people construct languages to give themselves over to, to lose themselves in

for instance, when one person tells another person “i missed the bus this morning!” & they’ve both unconsciously agreed not just that is frustrating but on an exact flavor with which it is frustrating, then they get to pantomime a commiseration about it, while eliding the deep horror of the actual fact that neither of them actually really knows how the other experiences “missing the bus in the morning.” the actual qualities of each person are completely absent from this idea of “missing the bus” that they’ve agreed on, but the idea is perfectly distributed between them, they both know it

when you try to use a language to describe yourself, you have to confront the fact that the language is a separate thing from you, a thing you’re hiring to try to represent you. what this means is that you have to make a certain degree of compromise with it, & the degree of that compromise is a decision you have to make before you start. the more compromise you agree to, the more you lose yourself to the language. here’s what i mean:

if you pick the minimum degree of compromise, you can convey your experience in a kind of poetic word salad that feels perfect to you, but no one else will understand it

if you pick the maximum degree of compromise, you give yourself over to a way of talking about experience that absolutely everyone understands, but that “you” are absent from. that’s where we find these stereotyped models of everyday experiences, “ugh, i missed the bus,” “ugh, my friend flaked on me.” we decide in advance what these things feel like so that we can have responses prepared instead of responding with blank stares, nihilistic confusion about how to feel

(hopefully it’s clear by this point that when i use the word “language” i’m referring to an idea that could refer to “English,” “Swahili,” or what-have-you, but also to the smaller languages we build inside those languages. we may both speak English but we may also have completely different styles of relating our experiences)

no matter what you do, you are equally faced with the horrific fact that your actual interior experience will always be noncommunicable. by adjusting this degree of compromise, you are trying to find the approach that hurts the least. what is most important to you? fiercely retaining your sense of self, or being able to relate at any cost? the priority you give to one will always correspond to how much you deprive yourself of the other. there is no escape

many people, by default, choose the way of commonality. they construct languages to completely give themselves over to. they’re putting the cart before the horse in a way: they want to become a particular language, they want to start & end exactly where it does, because that language is wholly expressible, & by reducing themselves to its scope they can produce a sense that they too are wholly expressible, that they are not alone. you can see this in the way internet memes tend to circulate, the way they define certain overall styles of responding to the events in life, & these styles collectively make up a sort of closed system, a generalized style of personality that is distributed to the people who identify with the memes & circulate them

there is nothing wrong with doing this. it’s uncomfortable to witness, yes, but that discomfort is just a reflection of the fact that they are employing one extreme of the potential responses to the fact that we are all alone. the discomfort is innate in that fact, it’s not in them or what they’re doing

although, one could maybe say it’s unfair that it becomes the default for people so incessantly, without them having it carefully explained to them that there is a compromise to be made & they don’t have to default to one side or the other

. - .

the internet can have an underlying pattern - or at the very least, the particular websites hosted on it can have underlying patterns determined by the ways they are structured - & if suitable efforts are not made in each moment to counteract the effect of that pattern, then people’s social relations, which on the surface appear so much to be products of their own agency & choosing, can be (on a mass scale) merely giving away to the underlying pattern of the platform on which they are communicating. are you being you or are you just facilitating the underlying pattern of the medium you’re communicating through? i’ve been saying this for like eight years since i first had a mental breakdown about it when i was seventeen. i’m saying it again right now because i like this particular formulation of the statement

& in the same way, the structure of our society is an underlying pattern of daily life, this is why dead processes on one level of abstraction beget dead processes on other levels of abstraction, why a dead process at the heart of society begets death in oneself, why constant vigilance is needed to not collapse into becoming the constantly lurking background qualities of one’s society, why the “cosmic microwave background” is so bleak & threatening

also check out this picture its cool

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conjecture: the necessity of interacting with dropdown boxes while e.g. creating an account on a bank website could be called supplementary to the seemingly unrelated process of being induced by a social media website to conceive of oneself as an assembly of discretized labels. because a dropdown box is directly analogous to the nameless mental architecture by which one conceives of themselves as a sort of arrangement of slots separated by rigid boundaries, into each of which one concept may be placed

there is a sort of… nameless broader category, which contains both the idea of “a dropdown box” & the idea of “this nameless mental architecture.” & by exposing a person to dropdown boxes, the notion of this broader nameless category is sort of piqued in the mind, so that it’s a relatively small step to familiarize with that mental architecture, since it’s just one other expression of a broader category of thing that they’re now familiar with

i more or less believe this to be true, albeit unintentional, not reflective of any sort of conspiracy. it’s arguably also reinforced by about a trillion other things, a sort of death spiral of constant reinforcement. if we’re talking the general idea of “rigid boundaries separating anything” then can any list we encounter be called an example? you do a google search, there’s a list of websites, each one has an entirely existentially separate place in one’s corresponding mental architecture of the results page. there you have it

you could apply the same general kind of reasoning to the mental construct a person builds & refers to as “their own immortal soul,” an intangible cupboard into which various sins are placed. you could also apply it to some people’s idea of the eternal immutable binary separation of humanity into sexes. trust me, people who argue about biology & stuff probably may not care that much about it, they care about a little wooden cabinet in their mind that is infinitely, infinitely more real to them than any textbook or study they could ever feel obliged to supplement it with

