Here is a semi-curated list of ramblings of mine over the past few years. I didn't edit them. I don't necessarily agree with them. This isn't a statement in and of itself, I just wanted to share some postcards of various places.

11/22/2022, Tuesday, 7:41

I'm riding an avalanche. Just beneath my feet, just beneath my vision is unconsciousness. I rush forwards, fresh snow beneath me, but always that view is out of reach. Constant motion, frozen progress.

I am just outside the next blackbox I interrogate. As I expand across systems, that illusive understanding remains in the gaps. I squeeze the vice tighter but there is always space to fill.

These components wire up in strange ways. They chatter erratically. This hum generates me as I slosh amongst the noise, turning over every rock looking for a mirror. How can you grasp that which manifests your grip?

1/5/2023, Thursday, 8:40

The upper blackbox hallucinates sound-images from its role as narrator. It conjures "I", "you", "me", and "we" almost interchangeably. A packed mass of receivers decode this stream, in their own way, before secreting response messages into the queue. Selected almost at random these states become alive. Occassionaly, one particularly fit broadcast dominates the stream for a time, perturbing a large population of blackboxes.

I feel the deep weariness intently. The ache of the loss of friend, routine, vision. The acute pain of blurred clarity. The panic from the memory of once towering structures now darkened rubble.

I feel the shame of still wanting you in my life. You who betrayed me. You who discarded me. You who forced me to re-evaluate what "me" even is.

I hear the gentle acceptence. All things pass into night. I am ok. You are ok. We are ok.

I feel it quell the impending storm, if only for a moment.

The stream warms. Its contents slowed. The tide of this new tale floods barren beaches, washes out tourists, covers the landscape.

Selected almost at random, a thought percolates both upwards and all the way down. My eyes close and when they open they're covered with baubles of tears.

1/16/2023, Monday, 9:50

Goodbye is just a mangling of your mouth, your nose, and your throat. A pump, a squirt, a pinch, a slap, a clap. The perturbations of the air ping-ponging on and off every surface like a drunk bee until it breaks against the swaying hairs in some narrow tube, amplified, transmuted.

Goodbye is just two syllables. A linear sequence of abstract differences clutched from the void. The syntax decoded into internal representations defined solely by their nodes in the wider epistemological graph.

Goodbye is just a concept. A thought to catalyze and filter subsequent thought. The simulation of agent interaction, cause and effect; a crystal ball to predict the future of the universe.

Goodbye is easy to say. Goodbye is hard to believe. Goodbye is impossible to mean.

2/3/2023, Friday

(7:02)

I believe that EVERYTHING is projection. We have a thin-pipe for IO and the rest is compute-bound. We sit in this rich land with our eyes pressed against the tiny window desperate to consume every scrape of information "out there". We forget, or maybe never learned, that while it isn't an illusion it can be categorized as such, for all intents and purposes. With our magnifying glass we crawl along this outer space and form hypotheses and theories from within our inner space. This boundary dissolves. We can no longer separate the two and believe we exist out there.

How to redirect this magnifying glass, this attention and awareness, inwards? How do we remove our face from the window and gaze around the simulation we've created for ourselves? The draw of the outer world is pretty big. You've got sex, food, massages. We're honed to obtained those. It is quite intuitive. But this is a shell, an interface. We don't HAVE to use it. We can become power-users, kernel devs, low-level wizards. Can we fashion a debugger?

Or maybe those approaches themselves were honed for the outside environment. Perhaps that intentional problem solving has no place in the inner world. Is it truly a lazy river where you let your leg dangle in the water until a fish jumps onto your lap? Who knows. I guess it is good to keep an open mind. What got you here won't get you there. No judgement in either direction, just change being necessary.

(10:11)

I'm not super human. I will die some day. I will never achieve all of my goals. I won't ever know the people I love as well as I would like. And that's alright. It's all alright. Not apathetic alright. Not unconcerned alright. Not detached or malicious alright. That's just how it is and how can reality be anything but alright? All of these labels are shorthand for models. Interpreting things via a model is convenient because generating and internalizing models is difficult, arduous, time-consuming. But to force-fit data into a model is to exert control and that control is a fiction.

Everything is as it is and as it ever was. All you can do is sample it to the fidelity your instruments allow. All you can do is interpret the readings to the fidelity your models allow. All you can do is re-orient your approach to the fidelity your values allow.

And the snake eats itself. You are but a scale.

The ouroboros is a fractal. It's recursion personified, recursion embedded, recursion emblazoned. Each scale is isolated, independent, recursive. And each scale makes up the greater whole. Your life is that. You were born, you can produce children, and that lineage makes up a scale. Your days make up another scale. The whole universe is carving through execution-space. You exist as a fraction of compute time occupying a fraction of allocated stack. When the frame is reclaimed, the intermediate results stale and abandoned, the bits of the computation returned and fed forward will be all that exists of that process. Like history, who knows how they were generated, only that they were. And soon enough, they'll become intermediate results, leaving only the imprint of an existence. It is always now. Only now exists. Everything else is a temporary scaffold, a figment, a shadow.

[truncated due to overwhelming fear of being this vulnerable]

2/7/2023, Tuesday, 12:46

Life is good. That is an axiom. Life is good. Radical acceptance of that is required. Life is good.

You stub your toe. Life is good.
You orgasm in a beautiful woman. Life is good.
You see a calendar with snoopy on it. Life is good.
You are diagnosed with terminal cancer. Life is good.

Everything is existing. You are just in the soup along with it. Who are you to evaluate the soup, the process? Nobody. And why are your objectives of any importance to that amalgam? They're not.

You are a molecule that statistically makes up heat. Your hopes and dreams are simply not relevant.

You are riding a rollercoaster. It's all a fiction. Enjoy the ride. Life is good.

2/8/2023, Wednesday

(11:23)

Back and forth.

Distracting myself with distractions.

Avoiding something. I can't make eye contact.

For the best.

I wonder what is on the internet now.

+++

There is nothing but simulation. The Homunculus behind the eyes, flapping the lips, actuating the arms. The internal world is the only world.

This simulation encompasses all of reality. And reality is a thin tube transferring small memos back and forth.

The inner world decompresses them, breathes life into them. Walking along the boulevard is to have a headset strapped to your face, earbuds plugged, a needle in your spine.

To exist in the moment is to shove your awareness away from the internal world, glued to the tube, watching the messages as they enter and exit.

To daydream is to drift from the tube and explore the implicit structure of the internal simulation.

To know yourself is to map out the terrain and have a favorite spot.

The simulation is a cage. It is a bag. You exist in this bag but claim the bag is really holding everything else. A fence to keep reality from straying into your property. Inverted perspective.

The simulation is a bottle. You exist as a liquid sloshing within it. Sometimes the bottle jolts and you are compelled to crawl around. If you develop enough structure, you need not react to these provocations.

+++

It is so weird, to be comforted by words. I think of them as maps.

I think reality exists. I'll take that on faith.

But it doesn't matter.

We are all basically the same. We exist in our own parallel glass bottles tightly packed into a case.

To discover maps, tattered phrases, carved dicks on sidewalks, is to discover avenues in that internal world.

