Much of my website was written during a long period of unemployment and retreat from the world, one that eventually ended in December 2022, was broken up by holidays, and then much interrupted during the period between Febuary till June, two months of which I spent overseas. Ordinarily you would be fired for that kind of volatility and absence, but it's a family business, and for that I was spared. Nonetheless, I've been on thin ice, and they expect the best out of me. I work in a chemical factory on the manufacturing end by virtue of my lack of actual skills. It's been about 4 months since I resumed work, where I have been too tired both mentally and physically to write, much less do anything else. I've been suicidally depressed for months now, and it was particularly bad this morning, so I elected to go home, making this the third week I've skipped a day. I've decided to take my rest to put down as much of my writings here from the past 4 months. Consider it largely seperate from the person I was in much else on this website, and take it as you will.
[Aria] is based on the paintings of Hélène Smith, specifically Paysage Martienne. Yume Nikki is denpa surrealism. Kansuke Yamamoto. Decalcomania. Pays Interdit.
4 birds, white with pink manes, intermingling and playing. a fifth flies in and tries to join, one of the birds attacks them, and they mope in a corner. the four then approach and harass him
this place is so big. at victoria park there were houses that reminded me of kruschovkas, or thai public housing, or lolas place when i was 11, it's the garden... or courtyard maybe. sundrs [alone]
the plants made me think of the people there-- i want to see souls in the ghosts of potted plants-- someone was here.
the situationist page [note: if ever i get around to it] should emphasize the lives of every person we can see in the world around us, an archaeology of the present
in the world of letters, in the dream of the sea life: it's how i connect myself to the world, in sound-- from coast to coast, little ghosts, in the songs of spoken words
i threatened or attempted suicide in siam more than i would like to admit. last week, in a 1950s compilation of Sophocles' works gifted to me on my final day in the kingdom, the preface defined tragedy as a kind of drama that is concerned with the fact that we are born to die, and yet nonetheless struggle with our fate, thus granting it meaning. in january, before the troubles came upon me, a vague friend of mine had attempted suicide. we conversed during her stay in the hospital, in which i tried to talk her out of another attempt; failing this, I consulted David, who explained to me that death was not experienced like a great slumber, or even really experienced at all, a non-act absent of any doing to begin with. to die was not to fall asleep and lose your consciousness, because it is how a subject becomes an object. rocks do not sleep, do not wake, do not suffer, do not feel relief. and so death resolves nothing, for there is no relief in it equally as much as there is no suffering. it exists beyond nociception or electroneuronics. it cannot be known, because objects do not know, it cannot be experienced because objects do not experience. and so, suicide provided nothing, in a way that is impossible to really fathom as those who live. -
is it wrong to have
beauty in cemeteries
or is blossom just
death playing with shyness
A poem I found anonymously on /lit/ when I was 15 or 16, around then. It's stuck with me ever since
i made a grave of stones, leaves, flowers, bark, grass, and words, one object set among many, as mountains and websites. I questioned why even bury him, to which my answer was that I would be like him one day: an object. I see beauty in mountains and websites, so why not let others see it in me?
I can see death in concrete parking lots and stretching suburbs. Maybe it is wrong to have beauty in cemeteries, but if the very world itself is a cemetery, it is the best we can do. there is no death in blossoms as there is no death in people on trains. we can only hope for a world around us that dignifies our subjectivity if only for a while, and honors it's passing when that subject ceases.
humans intuitively recognize quantities up to five until abstraction is needed. the singapore method of maths education is effective because it groups larger numbers into blocks, allowing us to recognize difficult abstractions within our intuitive senses. i detect sixes by two threes and twelves by two sixes. breakfast, lunch, dinner; a day, then 7; a week, then 4; a month, then 12; a year, then 10. I am going to be 22 next week. Portrait of the artist as a young fag. Ichi-go ichi-e. I am going to die one day. Sophocles stares me in the face. Thailand seemed to last in perpetuity, but Australia lasts from work week to work week, and so June has passed like a dream. More than any economic exploitation, I've been metaphysically disfigured by this, more than I can ever explain to you. I need to figure out how I want to live. I am going to die soon. I need to leave the factory. I am dying there. Industry is a cemetery.
I don't know what I want.
the grave was rather predictably destroyed when I passed it by the next morning, bark, flowers, stones asunder. I wondered if I'd be fined for obstructing a pedestrian area. Have you ever read Antigone?
