Insomnia
What a dull title. Nevertheless, appropriate.
Duplicate.
Replicate.
Parallel instance.
Stop.
Save.
Begin.
Trigger warning.
This is a thing we do now. Some may find it trite, others unnecessary. I won’t tell you what I think about it, other than fuck you. It’s done. It’s been done. Trigger warning for suicide/ideation blah blah look it up. You’ve been told. You have a responsibility to yourself to turn off. This is something you need to do for yourself so do it. Stop making excuses and do it. Get yourself right and when you do that, don’t bother coming back because there will be an endless supply of words all around you, I promise, and they’ll be just as empty as these and then some.
Save. It’s appropriate.
There will be no timestamps, no record of each semi-completed instance. These things we have come to expect from Twitter, the myriad of other tools, telling us when everything happens, when it is to happen. There’s no fear of those tools. Even your fear is false. They’re just tools. Don’t get emotional. In time you’ll have a new one and you’ll forget all about these.
Except for Open Diary.
If you’re still here, still around for as long as I’ve been and longer, you know why this one doesn’t lose its edge, why you don’t throw it away. Something about getting old, over romantic and absurdly spiritual. All spirituality is absurd.
What’s absurd is how long I’ve gone without really writing, even stream of consciousness.
What’s absurd is this ridiculous keyboard not fit for gaming nor typing, and while I have no desire to press buttons to play games, I have every need for a swift keyboard for language and this cumbersome yet expensive thing is slowing me down.
I remember my diNovo. My two diNovos. I mourn their passing. They were the best tools I had and I’m going to have to get something to equal their quality again, curse these last two years I’ve spent indulging god knows what it was I was indulging, it certainly wasn’t my emotional hunger.
It was something infinitely more powerful – my curiosity. You may find that mercenary. It’s because you have no idea what I mean and I’ll not explain it to you until you’ve had years and years and years of me and am sick to death of it and are beyond frustrated from not knowing. I will withhold from you. I will hold it in front of your eyes and crush it, hidden, clenched in my fists and when they bury me with it in my hand you’ll have to exhume my wasted frame, smash the bones of my fingers and pry it out yourself. You won’t be impressed. You’ve been warned.
Save.
Three things:
1. The meditation on the night walk in the city on Saturday two weeks past. Violence, love, desperation, affection and translations of intimacy.
2. The meditation on programs, ‘bots’, automation, pattern recognition, biological cell memory, permutation, output generation and the celebration of infinite rules.
3. Connecting to the acceptance of death, the embrasure of it, the lack of meaning in suicide and the perspective that I viewed it with joy, without a shred of sorrow, that the stale, desperate countermeasures of guilt and blind optimism failed to function, indeed, failed to remain relevant. That the random and dynamic nature of life always has prepared infinite inputs with which to flood any temporary vacancy. That I would depart, loving every dear member of my family, loving every newborn child to our clan, every friend I’ve spent time with and spoken to over the last two months, every person I’ve wronged so much and harbour regret over harming. That controlling, deciding the completion of a life is just as valid as fearing it and hoping it’s delayed as long as possible, forever beholden to the charge of keeping the paranoia at bay.
I want I want I want, I fear I fear I fear, I think about the things that will be lost – opportunities, memories etc., such a selfish, monolithic framing. We are better than that. We are broader than that. The example of programming, iteration/permutation/experimentation/observation/output only serves to celebrate it, a reason to be emotional about it. Emotions are mechanical in the most wonderful and dynamic way.
Save.
These three things have been fuelled by my elevated state. I have brought it about, intentionally. I have ceased containing it because that is the most uninteresting and harrowing thing to do, always, in any way.
Two more things, the last, this entry, the second to last, the iterative thoughts on a film leant to me by a friend and how I read her as a result of having seen this art she’s shared with me.
Save.
I am consuming people.
I have always consumed people.
I have always consumed people more and more until one day I will devour them whole, and it is as much an act of desperation as anything I do, anything you do and everything we all do all of the time.
I wonder if the intentional omissions of grammar will translate, the meaning, in dialect, why it is done. The key is the dialect, and this one I’ve not used often on Open Diary before, so no, the answer is no it will not translate.
I am curious about everything.
I am curious about people.
I’m thinking slightly in parallel regarding the Saturday night walk and the threat of drunken violence from the people around me, the compulsion to remain walking the streets and to see signs of it, consequences of it, see it reach and withdraw as a shy lover does. Hesitation, temporary and shaky boldness, certainty and then confusion.
We are desperate for connection to the point of tragedy and it is one of the most beautiful things about us. We destroy each other to connect, we hate each other, we lay about ourselves with wild, drunken fists, and we are drunk on emotion and isolation more than we are on spirits.
I will consume anyone.
I will be inconsiderate and brash and unkind, provocative, seductive, pleading, suggestive, subversive, anything to reveal some sign of some chemical reaction. I want to be drowned in a flood of information and intimacy and if not I want the full force of rejection, anger, defensiveness, assertion, aggression – there must be something, anything.
Anything.
Anything.
And it is entirely selfish.
I want to consume people because it makes me feel good, because knowing someone makes me feel good, because knowing how to please them, how to develop languages together, how to please one another makes me feel good.
And I want them to consume me because I am a narcissist and a nihilist and I believe in nothing but everything to do with myself and all the horrifying flaws in that philosophy. We want to be consumed. We want to be digested. We want to be broken down in complete vulnerability and exposure, praised, hated, reviled and desired and amongst all that mess of bone fragment and blood we want to be loved.
