fragments

Its horrible and cruel and absurd to say the least, where would one possibly acquire so many dead old people? Why is there seemingly no end to their arrival? And of all places why is it here that they have arrived? Stranger still than any of this however is the biggest conundrum of all; why do they all taste so damn good?! I mean grilled, sautéed, boiled, it really doesn’t matter and it’s delicious, no seasoning necessary! The first guy to taste them got killed by the mobs, but by the 5th or 6th time lone people got curious and sure enough, melt in your mouth, creamy, garlicky, wonderful! It even seemed as though the flavor of them changed person to person and perfectly fit their palate. I mean they were already dead when they got here so what’s the harm right? Well, that style of questioning has led to some trouble and now here came ours. Despite the fact that they were already dead, apparently cannibalism is cannibalism so now there is a massive outbreak of wendigos, so that’s been interesting. Yeah, it turns out the natives actually knew a bunch of shit, and we probably should have listened, but fuck it, it’s raining 100 Billion Dead Old People.

In order to point myself in a direction I have to know what my values are. This is because I feel the need to have a purpose in order to feel as though I am not stagnating. I think one of my biggest flaws is complacency, although people that fall prey to it don’t seem too unhappy. Maybe it is the pursuit that we should savor but not covet, as when we chase movement, we may run from what we don’t know we need. Similarly to how winning the lottery ruins more lives than it perfects, my yearning for progress may lead me away from what I truly need due to imperfect assumptions about the future and what in life brings me happiness. I think I feel lost often and I have been trying to make a map and get un-lost, but I think in life it’s more about becoming good at, and okay with… being lost. 

It’s been a while since I checked in just because I’ve been so busy. It’s an excuse I use a lot and to be fair it’s got plenty of merit in the chaos that is my life. I use that excuse to many people for many different reasons. What are my real priorities and what business of mine merits being too busy for the people I love? I suppose it feels like a passive choice, like as I said, I was predestined to be too busy just by being me. If my plate wasn’t as full I would fill it to give merit to my excuses. As excuses go it’s not bad but what is it worth to me to be busy? I suppose if the choice is a dichotomy of either total openness or total busyness at least one has tangible outputs. This is my expectations influencing not only my choices but my actual reality. So self involved!

A chance encounter as much as any other, I knew what had been created between us would never be destroyed. I was forged of my mother’s iron will and steely resolve and I was tempered in the blood of her womb. Despite our bloody and long anticipated introduction, the pact we shared in was one of calm, kind, solidarity in which we recognized in one another a spirit of creation. In her it was present in her vision and in me it was in my head. She saw a world that was hurting but didn’t have to and I asked how. Any time I thought I was growing out of it and standing on my own she would tell me what I knew and I’d be so angry I’d just run and hide. But the problem is you can’t hide for long from the person that put all the good hiding places there for you. Even knowing I have limitless love and respect for her, I get angry with her from fear of seeing in her the origins of the things I repress most in myself, which forces me to remember me. Some days I’m mad I was put here without permission, but if anyone was going to be the messenger I’m glad it was her.

I was thinking about my shoulder pain and evaluating my feelings towards the pain. I realized that up until now I had hated, dreaded and almost deified the pain into my tormentor. At a random moment I wondered what it would be like to love the pain in the way a masochist or something does. The thought made me laugh because although it felt ridiculous, it worked. I loved my pain and decided I not only expected it but revered it! Granted, my pain level on average is probably low on an absolute scale, the psychological weight of it was the real trick. In this realization I almost instinctually applied this love universally and I have now realized that the Buddha was right that the root of suffering is expectation, but on top of radical acceptance of what is, I would posit a deep love in an unconditional form for all things equally. In this radical love is also an acceptance and understanding of the innate unity that pervades all people, places, things, and nothings. I also realized in the moment that in loving the thing, no loss was generated upon its disappearance as I loved its alternative equally as much. Loss was then therefore less so loss and more so transformation. The practical application of this radical love theory with the material conditions I find myself within feels impossible, but maybe through love change could come. My problem is a lack of understanding on so many levels but mainly I’m figuring out a way to break the cycle of violence. It feels inevitable, and therefore like the best option, for violence to occur prior to any meaningful regime or status quo change. My issue is in the cyclical nature of systems being toppled in favor of a “violence free” system brought about through violence. Or a “class free” society founded on the division of classes in order to get rid of “senates” in favor of “committees.” To me it seems when you base your revolution on the oppressors’ rule book, you’re bound to become their successor.

