black box

crime reenactment, humiliation, and flat circles.

Dreams— big dreams, dark dreams, dreams that move slow, dreams that move fast, dreams that go up and down into different heights of consciousness; dreams in the color palette of my mind, a dichotomy of deep, rich jewel tones and shades so faded they’re really just the thought of a color; dreams with entire menageries of animals running in and out like it’s a house on fire; dreams of fire, of water, of ice and snow and light; dreaming outside and inside, to the left and to the right; dreams that happen when I’m asleep and dreams that happen when I’m awake. Certain textures show up more than others— wax, solid wood, bone, fur, stone, lace, old paper, glass. The themes that appear the most are the loss of my left leg, having to carry or protect something (dogs, a lot of the time), betrayal, and something being unmasked. I spend a lot of time in dreamed theaters. I spend a lot of time near dreamed water, a dream-ocean or -river or -lake. Music, when it shows up, is ambient and almost always has an orchestral element. People, when they show up, are either entirely faceless or rendered in frightening detail.

Dream of fighting a snake-self to protect a dog-self. Dream of having to escape a theater of dead-eye baby dolls and disemboweled stuffed animals. Dream of running through a jungle and getting my leg bit off by my pursuer. Pay attention. These things are important. I can’t figure out why, but I can’t get information about myself the way that most people do, so I have to assume there’s significance. I’m trying to fish myself out of a dark lake and I need every piece of bait I can muster. Pay attention. Are you paying attention?

Okay. Let’s call this crime reenactment. I don’t know what the crime is and I don’t know if there even was a crime, but there was something. Wasn’t there something? I don’t know. Don’t ask me, I don’t know; that’s why I’m asking you. I’ve started going out at night again, dragging myself around the neighborhood like I’m missing something I can find. Escape, meaning, justification for pain, anything pretty. I walked like that when I was a teenager, too. You can see Jesus, bleeding sex and crucified on street lights, if you look at the neon the right way. I only say it because I started seeing it as a kid and now I can’t unsee it.

Light flashes business hours on wet pavement. Carousel illusions flicker on the inside of restaurant windows. I won’t be going in. Interaction is not the point. The point is that I’m in a plane, and the plane is stuttering and choking on nothing, so now I have to reach my hand into the black box and fix the issue. I can’t throw it out because I’m thousands of feet above the ground. I can’t build myself a new engine because I don’t have the time or the parts. All I can do is reach in and hope I don’t get bit. How embarrassing.

I keep telling people I’m most vulnerable in metaphor, but they don’t believe me. I think I’ve abandoned making sense in favor of trying to be honest. Loquacity strikes me as particularly funny, now; my journal entries have slowly been dropping commas until it’s just single phrases over and over again. It’s just a phase I go through. Crossing the gas station parking lot, root beer in hand. Baiting my hook. Reaching in. Drumroll, please.

---

There is no place that is safe from AI girls. It’s always girls, too. I would say women, but the shapes they’ve been generated into are “girls with tits”, not women. Most of them don’t even look a day over seventeen. They advertise suggestiveness, spread across the internet like dandelion seeds. They are honey traps for lonely people, specifically men. The text floating above them always promises that the site is adults only, that you can do anything to your AI girlfriend, anything at all, anything you want. Limitless interaction. Limitless sex. She’ll never get angry or make you feel bad or tell you no. And isn’t that the dream? Doesn’t everyone want someone perfectly beautiful who can’t do anything but worship the ground you walk on? Doesn’t everyone want to be the hero of their lives, as if life is something that can have a hero?

In one generated video, a girl in a bikini reaches towards the camera. She makes a peace sign with her hand like she’s just figured out what fine motor control is. The top, which barely covers her imaginary nipples, doesn’t move at all. Her waistline is physically impossible. When she smiles, crinkles erupt from the corners of her eyes and the shape of her face completely shifts, changing into someone much sharper and older. It’s nauseating. And the nausea doesn’t come from the way she switches age and faces— it comes because those are someone’s smile lines, and a computer saw that and realized that skin crinkles when people smile, and now someone’s face is half-used for this mostly-naked girl. Her face then morphs into a much smaller smile, and she’s back to looking like an anime character. Maybe that’s better. She almost looked human for a moment there. But, of course, she’ll look like anything you want her to, because she is anything you want her to be, because the ultimate sexual fantasy of the modern world is not needing to go through someone’s personality to get to their body. Because the ultimate sexual fantasy of the modern world is having power over a person.

I knew this. I’ve known this since I learned what sex was. Somehow, the re-realization of it has made sexual power dynamics begin to show up everywhere, specifically the dynamics of humiliation. Even the AI girls have the fixtures of humiliation. They blush furiously as they’re pinned on their backs by mysterious forces, their breasts overflowing from their tiny tops, forever tripping and falling and fucking up. It’s debasement. Supplication. Unworthiness. All of that is explicitly about a power dynamic— I emphasize explicitly because power dynamics are everywhere, but they are rarely as visible as they are in the sort of sex the AI girls peddle. The girls are designed to reaffirm the user’s belief that the user is above them, which is why there are no advertisements for AI boyfriends. You can’t really turn a profit on being more powerful than a man. Misogyny strikes again. Shocker. It’s almost like you can’t divorce and secularize sex from external cultural values.