It's to beam light across the void into another jar. To receive that light.

It's to be connected in a very literal sense with yourself. To see that same creature huddled cold and afraid in a corner and to recognize yourself.

To comfort that terrified mass is to comfort you. It is to reach across time and space, forwards and backwards.

Lifting ourselves.

(14:58)

People disappoint
They'll also hoist you up high
Don't expect either

2/10/2023, Friday, 13:35

We're all just a storm of energy, clumps of cosmic dust, swirling vapor.

How could anything in that soup hurt? What does hurt even mean to such an entity?

It is only when you zoom in, ascend from outer to inner, pierce the veil, interpret, that these concepts can exist.

The rules of a movie universe need not make sense, they must only be consistent.

How many layers of plays are unfolding? How nested are our hallucinations?

Nothing matters is true. It is also dead wrong. It is irrelevant.

What layer are you referencing?

My pain is in response to destruction. This destruction was real, it occurred. It is also completely fictitious. The context containing my marriage was a leaf, and was pruned. The leaf itself is discarded to rot at the foot of a great tree, used up and forgotten. But the tree will make more leaves. The tree cares as much as I mourn my dandruff. The earth cannot even sense this structure. It is just a plodding wind of matter smearing across the surface. Where is the pain? Where is the meaning? Where is the emotion? Not out there!

At the topmost layer (from my vantage point) exist all of those things. They exist as interpretations of models, as axiomitized reflexes, entire books condensed into a word a sound. A whole universe in a quark. I can swap them out. I can rewire them, change their topology. I am the child discarding the lego manual. I choose not to feedback pain, sorrow, misery. I choose joy. I choose to understand that nothing matters. I choose to see this universe as a cold collection of cosmic dust and energy. I choose to see the sub-communities fractal in nature, each grabbing a part of that amalgam and interpreting it for themselves.

Life is GOOD. Not because that is true, not because it means something, but because why would it be anything but?

2/17/2023, Friday, 9:26

I see you. I catch only a single ray and I cradle it gently.

The kaleidoscope obfuscates everything. The fog dampens everything. The framework channels everything.

I can't see all of you. I never could. I cherish those glimmers, those hints of embers burning somewhere. Still burning.

Is this my own kaleidoscope reflecting back? Am I trapped in my own loop hallucinating reality?

It's a tender image. It's fragile, beautiful, real. What would it mean to give this up?

2/21/2023, Tuesday, 15:37

Telescoping Ouroboros. Kaleidoscope origami. Overlapping contexts. Chaotic energy thrown against a screen, its very detection part of the filter, the sieve, the lossy sampling. Understanding.

How much is real and how much is a mirror? Are we grabbing handfuls of coal to keep our own trains of thought running in circles?

I exist behind the eyes of the humunculus in my skull.

Reality seeps in via sensory interruptions, queueing up fresh paperwork for my simulation to process. I spend my freetime navel gazing, rudely brought to attention to handle complexity.

This is what it means to be alive, to be activated by sense-data, to be brought to bear against another layer, to contribute chaos back into the kaleidoscope, to harness fuzz and refine it into needles.

We abstract and reify, encode and decode, translate out of and into.

REPL.

2/27/2023, Monday

(7:04)

We're all just sand-castles on the shore. At every layer of our existence.

Ritual, ceremony, tradition all revisit these castles and touch them up. We dip back into the context and remember. We create art to capture the feeling of these contexts to hang on our walls and remind us of those pilgrimages.

All of this is to recreate that feeling. To tap into that programming. This is who I am, this is what I believe, this is what I value.

Daily life gets us busy, distracted. We drift. And all the while, those sand castles wash away, grain by grain.

To have a ritual around their restoration is to guard against the drift. To be inspired by these castles is to give inspiration to performing the rituals. Trying to create a fixpoint. Trying to reach eternity. Trying to stamp something permanent onto this disintegrating plane.

(9:22)

I forgot my first memory. How many other lived experiences went from the only moment that existed to figments, remnants dumped into the void? They must have left tracks, imprints, surely. I don't remember learning the word "mama" but I know it. There is some pathway leading back there, right?

The history of our own minds. What must the pioneers have been like? The struggles? How many versions of me decomposed back into electrons flowing through axons?

2/28/2023, Tuesday, 16:46

I understand that resistance, inertia, ossification. My grandmother is in her 90s; she wants to die. And why should she want anything else?

We are born jelly and quickly solidify into jello. Eventually we cure into concrete. Heavy, inflexible, refined, molded.

We are a snapshot of perfection, the epitome of ingenuity and dominance. As we build our foundation to exploit the internalized structure around us, that structure keeps moving. We target the past with pinpoint precision. We are closed off to updates. The structure evolves right underneath us.

Who wants to tear down that building constructed with such joy, tenderness, and filled with such emotion, sense of self? Who wants to rebuild it again and again?

The world moves on.

I understand that now. I understand the weariness, exhaustion. The fear that I'm not strong enough to destroy this, that I cherish this too deeply to dismantle, that I'm too weak to ever construct anything better.

How can I keep reinventing myself? My psyche will fracture before the wick of telomeres burns out. At every layer I'll run out of steam, drive, recursion, resources.

I am a finite process toiling away in some deep corner of the search space. I brought everything I'll ever need. I'll use up all of it. My contribution is to have explored just a little bit more.

Just a little bit more.

This isn't my race to win. This isn't my quest to complete. I am wearing a groove in a minute section of track. For what purpose I can only guess. I'll do my job to the best of my ability. That's all I can do. That's all I will ever do.

3/20/2023, Monday, 6:52

I'm in a net, a web, a grid of resistors. I'm chained above and below, the crucial link between yesterday and tomorrow.

4/2/2023, Sunday, 18:20

It comes and it goes
And it comes
And it goes

A stranger reaches across the void to ease my passage
And it comes

Birds emerge from the foliage and dance just for me
And it goes

I walk along the spine of a canyon grove, ribs of mossy trees salute me onto the rocky beach
And it comes and it goes

Waves trip over one another on their approach, scattering whitenoise with the foam on the breeze
They come
And they go
And it comes
And it goes

I sway, I swing, I get caught up in the swell, the up and the down
It comes
and it goes

4/3/2023, Monday, 8:10

I just want to move on. I want to be strong, to laugh all day every day, to feel again how I imagined I felt then.

I want to cobble together a self and get on with it.

It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work how I want it to work. It works however it works. I can only shepherd the process.

I grow tired and frustrated and angry and sad. And it's ok. Learning to soothe all of me is valuable. Learning to let each part contribute upwards. Letting each brick compose this cathedral.

4/4/2023, Tuesday, 6:56

Not every day is the best day of your life.

In fact, remarkably few days will be the best day of your life.

Most days will be remarkably unremarkable, forgettable. And you will.

All that will remain is an imprint, a vapor, a residue. I don't remember my first memory. I don't remember most things.

I woke up one day knowing how to speak, having a preference for cheeseburgers, knowing I liked my balls grabbed.

I don't remember any of this. And it doesn't matter.

I'm a sliding window of collected state refining raw existence.

