Category: journal

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

Daily updates to http://chia.pics these past few days

…

All human life comes at the expense of another

…

I have never been more certain about the meaning of ‘optionality’. This life, mine, is optional——

…

Too much to redact

…

My heart
must feel
the very bottom
of spring
it must face
the things it has
always feared (exposure
therapy?) — if you
are so obsessed
with death,
you must
try it.

Again, I wither in my bed and think about the end. I am thinking seriously about killing myself again. I think about the finite amount of time before me and oscillate between hope and fear. I think (and this is the scariest thought) of myself having everything I could have ever wanted but still wanting to end it all. I think a lot, as I’ve written before, about how beautiful of a person I could be if I weren’t so preoccupied with the thoughts. The dying thoughts, I mean. It’s narcissistic, vapid.

I stare at myself out of disgust. I observe so many things out of sheer disgust. I take pleasure in consuming things I hate, detaching myself from what I know I will enjoy, make me feel pleasant. Hating myself is myself, and the hatred at the root of all my perceptions is my only way of understanding the world. I forgive (and maybe it is not truly forgiveness if so) because I think of myself as a lesser thing; I think of the cruel, horrible things done to me and forgive because I deserve the cruel thing — but not to the point where I don’t cry out, perhaps in the form of the fight I wish I had for myself, for others. Lately I’ve been reverting back to the level of observation, witnessing, presence I had in the Philippines in the 2019 elections: people tell me I am cruel in the way I love, in the way I can’t type about feelings or express sadness and go straight into the acting. My detachment is love for the action, love for expression, love has always been about gesturing, feeling.

Here’s another thing that disgusts me: maybe the only time I am loved is when it is convenient. When there is a return, an offering. No, maybe not. But I’ve been dwelling on the question of debt and expectation: I think we owe everything to each other. Not to the transactional point of keeping precise money tools, not to the questioning of “am I doing enough for you?” in a relationship. I want so much of time, the hardest convenience to provide. I love it when people leave me. I love it when I remember that I never deserved any time. I have spent so much time with myself. That’s why I want to kill it.

The day before my birthday I tried to do the killing again. There is ritual to it now. Unpredictability is part of it — nothing being left of me is another.

The only sense of agency I feel left in this world is that, loose and stupid and foolish. I called myself a teenager, accidentally, because I’m obsessed with the revelation I had about all my fears a decade ago still largely remaining true — and how they likely will remain true for the rest of my life. I have tried almost every solution and been in every state of mind and the more I try, the more dreary I become. I’m certain that this is one of the many unsolvable things that may very well remain unsolved because there is not enough interest in it.

Other things I’m interested in: how much of the great world is at my fingertips that I’ve yet to consume, the value of repetition especially when I consistently forego exploration, the unexplored interplay between the digital and physical (that I talked about a bit when explaining the motives behind Bad Internet — which I didn’t do much with, because most people at Yale just want to review Mitski or whatever), what it means to hold things in my hands and preserve it then but also kind of feel nothing. I watched the Worst Person in the World and the most interesting character, cartoonist and ex of the boring European girl the film follows who dies of cancer, laments on artifacts and the material.

Aksel : Sometimes I listen to music I haven’t heard before. But… It’s old as well. Music I didn’t know about, but from when I grew up. It felt as though I’d already given up. I grew up in an age without Internet and mobile phones. I sound like an old fart. But I think about it a lot. The world that I knew… has disappeared. For me it was all about going to stores. Record stores. I’d take the tram to Voices in Grünerløkka. Leaf through used comics at Pretty Price. I can close my eyes and see the aisles at Video Nova in Majorstua. I grew up in a time when culture was passed along through objects. They were interesting because… we could live among them. We could pick them up. Hold them in our hands. Compare them.

Julie : A bit like books?

Aksel : Yeah, a bit like books. That’s all I have. I spent my life doing that. Collecting all that stuff, comics, books… And I just continued, even when it stopped giving me the powerful emotions I felt in my early 20s. I continued anyway. And now it’s all I have left. Knowledge and memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about.

Julie : Don’t say that. You’ve got the comics you created. I wish I’d had what you had. To be able to draw without doubting that you’re doing what you’re supposed to do. I really wish I had that.

