january 4th, 2023

i love my awesome modernist architecture local art center that exerts a wholesome & rejuvenating aura over
the downtown district & absolutely does not look like a flamboyantly desperate attempt at doing exactly such
a thing when nestled incongruously amid a bunch of century old decrepit brick buildings that have actual
character. i love the building that i go to to be inspired by art. i am nourished by art. art is good so
cities should have a place for looking at it at art so you know it's not all the time just business
at the jobs but there's time for the fun art & doing stuff expressive stuff side of life too

january 7th, 2023

i promise to never poison the psychic well ever again

two things that i have awareness of simultaneously:

1. it would probably be greatly beneficial to my well-being to harbor a general distaste for (& distance
from) the internet. & not in my way where i come on here & try to type cathartic paragraphs dissecting
broad or narrow things that happen on the internet, but rather in a more direct firsthand way

2. longstanding personal circumstances of isolation drove me into a place where because of excess exposure to the
internet it has become kind of difficult to precisely draw the line between it & myself, muddling all attempts to
identify exactly what i should apply distaste & distance to. i have a povertous store of early memories that
i actually feel able to point to & confidently say that this one or that one portrays the original, standard
form of my life before i psychologically entangled with life as refracted through the whole online lens. is
it in the decor of my room? is it in this or that hobby? & is it in this, & is it in that, & what is it not in...?

the sum of these two things is a kind of scared desperation, a sense of infestation of my being

the most strict & obvious answer as to where to draw the line would be at the actual devices &
applications that enable access to the internet in the first place. but, when i take it that far, the
aloneness with my thoughts & the interminable stillness of a room can become unbearable
at times. maybe it doesn't have to be that way though, maybe it's just a weaning process

i still can't decide whether i have a life to replace the internet with

a more liberal place to draw the line might be cessation of anything that could be called social media. the internet
can be something to sift through rather than talk into. sift through databases. spend an hour hitting this button that
opens some random ancient web 1.0 website & see what i uncover. investigate. torrent books, find my interests

(doesn't tumblr have journaling / introspection utility for me? can it really feel the same just writing everything out in a
local document? doing it this way feels so decisive, the progression towards a singular decision that the writing at hand
is finished & will be published. would a private blog work? can i find the drive to do this without the constant pull of
inferring that i am being seen in some capacity, even if it is so distant? is it a necessary component that, for someone,
for no one in particular, i put in real effort to be understood & know that it will succeed or fail on those terms?)

or i could limit myself to Discord, with its privacy & direct conversation? can just that be good for me? but it can
become just vicarious intake of other people's less careful intake. is watching videos still okay? i don't know. maybe
block every html element that serves to present false commonality. no more reviews, no more comments, no more scores,
no more metrics, no more forum. no more of the total thing so bigger than me that i always feel crushed by & have
to find some productive way to react to, writing paragraphs instead of poisoning the psychic well by
sharing the disgusting advertisement or what-have-you to relate around hearing it

my friend just released an album & he has beautiful creative drive, & the right people are having stimulating empathetic
thoughtful productive discussions right before my eyes, where i can see, or join, & i can't bring myself to keep up with
it all through the channels interface & the backlogs & the calls & the everything, i can't rein in my attention. i have
the great fortune of finding people & things that feel really real, & i squander that with my indefinitely postponed of
really exploring it all. i think i might just be apathetic, i think i don't care enough, i'm not sure that i care
enough to really want to really exist but if that's the case then why did i type this post?

january 10th, 2023

my intermittent frustration with internet culture is just another version of road rage... it's either people
getting reduced from human beings to an inexpressive Honda Accord or to an inexpressive comment
& avatar. common enemy that is systemic social alienation always rearing its ugly head...

january 11th, 2023

walking at the nature trail with friend & they think it's funny how there was a time when people frequently
had to deal with getting a "bad batch" of something, which seemingly doesn't so much happen anymore. things
are generally made in perfect mechanical ways. this spurs me to talk about a squirrel that we saw earlier,
when it leaped from a branch across an exciting distance of open space & grabbed onto another,
& they remarked how squirrels seem to never miss a jump, they're just perfect at it

the squirrel & "bad batch" comments connect in my head because you can see entropy & a kind of economic
inevitability in both, the squirrel had to be so perfect & specialized, it couldn't have been any other way,
in it you can see the tightening of screws, the cutting of corners, the evolutionary refinement of
that branch-catching behavior, the shifting & siting of proteins & genes winding into
the conservative shapes of all the inevitable ecological niches