A lazy day is a luxury rarely afforded to people like me. When one does roll around I find myself a blur of action to facilitate my inaction. By the time I’ve wound down from setting up it’s time to clean up and settle down. The days between lazy days turn to years and all the while I’m planning and replanning my approach so as to optimize my resting. If I get any less than the maximum possible value from my lazy days they’ll be no different than the years worth of non-lazy days between them.

Entry 1: Fuck, man… 3rd week in a row, no word on when the scouts may be back with rations, but at this point I’d prefer they came back with a couple of doses for the whole tribe. Sandra had taken the last charge and the remnants of her removal still laid in the square for all of us to be jealous of. A place like this was never meant to be used for so long and it is beginning to be obvious. Even the protein printers’ best attempts fall short of sustenance, not for the body, but the soul. Just another day at Amazon 2035.

Entry 2: In today’s day and age there is no time to get lost. Every step, every breath, every second is accounted for and plotted on your handy dandy LifeTrack™. I can’t even imagine where I’d be without mine, probably lost in a field somewhere walking in circles trying to find my Amazon workstation so as to avoid the cullings™. And that’s another thing. If I didn’t have my LifeTrack™ how could I possibly cast my vote for who was the weakest link in the company talent show (it was Beverly, nobody cares about juggling)? I heard one time there was a new recruit that refused his LifeTrack™ interface as it “goes against God to put Jeff Bezos in any brain but his own,” but seeing as how he was never seen again, the message from corporate was loud and clear. All things considered it’s not too bad at the Amazon Interplanetary Distribution System, or AIDS for short. AIDS does the galaxy a lot of good. I like doing my part to facilitate the spread, and if that part has to include eating my recycled coworkers, so be it! At least I have a purpose. Thank you Jeff Bezos for AIDS. I don’t know what I would do without it.

Your life = your perception (your actions + your circumstances) 

I say this because although the facticity of your life is determined by actions taken and circumstances, the sum total of your life is represented by your perception of the whole thing. Whatever your position, perceptionally (?) multiplies the facticity either upwardly or downwardly, exponentially. This being said, your life cannot be evaluated except in its entirety by its nature and thus we cannot judge life while we possess it.

I love the idea of God but religion feels like a room full of cult leaders proclaiming to be the only correct path to understanding the nature of the universe while placing themselves in opposition to every other possible position. Religion to me feels like a cancer, not because spirituality is necessarily bad but because religion is a hijacking of healthy tendencies that are then warped into a tribally driven spirit war whose aims should be absolute truth but whose aims most often resemble something closer to a state or governing body. I don’t even think this is a particularly special portion of religion as many outlets of identity fall into similar traps of reductionism. In order to join the tribe you must, as an individual, amputate any portion of you that exists in opposition to this particular segment of your identity, especially with something as dogmatic as religion. To me this is the problem with absolutes, I am not absolutely certain there is a God and I am not absolutely certain there isn’t, and at any point if I sway to either absolute I feel that I will have amputated an integral part of myself in that surrender to certainty. It has always come easy to me to understand the necessity of avoiding absolutes in the context of religion but true skepticism in the way I endeavor to practice it is more all encompassing, more absolute, for lack of a better word. 

Although I do feel there is no objective right and wrong, I do feel a responsibility to do my best to ensure a net positive effect on others’ freedom so as to better facilitate my own “true” freedom. Freedom to me is the measure of the an individual’s flexibility within their given conditions and conditionings. To this effect two individuals in the same conditions with the same conditioning can find themselves at varying expressions of freedom due to variances in their engagement with themselves’ and others’ freedom. In todays consumer social economy freedom is found most abundantly among people in a community and among individuals as hobbies. Hobbies are representative of an individual’s engagement with freedom insofar as an individual undertakes “projects” for the sake of themselves as ends rather than as means to an end. The idea of a hobby is the reduction of doing something for itself into a moment of recreation in an otherwise “busy” day that only permits these pockets of genuine living. A hobby itself is a manifestation of freedom as there is no justification for the action outside of the action itself which is closer to the way peoples’ motivations should be than they are.

My process today is sitting outside on my laptop writing while I listen to the boys in discord. I don’t have anything in particular to write about but I know I need to do something and why not this. It’s a beautiful day in terms of how it feels and honestly I’ve never seen a day that wasn’t beautiful, I suppose the only thing that makes it feel anything but is my hangups, and there's plenty of those. I want to live in my good days forever but I know the bad days set the backdrop for anything else to be possible. Therein lies the unfortunate sobering fact of reality that is the yin and yang, the duality, the nature of perception as I see it. In order for anything to exist perceptually separate from existence itself or other perceptually separate ideas or entities there must both be the object in question and also everything that is not the thing in question. My understanding of the world and separation of objects hinges on the duality that is at both ends of being. In order for being to exist, so too must non-being exist to show that there could be anything but being. Alternatively the separation is purely perceptional and we have arrived at monism, which feels counter to my perception of the nature of things. Although against that effect is the idea that my perception is a lie I tell myself to make things less overwhelming. 

