10.15.2025 Unrelated to my other post, but @big8grug, I think you are a very good writer. I used to watch my brother play Resident Evil, and it's a core cozy memory. The safety of that melancholy music, a gentle fireplace crackling, soft lighting. Nothing's cozier than being alive in a gentle place when you almost weren't! 10.15.2025 I feel...so grumpy today, dudes. Grump, grump. What even is this feeling? Anger, but it's nonspecific, and so it can be used anywhere, on anything. My anger is so versatile! I'm mad that whenever I ask questions about synthesizers on the internet, people give unclear answers or say "why do you want to know this?" I'm grumpy that when I asked a technical question about why substack tries to force people to download the app to subscribe to my newsletter, someone asked me "why do you even want to have a newsletter?" So many of my questions seem to be met with "why are you even doing this?" Because I want to understand deeply! Because I don't just want to skip to the end, I want to ask all the little questions along the way!!Because I want to explore the world and not gloss past the "why" and the "what is this" and the small levers and little filaments and interlocking pieces and inner workings of it all! I want to know what I want to know, and I want to do what I want to do! Why does every action have to be towards some kind of preconceived notion of success? Why do people like polish more than DIY? Why why why??? I'm angry anytime I hear marketing jargon. I'm angry about the world of careers, how tricking people into wanting things is more valued than creating things of value! I want to create a publication of just things people do without the goal of monetization, success, increased status. But maybe everything somehow ties in. I'm angry when I look back on something I wrote and realize it's poorly written or unclear. I'm trying to remember the best way to diffuse this deep grumpiness. I slept a long time today, because I am sick (another reason to be grumpy, but I don't think it's the root cause). Maybe I should walk for a long, long time. Maybe I should stop being on the internet (almost certainly, but there are things I need to do here). #8b0000 #8b0000 #8b0000 #8b0000 #8b0000 #8b0000 #8b0000 #8b0000 #8b0000 #8b0000 10.13.2025 I started a newsletter recently — a regular mailout of things I've come across that blow my mind (treatbag.substack.com, if you're interested). I feel Substack kind of sucks, but it just felt like the most plausible way to create a newsletter and maybe find a few readers. Still, I don't want to get sucked into another social media site, with an endless scroll and the demand that I constantly feed small pieces of my life into it in search of followers. Why am I writing about this? Isn't life more interesting than starting an email newsletter? I just want to eat sugar and play a little golf video game and go to sleep in front of a fireplace. I want to have important thoughts without trying to have important thoughts. I want to be a fountain of energy and meaning — I want to be a headless fountain shooting kinetic energy out out of my neck to shock everyone and prove that I am a real and spectacular thing. 10.12.2025 I wish Queering the Map still updated. I submitted something a year ago and it was never put up. 10.11.2025 Am I using this space correctly? I am going to fill it with a lot of words, which it seems is not the norm. Today I went to an artist studio open house. I remember now that art is the most meaningful thing (besides people) to me. Nature is meaningful too. Yesterday I went to see my aunt read her poetry. Sadly, this is a big weekend for me. It's time for me to start getting out in the world more. 10.10.2025 I kinda wish I could leave comments on other peoples' special fish. I want to tell them if I like what they said, and to ask the people who live in my zone of the world what their lives here are like. But of course, then we're in danger of being on social media. Before you know it, there are influencers and bizarre power dynamics, and this website is just a knife we use to stab ourselves in the face every day. I'm at the library. Out the window, there's a girl whose hair reminds me of a mean girl I went to jr high with. She was very good at basketball. I looked her up years later, when we would both be in our 30s. Like me, she turned out gay, but she still seemed like an asshole. Reflections of the government workers' picket signs in the pub window across the street. I wonder how many steps they take each day. I wonder if they're becoming closer friends with their coworkers. If it were me, would I just put in my earbuds and tune out for 8 hours? I'm so antisocial lately. I'm trying to find community, but I don't know where to go, and I feel guilty when the time I spend searching isn't spent pursuing the things I care about. I think one of my biggest issues in life is that I often have a scarcity mindset. I have been spending so much time on the indie web lately, and it is really nice, but I also feel jealous of all these people with their BFAs and their artsy jobs, traveling the world and making bizarre niche artworks and somehow surviving. It feels like some people are very skilled at sidestepping the drudgery of the economic world. Or maybe that's just how it looks online? I don't know why I'm writing all these downer things. Life is good to me. I'm very lucky. I just want to be luckier. 10.9.2025 I dredged up my old username from my teens for this. I know there's still record of it on some ancient mixtape website that somehow persists to this day, and it warms my heart. I'm freeloading, I apologize. I want to donate to the site, and I will as soon as I get a job. Still figuring that out... I'm not sure what I want to do, and sometimes what I want to do isn't what's best for me. I'm 6 chapters into "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," and it's funny to me that in many ways this book is just the author talking shit about his friend John. I should probably dislike it for all its navel-gazy philosophizing about nothing, but really I relate to philosophizing about nothing, and it's better than NOT philosophizing about anything, isn't it? It also feels relevant — a book about the importance of learning to understand the technology that gives you freedom in the world. I don't need to draw a diagram about how it applies in the today. Plus, there's this big section where he goes on about how technology has sped life up, and as a result we all have very shallow knowledge about lots of things, instead of digging deeper into our understanding of a few things. Here, I'll type it out: "Perhaps because of these changes [the advent of TV, fast-paced movies, etc.] the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be a growing havoc and destruction along its banks. ...I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for." I have bad news for you, Robert M. Pirsig. It gets a lot worse. Anyway, navel-gazing seems like a good response to the modern moment, I guess. I no longer know what I'm talking about, but I'll be back with some less dense paragraphs soon.