︎



10660

10,000 songs floating around inside me


10655

life is one long act of desperation


i am ferocious.



10653

to see myself reflected in the world. to see myself reflected in the things i love.




10649

i don’t want to fall into a hypothetical.




i wonder how wide my body would spread if it was laid one atom thin like a veil over the earth.




when the only language of care you learn is suffering



and that feeling where you just don’t want to talk to anybody until you have all of your shit together.




10468

fuck a toggle




10647

i don’t want you to ask me a question of opinion just because you think there is a right answer and want to see if i get it right. i want you to ask me because you genuinely want to hear what i think.




10646

is it just me or does seeing the term PG-13 still make you feel like a badass/breaking the rules/a big kid?




10645

long strings of transformations.onethingbecomesanother




10641

wait a nose makes a quart of mucus a day?




10640




my brain is scattered in thousands




it shouldn’t be about turning human movement into a computer sounds, it should be about teaching a computer to understand the sound of human movement.




10634

no matter how long the train takes to get here it’s always against me.




when i’m with you i feel like i’m cheating on myself.




10631

to come to terms with the nonlinearity of living







10630

when we make out i feel like i’m cheating on my art.

10630

all the stuff i’ve ever lost is somewhere. even if it’s burried 5 feet under the surface of a landfill, it’s there. manuscripts don’t burn.




10627

rancid spaniards spreading jesus




we sleep two in the low input room, two in the high input room




piano sitting in the middle of the room like a damsel with her pants off




10624

there are people who i used to be closer with and now am distant from. loved ones. and i just realized that in a way i treat my memory of them as if they weren’t alive anymore. i honor the belongings they once left at my house. those objects carry a weight that demands respect. i don’t know if there’s a name for this, or if it’s unhealthy, this pseudo-passed quality of remembrance. i don’t know who it serves.




10622

to think that even when we turn away the sun doesn’t stop




10622




he’s always late, but it’s just his way of saying i’ll never forgive you.




10616

meandering across our early 20s like chipmunks in pursuit




10615

capital per square inch




10614

to think that an indoor cat never experiences rain




10614

i don’t want your weasly dreams




10613

when half lit, the moon always looks like it’s looking back at the sun. maybe sometimes it’s turning away and we don’t know it.




10611

ya know i think the experience of losing all of my data, or thinking i lost all of my data, was so painful that a still-scared part of me is dettered from investing more heaving hours of time and energy when it is all so fragile. i think i need to really process and get over that fear.




10609

that the warmth of my coffee mug in my hands is actually the warmth of the flame under the kettle which is the warmth of the soil which is the warmth of the sun. holding the sun in my hands.




10604

obsessed with some notion of my full potential




10603

what people respond to in music isn’t perfection or any of perfection’s cousins. it’s realness.




10601

the unrecognizable specific




10600

working man’s yellow

leotard blue






each sentence is a spell cast




10599

the compulsion to go down the escalator rather than the stairs even if the escalator is off.




what i look for in a sound is specificity




10594

lost everything in the raging fire of my own stupidity.




i guess usually i’d rather look funny than hot.




10591

somehow everything is so avoidable, and yet it happens. shoulda shoulda blues.




10590

and why does it feel so much better to make someone else laugh than it does just to think of something funny to yourself?




it’s in these moments that you start to notice the sounds of the inside of your mouth chewing.




those deathly panicked moments when you can’t find your phone  







10589

somehow relationships always seem to be equal parts pleasure and pain.

like even if the relationship is full of joy, eventually parting ways is an equal and opposite grief.

but maybe that’s the better way to live. to dance on the rim of the extremes, feeling all of it.  




10586

wait why are bubbles white?




10585

of course if you shower me with compliments and good sentiments i will feel like i have to live up to them. so for the sake of my being honest with myself I don’t want to hear them.




if you could solo, mute, or record things in your mind which would you do?




10584

i see in you the things i am tryin to unlearn.




10583

seeing climbers who rush reminds me of former versions of myself. i think that’s the only reason i feel slightly pained by it.




10581

compositional process: add stuff till it feels good, take stuff out til it feels better. repeat if necessary.




10576

it’s hard to be around another person’s fear for an extended period of time. no matter what they’re afraid of. my breath becomes shallow and precarious. to converse with them you have to see the world momentarily as they do. you have to see their fears to relate with and respect them. and that’s exhausting.




i just don’t trust them to grow up. and i don’t want to be a part of that.




to be an adult is to be unafraid. or rather, to be an adult is to regularly confront one’s fears, rather than seeking protection from them. and in so doing opening yourself to relate lovingly with the world.




to be a child as an adult is to constantly seek protection. to be shielded, isolated from the world, and so deprived of a real relationship with it. you relate to the world only on your terms. it is not a give and take. it is not an ongoing exchange of energy. it is i want and so it will be. a kind of presumption of godliness. to not be an adult is to neglect to learn how the world around you responds to your actions, neglect to learn that messes have to be cleaned, that bikes need to be tuned, that people need to be heard.




i find it hard to work with someone who doesn’t express enthusiasm for what’s happening in the room as it’s happening. the process of creating a song is a process of yes and, you need to bring that energetic thrust to the table in order for the act of creation to be possible.




i feel like i’m just starting to understand that there is no negative quality of music. it is all positive, just different levels of positive. something that doesn’t resonate with you is a small yeah. as if to say yeah keep going, because you can hear what sticks with you in a track, what treasures could be pursued, even if they haven’t yet been found. and a track that has found its treasure, an idea that you really love, is a big YEAH. but it’s all yes. it’s all positive. the negative aspect, the haterade if you will, is totally superfluous.




10570

today i learned you can never trust someone who can put their legs behind their head. they’re up to no good. do not be lured into trusting them because they can put their legs behind their head. they don’t know what they’re doing. do not let them tell you there is too much heat in your body, or that you’re living in your proverbial basement,  or that the body can be cut up into sections of 3 by 3, fractally to infinity, or that you need to hold a block up with your butt against a pillar while turning your left knee to 2pm somehow without moving your ankle at all while he puts his feet forcefully on your upper thighs, saying “we’re going to open your windows.” he will also say things like “a clock always turns the same way,” and “life is about the where” and “i can tell by the way your ankle is callused that you are a worrier” and sit on your knees saying “you’re manspreading” and “i like google maps because it shows you where you are” and “i prefer to teach like baking, rather than cooking,” and then ask you what the difference is.




you think Moses watched porn crossing the desert?




10567

to make a song that has the form of a train of thought, where different ideas and feelings fly in and out as if from nowhere




and i understood for the first time that there were limits to my capacity to hold space for others. even if i wanted to.   




10565

just believes he’s so fragile that any change is a threat — organizing a pile of objects, moving a piece of furniture.




10564

on making music that feels like a body: in the same way that no part of a body acts in isolation, no piece of a sound thing works in isolation. the goal isn’t to find ways to fully separate parameter control of individual parts. they should respond to each other. they’re a part of one whole.




10562

trying to remind myself that standing in joshua tree gives me so much more than any amount of achievement ever could.




10561

fucking time crystals




10560

i prefer to be off the chain than chained too damn tight.




why be in new york? new york is like the everything bagel of american cities. i like my bagels whole wheat everything. i totally get it if someone doesn’t want an everything bagel. i just so happen to want the everything on my bagel.




the desperate warmth of knowing you’re lovable.




I’m a fistman




10556

i suppose i stretch to deepen my relationship with myself. to ignore my body, to not explore its limits and feelings and strengths and weaknesses, is to overlook my own existence, which is bodily. having a body and never moving it like having eyes but never using them to see.




making hand music without any kind of system of understanding is like composing for piano without any formal understanding of chord structure or harmony. you can do it, and it could be totally awesome, but it will be a laborious process, based on trial and error.




10550

that moment you look out the window and catch a telephone wire against a sun-bleached wall and for a second it feels like you’re anywhere else other than where you are. something about the universal placehood of things gathered under sky.







10547

maybe the real reason i want to be with someone is just to feel like we can grieve the planet together.




to wish for myself every day to make mistakes. have a troubled day.




the more words i say the less carefully i have to choose them.




10545

make a 1-bit piece of music




10541

somehow i’m just realizing that i can wear clothes not as protection, but to take myself out of my comfort zone, to push my own boundaries. to make myself more vulnerable by wearing what might not be liked. what might be whack. challenge to self: wear boldly whack garb and own it.




10540

Biking like a pod racer




10539

i won’t be caught waiting on the doorstep of my life.




10538

The only crime a performer can commit is not risking anything.




I want to see someone risk everything.




I want to risk everything.




Romantic love happens when each person sees in the other something better than the other sees in themselves. Otherwise how can you be obsessed with someone who’s obsessed with you?




10538

you will always be as late as you are able to tolerate making others upset. if you’re ok with others’ being a little upset then you will be a little late, and if you’re ok with making others very upset then you will be very late.




10536

capitalism can’t exist in a mentally well society. consumerism relies completely on the insecurity of the consumers.




tubeyub.coom




10534

I don’t use fossil fuels.  It’s cruel to the dinosaurs.




10533

the background spaces of one’s mind. landscapes from childhood. like the everhum background radiation of the big bang. the sparkle flitter noise that is with us always.







10530

If you look at anything long enough you can learn to love it.




Maybe one curse of being either attractive or wealthy is that you’re allowed to believe deep down that you’re fragile, and that without others you would not be able to cope.




perhaps it’s the gradual eroding of idealism.




supercompensation




10528

when you’re with another person it’s like in a way you only are the parts of yourself that they recognize in themselves, combined with what they don’t recognize in themselves, but recognize as different. But the point is you are only what they perceive along with the inverse of what they are. Wow this is not fitting well into words. I’ll try this again later.




10527

To be loved is to be deeply wanted to exist. None of us really want to exist. And so we need others’ love to justify being here.




10525

i’m feeling like shit today but i how can I complain when i’m getting more monthly listeners than Bernadette Peters.




10524

most of all what i want from sound is irreverence. i listen for irreverence. i yearn for the sound of irreverence.




