Maybe i should make the basement be only for writing and making videos. then the macbook would be the main work computer. i could put the second monitor anywhere, or even not use it perhaps. or use it. FUCK i don’t know. it so doesn’t matter. you could have panera be for work and the garage for writing. you could have the bathroom for videos and the underside of the couch for writing. you could work in the fucking car. you could buy a van. none of it is going to change the fact that three tables away from me, old ladies are holding hands and sharing their most exquisitely pat religious experiences, in the sing-song tones of someone reading a picture book to a small child. if you’re in panera, you’ve got to be at least a little bit comfortable. kind of like the “vibrational healing” lady at the drum circle the other night, with her designer glasses and her bougie smile and her lookin like brand new Remo synthetic “buffalo” drum that she expected to use as some kind of elevated, wine-sipping, enlightened, perfect-health chanting trancing but only for a couple of hours when it’s convenient and then it’s back to the condo with the automatic entry secure garage and the fucking i don’t know. you know how we had the thing about the realization that self-loathing, like a loud POP of the fire swamp announcing the ROUS’s, was the indicator of the urge to give up? Well, what is the compulsion to be superior and hypercritical of strangers around me a precursor to? OOooh, I can really get into it, too. All I have to do is spend a few minutes in exactly the same place that I’m condemning all the other fuckheads for being in, and suddenly I know their whole life story and how pathetic and meaningless and artificial it is, unlike mine, of course. Being a failure at being middle class obviously makes me some kind of moral and ethical expert. THe special artist, I’m so special you’ll never hear of me. And so we’re swinging back around to self-loathing. Maybe that’s the connection. Maybe being quietly, smugly condescending about others (in silence, all in my own perfect little invisible castle of course, where we’re always safe from attackers and marauders because we don’t actually *exist* in any meaningful sense of the word) is just another variant of wanting to give up. Kind of like: I don’t have anything to say, and I can’t remember enough from one day to the next to have any actual writing to finish or produce, and so that must be your fault, comfortable just-past-middle-aged religious lady who’s just looking for a connection and some friendship in a cold lonely scary world. It’s your fault, fat dumpy lady with enormous Windows laptop—how could you be so fucking dull as to have a *Windows* laptop, on which you are playing Mah-jong and some stupid seek-and-find game, while your abandoned book sits splayed pages-down on top of your grotty tote bag? How could you sit there and be so uninformed and complacent, while I’m sitting over here unable to string together enough thoughts in a logical order to make a coherent story, because of you? It’s the sky’s fault. It’s the sky’s fault for getting less and less bright, for letting someone turn the contrast way down and the blues up and the saturation down. FOr letting someone put that funky, cliched filter over this whole scene, that retro mono melancholy greenish haze filter that makes everything look like a sad memory of a derelict carnival. It’s work’s fault. It’s “this place would be great if it weren’t for all the customers!” It’s the fault of all my students who are trying to actually learn something, having all these questions and demands. It’s their fault for having parents, and it’s their parents’ fault too, for having expectations. WHy can’t school just be all about how you feel? Why can’t everybody just understand that logic is good, religion is dumb, grades are meaningless, and you shouldn’t fucking just sit there and wait for your teacher to tell you what to do, and it’s not my damn fault if you signed up or got signed up for classes and then you don’t do them and then you oh god i don’t know. Whatever, the point is, you scare me because you might have your own opinions which is something i believe in as long as they’re not stupid opinions, know what i’m sayin? I always like to say stuff like “can’t think of anything right now” or “nothing brilliant right now” or “i got nothing right now” or whatever, for two reasons: 1. the spotlight syndrome; i assume everybody will eventually read this because i am so important and special, and i want them to know that i know that this is not any of the actual real good stuff; you shouldn’t use this as a measurement of how great i am, because obviously, and 2. acknowledging that this isn’t anything implies that somewhere, there is something. again, evidence of my greatness is ubiquitous, you just can’t see it because you’re not lucky enough to be in the SO here’s a question: Why the spotlight syndrome? Did it become stronger and more prevalent with the rise of surveillance over the last couple of decades? who was that one guy that said if you’re constantly watched, you either become invisible or perform. Maybe that’s what the spotlight syndrome is; the presence of antibodies to the virus of the death of privacy. why be private in your own mind when there’s never, ever going to be any real-life outlet for that? Might as well practice what you’re going to need.