1. Discos are like playgroubds. Alcohol facilitates the inhibition that we might be children on them again
2. Discos are battlefields on which all life afterwards contrasts. When I get home, I will have a warrior's peace, but here, I can experience the vigors of violence in dionysian dance.
3. Feel that porous energy bleed. All cortisol melts off.
4. Dance.
note: im incredibly embarassed by this
are those potash burns or are you just happy to see me?
Little Shop of Horrors is the real Nick Land film. People who say it's Terminator are silly.
It's March 2024- I really am sparse in these updates. Anyway, my friend Clara managed to put out her site (https://eclairsdeclara.neocities.org/) and I figured I might as well work on this again.
It's relevant to mention that at a certain stage I stopped writing on my hands, putting it onto my notes app, and then turning those into documents for later uploading here; and instead started recording my impulse factory thoughts at work on a certain character limited social media site for which I have an unhealthy relationship to. A lot of what I put up here will be a translation of those posts into something more like, I don't know, befitting of this site? Filtered and made into something I can feel comfortable having put here.
Of course, I never stopped using my phone's notes app, and at times I even used a physical notebook (where, really, all of this ought to belong). Things from my notes app contained much more significance or immediacy to me, however, and I'll make an effort to distinguish between things from Website and Intimate Notebook, for all your perverse voyeuristic eyes, annotated as such. Obviously I'm not posting everything from there, even if I would like to, for reasons being a lot of things there belong on the analysand's couch, not a public website.
little white teeth bite a yellow line
can you cross a concrete passage
red between the vents little black message
raise the glowing standard passed by
semen blood and pain feel the whislte sigh
sunflower blossom bored trainline
(Edited from some much more vulgar original post) It occured to me that day that we might see scams regarding brain uploading technology, where someone trains an AI off someone's social media presence, asking for their security details, and pretends as if they've uploaded another's brain when really it's an AI they payed for at an exorbiant fee. You could probably see this turning into a huge scandal. I hope no loved ones turn this website of mine into an AI so they can continue enjoying a puppet of me, but I don't know. I'm pessimistic that this desire of mine will be respected.
Realization: [The Person under the Name I had in 2015] was as false as [I] felt [I] was: the mask became the face and I realized the person I always wanted to be when I was younger. It is, however, more complex in reality than in fantasy.
I was told that it was really weird for me to be controlling, but also kind of, benign seeming. [March 17 Note: I have a Misaki Nakahara complex] It isn't strange, though. This whole complex makes sense, in that I can be both a controlling and honestly kind of manipulative and dishonest person, whilst also seeming very friendly and nice otherwise.
March 17: It goes without saying that this is something I'm trying to resolve in myself. You should listen to "With My Hands Out" by mount eerie more. [Attic Abasement lyrics come to mind] I surrender myself to free will, just keep taking the bait, cuz you might as well.
It's been a bit over a month back working. I'm often too fatigued to write, much less prepare tea. Sip. My computer kicked the bucket. Sip. And I've been locked out of the house twice. Sip. Intensely grassy, but a very breezy sweet aftertaste. The roof of my mouth feels fuzzy afterwards, what lingers is kind of juicy.
Citrusy sweet, especially with retronasal olfaction, contrasting a cold room and electric hum from the yellow lights. I bought a guitar today. I have so many thoughts I need to share, so much to say and do and make. Clarence Clarity plays about as softly as I can get my phone to compromise with his natural loudness. I change my mind and listen to Joy Fiction instead, because I'm just that cool
I've always come into writing these trying to provide something that only I can provide, because I think all art seeks recognition. I write these because I want whoever is reading to recognize that I'm a person, that I sense and percieve in my very own ways, these ways to be intimated to another, and to show how every little sensation can come together in such synaesthetic ways. Beauty is in the senses and taste or scent is as much a part of that as sight or sound. Maybe I'm being pretentious. I don't know.
But a lot of things happened this year, I feel like my insides have been gutted. It's hard to show you my interpretations of these occult camellia senses as they are when the world around me is cold and sterile, and while this tea provides an oasis, where it once was simply a resting place to explore a whole forest of senses, I can only find desert around me now.
I mean, fucking look at this view.
And when I'm the remainder, when I have to live with myself, when I no longer have the garden of unemployment to draw life from, and it's just me to talk about, I don't really have much to say.