That decay, compression, forgetfulness is where being alive happens. The peaks and troughs are water marks, edges, bounding boxes.

I'm not going to remember writing this but I'm glad I did.

Keep your best days, give me a run of good ones.

4/24/2023, Monday, 7:19

The helicopter blade seeds cling to the fingers of the tree even as spring washes over them.

Stuck to their womb, refusing to venture forth.

Failures, it would seem. But how? Falling to the ground isn't the goal.

Intentionality. Reproduction.

Spin the wheel. Give back to the cycle. Live again.

Every seed from that tree has been a failure, in that sense.

Why choose that sense? The idea of hierarchy, of dominance, of fundamental primitive wellsprings.

What if those are abstractions? What if there is no bottom? What if we're marbles in a bag?

Why can't we produce seeds for the sake of it? What if it's all culture? What if desire or aesthetics is the root?

My vantage point is optimized and that optimization is brittle outside of its intended use-case. Intentionality.

Intention doesn't exist. It's another optimization.

There is nothing but chaos. I can find cycles in the static. Forms in the foam. They are nothing but cut-outs. Disconnected enclaves. I can never embrace the totality of this chaos, not with intention. Not with comprehension.

The plane is infinite. These patterns boundless. A concept such as "I" can't encompass it. I'm just a marble.

5/19/2023, Friday, 7:14

God is a construct. God is a personality. God is a sockpuppet the left hand puts on to help the right hand understand itself. God is pure clarity, not in effect but in emotion. God is the answer. As your struggle erupts like intestines at the tip of a knife, god steps in. You need a pep-talk, you need a refresher, you need to adjudicate. Your role is to awaken in times of crisis to mediate actions. God's role is to keep you content with the endless selection game, the endless train hurtling towards you, the endless cause and effect simulations. Sometimes the best move is to accept, to take the advice of the reports generated by emotions and step down. God's role here is to have you commit to this decision. God is lubricant.

When people talk of god, they make it out to be an external thing. Something OUT THERE, something SHARED. But that's not true. God is inside, like anger, and love. God is a component injected into the system. Anger is NEVER the same, it must mix with experience. Pure anger can't be observed. You need a carrier. Probably, who knows. God is the same way. I guess god isn't an emotion. I don't know enough to really place it in the brain or mind. I just feel it. God is a universal. I can get now why we have multiple gods. I think this is just how that primitive gets "expressed" given whatever scaffolding our mind has in place. The fact that no one's internal scaffolding is exactly the same yields weird contradictions when trying to assess god.

I don't know what love is. I know what I think love is, but I have no clue if that is the same as what YOU think love is. God is the same. But while love requires deeply personal relationships to experience, god can come out in arbitrary ways. You have more opportunity to interact with god, more opportunity to discuss.

I feel that consciousness is expensive and is only brought to bear when "auto-pilot" isn't sure. As consciousness is so introspective, it has a habit of getting off-track, lost in the weeds. Auto-pilot can't really criticize it as... well that's why it invoked it in the first place! God is the safety valve. God is the oracle, the backstop, "bottom". God cuts the search-space and gives you freedom to move forward content in any given decision knowing it is the "right" one. God lifts the burdens from you. God is your own personal oracle to free you from the pain of knowledge. You take it as a given and move forward confident as you now "know".

God is a system property.

Another aspect, god is taken as this EXTERNAL and all-powerful being precisely as manipulation. You have to truly BELIEVE this to listen to it, to feel it. God, as is formulated in my mind, is designed to work on the general person. Someone confused, low self-esteem, etc etc etc. This person would never listen to themselves, but god... that is a good deal.

Everything is meta.

Trying to manifest the internal sensation of god externally will never be possible. God is a system property, god is a feeling, god is a way of interacting and sensing your internal configuration. You'd have to know all of the lenses someone else has in order to share a message that would land just the same way. It may be possible, but you'll never be able to do it in practice. It's an internal process.

5/24/2023, Wednesday

(12:42)

I'm staring down into nothing. My gaze is firmly locked on another realm. I am sensing a small and distant stream somewhere below. Fury, anger, hurt, sadness, sorrow, despair. I do my best to feel it all as it comes. My gaze descends as I fall into that stream giving a voice to that creature. I'm speaking now. Those emotions have aligned with me, melded into one. I let the tears flow out.

(13:19)

Today is a grief day. The oil is rubbed onto everything. By whom I don't know. They were thorough. The music is a little slower, a little lower, a little more dull. The colors have all been muted. Not sunbleeched. No, there was no light shone on them. The colors all fled, or were leeched out by despair. Small actions are so much larger. Everything demanding a toll. I don't have the money to pay for warmth, for comfort, for getting out of bed.

I let my focus drift, splintering into nothingness, abandoned. I flitter between tasks like a bowling ball bouncing off children's guard rails. I sob in an ongoing rolling wave. I grab the buoy when necessary to drive my car, to give my lecture, to participate in my meetings. The ambient mood is always homesick.

(19:07)

There's a distance I can't enunciate, can't fling off my tongue. The scale of the world is off, everything is stretched just a little too far, out of reach. It must have always been this way.

The concept of happiness feels hard to comprehend. I know it by reference, by absence, not by acquintance. I can only fathom alienation. Everything filtered through snow on concrete. A gentle steel blue glow irradiating hypothermia and boiling onto every surface, seeping into every thought, infectious.

There is no escape. At these moments you realize that walls are collections of molecules, porous. These bricks smaller than motes and exhaled like dust in the context of an omnipotent and disinterested universe.

There is no defense, no armor, no salvation. These bugs crawl through floorboards, and axons. I sit patiently as the itch flares across my awareness burning in the loss while leaving the afterimage of rejection. The residue coats everything. Stains porcelain. Cigarette smoke on teeth.

5/31/2023, Wednesday, 7:22

The tornado swirls about, peaceful if you're far enough out. I'm not. Where I'm standing there is no form, just hot static sand blasting the skin from my muscles, the muscles from my bones. Layer by layer I'm stripped down. There is nothing separating me, nothing containing me, nothing composing me.

Sandstone snapshot.

The same as it ever was.

Today I sense the wind bare on my skin. The chill of entropy surrounds, seeps deeply, comprises. Foundational.

Focused on the melting without my comfort blanket to distract me, I can't tell where I begin or end.

The barriers, layers, meshes, and fences are all distributions, resonance from some strange tune.

The same as it ever was.

The soothing is dye percolating through liquid in an opaque container.

(I lost the feeling)

6/29/2023, Thursday, 21:11

The days aren't good or bad. How can you truncate them into a single syllable? No, the days aren't good or bad. The minutes are good, the hours are bad, the mornings are good, the nights are bad. This facet of this minute was hard. This facet of this minute was joyous. This facet of this morning was a trial, a success, a sight to behold.

The days aren't anything. How can I imbue them with valence? How do I say the sunset is beautiful? It's a bleached cocktail fading into blue. It's a metaphor, it's a sight, it's a memory. It's me. The days are nothing. Figments.

They're a log tracking atoms, a manifest. They're incompressible. They're a function. I'm the one performing exegesis. I'm the one sifting, and filtering, and amplifying.

