december 24th, 2022

i want to be curatorial, un-entropic, directed, organized, tactful, sparse, with restraint, to only speak here
if i have something distinctly beautiful to report, to show how crystalline something to be, to prove the
possibility of crystallinity, to show the positive potential of any medium, a blog or a book or some
miraculously inspiring piece of trash on the ground. & i'm faltering in it here by posting too much
& being blithe unless that's actually the "right" thing to do but i imagine it having more discipline

december 30th, 2022

i think i rely psychologically on the coffee shop as a stable thing that i can return to, because i have had probably at least
twenty dreams about it shutting down or changing radically & it has never shown any sign of doing either of those things

december 31st, 2022

hurriedly finishing the december journal with a feeling like i just have to make this "deadline" & then i'll get a break, but really
it'll just be january first wherein more stuff to write down might happen... the events & occurrences simply keep coming

january 13th, 2023

i am nearing the maximum amount of money that i can receive in student grants. i may even be nearing the point of
receiving a bachelor's degree, whereupon i will probably be disqualified from my student worker position. there is
a kind of pit of dread in my chest about it all, about maybe having to start working somewhere, but, particularly,
just about really feeling like i have found someone, but only here, at this particular temporal threshold. like
all the silliness & actual living has to start being suffocated at the very same moment that it begins

maybe this isn't the last semester, maybe i have a couple left, but, my current feelings are... i am not thinking beyond
this next semester, this next spring & summer. just this next spring & summer. i see a strong potential for this next
spring & summer to be the happiest time of my life thus far. past that, maybe that'll be when my free time really starts
to be drained away. but just this next semester, & this next spring & summer, with that unconcerned feeling, just one

the song kids by mgmt is taking over my brain

january 14th, 2023

i think it's a bit of caffeine withdrawal talking but i'm so easily scared by the passage of time. there's this feeling which always
rears its head again, that everything has a childhood, not just human beings. i cherish my relationship to my friend, but enough so
that it scares me a little that before i know it we're no longer in the "childhood" of our friendship, in a way. all those memories
now fixed in stone come to feel so crazily early &, & just... what i mean is that it's only through the context of all that comes
after that what came early on can come to feel so very early, & precious, &... there's just those moments where you might
not even realize how crazy it is that you've only known someone for a week or a month, given who they are. it's so
burdensome that the past is there to look back on forever, even if i try not to. every moment can become
a new temptation to dwell on it. to instead always look forward is a responsibility

i still want to write everything down, but i'm not in a mental place anymore where my relationship to that drive is one of
eustress. instead it exists in conflict with an opposing inclination to just exist uncomplicatedly in every moment without
pausing to jot down notes or take photographs. the end result is that every little event big or small, while cherished, has the
side effect of constricting me with the procrastinated obligation to always expend effort on producing its mirror image in text

january 15th, 2023

for a long time i've had a big diverse array of albums on my phone, & when i go on walks i listen to all the
songs as one big jumble that i slowly progress through in alphabetical order. even though the albums are not
all that aesthetically similar, i've found that having such a consistent set of them has caused them to kind
of bleed together into an irreplicable feeling that could only be created through their particular mutual
juxtaposition, a feeling that i associate with going on walks. even if i might not hear every artist
present during a given walk, whichever ones i do hear always feel permeated with that feeling

lately i've been kind of disemboweling this set of albums & replacing it with other ones so as to instate a kind of
fresh musical milieu for the sake of drives & walks with my friend. i have sort of been doing this in observation
of a sense that the period of my life dominated by solitary walks feels like it is over, at least for a while

doing this hurts & gives me a bit of a hollow feeling in my chest. it feels like disassembling
a part of me, a part of me that can only be honestly captured by that precise array, a part of
me that i am intimate with & will now begin to lose touch with. but i am hoping it will be a
good decision in the end. i am trying to tell myself that it is a proactive thing to do, in a way

lying in bed feeling vertiginous & anxious about all the albums on my phone being different & how i wish i could fit more on it & just very
insular sincere concerns about "music listening procedures," & also about all the brief happy moments & comments i haven't written down
& all the things i should include in the list at the end of the letter to my friend that i am still drafting & school & how much longer can i
attend school, & what if i moved away, the concept of "going on a walk" to me is inextricable from covering the same stretches of land
for years & years, would i have to learn to feel like i am "going on a walk somewhere else," thinking about every street in this city's
incommunicable place in my psychological geography, thinking about the hundred albums i'm yet to sift through & archive on youtube,
thinking about all the endless rote routines i set up just to have unreachable horizons of completion to look ahead to, thinking about
all the years i spent not really honing any artistic craft or at the very least exploring art as much as i could have, the eternal
insistent duty to plant a tree today if not twenty years ago, something, anything, vertiginous, existence existence existence
existence existence existence existence existence existence existence existence existence existence existence existence