& it's the same mechanic of ceaseless stripping-back to specialized, conservative necessities for the given task which makes
Amazon or whichever titan get progressively better at carrying out what it does. everything just gets more efficient, for better
or worse. & then the same process that made the squirrel so invariably good at grabbing branches made people good enough
at organizing that they can become the moving parts of that whole economic spiral, so that spiral is just a subroutine
of the overall life process. overall there's this helplessness feeling & a kind of "all i can do is laugh for
as long as i'm afforded anything to laugh about." i just want to see the little lived-life-level micro-
fluctuations of less-likeliness in the midst of the pall of inevitability, themselves inevitable
but like relieving zones of low air pressure in the midst of the global airflow

in the car talking about the strong sense of having crossed some threshold where thinking in terms of opposition
to capitalism can largely now only have personal benefits (in the way of not suffering for being totally defined
by capitalism), since the realization of those ideas on any societal scale just seems less & less & less realistic
simply because there is too much - too crushingly unthinkably much - momentum going in the whole process
that manufactures a supermajority of people to just be disinclined in various ways from any desire or
real ability to make that happen, even if they have the best intent. & obviously this is not
in effect to some smug, cartoonish extent but it's there enough

january 13th, 2023

humanity destroying the environment doesn't have to be framed as this objectively bad thing specifically with humanity as a kind of corrupting force
against the comparative ethical purity of animals & forests, i mean i love animals & plants too, & i recognize & kinda align myself with that divide,
in a colloquial way, but at the same time i don't think animals really have ethics. in large part it's just worth averting because, obviously, i think
we generally just don't want it to happen. lots of people love animals & plants, & i think pretty much none of them want to die in ecological
disasters... you don't have to appeal to some inherent virtue of the natural world to make this case, you can just appeal to empathy &
self-determination. destroying the environment is just what we generally don't want to do! & self-determination is the whole point,
bringing the course of history into conscious alignment with what everyone actually wants... i think the destruction of
the environment is kind of just the species-level folly of getting ensnared in the runaway effects of commodity logic

seeing humanity as worth deriding in an abstract way as some wicked force is just a corny position on its face, i think, but
i also feel like people with that belief might be under the illusion that humanity's grand-scale activities, & the functioning
of capitalism, are inextricably one & the same, rather than the functioning of capitalism being sociohistorically
specific... & that's an illusion that i would say is to the benefit of capitalism's ideological entrenchment!

i don't think it's even about the c.e.os who need to "control themselves & stop deforesting" or whatever. are we sure that anyone would
step into the same position & do anything all that differently? or maybe they'd just run the company into the ground, & maybe that wouldn't
actually be good! maybe it'd create some kind of economic downturn that'd make a lot of people's lives materially worse. capitalism isn't
supposed to collapse, that's just a flat out societal disaster & i think it's just what capitalism does as part of the overall harm
that it deals... i think it's just supposed to be kept working until people could conceivably escape it...

understanding economics is a good thing, i think. & not in the broad, dopey philosophical terms i'll write paragraphs like this in, i mean
the understanding derived from textbooks on economics, written from the perspective of capitalist economics. & i don't like that that can
probably be a good thing, but, i mean, it seems like a prerequisite for deriving the most humane arrangements of society for the time
being, not in the broadest terms like "blah blah overthrow capitalism" but in terms of nitty gritty contextually specific policies...
& even if those humane arrangements can be a struggle to actually implement, once derived

january 15th, 2023

if the spirit of the time i live in feels dominated by the principle that what people do is naturally indistinguishable from what they
appear to do, & that this can enable the twisting of society into a costume of exactly what it is, an unreality built out of realities,
then why shouldn't that macro-level tension mirror itself in me as a persistent fear of inauthenticity, of the reality that
everything i do even in absolute unquestionable earnest is at the same time its own appearance?

january 19th, 2023

sparsely attended "silent disco" event which elicits a feeling of bemused cynicism due to the sense that the Campus
Activity Board is a client of a certain category of unassociated companies who solicit the business of the campus
activity boards at very college, & this contributes to the sense of a more general principle that every enjoyment
is trotted out from some kind of roster of enjoyments while never having any reason to disclaim itself as such

when i got up there they were playing cupid shuffle...

