Sickness My made up feminine persona Mourning lost innocence and connection There’s literally just not enough rice to get everything done Fearing I screwed up bigger than usual on grades and targets Nobody knows how to close a goddamn door quietly Set of tech tools that’s supposed to make life easier happier and more awesome has grown cripplingly complex In the deep end your body was without shape, form You drifted like a dreamer in perfect wandering bliss Then god said let there be weight And drained the fucking pool “You” can be every bit as egotistical as “I”. what if seers only see things we all already know, but we still don’t believe them? Did you know that jelly beans are the best kind of beans ever? Well, they are! Did you like my little fun fact? YAY: OR NAH =^-^= i know not whether to revel or despair in the awareness that each of my worries comes to occupy the same mental space, like each balloon in a pullulating bunch, despite the conventional knowledge that the popping of some would sink me while others’ loss would have no discernable effect; yet i clutch the strings and carry the whole grotesque bouquet, twisting in the fucking wind amy’s picture of her and x at xmas at once a celebration and a confession When I was a boy, I was fond of the story of the pirate god. It seemed within reach. It seemed like a story that was just barely believable enough to be attainable. All good stories feature ourselves as the protagonist, right? I figured if even one percent of what I saw in movies or read in books could come true—and why couldn’t it? if it was all lies, then why did people make those movies and write those books?—then surely my own bed could become an open boat, cut loose from its moorings at my bedside table, and head out into uncharted dream space, free to explore, helmed by me, the pirate god. What would I do in my role as pirate god? I don’t know that it really mattered that much, to be honest. In a way, maybe the only thing that mattered was to be free. To be a pirate means you can dress however you want. You can wear swashbuckling silks, an eye patch, accessorize with a tropical bird, pierce your ears for no good reason, wear tights even, and nobody could laugh at you. Well they could, but they wouldn’t dare. Cuz you’re a pirate, and not only that but a god as well. You’re a poet and a king, you’re an artist, you have a license to go anywhere and discover anything you want, up to and including the secrets of the universe. To be a god is to have an ever-expanding circle of beings you can communicate and commune with. You will never be without a friend. You can talk to people—other pirates, of course, your people, your rowdy crew of compatriots and partners in daredevilry—but you can also talk to the stars, and squirrels, and the track of moonlight across the water, and you can have deep, late-night conversations with the glow-worms who created the universe. They will tell you their names. You gave them their names. They will form shapes for you. They will dance and wriggle and form into letters and the letters will form into words and then anything at all is possible. Then they will laugh because something you and they wrote was hilarious, and the letters will get all jumbled up and fall off the page, and you will go back out to sea, and start with a new blank page, and do it all over again, until the end of time. Because you are a poet and a king. You are the pirate god. 111919 psilocybin notes 1 people are (i am) scared and guarded and suspicious and tense; but also open and hopeful and warm and welcoming fear is (an essential) part of the human condition this place isn’t just bland and shitty and oppressive; it’s also beautiful and quiet and colorful and warm and home to many people’s treasured life memories you can’t write everything down from it; but it is best to use everything in some way, soon, as it occurs naturally to do so; that sets it up to keep trickling out in other ways over the long tail of the near future until next time you can’t overuse it or it stops working and becomes an evil shadow monster twin of itself divination is synchronicity; synchronicity is divination; you can look at a hilarious, beautiful, aching “first line of a novel” from both sides: as a beckoning path into (or out of) the woods; or as a precious photograph of a place you’ve lovingly explored, and survived, with someone you came to know and love my kinda people People willing to have the conversation People willing to have a fall even though there’s snow all over the ground People willing to let a bike go first People willing to let a cat go first People willing to hold on to the tears long enough to not waste a good cry when my dad said “i love you” it was just his way of saying “i love you” huh. My kids are poor. I’m not. I overlook how shabby this place looks cuz I’m coasting off my back story, my psychic resources. They don’t have that same back story, but I strut around here all angry and righteous expecting them to behave as if they do. the stuff you always say is automatically suspect. (with the possible exception of “I love you”) it’s not “how many things do you know how to cook,” it’s how do you react to stuff? can you be resilient? Can you take shit in stride? and it’s not me preaching it, it’s partly me