Aksel : Yeah, but I’ve got cancer. I’m dying. Of course I’m being retrospective.

Julie : You said you’ve done that for ages.

Aksel : Not for that long. In recent years. I reached a point in life when suddenly… It just happened. When… when… I began to worship what had been. And now I have nothing else. I have no future. I can only look back. And… It’s not even nostalgia. It’s… Fear of death. It’s because I’m scared. It has nothing to do with art. I’m just trying to process.

I’m preoccupied with the dying, yes, but also I feel my interest in the physical is in trying to give some form of shape to this meaningless, shit life I’ve lived. While Aksel is also a producer and shaper of culture, I feel settled enough in my relationship to creation and consumption — which I think the script discounts. It’s one thing to collect, curate, to shape a past and a material library — but creation lets you hold the future in your hands and lets one reign over time and transport things. To create is to occupy space, and to displace the material object in the past (as some record, documentation) or future (to make a living object, artifact), to interrogate your relationship with the present (what you take or capture, how embedded you feel your process is to time).

The only thing remotely interesting about myself is that I’m present in this digital form; there is a fascination, I think, more in the assemblage of myself than in anything I make or produce individually. I am the product, the artwork, the object of fascination. I think this is where I fail in the interest of living or mattering, but also where I succeed in the interest of agency. But – certainly, there’s value in how one has thought, even if their only output is this sense of desperation to preserve themselves because no one else will take on the role. This is why I love myself enough to kill it. This is why I live at the borders of what I suppose is isolation but signaling, a desperate form of it.

I’ve never felt connected to anything, or feel the witnessing at play. So much of life is about interconnectedness. I think you can be an object if you feel connected. I can sense the sacredness of everything but I can’t pray any longer.

The other important part about the movie I guess is how production should come secondary to actually living. “I don’t want to live on through my art; I want to live on in my flat. I want to live in my flat… with you,” Aksel goes on. The inner desire is domestic and mundane.

When I was thining about the end I thought about what I liked about the present, how easy I could change it (just as easy as I could end this) – or, that’s reductive – how easy I could attempt to change it and then cry further in process of nothing solving this whether it goes as intended or not. I thought about all the times I was discarded. Sometime in the past year I had to write post-it notes to remind myself that I was loved, even for just a brief moment. I turned towards love as attention, then forgetting. I remembered that mostly, I am loved out of convenience and novelty, as most things are loved. I remembered this great big earth and all the things that I have yet to find out that I love and how I was okay with not finding that out, and how small I felt and how stupid and empty my problems were but simultaneously — how it doesn’t take that much to keep me going. Then I felt stupid and useless because of how little it takes for me to want to go on, and how repeatedly, for the past 22 years, it has been so hard to reach that default state. I remembered that there is no interest in seeing me last; or, how real could the interest in that be if it takes so much convincing to witness me?

Hopefully the desperation and the dwelling is of interest. All this effort to preserve myself and then throw it away, just as I do with everything else I create. A contradictory practice of erasure and saving. Everyone I love told me that they would never go and try to find me, in actions or in words. How could tihs be – when I’ve spent all my life finding, seeking, holding onto everything that has ever mattered? Why is it always me doing the holding? And if I just…

Listen, listen. This is my present theory. Getting this far has been hard enough (so, so, so fuckingggg hard), and I got rid of the God but I still believe in the principle of sacrifice. I love the world and it is hard to love it. (For the people back home – in the context of the elections, this is the same thing. Maybe I express less because I finally understand why it’s hard to love and accept it for what it is, then love anyway?) But all I’ve been made to do with this life is make myself easier to love, or be told that I am not worth finding. Holy fuck. I love everything and it is hard to love everything. The same grace might never be extended to me.

And then the day before I counted 22 years of how difficult and worthless I was, I understood that I to my knowledge, was not…

I graduate this weekend. I come out sadder and less hopeful, though objectively more resourced and equipped, I suppose I really have taken in so little of this world — I come out more dejected and bored and tired and there is nothing sustaining me but the meandering bits of love left. I was not supposed to make it this far. Yet, many things outlive their purpose. Many walking things have long been dead.