Tea was kind of meditative for me, a way of accessing grasslands, underpasses, rivers, music, calligraphy, memories, beauty. I can't carry this tea board upstairs to my room where it's warm, and suburbia is a labyrinth with nothing to give but the company of rabbits playing in the night
By the third steep, it was coyingly sweet. Monks fruit in a trashed hotel room, strawberries from the fridge when my dad noticed they were in season, trying turon langka the first time at kalamansi kafe.
I don't know if I can write these anymore.
weekly ritual: when i arrive at my home train station, rather than going straight home, i go to the burmese grocer to buy 2 pocari sweats, any change being donated to myanmar war refugees. i go to the library and pick a random book to read until closing time. after closing time, i head to the vietnamese restauraunt and buy pho, but next week ill ask the chef about his childhood dishes, and then try their entire vegan menu in the subsequent weeks. after i eat, i go home and practice guitar until i go to bed. my first time, i read a book on surrealism. last week i read an overview of the ramayana. this week i read about aboriginal languages. next week i wanna try self help books or the section on islamic theology.
goals:
March 17 note: I haven't done any of these besides the creek and the bougie vietnamese place. Their vegan selection was both smaller and significantly worse. I know somebody who works at the library, but to be honest, I kind of wanna avoid him. He's nice and all but I hate interacting with anybody who knew me several years ago. Last week there was a huge argument at the library, one of the patrons got kicked out and accused the librarian of abuse and harassment. I was reading a book on the Heart Sutra
Lastly, this habit died when I became too tired and felt too dissatisfied with my guitar progress. I kept this up for like two months before one day, I decided to go home early. This killed the whole process for me.
the thought that started this: dyirbal concieves of gratitude according to empathetic reward rather than exchange
australia is an anglo-cosmopolity
adaption of aboriginalisms to produce a deeper linguistic relation
intercultural decolonial practice of adapting aboriginal framings and phrases into aus eng
travel can be impersonal
precolonial ph adaptions of indicized and sinitic cultural features through travel and then adaption
adapt from within to understand this place
dont source from outside
southland shld be our national epic
aboriginal restauraunts in every major suburb to promote native plants
culinary naivete
sociocultural naivete: there are definitely ideas and practices that wld be bad to adapt if only bcuz theyd be harmful
ritual is social comfort
anathemata, st aloysius
there shld be an initiative to promote native plant agriculture growth in conjunction with a state sponsored provision of culinary education to aboriginal communities with the intent of facilitating an aboriginal restauraunt culture in commercial/urban/cultural centers, first, to promote the use of native foodstuffs on a national level, second, to enfranchise and provide a source of income for aboriginal communities, and third, facilitating a deeper level of intercultural exchange between anglo australian and aboriginal society, u cld label it as a decolonization thing to leverage leftist support or an economic pull-up-your-bootstraps and nationalist project to right wing voters. there shld be aboriginal culinary projects in every major suburb run by each aboriginal nation, with spots reserved at community centers, like by train stations, libraries, council buildings, take ur pick. you WILL drink wattle tea lattes. you WILL eat the salt bush chips. you WILL enjoy the quandong desert.
I think we should have a linguistic regulatory body in Australia dedicated to creating an intercultural exchange in Australia between our English and the many regional aboriginal languages present here. I read this analysis of Australian national identity as the most authentically British identity, where "The British Dream" was of a polity that was neither English, Scot, Irish, or Welsh, but some kind of amalgamation of all of these things, and how Australian national identity, innately tied up with a mythology of Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and English convicts in one big melting pot, was British in a way Britian could not be, on account of the real divides that existed between the different peoples and cultures of the Isles. Britian's Irish broke off, but ours genuinely assimilated and constitute a core sense of Australian identity. In this sense, Australia is kind of a cosmopolity assuming that Britian was our cosmos, but it is a cosmopolity to the exclusion of Aboriginal people, and I think that should basically become a part of being Australian going forward. I want for a stronger intercultural exchange here, basically.
i am kept alive by mochas, pocari sweats, vegan cheese toasties, and nicotine. I would surely perish from fatigue absent these things.