10517

I am the sperm that won.




10516

and when i die at least i will be able to say to myself you watched plenty of youtube




10513

i want to see you

i want to see you be a body




every conversation is a song you write together, full of lyrics and melodies and struck chords




10510

and when you look out the brooklyn bedroom window at just the right angle all you see is trees, and you can imagine maybe these trees go on forever in every direction. and you sit relishing for a moment the freedom of misunderstanding.  




10508

too bad you never get to montage over the hard work like they do in the moving pictures.




10509

There’s the suffering of lying, and the suffering of telling the truth. Which is the same as the suffering of not living, vs the suffering of living.




Humanity’s greatest blunder was doing everything we could to be something else.




i loved sharing unalike worlds.




10505

To pretend to be a cohesive organism when each of your cells wants something different.




10504

What if the workers who built busses at the greyhound factory earned royalties on everything the bus did after that? Every fare that was bought, a percentage of it is split between those who actually made the machine, and who should therefore get royalties on its profits.




10502

Something you can learn but not teach.




10500

to only make glove sounds that you can make on a keyboard is like picking up a violin and making it to sound like a piano.




vladimir mutant




10499

music making as walking around blindfolded with a stick. looking for the candy filled mâché to whack.




10498

is there a musical analog to the visual concept of black and white?




10496

I have seen the kingdom of heaven. I have flown through the firmament above the clouds. And I must say, I am unimpressed. Not enough leg room.




The road is a stage




10495

to give someone the gift of knowing you don’t need them.




10494

on making things, if you go out wandering, even without a map, or any idea where you’re going, after some time you’ll end up somewhere.




i ask for a security deposit before we do it.




you’re nervous about what you say when you’re first meeting someone because there’s no past history of comments to average out one’s perception of you. Thinking about getting to know someone as finding the 0 sections in a polynomial, Newton’s Fractal.




10492

There are jobs where you yourself are the product and those are the jobs that people think are cool. As a performing artist and dancer.




10490

Days when I’m in touch with the wonderment of things, and days when I’m not.




10489

Whackalicious




10488

I am electricity flowing through a fluid body.




10487

and perhaps on my deathbed i will come to realize that living wasn’t worth all the trouble.




10484

Humor is resilience




10483

You can rearrange the letters in fiancé and spell finance. Kind of.




10481

Always on a ruthless crusade of self betterment.




10480

Drugs to live my life from many angles.




10476

Everything in the city ends up flat if you leave it there long enough.




10476

life as an ever-moving disappointment.




10475

it’s an artist’s job to take risks.




10473

the people who want to build pianos are often not the same people who want to play them.




Meditating being a practice of mixing. Turning knobs on the experiential EQ. Boosting the high end.




10472

it’s like i built frankenstein and now i have to bring him to life. or maybe more accurately, become him.




that i’ll never know what honey tastes like to a bee.




10468

Maybe here hoarding equals the fear and protective instincts of depression era Jews multiplied by the excess of industrial wealth in the age of mechanical reproduction.




10465

lyrics as the world of images and thoughts around a moment or idea, not as a statement of the centralizing concept itself




improvising music requires the same attitude as improvising comedy. always say yes.




feeling bizarrely bummed that i didn’t get any spam mail today.




Jezwaldo




10462

To remember that I, like everything else, am just a conduit for the sun’s energy. That the sun is trusting me even, with its energy, knowing it is up to me to do its work. To shine in languages and forms that it cannot shine. Sun’s work.




10461

maybe my family’s tradition of acquiring and accumulating and hoarding things is actually a response to the placeless-ness experienced by my grampa’s generation. Diasporic Jews, coming to find a new life. And that the gathering of objects was the same as building a new home, a new history in a new place. and that letting go of those objects would be resigning to placelessness.  maybe that’s what i’ve inherited. without a connection to a particular land, objects become synonymous with home.




wow i just want to be seen and loved so bad. when you don’t have a partner there’s no constant seen and constant loved, and you want it from community, or somewhere else. i wonder if i could survive without it. what would become of me if i needed nothing?




10459

to be able to clean for others and not clean for yourself is to believe that nothing you do for yourself can help you feel better.




a questionable mathematical illustration of why having a lot of friends isn’t important: if having one friend helping you with a job makes the job 2 times easier, that’s 2/1 times easier. but then another friend is comparatively only 3/2 times easier than with 2 friends. and a third friend is 4/3 times easier. in other words friends are diminishing marginal returns. the million-and-oneth friend doesn’t make any difference at all.




10450

the sun begging for attention.




knowing that the light of the sun i see is only seen by me. that light will never go to anyone else.







10449

it would take 7,000 years to walk to the Sun. that seems oddly doable. and they set off at dawn, the people who wanted their ancestors to walk on the sun.  




Pitchspork, the Humbucker, the Afflatus, the Athlanus, Truncated Tines, Monofuel, Peaches and Cream, the Berryjuice, Brooklyn Glutenfree, Snide Times, CultureKraft, Milk Carton, the Fade,




funny that im afraid of the apocalypse when i am the apocalypse. but maybe that’s the most basic premise of mankind, fear of self.




scrolling through pictures of yurts in my spare time.




10448

one probably misguided concept of adulthood: it’s like you’re born with a certain amount af youthful essence and then you can keep it or give that youth to a child of your own, and then you don’t have yours anymore because you had to give it away in order for your child to have it. (you have to make sacrifices. you have to make more money. etc etc)




10447

christmas is an idea conceived by the white optimism of 1950s america




10446

a thousand pounds of success won’t make the crickets any louder




The absurd strength it takes to look light as a plastic bag




life without someone to be grateful for me. everyone just wants someone to be grateful for them.




10445

and in the morning i go to my pee spot, two steps out the front door, the little patch of sandy loam at the top of the hill that has become my pee spot. it darkens over time, and after being back just a few days the splotch returns to its ripe deep fullness. i like to think that by now my urine has traveled somewhere deep into the crust of the earth, maybe even beyond. a piece of myself, evidence, buried in the mantle.




that dark moment when the concept of a thing replaces the thing.




My worst fear is to not have someone to be funny for.




10443

every leaf is a sun catcher, a sun mit




reality is a temple for itself




10442

what happened to make every member of my immediate family horrible cleaners?







10441




My head is a label maker. But maybe I can decide whether to stick its labels.




We actually already talk about space and time as the same thing. “How far is it? “It’s about 20 minutes away.”




For curiosity to be forever the thrust of my existence.




Maybe love and curiosity are the same.




Windows of slopportunity




$5 for pinball $10 for alcohol. Drunk enough to notice everything  




10438




to think this whole time the tick tock of a clock was the sound of something real, something specific, pallet jewels catching escape wheel teeth.

all hail the watch. the only thing that makes a clock meaningful is isn’t ability to predict when events happen. What events were people first looking to to syncrhonize with? I assume they were cosmic. A clock can see somehow into the future, and say i will be in this position and the sun will just crest over the horizon. It makes promises. If it keeps them it is meaninful.




modern clocks are quartz vibrating at 32,768Hz




All the many avenues of human judgement




If being aware of what other people think of you involves understanding their feelings and experience, is self-consciousness and self-absorption a kind of empathy for others?




I am my body’s lover.




wow what it would feel like to not have jealousy ringing out my tentacles, what it would feel like to not want to be liked deep in my pours.




10436

Spy Kids 3D is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.




10435

is it that you love them, or just want their love?




10434

some people just run with a rare hot current. it’s the same current that runs within everyone, but some people sparkle




something to take my mind off my mind




that age when you realize old people aren’t a different species




10433

if life is a balance of decay and rebirth, i can feel now, in my late 20s, as my body starts its slow decay, how spiritually imbalanced it feels to not have rebirth, to not have children.




wondering how to turn jealousy into love for a friend’s fortune. would i even be happy if i got the thing i so badly want? would that change anything? it feels from my vantage point so strongly yes. but it may just as easily be no.




10432




Some WTF excerpts from the 613 commandments of the Torah

“Redeem Jewish maidservants, Betroth the Jewish maidservant. The master must not sell his maidservant.” commandments 42, 43, and 44

61 - the courts must not let the sorcerer live

179 Lev. 15:19 — Observe the laws of menstrual impurity

180 Lev. 15:25 — Observe the laws of impurity caused by a woman's running issue




10431

wondering if it’s harder to become something or unbecome something.




10430

exercises that explore how the body relates to itself




10427

I’m comforted by the many worlds theory because it means somewhere one of me is living my best life.




can you get a plugin to process in reverse?




10426

memory’s vast guarded temple




10425

to expand the vocabulary of the mind




10424

i want to die knowing nothing




Pictures are padding against death.




10423

to make a daily practice of searching and sometimes discovering.




10422

cats can literally not taste sweetness.




listening to taste is actually acutely sensing what chemicals/nutrients the body needs.




10421

unsure if i can still hear the jingle of the ice cream truck or if it’s just playing on in my head.




10420

Seeing you so unhappy, not knowing whether there was some turning point, or just a slow string of small concessions.




Pulling water fowl from my head.




you didn’t used to be able to watch someone become someone you didn’t know. that all used to happen far away from you, when the stretch of life your paths crossed reached an end, as all crossings of all paths do. but now you can watch someone grow away from you at a distance. the face you had once been so close to morphing into something unrecognizable. that familiar birthmark tatted over. now they wear a new expression, one you didn’t know they could make, a wider smile, a meaner grimace. even as you grow further apart, and accept that your time together has ended, you feel something isn’t right. you, after all, are still you. or so you think. and so it seems only reasonable that everyone else would remain everyone else.     




what is the arc of a life? is there a proper one? am i tracing it?




10419

As much as I want to self sustain, I am filled with the desire to be seen and touched and appreciated.




10417

I dreamt I pan fried my hard drive. It started beeping at me “no”




10415

I broke it trying to fix it.




Life’s greatest joy is suffering together.




10413

Battalions of balloons




10412

Alas, it has eluded me for too long. Discord is the way. A free platform where you can connect with people with no advertisements. Unlike it seems every other social media platform it isn’t a behavioral modification empire. They do not survive by selling their users attention to paying third parties. Discord, here we go.