january 21st, 2023

i think the video interior semiotics is just one moment where, in a kind of darwinian way, the general churning of artistic
creation happens to produce something that lends itself perfectly to criticism from a type of person who might perceive a
general tendency of people to become sort of drunk on any modicum of, like, philosophical or critical engagement with life,
& to kind of nestle themselves in an over-dramatized conception of the practice of connecting with reality or whatever.
i guess this is what the word "pretentious" means a lot. but i think these are also frequently the same people who
fail to then think hard enough to actually come to more useful conclusions about how, say...

there might be systemic processes at play which might neatly prefigure this kind of behavior through the dual effects of,
say: 1. encouraging lifestyles insulated from unconditional reality, & thus inculcating in these artists a sense of lack
that might make the utility of philosophy attractive to them, even if in a superficial or stereotyped way, which they
can hardly be blamed for, as; 2. those insulated lifestyles tend to be kind of part & parcel with over-dramatized
conceptions of many things - conceptions always over-mediated through overly "safe" conventions of perception.
& this is the environment that people are essentially born into, clothed in from the moment they can
think, & left without guidance to negate in themselves to the best of their ability

but instead of confronting this, this sort of person i imagine criticizing that video might just feed back into these
systemic processes by using the video to verify their own stereotyped conception of this breed of "pretentious artist"
as a kind of unquestionable natural force that occasionally reaches its peak at moments like the one depicted, & this
little detail of the world as seen through their eyes might be something unconsciously regarded as not worth
questioning because it would risk disrupting the smug emotional utility that it serves, or the part it might play
in trying to make some kind of sense of whatever disgust they might have for patches of their society & culture

january 22nd, 2023

it feels good to write a "love letter" as something that i feel is just happening as opposed to me ever sitting
down & deciding matter-of-factly that i am going to invoke & participate in "writing a love letter" taken as
some predefined reified action to be picked out from a roster of actions. this is going in the letter by the way!

january 24th, 2023

in my head it feels like i never stop writing, i'll write praise & condemnation, from people who don't exist, of the things
i actually have written. i'll write recounts of things that haven't happened to me, or from the perspective of prolonged
residual life situations i don't reside in. i'll write attempted summaries of years that i imagine transpiring between
hypothetically abandoning this website for a long time & radically altering my life & then returning to report back.
i'll try to compose hyperspecific situations, & hyperspecific internal states of the participants in those situations.
i'll write analyses & criticisms of my interior states, or of things outside of me, or i will criticize myself for
always needing to be critical. i'll even write & refine copious & repetitive eulogies for people close to me who are
still alive, how i would describe them, how i would articulate what their loss meant to me, how i imagine being affected

january 30th, 2023

writing over eight hundred words on my sociology class discussion board about how it's from an educational institution that we are learning
the marxian perspective of educational institutions being one of the means by which ideologies in line with the interests of the ruling class
are dispensed & how this contradiction seems to point to the inconsequentiality of understanding the mechanisms of our own exploitation while
living under diffuse distributed power where a component of the system itself can dispense this self-condemning knowledge because it doesn't
need to control information, as it's more stable to maintain a general air of superficial freedom while skewing things so as to make it kind
of inevitable that people just won't care enough & mentally segregate it all off to the "political world" that exists as something alternative
to their (politically & economically conditioned) "normal everyday life" (& that radical & politically invested people will only go so far
as to identify with their radicalism (& that even if they try to go beyond that - what constitutes an actual rebellious act? what
fragmentary element of the system do you point at & say "that's the part worth acting out against that'll actually
make a difference & send a message & not be misinterpreted?")) because im ANNOYING

february 6th, 2023

i just want to exist wherever i actually am, wherever i actually live, & have it be spatio-temporally & psychically
consistent instead of punctured & interlaced with abstracted signals that render it a mere extension of "the world,"
rather some image of the world. i want to just have a life wherever i am, not that i want it to preclude using
the computer for genuine cultural & subjective enrichment either but you have to figure out how to do
it without succumbing to the false commonality effect that disintegrates whatever place you
actually are & fixes it at some point amid a different, incorporeal geography

i need to believe that the world isn't sick, which is to say, in actualily i will never have any hope of grasping the
actual totality of the world & can thus never know if it is "sick" or not. but i hold in my mind a conceptual scale
model of the world, & in this model i have placed great personal stake concerning whether it is sick or not.
& i have rules by which i negotiate with myself whether it must or must not be regarded as sick

