chapter 3

Drama-Masked Maestro (April 10 to 11, 2026)

One

It’s not just “copywork & emulation: craft” anymore. This is a conflict between two instinctive philosophies and how they both appear in me. I hold now the instinct for objective prose and “unjudged precise sensory detail (UPSD) being the meaning,” but I wish for metafictional ascent-plotting, even if it means subordinating grounding to flavor.

So if I want to do it, it should just be a matter of writing “I [violent act] these goblins” and go along from there, right? It should be. But ambitious desire is fighting constraining instinct. Even now, the “what is a dog” mannerism in me serves this new master—philosophizing comradely with mud, sitting together on a hilltop edge, arms over shoulders, guffawing, pointing together. Where are you? It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t wrath. It wasn’t even fury. Though it takes these forms. It was narrative control. Storytelling where UPSD isn’t ranked the same as the protagonist themselves, where it felt like there was actually storytelling beyond just a series of events [where] the reader had to throw their hands up and say “the meaning is the UPSD!” because whatever that is, it isn’t going to satisfy the Cale Henituse kinds of characters I want to write. I say all this while having four different 19th century texts on browser tabs. I barely defend my recent journal entries anymore, going from giving up doing it exhaustively to leaving it as they are altogether, even if blatantly wrong since the text isn’t me anyway. (I changed my mind already. I learned my lesson. I said something wrong. I know it already. Writing it down just becomes performance at that point. Though I did write for the longest time anyway to continue the work of self-rigor anyway. But in this phase, it really is groundbreaking.) I know how contradictory and honestly dumbfounded I am in this current whatever-this-is.

I just gotta brute-force it again, like slamming my head against the same motherfucking wall. If there was head-pavement-slamming to represent ruthless self-rigor, there’s this to represent this inexhaustible frustration. But how many times can I write “I [violent act] these goblins” before I just scratch my head in disbelief and start rolling around the ground like a father who just lost his child to a gunshot? (Yeah, I watched that video on Reddit earlier today. Revealing this makes me feel shitty about its use as an analogy here actually.)

At this point, this entire passage is the only satisfaction I can get from this plight. Just the sheer articulation these last several months has been its own entertainment and analytical fun. It shows a whole new side of myself. Not tortured the way I was during those four months of submission to critique feedback loops. Not delusionally free (at least that’s what I feel it was in retrospect) the way I was two years ago when I was serializing those enviable web novels. I’m just sitting down and grabbing the equivalent of Plants Vs. Zombies Sunflower’s sun from this situation, even as I do crave and covet that euphoric orgasmic release of drowning in the hellish fires of pleasure, of fiction writing that can be only described as “utter.”

At this point, I’m just rehearsing myself. Ha-ha. Even that laugh I’ve laughed before already. (I mean, I’ve literally written this same characteristic laugh many times before. Funny, right, that a person can have a signature laugh in what is effectively premeditated text?)

I wish something screamed out of the muck of life. (This phrasing isn’t true. I don’t think of life like that. If it’s muck, it’s the most beautiful muck in the world, quite literally. And at this point, the use of “screamed” here is just tastelessly overused.)

I know what I’m going to say next. At this point, it’s just front-loading the context “we” all already know just so we don’t get any repeated interpretations and suggestions. But in the end, I will get the same stuff. But at least, I get more and more effective over time. All this frustration of articulating to the beyond is its own improvement chamber. But yeah…

Frick this shit.

I could list them down:

• If it was just a matter of writing ability… but the problem is that that kind of writing, the web novel style, that philosophy altogether, isn’t actually that technically difficult, at least if we’re taking into account the broader wealth of literature.
• Integration is a funny thing. When you know your own thoughts and patterns. When you know who you are. It’s this strange situation of both closure and well… whatever this is. It’s not that it’s preventing me. Nothing wrong with awareness. But I’m at a point where it’s much clearer because I know what exactly all this is in the context of who I am. “Becoming” in the way of that web novel style is right now hard to accomplish, yet I’ve “become” in all the ways I could have ever wanted growing up. Don’t you dare say it! “Ironic, isn’t it?”

