3rd Thought

Three entries in one night is nothing other than enthusiasm, I guess. But it's important (I think) to work with inspiration when you have it and it drives you rather than waiting for it to fizzle out on its own or assuming that it'll still be there in the morning. Neither of those things are true, even if they feel true in the moment.

I want to clarify something that I set forth/down (sorry about diction here, by the way; I know I shouldn't be apologizing for things like this, but normally I would edit and draft and revise, and I've already said that I wasn't going to do that, so I have to do things like this that let you know that there's an editing capacity I'm purposefully not using, not that I don't have one -- yes, "set forth" is a pretentious way to describe what I'm doing here, but I promise you it's actually my first thought, which I have no real way of verifying or proving or demonstrating other than continuing to write in spite of it, so to speak) in a previous entry regarding how I thought LLMs would take this. I said something along the lines of they work better at grokking your intent when you give them volume over polished sentences; I think that's true and not true. Maybe I made a mistake in thinking that they were too different from how people read. What I mean is that what I hope is that the LLM (or the person, whatever) will get a better sense of who I am, and what I'm like, through continual chatter due to the -- to use a bunch of metaphors that will be misplaced, inaccurate, wrong, etc -- quantity and type and variety of "signal" in the noise, so to speak. This signal, X signal, a given signal transmits that the writer is frequently uncertain; this signal communicates that they enjoy this way of thinking about things; this signal is embarrassment, or what have you, and the hope is that these signals are both intended and not intended on my part -- that I would be both surprised and not surprised, that the reader (human or machine) would both pick up on what I'm saying and pick up on what I'm saying. That's the thing I'm trying to point at with the volume thing. Of course, this gets in the way (volume) if your goal is to make a substantive, coherent point, and if I have any points here, they'll have to be carved out of the rubble, but I don't think the draw to this kind of thing is substantive, coherent points, but someone moving in action, someone trying their best to translate themselves to the page, lossily. I hope this makes sense.

But if I were to transpose something I say in my journal/diary all the time -- or rather, said when I kept up with it, when I keep up with it, I have to correct myself that it's "when" in the sense of "when I choose to" and not a wistful "when," and I probably do that so I don't feel bad that I'm writing less often in it than I think I should -- I'm not good when I'm writing at speed about ideas, and I'm better writing at speed about things. I want to give a little explication there of what I mean, but I think that would fall into writing about ideas again; the very short version of it is that writing about ideas requires slow-turning thought (which is obvious but isn't obvious from the inside) and writing about things requires little other than attention. So. Let me write about things. Objects. What I see.

Outside my window I can see the other building in my apartment complex. Another building. It's dark, because it's one in the morning, and all the lights in the windows are off, but the third floor upper left balcony porch light's on. There's a solitary porch light between the door and the window on the balcony. I see my neighbor out there all the time, usually smoking weed, sometimes looking at something on his laptop while he rolls the blunt between his lips as he smokes. Fiddles with the blunt, rolls makes it sounds like he's rolling the blunt in order to smoke it, when in reality it's already rolled and he's fiddling with it in his mouth, moving it around with his tongue. I don't think people have written enough about the pleasure of having something in your mouth. Non-sexually. But I guess this is what mouthfeel is moving toward -- well, no, not mouthfeel, that's a separate concept from wine tasting, I think -- I mean very literally a toothpick in your mouth, or a Zyn, like the Zyn that's currently in my mouth. I feel it snug against my upper right gum and my cheek. Unobtrusive, but soft. I notice it's there but I can forget it's there easily, and I can't tell if that's a property of the object itself or a property of somatic attention. I do notice that the more I write about it here, the larger it seems to become in my mouth -- as I focus on it, the sensation, I can start to feel its edges, the wrinkles that accrue from it moving around in my mouth, the places where the machine that manufactured it had to seal it shut, as well as its heft, but not its heft because it doesn't weigh much. I'm trying to say something more like density, or wetness. It's not dense, objectively speaking it's quite lightweight, but it is wet. How can I tell that something is wet inside my mouth? Isn't it always wet inside there? I guess that's attention again and I just never really think about it. Fascinating; the more you look the more that's there. (A cliche that short-circuits thought. Press into it, press into it or press past it or go beside it, but don't stop there, it papers over the chasm beneath it!) Do I still taste it? The flavor? The Zyn's flavor is citrus, which is normally sharply sweet, pleasantly so, the exact taste it says on the can, but right now that flavor is still present but diluted -- more watery, less concentrated -- what causes this, why this? Well, saliva, obviously, but that's not really what I'm trying to ask and it's not what I'm interested in. (When did the Zyn make its way to the other side of my mouth? As I write this I notice that the Zyn isn't on the right side of my face anymore, it's on the left, but I have no memory of moving it there, and it must've happened while I wrote this, but I couldn't point to when it happened. I guess it happened because -- and it's a guess because I can't attest to it, I can only attest to other times I can consciously remember doing this -- I flicked it to the other side of my mouth with my tongue. I don't scrape it off my gums and flick it midair through the empty space in my mouth, that's not what I mean. I mean my tongue pushes it across the top row of my teeth, so that it crosses my front teeth, and then my tongue nudges it smoothly and unnoticeably into my upper left gums.) Does the flavor-perception dilute along with the flavor itself, or are the two distinct things? I want to say yes, it does, just because of what just happened with the Zyn. I'm a little disappointed in myself; I set out to write about things, objects, and instead I'm talking about ideas in an extended way, and I don't know if that's a failure or if that's high-fidelity to things, as things are trapped in perception -- no, not trapped, they exist when not perceiving them -- but that they're there when they're not there but not in the same sense -- I'm not doing a good job of describing this. It's one of those things you can't describe and just have to experience. In another entry I'll talk more about this, which I refer to as My Illumination, which I refer to mentally in that way so I don't think it was more than it was, or I have more insight or interest than I actually possess, interest as in interest in someone else, to someone else. I meant to type "to" the first time there but had a slip of the fingers. Now we're really getting off topic.