absurdism was initially the struggle to construct meaning despite reality being composed of uncaring
molecules. now i am willing to regard meaning as unconditionally real, but absurdism remains, its
struggle having shifted. it's now clawing for excuses to feel okay when the world is so plainly sick

negation would be when: 1. the world at large expresses an array like [-4, 1, 15, -8, -7, 5], & you take this on, it
becomes you. or rather, whatever array you initially started out as becomes that same array as permuted by each of
these degrees. let's assume for convenience that before the world expressed the array you were [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0].
so then; 2. ideally you apply to yourself the array [4, -1, -15, 8, 7, -5]. & it's not fair that you should
have to modify yourself, but you have to, & all in all it leaves you as [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]

inversion would be when you instead apply to yourself the array [8, -2, -30, 16, 14, -10], which leaves you
as [4, -1, -15, 8, 7, -5], a mutilation, a dissociation from oneself, causing them to be a shadow of the
world, maybe out of fearful self-defense, but it's only from the blank slate of [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]
that one can begin constructing what they actually want to see & to be

& this is generalized to the world's constant expression of hundreds, thousands, hundreds
of thousands of arrays. this is what i regard as the interplay between destruction &
creation yes it is just a more convoluted expression of my classic bad luck brian meme

february 7th, 2023

the four posts below this one express a kind of pessimism that presents itself as essential & obligatory. i don't think
i have the authority to now say whether that is justified or not, since there is the possibility that it does deal with
some genuine if unpleasant realities. but i can disclaim them as being typed immediately prior to falling asleep,
with a fever that felt like it was turning my brain into soup. so i can still make an appeal to the subjective
& say maybe we can always find a way as long as a fever isn't turning our brain into soup

fun trivia about this post: i slept restlessly & there were what felt like at least fifty occasions that i woke up
ten percent of the way & said the contents of this post in my head & now i've finally gotten up & written it

two trillion dollar sector of the economy devoted to generating things for people to resort to talking about on the
basis that they came from the two trillion dollar sector of the economy devoted to generating things to talk about so
that there can be anything whatsoever to talk about & you feel like a rotten stinking dead body on marionette strings

i walk into my living room &, as if to reaffirm my fears, my dad laughs & tells me how he just said
in an instant messaging conversation with one of his associates, "they're drawing lines in the
sand that'll blow away when the first breeze hits." he lampoons how dramatic it sounds,
raises his hands, & mimes like he is writing a letter, "My dearest Josh," & so on

the scale model of the world that i hold in my head is nudged in the direction of possessing such
a degree of omnipresent disenchantment that anyone would ever think in their right minds to apply
this kind of detached confrontation to the mere act of incorporating a metaphor into conversation.
i know this to not necessarily be how the world is, but i have no one to talk to at that
moment who will nudge my scale model back in the opposite direction

& among those i might talk to, there is no one to whom i would confer sufficient "authority" as a representative
of the world that, by displaying enchantment, they would actually rehabilitate my view of it. rather, i would
automatically feel like they are in league with me, in feeling like exception to the world. their positive
traits would only stand out in contrast to the world, reinforce all the goodness that the world lacks, &
thus steepen the the tenacity of my hesitance about the "disenchanted outside," the "everything else"

i'll be reading this article about escapism & the blurring line between reality & fiction, & the author will drop some
line like, "Not that I'll be hypocritical here- I too, of course, have felt it near impossible to resist getting lost for hours
in the latest program which so perfectly ensnares my attention." & it's like, you think that's normal? in the middle of
this article you're seriously gonna cop to that as an appeal to frank normality? i think i am grateful that my attention
span has gotten too fractured for me to pay continuous attention to tv shows or anything. i think i am developing
an unqualified disgust with people who even have the capacity to be continuously entertained, to be
completely honest. ok, maybe that is a little too extreme & mean. but i'm verging around there

i would rather do nothing than DO Nothing. i would rather sit in honest silence than fill dead air with noise. not that
silent immobility is actually my preference at the end of the day, what i would like to do with every day is construct
playful unexpected things. but sometimes it feels difficult & i feel uninspired, or afraid, often afraid that the
capacity for spontaneity could have been leeched out of me entirely. during those times of blank stillness
i would rather inhabit that blank stillness than try to fill it with cultural products

february 9th, 2023

shoutout to the tv executives for making the merciful & completely arbitrary decision of renewing
{category of people that i am in}'s lease to exist in their dystopic omnipresent media apparatus
onto which has been bestowed the ability to culturally legitimize or delegitimize categories of
human beings with impunity based on their presence or absence in a fictional media landscape