I’m probably at my 107th eight-hour cafe stay or something in the last eleven months. I’m at a point where I’ve gone through all the ranges of what a person could be in here, at least for the person that I am now in all the ways I’ve been in those eleven months. You’d think that with all this, something would change, and yes, everything did change. It completely shifted my perspective and added a whole new layer of reality that being in a room all day every day for years didn’t. And there’s no stipulation to it, no “but at the same time.” It really is. It is what it is. In all the good ways that it is.

But why did you mention it? Well… perhaps I was hoping I could blame it for everything or find some thing about it that reveals everything. But in the end, this current “philosophical” plight of mine really is just that, in the ways that a whole integrated (in many ways than just one) life can only contextualize in an ongoing especially modern life.

I’m searching for that “arrogance” that could lead to “utter,” and all I’m finding is a life, in all the ways that it now appears to me through writing as a means of bringing together everything that I’ve been, am (which wouldn’t be possible through sheer unassisted consciousness due to the nature of compartmentalization or multiple sides), and will be (through sheer integrated breadcrumbing, like Git-synced files at home and then now here at the cafe). I have become an apostle of realistic, grounded, biographical, historical context, a master of scuffing my orange-lit fingers against brown cafe tissue that I then take the time to dawdle around squeezing under the bottom left edge of my USB-C monitor (since it’s propped on my laptop), a priest of “this guy plap and dead” (where it zooms out of that street-level car collision homicide with my corpse so utterly “plop” and up into a panorama of the sky).

I’ve even recently lost that craziness that “required” me to post those “good” entries on Mataroa, which tracks given the disinterest in defending myself in my journal entries. Though as seen in this passage, the absence of defence might just be an internalization of the rigor, such that it comes out as just someone not needing to write even, which sounds implausible at first, but writing was never the true site of change. I’ve come and gone. I can go on and on with synonyms and polysyndeta to max out the precision of every single clause I make, but in the end, what proof do I need? I’ve fallen away into my own life—I have no fucking clue what this has to do with the issue at hand, but whatever, hope this helps.

Where is it? Where is it going?

You can really see it. The last ten days have been the lowest daily average word count (2,659) I’ve had in three years. But that was because I was focusing on the website. Even then, I can tell whatever I’m doing with the website isn’t just its own separate activity in a vacuum. It’s a task reflecting this late period I’m in. The website itself had its one-year anniversary 8 days ago. You would think that’s short, but that was the culmination of so many attempts at making something to hold my whole self. And even during that one year, everything came like Noah’s Ark. It really is the end of an era. I denied it. I denied that it would affect the word count. I mean, it’s just a number. But it does show in the way I can’t just summon that “wrath” flow that got me writing so prolifically before. “I don’t need to prove myself.” I wish that was complacent. But no, not this time it isn’t. I accomplished what I set out to do. It wasn’t an external goal like “become the best writer.” It was personal, so it makes sense that I can’t even argue myself into viewing as mere complacency, because I’ve been the one carrying myself so manically this whole time. I got here out of sheer “will.” And now, whatever will I have isn’t that. It’s quiet. It’s settled. It has lost those attachments, not that it doesn’t care, but it used to get so caught up and bled off it, making enraged creative fuel out of it. I hate this common narrative of healing curing the creativity that came with All Of The Shit. But maybe fully admitting it is the first step. But no. The only reason I can confidently say it’s not complacent is that I have never once relaxed and removed my index finger off the table. This tiny finger was enough to summon worlds, and it still can. But its eyes look on, not distantly, but in the way someone’s eyes just go about, in the way that only exists in this “transcendent” state. Oh I wish I was playing! If only I could snag them and squeeze out the juices that have formed in them. If only I could break them and swallow what beauty I can only guarantee from the wealth they now store. If only I could destroy everything that supports whatever this is and make out of it something of myself and become even more than I am, even as I am already who I am, in all the ways that I am and am already breadcrumbed (prepared) to take on whatever else that could be considered even more than I am. It answers itself, so whatever solution I have left is already intrinsic to it, embedded in it, part of its development, part of what made it what it is now. I can’t circumnavigate the very thing designed to be uncircumnavigable through alle-integration, alle-absorption, and alle-acknowledgment (or the more precise synonym). This passage it eats, (even while) unproven. It’s barely done anything to save its own face. Its “arrogance” is default functioning, not even a matter of stamping itself any more than a person standing “stamps” the ground below them. It is, and by that, it is behind already what tries to consider it first. It meets them where they are, not just halfway, but its very essence is to go forth. Because it’s not a fortress, you can’t fly bombers over it.

