have to offer, to establish in every word that there is always another way beyond whatever
frustrating flatness might be presented, that the most alienating human being can be only
a momentary host to that alienation & possess enormous alternate potential

i refuse to believe that all of this has ever been us, that humanity has ever been disgusting

september 12th, 2022

unprovable & undisprovable conjecture rattling in my brain: capitalism benefits from a constant inflow of people into the
world who are to some extent sociopathic, & one way that it constantly accomplishes this is by naturally clothing & feeding
people from the moment they're born with products of slave labor before letting this knowledge naturally reach them through
cultural diffusion. in their immediate powerlessness to objectively resolve the discomfort of this, they simply follow just-
world thinking to its logical conclusion & all the resultant implications it has towards their morality & character

september 16th, 2022

the entire planet feels completely devoted to filtering as many artificial noises, images, & signals as
possible through economically engendered cultural feedback loops of cynicism that make the noises,
images, & signals into ones that make me want to kill myself. humbly doing my sole individual part
to make an opposing case for unpretentious gentleness is the only thing i can do in response

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 17th, 2022

can't shake the sense of everyone starting out buried under a hundred feet of dirt, thinking it's normal. digging yourself out is
the bare minimum. maybe realizing just how good everything can always be if you just approach it with a pure kind of mindset
isn't the construction of some joyful realization, maybe it's just the destruction of the incredible shameful stupidity of having
not previously seen what is so readily apparent, what is so clearly that which one is completely oriented towards as
an emotional being. yet so much fails to live up to this minimum, things are so stricken with disease that reaches
so far in, disguises itself by turning the most fundamental implications of things into its expression. i want
to be so careful only to love the most really beautiful true things & no one will ever care

september 23rd, 2022

lots of people are smart enough to independently humanize everyone in sight whether those people externally "humanize" themselves
or not. maybe some people go rotten because they need a little help (& i describe it that way a bit condescendingly)... in any
case, i think it's noble to strive to play an individual part in humanizing one's relevant demographics through the lucidity
of their communication. & it hurts to think that there will still always be people who, not essentially, but at least at
that moment of reading or listening, will be too stupid to grasp what is being said. & also i doubt whether
anyone is ever truly humanized inside a cloudy pall of mutual anonymity & superficiality

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

october 9th, 2022

the officiated randonaut app is disgusting, oh my god. why am i spending micro currency to just Generate
A Set Of Coordinates... they seriously colonized & appified going to random places in the middle of nowhere

october 26th, 2022

i don't think i'll ever believe i'm playful enough, it's like i choose to believe life has become a total morass to the point
that a person at the minimum acceptable level of playfulness would seem impossible to anyone immersed, there is
always more i can do, i have to always believe i need to climb infinitely towards even the minimum, i'll always be
doing nothing, i have to never stop & say "this is enough" because it won't be, it'll probably be capitulation
to the omnipresent choking of playfulness, it'll probably still be a sad excuse for it, there must always
be more to do, more thinking to be done about methods of playfulness, or else the stuffiness wins

october 28th, 2022

there is an "ebm" artist here tonight but i skimmed their bandcamp & i swear i can just feel their music festering
inside with the same diseased spiritual pall over this region that makes people think that e.g. jokes about nicolas
cage are funny (i see this as kind of a flagship quality of the particular tepid local "weird" brand...)

some thread linking these two things under the surface, like the same demon that wears local acts (usually rock bands)
as a mask all the time only here it's achieving the slightest novelty of wearing a project of a less expected genre

"The Fragmentation Of Monoculture Has Largely Not Been Replaced By Re-emergent Regional
'Scenes,' But Instead Every Region Has Its Own Siloed-Off Artists Trying To Recreate Aspects
Of The Shattered Monoculture" (discord message typed by my pal twelve minutes ago)

november 1st, 2022

news shows & pop culture r living hell not because the things they talk about are vapid or pointless
or distracting but because they constantly offer one singular codified reality for people to fall
back on if they're too weak to try to inhabit the infinite realities available to them

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 11th, 2022

concept: a valuable subjective quality that tended to permeate life at some point in the past. it arose from some particular
confluence of factors that might have been socioeconomic, cultural, geographic, etc. this confluence was something
subtle, tenuous, discreet. you would have had to read between the lines to really take notice of it

the quality itself was also wispy - intimately familiar, but this made it difficult to
pick out & stare at directly; difficult to put into words, maybe even impossible since
no one had felt its absence which they could then compare against its presence...