March 17 note: After I started taking ADHD medication, I stopped drinking mochas, and the past week, to save money, I stopped eating toasties, with the lack of food during lunch preventing me from redosing my medication. Since I crash too hard, I don't take it in the morning, either. They don't sell pocari sweats anymore. It turns out the only thing keeping me running is nicotine. Everything else is a luxury.
back to july 14: you will be accosted by some ruffians today
pad see ew ulit ang ulam. I am a noodle based lifeform.
something thats definitely changed since i got back is my relationship to the factory– what should have been a three month spat needed to get to the life i wanted has become something more indefinite. on the one hand, this is scary, since i dont wanna live with this caffeine addiction + nicotine habit to get through every day; on the other hand, ive developed this sense of direction and drive to escape and consequentially ive been somewhat able to provide these to others through providing others the means to verbalize wants and needs and then transferring that into substantial parts of life such as work or play.
extended thoughts
i think ive really overplayed my relationahip to the philippines in some domains, but played it right elsewhere. ive found affinity in incessantpain's writings on japaneseness but lately that affinity is waning by the scope of the writings not really applying to me as much, based on the difference in experience i have passing as white and the ability to pass off that baggage through time distance. "too filipino to be australian, too australian to be filipino", but there's too little to offset the baggage this brings. i only have a handful of experiences to draw on regarding being there, as events of a few months rather than years, actual components of my childhood, very little spent with real language acquisition and more spent with festivities and a community that disappeared in early adolesence. three trips, the first i dont remember and the other two being a few months over christmas, followed with memories of foods i cant eat anymore.
I never went to church much as a kid, and although my highschool held a regular catholic mass for which attendance was compulsory, it was at a time in my life where I had learned to tune it out, allowing myself to think about things I had read off Principia Discordia yesterday afternoon instead. To the extent that Catholicism featured in my childhood was mostly as a form of identification and difference for other students; I remember being bullied or othered for not being baptized, with some of those people since having developed upon their sense of belonging through the Church. A lot of my friends seem to have complex relationships to the Church, twisting and winding sagas of shame and salvation, and for those whom faith in God did not survive, what remains tends to be a "cultural Christianity" instead, the corpse of something so formative made into a fossil and put on display in one's internal museum. It seems really important and special to a lot of people around me, but I lost faith at like 8, kind of forgot God existed, and spent mass daydreaming of cartoons I wish existed.
EDSA. Rebolusyon. Buwaya. Aktibista. Migrante. Marcos. Kasama. Demokrasiya. Neo-Piyudalismo.My parents met through the Student Christian Movement of the Philippines, one of the above ground fronts of the National Democracy movement. Communists. All of this defined my childhood. I remember the dirty looks from the south vietnamese restauraunt owners as my dad explained revolution to me and my siblings, playing tag with other kids in the union hall after going to rallies and chanting slogans against pork barrelling Buwaya, hearing about Neo-Feudalism and colonialism on the radio, being taken to leftist bookstores as a coming of age ceremony, my godfather bitterly explaining EDSA to me and then doing a class project on this, being encouraged by 4chan (at too young of an age) to look to tradition and family, and my first thought being fucking Mao. I remember thinking for the longest time that my dad wanted me to join the actual fucking *NPA*, the BAGONG HUKBONG PUTANGINANG BAYAN j u s t because I didn't distinguish between the above- and underground of the communist movement at the time, and thought guerilla was what he meant by revolutionary. The last time I went to a protest sometime in 2018, I felt like a kid again. Since I began learning Tagalog again, I realized a sense of disconnect with most Filipinos. You know the exception to this? Natdem twitter. It sounds obscene, ridiculous, unspeakably LARPy, but I feel like a cultural maoist
vulnerability is bravery against rejection in a way
you pull teeth and do something scary, and the fruits of that are the feeling of safety afterwards
day report: i had no coffee today, my only stimulant was a nicotine lozenge during work to not fall asleep. during break i went to the indian restauraunt for the first time and had veg korma as well as aloo gobi. i folded the bread the way i was taught in chiang mai. the food was kinda too fatty which wasnt the best dietetically because this morning i used a lot of oil in my aglio e olio e nooch to get a creamier emulsisification. back at work i got a very minor chemical burn on my ankle but managed to clean it. the train was really packed and there was this aboriginal guy talking to his mum who i found kind of attractive. he lifted my bike stand for me when he noticed it was down. i saw the funniest guy ever at the bus terminal. he was an elderly man with white hair like a clown and the smallest face i have ever seen doing a silly open mouthed smile with no teeth whilst gazing at some schoolgirls. he looked like :D it was almost surreal. i found it so funny i started laughing really hard and for a while and i kind of laugh thinking abt him now. the lack of teeth was the best part honestly, or maybe the beady eyes, or santa nose. anyway now im gonna work on securing my adhd prescriptions and then im gonna watch seven samurai yay
it's 11 PM. work is in 8 hours. ill sleep 5 tonight.