the assertion that most human beings are heterosexual terrifies me. it terrifies me in a way that has nothing to do
with any majority/minority perception, with struggle for cultural legitimacy of people who are not heterosexual.
it is also not me engaging in some cutesy, playful denigration of heterosexual lifestyles or whatever,
attacking them for their position as the cultural default, to whatever extent they still hold it

it just terrifies me because it is like plunging a knife into my desire to be self-determining, a desire that
kind of extends beyond any point of feasibility. it does this through its exhibition of human fate seeming
to be to at least to some extent conditioned by biology, reproduction, at least in the scope of this
aggregate-scale tendency. i do not want it to be the reality because that reality is helpless

i am not even heterosexual, but it terrifies me in some empathetic capacity to see humanity generally
subject to the tendency, its... it's like, humanity as animal, but moreso humanity as object. i look at
that tendency of humanity & it strikes at my being human too, it's the mechanism of my existence

(i think not being heterosexual also fails to bring relief because whether i am heterosexual or not is ultimately
just the variable which interacts with the constant that is my lack of sexually dimorphic self-determination)

i hope to God that it is just some worldwide pall of general cultural momentum
& that it could conceivably run out & everything would become relative

february 11th, 2023

being able to hear news programs out loud in my home every day has been eating my heart into a single giant dental caries
for nearly a year now. if my mental health were an integer it would be halved, at best. i cannot do my best at retaining
my optimism under these conditions. i cannot keep my chin up starting my day this way every day, feeling nervous
about leaving my room, turning on fans in my room to block out what sounds eke through the door, hiding

it's not even that the voices are saying their stereotypically downcast "oh, the war, the economic crisis," or
whatever, which inspires people to repetitively say "oh, i don't like the news, it's all doom & gloom!"

it's simply that there is a fundamental sense of violation in permeating the air with something that
a person cannot shut out, cannot seclude their thoughts from, must have their thoughts permeated by

& it's not that we all have to be hermetic, self-contained, thinking only about what we like to. but the content
is all abstracted, detached, far-off, editorialized, irrelevant, irrelevant to any life. the output of some ungodly
god-knows-what churning brought meticulously into my home by cables that spread into every home like capillaries,
turning any home's psychological element into just another capillary of the offensively singular "world at large"
proclaimed by the media landscape, spoken in inhumanly professional ball-peen metallic tones, amassed in endless
recordings so that they can speak continuously every single day without pause, perverting the value that the
human voice might have once had as audible at the time when there is someone present & something to be said

& this usage of the air in my home expresses a fundamental view on what a home is in the first place - points towards
a deeper estrangement. which is to say, no one with any actual interest in a home as a centrally emotional construct,
a place of focused self-expression or solace or anything, would be remotely willing to permeate its air like this.
this tells me that insofar as i have a home it is regarded in what i can only see as empty terms of utility, a form
of regard that everything seems to lovelessly spiral towards. if my home is a building of strict utility
where it doesn't matter what kind of sewage is allowed to aurally permeate then i'm not sure
that in essence i have a home. but i will not complain about not being cold

i feel like someone among many who realize that it's fully possibly to become metaphorically dead while still walking around,
& that it is their imperative to see beauty instead. except that realization has never quite freed me, there is an implicit horror
in it that i have never quite moved past, that i am weighed down by, slowly dragged under by. it is that i cannot take for
for granted that i am alive, that simply by my observing a condition of living death to be resist that surely i must be among
the living who meaningfully resist it. i feel hindered from simply identifying the life residing there in myself & letting
it grow. if there are to be the living & the dead then i must always bear the possibility in my mind that
i am failing & that i am dead. i am afraid of the shards of death i might bear in myself

guided more by fear than love

i think it largely lies in having felt truly honestly terribly alone for far too great a proportion of my life, in large part
i think due to so many things feeling dead in the first place. i have never had anyone to honestly live in relation to,
live in reflection of, see myself in, act & exist & speak for the eyes & ears of. i have never had tangible additional
perspectives to prove to my face that i was alive. so today there is lots of room for doubt about my being alive

although, for all i know, that may be too optimistic. maybe i was not alive, uncritically defined in character by the
same blandnesses that hang over everything, maybe i am only just recently sloughing off so many traces of death,
maybe in the past i could have only reflected death to anyone. i just didn't care at all when i was younger