10411

Why do I always feel like my life is just starting?




Something metaphorical about how the ideal screen takes up as much of your field of vision as possible but is also as shallow as possible. Everyone in tech is working as hard as they can to disappear a dimension.




New York is just a constant reminder of all the things you’re not doing.




A wedding is a ceremony of image, where you create the unattainable ideal of your relationship, take a photograph of it, frame it, and spend the rest of your life trying futilely to live up to that impossible picture.




10409

A cereal goodness strikes again




10404

of course your abilities and status and impressive qualities will bring people closer to loving you. you’re raised knowing if i’m not good at something i’m not lovable. i have felt that of myself many many times. and perhaps the compassionate response to that idea is not yes you are, you’re just as lovable, but actually what’s wrong with being unloved. to be ok with being unloved, knowing you can bask in your own love, knowing you can bask in whatever you want to call God’s love, knowing you can bask in the love of the Sun. it’s ok to be unloved. you are loved always by loves that come streaming through your window, and raining down from clouds, loves that have no bounds. maybe knowing that is the ultimate freedom.




10403

maybe i’ll marry myself and we’ll live happily ever after




make what’s dark and delicious




10402

tomato translates in latin to “wolf peach” because Europeans thought it was deadly and would kill wolves




10401

the dropped blueberry

you just can’t find




10399

watching the horror movie of my life unfold




10398

sick in bed and the phrase “peanut colada” comes to mind




practicing awareness and the second verse of “Accidentally in Love” comes into your head.




10397

is having children not just like the continuation of the cycle of samsara (suffering and rebirth)? our parents birth their fears into us.




10396




what sound would the sun make if there was somehow an intermediate substance?




interesting that I’m both the person who makes the mess and cleans it up.




how many people go to sex therapy thinking they’re about to bang?




i find there is something so deeply dissonant about spending money I did not work for. by did not work for I mean only that you have no experience or applied energy to point to which explains the money’s existence. “these $10 emerged from this hour in which I expended energy.” and so the things you purchase, whether it’s a dragonfruit from the grocery store or a ride on the subway, come to you as if they were meant for you. come to you as if you were a price who the rest of the world worked to serve and keep satisfied. since you have no personal grounding into the transaction, the implication is that the world went out of its way to magically serve you and keep you happy, and expects nothing in return. it implies a godliness, that the vast systems of supply and demand are built for your divine consumption. that is the explanation. and in a way that is the reality for a person who doesn’t expend energy, but receives the fruits of others’ energy. of course the most effective ways of earning money have very little to do with actually expending energy that serves others, and more about manipulating the medium of currency. but even for them, there is some experiential evidence of their energy investment that can be matched with the goods and services that are received. financial independence is important not because it is important to prove something about your worth, but because it is essential for connecting with the vast human apparatuses of care, and accepting the care that apparatus affords you. it is essential for believing that you are a legitimate part of the surrounding world.




10395

what’s the attack time of a thought?




what to do when the days i’m with you are the best days of my life?




you could say all routines, and all ideas of ourselves are just local minimums. we need to create space to try, randomly, mistakenly, other ideas of our lives, other possibilities of self. ideas which are vastly different from our usual self.  usually those ideas will not work as well as the minimum we’re in, but sometimes you will jump and find something fresh, closer to the root of you, closer to the ground of the world of you.




10394

movies and stories only relay the important moments, and leave out everything that isn’t a salient, consequential event or feeling.  our minds do the same thing, where we forget the trivium, the travel, the in between moments, and keep log of the moments and feelings that we consider eventful, or consequential, moments we learn from. i’m curious what it would be like to not have this sorting mechanism. for any moment to be as important as any other. to not pick and choose what constitutes a worthwhile memory.




10392

“the energy of a thunderstorm is comparable to that of an atomic bomb”




10391

I guess it makes sense that you’d have to close your eyes to see the light inside.




Boundaries are the foundation on which another person can build themselves.




10387

i’m just trying to make some small decisions about my relationship to technology. for example, I am with you all the time everyday no matter what does not sound like a model for a healthy relationship. that sounds like codependence. boundaries are important in any relationship. it seems weird to use the language of interpersonal relationships when talking about devices, but i think it’s merited. not only because devices actively pull for your attention and energy, as a person would, but also because more than anything a device is a portal to the thoughts and eyes of others. it is looking through a window that opens into everyone else’s pocket. being with your phone is constantly being in the blurred presence of an infinite other. an other thats beginning or end cannot be found. the collective mind. the god who loves to talk.     




10386

if making art is swimming, i want to swim out into the deep end. i want to sit on the floor of the pool with my eyes open. i don’t want to hang onto the wall of what i know, the wall of what others have built. i don’t want to be panicked for something to grab onto anytime i can’t touch the ground.




10382

it’s interesting that the thing we’re emotionally most resistant to is also the thing we as a species are best at, which is adapting to new surroundings, being flexible.




that feeling that the world is running away from you and if i don’t sprint my hardest i won’t have a place in the world anymore. missing the fact that the world isn’t 300 yards ahead of me, but right where i am. and the feeling that even as i type these words i do not feel in my bones their truth. i want to feel it in my bones. that the everything i am so afraid to lose is everywhere all the time, and so cannot be lost.




instead of greeting each other “how do you do” and “good day.” i think maybe we’d be healthier if we said “death and impermanence” to each other.




10378

There’s an ongoing war on space and time and I’d like to consider myself a pacifist.




“If a master plan was involved, it was conceived perfectly to alienate the soul.” Lo - TEK




In healthy ecosystems there is no such thing as waste.




10377

Come eat me




Not sharing everything is unnatural




“We don’t actually have infinite desires, we just want to have as much as the next guy.”




I can’t believe I’m me for the entirety of my own life. Are each of us just stuck in ourselves the whole time ? Somehow that doesn’t seem right.




Each of us drops on a window pane, all bending the light of the same background scene into totally different shapes.







10376

Why is the ear shaped like it is? What frequencies are accentuated, which muted?




The space in an empty cup does not belong to the cup.




Just because there is water in a cup doesn’t mean the water belongs to the cup. What is mine is not at all mine, including myself.




They ask how are you and I say happisad. Always.




It’s easy to be afraid of automation when all you value is work, and make no space for the joy of mere observation.




What about a full sensory experience, not focused on one. Visual, taste, sonic, textural stimulation all working together in concert?




10375

What does it mean that people think at different speeds? Are peoples’ perception of time different then?




10374

witnessing the tireless thinning of the nonhuman world

how can you not be broken?




why are humans so distanced from their sense of smell?




this world excite full brimming




10373

modernity is the war on spacetime. people working tirelessly to eradicate the limitations of space and time.




beneath all of the legislative and social and political and cultural and systemic issues that individuals and organizations are working to resolve, maybe the bottom line is that civilization just doesn’t work. still we have to try to make it work a little bit better, at the very least.




10372

Is it ok that I love just being around a person who I’m attracted to? I like feeling someone’s eyes lay across mine, seeing me, maybe even, in rare cases, wanting me. Making them laugh. And that’s all. Nothing more. Who’s to say that isn’t enough? Who’s to say that isn’t a sex life? To hole someone beautiful in your gaze while they hold you in theirs.




10371

in some ways PC and cancel culture of the left is like an antibiotic against the infections of supremacy, but like any antibiotic it wipes out a lot of the good gut flora too.




10370

i think there is some inherent value, some generosity even, in doing something differently — differently than others. there’s inherent value in a fresh glimpse, in variety, in bafflement, in discomfort. normalcy is a learned blindness. you only really have to consider something that you don’t already understand. everything else gets filed away in drawers, stashed in stacks of preconceptions. to see is to conceive again.




are all rain drops the same size?

at what size do cloud droplets become heavy enough to fall?

how long does it take for a raindrop to fall from troposphere to ground?




favorite food: maple syrup




milk is just a textured water




it’s nice we don’t have to be plugged in to charge. you can take me anywhere




10367

why can’t people express their individuality through porn and sexuality in the way that people express their individuality through something like skate? (i’d say they do, but it’s not received as the individuality and art that sexuality is)




10366

thinking about the pervasive weaponization of narrative, and how weak narrative content is a salve for the strong narratives that keep us gripped. and realizing that weak narrativity is something that music also can have, and often does. forgoing the drama, the giant swings, the journey songs. keeping subtly with a musical moment, a simple idea, like riding a train through the Norwegian tundra, or taking a bath.




10365

The infinite difference between the bottle and the hot sauce inside.




10364

if i had kids i would want them to know a temple, to be a part of one, only as a place to congregate with community to acknowledge something larger than one’s own story. a temple of religion is unique in that way. there are modern temples, but many of them encourage worship of self, rather than i guess beyond self. what are those modern temples? is a movie theater a temple? is a mall a temple? a sports arena, a stage?  




10363

He went to the opera and put in his headphones.




the earth’s magnetic field reversed 781,000 years ago, and will do so again. .




one more thing i fail to appreciate on a daily basis: earth’s magnetic field, which prevents the atmosphere from being essentially blown away by solar wind.




10360

You don’t blame your eyes for what they see.




Eyes as sun scopes.




10358

the world is made of poetry. any moment can be turned into compelling poetry. any moment is the fodder needed. the lamp and the shade, the rusty hinge, the hot sauce left open.




10355

I think to myself who am i if not becoming?




that growing old is like the world losing its detail, continually loosing resolution. high frequencies of sound become inaudible, sharp visual contrasts become blurred, precise movements become approximate as fingers loose dexterity and then limbs, until at the end of one’s life the world collapses finally into a single bit of information, the final reduction in resolution.




I’m much less interesting then you think. just a shell of a self pretending to be me.




