July 30th, 2025
this page started as a consolidation of four different short autobiographical pieces that i originally collated on February 6th, 2024, in the hope that bringing them all into the same place would have some kind of panoramic effect, conveying an overall feeling that was more than the sum of its parts. i believe the original four all may have been written throughout 2023. i intended to format these as a webpage for a long time, but didn't get around to it until now. there was probably minor editing between the collation then & the formatting now
later, i included two additions: a preface involving my father (written 2/6/25), & a final fifth one that i wrote today (7/30/25)
Update November 22nd, 2025: it's expanded further a bit in a way i don't quite know how to summarize here but there is more now
I find that the strange nature of memory is that I remember immense amounts of experiences, yet lack any index for remembering anything in particular, remembering selectively, by choice. It's always the case that I can summon a memory of some kind but there is no master list to contemplate & pick from. So if I ask myself how much I remember, I receive no answer but only a vague feeling called "the sum of my life," a handful of the most consistent locations, ideas, or people, considered in isolate, abstracted from the memories they feature in.
This is because I have no way of remembering that I remember anything in particular unless it's somehow cued as a memory, & I can never know in advance what cue I need, nor even what it is that cue would lead me to, because knowing that from the outset would be equivalent to already having this or that memory in mind. So there is all of this that is there but only as a technicality, porches & car rides I can reconstruct & know they were real, but that moment of recollection always comes for no reason, & then goes, & then the car ride doesn't exist again except as a silence that may at some point stop non-existing again briefly.
The only way to remember what all it is that I remember is in linear exploration that can only proceed by certain rules. I reflect on a memory & use details of it as connectives to other memories, ones possibly very unrelated. It's a lot like a labyrinth with chambers & discrete doors that must be found & passed through, where I never know where I am going, & every room is both new & familiar at the same time.
There's a different "daytime" for each degree of the sun's progress across the sky, but only one variety of nighttime, so that it ends up sharing equal time with the full ensemble of daytimes, but vastly overshadows any daytime in particular.
In the same way, I have all these memories, but even in the case of constant rumination on diverse memories it would still be the case that any particular memory that we singled out would not be that likely to occur to me, such that each thing that has happened to me might occur to me only a few times per month or per year, creating a sense that each thing which happens to me does so only "just barely" & it all adds up mostly to just a vague feeling of having lived, which has to be actively unpacked into actual recollection, recollection itself being only a transient moment wherein you label something as "permanently a part of me" or reaffirm that label, but then move on & forget it again.
~
When my dad was a child, his mom took him on a cross-country road trip, to relocate to the West Coast I think. She abandoned him in a diner - said she'd be right back & sped off. He was extrajudicially adopted by a waitress in that diner, whose name was Rose. He remembers her fondly. She very much became "his mother." It seems he's probably had an interesting life, although there's a lot of gaps in my understanding. I'd bet a hundred dollars that he has a draft of some kind of memoir in his Google Drive account.
I believe he spent most of his life living in California - San Francisco, I believe. I have no idea what dragged him to Missouri where he ended up meeting my mom & growing roots there. Maybe some of his birth family is there - he tends to refer to them in "hick-y" ways, an "it sucks but I gotta love them" tone. They're all Trumpers now, I'm pretty sure. But he did also tell me at some point that they're concentrated more around both Texas & Michigan, so I don't know.
At some point before I was born, there was a big meeting where everyone appeared on TV, some obscure late night show, I think. It would not surprise me if there were no archive of it. I have no marked recollection of ever meeting any members of his family whether adoptive or biological. Perhaps I have, but no memories stick out to me.
I was born on August 15th, 1998. I am left-handed, I have green eyes, & they made my initials ABC on purpose. A girlfriend once told me that my initials had immense explanatory power about my overall demeanor & didn't elaborate. I mostly lived with my mom, seeing my dad on weekends, but as a child I liked my dad more - & I recall saying so to my mom, with a child's googly-eyed sadism. It might have been because he "shared the Asperger's." Over time, this grew into a marked alienation from him, as I found his way of living & relating to the world markedly inane & alienated, in ways perhaps indeed "touched by the Asperger's." As a child, I was already older than my mother, while my dad was still my age.
In my lifetime, he actually had a daughter he wasn't there for whatsoever. Only her mother raised her. I vaguely gathered over the years that this was a situation hanging quietly in the background. Just a couple years back, he actually finally went & met with her in... Kansas City, I think it was. Or maybe Tulsa.? Somewhere. It was a very major thing for him.
I have little to no understanding of where either half (?) of my family "came from," & generally regard myself as having kind of sprung up from the dirt in Missouri without explanation. My mom might be British or Irish. My dad might be Scottish. I don't know. I was the only child of my mother & father. I have many half-siblings, none of whom have really remained in my life. Mostly out of mutual apathy.
~
I have a memory of being very young & going with my dad to a house in the woods where three old women lived. It was Fall or Winter. All the trees were bare. The bareness of those specific trees now flickers in my mind whenever bare trees I encounter today feel "real." I am not sure how many times we visited these elderly women. I remember being there at or near Christmas - I remember the tree & that I was sitting on the carpet holding a copy of The Jungle Book. Of the range of time in which we visited these three women one or more times, I am not sure how far before or after Christmas it extended.
I know that these women were related to me. Whether this was by blood I am not sure. I can't remember their names or exact relations. I can only remember Aunt Opal. I don't know if she was my aunt or if she was my dad's aunt who I took to calling by the same title that he would. I guess probably the latter.
My dad told me that, although Aunt Opal was old, she was, in her mind, equivalent to a young child of about age four. The things she said & did seemed to verify this. I was young enough that I did not regard it as a disease. That was not a perspective that even occurred to me. Rather, she felt like a certain ebb in the way that people's qualities were assembled randomly. She was like an interesting new type of person that life wanted to show me, an experimental enmeshing of old age & youth, & that was her essence. Her condition was just "an attribute."
It's easy to imagine that these three women are all dead now. I have never been informed of any of their deaths. While I believe they were related to me, & they feature in these intimate early memories, I only know one of their names & I cannot recall being informed of any of their deaths. But I have never asked.
A few times I ran down a path in the trees to a neighboring house where there was a woman & a bunch of other children & I would play with them. I don't know who this woman was, if she was a relative, or a friend of the old women, or if I just gallivanted onto her property & made friends.
Over the years, my dad took me along on random visits to many different friends & possibly relatives of his. So many random people, each representing their own isolated occurrence: The sole time that he happened to visit a given person at the same time that I happened to be under his charge. These people's houses are sprinkled all through my memory as enigmatic places, so many houses, without indication of where on earth they were, because why keep records? Why tell me?
One night, maybe in 2007, my childhood house, where I lived with my mother, filled with people. It was like a party. I think these all may have been relatives. I don't know. No one told me what was going on. In any case, I think they all would have been affiliated with my mom in some way. I never learned any of their names & I don't think I saw any of them ever again.