today all of these circumstances sum to a tendency towards reclusion,
hesitance, retraction, suspicion, criticism, wariness, dismissal

february 12th, 2023

i spent like an hour workshopping this post about blandness, because it would always balloon
into this paragraph of gobbledygook that didn't seem like it fairly represented the familiar,
intuitive perception that it actually deals with anymore. i got really fixated on trying to
create a direct bond beyond all the gobbledygook & the day-to-day experience of blandness

this is just me paraphrasing existing theories & perspectives like i do practically every day on this website,
blind to whether anyone even needs them, but it's just about the only thing i like writing. so here is the post:

two presuppositions that underlie the rest of this post: 1. a society's culture is informed by its conditions of
survival; 2. the blandness of a thing is generally inverse to how much it genuinely concerns itself with reality

one idea for why so much of everything is haunted by a sense of uniform blandness is that
it is because the only reality underpinning survival under capitalism is that it is artificial

capitalism sufficiently develops human productive forces as to conceivably free people from survival
obligations, but instead of doing that it traps everyone in a kind of new, higher-order system
of "artificial" survival as re-created & governed by its very own mechanics

this becomes the only reality which informs day-to-day survival, supplanting
other more tangible & direct realities which could have existed in its place

every unit of culture then, whether a work of art or a conversation,
has only this state of artificiality to base itself on if it wants to
refer to any reality that underpins the life it's situated in

this is not exactly to say that culture becomes "infected" by that artificiality & thereby becomes "artificial."
rather, the key idea is that there is only one reality for things to connect to if they want to touch a reality.
it's a limited scope. a narrow target. something that, inevitably, not everything is going to focus on

if it does not base itself on this single thing, it fails to refer to any such reality &
can instead end up referring only to some arbitrary point within the self-contained,
self-justifying rule set & conceptual domain of capitalism, then reflecting its
artificiality, its lack of rooting in anything beyond itself & its failure to ever die

(well, more or less. there are still timeless truths that people can sit & discuss, philosophical issues they can learn & talk about,
things that could be said to apply to existence in general regardless of what economic system we happen to be living under

i feel like sometimes you meet a wonderful person who roots themselves in something very essential

but, still, our culture is obviously not an even split between general philosophy, & then all other cultural objects
which all root themselves in the artificiality of survival under capitalism! & i don't know that a person's
engagement with philosophy, math, science etc. is necessarily to the direct detriment of this phenomenon)

if an element of culture never causally traces back to the (the) reality underpinning the lived
circumstances it was created in in some way then as you try to trace it back all it can do is go in
circles trying to construct meaning out of an endless chain of rootless cultural referents, like
trying to increase the height of a Jenga tower by putting the bottom blocks on top over & over

(& this is all to say nothing of all the inherent functions of the system that mask or at
least ignore how arbitrary its ways of functioning are but that's a whole different story)

& it's not like i'm trying to lay this out as direct causation, it's not like you go to the art gallery
& see a bland painting & think, "this person just didn't think about the artificiality of survival
under capitalism enough, if they had then they'd think of better ideas for what to paint"

maybe they would think of better things to paint, for all we know, but that's not the point. the point is that
what i've described is the unreality & cognitive dissonance that live quietly as the unspoken principle
at the core of things, the abstract systemic gobbledygooky core that conditions everything else

it doesn't impose itself as the absolute rule but it's from that core that the disease kind of oozes out & soaks through
irregularly, imposing itself as a general tendency which manifests to a greater or lesser extent across millions & millions
of lives in a plethora of different particular ways. it's not something you could ever meaningfully map out but it persists
underneath as the ethos that consistently wells up & culturally accumulates in scattered pools & blotches & speckles,
afflicting different human expressions to scant or uncertain or blatant degrees, & potentially affecting whole subcultures
or commonly held temperaments. & it all just creeps & accumulates in these diverse ways for decades & decades

lingering questions:

what do i really mean when i say that capitalism's recreation of the necessity
for survival is "unreal," how can it be unreal if it's what really happened, what
quality do i see as "real" in opposition to that, is it just "not self-justifying" or

if communism happened & fulfilled its general promise to free everyone from survival obligations
what would culture even look like, if it even continued to exist... to what extent does capitalism
actually free up people's capacities for creative expression & to what extent does this
find itself in conflict with blandness mechanisms that deaden those capacities