Whatever I do is just a matter of punching the wall it has designed for me to punch. It’s 1984’s birth-assigned limited range of self-expression within that local chamber where you think you’re free.

I rage against the machine that absorbs me and my rage and my consideration of it as a machine.

I can barely be, because I already am.

If only I could thrust my arms and hands out and have them search outward. But I have already made the path for their “self-expression.” I am my own master, and thus, I can’t search for what lies beyond myself save for what I’ve already “corrupted” myself into premeditating. I want to see the blank page as a place of total freedom, but I know myself. I’ve written 4.5 million words in a thousand days, if that helps. You would think a whole new worldview would have destroyed me, but I collect my Sunflower suns out of them. I squeeze the most golden juices out of the soil. And in that, I am. In that, I have already. I hope something shatters whatever this is, without taking writing away from me completely. I still want to see that blank page. For others, it’s the problem of having nothing to say. For me, it’s that of having said everything and saying even more that doesn’t really feel like a blank page but like that pink elephant that’s been always there, never erasable. The progress can’t be fucking reset. I don’t even need to write, and I am already here. The chair that I am is already there meeting me as I sit down without even bothering to study its dimensions and soundness fully. I go out there, and I am what I am. I am who I am. And that… that’s like a hole that’s already dug and already filled. Once that happens, you can’t undig it, unfill it. You are who you are. And at that point, you can only excavate out of who you are, and who you are out of the world in who you are. If only talking to others and reading books and their different worldviews was enough, but the person engaging with them is still… Me. ME! The person behind these 4.5 million words cannot erase himself. I can only work off who I am and in that work off the whole world and then some, in all the wealth that foreshadows. And that’s great! It’s fucking great! It’s just that… I’m just going to have to start getting used to this feeling. I’m not sketching myself on the page, discovering the drawing with construction lines. I know myself so thoroughly I can draw myself instantly and know where the lines should land and where I have already so many times drawn out of the line to the point of absolute absorption and mastery of even messiness. What the fuck is the point of that? To shake the hand that belongs already to myself? Fuck me, man. I’ve already beaten myself so much through ruthless self-rigor in an attempt to squeeze out that ambition, and I have already exhausted it so much that I don’t even know. What more can I cut out of myself? In what more ways?

When I do get the urge to write ambition and utter again, I immediately stop myself, because it’s practically noise at this point, in the embarrassing way, even as I say that I thirst for it all this time when the urge is absent. I want the satisfaction of actually saying something with the fulfillment of sketching myself actively on the page, and a version of that only happens in passages like this, which isn’t really sketching in the way that writing from that fiction blank page is. Maybe, it’s just not who I am right now. Who knows? I’ve said that before even, but at this point, you can trace everything I’ve said and point at each of them and say they’re the reason.

Intellectually and creatively, it was two years ago, literally. This is the blank page, even as I say that I am just rehearsing. I am writing this, which means that this is it. I just… have to find a way to come to terms with what in the world… This very plight is probably why this current thing I’m doing is the answer. That discomfort, that whole different worldview, this might just be it.

If we’re going by that framing:

• 107 cafe stays isn’t the end. It’s the start of something new.
• This passage is the start of a whole new era.
• 4.5 million words in 1,000 days is just the intro.

The fact that I’m thinking I have to believe it reminds me too much of what life was like two years ago, so yes, I believe it. I will just have to accept this new state of my life. I mean, I always do, and I said I would. I did already many times. This is just another one, even further. Advancing step by step. I go, and go, and go, and go. Man, I really do feel like I’m back to that speechlessness I had when I was still beginning to write: when 500 words took the world to do. Maybe, this feebleness is where the shit’s at.

Back to experiencing new things again. Now that I’ve processed the past, it’s really just a matter of consuming new material again, which I’ve already been doing, but which is becoming more and more deliberate as I evolve into and come to terms with this new age.

I will never truly know. I can’t dismiss the future just because I’ve already reached this point of integration. I will have to experience it all for myself. Let’s see. I have gotten frustrated many times, but I am growing to make sense of all this and what to expect and how all of this will unfold in terms of how actual growth will look like, counterintuitive to all I’ve ever known and come so far as to predict and feel already a sense of having come.