i step off the bus into the central business district. to my right is the shopping plaza where i buy my tea, i use this landmark to reach the nearest station– no dice, it's closed.
a guy shorter than me wears an oversized pink hoodie and a cat ear headband. hes in a group of five. theres a really largely built one and a tall slender guy with dreads and nice headphones. theyre all friends. passing by is a woman staring at her feet as she walks, lost in thought. i nearly attempted suicide when i was 17 and tried to self admit to a hospital, walking the same path she did some years ago. i stared at the floor as i walked the same way she did.
i head to the next closest station and walk a route ive walked hundreds of times. you can count the groups of people in view on one hand. i can hear skaters just ahead, shouting as ball bearings spin.
the city is most alive at it's most quiet
you can pick out each little group of people and see the particularities of their individual lives, i can see something particular and special in each person. i fantasize about cold approaching some group of friends and talking to them. I think that everyone here is really special. A dialogue plays out in my head:
"I think everyone is special"
"Bullshit. Nobody's special."
"I think that it's special and particular to you that you would come to that conclusion. It comes from your memories and experiences and how they inform the person you are."
"But lots of people come to that conclusion, reducing what makes it identifiable and unique. My experiences, moreover, are like those of a particular demographic. Most people here grew up in suburbs and their worlds are limited to just that"
"We value being special because being identifiable, different, or particular, necessarily invites recognition. You aren't likely to notice another white australian on the train, but an aboriginal would be more likely to stick out to you, because theyre not that common or large a demographic. Being different and being seen for that is important, because we are all fundamentally different in lots of ways. People want to be seen for who they are, how they are different from you and from others, because they want to be loved, and that is how you show love for someone."
"But you don't have the capacity to experience every single person and you hardly even recognize basic details most of the time. It only comes out now because there are so few enough as to give you that insight and space. You only see the superficial differences in others in how they dress, speak, or carry themselves; nothing ever more intimate than that."
"It exists in potential for all, even if I don't know them, and it is not the unrealized potential of something that does not yet exist, but the potential of something that does exist and awaits experiencing. What matters is not to be special only in relation to me, as to be special to me as the criteria by which someone is special would be a self absorbed way of treating others, excluding others beyond the world around myself. You don't need to be special to me, but anyone can be. And if they aren't to me, then they are to someone. The laughter in the street is a testament to that."
claustropop and deapfth pop records seem rlly cool though i just gotta sift through things a little before i find something i really really like. i was super excited this morning listening to some of the recent bands bcuz it felt like every little thing i liked in music in one go. i also had this juvenile insecurity abt how it seemed like my musical tastes and aspirations had already happened and if i were to make music it'd just be any other "claustropop" band. it made me feel like i hadnt done enough to form myself as a person and that im actually hollow, but thats not true. im sure id have something special to contribute to any artform if i gave my heart to it. i certainly did with denpa vlogging virca 2021, music wldnt be that different. also i was scared thinking abt claustropop getting really big and appearing on tiktoks tht like, wld be some form of musical sacreliege. on the one hand this is the normal kinda protectiveness that comes with finding smth you find special and not wanting others who wldnt appreciate it similarly to go "cool". on the other hand i feel like an asshole for feeling this way, i kind of do agree w the theory of obscurity now bcuz the experience and memory that finding smth only you know makes sharing it an intimation of something special to you rather than spreading a social virus with lots of meanings to everyone that homogenizes and denies yr voice. i guess it doesnt matter now though because on a peaceful day on july 25, whilst lying in bed all sickly, i found some cool new music i really liked and connected with whilst thinking very deeply about art and maybe thats what matters. this is something that only cld happen now. it will never happen through backround music to memes tht alienate me, it wont happen through a stranger i meet online ill never talk to again, it wont happen through social osmosis and zeigeist and partaking in something big, it was something i found on the wayside. for that reason it is special to me
first time trying ritalin: yknow how im kinda tense and rushed when i do Things. that just went away, ive never been more calm and in control than this very moment. world is slow, paced. i can probably hug someone without stopping, i can cook w a relaxed arm, i can see and hear all details of the world in unison. i am the first farmer and the last gatherer. the spirit of a thousand dieties of the harvest posses me. river valleys bear the fruits of patience. the crop looks to be doing well this year. irrigation is the future. no more foraging for energy drinks in convenience store groves and hunting for nicotine lozenges in pharmacy alleys. let nature take it's course.