A teenage (?) boy got on our Windows XP computer & played the Flash animation How to Kill a Mockingbird, which enthralled me with its absurdity. An older girl kept saying the word "manwich" to me in a threatening voice. I would feign terror & run away. This bit had taken shape because of a tin of Manwich in a closet with shelves by the kitchen, which we used as a cupboard. She wanted to turn me into a manwich!
When I was about nine, one of my older sister's friends came over. I wanted him to think I was cool, so I played the song Favorite Disease by Thousand Foot Krutch on the computer because it seemed like high schooler music.
I remember my sister calling me a retard a lot. Once, when we lived in the house that we inherited from my grandma, perhaps from 2004 to 2006, she had compelled me to walk in circles around the living room coffee table, crying, because she insisted that a wasp was hovering behind me & that it would sting me if I turned to look. I was afraid of wasps. I still am.
I have a maternal uncle who I have encountered only a couple times in my life, perhaps only two or three. I do not know his name. Maybe Tom. All I remember is his big white beard. The last time I saw him was probably at my mother's memorial service in 2015. It was in the big sermon room of a church on the edge of town.
I sat alone in a chair at the back of the big sermon room. A prominent local pastor who I recognized & had dim familiarity with approached & tried to casually talk with me a bit. But my replies were so awkward that they seemed to override the... The... Well, I guess there is an approach of understanding & patience & fellowship that you expect from a pastor approaching to speak with a teenager whose mother has died. But I feel as though my stilted replies simply torpedoed those qualities & made awkward an interaction which one would think should be exempt from awkwardness, exempt from the lens of interpretation that permits awkwardness. But it was just awkward & stupid. I couldn't play my part. I was not sad.
Around 2012 or 2013, my uncle's wife went missing for a substantial length of time. I do not know her name. When she reappeared, she explained that she had stopped to help a man whose vehicle was broken down on the side of the road. The man was only pretending that the vehicle was broken down, & while she was turned away he pointed a gun at her. He took her captive & she was his captive for the span of the time that she was missing. Then she escaped. She wore her hair different because she didn't want to be recognized around town as the missing woman & repeatedly reminded of the experience. I remember her staying one night in our apartment, asleep on the recliner. Someone casually awoke her &, briefly, she displayed a clear post-traumatic response - wide-eyed, "What?! What?! What?!"
Later that poor woman got up in the middle of the night & went to use the restroom, found the toilet clogged, had to deal with that.
Once, I was sitting in the living room, in the computer chair. My mother & father were sitting behind me on the sofa. They were talking about what had happened to my uncle's wife. My mother said she was sure that, in addition to the kidnapping & everything, "other.. activities had occurred." She said some phrase to that effect & glanced from him to me, to say to him, "I'm referring to rape but I won't say that right now." I knew what she meant, though. I knew what rape was. I also knew what fisting was, & bestiality, pedophilia, incest, coprophilia, knife play, & sounding, &...
The greatest separation reigned between the blank shadow that I presented to my family, & the debatably more substantive being I allowed myself to be on the computer. I did everything I could to maintain an iron curtain between the two. I don't have time to ruminate here on the early psychological effects of this splitting, nor the mild trauma (?) of its eventual rupture.
Once, for Thanksgiving, we - my mother & stepdad - convened at some large building out in the middle of nowhere, I guess a church, with lots of people who I believe were almost exclusively in-laws related to me through my stepdad, who was a cowboy. I use that word not as a description of his profession but as a pejorative term. He liked Alex Jones. You get the picture. Alex Jones to me was not what Alex Jones is now to to Tumblr, to the internet, & to the broader world, this man the world had to reckon with. He was, to me, some random obscurity. The insane man that my stepdad was taken with.
My first recollection of my stepdad is getting out of bed, walking into the living room, & seeing him sitting on the couch without explanation. He waved to me & said, "Hey." I thought he was a burglar. Maybe he wanted to kill us. I didn't care & I went back to bed.
He resented gay people, Mexican people, & homeless people. He once told me, with smug pride in his voice, about how he had once been stuck in traffic in his truck, eating a cheeseburger, & there had been a homeless man sitting on the corner. He said he had just stared directly at the man as he ate his cheeseburger, to reinforce to him the idea that he was just a lazy, wicked malingerer. When he told me this, I just stared at him because I felt my voice & input were meaningless.
It is fortunate that he left my life early enough to not end up becoming an explicitly abusive presence. His most recent Facebook status, from 2014, reads, verbatim, "its like part of a dream come true ........I have ben wanting to get back in the saddle agen ...........ya im loven it." His spelling & grammar are generally like someone parodying the writing style of a "dumb southerner." He loves horses - really does. He is impressionable, a child. He could not help the time & place he was born into.
My mother & stepdad parroted certain conspiracy theories - FEMA, the chip, & such - & from a young age I felt pitilessly disgusted by what I regarded in them as an infantile desire to feel like they lived in some kind of movie. It felt pathetic to be a child watching grown adults lack what was, I felt, the mild stoicism necessary to acknowledge life as a thing that is overall quite dull in many ways.
I remember a time when my dad became very enamored with country music & western aesthetics for a little while, in a way which felt incongruous. It felt almost like a kind of childish internal response to my mother's involvement with my stepdad. A cartoonish self-refurbishing. Store this detail about my dad away in your mind for when I give him some description later on. It will paint the picture a little better.
When I picture the foyer of that building that we went to for Thanksgiving, I think of a window which was open all the time on our Windows XP computer. "Preparing to uninstall...," it said. I do not know what was perpetually in preparation to be uninstalled. The window was impossible to close & it would open after the computer was restarted. I do not know why the foyer is linked to this window. I think my mother may have talked about it there.
That window has a feeling, a texture, in my mind. An intimate sense of frozenness, stillness, the color of sand, like the sand that would be in that hourglass cursor, the hard stillness of sand hardened into dry sandstone.
In that church, some vague number of children & I wandered together into the dim, empty sermon room, with all the rows of chairs, & a stage with one chair on it. It seems we organized into an activity of going up to sit on that chair one by one & introduce ourselves. I went up & cracked myself up by saying that I was a stop sign that had fallen down to Earth from outer space. No one else laughed. I loved nonsense though. I loved animutations by Neil Cicierega. In the same way I loved How to Kill a Mockingbird.
Later, I think in sixth grade, standing in a hallway with a small group of children, I had exactly one occurrence of cracking myself up with this zany humor that no one else connected with. A girl's brief but disgusted response pierced me fully & violently with a cruel understanding that would cause me to completely shut down this side of myself for at least the next fourteen years, without hesitation.
Once, we went to the house of my step-grandma, Sue. If memory serves me right, Sue was standing in the living room in a wedding dress, under some kind of trestle-arch decoration which had been placed in there. She might have even held a bouquet in her hands. She was in a state of deep sorrow & intense denial. Her heart had been stolen by some perhaps tall & skinny man, a truck driver, perhaps named Carl, perhaps he might have said he intended to marry her that day, some informal wedding conducted in the living room, perhaps that was the reason for the bouquet, dress, trestle. But Carl had vanished, cut off contact. She insisted stubbornly that he was going to come back as my mom & stepdad insistently tried to bring her back to reality.