It’s strange. I feel like a man in a soft Violet-Evergarden kind of grief, as if healing was its own bittersweet goodbye, where nothing bad and only good things happened but it still aches to see them leave. This has been the case for the last 3 months, and I feel it will only be the case as I come to find new ways of interacting with, responding to, interpreting, and growing from this.

In the end, I really am always here. I have never truly dissociated as a consequence of healing. It has only planted my feet on solid ground. All my emotions are new. I really am like a child again.

(I have always been myself. [Seriously? At this point, hang this “Love Laugh Live” on the wall… But yeah, I mean I placed this in parenthesis, so what can one do? It had to be said. Affirming the obvious sure it was, but still, necessary. Yeah, yeah.])

(I know I said this three months ago, but…) The world really is beautiful. I only feel an immense contentment that swallows my entire being. There is nothing left but that. Whatever else is the range of emotions I know, even as I don’t know them because they are new and novel as today’s childishness permits.

Two

Where does one go when he’s answered everything? At this point, is this me journaling, or is this anything that has to do with a whole nother character? It’s not like Matthew and Mark weren’t their own self-inserts in a way, but still, at a certain point, it’s blatant, no? I mean this is literally me journaling, as funny as it is. Just to be funny and to keep the context of this passage, I’ll leave it here in Fiction, even though I know it fits in Journal. I’m just going to have to accept what I’ve been dealt and all that I can say about it, even if it’s only statements.

I can really only snicker, if that wasn’t an answer I’ve already given many, many times. In the face of articulacy’s “speechlessness” toward whatever this is, what’s going on, it’s back to that sardonic chuckle, the same one I gave when I could barely even write. Now that I can, it plays a very sweet meaning on my face.

At this point, I haven’t progressed at all. I haven’t said anything new. I’m not really adding. Just rephrasing at this point. Or at least that’s what it feels like now, even if I know that every time that I write, the words carry so much more than what they look like as rephrasings, since context changes everything behind the words, and the more that I write and time passes and I grow and evolve and put myself in new places and situations and environments coinciding with all of these concerns that I am writing about even in what seem like rephrasings, I do progress and advance, even if it’s not necessarily to the fulfillment of what I wish.

It’s its own funny productive futility. I’m not saying anything new, and because of that, I’m saying everything new. This becomes the new container for change. It may be still and unchanging (as per being a medium/container), but it’s where the tornado rapidly evolves. I’m just going have to take this as it comes to me, and there I go, stretching across, farther, farther out, until “until” sounds like a funny conjunction.

I’m just going to have to carry the meaning the words can’t (which means LLMs are no help either and are practically just reinforcement of this very axiom). <--- Not exactly true, given that my articulation is different every time, indicating evolution in words themselves, which means meaning isn't at a static distance from it, just a matter of slamming one's head against the wall and taking off a chip each time, until one gets a breakthrough. Slow but steady.

It really is true. I don’t exhaustively defend my entries anymore because I don’t need to. I’ve internalized a lot already in a positive way. Now, it’s just a matter of accepting the growth and complication (immediately contradicting what I said just hours ago) that comes so rapidly even by myself with my own journal entries. Articulation really isn’t fighting with more words. It’s saying it, letting it go, and choosing the better battle. It’s very much internal, rather than getting roped into an exhaustive defensive posture in response to provocation or offensive misunderstanding.

It really was this. Reaching the point where I just say what I say, as this true private conversation with myself. But it’s only because I internalized the mechanisms that allow me to do all this by myself without constantly checking my answer with external systems just to be sure. The absence of defence proves this. It’s a sheer unprovenness. The words mean what I mean them to mean. That kind of “well, here it is.” At this point, it’s just customary or convention to have it be read and checked, a vestigial habit that doesn’t really add anything except point vigorously again back to “yeah…” the way a mirror reflects your own appearance, drawing your shrug. By the time I’m done, I’m done. That kind of thing.

This should be its own private, euphoric, giddy, super-relaxed “taking a dump in the bathroom in your big home all alone with the utmost level of the whole place to yourself” self-security, and indeed it is. You have your own crib, in a sense, in the way your integrated portable self allows you to go just about anywhere and still be anchored in who you are given you know yourself and have taken the time to arrange it all together so you can see things about like a director points and gestures to his actors and costume and set designers and whatnot.