then some broad, sweeping sociohistorical change came along which suffocated it practically everywhere,
& kept its stranglehold for at least a generation or two until it was forgotten, & people ceased
to even realize what they lacked, or that they lacked anything in the first place

the reader might have some particular quality in mind that they would like to project onto this description,
so as to reaffirm to themselves the importance & fragility of whatever it is. maybe they picture some
kind of humble agrarian community made obsolete by industrialization, & they think about
how it might have felt to live there, how it might have shaped people's worldviews

well, i want to emphasize that having anything in mind at all misses the point, which is the absolute specificity of it,
& the poetry which would have been needed to at least trace the outline of it, & of its precipitating factors, even
at the time when it still existed. this makes the blank impossible to fill in & obliges you to settle for as pure
& empty a void of content as you can imagine, the phrase "missing information" with no additional frills

i'll only put forward the nervous suggestion that it might have been something very grounding & fundamental, &
that maybe no one has truly felt at home since it disappeared, despite what they might have thought at times

maybe this nervous suggestion could also serve as the premise of a reactionary ideology, wherein some
knowable value would be proclaimed as the true identity of something that, in truth, remained unknowable

"american society has a horrible harrowing dislocating quality of... i don't know quite how to put it. there's no past to it. west of the
appalachians there are hardly any settlements older than 200 years or so, and most of them were founded deliberately by specific people,
rather than arising organically as part of the life-cycle of civilization as organism, and they were all settled by people who had nothing
to do with each other prior. there aren't roots that go down farther than can be discerned, american society is like a plant in a hydroponic
tub sitting on a concrete floor. there's no romanticizable past, just an eternal horrible present. there's no "time immemorial," the people
who founded the country had names that we know and they spoke the same language we do and they're perfectly comprehensible.
if you try to go back to find a way out of the eternal present you run into the brick wall of genocide and colonialism

"we aren't supposed to be here!!!!!!!! this has all been a terrible mistake!!!!!!!!!!!!"

november 8th, 2022

art based on love can be some of the best art possible for various reasons or some of
the worst, most genuinely repugnant art possible for depicting it in a dominant aesthetic
language & creating the suggestion that it & the language have anything to do with each other

if you don't get this then we are not remotely on the same wavelength

november 15th, 2022

you'll never find "it" there because there's no point putting time & love into trying to meaningfully describe or portray
"it" there when the payoff for all that work will just be that the many-faced poison energy of the website overtakes any
energy you feed into it & assimilates it into its cloying, sickly, eye-burning, pixel-quantized saccharine neon pall
of expression in the shape of wholesomeness & positivity but divorced from any of its original referents

Unless...??

constant indiscriminate distrust of entertainment even though in an ideal
world i guess it'd be one of the sweetest things people could do for each other

november 19th, 2022

something clicked for me yesterday which was the idea that if people make things like video games which simulate
school shootings, maybe the primary reason that they are bad isn't simply because they're distasteful, or that
unstable people might take after them in some kind of vacuum of imitative feedback that builds on top of their
personal troubles, but because: by existing as products they implicitly qualify the mindset that they speak
to as a marketing demographic, & recognition as a marketing demographic is precisely the system's entire
preexisting language with which it marks identities & ways of living as valid & sanctioned

rainbow capitalism & a game where you play as the columbine shooters are just different faces of a same demon, it's
just that when the people behind the latter grab the controls you can imagine the people behind the former acting
all embarrassed about it as if it shouldn't be fully expected for it to come back & bite everyone in the ass when
they start making concessions to letting their social reality be dictated by intrusive voices that essentially
belong to nobody, being just the constant compulsory output of marketing efforts facilitated by people caught
in a runaway system beyond themselves in which those marketing efforts are only a kind of natural process

i hate music that sounds like rockstar by post malone because it feels like it
wants me to think it's really futuristic & modern to be like driving to a gas station

november 27th, 2022

are art galleries, as repositories of the natural & good activity that is artistic creation, an enclave of that
goodness within the system that hosts them even as it attacks uninhibited creativity in all other fields of life

or are they just unfortunate appropriations of the goodness of art by that system for its own ends, where
every piece remains something potentially good when considered in its own right but, through the framework
through which it is presented, also necessarily carries the implicit statement that it's okay if things continue
exactly as they are, & part of why that is is that we can go on making art about it forever

can there reach a point where a lot of art can no longer even be considered so natural & good anymore, as over
generations it begins to be made under the inspirational shadow of this prior art which has folded in on
itself & become unreal with its development taking place in a vivarium of reified social conditions

