Date: 12/28/20
Time: 11:30PM
Subject: Mind curving like telephone tower cables

As if an accident had occurred I found myself blankly staring and unable to turn my head. Social media is like this. I see three different ex-s within three minutes. Perfect and even and balanced like a bunch of cars of the same color parking next to each other. On top of the cult of surveillance, blurred boundaries, erasure of privacy, and caricature of personality, the unexpected time travel aspect of scrolling is quite horrible. How quickly my brain starts sputtering as it attempts to move at the same impossible speed as social media. I feel it dying as it does. Sort of easier to erase the apps than to do the pointed unfollowing and blocking and muting, knowing that the network doesn’t actually let you erase anyone, just as it does not let you erase yourself (unless you can millionaire-afford to). It actually does not strike me as immature at all, to move away from what ignites intrusive thoughts, cycling, spirals of self-criticism. So I get offline. But eep! It’s all gross stress.

Date: 12/27/20
Time: 7:47AM
Subject: Catechins

Dreamt I got lost and had to deliver one pizza and two spanokopitas of different sizes. The latter looked like cheesy green flowers, like opened rosebuds, in their boxes. Everyone told me to take the subway but I said no, I have a car. Teenagers laughed at me for working in food-service and I shamed them.

Photo of the morning tea: blue clovers and pink ruffles painted onto a white ceramic cup. Jasmine in the silver tea strainer June gave me.

I asked Em if there were any Des Ark songs I should cover which gave way to this recording.

Date: 12/23/20
Time: 8:35PM
Subject: Tiny shadow

Maybe a little bit. Just thinking about loss a lot today. And what it means to give things - pieces of self, materials, objects, secrets, feelings - away. Living on in other people, changing other people, being changed, allowing your story to flow where it wants. Sadness but not sad

Date: 12/23/20
Time: 2:56AM
Subject: Flippy floppy early

When I go to bed at 8pm, this is what I get!

[ guest entry ]

Date: 12/17/20
Time: 5:19AM
Subject: Steam devil

We think we can’t phrase things because it is dangerous to. Truth is a black-out curtain, it slinks and sits and kicks. Submission is a condition which makes a lot of people happy. And fear is just a flour. Dear Anne, if the rotten ruby of love is friction, what is the diamond? If a flashlight could do more, perhaps we could instead stick our fingers into them and forget about carrying.

Barefoot in the river. Burrowing in the sand, an infection of red dots. Some are like a train, others a sign of smoothness. In this life you are allowed to adjourn literally anything you want. You are allowed to die. It is acceptable to you say you are a Capricorn even if you were born in August. It is recommended to leave behind some things, like the pale fried shrimp or the ex-boyfriend, but not required. Doesn’t matter. The snow pours down. Flippancy is a cold day, a hot day, an attic full of stackable storage bins.

But it’s not so diagrammatic. Nor is truth a window thrust open so quickly it cracks, it is just steam that exposes the heat. Now I would like to melt the snow, so I need you to hand me the key. Let’s get in my red car, warm up, and go.

(It did snow)

Date: 12/15/20
Time: 6:09PM
Subject: “Come here, I got you”

No coffee this week - “the wound is the place light enters you.” Learning a new language, it almost seems like. I love this blog, where I can write emails that don’t become drafts even though I don’t send them.

Spiritual pivot this, spiritual pivot that. My past lives. It does not feel fruitful to describe the marshmallows I’m eating or hot chocolate I’m drinking or really any of this evening’s details because I feel the little ghost knocking on my heart again. One way I am choosing to soothe them

Did the eclipse age you? Or make you feel younger again?

Jessica Dore: I wonder if we could learn to appreciate disruption as an opening, fall so in love with the potential that lives inside mishap and contingency that we might even come to call ourselves inviters and harvesters of chance.

Date: 12/14/20
Time: 8:00PM
Subject: Sleepy time

Trying to live the most simplest life like one of those small forest animals who wear wool hats and smoke tobacco pipes and drink tea out of an acorn

Sipping my hot cup of raspberry leaf tea and walking across my freshly vacuumed mossy carpet

And sifting through many many soft dreams of love

Date: 12/12/20
Time: 5:56AM
Subject: I know it’s Saturday

I had a few lives before this one, and we all had songs that kept us up into the night. When I was fourteen I wanted to be someone’s girlfriend in perpetuity and would perform availability that soon damaged my sleep habits and my sense of self. As if a door creaked open. Vines flew out and wrapped themselves around me and I then hurdled towards a destructive obsession with subtext and beautification. When you are externally sharp-edged but inwardly amorphous, you’re not a knife at all, you’re probably more like a broken plate. I lean heavily on the idea that “broken” does not mean “inoperative.”