But I wonder if this giddiness is fading as this whole thing is becoming this thing that is just a fact of my life. This whole integrated knowing-yourself thing that I am now. There really is this giddiness, but that giddiness might just be a remnant of that past self who didn’t have himself and didn’t truly have a self-privacy. Once this current who-I-am has settled, the giddiness about having the remotest toilet ever might just go away. I don’t know. I guess it won’t have to as long as I continue to expand and put myself in situations and places that really make me want to take giddy remote private pleasure in my own whole self whom I know so well now. Man, I really want to keep this creative euphoria I got from this newfound “privacy.” I want to feel the weight of all I’ve become in all the ways that I am and have integrated and continue to do so in full ongoing all-things-at-once simultaneous absorption channelling into the palm of my hand as I stride along this world and speak in hushed tones with a cheeky grin, going about chuckling and guffawing as any ordinary man, but yes, with the integrity of a person-in-(self)-power and the whole in the palm as I creatively collaborate and concede and conduct. The hand wields the whole of the self. I hope that shockwave that my hand sends into the ground totally commands utterly its own vehicles. Total full self-possession.

I will just have to conquer the way that a person who knows themselves can, taking full advantage of what I know to do and how to exploit myself best and explore farthest reaches and fullest capacities of my potential. In such a way can I truly grow out of myself.

I wonder. Have I come to overturn that statement?

I have already lived a life.

Can I truly reach escape velocity and get away from it and leave it as just backstory, formation, developmental stages, upbringing, or background rather than the whole life that I have long held to be so? Can I say I am not just an articulation, performance, composed orchestrated rehearsal of who I always was? I mean, I did say “I have always been myself” earlier here at the cafe. Then, in that sense, can the two phrases be separated since one could say that this latter entails the former? One could say that I can’t say that I have always been myself while denying that I have already lived a life in the way that “myself” implies of a life that started and extended to the present in uninterrupted continuity. That is that “lived a life” in the way that “myself” becomes already that “I have already lived a life.”

1. To grow out of myself
2. I have already lived a life
3. I have always been myself

All three feed off each other in the same person, perhaps the same illusion. They are contradictory, 2 and 3 being so despite what was said earlier about 3 entailing 2 because you can’t have been always yourself and say in past tense that you lived a life, which implies that the person beyond the point of ‘lived a life’ is another life—which assumes a different myself reacting to this strange feeling of already having lived a life.

Expanding from 2: Is there true novelty?

Expanding from 3: Past the point of integration, is it truly just “myself” expressing himself totally?

Expanding from 1: Am I not the pink elephant? How can I reach integration (a) and go even past that integration (b) and then say that I can go beyond even myself (c) in the way “growing out of myself” only implies?

Once I go home hours from now from this new cafe (assuming 107th cafe stay in the last eleven months) and, on a separate note, if the giddiness goes away, what will be left?

In the end, the only thing that’s truly left is my own confusion and my increasing ability to articulate it. Ha-ha-ha. Best I can do is read books, take active notes, observe, write book reviews, journal, and work on my website and continue this work of articulation and integration.

Let the contradictions sit, the intro end, and the new era begin!

Three

What will this “new era” look like for me? If I truly start over with all the skills, abilities, and pure knowledge resource I’ve obtained and honed to mastery?

I feel that this “new era” thing needs to be enacted since I wouldn’t want to have it blur in the journal structure itself. I need a way to do a big break, not just a scene break or even a chapter break, but a whole… well… era break. Well I guess it’s less a new era and more what one can call a maturation. It’s methodological rather than anything philosophical. The philosophy is in fact catching up to the methodology that is reflecting me months early. It’s just a matter of accepting and coming to terms with who I’ve become (intellectually, creatively, methodologically) and where my spatially erudite feet are taking me. My typing writing hands and creative-intellectual instincts have already long known what to do. It’s just the head saying “yeah” left. That’s where this conversation is.