& the final question: with respect to art that does achieve maximum liberation from all these phenomena, does
achieve a maximally real character, does meaningfully confront & transgress the system it's embedded in, would
it still be worth anything in these terms, really? or just a relegation of it all to the escapism & voyeurism
& insulated catharsis of the field of art, & a contribution to a forestalled promise that if we
make enough of the right art then maybe we'll change the temperamental tides

november 30th, 2022

it's very important to assume everyone is well-intended until given reason to think otherwise but i have chronic
difficulty with it because i feel owed the bare minimum of an absence of any sense of outright alienation but
am intimately accustomed to a sense of people subjecting me to it without even suspecting & entirely by way
of a kind of naivete, regardless of how well-intended they see themselves as or may even be fairly regarded as

physically departed from a classroom to escape the entire class discussing their spotify wrappeds due to it jabbing in
nuanced & multifaceted ways painfully at the framework in my head of incessantly reaffirmed social alienation which
i am starting to give up on articulating but which to me feels very debilitatingly real although there is the chance
that beyond my personal form of rationality it is just an airtight solitary cocoon of universally applied selection bias

december 3rd, 2022

sometimes you gotta ask yourself, "does what i am doing on the computer right now constitute an attempt to further construct my
self out of petty acts of criticism towards people who reflect the latest social media attention whirlpool only more egregiously
than i myself do as i incessantly talk about them with the smug assurance that i exist further downstream from the whirlpool,
sitting on some higher level of self-awareness, although in reality that self-awareness will probably never compensate for
having not simply just found something else that i like to do instead, rather than seeking out what i think i need to oppose?"

in asking myself this question right now, i think the answer is, "well, with this post i am trying to talk about it
& also escape the folly of it by wrapping it all up in an instructive generality that contains all the superficially
diverse social media phenomena, such that, even if i am participating in the system, i am at least diagnostically
describing it at the same time, which many others might not. but even if i have succeeded, i have still lost
in comparison to continuing to lie on the futon drowsy with the classical station & my puppy"

december 8th, 2022

when reactionaries accuse "lgbt" people of wanting to "recruit" or "entice" people into being gay or trans, they obvious
accomplish a surface goal of demonization & othering, but beneath that i think they implicity reaffirm the validity
of the highly specific social order they impose, by taking the truth of lgbt expression, which is this:

the negation of the specificity of an imposed order, & thus it is the generality of the entire range of
potential expression that merely happens to transgress that order; the entire unbounded space of human
activity in which forms of life & expression freely proliferate, randomly, endlessly, isotropically,
when not subject to rigid stipulations on its movement such as conservative traditions

they take this unbounded space & perversely twist it in its inherent openness, convexness,
unboundedness, exteriority, into an interior space into which a person can be drawn. their
rhetoric can only retain basic functionality if this game of categories is kept alive

the flip side to this, though, is that when we ourselves treat "lgbt" identity as an interior space, as just another ingroup to
rampantly signify to others, we give definitional footing to that rhetoric that we don't actually have to, & we also harm our own
dynamism by taking the absolute dynamism of "lgbt" (since it is effectively the entire field of human expression) & crystallizing
it around a bunch of categories of people to define ourselves as - & these categories are only sociohistorically specific products
from that unbounded space, created by the sociohistorically specific designation of that space as "lgbt." & they
are also the easiest to culturally seize as objects for interrogation & make into bogeymen

this is why i kind of yearn to see lgbt identities eventually disestablished entirely, in favor of a generalized
advocacy for disorder without the need to shackle it to discrete identities which are taken on as flagships
of disorder but always end up letting it down because no fixed mascot can do justice to its inherent flux

when i see a post that says, to use a very basic example, "trans women can be masculine, it's allowed," it feels like they are
taking the rigid squareness of identity categories & having to explicitly define exceptions to it, each exception chipping at
the corners of that square, rounding it just a tiny little bit more, until eventually they might exhaustively define the square
back into a circle, hewing it down to perfection - & this circle is actually what they had yearned for the whole time, but,
ironically, counterproductively, they had taken the square as their tool with which they had hoped to reacquaint themselves
with that circularity, which had initially been denied from them by square impositions of identity upon their natural
circularity (traditionalists labeling them "men" & "women" & imposing corresponding expectations), & the squareness
of the identities imposed was all they knew to utilize. they wanted to construct roundness from angularity
& this effort naturally reshaped itself into an effort of turning the angles on themselves to delete them