it's so hard to gauge where im at in terms of growth and self improvement rn. i feel like im wasting time i could be spending on becoming a better person, but i always feel like i have no clue where to start on that and still have a foggy idea of what that means. concretely i know ive become way better at managing lack of object constancy and im far more adept at vulnerability. i have a richer understanding of how it works and im a lot better at not splitting (but i still do it a lot under duress, which is where it matters), and then theres the really active planning and the schedule that's made for a virtuous cycle for the past few months involving the library and my suburb, the exploration, novelty seeking, etc, to say nothing of the growing body of writings, aphorisms, poems, stories, and ideas that flood my idle mind whilst my hands labour. ive come to appreciate better death, empathy, sonder, boundaries, desires, patience, roots, homes, intimacy, and so on. what i talk abt after work affects people in ways that i think are good, just, im not sure if im being affected by them in significant ways? idk im fucking lost dude. i need role models or something, but i live in the twilight of my idols and all men are brothers. i wont be myself again, but that's okay. im going to be okay.
i remember sometime in june after they threatened to fire me on my first day back, i started thinking abt ways to keep myself sane and push on w work, one of them being to create a compartmentalized mental box to store consensus reality ideas about the nature of work, so the past couple months ive basically had a mask and set of useful fictions dealing with familial and corporate loyalty, discipline, productivity, hard work, industriousness, etc. it's incredibly intellectually stimulating to compare such values and concepts to lived experience.
but theyre kind of disfiguring and i can only compartmentalize these things so well before they start affecting me off work. on the one hand, ive managed to preserve a sense of empathy, care, reciprocity, and consent, even as i go day by day without it– on the other hand, ive noticed my physical interactions w the world become more machinic so as to optimize labor time even off the clock. the factory encodes itself into my body: my pace is quick and it's harder to slow my hands, being shouted at for mistakes has me obsessive-compulsive and fawny, unquestioning obedience and constant self doubt
but most of all? im just too fucking tired half the time for anything else. why cook when i can get a cheap meal, pho or stir fried thai vegetables and tofu after the library and then crash at home only to do it again the next day, with no time for friends or art or language or culture outside a book and some guitar practice for a total of like three hours (compared to an 8 hour work day).
i remember fucking up a job and my coworker saying she was sorry tht she didnt notice the error, after i got shouted at, and the feeling of being empathized with being so profound the whole day afterwards, and one of my coworkers absolutely losing his shit at my foreman and shouting him down and getting suspended giving me so much second hand catharsis. and like i get workers solidarity now, yknow?!?! more than any discord marx scholar, twitter anarchist circle, or avant vlog scene has *ever* given. an offhand comment from a stranger of simple acknowledgement and the act of defiance against mistreatment
i get why r/antiwork and shit popped off man, and it's fucked even bcuz i actually really like factory work. id go to a production line to chill out and think, it can be really relaxing. i could be creative here, put drawings and designs on the labels, record machinery for music, enjoy the catharsis of a pallet full of boxes knowing it will help people. that feels really good and id lift shit all day in a communist society, i just dont wanna be rushed and feel the time taken from me and come home a wreck without time for anything else. i don't want to work. i wanna run around and play, draw, create, share, love and be loved. i want to be a feral bunny, wild and free in plains and parking lots, forests and factories. i do not want to be a machine.
a neocities site teaches her to consider the internet's effects on her. the site is backgrounded with #d9cff8. one can wonder if this is naturalizing, and speaks to animal dreams, or if that color strikes her as artifical & falsely warm, counter to the petals of the flower which might have guided my eyes to the words, & the moment might have inspired a thought which made her pause, & then the morning might have proceeded to who-knows-what-else
I think of leaves. The glow here makes
The small and domestic room seem lofty
And pushes the walls back;
Lush, innocent, basked with light and new,
It will move through its wind and its branches
And will print it's beauty on the messy
Margins of senses who's name it doesn't know
(In its world there are no senses nor past
Nor time to come, only the fixed moment)
And will turn gentle distances
And will scent of aromatic maze
Of all the scents the scent of twilight
And the textured scent of trees.
