Category: journal

Reading Time: 5 minutes

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One day last year I wrote post-it notes with moments I felt loved and put them all over my closet door. Last week I then ripped them all apart.

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Lately I’ve been seething at the reduction of hatred as a fuel, which is ironic in itself.

How many times have I pushed for a better world because I resented the state of the people around me? I’m wondering how often the hemming of anger as a volatile, reckless force has shut down movements & time of radical revolt. I am thinking about how ‘respectability’ and ‘politeness’ has never brought me far. Worse, it is used as a silencing tactic to dismiss the concerns and voices of the marginalized.

I enjoy the small, beautiful, and tender things in life because there is so much darkness threatening to crush it that I must save it all from, and when my hands are battered — of course I allow myself to scream every now and then.

And how much of a life have I lived through because I wanted, despite the hatred I was given, to get to the other side? And because I had no other choice, but to reinvent a place to be of my making? To hate this body and resolve to find a better vessel for it? To hate all the bodies that have given a cruel vestige in front of us, to hate is to respect the stewards again, to make the possibility of choice available, to refuse to revel and to always ask — “is this all there is?”

I walked backwards and pressed my back against the dock, against a shrouded night only withheld because of human light, and wondered if this is all we choose to see. I and all the perspectives I bear of my making, I and the human hand that cups water perfectly & struggles to pierce itself, I to look keenly and because of that detest what has dampened the natural world. If we move towards the artificial, how do I make it of my own making… Because anger is often synonymized with powerlessness, whilst joy is reduced to immersion in the present — and thus some sense of complacency.

When I listen I want to feel richly interconnected and interdependent. I want to fall into this world, caught with all the human hands and the machines they have made to continue carrying this body—I want to continue, against all ideas of what ‘joy’ should be, to truly feel this sensation. I want to listen without settling. I want to be needed. I want to need things again.

My microphone sits with my body and we record the night. I do this to remember the feeling; to capture something true for the people I love, to capture a sound I hadn’t heard in ages. For a moment, I also remember the human quest for silence, e.g. the need to find spaces without human noise, to find natural ambience again.

And then again I felt most comfortable in times of struggle. Unlike many others, I can’t sit still knowing something is brewing, and this summer has affirmed that completely. When I bask in the world there must be a next step, for all in this world is something to be shared and given to another, for I know that when I listen deeply to the world there is someone who has never been afforded this sound and all I seek to do is share it with them.

So in this incomprehensible mess I think of: absence, complacency, neutralization, everything, nothing, all that I could be is all that I choose, that to me what is ‘momentous’ is everything, and that I must spend my whole life tossing this strength around, and that I cannot silence the little feeling of suffering but I can spend a lifetime ensuring that nobody feels the same sense of dread. That hatred might be love disguised, a possessed kind of love carrying every burden, a love sure to ignite but a love we fear for with ignition comes the extinguishment, because I dislike all the pieces of this world that have been shown that absence of love and care and believe that everything I have ever hated comes from a desire to rewrite, fix, hold, see differently.

I’m walking home knowing the soil deserves better.
I’m walking because the world is carrying me.

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How much of my frustration in this world is seeded by how I cannot take something beautiful of it?

I want to pluck tender things and give them to my friends, offering bits of joy. Not just from myself, but out of the things I see and feel and hear and touch. Because my life has been so devoid of experience, I’ve learned to fill this rift in by making. I make the beautiful things to give to others.

This summer I was listening.

And I listened carefully to my heart and what ails it.

Where this rhythm has been conscious and giving me life, against all odds, from before I could remember. What made me cry when I was nine still makes me cry now. So much of this life is about giving, unasked for, until we cannot give any more ——

because I want to experience and know life for the sake of my friends,

because I want to create an experience and a way of seeing for the people I love,

because I want to challenge abnegation and see that nothing is irredeemable, even myself,

because I want to see the sky with all my friends knowing that shrouded or not, it is in clear view, it is something we can reach towards.