10354

we act as if google is a publicly owned good. like a digital national park. what if it were?




maybe it’s that there are two kinds of imagination. there’s the imagination of inventing far off places, and there’s the imagination that sees the invisible wonder of whatever is right there in front of you. and perhaps, like I’ve said, homo sapiens ended up where we are because we could imagine far off places, we could imagine things differently, and the allure of those invented places has driven us mad. but imagination is not one thing, and there is an imagination required to invent for ourselves what is already there before us.  the imagination of escape, and the imagination of return.




lyrics are in some ways harder to generate collectively because words (tend to) imply perspective. I guess any verb implies perspective kind of. Just a noun phrase wouldn’t. “the cart with the busted wheel” “the bucket dusty with spring,” but even these imply the perspective of a person observing these objects.




10352

“The universe began as an enormous breath being held.”




What if, like energy, pain cannot be created or destroyed.




10348

Professional song doctor.




The zipper you can’t trust.




Maybe parties become less fun as you get older because you become more aware of the ways in which your words and actions can hurt others.




I want to be around people who are unafraid to be themselves. I want to be around people who don’t feel the need to hide behind.




10347

Wondering or grief has any aspect of humor.




Present as a fox.




Superhero whose power is glass blowing. Have heats up rods and bends windows using her super hot rod.  




A rosy telling of history, where politeness often comes at the expense of truth.




Playing life like a continuous game of would you rather.




10346

how incredible it is that all of this is happening at once. all history, all life. and that history is just the vague outline generated by all life constantly happening, on the smallest scales. the new spider on my table, the girl playing backgammon in Omsk, the boy in supplication at the Edirne mosque, the migrating hummingbird.




that at some deep down level humans are afraid of the natural world taking them over again, afraid to lose control over the land, constantly warding off the perceived threat of the return of wilderness. and maybe that’s how and why those who live in rural areas are often the most willing to exploit the land — timber, oil, agriculture — and least concerned about the environment.




10344




dancer musician software developer lets do it




each of us a jumbled exotic magic mess




I’m gonna start a gofund me to get Tom Hanks to the moon. he got so close in Apollo 13.




10341

each day I layer myself over myself again, to see what’s the signal what’s the noise.




to layer myself over myself 1000 times, and see what’s the signal what’s the noise.




10340

the point of entertainment is to enter worlds where the concerns are not our concerns. if our brain spends its days rifling through problems, a moment when those problems don’t exist is a respite we crave.




10339

when you’re crying the first thing people ask is “what’s wrong,” though there’s nothing wrong with crying. there’s also not necessarily anything wrong with a situation that causes a person to cry. maybe crying is the healthiest thing to do at that moment. i could get with “do you need anything” or “do you want to talk about it,” but not “what’s wrong.”  




what if people who move slower die slower. would everyone move as slow as possible?




the slutty machine







10338

life a current of moments wavering, coming together, coming apart. most of it is the coming apart, but which moments are the ones that feel like coming together?




it’s interesting that money is earned by doing one specific thing — programming, investing, performing — but that the power of that money applies to everything. Your power is not limited to your field of expertise. That means you end up with people having huge say in aspects of the world they know nothing about.




Agnese Collard: “The very presence of other people can make us better, even when they don’t make us more like them, or change us, or even understand us. Sometimes other people help us exactly by not feeling what we feel, exactly by remaining resolutely who they are.”




10337

buy local? i only buy local. the supermarket’s just down the street.




it’s like i can see people around me suffering and i feel like the only way i can make it make any sense is if i make myself suffer too.




10336

The question what is art has never seemed interesting to me, but if you need a definition, one can be anything that has no utility, serves no purpose outside itself. Which to me means that life is art, and the universe.




I think there is a dissonance ringing in my soul at my role as a human made god on earth. It makes me want to prostrate myself to the forest in response, seeking some kind of balance. I don’t like being here. I don’t like sitting up on this throne. rone.




maybe to be an adult, if that means something, is just to clean up after yourself.  




10335

we are all the criminally insane




“It is very hard to tell whether one is being listened to, given that the only sound it makes is silence.” agnese callard




i don’t want to be an asshole.




10334

today give your attention to something that doesn’t require it.




I base my decisions solely based on what will look best on my wikipedia page.




goddam it’s so hard to wash a colander.




10333

pickup line: so, you have an innie or an outie?




10332

I can get something done efficiently as long as I convince myself that I’m procrastinating something else. My most productive week of the year is the week before taxes are due.




10331

daily reminder: the world is vast and unknowable, and does not care for words.




communicating a feeling or experience is like trying to know the position and speed of an electron — the act of communicating it inevitably changes the feeling. at least that’s what i feel. my therapist asks me what am i feeling, and i prefer not to say, because i can’t communicate it and feel it at the same time. which in some ways means you can never really communicate to another person what you’re feeling.




everyone is a genius at being themselves, no matter what.




“there will always be a boat at the end of a dock, but you can choose whether or not to board.”




10330

besides not wanting to get itchy, the reason insects are so gross to us is because they seem to have so little regard for their own individual survival. it’s like at every moment an insect is risking its life to get what it wants, single-mindedly, without consideration, no forethought no afterthought, just hunger and struggle. and so very often we see insects in peril, near death. it’s this closeness to death that makes us uncomfortable. it’s what we refuse to fathom, and therefore cannot understand in an insect. and so they’re gross.




10328

Maybe you could say the problem with humanity is the ability to imagine. Imagine things differently, imagine things that aren’t real, and haven’t happened, somewhere else, where things are better, easier, temperate. And then inevitably we go off in desperate search of these imagined worlds, as fast as we can, ruthlessly, forgetting whatever realities we come from. Maybe this is what inevitably happens to a species with an imagination.




there’s so much i’m sorry for. someone flog me so i can forget it.




I can’t believe potatoes originated in Chile, and in the 1840s a million people died of starvation in Ireland because of potato blight. They didn’t even have potatoes in Europe until 200 years earlier when the spanish brought some back.




quietly beholding the constant process of history converging on itself.




10326

Geopolitically Germany has always been grumpy because it’s been forced to sit bitch, as they say, between France and Poland.




10323

I want to be the kind of guy who walks up to the register and says “any pumps down today?”







10322

Art is anything that is worth itself. That doesn’t justify existence with anything external to it  




10315

somehow every time i arrive back home i am relieved that the house didn’t burn down because i left the stove on.




there are few things better than spending time with friends in a place where people are available to love.




10314

Retail therapy as placebo effect




just realizing that one of the reasons non-white people live in urban areas is because the rest of the country is built on land ownership. in rural areas people are expected to own their homes and land. so without privilege there’s nowhere to live there. in cities you at least have the option to rent. (though now I’m curious why renting is so common in cities. why can’t people rent in rural areas?)




10311

It’s so silly that people say “the universe is actually dark, it’s just the mind that makes color,” when really the universe is bursting with a massive spectrum colors we can’t see.




10310

We are the fuckers around.




10308

“Subordinating oneself to an owning  master for most of one’s waking life”




nothing goes harder than a quiet thing turned up loud




the guy standing outside the studio as I walk out says
timing is everything

that’s right i say

he walks one step behind me

and im the best at it he says

7.8 billion people and no one can do what i do

that’s true i say

and we part




10307 dare to be unremarkable




10306

pickles and bagels, at least I’ve got those.




Inhale and exhale are the relief of having and the relief of letting go. Constantly.




10305

lyrics are not a premise to be proven over the course of a song. they are word colors that feel true together.  they don’t need a thesis, even a center, they only need to flow, and depict life, honestly.




10303

Art as a way to challenge consensus reality.




Math and truth are just not the same.




name your kid Hieronemous  same.




we tell the story of the founding of the US like it’s the story of creation. giant white headed gods looming in ancient Dakota mountains.




10301

Space and silence as precious resources.




10300

i left water on the stove and by the time i remembered it was all gone.




10298

that eventually you don’t have to do it because it’s good, or the right thing to do, but because that’s what comes naturally, and authentically.




10297

midi mapping it’s like as if every time you wanted to say something you had to position your jaw into your face and make your tongue the right shape.




10293

History is in all of us.




10292

Synthesize bird sounds




10291

In the marketplace of ideas, truth is supposed to emerge from the scrapple with untruth. But that only happens if listeners can magically discern truth from untruth when given both options. Obviously that’s not possible. People will choose and advocate for the idea that they already believe. Which means that each person just lives in a bubble of their own preconceptions about the world. It’s like our dreams have come to life. Directly from mind to appearance of reality.




10290

Has anyone thought about the similarities between proving yourself a qualified suitor and a job application? what is hinge but a linked-in for the career of lifelong partnership?




I’m a bit short for my height.




The first visual art form ever practiced by man was almost certainly making shapes in the sand with your piss.




10289

to realize that it’s just not easy for me to disappoint when faced with the suffering of others. how much of that is care for others, and how much of that is attachment to my identity as a good person? feeling, usually, responsible for the wellbeing of others.




10286

maybe there will come a time when we think it’s funny that music used to consist of multiple disparate parts. everything becoming one morphing rhythmic entity - a body.




10284

my mind has duped me into thinking i’m it




thinking yet again about capitalism: there is nothing so loveless as looking at the world and seeing only the ways in which it can be made useful.




(^grinding up what is, and converting it into the potential to be something else later. grinding up now and turning it into a hypothetical, nonexistent future. taking trees and turning them into money.




10279

I’ve spent my life paying no mind to the quality of air.




i’m just realizing that any game in which you’re winning or losing is psychologically symbolic of living or dying.  




days of cloud cover, where the clouds are not thick enough to be grey, the sky is actually brighter than the blue of a clear sky. all of the light that would normally be visually concentrated in the blinding blast of sun gets refracted and evenly distributed. there is no shade on a cloudy day.




10276

“if corporations were people they’d be psychopathic.”




when you’re that close with someone, their pain becomes in some ways indistinguishable from your pain. if only because you have learned that their pain will in some way find its way to you.




it’s like when you come from wealth all your money worries are really just worries that your parents will be mad at you.




as if to leave was to accept that I can’t protect my loved ones from dying.




a thought experiment: what if instead of being paid to do things — carry stuff, build houses, mine materials, serve food, create products, generate content, sizzle jerk in the cacophony of civilization — people were instead paid to do nothing. What if people are paid to be still and quiet. That is how you make money, by being still, and doing nothing. And then if you decide you want to do things — move and carry and mix and make — you would pay what you earned by doing nothing. How things would shift, inside and out… of course it is not that way. The world does not pay people for doing nothing, or sitting still. The world pays people for big somethings and visible change. The world values survival, which takes heat, which takes food, which is something, and not nothing. And the world values elsewhere more than here. And so we have been doomed to a system that does not recognize any of the infinite value of doing, saying, being nothing.




