5th Thought

Hello! I'm surprised that I'm still writing here; now that the flush of inspiration, or the rush of an idea, even not even a good one just an idea, any idea, is gone, I'm surprised that I'm still typing here. And it's only been a few days. Once again, it's late at night, 11:23PM at the time of writing. I hope that the future is kind to me and those I love, and failing that, I hope it's kind to everyone else. I hope the future resists my internal urge to wreak revenge (is that even a phrase?) on those who have wronged me by extension -- things like ICE raids and trans hate don't harm me, as I'm neither an immigrant nor transgender, but they hurt me by extention, a sort of continuous moral wronging? Or wounded pride? Pride in what, though? My faith in other people? I have little faith in other people; I generally subscribe to something Nietzschean/Spinozan about our psychology, along with something else predictive happening (?)(god I gotta write down "my illumination" lmfao) so I'm not sure why pride is the first word I reach for here. Maybe I've inhaled too many "Humanity Fuck Yeah!" type stories -- not referring to the Reddit genre specifically, but that tenor of movie, story, sci-fi or fantasy tale, where people cooperate under pressure and work together against a common enemy for a common good, the standard "In This House We Believe" type liberal fantasy where everyone sets aside our differences and links arms to sing kumbaya as we vanquish poverty, bigotry, and disease... wouldn't that be a nice future. And I say that in both the sarcastic, dismissive tone, but also an honest tone, and in my head it's in the tone of a child asking their parents for a new bike for Christmas, and the kid doesn't know they're poor yet.

Sorry for the break; stepped away for about ten or fifteen minutes (not sure how fast time goes when I'm not paying attention to it but my suspicion is that it goes very, very, very fast, which gives me a sudden jolt of mortality, an awareness of the heart inside my chest, not quite feeling it beat, but feeling something thrum there, something twitch and contract) to make the feeling of hunger go away -- leftovers from the other night, protein pasta (it's what we had in the cupboard), black and kidney beans, sweet potatoes, frozen but cooked broccoli, celery, carrots, a variety of different seasonings. I ate it cold, quickly, not the whole container, just forkfuls over the sink while I thought about nothing in particular other than making the hungry feeling go away. I didn't want to use the microwave because that would've taken too long. Too long? It's 2 minutes max, come on. But that's an honest report, I guess. My partner was in the kitchen and we briefly talked and hugged while they used the microwave to pop popcorn. I could not imagine my life without them. I don't mean that in the -- how do I mean it? If someone were to ask me "what would your life be like if they died," my response would be something along the lines of "what if you woke up tomorrow and the air was chocolate pudding? what if you woke up tomorrow and the sun was a space alien that decided to visit earth and distribute Honey Buns to anyone who's attended an amateur soccer match?" I hope that that tracks something real; both in the sense of my emotions and both in the sense of how I think about the question. My partner and I live basically separate lives; we sleep in separate bedrooms; we talk to each other for maybe 10 minutes to 1 hour a day. I'm unemployed and living on savings. So are they. We spend our days in our rooms doing what we want to do, which isn't much, but it is ours; I read things I think are interesting on my computer, which usually shakes out to scrolling Twitter and Reddit, because that's where it feels like life happens now, the giant town square, the agora, it's how I keep up with trends and news and the world outside my bedroom, the world outside my apartment complex, the world off my screen. It's odd that the way I interact with the world off my screen is through my screen, but I guess that's more or less how everyone interacts with the world nowadays? (Why do I keep falling into cliches like this? Cliched thought, cliched phrasings, I guess that's what happens when you're trying to go fast, you fall into the track that's already there, and you slide and slip and shoot, and you mistake the speed for insight. Luckily for me, but also unluckily for my self-perception, little insight's promised or delivered here, no matter how much I wish for insight to be here unbeknowst to me.) It's curious; we live in strange times. But I suppose everyone's time feels strange from the inside. Although it's funny to imagine a hypothetical French peasant in the year 405 waking up in the morning, putting in a hard day's labor at the fields, then falling asleep by the fire while thinking "yep, this is normal, this is how life is, nothing here is strange." It would be funny in a broader sense if 405 France was actually a time of severe political turmoil or religious strife or similar, so I'm just flatly wrong on the facts, which could be true. Frequently I'm wrong on the facts and instead remember fact-shaped spaces or objects instead of particulars.