december 10th, 2022

i don't think it's that hard to grasp the idea that every communicative medium imposes its own set of distortions, & so in one's
mediated communication it is necessary to introduce aspects which counter the specific distorting effects of that medium,
if they want to retain themselves against it & avoid becoming, to some extent, only an expression of that medium itself

picture a grid. & in each cell we place a label like "+1," -2," or "+4." each of these represents a distortion carried out by the
medium. & what one sends through this medium must have a "-1," a "+2," & a "-4" in each of the corresponding cells, to keep things
neutral. & this is not a metaphor for actual signal processing in communications technology, but about the skill of communicating...
the person sending a message might be absolutely wrong in whatever they have to say, but at least it's wrong on its own merits

i don't think it is that hard to grasp, & i think we could avoid a lot of
wasted time & energy & headaches if it were commonplace & taken to heart

i feel that this distortion can be prevalent on an individual
scale, but when you scale it up is when it absolutely takes over

think of i am sitting in a room by alvin lucier. or look it up if you don't know it. it doesn't require a lot of
reading, the idea of it is simple. & my analogy here is that each increment in lucier's exercise can represent
each time the number of people involved in online discourse is scaled up by a factor of ten, or something
like that. this analogy holds insofar as the people using the medium fail to counter its effects

there is a threshold where the medium becomes nothing but a constant proclamation of its specific vectors
of distortion, its + & - operations on that grid. that's all it says! a grid with numbers on it, & the verbal
content being processed through them is secondary. it's like taking in the coherent input signals of
human thought & dialogue, & processing & scrambling them into the medium's demented self-portrait

& then, when the structures of websites are dictated by profit incentives, we arrive at the most general point where a mediums'
constant expression of itself is only one subroutine in the overarching process of capitalism's constant expression & carrying
out of itself. & the potentially dangerous, dynamic, stability-threatening qualities of human dialogue & thought are safely
folded away inside communicative distortions, which were essentially designed autonomously by the system,
& so all conversation becomes indistinguishable in spirit from the general activity of capitalism

i think it's not that the heads of social media companies personality lack the morality to prevent people from getting caught
in endless feedback loops of constant reaffirmation of their own ideas, it's more that... the system just tends towards
propagandistically chauffeuring people along ideological death spirals, & as it incites the development of improved
means of doing so, it will naturally use those means. everyone's hands continue to be forced in certain ways

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

i love movies as things that are wanted, & fear them as things that are needed

the previous sentence expanded:

i love movies as pieces of artistic expression (movies as regarded as things that are wanted), & i fear
them as potential reaffirmations of life being an inherently dull thing where movies are needed for
the vicarious experience of any real & gratifying dynamics (movies as regarded as things that
are needed), when what i want to believe is that life really doesn't have to be dull

neither of these positions ever reconcile with each other & neither ever totally overpowers the other

december 13th, 2022

my lifestyle in large part consists of 'writing is the only thing i can do to try to have any part in dismantling the inane social
phenomena that have made me feel so estranged from so many human beings across my lifetime & feel so unwaveringly deprived
that that estrangement is now the default state against which everyone must prove themselves to me as an exception to it before
i can allow myself to feel any degree of kinship with them. the productive act of dismantling it is the only way of approaching
catharsis about it that i can engage with on my own terms whenever i want. it feels extremely important to me to write
the kinds of things that i want to write & i crave constant verification that the general atmosphere is not that people
are too stupid or too apathetic to care, or at least to understand. if it is ultimately the case that everyone is generally
too stupid or apathetic then my only recourse is to keep writing & bide my time & just survive until whoever comes
along that understands & on those grounds alone is basically worth living for, even if that's overdramatic
& ideally under less desperate conditions they would just be them & that'd be all"

december 17th, 2022

i have to turn off my wholesale addiction to the explanatory power of theories as applied to my everyday surroundings

december 18th, 2022

if something inside me were dead, then no life outside me would stir it

this assumes that what's out there is really life & not something dead passing itself off as alive. if the whole
world were really dead, & i, having internalized that death, were dead as well, then it would just be an inner
& outer equilibrium of death, & life would have never been a part of the equation in the first place

there could also be a circumstance where the world is generally dead, but life is always still worming
around in the cracks, & i, having internalized the more general death, cannot relate to that life
even if i see it & know it. that would be actual life failing to stir dead aspects of me

all i would like is to share life with another human being but
i don't even know if myself or anyone else are actually really alive