In my memory, she is a distinct type of rural middle-aged white woman who would be consumed by computer games such as Bejeweled or Zuma Deluxe. At the risk of sounding very patronizing, when I look back at this memory I feel her as such a poor, confused thing. Her moment of emotional agony & desperation registered as one that would take little work to adapt into a Tim & Eric skit. I'd like to think that I don't say this mockingly, only with an eye to absurdity.
~
In middle school, I had an intense & lasting crush on a girl named Amanda. This was because on the first day of sixth grade she had approached me & briefly complimented my Homestuck t-shirt, which blew my mind. My mind swam in feverish spirals of her recognizing Homestuck. I interacted with her very rarely. Once she glanced at me from across the lunchroom & I felt my whole head vibrate.
My dream was to have a girlfriend who knew what Homestuck was.
One day, at the lunch table, an eighth grader named Grant talked with his friends about The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny. I aggressively shoehorned into the conversation my memorization of the "Gandalf the Grey & Gandalf the White" part. As I did this Grant stared straight down at the table, an ambiguous posture I have always retrospectively parsed as petrifaction by secondhand embarrassment, & there was little response afterward.
Once, during gym, a boy - I believe his name was Jotham - took my notebook & ran around refusing to give it back to me. I do not remember what my demeanor was like as I followed him back & forth to get it back, but I imagine it was stilted, rigid, because I clearly remember being caught in a kind of anxious thought spiral around the idea that I might be blushing in response to what was happening.
This was at a time when I would have regarded this as "gay" & when I likely had a degree of firm & unquestioned internalized homophobia from my mom & stepdad. This did not ever manifest as an actual dislike of gayness or gay people, rather just an invincible conviction that I myself could not possibly be "gay." I was not afraid of being "gay," as though it would make me lesser - it's just that it simply wasn't possible.
I was friends with Amanda on Facebook. At age fourteen, on July 13th, 2013, I decided I would try to befriend her. I sought to do this by opening a computer program that you could type a message into & then have it automatically send the message once every x seconds, in whatever chat window you selected. At 7:29 PM, I began repeatedly sending her a message, once per second, that read "ก็็็ʕ•͡ᴥ•ʔ ก้้้ BEAR RAVE ก็็็ʕ•͡ᴥ•ʔ ก้้้"
I feel that I did this to avoid the perceived vulnerability of just saying "hi" & initiating a normal conversation about whatever middle schoolers talk about. I sublimated my desire to reach out into a piece of expression that felt irreproachably irreverent, & as I did it I could tell myself that I was just following an innate drive to be chaotic & weird, rather than trying to befriend someone - drown out rational consideration of what I was doing with the voluntary white noise of "being random," "being zany."
As the bear raves sent, one after the other, I leaped & flailed around my living room in a state I will venture to describe as autistically hyperactive nervous excitement, tacky as I may feel in appropriating "autistic" as an adverb.
After eleven bear raves, she replied, "Um okay lol". After about ten more, she replied with a sticker of Pusheen sleeping. I continued sending bear raves until 8:33 pm.
We did not interact again until August 24th, when I sent a message reading "WHO IS JOHN GALT". There were, at the time, banner ads around the internet for a movie adaptation of Atlas Shrugged which just read "WHO IS JOHN GALT", presumably in an attempt to be eye-catchingly enigmatic. For a little while, I thought it was funny to repeat that phrase. I understood nothing about the book or the film.
She replied, "John Galt is a character in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged (1957)." I replied, "but who IS john galt" after which we had an inane conversation where she typed like Terezi Pyrope.
In 2015, when I regard myself as having been more or less insane, a time I pray to God will never be bested as the subjective nadir of my entire life, Amanda sent me a message which read:
"So I know that you’ll never respond to this message but I read most of the post you make on tumblr (when I'm online) and I just wanted to tell you that I wish I could be a better friend and help you out when things aren't going well. I sincerely hope that things get better for you, and I'm sorry I was not there when you needed someone but I do want to be there because I do consider you as a friend even though you probably don't consider me as a friend."
I never replied to this. I am not sure how I reacted to it internally, but for much of my life I had instinctively, as stated prior, had a very very militant attitude about the separation between my "real" & "online" expression, & if this was my first moment of realization that she read my blog then there is a chance I was very disturbed & caught off guard by that. I hate to think of what she might have been responding to. I was a chaotic whirling of thoughtless nihilism, cynicism, & dread. [This wasn't the traumatic rupturing of my online & offline lives that I alluded to earlier. That happened a few years prior. Maybe I'll add that to this page later.]
Today, while trying to ascertain the date that I messaged Amanda with "bear rave," I rediscovered the above message as well as a 2015 drawing by her of me in a "bear suit."
I also rediscovered a still of me on the local news in 2011.
This was from a local news segment where a man named Brad would seek out the more "off-beat" things happening in the area. The segment was called "Brad's Beat." I was being featured as a thirteen-year-old stand-up comedian.
I was interviewed in this capacity at the same dining table in the same two-story house where, six years later, I would (with a confused mixture of emotions) acquiesce to eating the dinner at a Christmas party in lieu of penitently fasting for several days out of guilt related to interpersonal tension with one of my exes. This was the same ex who, about a year after that Christmas party, would, in a state of severe emotional instability, send me a rant calling me a loathsome homeschooled animal because I got a haircut without them. Another six years later, I would notice that these events took place at the same table & unify the memories in this piece of writing as if to vaguely say something about time & places & change.
In addition to the interview, Brad & I filmed a short teaser that would play before the ad break preceding the segment. It had Brad describing what was up next, followed by me saying some standard sentence that he had asked me to say. Then, after my sentence, I followed it up with my own non sequitur phrase, "exploding bears in space." I hadn't told him I would say that, & the teaser showed him looking at me, chuckling, & saying "what?!"
That I was a thirteen-year-old stand-up comedian was my dad's doing. For a long time, before I was even born, he had done gigs as a stand-up comedian, children's entertainer, or magician. As an extension of this he had, since at least first grade, been occasionally parading me onto stages to recite material that he had written in a mindset of, "These are the kid version of jokes. It will be funny if a kid says this." I did it for the school talent show. I did it at a Christian nightclub.
My set included such jokes as:
My mom works at a portrait studio. that means she makes people look beautiful... For a hundred bucks!
I'm not sure what my dad does... This week. But he came home yesterday smelling like a Big Mac.
He told me he slept like a baby last night. I guess that means he woke up crying because he wet himself.
Last night my sister talked with someone on the phone for three hours! I asked her who it was & she said, "Wrong number."
My teacher started telling this story that started off "rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub..." I didn't even stick around to hear the rest of that one.
Anyway, my dad says I'm not supposed to talk to strangers, so I gotta go.