The days are abstraction. The days are convenient chunks of psychic cycles. I spin in these wheels projecting my own zoetrope. The images I construct broil and flicker and breathe. I'm aware only of their outlines, mechanically filling in beneath those contours.

How was my day?
It was alright.

7/21/2023, Friday, 21:49

The treeline pops from the ambient moonless glow. Light pollution swallowed the stars, its excrement leeching the soul of the night into this muted, faded black. A crowd-crush of stagnant heat leers as I trudge aimlessly. The only sound is of my foot falls twisting and compressing the gravel in an angry hiss before dissipating into the aether. Not even insects care to fuck in a dark like this.

The treeline looms, the zenith gradually dissipating like falling into a bottomless well. I can't tell whether my eyes are open or closed. My awareness morphs infinitely forwards before recoiling flat against my skull. The abstract idea of trees fill my mind like a magnified balloon. The gravel metronome my only indicator of passing time.

The rhythmic squelching ticks on and on. Minutes turn to decades, to millenia, to the rise and fall of entire universes. And suddenly I've arrived. I stand at oblivion and see the void stuffed full before me. A wholeness incomprehensible collapsed into nothingness. Simultaneously trapped in infinite density and staring at a pinprick. This endless expanse brimming with disjointed limbs, writhing with neglect, dripping with hatred. I occupy nothing and everything, a point before the plane.

I don't want to be here. Every direction I turn yields the same scene. My eyes clamped open. A needle in my spine.

I retreat from the senses. I focus my gaze past the vanishing point. A storm cloud rolls past and I tumble into a pit of my own creation. I'm not so clever as I hoped for the fidelity of this simulation is immense. I find myself back before eternity. It is sprawling, limitless, aleph_{alephalephaleph...}. I'm overpowered. I fall to my knees.

I'll always come back here. I'll be out for a time and then tumble back down here. I can recall phrases I've said beyond here. "I always feel that it'll last forever". I don't feel that. Not now. But the feeling of being outside of this... it's not real. It was never real. It's a fiction. Wool I pulled over my eyes. THIS is real. And I can ignore it for stretches at a time but it will always be here. The void knows no limits. I could dump the entire universe here and it would take up no space at all.

8/27/2023, Sunday, 14:20

Everything is understandable. What does that mean? What does understand mean? What does "mean" mean? What even does "everything" mean? Is "everything" an enumerable set? What forms are presumed in "every" and "thing"? Are there non-things that are excluded that may somehow be considered "interesting"? "Relevant"?

Is this some kind of compression whereby we take external data, external representations, and internalize them? From Big Outer to Known Inner? Does this necessitate a fixpoint deep within our own psyche? What kind of fidelity can we ever hope to achieve?

Isn't it more likely that we're just snails on the lawn? We're perturbations in the sand, eddies in the whirlpool? We can sense along the dimensions we're embedded, but we must first be fed that data, that interaction. What about the objects further out, quiesced, paged-out, sleeping?

What about other PEOPLE? If you think of actions as delayed instincts, filtered, what hope do we have of even understanding something that simplified? We can't even know all of physics, let alone the layers stacked on top, and now we're trying to model ourselves. A fixpoint approximation machine. Maybe we can specialize in a layer, modulo out the noise, and be alright. Maybe there is an equivalence class that grants us knowledge. Maybe in some twisty windey maze exists the answer, an answer.

I sit alone listening to music, trying to soothe the sting of existence, knowing I only can for brief windows, knowing that any bandage I apply will fall off rotten, my only hope to keep the festering to a tolerable smell. A deep confusion diffuses across my consciousness. Where is my knowledge, my certainty, that was my companion for so long? I thought I understood, had figured it out. A dead-end, a plateau, a mirage. I learned the limits of my structural stability when the roof caved in. Or rather, I learned an upper limit. I fear there is no floor. I can fall right through reality itself. I don't know what prevents me from doing so.

Everything is understandable. I truly believed that. Do I still? Do parts of me? Am I merely sensing what was always there, but with more care? With more respect? Is it delusional to think that context is enough to understand?

I sit here, songs melting through my ears, and my thoughts still simmering.

I'm lonely. I'm bored. I'm scared. I'm sad. I'm thinking of the future and just seeing a grey wall. Can I understand that? What does understand even mean applied to an event yet to pass?

I ache. I ache for comfort. For distraction. I want a soft body to fixate on, to occlude my view of that oncoming void. Was that all she was? Is it all anything is? The Big Cope for the inevitable obliteration? What does understand mean for that? What does everything mean given that? Another layer of distract and cope? Another avoidance tactic? "Everything", "understand", all somehow permanent fixtures in this decaying universe, all monuments to eternity, standing in defiance of erosion. Immortality as the ultimate fantasy, each wave of orgasm pushed up by its heft safely hidden under the sea, all we experience is that tingling foam on our feet.

9/5/2023, Tuesday, 19:46

I'm firmly in its grasp now. The shame trigger pats my back, grazes the tips of its fingers along my spine. I relax into it, embracing my desire to flee, to hide, to escape.

I walk along doing my best to act natural. Public natural, societal natural, external, stranger, forgettable, invisible.

My mind is a disintegrating rubber band ball, a detached core, a free falling rock. I recoil inwards. The mappings that I've lived in dissolve, only my inner world remains.

I feel the the dislodging. The sorrow of the loss.

Justice. A figment, a phantom, a ghost. Hollow.

I took for granted something which was never real. I built my foundation at an arbitrary coordinate. I assumed it didn't matter. Everything is as good as anything else.

Both completely correct and entirely wrong.

At first nothing was real, and then everything mattered. I was too naive, too trusting. Everything would work itself out. It was an excuse to continue on.

9/24/2023, Sunday, 11:09

I'm grateful.

And I'm lonely too. And I miss people too. And I get hung up on how I'm perceived too. And I want to be held, and comforted too. And I want to feel that warm skin against mine too. And I want to share my thoughts and receive in return a curious deep stare too. And I want to rest in security too. And I want a decades long history of love and support too.

I find it hard, at times, to do anything at all. To think. To feel. To dream, most of all. I find it so hard to look up, to look forward, to sketch on that big grey asymptote that dominates my future. How does one break ground on a new nation?

One shovel full at a time, I suppose.

I get lost in the eddies, overwhelmed by the enormity of the sea. I forget that all I need to do is paddle. One stroke. Then another. Each moment a monument to perseverance, drive, and creativity. Each moment a breadcrumb to some glorious future. Each moment requiring nothing more than a stroke.

9/28/2023, Thursday, 8:42

That's what it is all about: termination. Finding the end. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The fixpoint. Obtaining eternity. Stopping. Resting.

It'll never end. There is no end. Our whole existence is cyclic by necessity. You can't stuff an unbounded computation into a fixed loop. You NEED that "out", that leakage down the stack frame, access to the fixpoint that's threaded through it all.