I say this, but it’s not out of sheer denial that I’m struggling with this. It really is taking that much time and putting myself in a wide range of situations, places, and mental states (SPMS) to ensure that this new reality and all that it is is fully processed since I have no true idea what it is to begin with. While I do say that the hands already know what to do, the understanding of it entails enactment. Enactment only truly happens when it’s conscious and deliberate instead of instinctive merely. So it’s more precise to call it “going around the elephant and finding out what it is in whole” instead of just experiencing very obliquely. Similarly, the fact of the loss of a loved one only becomes truly completely real once you’ve gone through a full range of SPMS in which the fact sits in the corner as you swim through the boggy fog that is processing and understanding, but infinitely more unknown than the fact of loss since I don’t even know what the fact is. I’m essentially someone who went to a new cafe and knows no one who goes to that cafe and is trying to guess a stranger regular’s loved one’s absence due to loss when I have never met this stranger and their loved one and never gone to this cafe before.

It’s sort of like staring at a specific object in a cafe in your 107th eight-hour cafe stay. It is there in every cafe. More than 800 hours outside. Yet I only notice it now. It’s not as instant. But it’s trying to see something that’s been there for so long and isn’t just there only now or for no reason this whole time but has been actively been functioning the whole time. That’s what the instincts are here vs. my own understanding or noticing.

It’s probably why I am defending myself so much less. It’s already there internally. The words are not matching yet matching, if that makes sense. The content of the words don’t correlate with any understanding, since I really don’t get. But the new instincts that have been there for months now have been slowly guiding my creative-intellectual-methodological articulation and integration. Very strange way to put it, very complex idea. But this is it.

Can even a writer who journals rigorously about their thoughts, feelings, memories, experiences, and ongoing changes, contradictions, influences, and states of mind still find those instincts and mannerisms elusive and hard to track especially when they reflect a whole new way of doing things that they haven’t fully mapped out consciously like a brain being transplanted into someone else’s body with highly developed muscle memory (structures) they have no conscious memories of? Apparently.

I guess it can take years to process consciously fully things (not even including the articulation part, which nevertheless is crucial to full conscious processing) that your mind has already known since forever. This is especially the case when those “things” are not past life experiences, but vast changes that happened through writing (the same tool they used to capture and process those past life experiences). This entails its own childlike speechlessness, because while writing is separate and outside those past life experiences, it is not outside itself and the vast changes engineered internally (instinctively, creatively, intellectually, methodologically) through it. Those 800 hours of cafe stays were not containers, nor was writing. They changed me. Strangely enough, (now that I have reached that point) integration is struggling to integrate itself.

I can tell I’m confused by how I’m improvisionally singing while playing guitar not to express anything that’s burning to erupt from inside me but to search what I’m feeling by going through many different sounds, lyrics, and feelings, only to come out basically speechless. The only wanting to get out is utter technical playfulness (having fun) and reinforcement of who one is and who one already knows one is through SPMS, which mirrors the current the way that I write fiction and journal. It’s searching… for even more intentionality, control, and mastery.

Maybe that’s it. It’s not “myself” in “always been myself” and “grow out of myself” and “life” in “already lived a life.”

It’s quite simply total self-possession in the way full-advantage-taking self-knowing only does. I’m just in the process of through through SPMS (e.g., the continuing cafe stays, the improvisional singing with guitar, the journaling, the fiction writing even amid the concern) to notice and understand this state, only after which I will truly enact and embody it.

I’m essentially the grieving bereaved looking everywhere for them and finding that no matter where they go, they’re no longer there. But in my case, it’s positive. I’m going through all manner of SPMS and finding that it’s always there in full force. I cannot escape integration. I can only integrate integration and fully enter into total self-possession. But give me some time to go through as many SPMS as I can until I fully come to terms with it in noticing and understanding. Let me say a full goodbye in every single possible SPMS. Journal entry after journal entry, improvised song after improvised song, cafe stay after cafe stay, fiction passage after fiction passage. Let me. Let me master mastery itself. Let me integrate integration.

I don’t care about being right anymore, because I am already internally all right. I just care about throwing everything I got, even if it’s all wrong every time, entry after entry, until I have fully settled myself in this new phase.

I want to be who I am.

I’m trying to problematize my own wholeness. I can tell. But I’m doing it for my sake. This is part of the SPMS. When I direct my attacks against it and they fall like all the rest, again and again, entry after entry, slowly but surely, I will evolve to come to terms with all this that I am already. It’s not enough not to fight back. I will only complete this processing and “grieving” if I throw everything I can at it, until I finally say, “Yes, it is done… Let there be light.”