I was neither for nor against this. I simply did it. It was a routine in both a comedic & programmatic sense. The audience's laughter brought me no joy. Nor did I feel cajoled or used. If I had been raised to have a more robust sense of agency, I might have found it a kind of demeaning way for a parent to relate to a child. But I wasn't raised in such a way. After my performance in the talent show in 1st or 2nd grade, a small group of girls swarmed me enthusiastically on the playground & I just stared at them blankly while they touched & shoved me.
It didn't take too long for me to start seeing my stand-up act as an expression of a characteristic sort of naivete that I have always known my dad to display about "being an entertainer," among other roles, including being a Christian. I feel that this naivete endures nearly twenty years later. He is one inclined to make something a technical reality so that he can declare it to himself as a full-fledged, essential reality, & be "pleased" with that. He seems to approach life as a series of parcelized costumes to try on, with each representing a new "era" for him to have gone through & store away in a section of his mind resembling a trophy case, a portfolio, or a series of portraits.
By having me deliver these jokes, he could enjoy the technical reality that I was also a stand-up comedian like him. He was able to ignore the way that the artificiality of this drained it of its essence.
Similarly, by creating a thing that technically counts as a song or film, he can enjoy the technical satiation of a drive in him to be a musician or filmmaker - not because he has something he wants to express in these mediums, but because the roles of "filmmaker" & "musician" have taken roost in his mind as things which hold an air of exoticism, & he wants to bring himself into alignment with them. He will become drunk on this feeling, sitting on the couch, cackling to himself at his own creative energies as he pens lyrics to an extremely by-the-numbers country or rock song. He will obsessively accrue filmmaking tools he never makes use of & take joy in brainstorming film plots that come off as odd caricatures of conventional storytelling. He is a man who lives by trying on various masks, careful always to maintain a layer of dissociation between himself & the real breadth of possibilities, so that the target of his fixation remains a sort of cartoon version of itself, safe to approach, unchallenging.
This is glaring to anyone who meets him & also has a decent measure of honesty with themselves. Most of these people have been my friends from outside my hometown, who are not subject to its particular delirium, which is like that of an entire city of people who are, in spirit, "homeschooled." I have never spoken frankly to him about this because his fever, while comprising so much of his being, is also so paper-thin that there is a sense that one could not press on him at all without doing far more severe & extensive damage to his character defenses than he really deserves. I feel that holding my tongue about something so flagrant for basically my entire life has done me some kind of damage, made me find my own voice worthless.
Framed in my living room is an old article from the local newspaper about my dad's magic act & his fascination with Harry Houdini. Framed right above it is a blue poster in Comic Sans which advertises a show at the above-mentioned Christian nightclub, on April Fool's Day 2006. The main act is my dad with his stand-up, followed by myself & two musicians.
Over the course of the following year, one of these musicians would start to become popular on MySpace & would sign to Warner Bros. Records in 2009. His band has a Wikipedia page. They have released ten albums, the most recent one being in 2020. Their second album has 176 ratings on rateyourmusic.com, the most of any of them. About eighteen years later, I would leave for Virginia to stay with some friends for about four months, the longest I had ever been out of state or even out of town. In a thrift store in Virginia, I would find a CD by the band in question.
It was true that my mom worked at a portrait studio. My mom was somewhat locally recognizable for manning the studio at a Wal-Mart. Sometimes when there was no one to watch me after school I had to spend hours corralled in this portrait studio. This is undoubtedly how I developed an affinity for fake pieces of fruit that are used as props, such as those that could be found in the prop chest there. I do not encounter fake fruit very often, but it tends to stimulate something in me. There was the blanket, the curtains, the fruit, the foam... I feel that the portrait studio donated a lot of textures to a part of my psyche.
As for my mother's sense of humor: The only joke I can immediately recall ever hearing her tell went as follows, "What do you call a black guy in space? An astronaut!! What are you, racist??!"
When I was somewhere in the range of nine years old, I called my dad on the phone to demonstrate to him that I had memorized all ten minutes of Weird Al Yankovic's Trapped in the Drive-Thru. I definitely also called him once to sing the entirety of Virus Alert. When I was about twelve, I called him to express my excitement at having learned what "precordial catch syndrome" is - that I had always just been experiencing that, rather than having frightening heart problems I hadn't told anyone about.
I think the funniest anecdote i have about my dad (other than maybe his period of Jim Carrey Grinch obsession & Grinch cosplay) is from c. 2016-2018, when he (approx. age sixty) grew resentful of the unnecessary zodiac of psychiatric medications his doctor had prescribed him & decided to quit them all at once, then announced this through a Facebook post featuring a photograph of all the pill bottles lined up on our kitchen counter captioned "bye bye bitches!!" which immediately prompted alarmed messages from people who thought he was about to kill himself by taking all the pills &, crucially, were willing to believe that he would christen this decision with no greater statement than a caption that just read "bye bye bitches!!" & then just him being dead.
Also - this is less comedic - as it happens, stopping all the medications at the same time did actually cause him to have a heart attack soon after. It's not unlikely that he possibly came way closer to death from this than was necessary due to absurd delay in calling an ambulance, on the part of my brother, who, observing his extremely unusual sense of panic & dread (the only time I've directly witnessed how very markedly & identifiably these feelings are induced by a heart attack), dully advised him to "drink some water" & took no further action or interest, leaving my dad to eventually call the ambulance himself, something he probably did in spite of a personal sense that it was kind of histrionic to do so.
(For much of my childhood, my brother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia with very visible & explicit positive symptoms, which manifested quite a number of times as verbal abuse & aggression towards my sister, for unclear reasons. Certain moments of his mental troubles likely constitute some of my more traumatic memories. The positive symptoms all diminished & more or less disappeared entirely around the time I turned sixteen & he is now simply a rather inoffensive & dependable person, though I still perceive him as behaving & expressing in a very inexpressive, detached, dismissive way possibly very marked by negative symptoms, in ways that I could maybe imagine registering to some people as some kind of "intellectual disability.")
~
About a month before my seventeenth birthday, I was on the website Omegle.com, using a feature called "spy mode." The way this mode functions is that a user types in a prompt, & then two strangers are connected as usual, but with this prompt to discuss if they so choose. The person who types the prompt can see the conversation happening, but cannot interact in any way.
I was typing all kinds of nonsense into this prompt field, & at some point two people connected, John & Sequoia. They had a long conversation & quickly went from strangers to friends.
I do not recall if I paid full attention to this conversation as it happened, or only cursory attention, or whether I only reviewed it after it had concluded. In any case, I was sort of captivated by the whole thing, because both of these people talked to each other in a very... Approachably plain-spoken way unlike anyone Ii had ever talked to. "Normal," I thought of it as, a finnicky word which one can connote either positively or negatively on any particular usage. The positive side, groundedness, the negative side, banality.
In this case, I thought it was wonderful. I guess if I had to vaguely describe it, I would say... They just talked, but, "just talked" in a way that escaped being banal. It felt real because there was no excess of self-consciousness or self-awareness to it, nothing convoluted. It felt very cozy. It made me think of the house I grew up in. It made me think of a scene from a book that I had always visualized taking place in the kitchen of the house I grew up in.