this car ride is a mental flavor that i'll carry with me & want to exist in whenever i want forever, not for its greatness but just because it exists
at all, & so is this walk, & this other car ride, & this other walk, & this mundane day at my laptop in the coffee shop eighteen months ago, & this
other more eventful day, & this conversation, & this other night sitting on a couch, or a porch, or an evening at a park, or a picnic table or this
street or this event or that bridge or park or house i can't go in anymore, or ephemeral combination of static place & ephemeral energy, or the
weather on that one day, & this solitary day & that social outing & this one night that had this exact juxtaposition of albums, & that other
unreplaceable experiential composition of juxtaposed stimuli & this & that & this & that & this & that & this & that & this & that & this & that

i feel afraid of being alive right now, like i love it too much. i feel overwhelmed & like i do not want to physically
move. i want to feel in this apartment like (my inevitably myopic personal conception of) indivisible existence

i feel younger than i am. i feel like my life is happening in jumbled order relative to the objective
linearity of my aging. i feel like in 2020 i was reborn out of necessity to slough off some initial
prototype of myself that had no future, & i've been living in fast forward until i catch up with myself

my renewed anxiety about the ephemerality of experience is simply a symptom of being, more tangibly that
at any other time in my life, what i would hesitantly postulate as, with more confidence than at any
other time in my life, but still, hesitantly, postulate as "in love." &, by way of this, having days
more populated than ever with memories that i would like to hold onto more than ever

my practice of journalling started in times of comparative dullness & slowness. & in that slowness
it was easy to employ as insulation against ephemerality, since it had so little motion to contend
with in the first place; rather, i documented a frozen eternal present of a daily life. now it crashes
incongruously into the obstacle of full days - fleeting joys that actually present it with a constant
challenge & obstruct the insulation that it once performed handily, when that task was so small

i am not living on so much of a slow drip of ambivalent events anymore, with so much time to integrate each one.
a car ride can be a shower of small events, each of which i wouldn't mind holding in mind for a long time

& even in the best case, whatever i do write will only trace the outline of its associated memory, which
will always be a multifaceted assembly of sights, sounds, places, context, people, & everything

the writing can only serve the dual purposes of being either for me, in aiding reminiscent reconstruction of the event,
or for "them," which is to say, i can make an attempt to wring some kind of "truth" out of something that happens

slight pivot: i want to soundtrack everything with the best music i can, i want to branch out to new untested
music to form those fresh associations with no baggage, belonging wholly to their associated memories. i want
to be able to drum up spontaneous & experimental ways of passing time like when i took us off into the
woods that one day where it would have been so easy to just progress along the blacktop

i want to read all the books i'm supposed to read & hear everything i should hear & say everything i'm supposed to
say"i wanna hold everyone, i wanna say everythingi wanna hold everyone, i wanna say everythingi wanna hold everyone,
i wanna say everythingi wanna hold everyone, i wanna say everything i wanna hold everyone, i wanna say everything&
i have too little energy & too little time, i'll read a quarter of a book over a month & tell myself it at least feels
like progress respective to all books i should read when no, that's not enough, i need to pull it together, the
focus just never comes, i don't want to waste this (my mortality), such enriching ideas are all around
everywhere for me, & i don't want to learn only just enough that i can infer how
much enrichment & existence i'm shirking by not learning more

& then back to eyeing the .pdf fretfully

january 18th, 2023

i am scared of change. i define myself by the exact permutation of people, places, objects, &
circumstances around me. a change to even one element can feel like a fundamental alteration to
the unique identity of the permutation, & thus carries for me a sense of personal dissolution

naturally, the elements around me are in constant unstoppable flux, entailing my constant
slow redefinition, & this is healthy. but if there is any constant, it is that, whatever
the current permutation is, i would like to fix it & hold it for eternity. each iota