10275

two rollercoasters riding each other




maybe processing feelings is like making merengue. just by giving it time and air, it transforms into a more edible, even delicious, version of itself.  




10274

I don’t have to be the exact size and shape of my worries.




10272

drinking air through my nostrils.




everyday i walk past this dead mouse. my cat killed it and i threw it outside, and now its sitting in front of the house slowly degrading, slowly becoming soil. each time i go out it looks a little more feeble, a little less like life, curled there, eyes pried shut tight. bones wound round up, as if still protecting itself, recoiling from the outside assault, as if death isn’t the transcendent outward release that everyone talks about, but a collapsing inward, into some kind of singularity, beyond time.




last century women, children, and black people were all property. this century animals and land are still property.




10270




sometimes i feel like everyone around me is sad, is everyone around everyone sad?




train horns are all required to blow a sequence of two long, one short, and one long blast. it’s the shofar of the industry. a call to attention. a prayer.




to make myself the landscape




gather all the trust fund babies you can find

make us do a good thing once and call it kind




when everything feels perpetually wrong almost all the time no matter what, and you look to me to make it feel somehow better. it’s a futile endeavor.  




i still have shame about that non-joke i made in at the pool, on the bleahers in 7th grade, waiting for gym class to start. i wanted to show off my abs to Forest, who i guess I wanted to impress. “uppercut, middlecut, lowercut” i said, and flexed my abdominals to make them go high, middle, and low kind of. there was nothing funny about it. it was just three words i’d stitched together to be able to bring attention to my abdominals. “i don’t get it” Forest said, with a disinterested honesty i couldn’t then fathom. maybe the shame around this tiny forgettable moment has a purpose. don’t show off, pretending it’s a joke. people can tell when you’re just trying to show off, and it’s not fun for anyone. you don’t have to do that. lessons from the bleachers of a 7th grade swim class.




10267

maybe normalcy — the tendency to accept the many insane humans customs without question — is its own kind of mental illness.




10266

on redistribution: I need to remind myself that my goal is not to be generous, or to save the world, but to relinquish the safety I was told I needed and let it become something real. To settle with old ghosts, and to make an imperfect but honest attempt at not living in total hypocrisy.




it’s hard to give something away, but it’s much more exhausting to hang tightly onto it.   










10265

this can’t be it

this is it

smile




the hubris it takes to value the thought chatter, the intellect, the conscious, over unconscious aspects of being, when each of us was created in an unfathomably intricate process that happened in the womb of a mother-to-be who had no conscious idea how it happens.  Each of us is the outcome of patterns and forces so wildly beyond our grasp.




I am beginning to value just sitting around again.




10264 the primary objective of an educator is not to teach her students, but to stoke their curiosity, and give them the tools necessary to follow it wherever it goes.




10263 circadian tail chasing

John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmitt and the sound of bleachers underfoot




Working to become a stronger swimmer in the ocean of my mind “acknowledge the wave stay with the ocean”




10262 the wash of gloom and despair that rolls over the eyes when my concepts of the world replace the actual world.




10261 maybe the distinction between living and nonliving things is arbitrary. maybe it’s just a matter of how slowly or quickly a process of transformation takes place. the things we call living are just those things which take place quickly enough for us to observe them.  




I am like the single organism forest Pando, only i am a forest of moments and days.




10260  i am attached to my wealth not only because I am afraid to give up my own power and safety, but because I am afraid to give up the power to protect my friends.




10259 something about paying attention to the things that aren’t useful. things that don’t have utility. suddenly everything opens. maybe it’s because something is defined as having utility if it can be used in the creation of something else - something in the future, something that doesn’t exist. maybe to attune to reality means to ignore utility altogether. blah blah yada yada boom.  to do something for no good reason. to examine an object that has no use to me.




10258

my heart was in it i just forgot to pump




over the years the people change, but the patterns of thought stay the same. it’s like I’m a puppet vessel for the real organisms to inabit. ides, ways, concepts, beliefs about the world. my body came awake in 1993, but these beliefs were here long long before. and now here i am holding them, caring for them, as if they were my own.  the sun has no ideas, no concepts, no beliefs. it is only erupting, continually, being. that is truth. that is all there is.




10257 to listen instead to the twinkle in your heart




no matter what age you are everyone older than you is old and everyone younger than you is young.




i am a bundle of myths.




“all children are born artists. the challenge is to remain an artist as you grow up.” picasso i think




10255

question: do you know where milk comes from?

question: have you ever even seen a cow even being milked?

myth: milk comes from cows.

fact: milk actually comes from the naturally occurring juices of the invasive vine known as milkweed, or lactoba garacia, an extremely adaptable species which can be found in both rural and urban areas north of 34º latitude. They are commonly seen in basements and attics, setting a scourge upon the common American homeowner, as well as threatening to destroy the natural habitat of local wildlife, most notably the woodland of the tufted titmouse. The species is so resilient that in conditions of poor light and water it can up its roots and slowly maneuver (in what’s known as the primordial walk) up to three miles, until it finds a more optimal growing environment. They can often be seen congregating along riversides, where sun and water are plentiful, enacting demonic rituals that have been linked to the killing of local first-born children and the elimination of the great white wasp, which is no longer found as far west as Ohio. These demonic rites often include behavior that can be considered salacious, in which individual milkweeds grow a fugacious quasi phallus and penetrate the adducted ringlets of fellow milkweed. Under certain conditions, this ritual is performed on captured chicks, and during the flood of 1997, milkweed were regularly seen to penetrate rodentia as large as the common possum, who were found days later, miles downstream, covered with clods of milk lying in pools of their own excrement. The only way to remedy the injustice wreaked by the invasive milkweed is by pruning and draining milkweeds of their milk. It is this studious draining that produces the milk we find in supermarkets. It is best to drink as much milk as possible, to prevent further spreading of the invasive weed.  




10254 fear is just the projection of future pain. a thought wisp. it’s pain that simply doesn’t exist yet. though of course these projections of future pain are often, but not always, based in past pain. more often these projections are based in inherited concepts, which you could say are born from pain so far past that you didn’t feel it. Pain that was experienced by your ancestors, or the long-dead founders and perpetuants of your surrounding culture.




according to many ancient texts, the true essence of oneself can only be found in the promotions folder of their email inbox.




10253 real wealth doesn’t only come in the form of an inheritance or a large bank account. it more often comes in the form of having enough costs covered that you can perpetually save. a free room at a house that your parents own, no student debt, no credit card debt.




in the same way that we have fuel emissions standards for vehicles we should have energy efficiency standards regulating the production of food. the amount of resources and energy that goes into making beef and dairy would make cattle ranching as bizarre as driving a tank to work.  




10251 trees must see all animals the same, the way that people see all trees as the same.




what to do with the crushing reality of something that isn’t real?




10250 protests staged in my mind, demanding new leadership.




think of all the beech trees in your life. where do they stand?




10249 i don’t know about you but i’m feelin like dropping something and not picking it up




are all ideas contagious? and if not which are and which aren’t?




10249 fuckin snow, how can so much of something so beautiful be made so quickly and then be gone even quicker.




10248 How to Measure Your Success in 5 Easy Steps!




10247 think of the thing that disturbs you most. now think of something else.




“a particular place with particular people in a particular situation”




to sprinkle sand on a sticky brain




10240 I am the wind inside myself.




“The Krakatoa eruption in the 19th century measured 172 decibels 100 miles away. No one knows how loud it was at the volcano since nothing there survived the blast. But the sound travelled around the world 3 times.”




10240 I wake up like a lava lamp.




10239 minimum word counts




10239 “settlers that brought stolen people to stolen land“




Willful blindness

To the mites feeding

On my face

Demodex




Maybe being moral in the 21st century just means choosing to see that which is not immediately in view.




Plenaries




People want to be bigger. Take up more space. Last longer. It feels like then they’ll finally be real.




10228 hiding behind other people’s ideas of living.




10226 i used to be so confused by the phrase “every other day.” i stand by my confusion.  




10225 “aim for integrity, not perfection”






10221 packaging is the source of all evil.




10221 the question for humanity is when do we stop? When have we done enough. What would it look to call today enough?




10219 fearing all this, struggling to stay afloat. it’s like I’m a fish afraid of drowning. Maybe it’s worth something to be curious about what’s actually under the water.




10217 Inherited blindnesses




The money tension is weather to live life or to defer life ever into the future. An ideological tension around the urgency of living.




10217 when i think of jellyfish i think they are someone else’s. someone else is close to jellyfish. someone else is more like jellyfish. but no, i’m as close to jellyfish as anyone else. i have as much connection to jellyfish as any other human.




10214 Jeff Besos is the closest thing we have to Santa clause. That’s why Amazon is so popular. People get to believe in Christmas every time they need paper towel.




10213 cascading imperfections




Constant yearning for capitalist leveling up into adulthood.




10212 to run for cover in the thoughts of others




10208 how many people die of boredom per day?




10203 That I don’t have someone else to dream this with/for.




Holding the fam together.










10202 Learning at last that the body can generate its own heat.




I’m better at seeing now that the wrong notes are the most musical part of the music.




I curl up in local minimums and hiss at passersby.




Thinking of my life in terms of blunders and bests.




It’s like having a conversation where ever 3rd word gets randomly swapped out.




Every town should have a clown.




Music is a mental lubricant.




Because now I know no matter how hard I try it won’t make things better, it will only stay the same.




10191 when people talk about burgling being bad what they really mean is that it’s unfair. It’s unfair that someone gets something that you worked for for nothing. But if that’s the case, and I really think it is, then let’s talk about who in this town is always getting something for nothing, and who has always gotten nothing for something.