Let me try again but from a different angle. I can tell when the AC goes off during its cycle even when I can't hear it or feel it because of temperature; I notice that I'm slightly too warm, that I'm not quite sweating, but different parts of my skin are threatening to sweat, if that makes sense. They feel hot -- no shit, obviously -- they feel unseasonably warm? is that it? that's not quite it -- they feel just a bit too much out of the rest -- that's something like it, I think, I'm sensing a differential where before there was smooth, seamless continuity -- the skin underneath my hair, or the folded skin in kneepits and elbowpits, that slicks. It doesn't sweat, that's not what I'm talking about. Not that kind of hot. But I can feel a small, increased circulation in those areas, and alongside it an increased awareness of the air in those places, which I attribute to the air in the room evaporating the moisture off me, and there's more moisture to have there. It's quite difficult to talk about these things. More difficult than I thought it would be. I'm starting to gradually understand piece by piece that just because I have a body or rather I am a body doesn't know I mean what it's like to be one. What's the Spinoza here? "We know not yet what a body can do," right? We know not yet what a body can do; I know not yet what my body can do, or is capable of doing, or is doing at all. An easy example of this is that I know immediately that the sweat on my palms is a different kind of sweat than the sweat that accumulates along the base of my neck/my shirt collar when the AC's in its off cycle, the quiet portion of its cycle.

I wanted to continue going but I felt pleased with myself for trying and decided that I'd rather go on the internet instead, so I -- that isn't right. That's not accurate. I felt pleased with myself for trying to convey somaticism, and decided that I'd rather go on -- no, again, that isn't right. Why do I keep reaching for "rather" here? I felt pleased with myself for trying to convey somaticism in text, and thought that I'd earned the right to go on the internet because of it, so I opened /lit/ and immediately found myself in a stupid argument with someone in a thread about philosophy. I don't know what I'm talking about, neither does the other anon, but I'm in it for the sheer and simple pleasure of contempt, of fighting, of the sharp tongue. I've gotten very good at that, even when I don't know what I'm talking about, which is most of the time. Not sure that this is a tendency I should encourage, but I like doing anything I can do well. As do most people, I guess. Also, why do I say "found myself in a stupid argument" as if I didn't seek one out and stoke one? Maybe I mean "found myself" in the sense of "habitual action approaching daydream in how habitual it is," that I came to and came back here. Maybe I mean something like that. (Again, I found myself elsewhere, and return to this paragraph after several minutes.) I apologize for the homecooked armchair philosophy type shit that's going to clot up these webpages with nonsense; take them or leave them. I'd prefer you take them, because I want to think of myself as deep, and I know how that sounds, but that's honesty for you -- and simultaneously as I write that I notice that that itself is a sort of performance, that in saying that I want you to take me as honest, bare, when in reality there's got to be other things going on that I don't see, or don't want to acknowledge, don't want to look at. A story from James Joyce leaps to mind here; I can't recall the specifics offhand without pausing to read the story, but it's the one from Dubliners about the motorcar race, and the young men spend all night drinking and partying, and at the end of the night they've lost all their money (or our hero has, at least) and they're hungover and someone throws open the curtains and says "Daybreak, gentlemen!" I don't know what I'm trying to point at by bringing that up. The first thing that comes to mind is that Nietzsche named a book the same thing, Daybreak, and I wonder if the two are related, but they can't be because I don't think Joyce knew about Nietzsche then. The second thing that comes to mind -- not sure if this is in the story, can't recall -- is the shattering of illusion, the sense that this is the rest of your life, and the sense that this is who you are, and you're not who you wanted to think you were. It's painful and it hurts and I would rather avoid thinking about that. I would rather live in delusion than see my life and myself as a failure. Which I do. Live in delusion, I mean. Maybe I have such a strong reaction to that idea because it hurts that much to acknowledge, to see. But at speed I'm better at things (avoidance) than ideas (avoidance) and I'm feeling tired. It's two in the morning now.

I hate feeling tired. I wish I never needed to sleep and never felt tired. Sleeping feels good but it feels good because it's something I have to do, not something I enjoy. Eating is fun when I eat for fun but eating when I'm hungry is just tiresome, especially if I have to go get food or cook food. Then it's just labor.