& whatever has survived the longest i am naturally inclined to hold onto the most

if i ever moved away, i think dismantling my bedroom would be a deeply painful
experience, even if i would try to generally reassemble it somewhere else

intellectually i know that it is healthy

see january 18th

january 20th, 2023

can't find my earmuffs & can't retrace my steps with them because i can't remember when i last had them on, or saw them,
& for that matter i can barely remember where i've been over the past week or two. sometimes it feels like my memory
could diminish entirely to the single needle-thin point of the current moment & i would take up residence in an
eternal present hopefully of hugging my friend a lot, cultivating happy times only to feel them not to store them

january 22nd, 2023

all i can do is walk back & forth. every potential task is gridlocked with every other. overburdened
with idyllic images of nature in my head that linger with me & tantalize with a sense that even
if i lived those moments i don't know that i would really contain the essence of their images,
piercing through dissociation & excess thoughts to embody an undisturbed matutinal greenness

(i googled to learn the word "matutinal" for that paragraph. originally it would have been "crepuscular" but this
would have turned out to have been too ambiguous, although i wish "crepuscular" had been suitable, a word
like biting into an apple, adjacent to crisp, fresh, crunch, crush, but even more the "pusc" just has it,
texturally, phonetically, like it contains the particular friction of apple pulp against itself)

overburdened moreso with thoughts of all the people i ever could have loved, or known,
or been, & also with over-attachment to my own growing store of memories, to transient
ultra-specific permutations of circumstance, to the permutation of objects accrued around
me & the incommunicable psychological meanings of different buildings & streets

the thought of something being locked in place

which will only ever be an idea to project onto reality taken as a sea of churning particles. except those particles
do sometimes assemble into things that literally are, at least for a time, locked in place - a latch, for instance

it's confusing

january 24th, 2023

i spent years feeling like i had rationalization of death down pat, but now thinking about time makes me feel a
bit sick every once in a while... repeat after me i want to feed the ground. i wanna feed the ground. its fine

i can be like an animal who loves life even as the container of death, recognizing no distinction between living & the
slow death towards which each act of that living ushers me, i can love it all the same. we're bringing back 2020 alex

february 7th, 2023

my default emotional state even during times of tranquility, i think, is that something may be about to destabilize, or collapse,
or lose form. it could be anything. a social relation may decay - in some inexpressible way, a person may essentially change.
a productive routine may decay, or one of bodily self-care. something may physically break, an article of clothing may be
torn. a critical piece of technology may malfunction. a hard drive may fail. resolve may weaken. healthy disciplines
may weaken. ability to pay attention may fracture, crippling the ability to tend to bureaucratic obligations. a certain
structure of social or economic safety may fall through. a personal system of meaning may fall through, leaving
only a sense of adriftness. a novelty may wear thin, thereby exposing itself only at that moment as
mere novelty. someone may die, may get in an automobile collision any day now

february 8th, 2023

when i come to feel generally sad for a prolonged duration, maybe in a way rooted more in biology than life
circumstance, i also tend to irrationally feel like it signifies that the happy times have come to an end,
that my present sadness must be reality reasserting itself, & all the things that have been making me
happy have revealed themselves as mere distractions that never contained any longevity & must now
dissipate, must give way to the sadness & worry that always underlied them percolating patiently

it can be normal & okay again

february 9th, 2023

i haven't even really been thinking about writing down February so far. & i do feel like by this point there are lots of
nice little events & situations that have slipped from my memory & disappeared. & that does just feel tragic, it keeps
giving me little twinges of regret. it's like little deaths of potential beauty, beauty to me if no one else. i keep trying
to tell myself that it's a good thing that i just have to get used to, or at least an okay thing. but i don't know

it's just this negotiation with entropy & time where there's not really a clear resolution.
the constant ability to turn all events into history to be cherished as history feels like
an intimidating thing that it is hard to turn back away from once the box is opened

i have a memory from yesterday of sitting on the platform rocker in the living room & recalling two charming
events that happened recently. i thought of phrases i could quickly jot down as memory aids. but i felt a bit
intimidated, like if i wrote those down then i'd have no excuse to not start trying my best to reconstruct
the rest of february too. so i shied away from it. now my memory on the platform rocker contains
only the experience of recalling those two memories & not their actual content

i feel like i can hardly remember my own life, even just a week or several days after a given event. i can remember the
broad circumstances which are host to all those daily events that i largely forget, & little more can be counted on.
i want to record. i am afraid of losing myself to time. the fact that it is in my ability to make everything possible
to remember creates a sense of a frightening workload that lives alongside every carefree happy moment

