110522 the thing you need to remember, the thing you can’t not remember, is never any of the things you highlighted in the book. it’s the in between. the thing that grabs your brain and squeezes, so there’s no time — no NEED — to highlight. The highlight would be ridiculous, gratuitous. Like if brushing your teeth? breathing? taking a shit? if puking were some kind of intellectual marketable epiphany usually because you don’t “get it” right away--there can be any number of pages or days or years between the initial jab of it and the interaction with the other bits that make it more devastating. like how you thought “No one told me I could still dance” was an enumeration of your situation, your problem, until you got to ““Showstoppers wear off. Every girl knew that, but you know who didn’t?” And even then, it keeps going, because the next line is “What would Ed do to Lottie when it wore off?” and we’re back in the plot, out of our own selfish head, so that the show can keep going on and we can keep getting lit on fire and extinguished, over and over again 110822 live in the god of the sentence in the house of the page this is the house of the word these are the woods the weeds the house and the houseboat statue and structure the shelter and the invitation defense against the dark and refuge against the overweening light build the walls stock the shelves lounge on the chaise i’ll be there as soon as i need more magic in my life as soon as i’m fit to witness the drop of blood in the lace the puttering animal in the den the logic in the bramble the inky water under the boathouse the writhing bloodthirsty scream of the words of the sentence in the house of the gods i am terrified every time i try to close my eyes there is a cold, a quivering inner wind, when i yawn as if i am a house of rafters split open to the oncoming winter in self defense i worry over the sufficiency of the woodpile to shelter the chipmunk who lives right on the other side of the window where we spend our days literally inches apart he does his work i do mine who will survive? who has gathered enough crumbs and seeds? who can slow his breathing, tame his pulse who has instinct who has teeth who has fur to guard against the ribbons of wind insinuating in between the boards and logs who will finish out the full extent of life’s expectancy however brief or frantic or relaxed who will be watched and studied and adored by children who will be hunted by cats until he draws his last infinitesimal anonymous breath 111722 ## why getting a haircut is good someone taking care of you physically just feels good, hypnotic, "asmr" you spending time and money on taking care of yourself in particular, on your public presentation, which for many of us (who?) may be one of the first things to get neglected someone paying attention to you professional: boundaries are slightly mutable but firm enough to be comforting feels good to walk away from a situation or encounter feeling as though you behaved properly conversational practice how personal to get, what to say, what not to say, it's a lower stakes sandbox for processing these kinds of signals [possibly dangerous] feels good to support someone who is not particularly powerful you can leave a tip to show that you're a good person feeling of belonging in a set environment; part of the ongoing small talk conversation, like being part of a temporary but continuous club like, we're in here, and out there is the streets, construction, winter, uncertainty, fear, pollution, and everything else, but in here we are like passengers on a plane, trying to be decent to each other, a permeable sense of solidarity > Most evidence suggests that oxytocin renders individuals more sensitive to social information (Stix, 2014), both positive and negative. For example, although intranasal oxytocin seems to increase within-group trust, it may also increase out-group mistrust (Bethlehem et al., 2014) [1] feels like you're part of civilization; you're doing something not 100% necessary because you can in short, like being in the phone book (use ta be) only better, you have evidence that you exist and belong And yet at the same time I still felt a little icky later, like a let-down. Opponent process type thing? or the aftereffects of methylphenidate? Or just anything social—always leaves me a little raw, scooped out, dirty, unsure of my own motives or if I did something wrong. Dude that’s fucked up lol. 111922 just cuz someone whose subset of available data comes from the same larger set as yours does (in fact the subsets probably overlap, tho almost definitely not 100%) draws conclusions different from yours doesn’t mean they’re necessarily an evil criminal mastermind or idiot. they could be missing something; going a different direction at one or more branches of the logic tree, perhaps cuz of values, experiences, indoctrination, education, whatever you want to call it; you could be missing something else or even the same thing but for a different reason. honestly, you both probably are missing a lot of things and at least occasionally making some real boneheaded deductions. i do still believe that anyone can learn at least one thing from anyone else. unless one or both of you have made up your mind beyond a shadow of a doubt that either you or they are definitely, finally, ultimately, inflexibly, irreversibly totally smarter than the other, in every