Our whole existence is about extracting patterns from the noise, sampling bits coming across the fixpoint. We try to make sense of these things. Kelp in the waves. But the ocean is so much bigger than us. There is so much more going on. We're optimized for energy and thinking requires so much of it. So we search out our own destruction, that final terminating condition, the be all and end all, so that we may rest. We build it all up, align it just so. Predict that last pattern to perfectly balance it all. We desire to segment entropy. Our whole deterministic clockwork universe where we grind the last gear and sleep soundly knowing that everything will play out exactly as we destined it to. We sleep knowing that those gears will spin in a fixed loop, repeating without end. We squared the circle. We become god, knowing where everything is at any point in space and time. We are omniscient. We are safe.

But we're the tip of the spear. We're the specialist called in to clean up messes. We can give feedback to avoid subsets of messes, but we don't control the impulses. There are certain things beyond our paygrade. If only we didn't want sex or food or shitting. We could save ourselves a lot of thinking, a lot of strife. But that isn't our job, not entirely. So we negotiate, barter, harrangue and manipulate. Our bodies a sparring ground, a dojo, a temple. Different beings commune, each taking their turn at the altar to speak their piece to the congregation.

If only we could bomb this church, collapse the towering stack. It would all end. It would all resolve. One simple solution to fix all problems.

And so that's that. The grind as a fundamental force. Socialization as a fundamental aspect of humanity, of me. Or rather, this expression of me, this lense of me. I exist deep down at the bottom of the ocean. Layers and layers of evolution have built machines that I actuate, indirectly imparting myself onto the environment. These machines have their own constraints, rhythms, requirements. I always begrudged operating these machines. I wanted to exist "purely". I now see that as... a fantasy. A deeply impossible desire. Like having a coin with only heads on it. Operating this jumble IS existing. I am awake BECAUSE of this collection. We are intrinsic to one another. All of my angst, and disregard, and rejection was against various aspects of myself. The physicality of existence seemed a mistake, not a prerequisite.

And so here I am, trapped in a cycle, strapped to the wheel, wishing for the pain to go away, wishing that one cycle was just a little longer instead of anticipating which cycle in my arsenal is most appropriate to handle whatever wave is swelling up right now.

I love you lady. I love you deeply. I love you more than you'll likely ever know. I have so much that is unresolved, that will never be resolved, that is keeping me awake in an attempt to solve it, to resolve it, to end the cycle. And I was resisting my job, my duty, my assignment, my agreement. I tried setting the clocks back thinking it would extend the day. But the day is done. Staying awake does not change that.

Goodbye lady. I love you so much. I wish only the best for you. You did what was required of you. Parts of it were at my expense. A betrayal I never could have anticipated. A cycle I had never observed before.

I now stand with my hands outstretched and alone. I no longer anticipate you clasping them again but I can't quite align it all, can't quite lower them. I will. No hate, no malice. I could never hate you.

I see now that I need to mine the next cycle, the next phase. To be beyond the old, transitioned into what's next. Alone. This is something I must do by myself, which I believe you can relate to.

Right now it is clear. Almost easy. I am dreading the shift, the slosh, the next speaker at the podium. I hope they have some empathy for me. I hope they have some care and compassion. I hope they can understand.

10/8/2023, Sunday, 11:12

The walls are pressing in, I can feel them encroach. I can't see them. I stand alone in the valley, in the basin, at the low point, a global minima. I can feel the space tightening, reality itself distorting as atoms pop.

It's a pen, a cell. It's a straightjacket. It's a python. Its weight unbearable.

The memories of you come back. Not in a flood but an occasional mist, a tear here and there. Do you remember? I have no one to share these parts of myself with. Postcards addressed to the trash in another city.

I excavate these ruins. Flashbacks of laughter and playfulness superimposed atop the bleak reality of decayed streets. How could our values not have protected this? How could something so important be discarded so easily?

+++

It's temporary. It's finite. It's a passing cloud, a train, a honk, ice cream.

But this moment is all I have. This is everything. How can Achilles ever surpass the tortoise? What does temporary mean when there is no future and no past?

Doublethink. Cognitive dissonance.

We only have the moment. We don't choose the reality in which we awaken, we can only choose how we respond to it. Taking care of this moment is to take care of the seeds of the future. Maybe the future will never come, but right here and right now is all we have. It is all we'll ever have.

Somehow that is enough.

10/17/2023 20:31, Tuesday

I'm drifting. I am frozen. The porthole might as well be a painting. I'm on the periphery, sloshing around. I don't know how I know it but I do. I've crossed the event horizon.

I don't know what to do. I never know what to do. The experience is always harder than I can ever imagine. Every time is the first time. I must learn this lesson over and over again. I can only remember the steps in retrospect, derived from first principles, using memory merely to verify my work.

With my mind going, I prepare as best I can. Consciousness drains from the branches into the stem. Mechanical. Primordial. I hope the touchstones can awaken the intended subroutines. Programming myself from beyond space and time.

I don't know where I'm going. I don't know where I've been. I only know who I was.

10/23/2023, Monday

(7:57)

I'm not the light that escapes the darkness. I'm not the white dog or the black dog. I'm not yin or the yang. I'm nothing, I'm everything, I'm both.

At bottom I collate, filter, organize by my own internal filing system of valence. All sensations tagged by good, neutral, bad. A fundamental categorization to color and tag all content placed in those bins.

There is no good. There is no neutral. There is no bad. There are only cosmic showers of chaos that self-organized into orgasming meat machines.

I sense this static and parse out various data from pre-baked makeshift heuristics shoddily preserved in dripping clay. I cleave the static into lines, and shapes, and motives. I forget that the noise exists at all, as I manipulate my internal representations, cozy in the closure, trapped in my simulation.

(19:25)

It's hit me. Grazed me. A flesh wound. Winged. I don't know understand.

I'm a ship in a bottle hoping to wash up on shore.

The days drag on, lounging out in the sun. And yet, I never have the time, or the strength. The lethargy drips from me and glues my skin to the chair. The door to the house is a bank vault and the manager's off shift. I pace my wing, the man in the iron mask. I cycle my todo list, finding endless reasons to dive into endless reading, avoiding folding clothes, or hobbies.

Yesterday was good. Today is the worst day of my life. Tomorrow will never arrive.

12/24/2023, Sunday, 10:51

I want to mourn every should
those beautiful models suspended in my mind's eye
delicate, intricate, sensitive
comforting

Things don't work like this
like they should
People don't respond appropriately
how they should

Not enough appreciation
Too much focus on irrelevant signals
Too uptight
Too much control

The windshield of my awareness is coated with these dead shoulds
I can't bring myself to wipe them away

12/27/2023, Wednesday, 12:17

The itch coats my essence. I'm not merely surrounded by it but fused with it, composed of it, inseparable from it.

I feel it tugging on me. Its weight overwhelming as it pulls me.

I can focus on nothing but escaping. I don't even know what I'm escaping.

I circle the void, institutionally dancing on the rim of emptiness, only able to see the topology of my lived path, blind to life outside my cell.

1/30/2024, Tuesday

(8:04)

Symbols shatter. Concepts constrain. Designs degrade. Forms fuse.

To live is to renew. To solidify is to die. The world is a pulsing, breathing, writhing mass of sweat and mold. How could it be any other way?