december 20th, 2022

"When identity is derived from projecting an image in the public realm, something is lost, some core of identity diluted, some sense of authority
or interiority sacrificed. It is time to question the false equivalency between not being seen & hiding. & time to reevaluate the merits of the
inconspicuous life, to search out some antidote to continuous exposure, & to reconsider the value of going unseen, undetected, or overlooked in this
new world. Might invisibility be regarded not simply as refuge, but as a condition with its own meaning & power? Going unseen may be becoming
a sign of decency & self-assurance. The impulse to escape notice is not about complacent isolation or senseless conformity, but about maintaining
identity, propriety, autonomy, & voice. It is not about retreating from the digital world but about finding some genuine alternative to a life
of perpetual display. It is not about mindless effacement but mindful awareness. Neither disgraceful nor discrediting, such obscurity can
be vital to our very sense of being, a way of fitting in with the immediate social, cultural, or environmental landscape. Human
endeavor can be something interior, private, & self-contained. We can gain, rather than suffer, from deep reserve."

Akiko Busch, How to Disappear: Notes
on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

it's so difficult, because i think about everything i've ever really loved that's found me through the whole
ether & it's like, i find it so hard to turn away from, as... a need to pay it forward. it's like, i don't know
who is even out there but i want to do everything i can imagine, in service of like, a hypothetical
vicarious me who could need my voice. not that my voice has to be all special, but anything can find a
place where it fits in as what was, to some extent, needed. it's like that's the point, it isn't special

one thing i've thought before is that, even in consciously trying to do some big confessional introspection exercise, i'll
probably always have a limit where psychologically i can never truly, like, eviscerate myself (in a positive sense) through
these platforms. & so if i focus on them too heavily as where things "happen" for me then i'll always, like... maybe be finding
odd insights but never performing that real & unobserved self-evisceration that really acquaints me with my own truth

december 24th, 2022

any time i lapse into forcing someone to think in any capacity about a current event or
celebrity or website as something to resort to for the sake of conversation i immediately
feel like i just spat in their food & try to backpedal it as quickly as possible

i'm nervous even saying stuff like "focus on your true passions" because it makes the assumption that true passions actually
functionally exist under late stage capitalism, which they might, like i might be exaggerating in my head the total-ness
of the soul-suckingness. but if they don't then what i've said, "follow your true passions," has implications
that kind of make it just me echoing some smiling superficially wholesome apologetics

but then it's like, what, killing my joyfulness for my whole life on the .001% chance that it contributes at least
one atom to like, honest internal opposition to like the spiritual effects of capitalism? there's no escape

i want everything to be communicative instead of escapist because i am confronting the
internet in terms of all its communicative utility specifically as someone socialized
under experience of feeling endlessly & profoundly never communicated with

i feel condescending on tumblr & the reason i feel this way but do not adjust my output so that it doesn't feel that way, is
that the internet is sufficient to establish that yes not everyone in the world is like all my family & classmates, & so
there is no need to veer so much towards feeling condescending, but the internet also keeps it all at a sufficient
abstracted distance that i can never really internalize that it really is the case that i do not have to feel so alone

december 29th, 2022

why do people pretend that artistic snobbery exists when bad art can have like actual visible negative effects on people where they
start contorting their initial standards (for what they'd actually feel nourished from seeing outside of themselves) into the
disparate shapes of the aesthetic decisions made by whatever is most visibly available as pathetic approximation for those
initial desires & that initial contortion just builds into an endless stringing-along deeper into the condition of settling
& tolerating things that are incrementally founded on more concession until a person is acclimated to thinking
within artificial boundaries & it leaks into how they approach other aspects of their life

it's kind of agonizing to feel like i've possibly at least to some extent extricated myself from settling for lifeless excuses for
benchmarks on things like playfulness & honesty & emotional expression in art, to feel like i just might be acquainting with
anything that feels like some kind of actual meaningful reflection instead of contorting myself to tolerate what's available,