I saved a copy of the conversation to my computer. I had always done this after pretty much any notable Omegle conversation that I was involved in, although I wasn't actually involved in this one. Consequently I feel like this was the first of a few subsequent actions I took that I don't think were exactly conscionable.
The second action: Towards the end of the conversation, Sequoia had shared her e-mail address with John so they could keep in touch. I sent Sequoia an e-mail, just to express that I hoped it wasn't strange to say, but I thought they both had a very interesting & entertaining conversational style. I reasoned to myself that this would not be exceedingly strange, given how she'd willingly disclosed the address in "spy mode."
Sequoia replied with bewildered alarm. I immediately felt deeply embarrassed. It felt very obvious in retrospect that it was a strange e-mail to send. I sent a second one apologizing & then dropped off the face of the earth as far as that was concerned. I moved on with whatever stuff I did around the time I turned seventeen. The experience faded away. But I would remember it on infrequent occasions. The impression never wavered: Those people were so normal... I've never talked to anyone so normal...
Just over four years later, in 2019, about four months after my twenty-first birthday, I was chatting with a close friend who I'd met early that year. It was December. I was having a particular moment of recall about the conversation. I told my friend about it, & about the impression it had left on me. & then, to illustrate what I meant, I did the third & final thing which felt less than conscionable: I dug up the conversation & sent it to him in full.
How did he respond to it?
The conversation revolted him. He felt that each of them talked like characters in a mid-aughts British young adult novel - weird, prefabricated, colorless personalities that he couldn't stand. He found it nightmarish that each one seemed to be consciously choosing to play such a role, & insisted that people do not talk like that, that no human who existed in an environment independent of young adult fiction would ever, ever talk like them on their own. He likened them to fifteen year olds who'd read Harry Potter & now made attempts to be witty & quippy with sentences devoid of semantic content.
This new lens of interpretation clicked into place effortlessly & I immediately saw how grossly accurate it was. Just like that, the spell was broken & the conversation was now a sort of unpleasant thing to skim over. What had I been thinking?
~
I am not as fond of how I wrote this part - a bid muddled - so I have kept it here but lowered the font size to mark it as secondary. If you give it a try & find it tedious, feel free to skip over it.
Around Christmas of 2017, about four months after my nineteenth birthday, I went to a Christmas dinner in a big, pretty two-story house that I hadn't been to in a long time. The house was owned by a married couple, two friends of my dad's. He had lived there with them for a while back around 2011. Now he'd invited me along to this dinner, which he was attending in his capacity as an employee of the couple, who had since become franchise owners of a pizza restaurant. I arrived at this party trying to starve myself for three days. I will tell you why.
This was during a time when I felt like I had terribly wronged someone. At least, I sort of think that's how it was. It's possible that I had done them wrong, & sensibly felt bad. But it's also possible that they had made me feel far worse about something than I deserved to. Things were mutually pretty negative between us &, certainly, neither of us were blameless. The relationship was an absolute mess, completely inadvisable, no one involved should have been.
If nothing else, I had done something especially bad back in October, so I had good reason to feel bad, generally. But it's possible that my guilt on Christmas may not have been deserved in an immediate way. It could have been! I simply don't remember the exact circumstances. What matters is that I felt very bad.
I cared strongly about the way I was feeling. The guilt was eating me alive. I felt like a worm. This was a period in my life where I didn't have much self-esteem beforehand, & maybe I felt like I could be very negative & cynical, but one way I at least didn't feel was ethically compromised. But now I did. I felt shattered.
During this part of my life, I had hardly any capacity (willingness?) to really think about myself, & I was even less adept at interacting with others - more or less completely crippled in that respect. So I had this crushing store of guilt & felt totally clueless as to how to process it & make sense of it, or how to make things right between me & the person. The situation between us was fairly complicated & intense in its own right, far surpassing my fetal social capacities, & maybe enough of a product of their own private pain paired with my clueless barely-human quality that there really was no feasible way of definitively settling things between us. I had no idea what to do. But it felt impossible to imagine that the guilt could just linger there inside me, taking no form.
So the only outlet I saw for the guilt, the only place I could put it, the only way I could do right by it & assuage it, was some kind of self-imposed punishment. & what I went with - what i did multiple times (or at least attempted multiple times) - was set a countdown on my phone for one to three days & restrict myself from consuming any food or drink for that time. I went with this because I was simply too afraid of subjecting myself to anything more visceral & directly painful.
So I had one of these countdowns going at that Christmas dinner. The countdown was three days long, I believe. I had a plate of food. I broke my oath, even though I didn't want to. The reason I did this was that the idea of not having any of the food while I was there made me feel a sad in a very potent & sentimental, & this sadness overpowered the guilt. It was as if I was personifying the event itself, or maybe the food. Feeling sorry for it. & the thought that I would have to neglect it because of such a dismal, loveless ritual motivated by such dismal, loveless circumstances was too much. So, begrudgingly, I ate the food.
What most stands out to me is the peculiar emotion as I ate. In one part, although I did not forgive myself, I felt like someone who had been mercifully forgiven for something but in a bittersweet manner where I couldn't quite believe it was really the case & was uncertain, hesitant, half expecting to be hit or scolded. In another part, it was like all the people at the dinner, who I felt represented a quite different sphere of reality from the person I had wronged, were all sort of taking me in their arms & insulating me from the other sphere where all the wrongs & grievances existed, so that I existed only there at the party, innocent of wrongdoing because the other place wasn't real anymore. I felt maybe like someone who had been walking through a war zone, resigned to their certain death, but some kind & loving people appeared & scooped me up in a truck & now I was just speeding along towards safety. Although no one at the dinner was remotely interacting with me in this way, if at all, & I didn't feel that close with any of them - fairly alienated by them, in fact. None of them knew about my social circumstances or my oath not to eat. Regardless, this was how I felt while I ate the food.
~
Even if any of my family had been adequate, I fear I never could have emotionally fallen into any of them for comfort - that way you emotionally fall completely forward into someone, letting gravity take you, hiding in them - as by a young age my dimly recognized notions of intimacy, romance, & family had colluded to produce a mistaken sense that full surrender of oneself to a member of one's own family would be akin to incest. My exposure to extreme sexual content through the internet likely didn't help matters. This was a large part of why any hope of developing an early-life framework for emotional relation to other people was out the window for me pretty much immediately.
This was, however, ultimately just an extra, superfluous nail in the coffin, as by that time I already dimly recognized, if unconsciously, that the landscape of traditional media & radio country music had already - in a kind of pernicious, eldritch manner - reduced the people in my small town to shrieking automatons. If this sounds pretentious or misanthropic that's because it is pretentious & misanthropic to type in the present day but I feel that to sit here & pretend to fault myself back then for developing the impression in complete earnest would amount to an act of retroactive self-child-abuse, with marked psychological severity, given my circumstances at the time. So everyone I had access to felt severely confused & utterly inconsequential to me, & if anyone did stick out I was naturally too stunted to attempt to interact with them in any coherent way.