modeling it, but it’s also me OBSERVING it—recognizing and embracing when they do it, cuz they do it, they figure this shit out for themselves and you can be there to be like yes, nice, that’s it, damn, yeah, i’m proud of you and i love it when (for example) you clump down the stairs in your pajamas right before supper’s ready and play your song on the piano again, cursing and muttering to yourself in all the right spots i tend to stop trying when i get to a certain level of comfort. if i want to continue to be some kind of resource—financial, emotional, whatever—for them, I can’t afford to just sit on my ass. Time to get up and take a fucking shower and go to yoga, yes, but— not just kinda peter out and quit after that this time 112119 psilocybin notes 2 messy process is everything, not just the things listen to and play with the weakest person in the room\*  \*hint: you don’t necessarily know who that is tom said: if i was by myself, this would be lame, but you all bring the music that makes it something special (ps: false epiphanies are a thing. but then even *they* can turn out to be false, which makes them a kind of true. It’s like Emma’s TRF problem about the percentage of false positives being negative or whatever. None of which implies at all that anyone around here overthinks things. Nosiree.) all of which is nice and everything but you know when I said to jas that my “i could maybe do something a little special with this job” was acocmpanied by the flashing lights of the grandiosity and narcissism warning system, i wasn’t lying. i kinda alternate between hyped-up, orange-hued, drug-reinforced, blustery self-assurances that i’m “still a poet” or “have a restless soul” or whatever; and the lurking inevitability that i could try as hard as i can every day for the rest of my working life, however short or long that may be, and the best i can hope for is to end up as someone’s kind, kinda quirky, old uncle. which sounds a little funny given that i have my own kids, but you know what i mean. i’m talking about the profession, about skills, about the ego here. most reassuring refrain i’ve heard/read lately: Mr. Rogers. His thing about people wanting to create stuff because of “the gap between what is and what might be.” love it. love that guy that i never met, like how i love bryan safi, for being able to make him & erin be a collective genius, instead of just hogging it all for himself. and john gruber for being a good writer all this time, concealed in the “tech journalist” enclave. the way he stuck “Mr. Cook stood silently nearby” as the penultimate paragraph of [his article][1] about Trump at the Mac Pro factory—damn. Just, damn. 112319 psilocybin notes 3 finally it comes down to a certain detachment, not exactly the opposite of gullibility but just a sort of flat acceptance that nothing is certain and the passionate poetics of those who sound as if they think they know something is just another buzzing noise in the field. make sure the kids are ok. shut up and listen. be nice. be honest. if there's anything left to be done or to attempt tonite or tomorrow then go ahead. why not. but remember that grey damp sadness—or is it emptiness—loneliness?—or just a wan, sun-starved distance—that clings to your spine like rainwater to a windshield—remember it or forget it, it's up to you i guess—but it's never going away, not completely. it's odd to think about how powerless we are even while the position of our minds in our brains makes us feel like our decisions are so momentous. maybe it's because we have eyes and can watch the waning of our own enlightenment as the progress that begets progress pulls up anchor and steams slowly out of the harbor, bound for other climes, while we sit here on the luscious island, awkwardly smiling and avoiding eye contact with each other because we all know we're about to devolve quickly back into piracy, tribalism, cannibalism, and ultimately senseless grunting and unredeemed oblivion. when that ship comes back, its next iteration will be unrecognizable to us—because there won't even be an us—we will have ceased ever to have existed [1]: https://daringfireball.net/2019/11/cook_trump_campaign_ad 121919 i’m a genius. i came up with how to make the toilet paper roll never run out. of course there were some problems. there had to be a constantly-renewing forest out back behind the shitter. i also came up with how to keep old people from being lonely in cafes; it started when some mumbly old dude with a dirty santa claus beard asked the guy next to me to play Uno, and the guy said nah, look at all this, i have to grade three hundred and thirty thousand exams! and went back into his computer. of course the old dude never asked me, because i was a couple tables away, quickly ducking inside my own computer, so i didn’t have to feel bad. but because i’m a genius, i came up with a solution anyway. Of course there were some problems. You have to have a never-ending supply of gingerbread cake and at least a few CPU cycles that aren’t tied up with worrying about getting fired or kicked out of your house or just being a little bit awkward and having normal people shun you. You have to have it so that it’s not all or nothing, and that’s in pretty short supply. Come on, fellow geniuses, help me out here!