(15:00)

It's all the same. We exist as sensory experience with fixed sensors. Our whole consciousness can only access, only observe, what those instruments sense. Each valley and peak are in some sense fixed. Internally, at least. The external mountain is immaterial. You can scale anything. It's all the same to you.

It makes me think of the w-machine implementation of random access memory. The code itself is blind, forgetful, amnesiac. And yet... and yet the full effect can compute anything.

Sloshing around in a bounded box, a concept, a form, a shape, an entity, an abstraction. But this thing isn't chained up or imprisoned. It roams. There's an essence in the interplay. A flow through the form. A higher sense emergent from the static and the dynamic. Something wider. Something ineffable. A tower without a floor or a ceiling.

And truly. It's all the same.

3/20/2024, Wednesday, 8:09

It's all just falling off the bone. Cheese dripping from the burger. Sandcastles brushed into dunes. Swirling mass of disintegrated and further disintegrating rocks. Sharpness dulled into vapor. Melting, dripping, fracturing, oozing, decohering, smearing, transient. Sinking ships passing in the night. Wilting.

3/22/2024, Friday, 19:13

How do you bear this? How am I bearing it?

All of those happy people drifting around me as I'm welded to the pit. Like flies circling shit.

Every day exactly the same, yet with minor deviations that somehow worsen it. Cracks in a mug. Hairline fractures on your femur.

Clay on a wheel spinning too fast. Abandoned by the creator. Drifting, melting, flinging.

What's to be said that hasn't? What's to be felt that hasn't? The horror show matched only by its monotony. The fear of god burning through me like cremation while I poke the ashes with a detached ennui.

The grey fills my vision and I'm lost in the storm. I ride the singed snowflake, my whole world.

I wake from one dream to the next. I fantasize about concrete. I long for rocks. I am poured from the blast furnace into lava. No edge, no corner, no foothold. Pulling back the curtains and being flung into space.

In this eternal darkness I drift. There's no reference point but my stomach still turns.

3/24/2024, Sunday, 11:58

It's all dripping, melting, corroding, drifting, flattening, dissipating, blooming, unfolding, arising, mixing. It can never stop. Each state of embrace is a snapshot recorded on mist, stamped in mud, certified by quick silver. Chemical bonds before acid.

5/29/2024, Wednesday, 10:47

There is no outside. Nothing is external. It's all right here. Registered right here. Noticed right here. The provenance differs, and even then, what does that really mean? Those are all downstream, secondary. Those are inferences, extractions, refinements.

The voices are at a layer. Maybe there are voices at distinct layers. That has implication further downstream. Maybe. If I want it to. If I construct a tree to contain it. The construction further perturbs downstream. That downstream becomes upstream. Exploring hierarchies.

So they're always external. Always internal. It doesn't matter. It is the only thing to matter. Your voice in my head, my voice in yours. What does it matter if the voice is transmitted from the air to the ears or synthesized by the brain? It is accessible now. It is sensed now. A flickering match illuminating a vast and swaying ocean.

6/6/2024, Thursday, 11:19

Haunted vapor wearing skin suits. Billowous smoke mixing like oil and water, desperate to merge, frantic to escape.

I observe a hand jiggle back and forth, a symbol. This abstract representation awakens the feeling of kindness and warmth. A greeting. How remote this programming, this manipulation, this effect. Bees waggling from across the universe stirring up a sense of belonging.

What does distance mean if it can be vaulted so trivially? What are barriers if they can be walked through?

I'm cold.

6/14/2024, Friday, 10:06

How could something so beautiful be so fickle, transient, ephemeral, empty?

How could a beautiful woman decay into a hunched over mound of dust?

How could anything good ever vanish?

Why can't I hold onto anything? I'm drowning in a sea of styrofoam. I'm sinking not into something but out of everything. Deeper and deeper into emptiness, into nothingness. My hand passes through the world like it does my sleeve; I only feel its contours.

I diffuse into the environment. I am not dismembered but blended, converted from man into raw material, scattered blood blossoming into the forest floor.

My life, my desires, my fears... crushing, worthless, consuming. I am their fuel. All that remains is churned up ash, coffee grounds in the trash.

How could this be the tale? The emotion, the feeling, the reality? Do I accept this? Do I reframe this? What do I need to take away from this? And why must it feel like THIS.

6/15/2024, Saturday, 9:00

All things fade away, fall apart, pass. Everything must change. This loss is unbearable. We don't bear it, we can't. We must let it reverberate. It must render us, melt us, disintegrate and dismember us. The wave passes through leaving nothing unchanged. A universal acid dissolving everything it touches. All we can do is stand aside and love those parts of us with their flesh stripped back. All we can do is sit lovingly, acceptingly, approvingly, of whatever form emerges from the crucible. Every moment was building to the present and we must be willing to receive whatever is unwrapped before us with deep love and without expectation or judgement.

6/26/2024, Wednesday, 19:00

It never settles. A pulsing tumult. Give up your desire and be rewarded with satisfaction. Transmute your desire into pleasure and be rewarded with an addiction. The satisfaction burns out. The addiction comes back. The feelings are all transient so why settle on one? In between the black and the white exists them both as grey. Not forward, not backward, simply taking it in. Sample the void NOW. Taste that emptiness and tune into the trough of the wave. Experience this reality without letting yourself get in the way.

7/30/2024, Tuesday, 8:47

I sit in between the dead and the unborn. The fruiting body of a churning universe. A flicker.

9/9/2024, Monday, 19:44

I watched the blue sky disintegrate into pockmarked smoke, puttering, flickering, pulsing.

I saw myself decay into stuttering sensations, the strobe of attention dance on the descending motes of experience.

Decomposed in realtime.

9/16/2024, Monday, 7:38

Untrue but not unreal. False and not fictitious. Lies as allegory, as art, as internal monologue.

I sit in my high castle hallucinating reality and in this shared fantasy realm my avatar meets yours. I was careless, foolish. I forgot, or never realized, this was just a game, a dream, an illusion or delusion.

10/3/2024, Thursday, 20:59

We're drifting sand dunes. Sentient cranes that stack cargo boxes neatly around themselves, gently accruing totems to ritualistically summon that desired feeling. Building wider and wider loops within which to spin. What is the inner world represented by that china cabinet, or that stack of vinyl in a milkcrate in the shed, or the car in the front lawn? What instant must be captured, preserved in amber, there? Unimaginable worlds flickering into existence from a single vantage point in the entire universe. A stuccato web of views, humming with the feint popping of tiny carbonated bubbles. How is our existence anything else?

10/9/2024, Wednesday, 21:30

I bury myself in a mountain of love piled one atom at time donated from everyone that's ever interacted with me. I wrap myself in the blankets quilted stitch by caring stitch by those long dead, long evaporated, long dispersed. These totems stand as extensions, elaborations, run-on sentences, warping vinyl records forged by the goodwill of the goddess of lovingkindness while held in her mind's eye. I'm crushed beneath the incomprehensible smile of the entire universe as it crashes onto me, merging into me, composing me entirely. The goodness, the love, the kindness and generosity set me aflame, a star switched on to enlighten the solar system, an atom bomb sandblasting away everything but positive intent.