I went on the internet, which I recognized on some animal level as my only avenue of anything resembling an "authentic existence." There I recall, among other things, browsing Encyclopedia Dramatica in vague, confused recognition of it as a "funny" or otherwise "eclectic" website. There, however, I prominently recall seeing a close-up photo of a person's head splattered on a road, a photo of a person suspended from a ceiling in bondage gear being anally fisted, a gif of a person shitting in another person's hand, &, on one of my few visits to /b/, a photo of a removed eyeball with a razor blade embedded in it about halfway deep in.
This was not my authenticity. It was all just there. It's just that it was there.
I alternated these exposures with playing Roblox, Sonic & Mario flash games, mouse avoider flash games, single-player browser RPGs, & a chatroom where I roleplayed with strangers as an orphaned vampire child.
On a few sparse occasions my mother would discover things I had been looking at in the browser history. She would scroll through the odd things but not take any action or really commentate on anything. During these moments my mind would completely petrify & I would feel powerless. When she didn't do anything I could just pretend it hadn't happened. Maybe her mind was petrified too by this unfamiliar hurdle in the experience of parenting. Or she just didn't care. Privately I began to recognize the sense that I had been quietly made into some alien thing different from the rest of my family & that it was some kind of responsibility for me to conceal this fact.
My stepfather once found the worst of it, terrible pictures I had saved in strange indifference. I saw him navigating the file browser. I approached &, feeling like it was my only avenue of control, pretended to trip & fall so that my hands struck the Alt+F4 keys to close the window. It was obvious that I had faked it. He lightly scolded me & resumed what he was doing. I couldn't look. I went away. I lied on my bed or perhaps under my bed feeling like something absolutely unacceptable was happening. Finally he appeared in the doorway, stared at me for maybe less than two seconds with a sort of queer expression, then walked away & it was never addressed or brought up again.
The only thing my mom ever got mad at me for doing on the computer was swearing in Roblox. I got banned & it sent her an e-mail with what I had said. She shamed me to my sister while I sat on the kitchen counter, genuinely repentant, paralyzed.
In retrospect, everything she was saying was probably a sort of unconscious roleplay of being a parent. Everything was roleplay. Always.
Everyone in the household was too stupid for it to even feel reasonable to assign them culpability for abuse or neglect. No one's sense of self was robust enough that it would convey the sense that conscious decisions underlied anything that anyone did. The house was people vaguely strewn across the fact of being alive like used tissues from a small overturned trash bin. It was like a science experiment gone wrong, abandoned, the building hastily sealed up, the things in it left to fester & develop their own sordid, ramified ecosystem. Each person's overall demeanor consisted only of vague gestures towards what it vaguely seemed like they were expected to be. It was 2007 in the American south. People were not self-made. Their existences were not their own, their existences had been taken out of their hands, each person's range of possibility for who they could have been was erased. It was replaced with their development into passive outgrowths of mid-aughts cynical monoculture. (That was the science experiment, not yet balanced out quite as much by the growing prominence of the Internet & the cultural democratization associated with that.) They had been robbed, violated on a level so deep that they felt no disagreement with it & did not even know of non-violation. We were empty bodies all collaborating on this collective, animalic retardation, chucked listlessly into the world by the world & then forgotten by the world & abandoned to while away time as unconscious, impartial fruits of the world.
I came to understand the world as a place where consciousness is conditionable, where the things you see, think, & feel, which feel so much like things of you, inseparable from you, can be but only reflections of things devised far in advance to make you the sort of person that you are. I came to understand the world as a place where the line dividing subjects from objects is not as firm as we would like to suppose. I began to construct myself around the obsession with surmounting this, of not being controlled, of not being blind, of actually living, actually existing, yet knowing always just an inch past the limits of my vision might be the glass of the fishbowl I still live in. I am always scared that I have been spiritually killed & cannot be but blind to the fact that I am dead.
Writing this makes me picture low-grade camcorder footage of an orange plastic bucket full of live mice, clustered on top of each other, biting, writing, copulating, incest, birthing, eating their young, in a bucket, piled. I never saw anything like this. It only comes to me as an image right now.
Today we often use the Internet to shelter ourselves so effectively in the cosmopolitan that I spend a lot of time wondering if anyone I know can understand this kind of... Of...
~
On May 22nd, 2011, an EF5 tornado struck my hometown & leveled approximately a quarter of the city, killing over 150 people.
We were staying in an upstairs apartment at the time. Tornado watches & warnings were so common in that area that everyone was a bit accustomed & cynical about them. But though nothing was happening yet something about the sky became fucked in a way that tugged outright on our animal instincts & as my mother told me to put on my shoes I sensed a greater urgency & trepidation than was usually in her, which made me fall in line quite readily. We went to an empty downstairs apartment which we would happen to later move down to in 2013. None of us knew anything apocalyptic was happening but the sirens were going off so I was scared & I sat apart from everyone in the closet of what I didn't know would later be my bedroom, screaming hysterically, a formless scream. I already had a well-established relationship of powerless fear with respect to tornadoes & tornado sirens, the sense that God could reach down its finger & scrape me from the Earth, & the sense of total dependence upon an adult to drive me somewhere safe in a hurry while the landscape wailed, the sirens like horns announcing the rapture, this sound that became everywhere like an organic ghostly wailing & only under this particular condition of inescapable leviathan death that could approach from any direction at any time.
But it died down & nothing seemed to have happened til we went upstairs & tuned to the radio to KZRG where we heard live phone conversation with a grown man in tears as he explained the scene around him. So we went out driving.
I saw a landscape of flattened neighborhoods with people dotted around picking at their destroyed lives, weeping, powerlines splayed casually deadly across the road. On the horizon an enormous plume of black smoke from the burning of a nine-story hospital which had been entirely rotated four inches off of its foundation.
No one I knew was killed. My childhood house was in the path but survived somehow. My elementary school down the street was ruined & had to be demolished. It was later replaced by a Gringo's. This Gringo's, a relatively tiny building, sits so comically as a small island in the middle of a flat cement plane of implied empty space - still suggestive of having once been occupied by the much larger two-story school & encompassing half a city block - that it's as though the decision were made to put it there in an act of mockery towards the notion that there could have once been a place there that might have held nostalgic significance to anyone.
The city after the tornado is not quite the city it was before. Much of it is the same but there is also a massive scar of terrain that feels deeply alien to me. To this extent, the city I grew up in does not quite exist anymore, & this was effected not through the gradual changes & disaffectations of a fading childhood & subtly shifting relationship to a place itself subtly shifting - a relatively sentimental process -, but in a single, decisive, violent act. A patch of a different city was pasted in asynchronously over what was there before. The houses are prefurbished & the flora is patchy & bare. A certain dry, rugged, honest, aged quality is gone.