the same wooden cabinet they identify with & defend, i also have in myself & disidentify with. i have tried to dismantle it, saw away at it, burn it, demolish it, because it has caused me so much pain. it is not “facts” to me but an arbitrary architecture seared into myself, telling me from within myself that i cannot live, it is futile, what’s done is done, the bone is fused, it is sealed, the plate is broken. it has caused me so much pain. i never feel like i have really rid myself of it

this provokes a quite disturbing consideration: for all my efforts, for all my confrontation, it still feels this intrusively real inside me. i can hardly imagine it being more tenacious. & yet. i think of the people who do not go through any of this, do not even think about this stuff, & i can only imagine it being infinitely more tenaciously real to them in ways i cannot even dream of. in this light, their eyes are absolutely scalding to me

curiously, on the flip side, i suppose we find a humane application of this sort of logic when part of a person’s pain is quite assuaged through modifying their birth certificate or a little field on an identification card. i cannot relate to this - what’s all these worldly bureaucratic endeavors when i feel like some deep intangible destruction has already befallen me  - but i feel i at least understand it

anyway, go out & start a political conversation & try to bring up the matter of intangible mental architectures that would seem to be so utterly crucial to the conversation & informing everything about it. see how long it takes someone to ask you what the fuck you’re talking about. what is to be done

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{previous pinned post}

i don't feel like the inhabitant of any of the places i go, any of the jokes i make, any of the conversations i have, any of the situations i encounter. my first reaction is that maybe this indicates that i've accrued an inauthentic life but i really can't picture anything i would actually feel like the inhabitant of, i think it's just the channel between myself & reality that's deeply broken & swapping out the current reality for any others would be irrelevant

i shouldn’t fly too close to the sun. if i overhear any conversation that demonstrates how alive life can be, i will become keenly aware that a part of me was gutted out long ago, the part of me that would have been able to capably respond to that aliveness. without that part of me, i have no place in life. i shouldn’t fly too close to the sun because if i stare directly into the blazing life i have no place in then i will go insane & maybe jump off a building or something

if i am to live a long life, it can’t really be an alive life - more larvally buried in the dirt, hidden, repetitive, insulated from the full aliveness that would only destroy me if i looked at it

& yet sometimes i get a desperate hope in my head that i’m not a really a ghost & i can still live & be alive & i eavesdrop on people’s conversations like a ghost lapping at the waters & it only burns me & i experience a horrible horrible unfathomable grief that i wouldn’t have known if i had just kept away & i think very seriously of killing myself & i hide until the pain fades & i can go back to my patient repetitive whittling away of time

i do not want to make art or engage in creative dialectical exchange with the vast reality outside of myself. it only provokes immense stress. i do not want you & i do not want to live. i have no sincere interest in the art anyone else has created. nor do i have interest in any more banal forms of conversation that i would have with people who are not creatively inspired. i really don’t want any of it

i want to hold everyones hands & ruffle their hair, while knowing that if anyone invited me to do this i would only find the moment extremely bleak, since i don’t feel like the inhabitant of any situation around me, & i think it’s bleak for sentiment to occur if anyone involved doesn’t even feel present to its occurrence, like a dishonor to it. & in that moment i figure i would compulsively say “heheh” in a flat tone or something like that, in a pantomime of understated affectionate verbal response, covering up my automatic dread at how little anything seems to matter, even though this should matter in some way

i feel like i have to pantomime sentiment so as to be able to build something facilely resembling a life, so that that pseudo-life can be allowed to metastasize to a point where it actually draws emotion out of me, & thus become a life. i have to do this pantomime because if i respond to the things around me with the apathy they actually evoke in me then there will never ever be any foundation upon which to build a life which might someday actually make a crack in that apathy. if i honestly reflect how little i care about anything then the conditions to make me care will have no room to ever form, because blank staring will never give rise to a life

went to a bar / diner place where in the same night i overheard the sentences from three different people, “i should be dying in a ditch somewhere,” “my face is terrible,” & “i drink a ton”

when i was in elementary school i was very afraid of authority or of breaking the rules & because there was such a constant insistence in my school on not talking excessively i just didn't talk & underwent zero social development for my entire childhood, & now i am just me today, feeling myself reach others through an incredibly dense fog that numbs & nullifies everything i try to express. the people who did that to me aren't even morally culpable for it because they were just stock standard cow-eyed retarded southerner wives too complacent & innocent to recognize they were really doing anything wrong

magic trick😂😂😂 i go in the club with a glass wine come out with an empty glass

smiling at the thought of a crowd of like a hundred people angrily chanting "da tirdy point buck! da tirdy point buck! we want to kill da tirdy point buck!"

character

keep forgetting to make time to try toast again, that stuff was so lit! i think if you could spread a butter or jelly on it this also would puts its whole new unique spin on it too, you can see the faint outline of like a whole world here thats beginning to take shape

audiopoems by henry chopin is so dang gnarly

theres no one on earth who i wouldnt spy on to an unlimited degree if given supernaturally convenient & efective means to do so

i went in a grocery store & encountered the bus driver who is so curiously hype about my existence & gave me the lil metal disk that says "pocket hug," i hadn't seen her in months cause she got shuffled onto a different route but she was just as hype about my existence & gave me a hug

i spent the whole movie in mild anxiety because i inexplicably felt like when i exited the theater some kind of disastrous event would have taken place in my life during that teo hours, & i felt committed enough to not checking my phone that i couldn't look at it for affirmation. i think this kind of innervated me & made me more responsive to a lot of the things that happened in it, which was a nice effect all in all, i think. this concludes my review of mickey seventeen

popula music shirt 4 mr. bong joon ho