Everything I am most confident in my abilities to understand I am furthest from understanding. Similar sentiment to the Platonic/Socratic idea of being wise in your knowledge of nothing. This is how I strive to feel, despite the fact that in practice I am oftentimes very dogmatic and assertive over matters I have no business asserting or dogmatizing. I mean look at anything I do, it all feels self-destructive and pointless but I love doing it. Maybe this is me grinding away my own holdups by a process of exposing my own ignorance. It feels hard to even figure out what I believe to then expose the issues in those beliefs. It's similar to a process of Sisyphus where I forge a path with myself, through myself to then understand that it's all not only temporary but almost nonsensical. 

In the same way people inhabit an environment with a certain scent and lose the ability to pick up on said scent due to sustained proximity to it, I think people become “nose blind” to their own behaviors, opinions and attitudes. From this idea I want to find a way to shift perspective in myself to metaphorically “sniff out” my own shortcomings or blind spots. Some of the ways I have been doing this is by recording the things I do in order to utilize the benefit of hindsight as my mindset shifts, I have also been doing experiments in my life, or just ways for me to shake up my routines and actions. For instance, I did an experiment where I had noticed I was getting really emotionally involved in stupid stuff I had no control over while driving, so I decided for one whole day to do a commute with happy music and I tried to maintain a smile the whole drive. I didn't care if the smile was disingenuous or not, I just had to maintain it, and honestly I found myself driving slower, less erratic, less tense and generally a better commute with minimal shifts in time. Just this one experiment among others I have been trying has helped me begin to highlight my errors in priority or perception at any given time and I hope to continue this pursuit in the future. I honestly might start a page on here for my experiments to keep track and incentivize myself to really engage with life. I also want to at some point figure out a comments section on here to give anyone the ability to express themselves as it relates to me and my work.

At work and in many social settings I find myself not only lying to other people to minimize abrasion, I find myself lying to myself about how I actually feel and what I want to say. Granted many of these lies are menial and purely for convenience, but, I worry the habit establishes a precedent within myself of sacrificing myself and my values for the sake of convenience or potentially something worse. Along with avoiding lying to and about myself in passing and in casual conversation, I want to be especially wary of picking a hill to die on in a moment of conflict or other disturbance that goes against something I would stand by in a vacuum. I find a tendency in myself to be drawn into defending a position I don’t even genuinely hold as a consequence of placing myself blindly in opposition to someone or something that I feel the need to attack or distance myself from. This habit leads to a lot of choices being made that I would never make without the external stimuli, but the fact that the response is latent means it may always lie there and the times I worry about it is the times I don’t notice it.

Placebo and stockholm syndrome as they related to self prescribed duties. The specific example that drove me to this connection of ideas was my own self prescribed duty of exercising. Granted there are obvious pros to exercise but the idea is that since we know for certain the advantages, any disadvantage is just something we take in order to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. At some point however, my own relationship with the duty of working out, it became caustic in that I began to idolize not only the pros of the duty, but also the willingness to deal with the cons. This fundamental shift in perception led to the cancerous idea of self sacrifice as a mark of success and virtuous character, which once rooted in my duty of exercise spread into many facets of my worldview undetected. I slowly but surely became someone who worshipped my own suffering because of a perceived moral high ground on the basis of stoic acceptance or even a masochistic glorification of pain. I am trying to find a balance in all aspects of my life and in the radical reevaluation that is necessary to facilitate such a shift in such an unbalanced life has led me to realize that a good habit motivated by toxic reasoning is no good habit and that I must be constantly wary of falling prey to my own failures in wisdom.

Is death failure or success for an organism? I am thinking it depends on many points and pieces of context about the broader type and aim of said organism but also specific contexts to the individual organism. For instance, in death some creatures fulfill their ultimate purpose of nourishing and facilitating the continuation of their species, while others’ deaths seem to be in the name of no honorable sacrifice and their deaths seem to acts only as the final punctuation to their short existence. Even in these deaths that feel pointless from where I am standing, they still serve some purpose in nature, either in their physical components’ return to the biosphere or their absence allowing for the newer generations of life to flourish. I am trying to shift my focus from the loss portion of the circle of life towards the repurposing and recycling that inevitably happens at every level. For instance, I saw a dead cricket this morning at work and mourned for it briefly, then when I went back through the same area there were so many ants on the crickets’ corpse that I could no longer even make out the shape of the creature. My instinct at first was to further mourn the cricket and disdain the ants for their desecration of the creature, but I would like to shift this internal narrative to an appreciation of the ant-like forces in nature that give us no choice but to give death meaning and redemption.