How much reaching do I have to wait for?
How much listening until I know that a thing is not worth it,
that a presence is only picking up the sickly and feasting on all the ills,
such that the presence does no good…

And I wanted to find light in every

single thing

and I wanted to find light

in myself

but it’s

not there

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Things you’re allowed to do

After Milan Cvitkovic

• Make a world
• And then leave it

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Tuesday, August 16, 2022

all this life is about remembering

so i find it so tragic when the movie posits that the girl remembers nothing; like how my heart blacks out when i wake up and text people asking if they remember something until they reassure me yes, where the worry is coming from; or my mind racing when i remember it and you don’t; why i think it’s disappointing to shrivel dying without being able to comprehend what’s in front of you — it must be a feeling worse than dead to me

so it mustn’t be bad to want to be remembered, to remember that i remembered. the desire might be inherently selfish, but what if i switch it around — to be remembered must mean that i left some indelible mark, if even momentarily

and i can’t remember anything good that happened to me in the past 22 years, and i still freak out at minor acts of kindness (thinking about men being offered cigarettes on death row and being so taken aback), and there must be a special kind of torture in being told you mean something without seeing any proof of it

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I love every reason that I have to live
I love every reason that I have to leave
I love disappearing from everything
I need to find a way

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I believe in this world so much

I believe in all the worlds I can live in so much

Reading Time: 7 minutes

lately i’ve been up to nothing. but i:

• completed 50 daily nyt crosswords (mostly m t w) in 2 days
• made a parappa the rapper tote
• have been thinking about websites for websiteweb.site
• still think i am an evil person…
• bought a smalll portable air conditioner that will likely break on me in a few, because it’s 32 degrees in new haven
• came back from a 5-day trip in chicago with friends to go to pitchfork music festival. pics of that below
• am waiting for the monome norns + grid july restock and haven’t shut up about it; using op1 more as a sampler and very expensive midi keyboard now
• have been making useless things on max for live
• am trying to pick out the best (read: interesting) blog posts from when i was teenager to compile into a little book before i leave new haven
• am thinking about really starting tha label
• haven’t been able to feel my body for a few days – maybe from overstimulation? now it feels incredibly null. touching things but not really feeling it, when a lone brush of shoulder would make me scream.
• am currently watching an old but ripped white man do crunches on the maya lin women’s table (at least not on the fountain area)
• got accepted into a weekend sound art residency in the woods of washington called campbient. i tweeted about it and dont know why i did
• am scared of moving to san francisco, but am excited for my job (? is this bad?)
• am tired from talking to too much people. . i think i need to be alone for a long long long long time.. its not as energizing; i like periods where i am distant but connected, you know? i like feeling that the world is here waiting – i can drop by any moment
• reading too much philosophy books
• writing scary words like the ones i used to write when i was locked in my bedroom for most of my life before eighteen at graveyards and parks and in the outside, kind of reveling in the idea of the droves of tourists walking around yale seeing absolutely batshit insane density of text. in truth, nobody really cares and these words go on
• don’t know whoi am

life is unusually still lately; i’m segmenting myself to better understand it (this body) and am both discomforted & comforted by the only realization that has ever mattered: that the world is something i can just as easily change and make; that i owe consistency to no one (so the choice to give it is particularly priceless) and constant radical reinvention is the only way i’ve made it this far

this is of course thinking in the short-term. how i act and my affects are apparent to myself alone, and the only way others can realize my changed self is through the act of consistency—which is conveniently something i’ve been evading for the past few years. my favorite thing to do is disappear and count clocks and feel so small until i snap out of it and realize the smallness is the good thing about the living.