The neighborhoods that were swept away, I am sure I have casual nostalgic memories of driving through. I cannot recall them though. I am sure I could reawaken them through exploration in Google Street View's 2007 rewind, a feature I generally find extremely vexing & bittersweet, the original photo quality seeming to contain a grainy warmth that buzzes with the feeling of that time. I have not explored those neighborhoods through it. When the idea occurs to me, I tend to feel a little overwhelmed, hesitant, & quickly distracted by some other thought.
I have never been sure of the effect on me of the event itself. My home was out of the path & no one I knew was killed. But I was only twelve years old & there was that landscape of devastation & loss. & this was the apotheosis of helpless terror from the sky. One would imagine this being very traumatic. I was in sixth grade & I am certain that my most prominent & lasting emotional problems began to develop in seventh grade, but I have never felt very certain about the link.
I want to note this, though:
Everything was always roleplay. In the current day, I try to desperately reconstruct some vague idea of what it would mean to be "normal" after witnessing, in childhood - among other similar things - my family behaving & expressing in a way that Ii can only characterize (& could, at the time, only characterize) as "larping" the nonexistent trauma of an actual extremely severe natural disaster that we had all witnessed.
&, through this, being taught that it might be genuinely impossible for there to exist the notion of what a person is "actually" saying or doing, not in the sense that people are often self-deceiving or dishonest, but in the sense that there genuinely do not exist "actual" words or behavior from which deception or dishonesty would be a departure, possibly not even in myself.
Far earlier in childhood, I had already found people to behave in ways I found so bizarre, yet so universal, consistent, & integrated between different individuals, that I began tentatively to wonder if humanity didn't operate on some kind of hive mind consciousness that I wasn't privy to. This didn't stabilize into any later full-blown delusions, but it was representative of a sense of fundamental, desolate difference from all other people, which has never left me.
~
When I was twelve I remember I would lie under a blanket on the living room floor, eyes shut, immersed in strange, gratifying fantasies of having my neck bitten by vampires, my blood drank, helpless. I was not old enough to experience this as primarily a sexual gratification. It was like it touched something deeper that was conducive to later manifesting within sexuality for a time. Sometimes I would have similar fantasies of my soul literally being torn agonizingly from of my body. I wanted to be stabbed to death with a knife & feel myself fading or mouthfuls of flesh cannibalistically torn from my body. I wanted to be dissolved in acid or crushed to death.
I was often left home alone while everyone was at work. This was, in retrospect, quite a problem: Internet screamer pranks & horror movie trailers had led me to develop a severe, untreated, unacknowledged anxiety disorder starting from around age eight. When left alone I was too petrified to even explore my own house. I was afraid of hallways, doorways, & mirrors. I lived in unbearable tension, constantly visualizing the possibility of a horrifying ghoul leaping from around any corner & screaming blood-curling as it sprinted with arms outstretched. It felt always like this was liable to happen in one second.
I feel the Internet screamer pranks were a particularly cruel aspect of the etiology of this, as they would sometimes feature photographs of ordinary rooms prior to the screamer, & this conditioned me to see an ordinary, quiet, motionless domestic space as a pressure cooker of tension, the setup for something that was about to happen that would be all-enveloping & overwhelming & unexplainable & senseless & meant only to terrify for terror's sake.
Going into the "deep" parts of the house (past approximately the living room / dining area) usually felt out of the question, & in the parts of the house that I kept to I would navigate by darting from corner, never turning my back on any room, eyes glued hypervigilant to the doorways. This made getting to the restroom & back a terrifying & difficult affair, & I do recall once particular instance around age twelve where I voluntarily wet my underwear because I couldn't face the unmanageable prospect of going into the hall. I did not tell anyone about this. Nor did I ever express discontent about being left alone. I think it just felt, in a very natural way, like the way that everything had to be.
It was either this or sitting at the computer. I didn't feel entitled to leave the house by myself, not even onto the front porch. (I didn't go on my first walk around my neighborhood by myself until around age sixteen.) In retrospect, I am surprised that I was willing to use the computer, since the chair would always force my back to the room very distinctly. Maybe this works to demonstrate my attachment to the computer. Certainly I was always very nervous at it, looking over my shoulder - sometimes it would grow too intense & I would have to pounce onto the couch & huddle on it, balled up in its furthest corner. Probably it was the distraction I accessed through the computer that made me able to suppress my fear well enough to use it at all.
It took me a long time to recognize how horrendoues of a double pin this was. I've alluded to my resentment for my hometown, the spiritual / cultural deadening, but it took a long time to fully register to me how - if my general social surroundings had absolutely nothing to offer me - we could normally imagine an outcome where I at least retreat inwards from them & learn to enjoy things on my own terms, fooling around in my bedroom, taking an interest in drawing, just doing something, anything. I might have used my time alone to develop a bond with arts & crafts, or setting up little plays to act out. But this all required turning my back on a doorway or focusing my attention on something other than the continuous self-assurance that no monsters had entered the room. There was just no way. I may as well have just been strapped to a chair. In retrospect, this may do a little work to explain my long-standing fixation on the case of Genie the feral child.
I was always relieved when people got home, though not happy. My relief was not rooted in any sense of bond with them, or of them being my protectors. It was just that having other people around felt like it forced reality into compliance: If I were alone, then it felt like the universe might make a brief exception for me & show me something supernatural & terrifying, & the only evidence would be my meaningless testimony. But it wouldn't do that with other people around. Then it would make itself actually supernatural, it would break its consistency in a way that was unheard of, it'd be a type of thing that could appear on the news. The universe doesn't do that.
I did not grow to feel entirely safe within a house, separate from the absurd terrors of my imagination, until maybe around age seventeen.
Today I walk home in the woods after nightfall listening willfully to scary, shapeless, experimental music that sounds like monsters all around me. But I am not stronger now. The world is just less real now. For better or worse, it can't touch me.
~
On Halloween 2025 I found myself at a rave. Before I tell you what happened there, I want to tangentially describe two people I saw.
They were wearing jeans & these matching light crumply white shirts. I didn't talk to them or hear anything they said, but for some reason they conjured this unbelievably distinct & dreamlike feeling for me where they felt like two supernatural twins that moved as light as feathers & could hypothetically bless or curse anyone as they saw fit but never bothered to do so. They made me think distinctly of this photo of Marina Abramovic & Ulay - not just the duality & the outfits but the particular visual quality of that photo. I feel like buried away in my memory is some kind of perfect point of reference for this feeling & for the way they moved at the most prominent moment in my recollection but it's not occurring to me & I feel like it won't for several months. I feel like they gave me a new feeling that’ll just be in my brain's catalog of feelings forever now.