I digress, though. The point is that I’m now looking out for humiliation, which means I’m working my way through the list of sex films I’ve got in my head, starting with Luis Buñuel’s 1967 surrealist classic Belle de Jour. Which means I’m looking for clues to myself in sex films. That also means I got mildly disappointed by Belle de Jour, not only because I didn’t see much of myself in it, but because I made the mistake of thinking that Buñuel would be interrogating humiliation instead of just depicting it. No dice. He enters the intersection of sexuality, womanhood, and masochism from the outside, as a stranger. I can’t fault him for that. I can fault him for seemingly never having talked to a masochistic woman before, but whatever. We continue regardless. I keep my humiliation goggles on.

I don’t really know why I’m digging so hard for signs of humiliation when I already know the answer to what I’m digging into. I re-read some of my teenage journals recently; there’s plenty of discussion about male fantasy and how every boy that talked to me came at me from an angle of mild dehumanization. For all the preaching of social justice, very few boys have had a conversation with me where they aren’t either putting me on a pedestal or considering me firmly below them. I know humiliation. Now I want to understand it. Acceptance is one of the most universal human desires, and of course all “normal” desires are subject to subversion, but what is it about humiliation? Is it because of the physical reaction to it, the blushing and the heart racing? Is it because it confirms the masochist’s self-deprecating view? Is it because sexuality in general is humiliating, and that cognitive connection allows someone to get off on shame? Is it because all your filth and failures and flaws are put under a spotlight, forcing you to be vulnerable, and then you get taken care of? I want to understand it because I’ve been on the other side of it— there’s not a lot I won’t do for twenty dollars— and I want to know why. I want to know why I was there. Twenty dollars was not enough to get me into that bathroom. I need a clue. I need bait.

But what do I know? Similarly to Buñuel, I enter humiliation from the outside— the side of the stranger, the side of the humiliator— and reach my hand into the black box, hoping to hit the mark I need to. It’s a matter of dissection. Isn’t it always? I want to cut someone open and walk around in their head, to figure out how their life has made them do the things they do and want the things they want. I want to interrogate. I’m curious.

Oh, well. Godspeed to the fake girls, because sometimes I’m fake, too. Godspeed to all the masochists. Godspeed to curiosity. God willing, it’ll do something. And no, I’m not going to resolve my quarter-life crisis by going into psychology. You don’t want me in your head. Trust me on that.

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So I can do metaphors. I can do relation. The only way out of me is into someone else, which also means that the only way into me is through someone else. And I need more bait, so I start watching television again.

It actually leaves me with less bait. As it turns out, I make a very good mirror— my vocal mannerisms, expressions, and body language all change depending on what show I’m watching. I think I got quieter than usual while I was rewatching Sharp Objects, more focused on whatever I was doing creatively. Hannibal made me expressionless and articulate. I changed the least while rewatching the first season of True Detective— that’s a kind of bait, I guess, and it does make sense. I always get Rust Cohle on that one personality test, not that it means much. But it could be bait for the body I’m fishing out of the lake. The lake, the lake, the dark lake, the dream-lake. It comes back around. I told you to pay attention, didn’t I?

I have found myself in a place. It’s similar to the place I was in when I was eighteen and living in Colorado, but much less graceful— back then, I had the poetic imagery that my sleepwalking provided me, the visual of crawling out a window and walking into the fields and only waking up when I saw deer. This is much less fascinating and much more boring. I’ve got a one-way ticket to Loserville. I go outside or online and see constant sex, a hundred little humiliations. I go inside and I see the black lake. It shines like a mirror even when the surface is broken. If I stand in the doorway, I see them both, and, well, that’s just a nightmare.

When I was little, I used to think of time as a gallery of moments that the consciousness or soul sprinted through, like a kineograph. Millions of film stills creating temporal motion. This also has the implication that everything you’ve ever experienced stretches out behind you in perfect Technicolor, even when you can’t see it. I try not to be frightened by that. Sometimes I fail. Lately, time has become more of a river, alternating between fast and slow, rough and calm. Things are constantly washed away. It’s all the same river, but you never step into the same river twice, do you. Have I been here before? I can’t remember how I got here. It’s like waking up in a field of deer again. On one of my nighttime excursions into the field, I once saw a stag so big I thought I hadn’t woken up. On my present nighttime excursions, I see nothing at all.

Time is water moving in a flat circle. Time is a lake. Time is a lake, a black lake, and I’m on the shore because my plane’s engine is in the lake bed, waiting for me to find it and fix it. I am in a room with no lights. I am baiting a hook in a room with no lights. Haven’t I been here before? I don’t know. Don’t ask me, I don’t know. That’s why I asked you. Haven’t we been here before?

Cast your line. Now start hoping.