And that, children, is why you either will grow up to look back at your impressions of what love and intimacy were and scoff/laugh/vomit/weep/be stunned and speechless and incredulous or you are still there pining for an illusion of something that will crush you every time you dare even think about it.
You will be crushed either way.
I am crushed either way.
We are experts at beguiling ourselves, foremost before others – after-all, we are most familiar with the machine we pilot than the mere exteriors of the ones we observe.
Save.
My mundane clever thought for the week was:
You know you’re in a machine, you even know how it works. But you won’t know what it looks like and what it does until you leave it and view it from the outside.
And it is a predictable but scathing commentary on cultures, but significantly more evolved than my adolescent thoughts at departing a religious institution. Religion, I’ve found, is a very small subset of human behaviour and pattern establishment and barely warrants scrutiny. There are much more volatile, interesting and potentially rewarding dynamics available to us with which to play and burn ourselves.
That bullshit artists say when they say ‘I never stopped loving anyone, even the people I’ve left behind, even the people I’ve hurt and the ones who’ve hurt me’ isn’t actually bullshit and that’s a terrible thing to have to admit at times. We hear a thing and sometimes we hear a thing often and we think bullshit that is to say I think bullshit and you ride on that bravado and that bravado is desperation.
You will carry it that way. It is an icon of youth, one that many won’t abandon and you may not and you’d best prepare yourself for what it means when you don’t.
Youth is precisely the act of no longer being a child and, after all the posturing, simply not wanting to die. This is what it means to be an immortal youth, indestructible, when we faff on about being forever young ad infinitum. The sooner you embrace your fragility, your vulnerability, the sooner you realise just how much exposure you’re going to have to accept in order to get even the tiniest shred of anything, the sooner you’ll completely shatter yourself against the immovable cliff-face of human interaction, leave the dust and shards where they are and carry on with humility and sincerity.
It always comes back. That shell of denial, that aspiration that doesn’t necessarily aim too high, but is just on the other side of unreal, that selfishness that says you can bend it first before you’re bent yourself, that you can change it before you change,
that you can change that other person just a little bit and then everything will fall into place right now you are nowhere near as afraid of that as you need to be. I’m not even as afraid of that as I need to be because it is the most cunning and insidious of double agents that has every trickery available to it.
Naturally the other one is I will just change myself a little bit for this person/community/thing and then I will be embraced and accepted and will succeed and that’s just as dangerous for the same reason.
Save.
Actually before I do that, naturally, you understand by now that I’m lecturing myself, else why on earth would you have read this far thinking I was admonishing you?
Just to further clarify, I am also admonishing you. We are one blah blah don’t blame me, I’d never say ‘We are one’.
Save.
Anger is desperation is love.
Frustration is desperation is love.
Connection is desperation is love.
Boredom is frustration at feeling subject to a restriction of stimulus resulting in a seeming limit to output (expression) which is desperation which is love.
Everything we do is an expression of love.
We love everything and everyone with every single thing we do, and this is why the ideologies of religion aren’t as hair-brained as they may appear.
Yes, we populate it with myths and legends and idioms and culture and perverted history and misogyny and sexism and racism and endless (endless) ego, but the reason we do it makes sense.
Conversion, assimilation, unification/homogenisation, fear is all desperation is all love.
Control is paranoia is desperation is love.
The hunger to consume art and experience in order to evolve established processes in order to expand permutation sets in order to increase expression vocabulary in order to share and connect and grow is love.
Everything is love. Everything. The meaning of love is so much greater than affection and intimacy and in a fashion, can encompass all matter and existing and metaphysics and dynamics and atomic relationship and abstract activity and everything that was and is and will and can be.
Pause.
This is how you make a religion. I mean, this is why you would. You’d take all this stimulus and all this memory and all the algorithms you’ve fashioned from them and all the output you’ve generated and all the dynamic processes you’ve engaged and you’d start applying it to the world around you. You’d apply it to your experience, as an individual and how you experience others.
Religion, then, is love. Which seems obvious. And naturally the repulsion with which we often respond to ‘religion’ and much of what it’s done will be inspired by the word but dismissing that as human dynamic, not spiritual dynamic, and over-looking all the perversions of its many expressions, religion seems to be what we do to hide our vulnerability in loving.
Love via proxy.
That’s not a condemnation either, because this love, this thing that expresses and contains all things is pretty fucking daunting. That’s probably why it’s such a rush, why it’s so exhausting, why it’s liberating and frustrating.
Absolutely none of this is grand, at all. Sure, our framing seems large to each individual, take into account our natural reliance of literal translations (like sight, which in context to existing, is extremely limited. The expression ‘I see’ to mean ‘I understand’ is multi-faceted in what it reveals about limitation as much as it does comprehension).
Save.
There was more about death and suicide, more about completion/conclusion and the unnecessary theorising and ideation of ‘after death’ and how it establishes an interesting dynamic affecting change in the present (what a wonderful cultural-philosophical paradox). More about ‘death is love’ but fucking fuck I have to try and sleep.
I’m all for sleep deprivation, if I’m honest, I need to maintain this over the next two weeks because I know it will precipitate specific mental states in which I will achieve things not possible when elevated, nevertheless, for tonight – just tonight, and the hour I need to be up at in the morning, I need to fucken sleep.
Let’s see if talking and thinking myself to sleep works. The only alcohol I have left in the house is sweet and two small glasses of that was enough (the sugar, not the alcohol – alas, I am out of scotch).