coming into
entries from journals, the notes app, etc. from may 27th to june 4th. (june 6th, 2023)
Untitled entry, 5/27/2023, 10:48 p.m. In a notebook.
I think it’s pertinent to know exactly the kind of person I am and where I’m coming from. There’s no chance I can fully understand myself, or any of my actions, unless I understand my processes and my environment.
To treat it like character creation— what do I need? I don’t need anything except to live in the world I grew up with, which is a terrible and unsustainable thing to want, as the world I grew up in is dying and rife with bits so ugly they cannot be put into a better light. I need the ease and the constant going and strangers and the escape, which is strange considering how fussy I am about specific things.
Who am I? Someone who’s reliant on small and thoughtless routines within their life and has structured their life around those routines. A detail-oriented person. My outlook on life is similar to how I imagine a doctor looks at a body— clinical observation of a system, made of many small parts to form a larger whole. If there is a problem around me, I will find it, but not for the sake of gossip or entertainment. I will find it because, much like a doctor, I enjoy making diagnoses. I self-reflect when I have nothing else to do (which is always), and that’s gotten me effectively nowhere either in life or knowledge of the self. My mother said I reminded her of a Wes Anderson character, and listed the traits “obsessive”, “nit-picky”, and “difficult” in defense of her argument.
My environment is much more complex, an echo of the old California rippling out and hitting me and the others— sex, drugs, rock and roll, disaffected children who grew up too fast. The 1960s and 70s were ugly and rapid and glorious, from my understanding, full of terrible things done in the name of enlightenment and so much love that it coated everything in a saccharine haze. It was bursting at the seams, unrestrained and beautiful from the outside, terrifying from the inside, and wholly impossible to contain. But that died long before I was born, so I grew up in the dregs of that cup with all the other tea leaves and saliva and unwanteds. It doesn’t really matter though. Everyone knew we were fucked once the cops figured out the surfers were smuggling hash inside their surfboards. Besides, my environment these days is just House House House.
What do I want? Everything, I think. Necromancy and raw meat and a house of my own and cake.
Entry titled “✩”, 5/29/2023, 3:22 a.m. On loose leaf lined paper.
Fell asleep on the floor in the same jeans and tank top that I’ve been wearing for the last two days and dreamed of New York. Maybe I could make it. Say fuck you to the “go to college, get a job, and die” complex, be a better bassist, record an EP or some demos or something. Get the fuck out of here. Be more. God knows I probably have enough shit written to do something with it, to make it into songs or fucking spoken word if it turns out lyrics are too hard. My old music teacher said that I had a rare gift for rhythm and music. Maybe I should actually use it.
I don’t have time for that right now though. I’m running out of it, actually. I’ve never felt this sense of urgency before. I’ll do something with all the lines I have scrawled in my notes app when I get older. More stable. Living in a place that fosters creativity, where there aren’t so many rules around everything and I can eat and sleep and write and play when I feel like it. I like the idea of having roots in healthy soil. I like the idea of being able to return to something that’s my own.
I mean, what are the chances of that, though? Of a successful career in something I enjoy, of being able to live without interference from people who I don’t want interference from? Low, but who gives a shit.
I need to get to Brazil.
Entry titled “Hope”, 5/30/2023, 2:53 p.m. In a notebook.
Hope is not an emotion that I thought I could still feel which sounds sad, I know, but it’s not terrible. I feel exhausted, maybe. Drained. The human personification of Radiohead’s No Surprises. What I feel towards the future typically can be described as ‘resignation’ or ‘complacency’— the future will happen and I’ll be there to see it, I guess. Not like I have anything better to do.
Clinicality strikes again. Everything is like that for me, really. Emotions happen to me, life happens to me, the future happens to me. Recently, I described it to a friend as being a concrete wall with frosting on it— the color is whatever the color is, but I’m still concrete underneath it all. There’s an expansive black apathy beneath every single thing that I do or feel, unavoidable and omnipresent. It is what it is. I’ve learned to live with it, carry it on my back like that ghost story I heard when I was young about the man who was permanently hunched over from the Devil riding on his back like he was a horse. My devil’s not riding me, though. We have a grudging agreement; it can stay as long as it doesn’t get in my way.
For the most part, it doesn’t. We work around each other. I feel the not-emotions, and the apathy looms over it all like the vacuum of space above all our heads. This is the agreement we have come to. So shall it be written, so shall it be done, so mote it be.
But hope is a motherfucker, and I like to dream away all my time. So maybe there’s something good out there for me— something beautiful and voluntary on the horizon, a place where I want to be instead of being there because there’s nothing else for me to do. I really want to believe there is. I have to, because if I’m not going to have a future that I want to be in, what’s the point of all this enduring?