& then reflect that extrication in some way,

& then receive signs of people seeming to relate to it on exactly the repressed terms that i had perhaps
extricated myself from, & just seamlessly integrating it into their mode of processing for inability to
see what i see in it, seeing the hard-won miraculous honesty in some timbre as absolutely no different
from some other timbre's simulation of honesty informed by fifty generations of progressive dilution
before it & now spat out by an artist who might even really think it constitutes honesty but the
fabric of life is so composed from the ground up by liars believing their own lies that you can't even
blame anyone for it, it's just what the building blocks of experience are, it's just the state of nature

i feel like every several months i piece together in my head some new way of phrasing some retrospective evaluation of vaporwave
that's just a little bit closer than whatever i had several months prior to how i've always felt about it. it's silly that i think about
it so enduringly. it probably wasn't that important. i extrapolate it into these broad feelings but i'm extrapolating from
a very narrow subset of dweebs on the internet. unless they really are valid as a general indicator! maybe even if it's
not that important it still serves as a good example of something that might not have been quite possible in the past

in any case:

lots of people probably experienced it in totally different ways but to me vaporwave has this nightmarish uncanny valley quality
where i get an impression that everyone really involved in it lived cushioned enough in a little conceptual vivarium that they
perceived the entire constitution & development of a "subculture" or "counterculture" as a kind of pre-determinedly available
action, spiritually equivalent to an option you'd select from a drop-down box - something to carry out through the mere
quantity of people outputting certain consistent aesthetic decisions, until a threshold is reached where it can be said to
"count" as an artistic movement & then be fawned over in that way. quantity as opposed to what anyone really
wanted to express through any of it, or whether they wanted to express anything in the first place

whereas "subcultures" or "countercultures" are generally thought to take shape on their own terms & represent
sociohistorically specific responses to the gross movements of the cultures they're embedded in & constitute
broad dialogue of some kind, even if at the constant risk of being appropriated into a costume, vaporwave
felt like that entire general notion of a "subculture" or "counter-culture" being divorced from
any specificity & fossilized into a model to be repeated for its own sake

it's like the blatant incorporation of the whole idea of a "subculture" into a detached conceptual interface, flattened
by acclimation to a world where everything feels frozen in an eternal present & cultural response to the world at large
is largely available as something to research & consider in retrospect & inevitably develop feelings on as a defined
process with certain broad qualities, rather than something whose character was always written in a dynamic present
at each time when it was happening & yet to be etched into a history & contemplated forever as an example of fixedness
instead of dynamics... & the more we accrue to look back on under these conditions the less possible it
becomes to separate in-the-moment possibility from repetition of the past!

it's like it was kind of reflective of a sense of there not really being any discussions to have anymore in that way, beyond
just, like, pointing out over & over in consolingly absurd or self-aware ways that the whole world is thoroughly held in a
stranglehold by capitalism & that it kind of defines everything & that whatever art you might be making isn't going to
meaningfully have anything to do with it beyond hopefully some kind of, like, spiritual insulation against it

& then vaporwave obviously gestured consciously at qualities of existing in late capitalism & the question is
whether this post is describing the elaborate intention that really functionally lied beneath what was easy
to mistake as vague semi-ironic expression & copycatting, or whether this whole perspective represents
how it unintentionally succeeded at demonstrating what it failed to intentionally demonstrate

what disturbs me is that vaporwave may have just been a flagrant display of this phenomenon & that everything else that feels like
it forwards some kind of dialogue may just be doing it less flagrantly, that maybe anything that feels like novelty & genuine
artistic freedom can hardly ever be more than the output of whoever best learns to speak novelty in predetermined tongues
instead of their own tongues because those predetermined tongues only become harder & harder to see past

i need to just stop looking so much at my primary discord server because i think any time a person obliges me to think about
elon musk i have to write at least two paragraphs with a phrase like "death spiral" somewhere in there to feel better about it

december 31st, 2022

gender variance & the questioning of gender roles should provoke an awareness of a kind of
underlying social phenomenon which underlies gender as much as it underlies anything else

this phenomenon is that gender, like many activities, is only a self-perpetuating pattern in human behavior,
& such a pattern perpetuates when people accept a single arbitrary reality out of all possible realities
& proceed to act it out through their broad collective social activity. the outcome of this is two-
pronged, & that two-pronged quality is the all-important central element of this post

the first prong is that the people acting out that arbitrary reality do end up autonomously creating the
reality that we do actually, in practicality, live under, just by virtue of their number & cohesion

the second prong is that they create the illusory appearance of a more essential underlying reality, with the arbitrary
lived reality that they themselves create seeming like just the inevitable natural expression of that underlying "truth"

these two effects, one real & one illusory, seem to each act as proof of the other. they interlock &
appear to be one & the same, reinforcing seamlessly, creating the sense that this is all self-evident

gender is a really common vehicle for confrontation with this phenomenon! it's in vogue! except you get people localizing
it entirely to gender & failing to generalize it to everything else, so that you get people who are gender variant but
also, like, i don't know, still willing to believe that art unconditionally has meaningful existence in 2022