10190 What I realized is that I have a mighty will in me. This will can take hold and strangle me, or this will can flow outward into the world into expressions that warm and curl. This will, is a kind of tension, a taught-ness, a pressure, a potential energy.

When I do not let this energy move and breathe and act, this tension sits with me, and manifests in my anxiety and obsession and some deep insurmountable feeling that things are not right. Thoughts pass by and take on its light, until something inevitably crops up as the thing that is not right. But when I let this energy do the work it pulls to do, its tension is released. I think my anxieties might just be the writhing a beautiful will stifled. By doubt, by confusion, by fear, by others’ thoughts, by my own grown preconceptions.  Perhaps everybody has this will. Maybe it’s just some aspect of what people call the “human spirit.” It is the part that demands justice. It is the energy that builds in the collective consciousness and erupts when some horrific mistreatment is finally too much to bear. It is the will to heal. It does not always know where to go, or move what it means to move, or build what it means to build, but it demands expression one way or another. And it will wrap you in its sadness if you do not let it do what it is called to do, what it is here to do. Heal.  




10190 Bill Withers had a stutter.




10190 Only in moments when life is not happening - new people unmet, fresh sights unseen, fresh love unshared - do I obsess with alternate realities and times that don’t exist — ways in which it could have been different, futures that I fear, pasts that I regret, things that I want, things that I decide could have gone better, invented mistakes, unknown unknowns. But of course these things do not exist. They never did. And I find if my life is happening, they dissipate and disappear.  Reality, when allowed in, washes worry away like sand off a body.  




10189 Reading physics books gives me permission to wonder at the world. That it is possible for a moment, acceptable even, to take a moment to back up to the perspective of a nearby galaxy. And from there everything looks different. Simpler. Ok. From there the universe no longer involves me, and so I am relieved of all of my struggle, my guilt, my anxieties, my endless trying. You don’t have to try so hard.




10187 I’m thinking about making it a routine to go for a swim in the freezing cold lake first thing every morning, and finding myself faced again with that terribly annoying predicament that doing something is altogether different from talking about doing it, and almost never easier.




I let a leaf drop and a miracle falls to the ground.

 
1/3 of United States drinking water is allocated to lawn grass.



Drugs are a way to transcend local spiritual minimums. Sometimes you need to try a random variable, so see what else lies beyond the rim of the function.



There has to be a differentiation between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. It’s a very simple one. “Jews are ______” is potentially antisemitic. The actions of the Israeli government are _________” is not at all antisemetic.



the very special branch of government tasked with the assassination of ideas.



an awakened soul is ok with a troubling situation because nothing compares to the total wonder reality of sheer existence. everything is just tiny sprinkles of cinnamon on the hot chocolate of existence.



America doesn’t have to bomb smaller countries in the same way that a movie producer doesn’t have to rape women. just cause you can get away with it doesn’t mean you should.



the back is the only part of the body you can’t tend to yourself



it’s like the wealth of sheer existence is a vast ocean of fresh water and we’re busy buying and selling and warring over bottled water we exchange in boats on the surface.



maybe the human assumption that things are not right, and the accompanying compulsion to fix things, change things, think things will be better in a different form, emerged as a sordid byproduct of our ability to manipulate our environment - use tools, construct homes, cultivate crops. Maybe this aptitude for manipulating the environment, make things “better,” easier, more comfortable, more efficient,  is why we were able to reproduce beyond the earth’s capacity. And so now we continue with this mode of behavior, thinking we must manipulate the world into conforming to us, in every aspect of life, spiritual and physical.  



I am cultivating a wonder inside of me, a wonder for ordinary things. Nothing here is ordinary. Everything here is aflame.  



there is someone inside me who does not want me to be well, who drives me like its slave and scares me from delight.



dropping an album into an audience of culture is like dropping a chemical into a reactive solution



that there is someone in me, some part of me, out to torture me every day. why is he doing that? what does he want?



I am growing a silence inside me, nurturing and loving it, watering it every day it into a harvest.

I am cultivating a wonder inside of me, a wonder for ordinary things. Nothing here is ordinary. Everything here is aflame.  





out here waiting for my past to change



all thought is compulsive, and ultimately destructive. I see now that it’s all a part of the same beast. a disease of civilized mind. the same disease that allows people to look past each other, lapses in consciousness where the horrors of the world are allowed to burrow. but it is only thought, and it is not what is. what is is always, and humming just beyond the horizon.



if you put a dead fish in turbulent water, it will swim upstream. really. they did an experiment. it is physics. 



sharing wealth can be easy. it can be obvious. imagine it is your birthday. everyone is gathered there for you, and your mother has made you a big beautiful cake. this is your birthday cake, made by a loved one specifically for you. when she sets the cake down in front of you, do you sit there with your fork and eat the whole thing by yourself? Do you gorge on it while everyone watches? It was made with you and only you in mind, after all. Or do you take the knife presented to you and divide that cake into equal portions, passing it around to the people you love, so that everyone can enjoy its sweetness? Cakes come in many shapes and sizes, but they are all cakes, and it is much more fun to share them.  



The permanent discoloration of my world into the palette of a tragedy.



turning the music up loud, literally as if to drown out whatever’s in your head.


“make a [song] that does not disturb the silence from which it came”


nighttime is the world with its clothes off 



the caterpillar decided to go back after a series of seedy compromises



propaganda as “the conscription of thought”



How Wilson could fight so hard against the plutocracy on behalf of workers’ rights And also open the condone prejudice against Black people... the fight of the pope white man against the wealthy is just different than the fight of the person of color against oppression.



In 1908 400000 people voted for the socialist party in the US


perhaps oppression would arise in any instance where one people can be visually delineated from another. can oppression sink its teeth if there is no mark of the oppressed? in order to gang up on any number of people, the gang has to act in concert, recognize their prey. I wonder if history shows that where there is visible difference there is oppression of one under the thumb of the other.  



and at last you find it is impossible to penetrate the wall of other peoples’ feelings that are not you



In 1908 490



It’s hard to stay anchored to my own needs when the tsunami of yours rumbles ashore.



“stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. there are no unsacred places. only sacred places and desecrated places” wendell berry



infrared pornography



how am i to stay afloat with such tsunamis of feeling and vast deadly oceans of consequence?



“a difference is always read by Europeans as an absence”



to not be dragged kicking.



take a moment to think about the implications of the heroic phrase “it’s my job.”



after the 14th amendment was passed it was/is used to protect the rights of corporations 99% of the time, not the rights of Black people.  



so much of what we are is how others reflect us, like how reverberation can change the sound entirely. what is the iso chamber of the self?



“The African labor supply association” 1859, fuck



“We the citizens of the United States and the oppressed people who have no rights” John Brown’s alteration in the 1850s



I do not know either hunger or fear, yet here I am feeling unsated and afraid



in our concrete there is coral.



just for today I will not long for something bigger than today.



spend days plotting like a bomber, only instead of a bomb it’s a delight explosion.



i suppose true love was never really my thing. i was never big into the idea of finding salvation in another person — at least not consciously.



to comprehend for a glimpse that I actually have ancestors who were alive in 1000AD, and 3000BC, and 10000BC and 2 million years ago, and that I am just the latest leaf on that larger whole continuous entity.



to drown out the raging loneliness of a temporary existence



In the early 19th century, only 1% of the population owned slaves. Talk about the enduring 1%.



America no longer has the safety valve that was the promise of the untapped west. In the early days there was always the understanding that if a family fell on hard times they could always move to the west, build a cabin, fell trees, and plough land. This was one of the origins of the American dream a dream that no longer has vast swaths of land to feed on.



America’s biggest canon on its best warship was named “the peacemaker.” That tells the whole story of the myth of America.



If you had to pay for speaking, per word.



“They are but an improved means to an unimproved end.” Thoreau



“to join our wildernesses” Ross Gay



“The policer of delight” Ross Gay



Freedom is conditional.



Touching parts you can’t reach.



on acid while the earth curves out of the sun’s light over lake Michigan: if ever you thought there was nothing to see, know different. the awesome power-might unshakable towering all of tiered vapor prisms stretching to the cosmos undulating effortless in broad daylight. and it’s there every day. how can i be missing that? how is that not impossible not to see? lost only to itching the clang chatter-math of everyday thought.



the clang chatter math of a brain in motion. incessant nothing, back and forth.



Thoughts as the allergies of experience. A bloated unnecessary reaction. A defense.



“To take the shoes off your voice”

“You are a participant in the future of language.”

A study where they labeled one mouse arbitrarily the smart mouse and it always won.

“The future is not in your hands, it’s in your mouth.”





the states thats vote matter: pennsylvania, michigan, wisconsin, and florida



“there’s nothing as expensive as being poor”



A boundary is the difference between what you are and what someone wants you to be. They are not the same. It’s imperative to communicate boundaries simply because they’re not the same. If you don’t, you’ll be pulled into someone else’s wants for you, away from your own, able to offer them less and less of your true self.



guilt is productive in so far as it prevents an unjust behavior, but it doesn’t help to create productive action.



we think that in fame becoming this super-human image (the word imago just came to mind) will be an escape from ourselves. if only I can become that. if only I can transform myself into that beautiful somebody who everyone loves. then I’ll feel good. then I’ll be ok.



is it just me or is anybody else like a little bit proud of themselves whenever they get the recaptcha right?



since he knew it wouldn’t lose value, he started putting all his wealth into water, as water started to replace gold as the standard. some hoarded oxygen, but most took their money out of gold and kept it in the form of water, knowing its value would only appreciate.



Jews were not here when slavery began, but we are here now. And we have found salvation in a country that’s wealth is owed to slaves, past and present .



“The appeal” walker



“the real violence, the violence that’s unforgivable, is the violence we do to ourselves, when we’re too afraid to be who we really are.” sense8



https://youtu.be/eZmBy7C9gHQ?t=935 Baldwin when the hohocaust comes



culture is a chemical reaction, and cities are where the matter is hot. it’s the same reaction but because everyone is bumping into each other more quickly, its progress is further along.



maybe the good thing about making art is that having proclaimed my existence in it it’s easier to let that existence go.



sometimes honesty comes to your door, and you’re lucky enough to have the nerve to let it in.