Four

It’s crazy that I say shit. It really does feel like I just get things out, not that it was anything other than just something to get out. I may invest 2 hours and 30 minutes on one entry, but in the end, it really is just a bunch of words in the end. I spent the last 9 hours writing, and in the end, I only stand by what I wrote as much as articulation, but not really anything beyond that after the fact. I carry the life that my words can barely indicate. I don’t really care to defend myself by words. I am only as much as I am as the living, breathing person who has already reached a point of carrying it all internally in the best way possible. Writing at this point is just a fun activity, a way to put out a torrent of words that don’t really reflect anything except my ability to digest into words my experiences and the capacity of my consciousness to keep track of all of these nuanced experiences and the proof that I am indeed just writing with none of the craziness I used to have.

It makes sense. When you have written 4.5 million words in 1,000 days and done 107 eight-hour cafe stays in 55 unique cafes over the last eleven months, you don’t really go crazy over being sleep deprived and then staying at a new cafe with many people where you read, write, and study for ten hours straight.

Life is very mundane post-closure as well. You can invest all you can into an entry in a flow state for 2 hours and 30 minutes and then just move on as if nothing happened, without anything much save the complete satisfaction of articulation and putting and puzzle-solving (since every new entry is an opportunity to try new word combos, analogies, metaphors, figure of speech, images, concepts, phrasing, structure, and all that fun stuff) thoughts, feelings, life experiences, and ideas on the page. It’s a fun, interesting game that’s practically a sandbox for me. The meaning at which the words are pointing is important to me of course, but because it is a complete satisfaction and I’m not really pointing at anything that isn’t already this whole self that I am after integrating my whole life, it is practically just someone with their hands in their pockets sauntering in the cold early morning an hour before dawn probably around the neighborhood park. It’s a very fun, enjoyable thing where you can really immerse yourself like you’re reading an intense, thrilling web novel and then come out feeling totally renewed, fresh, inspired, and accomplished (not in the sense of showing to others, but in the sense of engineering and orchestrating the way those web novel protagonists plot their pleasurable ascents—fun, fun. fun!). The world becomes this fun, joyous stroll with a joshing simplicity that isn’t exactly sincere in the way a person belts themselves out, but in the way a person just goes around and is just as it was as they are (if that makes sense). If sincere, they wear it like a scarf around their neck. The world is so beautiful from here. The smile comes unhurriedly in brief glimpses in sparse sunbeams. And it is a very happy private one, the one that would laugh so loud they hug their belly and get all their wind from that, but keeps it to the most restrained grin where you can see the eyes really gleam, not out of some inability, but in the way only someone who has that world of their own can (have). It is a simple precious joy that lives on in that daily come-and-go of vignetted life.

It’s fun to write.

It’s not “you get to say what you feel.” It’s not “you get to have a voice.” It’s not “you get to express yourself” in that desperate weathered manner. It’s not “you get to say hi to a world that would otherwise shut you out.” No, it’s “flow,” not in the way of forgetting the world or the moment or everyone else or even yourself or even anything at all. It’s that feeling of dancing and knowing exactly what you’re doing and even working and puzzle-solving throughout it in those little tiny micro-movements that only you are privy to. That special private joy. That place where all of it goes along. It’s a special place. To feel that and to feel that even ws the world goes on around you, you can thrust your hand in what looks like a desperate maneuver but is the expression of a soul (not out of this idea that a “bereft soul must find an outlet or a means of declaring itself true, valid, and existing,” but in the way of waves and perfect places and pictures, the way things roll along, like tires humming against asphalt). You feel it thoroughly and you feel the little things and the big things and the way people move and express themselves in their tiniest movements and in the uniquest ways they “portray” themselves through having their body operate and make way in physical space. That total identity. That wholeness in the self. That feeling which is only privy to the observer who is also the experiencer at the same time. That feeling of being totally inundated in that joy, in that moment, in that being, with both a capacity for analysis and a zest for life the way the body trickles along and scuffs along the pavement and gets its limbs sent through the air. It’s a perfect coordination that exists only for its own validation and after that, totalitum. Somehow, the clumsiest walk and thrusting of the hands serves the highest delicacy, for even in that moment where all things flow, alle is flow. Aliveness, breath, the signs of being a person, how a person thinks, ponders, and slips into a labyrinth of imaginations and goals, how their soul bursts in rage, sadness, happiness, and momentary mundane blisses, how they move on concrete, how their eyes flit and dart, how the soul lavishes the earth with perfumes that can only be inhaled by those who have taken the time to permit, to be sensitive, to be the most delicate, even the most fragile, so that in that moment, purity in the way of what it means comes down to a simple series of steps heading outside.