i started uploading pictures of what i do each month to chia.pics, as mentioned before. i still am writing in my diary, albeit slowly. i’m scattering my thoughts everywhere with no intent but for the certainty of seeing them written. my idea of perception is that i love feeling everything all at once and blurring my senses as necessary. when i read letters they are unfiltered and when i speak it tends to go the same. i don’t know if i’m interested in stories, but i like hearing them. i wonder how much of this generation is growing up in a way that is self-referential, constantly checking in on some idealized perception of themselves/following some code of being and comparing themselves against this metric. what i mean is there are standardized identities of being and the desire for ‘subversion’ is still pitting yourself against a construct, falling into another construct. i fell into this quite badly as a teenager and am still teaching myself to regress to normal brands of lookism (last night i reread ted chiang’s calliagnosia short story and thought it was shit) that do in fact dominate how we think—by hating nice looking things less. i revel in this reversed brand of trust-distrust but look at myself in the mirror too much while not liking what i see, knowing too that this is something i can change at any moment—but is also so useless and superficial. i hate optical assessments. i hate representations. i hate how no one makes the good abstractions these days. i hate how i refuse to contribute to most conversations i’m in because no thinking goes beyond the first order and all i hear are the obvious. maybe human conversation is about saying the obvious to each other, because the obvious as we see it cannot be readily accepted unless it is obvious to everyone else. i like it when things are only obvious to myself. i love it when i am in spaces when these things that i thought only obvious to myself are obvious to everyone around, and i can suddenly operate in new social contexts with (i guess, looser, free-er, healthier willpowered) the self without filter. but i have to find the self… and it’s been eluding me for quite sometime

i think i will find myself after i remember them. lately have been thinking a lot about my relationship to the internet and memory and what it means when i participate (or maybe even ‘lead’) in the creation of culture, which i suppose is what anyone who exists digitally (and moreso someone who finds a huge part of themselves in it) tends to find themselves in. it’s not good to be in control of my self-representation here; i feel too curated so the best thing i can do on the internet is show all of my life and let someone else find the wonder in it. that’s just like existing in the real world! i don’t think i have many nice memories. i don’t think many people have memories with me in it. so my only solution, for now, is to contribute to culture in other means — something more subtle but wide-reaching, perhaps. to allow myself to be content with dedicating the self to a pursuit that will not be remembered. to be content with, myself as the memory, remembering my own self— and nothing else after.

i’m listening too much — interrogating what i am listening / an overload of abstraction is just as bad as wandering aimlessly; i have an idea now of what i like and what i don’t like but how much of it is rooted in an unnecessary resistance? i’m getting easily tired of things that normally bring other people joy, and am not feeling any particular pressure to do anything but prove that i am myself and i can survive as (the self) alone after being a figure always paired with attachment. of course, to forego all connection to the world is the surest way to leave it quick

i like it when things ask for love because it’s a stupid thing to ask for and a stupid thing to be seen doing, so it must be less stupid when they do

reading a book about walking that differentiates the stupid lunch break type “this is sufficient” 10k steps counting and emphasizes the need to let the mind roam. wander mountains or webs and let the mind rest on what it wants to seize. this is how i might want to live. unlearning a lot of things about how to see the world is hard, especially when you want to formulate how you want to see all by yourself. it’s sometimes nice to hear someone else tell you what they see. maybe i should stop being sad when i don’t see the same things as someone, but i am burdened with the need to experience and know every emotion and sight that has ever been felt — not because i want to feel that particular way too, or hold onto it, but because i want to experience the full spectrum of the world over and over. i have control now, over the pang, the suffering. i’m particularly good at hating things that are supposed to be the most joyful moments, like when i graduated from college like two months ago and walked on a stage thinking about how to kill myself quickly and silently. i love to feel the deepest ecstasy when i am doing something relatively mundane. all these emotions i can control and suddenly smallness is an indeterminate factor to the joy of being

holding onto physical objects is another particular joy for me. i want to leave marks and scuffs on everything, show that something has been used. in the new age nobody cares about keeping anything for themselves: pictures and media, things left to resell. i’m collecting things so i can form some picture of what had mattered to me, when and where, maybe even as to tell a bit of a ‘why’ to the meaning i find here (on this earth). im destroying the boxes because they dont offer any clues as to what had moved me to love a thing. documenting the things in use, what has been produced, how ive thought about them

saving myself in the margins, thinking about the perfect poem as a box unopened, thinking about how the perfect emotion is the one you havent felt. ive been longing for lots of dark things lately. ive been thinking plenty about the end