“The electoral college was a concession to slaveowners.”



there’s nothing fresher than finding a new street in a neighborhood you’ve known your whole life. the map your brain always holds is suddenly rendered obsolete. the place you thought you knew, is something different. the things you thought were true, are not quite right. the world is something altogether distinct from what you think of it.



the time is long, longer than you think. caught up always in the moment, but the moment of just a blink.



all thought is synthesis

whatever that means



16rd



The luxury of caring about stuff that doesn’t matter.



delete it, fuck it, salvation cannot be found in the past.



“the safest communities don’t have the most cops; they have the most resources.”



fuck mandatory minimums.



i guess the real thing is i hate politics. who wants this shit? but we have to do it. we’ve gotten out of hand and now we live this superogranismic civilized existence, and the structures and values which form that civilization have an unmistakable impact on the quality of individual lives. the Office of Budget and Management shouldn’t have anything to do with whether or not a kid can learn to play guitar, but it does. the pension goes to the father and the father has enough money to buy his kid a guitar and pay for lessons. it’s really ridiculous.



it’s really very simple, wealth and its power can either be hoarded or it can be offered to those who urgently need it.



the police can’t handle every situation. it’s like every time your child is crying you yell at them. you don’t ask what they need. you don’t ask what you can do. you don’t offer them care. when a child acts out or is in need you only yell at them. when someone has a drug problem they should go to a funded rehab program to help them recover, when someone is having a psychotic episode and thinks their neighbor is going to kill them they should be met with a mental health expert who can help them find what they need, when someone steals they should be met with someone who is there to help them find the support structures that they need - affordable housing, healthcare, job training, unemployment benefits.



instead of fighting crime, why not develop programs that make it so that people don’t have to commit it.



all things fall apart. the act of creating a thing, especially a baby, is a rare occurrence of things coming together. maybe this is why we seek it.



“Don’t believe everything you think.”



Listen to the colors and smell the sounds and see what’s wafting in the wind.



“if you don’t like Seether there’s something wrong with you” Sam



We’re taught that salvation comes in the form of accolades.



Trustworthiness can only be determined by the level of admitted doubt.



if you tell constant lies, the concept of truth just disappears.



The only way to bypass your biases is to switch the names of the parties involved. Israeli kills unarmed Palestinian. > Palestinian kills unarmed Israeli. And what you feel when you switch the names is the moral truth of the matter.



it passes.



i feel like a renter of my own life, and the landlord’s a piece of shit.



things have a nasty way of feeling like they’re getting both better and much worse all the time.



unearthing the rock.

rock separate

rock wiggles

rock has bottom

rock doesn’t go down forever

heavy rock

heavy rock you didn’t put there

burried for so long

sunless

jagged

cobbled together

from other rocks

that didn’t belong

that couldn’t see

burried underneath

breathless

and deformed

a thing

only man could make

we dug without knowing

only hoping

it would one day wiggle

it did







Light is so clean. It sprays all over the walls but you never have to clean them. It never makes a mess. Though I guess sun erosion, and heat. It makes a microscopic mess.



Light has no sense of height. There’s no high or low light, like there is high and low pitch.



some little fearful scrap of un-chewed past.





still in the long of my heart i know i want to be right more than I want to be good.



Sti ioopooo oooo Oz



funny that you can’t hear light.



the harsh echoes that pang across the heart when you come into existence and are told in so many ways that you were not supposed to exist. the most profound thing you can ever say to someone else is “you’re welcome here”



And looking down at the paper clip he absentmindedly bent, he realized he had made the shape of god.



an example of the difficulty of truth: apples have cyanide. one could easily start yelling that apples have been engineered to kill us and keep us in the hospital and that we should stop eating apples. it uses two facts to produce a third falsehood. cyanide can kill you, there is cyanide in apples. it disregards all of the rich multitudes and complexities and variables.   



leaving some semblance of yourself behind in sound, like the trees dropping seeds for the coming spring.



the peculiar scenario of being the problem and the solution



only positivity. there can only be positivity now. i am trying to see how



pseudoscience: using big terms that describe phenomenon people don’t understand to claim something totally bogus about the world. exploit peoples’ lack of understanding to make some bogus and unrelated claim about the world.



it seems i have been brought to heel.


forbes list of most spiritual men.



two mondays from now,

a cold front wrapping the lake

a pinch of pepper



from boredom of his quarantine grampa says “keep the faith.” Will do.



having an audience is having an audience with the king.



“helping a human being come to their own conclusion without ever giving them your opinion” is the only real way to change someone else’s. Jane McAlevey



there are a lot of things people should freak out about that they don’t, and even more things people shouldn’t freak out about and they do.



my new ambition: to live utterly imperfectly and be ok with it. 



the wild thing is that the virus cannot be blamed. the virus isn’t trying to kill us. it’s not trying to do anything. it has no wants, no self. it is only a sequence of DNA that, without any will to do so, multiplies.



a world without audience.



something compelling about not using material from ads ironically, but finding real, beautiful shots. as if to reclaim the real beauty that was exploited. to take what is attractive and beautiful in an old add and expunge the brand association that abused it.



I do that that presenting yourself as ridiculous - wearing something unusual, wearing bizzare ‘do - is worthwhile. worthwhile in the same way that clowning is meaningful. it is a reminder that civilization is ridiculous, that most of what we consider important is meaningless, that reality is absurd, and that there is a wonderful world outside the scope of these neurotic civilized woes.  



among other things, corona feels like a coming to reality. the surfacing of a realness that is everywhere and always suppressed, only ever obliquely acknowledged in the forms of entertainment and media, but never here lived. a tear in the veil of civilization. a skip in the record, where for a brief moment you can hear the sound of the room. here we are, tiny, fragile, turning on a soft rock in the void of everything. do you hear it? the sun’s corona blazing.



The migration of monarchs.



“Society is an association for the protection of property.”



“The electoral college was a concession to slave owners.”



Strange when your l
ife’s really good thing is also the really bad thing.



I’d rather be a jerk than a disappointment.



And since who we are is so much who we are to other people, by losing you I feel I’ve lost myself.



messages

my god

how the mess ages



A therapist is necessary as an outside point of orientation because you can trust that the don’t want anything from you. They don’t have any reason to manipulate or seduce or deceive you.  



Wherever I am my life feels far away.



An aversion to arbitrary power.



to fully sink into a memory means forgetting everything that’s happened since.



Dad used to walk back from the south shore down the middle of 12. right down the yellow lines.



neverbetter’s anywhether

come on down to neverbetter’s anywhether,

it’s never getting any better



loneliness as nausea of the heart.



loneliness as without a reason.



the current ideological iteration of the republican party coalesced around abortion and gun rights arguments in the 70s.



why in indiana: there is a kind of film that falls over the consciousness of a person in constant contact with the modern world. it’s a film of lights and colors and people and products and sounds and whatever else. it’s just a film, but somehow it’s almost impossible to see through. and I don’t want my vision constantly filled with this. I don’t want to think that that’s all there is. I’m not very good at shedding the film when im in indiana though either, so who knows if it’s worth anything at all. I get a few seconds of outside time here and there. it’s ok. I should probably just move to los angeles.



the unjust process by which money becomes more money.



“democracy is the glorification of the science of demography and the act of counting” approximate jill lepore quote



scrupulous housewife indicates which of her 4 avocados should be eaten on which day of the week dependent on ripeness by sticking a labeled sticky note on each.



it’s nice when it’s raining or snowing outside because it’s nice when something’s happening. something is in process. like sitting in a moving car. a screen saver.



I need to do some soul surfing.



trump is symptomatic of a disease that was already in us. he is the self obsessed, the deluded egotist, the lie in each of us that clings scrappy to its own illusive. he is identity and separation and mortality and our fear of it.



maybe I don’t have to miss her because she’s inside me, and is me.



Solemnly reading the lyrics to “what I like about you” at his wedding reception.



I wanted to give you more. I wanted to give you more, world.



aluminum used to be more expensive than gold.



I’m not a musician, I’m an audio file generator. I generate audio files that people can open on their device and feel things.  



yoga with sunglasses



“one of the greatest acts of courage is to be vulnerable with someone with whom you disagree” francais kissling



“it’s hard to hate someone from close up” Brene Brown



“most of us are brave and afraid at the exact same time all day long”



free will means less if you can’t decide how to feel.



I exist, and I am who I am, from what family I am from, in what country I was raised, with what money I was given, and none of that is wrong, and no guilt will ever change it. But the best I can do is be an ally.



Education without action is amoral.



I don’t want it to corrupt me, in either direction.



I don’t want power, I just want to be understood. Power is the opposite of understanding. You can’t be understood when your powerful. To others you are the power, you are not the you, or the consciousness puppeting it.



it’s just digital hygiene.



someone underscored their blowjob video with a recording of B’s Moonlight Sonata. it was an epiphanic piece of content.



the total oblivion of which I am an integral part.



why is the night so damn different from the day?



molecules are spirits. bacteria are spirits. they give and they take. they are feelings from outside.



To relinquish spinelessness.



Aggressively kind.



We are taught to occupy the external before we can experience the internal. A person running in jeans and a button down because it feels good is ridiculous while someone running prepared in the image of adidas sweats isn’t.



Selling stock is actually a beautiful act. It is the act of saying “this is enough.”



egos jittering across the underworld.



i put dinos on my face to keep the moisture in.



music as some alkaline solution that dissolves the volatile acids of living.



CEO/worker pay ratio.



skeuomorph.



Of course the ending is the same as the middle, just without more after it.



In many of these ethical questions, pc, we signify membership in a class or movement, rather than actually working to do something good.



Most of the ways in which you change are imperceptible to you, as the one who has already changed. You’ve become the change, and no longer have direct access to the mind from which you came.



