january 2nd, 2023

january 4th, 2023

version two of this post:

two people:

person A is attempting to stop swearing, out of the belief that doing this may effect tranquility in
them to some extent, for its sanding-off of the more casually barbed, prickly points in their everyday
expression, tapering off a certain unnecessary "on-ness" that keeps them from ever fully relaxing

in person B, the causality is reversed. they are attempting to cultivate personal tranquility in a more general way, & one
aspect of this is that they note the frequency of their swearing as an indicator of how well they are accomplishing
their task, since a tranquil person will not go around finding things to swear at everywhere they are

is person A putting the cart before the horse?

version one of this post:

occurred to me as i was crossing a street that if i take my prior project of trying to to some extent effect
personal tranquility through cessation of swearing (i felt that a broad excision of "bite" from my expression
could ultimately be beneficial, maybe owing less to any 'harmfulness' of "bite" per se & more to the promotion
of the temperamental spaces that would develop as necessary alternatives for where "bite" would have gone prior),
& reverse the causality of it, then i get a person practicing a more general effort towards personal tranquility
while nothing the frequency of their swearing as an indicator of how far they are falling short in
their efforts (if one is tranquil then one is not always finding things to swear at)

here i'll examine why i did end up swearing today

i was having trouble logging into my bank account on my phone. but it wasn't about the bank account.
it was about being in the back room of the coffee shop & seeing the couches propped up on their sides

i didn't know if the couches were just being moved around or if they were being tossed, but i was rashly
assuming the worst, which was their being tossed. i was having a little emotional crisis over this

i was having a little emotional crisis over it because one of those couches features in a mundane moment that i have been looking
ahead to endlessly for short-term consolation, & when i saw them propped up on their sides i felt like everything was lost in a way

it was a very irrational, symbolic frustration, a kind where it feels a little like God is trying to send a message, make me
acknowledge some reality... & it was silly, because that moment i've been looking ahead to represents a general improvement
that will come whether or not the specific moment actually happens. but in that moment i felt cheated & robbed of it

it turned out that they were only moving the couches, though. so it's okay

january 5th, 2023

i can't stop thinking too much because i associate not thinking with eventually doing something out of undirected passion that turns
out to not be for the best & then having to be accountable for my thoughtlessness, the thought of which feels like being destroyed

i am very apologetic but you're not allowed to know what i'm apologetic about but here i proclaim it

january 13th, 2023

it drives me wild how specific of a sentence a person can write at any time, i can just say something like, "he frequently
demanded of others that they admit to illusory, concealed cynical beliefs, out of a masochistic drive to verify that he
really did live in as cruel a world as he imagined." i just made that up, i can just type that, nothing stopped me

january 16th, 2023

i'm bad at correcting my sleep pattern now cause i spent a number of years over-internalizing self-denial in
various ways & now i am inversely averse to it such that i just can't feel how nice it is to be about to
doze off & then tear myself out of it, it's like come on i'm not gonna live forever i gotta have this...

january 18th, 2023

this semester is looking to be a caged grind smeared with the incessant whoring out of my expressive capacities
towards insincere forum posts about things i have no original investment in but the weather will be warm for
much of it & eventually it'll give way to "you" & me & summer & certainly at least two thousand dollars

january 19th, 2023

a lot of my jokes will just be me saying things that mean nothing as a subversion of sentences usually meaning things.
sometimes i don't signpost them very well, & every once in a while someone might have a quickly reply that seems to
indicate a certain interpretative stretch they made on the fly. this is usually a little unpleasant cause it's like
my sentences end up signifying totally random things i don't intend, but also a little interesting because
i feel like it can reveal a little about their thought processes & how they approach stuff

january 25th, 2023

as you read the text posts you are witnessing the compulsive contradiction wherein i pledge to express myself here eternally &
openly before walking away from the computer & taking refuge in the notion that no one knows what is happening in my brain

january 26th, 2023

every transient internet culture phase leaves behind enclaves of people frozen in that phase where you can't
believe they still exist, right now at this moment there are enclaves of 2007 otaku people, there are enclaves of
2012 electroswing team fortress two brony-type edm people, there are enclaves of 2016 people playing splatoon
& saying the phrase "nice meme" & the word "salty" a lot, & then there are all the honest-to-god scattered
year-2000-esque chatrooms that still feel like if someone at the time wrote out a parody of the
uncouth ways people classically act in chatrooms like bash.org type human interaction

january 30th, 2023

it's crazy to me how commonplace it seems to be for people to recognize "good singing" & the twelve note scale
& whether an instrument is out of tune, like this doesn't even require straying off into some wacky atonality
avant garde perspective talking about "prescriptive musical language" or whatever it's just baffling to
me on its face, if you didn't tell me all the instruments across all the songs on the classical station
were sticking to a consistent set of frequencies i don't think i would ever notice, i just process
whether it's tuneful regardless of tuning, like just in terms of subsequent intervals

february 1st, 2023

me at age ten completely uncritically reading the en--------ia dr-----ca page titled "l-ft-rd" & lacking any
of the conceptual framework in my brain to fit things into so as to even agree or disagree with any of the
statements being made, just taking in the existence of the perspective portrayed with absolute impartiality

february 2nd, 2023

my self-realization would see me knowing how to create beauty & feeling
capable of doing so, rather than just advocating for its creation