Between the lines of HTML I decipher
Its texture and have the feel of stem and structure
That grows underneath the glowing skin.
all this in place of the biologically regimented messiness
of a textured sheet of palisade mesophyll, hopelessly complex in their tissue
as it stands, though, she is reading a story
the providing of the knowledge of how to exercise one's humanness, of how to generally take care of one as a self, isn't merely a service, rather something personal, out of care, or impersonally, out of obligation, in the interest of documenting, or recording, in the interest of maintaining a memory of being alive, or even just boredom
In vain do the curving seas intervene
And the deserts of the planet;
From this house in a far off suburb
In Coastal Australia, I pursue and dream of you,
O leaves by American streets.
Im my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect
That the leaves invoked in her verse
Is a ghost of a tree, a symbol,
A series of sensory tropes
And memories from poetic works
And not the lagomorphic clouds, the speckled sky
That, under the sun or the varying moon,
In Texas or Los Angeles goes on fulfilling
It's rounds of love, of idleness and death.
still, though: she appreciates better the difference between this screen and the garden, although without the internet she'd probably not even contemplate this. this is certainly better than nothing. she knows that the writer has the same struggles of character and writes for people like her, but she tries to cultivate a feeling in herself that the consideration for her is simply secondary, circumstantial, amid a more simple need to express despite all others in league with herself, for that drive to express oneself seems to be what produced a short story, irregardless for who might need it. a local individual oasis of thought. writing internally directed and no particular inclusion, a display for oneself rather than people who obsess over things like "metaphysical disfigurement" and being a "human animal", maybe spme other variables too, she supposes
To the symbolic leaves I have opposed
The real thing, with it's cool cellulose,
That draws the rays of day
And today, the twenty first of August, '23.
Stretches on the grass an accidental
Shadow, but already the fact of naming it
And conjecturing its circumstance
Makes it a figment of art and no branch
Living among those that root the earth.
still, the moment feels emblematic of the sense that she seems to be missing the actual richness of a tree, & that lack is soldered onto her now. she doesn't like that, & she can't pretend to. her heart doesn't feel good, & this is all just an attempt to rationalize that away. all she needs to do is look outside and hope to compensate by populating her senses with a real tree, but she sits inside and keeps reading instead
We shall seek a third tree. This
Will be like those others a shape
Of my dreaming, a system of words
A man makes and not the tracheophyte foliage
That, beyond the mythologies,
Is rooted in earth. I know well enough
That something lays on me this quest
Undefined, senseless and ancient, and I go on
Seeking through the morning time
The other leaves, that which is not in verse.
One morning whilst preparing coffee and breakfast on the twenty first of August, '23, around 11 AM, I walked into the backyard and saw turning leaves and remembered a neocities page, it reminded me of a poem. I rushed to my phone and wrote, passing an hour or two between. Foliage shuffled and swayed without me, and I knew this, but continued to write, pulled away from being able to simply sit with the beauty, allowing it to linger, imprint onto my memory, something to cherish.
It felt stained by the idea that a website was the first thing to come to mind. I tried to console myself with lyrics, "mountains and websites" is a phrase I use to remind myself that I remain an animal no matter what I experience, and respond as an animal does; that I can never be truly artifical, only act in imitation of that, yet should remain vigilant of when I do, not just so I can understand those people around me, but feel empathy for the hares that leap through the suburbs on my way to work, the bird nesting by my window, and the housecat Maple that lives at my mother's place, but most of all feel empathy for myself, when I'm lonely, loved, sad, or content.
I turn my chair and face the window, listen for the magpies singing, an electric hum, the wind outside, but most of all, stare at the leaves in the front yard. It's 1PM now, clouds pass by the sun, and it's light comes and goes. I toss between looking and writing.
It was June or July in 2017, and I was something between 15 or 16. In either November or December the year before, I chose the outdoor education elective, where for a winter excursion, we went cross country skiing. At some point on the second day skiing, I went ahead of everyone on the track, sat down, and watched the leaves, damp from the snow, glistening and reflecting light, almost sparkling, shimmering. Although the experience probably only lasted a few minutes, it felt as if it went forever.