Grade school as a daily performance, like a tour. Get up, get driven to the show, play the 7 hour gig.  



It would be interesting to study and map the series of motions different people execute to complete the same task. Like rolling up an inflatable mattress. Or putting a pile of clothes in a laundry bag. Simple tasks, but people would diverge in the ways they turned their arms, how their fingers curled, how and when weight was shifted. People would diverge dramatically if you looked closely. The experience of being in another person’s body impossible to comprehend. I wonder how my brain ship feels different than my friends’ brain ships.  



“You’re obligated to do nothing, allowed to feel anything,” she said.



A mountain is thoughtless.



A mountain cannot lie.



rocks sleeping.



Tech moves faster than attitudes. We aren’t equipt.



Obit: Rahm Silverglade, died while living.



All of our problems come from carelessly wielding powers we should be in considered supplicant awe of. The power of words. Words are powerful objects. But people toss them around recklessly. The power of computation. The power of oil. The power of machine.



I’m leary of saying the right things because I know they’re the right things to say. It’s like I want to go through the world not knowing what the right thing to say is, and then I can be only honest. I cannot blur or bend my words into desirable shapes.



You don’t have to access some alternate universe to do a spiritual reading of someone. All you have to do is look, really look, into their face.



Maybe that’s a self, the repeating patterns of activity and thought that comprise a life.



The wrong notes are what people came to hear live, or should have if they didn’t.



Maybe remorse is the only thing worth feeling remorseful for.



Human interested in Machine. Likes Italian food and getting up early to watch the sunrise.



numbers always lie.



how come you can’t smell boogers?



trying to reconcile the infinitude of things.



stuff that tries to reconcile the infinitude of things.



in a world of ins and outs. waiting for the collapse.



and of course what is the relationship between ass and climate change?



Sitting here accepting neither fate nor responsibility.



Ah, evil can be confronted not by destroying those people’s considered evil, but by taking their power away. Violence begets more violence, and every destroyed home is the seed of more retaliation, the justification for more violence. Power is the only evil. Not people.



of course no matter how above it you think you are you end up worshipping something, praying to something. because at the start of the day you have to justify this magnificent monstrous thing called being alive. and the course you set yourself on, maybe the first thing you pick up, your phone, a poem, a torah, an instrument, your email, your stock portfolio, incense lighting for your ancestors, your lover, is going to be the urn which holds your life together. and so you have to choose wisely, what you worship, in what holy frame of world you choose to contain your aliveness.



You don’t have to be an incredible instrumentalist for people to think you are, you just have to be good past the point where people can tell the difference.



And when the noise of the world comes in through your noise canceling headphones, be grateful that you are hearing the song as no one has ever heard it, and will never hear again.



Walking through an airport without buying anything is like holding your load through a prolonged doggystyle.



Lying sun caked on the carpet over kat, an ice cream truck goes by playing you are my sunshine and I sing the chorus along to her. you are my sunshine



don’t throw that out, you’ll never know when you’re gonna need it, my mom says. yeah, I say, but you do know when you don’t.



What’s the intersection between eating and sexuality?



My whole life is an ancient match of tug of war with myself. I do something, I make a decision based on unworthy motives and/or guilt, and I am angry at myself for making that decision afterward, an anger which feeds back on the self flaggelatory motivations that inspire lackluster choices. But maybe the choices aren’t even lackluster. Maybe I will always think to myself “it could have been better another way, you were stupid” until I grow enough for that part of me to die. That part of me being the me part.



The thing everyone wants doesn’t exist.



And of course dying is the fearful thing to do.



They cut out The Thunder, Perfect Mind from the bible because it declares there is no right or wrong. It is all an immense unity of flowing. And if there is no right and no wrong then there are no grounds for the powerful to justifiably reign over the powerless. “Do not cast anyone out or turn anyone away.”



Death of the fittest. Those most worthy of death. Who no longer need the suffering of existence.



existing in darkness is an act of trust. in cities there are too many people to cultivate trust, and so the lights are always on. there is no real darkness.



It’s interesting, why are some professions placed on expensive stages and other professions hidden away where employees only can enter? Every profession is a performance. You perform your job. But the cute girl at White Castle does not have a venueful of people and a jumbo screen showing her making the burgers masses then consume. Is this because some activities are by nature more fun to watch? Entertaining, we call it. Or is it because an entertainer does not make the product, she is the product. We are glorified because our glorification is what people come to see. It is not about the nature of the job, what’s being done - there are a dozen channels overflowing with shows about cooking, including cooking burgers - it’s about who has established their place among the mainstream glorified?



___ has been so deeply a part of my becoming that she is inside me. She comprises me. She comprises me enough that in a way I am her. I am ___, typing now filling spaces in the vessel that would otherwise be Rahm alone. We are a we inside me, overflowing worlds.



songs and memes are converging. ol town.



I don’t want to be financially disembodied.



You say that the stock money is for some unfortunate time in the future, a “rainy day fund,” but today is already a rainy day for a lot of people who aren’t me.



Style is the only real tool of persuasion. Not logic or evidence or coherent arguments. People are swayed by personality and style.



it’s funny that I can’t feel my blood. or can I?



If each person is infinite than counting people is like counting infinities.



The internet is the all mind.



maybe all these songs are about relationships because of course that’s all that really matters, and the structures of society and issues that plague us matter all because they determine the well being of those meaningful relationships. there are many hurdles to nourishing relationships.



People have a lot to be upset about. Rightfully upset. And these millions of upset people want to know who is to blame. Unfortunately a lot of money is devoted to misdirecting that blame by exploiting our most basic tribal instincts.



When an ideology is entrenched it becomes invisible. And that invisibility gives it a tremendous power.



What if they tested you in school for ability to empathize, and not the ability to multiply.



Defending the right to free speech means also defending the right of ill-intentioned and misinformed individuals to speak and write freely. This does not mean that holocaust deniers for example should be widely heard and published and their message promulgated. It simply means that the state should not have a say in who gets to be heard. It should be up to the listeners. Without any influence from the state, publishers will make decisions based on demand from buyers, who are individuals with some power of independent thought. It is simply a matter of curbing state power, and distributing the power of discernment to individuals.



It is true that democratization of technology has been happening for a little while now, and that it is not an awful thing. The telephone has not probably made the world a more dangerous place, even though it simultaneously empowers friends to confess their feelings and scammers to deceive. But the problem as we move along the course of optimization into the inevitable world of deep fakes lies not in some evil inherent to technological progress but in the weaknesses of the human psyche. As reality augments, I will simply not have the neurological equipment to readily discern between the friend and the scammer. And our ability to discern between reality and the distortions produced by our technology is crucial to that technology’s ability to do us any good. The technology of moving picture has allowed us to tell stories and travel to lands long ago far far away where we can live shared experience and connect with those we once might have thought were so different. But this is true because the reality of Star Wars is defined clearly by the 16:9 rectangle it occupies on the wall of a dark room where people gather to willfullydecide to suspend their disbelief. And it is when we no longer have that power to decide that technology forfeits the potential to do good.



When you are wealthy enough to control the appearance of your environment you surround yourself with cute things. With them you nourish an idea of the world in which tiny unthreatening souls want only to eat and play with circles of red light which, containing no matter themselves, are infinitely less threatening even than the tiny unthreatening souls bounding absurdly across the room to catch them. It is a worldview in which everything is fundamentally ok. It is a worldview which aligns most with the contents of children’s television. The relationship between one’s wealth and the world around it is a symbiotic one, and all signs of the poverty and ugliness that characterize most of life on earth are banished from sight.



Annihilated into god. 



About suicide people think what a horrible thing to die it should be prevented at all costs, but people rarely think what a horrible thing to be so unwell. To keep a person alive is not a worthy goal, to give the person a chance at real living is.



Being roped into a recurring contribution by a save the children representative is the closest thing I’ve experienced to rape.



The sun leaves without an apology like a promiscuous woman.



A sunset is goodbye in the language of light.



The world is constantly being seen through frames it doesn’t know about. Clouds through my window. A kiss from across the street. Anything through my eyes. It’s all intersecting frames.



Water should be our currency standard. The substance most universally and indispensably valuable.



to be a pinecone. that is the highest state.



It’s an odd thing. To exist in a world designed meticulously for one’s own existence. Rather than to survive in a world a species has evolved to survive in. The very root level relationships between soul and world have been twisted beyond hope of recognition.



Technological progress is driven by our desire to have slaves. We want these things to be alive. And we want them to do whatever we tell them. A car is a slave. As is any piece of electronics. As are any domesticated animals.



right now electronic music performance is giving instructions to computers. press button gives instruction to computer to do some series of parameter shifts. but in movement a person can be the instructions, can be the shifts.



It’s like saying “why don’t adults get to play with kids on the playground” and “why do people in wheelchairs get priority seating” it’s not fair.



Mass psychogenic illness.



The only thing that is yet to be done is the undoing. It seems that by 1990s people had done too much. Invented more nonexistent problems than we born into it can enumerate.



Using form as a conduit for the formless.



To rail against death. To pluck loud for the living.



I am a miner. I mine for a living.



Chernobyl indirectly led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.



“Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention.”



Context collapse.



“The only habit worth designing for is the habit of questioning one’s habitual ways of seeing.”



it used to be that self-destruction was the attitude of the rebel. but I think maybe by now self-destruction has become such an accepted part of the everyday ethos that self-care is the the truly rebellious act our day. kindness to oneself. kindness to others. giving a shit. (but then again the whole superhealth movement)



Of course yes you shouldn’t do anything out of obligation. You shouldn’t give someone your attention if it isn’t attention you want to give. But then again it is not a binary between what one wants and what one doesn’t. There are confusions and ambivalences. So that in some ways you don’t want to but in other ways you do. What then? How does that play out in the heart?





Everyone has a circle of people who they treat justly. Sometimes it’s just ones immediate family, sometimes a tribe or community, sometimes a country, sometimes just ones self. Virtue isn’t measured by how well you treat the people in your circle, but by how big the circle is. The most just and righteous among us live in circles that have no bounds.