Now, at this rave, I collapsed hysterically crying in a corner with no one noticing. This was in a period of my life (still presently unfolding broadly as I update this webpage with this paragraph), wherein I was experiencing what could probably be fairly described as full, agonizing manifestation of a schizoid condition that had been a lingering presence for a majority of my life. It was becoming increasingly frequent that I would bring myself around people & end up so threatened by their sense of elaborate realness & aliveness that I could seemingly never hold in myself, that it would lead me to fall into a black pit of gried & traumatized numbness, my faith in my own personhood felt freshly broken day after day, I didn't know what to do. After a lifetime of isolation I had finally ventured from my hometown, gone somewhere else, & "found real people," but found myself too deeply broken to exist on the same plane as them. It felt like I had arrived at the end.
In the beginning my world had been dead & unreal. I had followed suit & died with it, & this didn't seem to matter to me because a death in an unreal world as only as unreal & inconsequential in that world. But then I went somewhere else & the world stirred & came back to life, starting to show its vibrancy which lit up my corpse which was suddenly revealed as lying rotting in a world real enough for death to actually matter, so that in one moment I had to contemplate two different earth-shattering changes: Realizing a world real enough for death to matter was even possible & in fact already here; & realizing with hysterical fear that I was dead there.
It had been less than four months since I had attended a show where my partner's band was playing &, so distraught by the sense of unattainable aliveness of those all dancing & enjoying & thinking, speaking, feeling - none of whom I disliked or felt anything less than respect for - I, feeling I could not seek comfort from this in anyone because their existence was "the problem," hid myself away in a broom closet as music was happening & fun was being had, & I tried to purge the feeling by choking myself with my laptop's charger cables.
Some months prior to that, during a group interaction, I had murmured to my partner aside from everyone else, drunk & sad, that I didn't have the ability to form authentic opinions about anything. They became quite distraught about this, because how did that relate to statements I had made like, "I love you?" ... To see them distraught by it made me feel inhabited by such corruptive darkness that I left nonchalantly to go for a private walk but once outside I quickly entered a state of hysteria that drove me to sprint downtown & then stagger hunched down a prominent commercial street repeatedly slumping against walls & screaming in hysterical fear like I was being murdered, people in earshot but no one taking notice, eventually hobbling down a side street saying the syllable "e" in strange modulations like an imitation of desperate speech, like inchoate calls for help though I knew not what words or acts could help me, falling to my back on the sidewalk at a residential intersection with houses around me & staring like a dead fish up at streetlights, occasional long, croaking, howl-like animal moans from my throat. Finally I got up & carried myself home where I found the others gone, the attic darkened, my partner passed out drunk in the bathroom with red hair dye smeared all over.
Right: So, at the rave, I was crying there on the floor, knelt, face pressed into my knees, & I started silently telling myself that if I screamed piercingly & hysterically in a way that made people kind of stop & look in my direction & feel strange or worried, then, while I'd regret having done that, it'd have been a price to pay for just proving to myself in that moment that I actually existed & could have strange marked effect on my surroundings, & then I would apologize to everyone & explain it, weeping. I was giving the moment intense almost prophetic weight, immersed in this micro-narrative where things had always been circling in on this moment but I hadn't known until I was suddenly there for real. It felt very intense. It felt like reality was asking me to do this one thing with which I'd buy my place in reality with everyone else.
I didn't do it. My partner walked over & started sort of attending to me. They were concerned, believing I was so drunk I couldn't move properly, though this was not the case (though I was quite drunk). I just started crying a lot & we left, they took me home ina cab. They were on psilocybin, a bit stronger a dose than they had expected. At home, I looked after them & they said a lot of things to me of which my recollection is now very hazy because I was pretty drowzy & drunk. I remember holding them & softly crying in sympathy about something they were experiencing/expressing that was a pain I felt I particularly shared, & I literally don't even remember what it was. I find it very depressing that I don't remember.
I keep turning more & more days of my life into dreamlike smears because I'm afraid that if I'm sober I won't feel like I experienced them at all & then I overdo it past the level of intoxication that makes me feel more immersed & I go into the level that robs me of time. It's scaring me.
Their thumb was bleeding a lot the whole time we were home & we never figured out why. Their blood is on my headband now. I like it there.
I think I just remembered what made me cry. They have this little coinpurse thing that looks like a cat, I think it's a cat, it's white, they got blood all over it, they noticed this & started crying really hard, I figured this was in large part because of the symbology of this cute charming entity covered in blood, it was making me think of when I was twenty-four in June of 2023, I got a coffee stain on a white dress, I tried to use peroxide to remove it but it removed an initial dye from the dress, creating a yellow spot in the middle of the chest, I had a breakdown over this, I cried so hard it made me retch, by some park benches, I immediately took a photograph of my puffy tear-stained face surrounded by grass & little yellow flowers. I later used this photograph as the cover for a sound collage.
Most things that happen to me I still experience as "negotiable" even after they've well & truly already happened, because usually I'm dissociating from it a lot whether I want to or not. But if I damage an article of clothing, I experience that as distinctly "non-negotiable," & I guess the clothing operates so much as a surrogate "myself" (a surrogate me for me...) that I get really freaked out. It's like my sense of identification is so transplanted into a thing outside of me that it's one of the few distinct channels into me that remain, & the channel leads into a place that's usually so anesthetized that when something actually touches it it's like an electric shock, or years of deafness broken briefly by a scream. It's like the world had agreed to keep its hands to itself & this were the status quo I was familiar with but suddenly it lashes them out & does something uncalled for...
My hysterical crying at the park benches was the beginning of a brief, transient period of several weeks where on occasion I would enter a very dissociative, childlike, actively trancelike state & slowly, slowly walk out from my house to nowhere in particular, quietly muttering isolated words & phrases to myself, thoughtlessly, until arriving at nowhere in particular I would fall apart into hysterical, mindless, desperate crying, screaming, like a baby, all thoughts on hold, my capacity for self-consciousness forcibly shut off, & I always wanted it to last forever. Once it happened curled on the tile floor of the back room of my small office in the college radio station, in the dark, tucked between a shelf of classical CDs & the side of a file cabinet. & then, one day, all at once, the tendency was gone.
The above-mentioned sound collage incorporated recordings dating all the way back to 2019. The oldest is a field recording of me standing on Main St. in my hometown while it was crowded during a monthly event. You can hear me repeatedly hitting a crosswalk button to make it say "wait."
It also faintly, somewhere in there, includes a November 2019 recording from when I heard the song Small Car Big Wheels by Enjoy in a coffee shop & desperately recorded it so that I could upload it to Tumblr & ask anyone to identify it for me. You don't ever hear the song, in the sound collage, it's quite buried, but I think a chair scraping a floor might be audible somewhere in there.
The day I heard Small Car Big Wheels was the same beautifully dreary November day when I visited the headquarters of a small local taxi company to see if an umbrella that I had left in one of their cabs was now in their lost & found. It wasn't there. Their place of business was like a skeleton - the whole operation was several bare rooms of office space, an iPad, cases upon cases of water bottles, & their trusty fleet of cars.
Prior to actually making my way to their place, I had gone into the wrong building, where they had been formerly situated. This was one of those indeterminate buildings where you find lawyers, massage therapists, all kinds of various practitioners in suites. It had a very surreal, ancient, sickly quality.