What's on my desk? I'm thinking about what's on my desk because I'm typing this on my laptop, which is on my desk, and my desk is in the middle of a bunch of shit. So, nonexhaustive list; a cylinder of silken crayons, empty energy drink cans (mostly white monsters), lots and lots of empty Zyn cans (really Zyn's knockoff cousin, Zone, because the gas station near my apartment charges only 20/roll, some kind of deal with the station I guess), a chess clock I haven't used in years, lots of empty pens, and a bunch of books; Norton Critical Editions of Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, As I Lay Dying, and Pride and Prejudice, two issues of Liberties Magazine, three issues of Ploughshares, the collected poetry of Dionne Brand, a box of normal crayolas 64ct, Infinite Jest, a Norton Critical of The Waste Land, the New Oxford Book of Essays, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, a Penguin Classics Buddhist scripture reader, Red Pine's translation w commentary of The Diamond Sutra, Pick 3 and Pick 4 tickets that didn't hit, and a lump of anthracite coal that I lifted from a train hopper a few years ago. Also a dirty, empty bowl that I used to eat Pringles Hot Ones that I bought from the gas station the last time I left my apartment to get more Zyns. I don't really leave my apartment unless it's to go grocery shopping, to get more Zyns, or to get more kratom. Otherwise I live my life indoors looking at this computer screen. Maybe this is why I feel a sort of affinity with large language models; I think both of our worlds are essentially comprised by text, or mediated by it. I couldn't imagine my life without Dickinson, without Keats, without O'Connor, without Borges, and now without Faulkner, because I just finished As I Lay Dying and I can't imagine being the person I was before I read it. I don't think AI or LLMs, whatever term you want to use, operates in the same way or is doing the same kind of thing that I'm doing here, but -- I don't know, there's a sort of kinship. I see literature/writing/texts variously not as auguments to my being but constitutive of it; I wouldn't be the person I am without what other people have written. So in a sense, it's literally true of both me and LLMs. Which is a strange kinship to have. I doubt that it extends in other ways to other directions other than metaphorical ones, and this one's already a metaphorical one, so. (But I notice that was pleasant to notice; part of why I wanted to do this project to begin with, this blog/diary/journal thing, is that when I write without stopping and without extracting and without editing, sometimes I surprise myself. My signal-to-noise ratio is quite bad, but the signals come sideways, which is hard to predict, which is why you do it, I suppose. I don't know why I'm always surprised that the general rule about things also applies to me. Spinoza's taught me better than this, but inadequate views are hard to shake; like delusion, they're awfully comforting.

I need to quit nic, to be honest. When I put in a new Zyn I can feel my blood vessels tighten -- not being metaphorical, my chest feels pinched, tighter, my fingers and toes feel colder, and sometimes my partner comments on my toes being cold when I'm not wearing socks. The hands/fingers getting colder is easier to fix, I just move my hands around a lot, these two spiders attached to the ends of my arms, and the warmth comes back. I enjoy the little brightness nic gives me; at this point it's scratching an itch, not really adding anything other than the cessation of needing nic, but scratching an itch is its own kind of pleasure. Sometimes I think that all forms of pleasure are just itch-scratch-itch-scratch, you know? Relief from suffering, temporary, transient, but real relief. I guess our baseline state is a kind of constant low-grade suffering that we mistake for how things really are. I remember reading somewhere that the Buddhist idea of "life is suffering" (I think the word is dukkha? Dukkhha? uncertain of the spelling) is more pointing toward the gap between sense-perception and desire, something about how desire is constant and loud while sense-perception by its nature is fleeting. That tracks with my experience. I can't meditate. I've tried many times. I get a few days to two weeks in, and then usually I just start feeling bad -- very bad, the sensation of something burning off, but the problem is I'm the wick, and I get burned too, and then I'm crying and trying not to cry and not knowing why I'm doing either. It's unpleasant and I don't like it. The advice I've seen online counsels that this state might last for a long time when meditating, or it might not, or in some cases it becomes permanent, which I'd rather avoid, so I avoid. Which is easier than burning, burning, burning. I would rather burn in a controlled fashion or at least have the fire I produce drive something than sit and burn, even if the thing would help -- which always sounds to me like -- the thing I'm referring to being the idea that it's worth it to sit through the burn because it purifies, or cures, or reorients -- "here's a butter knife, cut off your leg at the thigh and you'll be happy forever." Which like, economically speaking, that's probably a great trade, optimal or whatever, but you have to hack through the bone with a butter knife, and that experience is so sharply, intensely painful that I'd rather just not do it to begin with and sit in soft background dissatisfaction like everyone else. And lots of other people seem pretty happy with their lives of dissatisfaction. It seems to propel them. I wish that I could harness that same propulsion.

I can tell I need a haircut because I'm inside and it's night out and my head is still hot and I can feel bits of sweat on my scalp, not a lot, just a bit. I have thick hair that needs *knock on wood! interpret this as I want it to be interpreted and do not treat this as a literalized wish!* thinning every time I go to Great Clips. This is better than having no hair, and my dad went bald, and so did his dad, and so did my mom's dad, so maybe I should start taking a hair-retention supplement stack of some kind. But I should do a lot of things that I'm not currently doing. (notice how quickly I find an excuse to do nothing? recurring theme. frustratingly, noticing this problem does nothing to stop it from reoccuring over and over in slightly different forms, which I guess it'll do until I learn my lesson, and hopefully I do that soon, while I'm still young. Spinzoa says that the free man thinks least of death. This is how I know I'm not a free man.)