Those were my other leaves, those which are not in verse.
your experience of being filipino is different from your relatives in a substantial way, and to the extent that you have a common ground is the extent to which you understand the significance of various cultural signifiers. some of these are spatial:
a memory of laguna, an old family home, christmas firecrackers, metro manila, poverty, catholicism
some of these
...
aug 27, watching filipino films while alice is at drag
i notice i get slightly disappointed abt the european stuff and tend to crave precolonial depictions of the archipelago. amusingly, this is probably a desire for smth foreign the way chinese or japanese media is. but for what it is, it feels homely and familiar the way your families place does
I read «My Psuedo-Age» and «Coming of Age» by A New Institute For Social Research and it really spoke to some things I've been thinking about lately. I've been watching videos about childhood and maturation in various societies, it's a nice compliment to this.
it's fucked up how despite how resplendent of an upbringing ive had, ive become increasingly disenfranchised over the course of my life. i went from a middle class kid with a lot of opportunity to a high school dropout factory worker with no money. this sucks.
declassé
I've ridden a train into a regional countryside town to see Mount Eerie live. During the intermission, there's signings and merch you can buy. I ask Phil Elvrum for advice, he doesnt know the subject and lands on life advice, telling me he considered getting a tattoo (but did not) saying "No big deal" on it, because it would have been an important reminder, that most things are no big deal. When he sings about impermanence and irrelevance later on, I consider that the practical manifestation of this is to consider the world as no big deal. Despite that, I look up at the red curtains and make poems in my head about them. Being alive feels like a very big deal. As I write this the next morning, the intensity of experience the night before didn't feel as big a deal as it did in the moment. I remain myself.
butterflies swarm the industrial district, around 10 take flight as I pass by them, frenzied flashing white, following me west to the climbing gym where i eat my lunches between work
I walk past construction workers on the way home, growing a labyrinth of suburbs. one of the fences has been torn down, a looking glass towards trimmed grass and white plank homes: a scene from my childhood, the building resembles the cabins I'd stay in when my family took us hiking.Two birds play as I near my own home. I bought a falafel kebab by the train station once I arrived back in my home town, and while waiting for a fluffy warm pide and oversalted chips, I stared at the glass, steel, and cement entrance to the station, vibrant greens shimmering off the leaves spring-summer trees. It reminds me of two scenes: One is a place I'll never see again, a festival in the city, where I stand on a concrete block watching the parade go by– it might have been the May Day march, because I remember the sound of tagalog, but I do not remember the other kids in our organization being there– the other, I am in the Archipelago herself, at a basketball court turned community event, eating cheese ice-cream with my siblings, possibly after going to church– the green of the trees will burn themselves into my memory, and I will seek that comfort for the rest of my life.
I walk past the slowing traffic of people heading home for the day, and try to count how many hours I spend happy on working days. 2 or 3, one in the morning watching cartoons, and the other(s) talking to people in bed. I don't mean happy in the big, transcendent, overarching way, the kind that doesn't exist, just in the mundane way, to smile really big and often and earnestly. It will be okay, though. One day I'll smile lots and lots.
day in the life of nepo baby: wake up, toil in the family factory, regret my decisions, try to forgive myself, go home to play mahjong, order thai food, eat, go to bed
i think it's funny how nearly all media i consume with a poignant message will be partially internalized by me for the purposes of "how does this help me cope with factory work"
all my dreams are about needing to be accepted by others and theyre all strung together by a common theme that social rejection leads to death, usually leading to me acting violently to protect my status (and life) in a group, which speaks a lot 2 my sinthome actually
the best dish in this city is from a small, cheap korean place from before the korean wave. best of the two vegan dishes, their bean paste soup has no oil or fat added to it. it's served with rice, pickles, a small portion of japchae, and two gyoza. nothing fulfils me more. nothing tops this for some reason. ive had so many dishes so generous in fat and salt but each one leaves me so sluggish. but when i taste carrots, mushroom, and tofu in broth inbetween bites of rice and pickled radish, i am on cloud 9. do not believe people who tell u fat works. i remember id add like 2 tablespoons of oil to my beans and passing out every time, and using just as much for my pasta. it's so draining every time. food can be energizing it's true :) u do NOT have 2 pass out after ramen. u instead eat tofu and vegetables w sauce and rice,,,,