Untitled entry consisting of a T chart, 6/1/2023, unknown time. In a notebook.
WHAT I KNOW
1.) I am not good at praying. I do my best, but it can’t exist to me— prayer invokes the image of a one-way communication, like yelling into a void, and everything talks to me all the time. Nothing is ever one-way. What is there to say, anyways? Give me cake and orange soda, angels of the sugar rush. Give me arms to pray with. Oh Lord, send an angel unto me to fuck me into the mattress or kill me or play rock and roll so loud it rattles everything back into place or make everything better, amen. Everything is already known, rendering the act pointless.
2.) I am not good at doing things/following rules/believing in things that are pointless. Of course, much more has a point than you think, even if it’s by holding a small space in the fabric universe the same way a zero is a placeholder in an equation. Some things are truly pointless, though, and I can’t make myself commit to something useless.
3.) 5.5 to 6 seconds is something found in dozens of religions everywhere. The Ave Maria, Om Mani Padme Hum, the sa ta na ma chant, the rosary, khechari— all involve 5.5 to 6 second intervals of breathing, which increases blood flow to the brain and synchronizes your circulatory, heart and nervous systems. It’s the same shebang as frankincense relieving anxiety and depression in mice. Over and over, in multiple different cultures, we have found the same golden ratio of things that soothe us. I am good at breathing slowly. In this way, I am good at praying— all but the words.
4.) My actions do not face effective consequences due to my ability to weasel out of almost everything. I don’t know what’s going to happen when I actually do have to face a consequence bigger than getting my phone taken away. I don’t think it’ll be good, though.
5.) Nothing.
WHAT I DON’T KNOW
1.) If it’s ever going to get better.
2.) Why it happened. Why it happened to me. Why they made it happen to me. Why they wanted it to happen. What the point of it all was.
3.) People can survive without massive chunks of their brains. Theoretically, could I remove mine? I’ve always seen the brainless jellyfish as the most pious creature— they’re able to float purely on instinct and the will of God, no thoughts to be thought, just something beautiful existing in a space. I want to be a jellyfish. Could I survive it?
4.) The story is going to end, I know that much, but how?
5.) Anything.
Untitled entry, 6/2/2023, 9:13 a.m. In the notes app.
The raw meat cravings are as vicious as ever, made stronger by the medication they have me on for the mold infection. (Unsurprising, I’m sure— the things coming out of my mouth are miasma-worthy, I suppose, even despite the fact that I have journals dating back to age 5 that are just as macabre. It’s a child to me, this parasite. I love it. The only guilt I’ve felt since I was a preteen is my guilt at killing it.) The flesh, though— I want to embed myself in the flesh. I understand vultures more than my own family. I’d quite like to be neck deep in a carcass, the smell of the blood and the meat. I’d like to wear someone’s else’s body like a suit— truly wear it, be physically inside of it. I’m not going to kill anyone, though. I think.
Untitled entry, 6/4/2023, 11:31 p.m. In a notebook.
I can’t imagine that I seem happy to you. I want to— I want to be happy, and at the very least seem happy— but I’m stuck. I want to be sedated. I hate psychiatry and the idea of being chemically dependent on something makes me nauseous, but I know that somewhere out there, the American curators of sadness have a pill that can take away some of the mania and the fog and the mood swings and the compulsions and the paranoia and the emptiness. Something that could maybe make me human.
I don’t want the pills to take away my ghosts, though. The voices are kind of all I have right now, them and the angels. I would be awfully lonely without them.
Here’s the thing. I don’t want to be afraid of needles. I don’t want to throw up every time I touch latex because it reminds me of tourniquets. I don’t want to have to be so scared of a lack of autonomy or institutionalization that I sit and rot with the knowledge of my actual state of health. I don’t want to be afraid of being left before I can leave or running out of things to say or that I was wrong to smoke Luckies because I’m not very lucky after all or that if I stop talking in big words and references people will stop caring about me. I don’t want to live with those what ifs— what would’ve happened if I started modeling again, if I hadn’t said yes to all the trips, if my brain function wasn’t so bad, if I stopped saying no to the opportunities I’m so lucky to have been given— but I don’t really want them to be realized, either, and I think that’s okay. I think I’m okay.
I guess I’m doing fine. I’m content, and if not that, then I’m complacent. I’ve got joy, the kind that doesn’t come from happiness but from a thorough love of existence. I’ve got a friend in the city and a couple outside of it, food, water, shelter, access to health services, .
It’s enough for me. And if it isn’t, then I’ll make it enough. There’s no other option here.
I choose life.