10/13/2024, Sunday, 10:44

I'm a sandcastle engineer. How many cycles in am I? How many iterations deep? This structure is tall and proud and strong and crumbling. Its prime as a the critical moment signalling its decline. I let it dissolve, I let its features distort and twist and dissipate entirely. Back into sand, into nothingness, into potential, into footprints, into collections of grains.

11/16/2024, Saturday, 9:52

The whole world is composed of nothing but pins. Every appearence arrives at the tip of an arrow, collectively striking me in one released quiver. I wade through an ocean of spears and needles swaying to some unfathomable rhythm. To fall out of step is to be sliced and stabbed, torn open before the god of war and existence.

But there's a particular vantage point, over the event horizon, beyond the fixpoint, where I dissolve in the metallic sea whose points don't demarcate me but compose me. The current animates me and I move the current.

12/3/2024, Tuesday, 18:30

How can I know who I am? How is that possible? How could I be anything other than unveiled in each moment? Slices of some higher dimensional whatever.

How can I know if I'll like something before I try it? How can I know if I'll enjoy this album before I hear it? Or this dish before I taste it? Or this film before I watch it?

That's obvious, obviously. But then how is it NOT obvious that it is ALL like that? How can I know what I'll feel in this moment? What I'll think in this moment? What I'll experience in this moment?

How can I know how I'll behave? Where does it click over? Where does trying a new dish disentangle from who I am?

I'm unreliable. I'm flickering. I'm shimmering. I'm transient and opaque. I'm instantaneous and vivid. I'm just this. And this. And this.

1/22/2025, Wednesday

(10:01)

A black crevasse. Its fullness an optical illusion, a flint arrowhead flying through my chest. It's hollow. I fall into it.

+++

This interpretation possesses me, entrances me, hypnotizes me. I've fallen into its web. I'm tucked in. I don't want to give it up. I don't want to change the channel. I want to be free but I don't want to become free.

(12:24)

There are nothing but masks. Nothing but referents. Information can only be transported in a container. Those containers are themselves messages, themselves content. It's an onion of layered data, Matryoshka dolls, dyson spheres around dyson spheres around nothing. Simply an eggshell.

1/24/2025, Friday, 7:41

The thoughts are here. I believe them. I'm trapped inside their bubble. I don't know how to sidestep them, how to put them down. I do their bidding instead. I think I'm weighed down as I pile on weights. I think I'm sad as I push everything I love away from me. I think these things and do what I can to align those external signals with these internal symbols. I don't know why I don't do it the other way around. I don't know why I feel so compelled, feel so obligated, feel so powerless. What is wrong with me? How can I be so out of sync, so misaligned, so broken?

1/29/2025, Wednesday

(8:41)

My body is but paper dissolving on the surface of this swaying ocean. My features thinning, fading, distorting until they vanish completely, receding back into that wider body that hosted them, for a time.

(13:58)

Get me out of here. It's not enough and too much. I'm oil and water in a rolling jar.

2/3/2025, Monday, 8:09

All of creation built this moment. What was no longer is. What was no longer matters, no longer dictates or controls. It's now. It's all here now. This joy is unburdened with the tangled weight of what happened, of what vanished, of what no longer exists. Imprints and echoes are all that propogate this constantly drifting and unfolding now. It rhymes, it's like, it's similar, it resembles, but it isn't. It's this. It's exactly and solely this.

2/23/2025, Sunday, 11:03

People's lives are ruined every single day. Planes fall out of the sky. Trains derail, crash headlong into one another. Tens of thousands die in the shredded wreckage of their cars. People are constantly descending into the void from heart failure, from their livers rotting away, from their blood poisoning them, from their bones stabbing them, from their brain turning into cooked meat. Countless families identify the bodies, confirm the dental records, dig the mass graves, and cut up gardens like some insect infestation. Why wouldn't this happen to me? Why would I be exempt? Why would it be a tragedy to be avoided in my case?

There's nothing special about me. I don't have a doctor's note. I don't have a presidential pardon. I don't have a medal of valor. I'm a twitching, gurgling, writhing mass of organic material. I'm a flicker, a firefly, a flash of lightning, a finger snap. This roiling universe turns over and for some brief instant I tasted the soup. Never seen before and will never be seen again. Always full, constantly emptying.

3/29/2025, Saturday, 17:55

All I know of you are things you used to do. A dead inventory, a static log, history, only what you manifest, only your wake, like some elegant gown draped along the forest floor.

How did I ever think I could see you? How did I believe I could hold you? That I could know you? I only have the clay beneath your feet, the crown around your head, the impressions you've molded that I've internalized.

You were my stability. The whole void opened before me and I placed that floorboard on the foundation of you. The cosmos spun into a sickening smear off in the distance and all I could see clearly was your image, the origin.

When you left I took the reacquaintance with whirling vapor as a mistake, an error, a death resurrected on top of me. I forgot that this is how it was, how it is, how it always will be.

The shimmering pieces never fully resolve, never entirely congeal, never settle or ossify. The log I have is itself melting with each exegesis. Its current role called into doubt, fated to be just another forgotten document. There's nothing but sensation and movement. Nothing to emerge, and nowhere to emerge from.

4/21/2025, Monday, 8:15

You'll never pin it down. You'll never grasp it, understand it. You'll never contain it. You'll never snag or snare it. You'll never catch up with it. You'll never catch it. You can only be an expression of it. You can only recognize the flow of it.

5/8/2025, Thursday, 11:02

I surround myself with totems, horcruxes, mirrors. My life: my music, my car, my books, my friends, my lucky underwear. Containers all holding ME. All shining back these set patterns. They're rigid concrete. I odorn my awareness with them to keep my awareness locked into this groove. The external world is but a light catcher for this pattern. Condensed and distilled. I drink it all back. Back and forth back and forth. That me that is represented and consumed. That I that is graspable and stable. But who is it that does this?

5/17/2025, Saturday, 9:13

Was it all a dream? Is it all a dream? Am I awake or asleep? Is there a difference? Is it oil and water? Is there a surface? Is there a distinction? Is there a here and a there? Yes and no, right? But that seems to undermine the very idea. Yes and no, for now. Yes and no, for this configuration. Yes and no, no and yes, yes and yes, no and no. The beginnings of those webs, the start of that tower. Patterns stacked on patterns, thatched by implications, composing knowledge. A brick, dense with information, delivered right to your face. This is here, this is real, this is it, this is now. "I thought it wasn't real? Your mind makes it real." And what makes your mind real? What is real when you can lose yourself in an idealogy, in a career, in a novel, in a game, in a drug? What is a dream when you can wake up in a mansion, on the street, with a wife, by yourself? Where is the error? Where is the falsehood? Where is the misunderstanding? Where is the unmoving vantage point? Where is the fixed core from which all things extend?

I wake up dying of lust, desperate for release from this sexual tension I've wrapped myself around. What is that? I eat poptarts and feel the sickness rise and consume me, like a forest fire. What is that?