possible category of knowledge and skill—if one or the other is convinced the other one truly has nothing to offer--if anyone not demonstrably a genius is irredeemably a pawn-- if human intelligence, creativity and worth are ultimately a pyramid scheme-- in which case, yeah, i guess war (or abject servitude) really *is* inevitable. in case you can’t tell, i’m bored off my fucking ass i pace i eat i drink i do whatever repeat endlessly like that polar bear at the zoo that makes you wanna tear your soul out of your own chest and hurl it aloft like a paper airplane (destined for a nosedive into asphalt) but maybe— just maybe— 112022 i don’t need someone to tell me i’m not a failure. or that i haven’t failed, or wasted much of the productive energy allotted to me on this wretched earth. Rather, i need help figuring out how to stop failing, how to stop wasting energy and time, how to stop solving the wrong, dumb, picayune little problems; how to do *something* different while there’s still a few lucid years left to me, so maybe i can go out having felt something other than wan unease, having done something other than dumbly watch and judge without enough data to even have a real opinion of my own. so maybe i can a little more frequently feel like i have... - made or accomplished something useful and good - materially helped other people do the same - enjoyed my days and gone to bed satisfied with my position in the tapestry of personal, social, and/or economic life - been an example to my kids of doing something other than passively receiving the whim of the internet, news, politics, marketing, netflix, and all the rest Look, I’m not forsaking *poetry* or whatever you wanna call it. It’s too late for that, that part of me’s too ingrained and i actually like it. I’m not trying to do some kind of reverse Mary Poppins. It’s just. Mary Poppins *did* something, you know? She didn’t sit around wistfully idealizing herself while resenting the powerful bankers. So how do I do what I should, yes *should* have done 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, and actually intentionally LEARN something that will make me... - smarter about people - smarter about money - smarter about technology - smarter about art ...in some way that I can actually concretely use, yes *use* to make some kind of a difference so I don’t die this way: flabby, sad, cynically nostalgic, and grateful for a crumb any time anyone accidentally invites me along on something adjacent to a real adventure. How do I head up my own adventure? How do I get on the ragtag crew for Treasure Island—especially now when there’s so many ghost ships that’ll lead you exactly nowhere but into philosophical and financial ruin? Yes I know, I ask this routinely every few years, and then I buy a bunch of stuff and soothe myself with THC. Doing something different with this impulse has to be my actual, real, literal priority now, today, and... ...I’m gonna need some help. Moreover, I’m gonna need to *be* some help. It’s not just about me collecting sympathy and pets and reassurances. I don’t need someone to tell me I’m smart enough; I know I have enough basic processing and storage capacity to do *something* more than I have been doing. I don’t need to be a genius. I just need to give enough of a shit, and shrug off the stultifying layers of sleepy acquiescence that have poisened my days. One of the problems, should I say *challenges,* is that there’s too much stuff. Write 500 little words, burn off some fog, and then what? Before you can take a full breath during that pause, the internet beckons. Newsfeeds. Bullshit. Hot takes. More blinking lights, brighter and faster and more compelling than your homely pointlessly “private” ones could ever be. Who are you? You’re nobody. There’s a vast, swelling, pulsing, horny ocean of somebodies out there, and they’re all straining against your computer screen like a hot cock against tight jeans. How can your little old attention possibly resist that? Maybe “meditation” needs to just be literally “nothing” sometimes. Just sit here. Or go get another cup of coffee. Or look at the scraggly birds tryin to fortify against the onslaught of winter. Anything but succumb to what consumed you yesterday, and last night, and the day before that, and the night before that, and.... I expect it has something to do with being willing to feel something other than numb or high, too. To be *able* to sit here with something “negative” (which is sometimes just another word for honest or thoughtful), like you used to do back when you didn’t have much of a choice because technologee was so effing primativvvv.... (and pot was still illegal) Dude. You are not allowed to write anything else in this dumb “journal” or whatever you want to call ephemeral blinking lights whose patterns no one else is ever gonna see, until it’s part of the answer to this, some kind of advancement of this, some kind of progress. (i mean that doesn’t mean you can’t write stuff somewhere else....) When cel said she said in her friend’s car “my dad stops for butterflies” when they were talking about braking for animals in the road—that was about as proud as i’ve felt for a while. She said the parents chuckled and she was like what? I’m not joking. 112222 doing your best is a curse, risible, pathetic as a dog tilting at the sound of spoken language. but god fuck it, you still gotta do it