I have no desire for money and no desire for material belongings other than as ways to bridge the gap between me and the things I would like to do. This feels counterintuitive and I have been trying to explore this desire for things as a means to reduce the difficulty in either becoming or creating. I am now trying to get into the mindset of using what I have at my disposal, as opposed to the mentality I have had before and see often, that you must simply work hard enough to get the best things at your disposal to be best suited to create and become. For instance I was obsessing over the idea of getting a “real camera” to use instead of my iphone, but then I swapped my mentality to one of appreciating the access I already have and also to instead of working towards a new thing, to work towards mastery of the things I already have. I have learned there are innumerable ways to improve your iphone shots and I was one amazon purchase away from completely giving up on a medium that is already perfect for what I want.

An essay exploring the role of fitness in my whole life with an emphasis on my weight loss journey. It could start with playing sports to stay active and how I would love the sport itself but find myself dreading and dodging every aspect of practice. Then I could talk about how being forced to go to the practices created a feeling of helplessness and frustration towards anything physical than festered as I got older. As I got into high school age and even before I had made some attempts at establishing a routine in the gym in the pursuit of weight loss but had always failed for various reasons, chiefly among them being that I didn’t really want it as bad as I thought I did. Then, fast forward out of high school and I had kind of just resigned myself to being bigger and out of the loop physically in general. Eventually, while working at (WORKPLACE) I gained a bunch of weight due to stress and increased budget and food availability, a fact that eventually pushed me to wanting a change as bad as I needed to in order to do something. The very final straw that broke the scale was when me and (COWORKER) went into the parts warehouse and were grabbing stuff when he decided to weigh himself in the industrial scale. Once he had checked himself I was curious as I hadn’t weighed myself in years at that point, the number came back 272 and it was then and there I decided something had to change. Then I’ll describe my process of losing weight as well as the part of the journey I’m at now which is finding a balance between fitness being my life and my lack of fitness getting in the way of living life. 

My plans right now as far as I know them are as follows: continue to build my body of work by taking photos, writing, making music and any other outlets that catch my attention. Once I have a decent portfolio of stuff I’m really proud of I am going to start planning and creating a gallery-esque experience. Once I have the gallery experience created I will display it first at the farmers market unless another cooler opportunity presents itself. I will thoroughly document the process of creating the gallery and once I have done it I will begin the social media rollout. Throughout this process I will begin to parse out creations into social media sized pieces, and with the social media rollout it will all be mobilized. I have no expectations for what will come of any of it and I would like to make a concerted effort to keep it that way. I want to be doing this for the sake of itself and for my own curiosity and creativity rather than to commodify myself and my art. Alongside the gallery and social media plans I will be freestyling, writing music and recording in the studio once I have this first project. I would like to eventually become self sufficient for the music to skip the studio expenses so I may start experimenting with mixing and mastering. Once the first big music project is out of the way I would like to start generating a more regular stream of singles, while parallel processing the skeleton of an album at some point. I also would like to start trying to make music videos for the songs I like the best. Along with the gallery and music avenues I would also like to branch into video making as a way to further develop the ideas and themes my essays strike at. I want to make things I care about and make sure I am doing it for the sake of itself, not for any other means. Attention feels great but its not everything and its not supposed to ever be the primary goal of any of these outlets of mine. I need to find love and satisfaction in the act of creation, not covet the idea of becoming a celebrity for people to worship. 

The strange disconnect I have been observing in myself between what I actually feel and what I think I should interpret my feelings to mean, oftentimes the conditioned response is louder to my conscious self than the stimuli that warranted it. I wonder if this disconnect is a survival mechanism, a means to maintain approval despite internal conditions not matching expectations or some other 3rd option. I also wonder whether me or my environment or what combination of the two facilitated this process. For instance, I know I love people and they deserves the best, but there are moments when I feel otherwise, not that necessarily I feel feelings that directly oppose my love, but that I feel things that are counter to my constructed understanding of what love should be. I think I often discredit the parts of my feelings that I feel don't fit for whatever reason and I want to figure out why and reduce the unconscious conditioned response getting in the way of my experience of my own unadulterated feelings and emotions. I feel as though I have this idea that any inkling of "imperfect" or "contaminated" feelings needing to be stripped of their contradictions to be valid. This is a common theme I have noticed in many facets of my life where the true ambiguity, nuance and general messiness is so immediately uncomfortable that it makes me feel a need to amputate portions of my experience so as to not invalidate my idealistic view of reality and how things "ought to be".