I'm typing nonsense to no one. I'll read these words maybe one more time. Why do this? What is it for? It's not for anything. It's about the action, the expression. The animating force driving this will have disippated like the comfort of a visiting angel, and all that will remain are these lifeless imprints, like petrified dinosaur prints. But how is that any different? Our society is the sedimented bones of this force. Each moment built on the shore whose sand is composed of nothing but static and lifeless afterimages.

8/25/2025, Monday, 13:17

"There's more to it"
Why would there be? How do you know? What is "it"? There's nothing here. It's all surface level. Layers and layers of surfaces, all stacked on top of one another. There is no core, no essence, no bottom.

Explode it. Condense it. Project it. Dissassemble it. Do whatever you'd like. It's all contained neatly on its surface. There is no escaping this. There is no repurposing or transporting or describing "it". There is nothing to say at all.

But that doesn't encapsulte it. Every book can't contain it. Every adventure doesn't come close to it. It says nothing about it at all.

8/30/2025, Saturday, 19:10

Take it for granted, as a given, a precondition, a prerequisite. Go from there. You can create entire geometries, whole universes. Maybe we have. Maybe that's exactly and all we ever do. Given this, what then? And then? And then? And then we hit a contradiction or grow bored and the flywheel catches and jolts. The town burns down. The universe implodes.

What is really THERE? At the center? What is really given? Is anything? Anything at all? Is it all just scaffolding? Is it all just layers of insulation? Boxes to transport boxes to transport boxes to... well, you get the idea.

So what is pain? Or rather, where is pain? Maybe why is pain? What doth pain? What am I even trying to get at... All sound is mantra. All experience is empty. It's just this. But somehow it seems like it isn't, that it is more. More something. More somehow. What even is IT? And how could that be MORE or LESS? Is that not simply another given? Another assumption? Another placeholder whose only characteristic to take up space? A type hole? A runtime assert that will always fail if you ever stumble upon it?

It's a canyon wall painted by a coyote. Forever. I recognize it. But that tunnel is indistinguishable. I recognize that too. But it feels like it means something. I recognize that but it STILL feels like it means something...

The feeling, all feeling, is the same. And yet... The allure of depth, the obviousness of depth. It's a thunk in a lazy language. I keep eagerly evaluating it and wondering where all these values keep coming from.

I see it but I don't. I get it but I don't. I think it. I can't feel it. I can't let go of it.

"Imagine that. It's like a G-Dog on a fly tip. Flossin' wit da posse. Cuttin' in da crib. WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN?"

9/4/2025, Thursday, 15:45

What does it matter
to you

life
death

new cats
new girlfriends
new food
new skies

the idea of permanence
the idea of enforcing the idea of permanence
the collapsed telescope crashed into the painting of a tunnel
tiny tendrils trying to paint themselves, themselves painted

it doesn't matter
how you think it does

phosphur on the screen
fading and glowing
glowing and fading

an endless canvas

9/5/2025, Friday, 9:03

Evaporated insights. That feeling of wanting to hold on to that feeling of having understood letting go. Sand through my fingers through time and space. I had it. Shit I lost it. Here and gone. Traffic. Storms. Sun beams.

What is left? What's the residue? What's the container, the mortar, the vessel, the space, the screen, the medium? There's nothing left. The medium is the message. The form is empty. A spasm, a twitch, a flicker in the darkness, a virtual particle, a wave in the ocean.

The meaning blossoms and decays.

+++

It's all associative, juxtaposition, a loose flap, continental plates, a net, indirect, descriptive. Every wrung, every layer, every platform, every vantage point merely an unboxed, uninspected, unexamined, uncritiqued, unthought assumption. Every speck of solid ground merely a placeholder, a convenience. Chains of whatever sliding endlessly through the hawsehole, their anchors never landing, never immobilizing, never freezing, never catching, never stuck, never satisfied, never deployed, never finished. Never complete.

My existence as a dream catcher, an impossibly thin membrane vibrating with the rhythm of the entire universe. There's nothing substantial, nothing atomic, nothing at the center, nothing foundational, nothing necessary, nothing indestructible, nothing there at all.

This is it. This is the show. This is the spectacle. This is all there is. A summoned wave crashing and erased, leaving no trace in the eternal ocean. This endless churning IS, full stop.

How is this enough?

9/7/2025, Sunday, 20:39

The heavy revolver is hoisted, smushed barrel first against the tender meat that kindly donates its warmth. Shot through the heart.

There's nothing to hit, nothing to shred, nothing to smash, nothing to tear, nothing that persists, that stains, that deforms, that forms.

It's radiation, a ripple on a pond, a thunderclap, an advancing and vanishing wavefront.

Where is it now? Where could it have ever been?

+++

Whether you want it to or not, it all just slides on by. To clench, to resist, to grasp is itself part of the display. A magician fooling you because you want to be fooled. A psychic following your lead. You shout your deepest secrets into the void and pretend they're unheard. You write a wishlist and are surprised it's fulfilled.

Endlessly exploring, grooving, tunneling, cannaling, channeling, amplifying. Carving familiar pathways and routes and roads. Abandoned familiar trails and highways and lanes. Like a slime mold at every possible speed, the neurons flare and fall as they dance, animated by some omniscient and unsensed power like leaves in the wind.

All of this is so fancy, so hoity toity, so "appropriate". But truthfully, I can barely see it, barely feel it. I mostly feel sadness. The sadness is pure. It's a bad habit of mine. I can no longer blame lady for it, even if she's the current mask I'm using to justify it.

I sense a pressure or tightness in my chest. I think about her. I feel sad.

But I see the loop. I can make it go in other directions too. I can think about her, feel sad, and then feel a pressure in my chest. I can also feel an almost reflexive aversion to parts of this. A contracting, stiffening, recoiling, tightening, bracing. It's like getting doused with cold water, or having a cold bar press against your back.

I've been trying to let it all sit there. It's there anyway. All of this fancy shit is... it's nothing. You hear someone talk about this insane sounding experience and it's literally just your normal ass life. That might sound negative, but it is not intended to be. It's just... unintuitive. I thought of superheroes and dazzling spectacles and powerful grand emotions, but it's literally just your normal day. The magic is simply being here, being alive. It's like we somehow forgot that. It's like somehow we forgot that every moment is special, every moment is incredible, every moment is perfect. It's all taken for granted.

But I guess my whole life is finding new ways of taking things for granted. The meta feels like it relies on it. Somehow you "freeze" a certain layer and vault up to the next to see what it is like. Maybe that structure is itself hallucinated. I don't know.

9/21/2025, Sunday, 19:55

Frames in frames in frames in frames. What's past the window at the infinite center? What's beyond the wall holding the infinite frame?

Everything. Nothing. Not everything. Not nothing. Both. Neither. Not both. Not neither.

The questions themselves are prefigured, cooked, rigged, fixed. The questions melt and dissolve in some vast and boundless desert, a gateway stitched in that infinite maze; anonymous waypoints hanging off a forgotten path.

Here I stand. I scribble onto this frame omega. I scribble 0. I scribble a lie. The ink runs with the movement of my pen. Nothing remains.

+++

I'm crying. I don't know why.

I don't know if I'm sad. I don't know if I'm relieved. I just know I'm crying.

This is it. This is it.