“And he has, that is exactly what he has done, whatever he wanted. As if attempting to reach the end of his desires, to find out what is there at the end. Discovering instead with horror that his desires even when instantly and gorgeously gratified only make him increasingly unhappy and insane.”
—Intermezzo, Sally Rooney, 2024, p. 411.
As of writing this, I have been married for nearly seven years, and within that time, I have thought about sleeping with an unquantifiable number of people who are not my spouse: men, women, non-binary, otherkin—whatever. I am not picky. Pretty much anyone I see that I find even remotely attractive, I end up thinking: “What do they look like without clothes on? How do they kiss, I wonder? Are they wearing a wedding band? Would they be receptive if I made an advance? Do they have a boyfriend? Would they prefer top or bottom? Do they have a girlfriend? Have they ever thought about having sex with me? Are they thinking about having sex with me right now?” and so on.
I want to watch the President bleed out on stage while surrounded by his goons, who are all hunched over his morbidly obese body, protecting him from further gunfire, totally unaware—in that very chaotic moment—that the president is now just a corpse, having given up the ghost after the first bullet ripped through his skin and shredded through the cartilage around his sternum and slipped right through his spine and then, finally, burst out of his lardaceous back; the bullet—blood, pus, and serous fluid twirling behind it like a little horizontal tornado—lodging itself into the wall right behind where the president once stood all tall and arrogant while giving some elaborate speech about how we’ll soon reach the Promised Land if we just rape the planet a bit more and get rid of all those nasty poor people in the slums eating all the cats and dogs, right before he collapses, simultaneously pisses and shits himself, and then twitches out a little bit in his own bloody-piss-poop juice before going completely still and just ceasing to be a thinking thing at all.
*note: these notes are presented without proofreading or editing of any kind, and many of these notes were taken with speech-to-text.
since moving to email-only communication, many have reached out to me, and the overall tone of these people has been very different from the general tone you get from people on social media (note that some of these people are indeed the same people from social media, but I’m not going to name names); they’re way more personal, understanding, and empathetic; as if, since they are no longer potentially being seen by others, they have shed some upper-crust layer of their persona thus revealing more of their true selves; they’re “more comfortable,” is the main takeaway (i guess).
why does an RSS reader need “enhanced AI features???”
Syd Barrett The Madcap Laughs; One of those albums that I pretended to like in high school but ended up really liking a whole lot in adulthood and now I can't tell if I just pretended so hard that I ended up liking it, like pretending myself into enjoyment? Dark Globe has to be incredible, though, I think.
“To breath, so to speak, without air … To be, in a word, unborable.”
—The Pale King, David Foster Wallace, 2011, p. 440.
Question for you: What do the following three people have in common? 1) a young boy who spends hours a day contorting himself in very painful ways so that he can eventually lick every part of his own body, including “the papery skin around his anus” and the back of his own neck; 2) a GS-13 Revenue Agent at the Peoria, Illinois IRS Technical Auditing Branch who can complete over 100 tax audits per day and levitates a little bit while doing so; and 3) a verbose college kid addicted to Adderall who is able to tap into such heightened states of awareness that he is even aware that he is aware of being aware and can describe everything around him with near-perfect clarity.
Keep that question in mind—we’re going to come back to that later.
Just a heads up that, while typing this email, I was (am) listening to the track titled “Elwynn Forest (Ambient)” from the official World of Warcraft Soundtrack—which was ripped by some person named “Homer” (per the attached metadata)—which I had illegally pirated some time ago (along with nearly a terabyte of other video game music, all of which I had listened to while playing the actual games in question at some point in my life [meaning I did not just download this stuff to have it for no reason—each soundtrack holds some sort of special meaning for me]), all of which I have had stored on my second hard drive for many revolutions (the drive is named “X-Drive,” and yes, this predates Elon’s co-opting of the letter X, which is also a good reminder that I need to get a new drive for storage sometime soon). And I was (am) listening to this track on repeat, of course. And if for whatever reason you don’t believe me, and you think I’m just trying to be cute or clever or funny or whatever, I have attached a screenshot of my desktop with both X-Drive and the Rhythmbox media player pictured as proof of these claims (see attachment titled “proof.png”).
“It’s so nice, Ellie bringing friends over. She never brings anyone over, always in her room tinkering with something, head wrapped in a headset, sometimes on the holotable or clacking away on one of those old letter boards—the key thingies, whatever you call them—old stuff.
(context: this is an email response to a reader who provided feedback on my scathing critique of social media found in the first issue of Mognet; essentially, this is a follow-up clarifying some of the WHY of why I left social media.)
Hello Reader,
I really appreciate you reaching out. It kinda made my morning when I read your email. I didn’t know I had this type of influence on people—or even one person, for that matter. I was especially surprised that it was you who reached out, as I was under the impression that, for some reason, you didn’t like me or something, but that was probably just my mind playing tricks, as it often does.
When I first saw your email—(of which I'm usually notified through my phone, but for some reason, it [your email] did not push a mobile notification, so I only found your email once I manually checked Protonmail on my PC using Firefox on a whim [which, oddly enough, was three minutes after you had sent the email itself])—titled “Morrowind, Social Media, and Long-form Writing,” I honestly expected a long critique and/or attack on my work; something like “you misunderstood the plot of the game,” or “you overuse semicolons,” or “you can't just put hyphens between random words for emphasis like that; compound nouns/adjectives don't work that way—it's confusing,” or “you could have cleaned up this and this and that, and it would have been much more concise,” etc., etc. (These fears likely stemming from some deep-rooted insecurity about my own ability as a writer.) So, as you can now imagine, when I read your email and found it to be quite pleasant, it coaxed a genuine smile out of this pale, blue-light-stained face, especially considering that no one has ever emailed me directly about my writing before. And for that, I thank you.
When I was a real young kid, I watched my neighbor shoot my cat with a rifle; I watched her eyes go dark and felt the warmth of her blood on my hands. On that day, I looked deep into the eyes of death—the hard-coded reality of it all—and it pained me terribly. Now, I only look when I really really have to, and even then, I shield my eyes, peering through the thin gaps of my figurative fingers, playing peek-a-boo with the quote-unquote real world.
The thesis of this essay is that everyone does this—not just me, but you, too. And you’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise.
This one is for Corbel and all the other cats out there who just want to explore the world unfettered by the fear of death.