at first i wrote down every dream i had. & then i stopped writing down my dreams. & i had this
same fear. & it's never stopped feeling a bit tragic, even if i ignore it. but i still wrote down
my lived days. now maybe i will stop writing my lived days, lose much of the sense of my
past, at least much of its potential clarity, & lose my sense of accumulation of being

i love reminiscing. i don't know how to articulate the value of the unmistakable mental
texture of a properly fixed moment in time. it feels too elementary to communicate.
it's just - of course it's valuable. it's valuable in itself. that's how it feels

there's no way out. time will keep going & memory will keep doing only its faulty best to keep pace. this imposes
a decision which has to be made & renewed every day. embrace ephemerality or write down everything.
if it's possible for the former to not feel like oblivion, i am having to figure out how exactly

"won't you die anyway? might all this stuff just go to oblivion for you anyway?" yes but, thinking on it, i think it's maybe
less about wanting to eternalize each moment & more about hoping to make the personal best of my ephemeral life
while i have it, by giving each moment the opportunity to live in memory for as long as it needs to find its meaning
there through consideration & time. instead of fluttering by as its one single dissociated actual occurrence

that every moment could either be given this opportunity or not makes me anxiously see two potential lives
stretching out before me - one where i gave all of my moments time to find their meaning & i feel more
of a sense of chronology & integrity as a cumulative being, & another which is a kind of vacuum
of vague feelings of time having passed, & missed opportunities to construct meaning

it consistently frightens me how, even if a person really loves you for who you are & not just whatever show
you put on, as they should, that love does still feel... dependent, contingent, on the successful production
& expression of who i am. what i mean is that i always fear that each little thing i think of to say or do
may be the last. i feel like at any moment i may collapse & cease to meaningfully be myself, regress into
something airtight, opaque, inexpressively self-interested. i cannot tell if there is any real spontaneity
to my being. all the sincerity in the world still feels like it would fall against this threat

february 16th, 2023

i don't like thinking about how i'm not writing down february. i could try to start now but by reinstating it as a goal
i would have to confront the fact that i've let a bit over half of it largely slip away. it just feels like i can't do it
anymore. my ability to approach tasks feels too fragmented to sustain the practice of having every little event also
create the task of writing it down that i have to attend to. i don't like that i am not doing it, i wish i still could. not
doing it makes me feel like every little nice thing is prone to slip away into a blank emptiness of non-remembrance

february 27th, 2023

i had been keeping the idea of dropping one of my classes stored away in my head as a matter of comfort

today, though, i realized that to drop any of them would reclassify me as a part-time student & result in
the termination of my student worker position. i am now weighing how much better off i really am with
this job. i feel as if losing it would make me sad some fair amount, even ignoring the financial
aspect... but maybe i am wrong. i wasn't feeling so bad before i had the job, was i?

in any case:

when i think too hard about my classwork, i now feel what it is all an extension of: that it is meant as
preparation for the job market, which feels like a general threat to my existence that feels like it is only
now showing signs of beginning to close in around my naive self, or at least preparing to begin closing in

when i think too hard about my classwork i feel overcome with dread, like everything is going to
come apart for me & it is only a matter of time, & i feel intensely disposed to simply lie down & die

everything may come apart for me when i have so greatly acclimated myself to stability
because i have been allowed to. my household is not "well off" but it has been stable

my mind is a thing in the shape of the concept of stability. i am afraid of dismantling the layout of my room. i am afraid of
staining a shirt. i am afraid of breaking a glass. i want to retain my array of symbols. i want to hew out some particular
mode of existence & have it persist forever. to some extent, i want this present life of self-selected routines &
intermittent walks to the nature trail for the rest of time. but in actuality this sense of dread always lied ahead

i'm afraid of the idea that the blankness i feel when
i read this godforsaken .pdf of a textbook chapter
is the general forecast going forward

the nonchalance of the people around me, particularly the professors, all feels like a veneer over everyone
having found something to cling to so that they are not abandoned on the streets & left to die in the cold.
i guess they are all probably secure, though. they are all people who made a plan. i cannot take my
eyes away from how much making a plan resembles killing a part of myself. i am afraid

march 13th, 2023

this year i have been becoming far more acutely aware of myself as a thing that actually needs forms of
security. i have never really thought of myself as needing security. i have never regarded myself as
"under threat" but rather bored, something left to rot under excess security, purgatorially, deprived
of consequence, locked away. but this year cracks in that self-conception are starting to show