From 2005-2010 people used Meebo (which has since been purchased and killed by Google) as a master hub for multiple instant messaging applications. It was browser-based so you could open it wherever, like especially on a high school laptop that blocked chatting software. Online all the time, on Yahoo, Hotmail, and AIM simultaneously. I had a few precious (as in cute) handles and then gradually realized cool people represented themselves nebulously online, employing vernacular and images that didn’t necessarily apply or exist in their offline lives. So I ended up with a few usernames that were sort of like gibberish and meant relatively nothing until I had possessed them for so long the strings of words became images unto themselves. I loved complicating things even more and utilizing the “Away message” function on Meebo, tucking in each account with a different blanket when I either stepped away from the computer or wanted my friends to think that I had.

A performance of availability is not necessarily an ocean of waving hands, more like, when you’re desperate for attention, you create a character and become hyper-available to shaping that character’s aesthetic, thus inducing a sense of chronic disembodiment and needlessness. It’s performing because you’re actually sinking into a pit while cooly typing out Radiohead lyrics and placing them in your AIM “Away message,” hoping someone messages you while you’re supposed to be “Away.” It’s performing because you’re wanting to appear to be elsewhere, when you’re actually just “There.” Availability as in harmfully mutable, as in submissive, as in building myself around what I think will attract other people.

A song that kept me up all night during this period, or made me want to perform even more, is one that framed my forced insomnia as something gentle and romantic, folkish, and made me want my sadness symptoms to be an actually cool and incidental lore about me. Perhaps I was just up all night to appreciate the quiet, and people would notice me awake and I would say Oh, I am just like this! It’s a beautiful song, sent to me by the someone whose girlfriend in perpetuity I wanted to be at the time. When I listen to it now, I remember staying up very late on Tuesday nights so I could reference the song lyrics somewhere on instant messaging, just so I could pretend and perform how crazy it was, how incidental, sentimental, romantic everything just happened to be.

Wednesday Morning, 3AM by Simon & Garfunkel

Date: 12/11/20
Time: 6:25AM
Subject: Coins spilling into fountain morning

Looking at yurts on AirBnb

Hoping a DVD I ordered in the mail comes today but it’s impossible to say, the mail has been deceptive in its tracking, appearing on the map only when it wants, and so very slow to arrive, as if it’s drinking in the whole postal-infrastructure-might-be-crumbling ride without a care

Who was talking about how metabolic it is to have a crush? Maybe it was me.

No social media today, I’ve deleted again

Date: 12/7/20
Time: 8:56AM
Subject: Rehearsing down the road

Suddenly I have a small collection of knives when just a month ago I had none. More than ever the internet feels like an inappropriate venue to talk through such things. I think my pothos plant is no longer infested by gnats. I dream of it unspooling and draping and curling as Lazuli’s does, over window frames and kitchen light, and worried it was far closer to death than length when I saw the tiny bugs. When my plants die, I throw their brittle remains into a trashcan and watch the lid snap shut like a door with a loose tooth tied to its doorknob.

Everything I write feels like a contrived little book because I am only actually writing in the places I deem my Writing Areas, like this website or my master personal 2020 Writing Word Document. Have been spending more time sharing the raw minute details with my close ones instead of my journal. Often I write in there when a thought or series of thoughts becomes intolerably cyclical, but there’s also a few ebullient entries from moments of radiant enthusiasm/gratitude that wanted to be documented. My processing journal used to get so much more of my writing because one of the main ways I process things is through writing, but now that I have a writing practice for the sake of developing my writing (which has coincided with a dramatic growth in my distress tolerance skills) I’ve seen how I approach emotional processing shift too.

I’m somewhat-reading The Odyssey because Mathilde left her copy with me. “The wine-blue open water … a blast of shrilling winds … waves that bulged and grew monstrous, like mountains … a little stone holds out …” Homer’s airbrush storytelling.

FKA Twigs interviewed by Zane Lowe