080718 do you want a catalog of my discomfiture? Cecilia said last night, “I don’t feel good. I feel the opposite of stupendous. I feel... empty. Not like hungry, but just... empty.” Sigh. I kinda do too, this morning, starting last night, starting in the middle of the night when as usual I woke up multiple times to try shed the sugar and beer and wiry discontent. OK, I guess it really is time to stop drinking again for a while. Maybe a few months or so, see how it goes this time. It really does usually help me sleep. And eating about two dozen dumdum suckers right before bed is probably not helping anything either. Invariably, the thing that stops your fingers from typing is the need to have the words be stunning and revelatory. But how can they be, ever, really> They’re just words. And words aren’te even a thing, unless someone who understands or claims to understand words is looking at them. And no one is loking at this. What, physically, is even happening here? There is a big rectangular box on top of my desk. The box and the desk are “objects” I can classify as being real, but again, they are only real insofar as a being that claims to understand and differentiate between objects is “looking” at them. So there’s my eyeballs, my body’s sense of gravity, gravity, a planet for all these little bits of crap like the screws and fluff and cardboard and tubes that make up this chair for instance, the dead tree that I call a desk, etc. So there’s, let’s just provisionally say there’s a desk with a big glowing rectangle on top of it. The rectangle takes too long to wake up, kinda like me. with typewriters, you can either just turn them on instantly or else you don’t even have to turn them on at all, depending on how far back into the glorious past you go. But anyway. The rectangle on the desk emits a certain kind of light. How do I know this? My eyeballs seem to register the signal of it, and the signal of it seems to do something to what I can only describe as my attention. The signal of the certain patterns of light coming out of the rectangle commandeer my attention, and momentarily make me distracted from the extra layer of fat all down my front, at the same time as it makes me even more painfully focused on same. I suppose, taking on faith that there exists a “thing” called a “brain” inside my skull, and that said “brain” somehow has something to do with receiving and possibly broadcasting certain kinds of signals, you could say that the rectangle on the desk is an instantiation of said “brain” turned inside out into a fourth spatial dimension, and therefore I can “see” both the inside and the outside of the brain at the same time. But again, I’m told that the brain is responsible for the seeing. So it is a closed system? I am sitting here “seeing” my “self” only? My belief that I am aware of anything at all is itself a construct of my own brain? It’s kind of scary and claustrophobic to think about. My sense of what it means to be a human being with a “meaningful” existence seems to depend—whether because of my own experience and reasoning and visceral instinct, or because of social signals and lore and mores, on embracing the given circumstances that there do in fact exist other “people,” other brains and bodies with which I can exchange various kinds of signals. Every as they say fibre of my being is attuned to this assumption. My suspension of disbelief in this regard is fundamental to my survival. Holes in the ratty blanket that’s hung up behind the stage, the blanket with the existence of these hypothetical congenial aliens painted upon it, are what we commonly refer to, by assigning a word to them, as “loneliness.” And loneliness is a source of a great emptiness, even if you’ve had plenty to eat. Look here, I’ve built a sand castle of existential bullshit, all because I’m afraid that staring at the little lights on my glowing rectangle may not “mean” anything. How can nations and people get carved up and exalted or slaughtered based on iterations of these same lights? Why do we even debate, why do we pretend it’s a science-fiction amusmement only, that “we” are a “computer simulation—” when we are so swiftly and easily programmed? What else could we be but more ephemeral combinations of signals? There are levels of what I can feel and perceive as reality, I guess. The blinking lights are close to the red end of my visible spectrum of concreteness. As you progress towards the inchoate and the chaotic, there’s like an exponential curve of increasing apparent difference between markers, milestones, phases, or what have you. For example, there’s only a very small difference (as far as I can elucidate) between glowing lights in these letter shapes and words spaces, and inky commitments of the same shapes and spaces on a “piece” of paper—and yet the “hard copy” seems a whole order of magnitute more “real,” somehow. Maybe it just has to do with the relative speed of decay. I could destroy all these glowing squiggles right now in less than an instant, and they may as well have never existed. The piece of paper I would at least have to chew on for a while. Or maybe burn. The planet that holds up the desk, likewise, is a collection of signals; it may take a while longer to burn as well. I guess we’ll see. Or maybe we won’t; maybe we’ll be blind and dumb and never have existed by then.