i have to stop & acknowledge that if & when the situations that i dream about actually come to pass i'll probably
just feel & display a kind of reptilian blankness, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't actually
the situations i want to see, or that they aren't happy. (unless it points to a crazy deep extent to
which i need to tear everything down & rediscover & reacquaint with my genuine desires)

unnoticed desire in the background of my consciousness to collapse onto a cushioned version of whatever
(perhaps tiled) floor happens to be under me & become something more than cocooned in squeezing
arms, maybe to incorporeally become the very action of arms squeezing anything, in the abstract

february 5th, 2023

i might spend ten hours slowly going crazy simply because i need to lie down for five or ten minutes, while having
that option available to me the entire time but the impulse to do it just sort of hangs around me never actually
connecting with my conscious... unconscious self-denial feels diffuse in my behavior like a sprinkled light powder

in my dreams i saw a bird's eye view of an amber-tinged stretch of freeway in an infinite empty void of darkness, then i woke
for a few seconds & thought it was the most indescribably beautiful image or idea i'd ever held in my mind in any way

i think that was just a product of not being fully conscious, but i still remember the feeling of being awake
for that moment, the actual conviction i'd felt about what i'd seen. it was amazingly peculiar. i don't know
if i can quite do it justice... but i'm gonna try, & i hope i don't sound like i'm just pretentiously
overdescribing it because, really, nothing less would gesture towards the way i really felt!

it wasn't just about the visual of that freeway. it was that i was actually there, far up above it, & more importantly
i was in that black void... but it wasn't about the fact that it was a void. it was just that the realm of the dream
happened to be a void, & it was more the existential frame of the dream which had an extremely important quality.
& naturally this dream did not acknowledge itself as a dream. the extremely important quality was the
existential default by all measures, alternatives to it being totally outside consideration

& that important quality was what i would hesitantly label as 'absolute subjective existence.' absolute power, but not really power
with its negative connotations. absolute freedom. incorporeality, unconditional existence, the ability to fly, to reshape the world
around me by my whims, to enact absolute unfettered creativity, to never die, to be beyond the human condition. absolute relief.
absolute success, absolute existential success. what we might call Heaven, or to be God, or any other sort of thing, only this
had no need for recourse to the supernatural or any underlying logic at all. it was the default. a universe which naturally
existed around the principle of acting as host to disembodied minds that would never know fear, only playfulness. the most
greedy aspirations one could possibly have about reality. the desires we all might start out with in full force while
young, but gradually forget as we humble ourselves in accordance with our physical existence. the desire to fly into
the sky & teleport & shoot lasers from your fingers & reshape everything around you into sensory self-portraits of
nuanced comfort & have all this without being solipsistic. having there be others, having there be togetherness

& so i woke up for one second & blearily felt this half-conscious sense of
absolute success towards the amber-tinged freeway & then fell back asleep

after that, though, i got too hot under my blanket & had stress dreams. one had me standing in front of my brother in
the kitchen. he dropped it on me that tomorrow we would be packing up everything in the apartment & moving to a city
about two hours west. i started crying & saying i'm going to be hours away from my only friend in the world

february 6th, 2023

thinking of writing a short ruby program that each day will give me a random location on campus & time
during my office shift that i have to stop what i'm doing & walk there just to see whatever i might see

february 7th, 2023

realizing just how hard some amazing bass-dependent music gets highpassed by my crummy laptop speakers
into dullsville & how this has probably been conditioning the course of my music taste for three years,
making me prefer songs whose intrigue all happens to lie in mid & high-range frequencies

how many dreams can you have about something before it starts to become fair to say that you wouldn't be having
this many dreams about it if you weren't engaging in pointless excessive rumination & that you do have a kind
of responsibility to dream about it less, or rather, to ask yourself if you're really employing all the
voluntary practices of cognitive hygiene that you could that might make you dream about it less

february 8th, 2023

not necessarily how i feel but just the sentence i want to type & publish: nothing else has to
feel the way it did in third grade again if at least the birds sound the way they did again

february 10th, 2023

i feel fanatically worried about succumbing to repetition in whatever corners of my life i may succumb
to repetition in. i feel like i am always trying, to an unnecessary degree, to think of how i could break up
some pattern, or routine, or rule, or language, or standard about how time ought to be spent or divided up

even just waggling M's hands to the rhythm of a song
the other day, my thoughts were wordless but their
feeling could be translated to something like,

"is there an oppressive, mundane regularity to this song's rhythm section? a nice thing to dance to, but still. & is it mundane
that i should couple my movements to the various elements in such default ways? should i aim for something better
than this? what unexpected alternate syncopation could i waggle their hands to, just the hi-hats & every other snare,
something irregular like that, or, like, or how could i vary up the actual waggling? how do i derive something new
from these three familiar & stale axes of physical movement, i want to find a pattern, some unexpected pattern,
some language to speak, i want to write a joke told through these hand movements but i don't have any ideas.
i always just look at the limited dimensions of expression at hand & proclaim myself helpless to do anything
new in something so simple, but i shouldn't do that, i should know how to be playful. or is it just
more playful to waggle my hands as i do? what could better be called 'play' than that?"

this bordered on honest worry, i felt like there were stakes at hand

i am afraid of the temptation to quickly say "let's go to the coffee shop" on reflex rather than "let's drive
somewhere," with its risk, like if it turns out to be boring i'll be accountable for suggesting something
so aimless but what if there is some parking lot where the rain is coming down perfectly like it
wouldn't have come down anywhere else, or somewhere an animal is doing something funny?