It’s elusive to describe.

Clear Water in a See-Through Glass (April 14, 2026)

I’ve become so unselfconscious and secure. I’ve lost that egoistic arrogance. I’ve become just a person taking their sweet time in their own creative flow state. I can’t believe it. It shows in the way that I write fiction now compared to years ago.

Yeah, now that I sit down here, I’m just baffled. I forgot all about my own life narrative as this pressing thing, and that makes sense because I’ve integrated my whole life. It was what paved the way for how I am now, this current state of my life and who I am and the way that I am.

Still, it’s just strange to think about, even when I haven’t even thought it at all today. I just enjoyed myself and went on exploring and curious and experiencing the world with fresh, present eyes.

I’ve become the kind of person who just learns curiously, reading books with fresh eyes every single time. I am an endless, excited learner, taking active notes and copying down striking phrases as I read.

Nostalgia, angst, dominance, performative philosophization. They used to be my idols, my gods.

I’ve become so self-happy, if that makes sense. It’s interesting. It’s bewildering. It’s invisible, like clear water in a see-through glass.

My fiction writing is so far away from me, if that makes sense. I don’t see myself in it. It’s total reception. There used to be a feeling that everything came down to self-expression, but now, I can’t even tell I’m doing that. It doesn’t feel like it. There’s nothing to prove. Not anymore. Or there never was. It was just something I had to prove to myself, and once that was done, it resolved itself and cancelled out, falling out of existence quickly. Now, all that’s left is me, not me in the way of total in the way someone still searching for it thinks, feels, perceives, but the medium that I now am. Where am I? That’s not a question that makes any sense in relation to that old language anymore. When I ask it, it’s not insecurity. It’s just me fiddling with my fingers and going about, not in any way so as to say that it was forcibly me, but that in the steps, I walked, and walking in and by itself. I can’t tell, because I’m not the one telling. I’m waiting, and I don’t even answer. It just happens, and I’m there to see it. And I’m not even seeing anything at all. It just happens in front of me.

I guess when you feel do certain things every day, it really gets to you. It really reinforces.

Heat, carrying bags. Okay, maybe they by themselves are not enough. But to an integrated person, they are further integration. Every day, heat, sweat, carrying heavy sacks,  going outside, feeling the world and people around me.

How could anyone ever become arrogant in that state? It was possible though. I did see it.

So it wasn’t the heat. It wasn’t the carrying bags. It wasn’t going outside. It wasn’t staying in a cafe.

It was me. I changed.

And now, all of a sudden, with this reception, all of these things that I mentioned now feel so valuable and effective so as to feel like they’re the ones that caused it, even when it was me the whole time, from start to last, from start to last.

My Sparring Partner (April 15, 2026)

For some bloody reason, even when I’ve spent most of the last 7 years sitting down indoors on chairs and the exercise I’ve done has been sporadic and in bursts, I went and climbed down the whole staircase on four legs for the first time today, doing so from the second-floor hallway up to the bottom of the steps. It was 16, 7.15-inch (this being the average with a sample standard deviation of 0.43) cement steps with anti-slip grooves. It made me realize just how awesome my life would be if I exercised as rigorously and self-directedly as that. The conventional adult’s weightlifting gym sounds almost stupid after that, like a place where numbers replace actual interactability with the whole range of what the body can actually do and feel. I feel right now like I touched a spot I never knew I was hiding all my life. Like I grew up obese since birth and never knew there was skin that could feel this way when exposed to the air rather than forever smothered, crushed, and unfeeling inside blubbery folds. I feel I’ve been performing learned helplessness all my life, even when I did go to the gym, because everything is free and accessible. It just takes a body-mind that acts in and of itself in so self-freely as such. But that’s a very psychological thing to arrive at, and I’m closer to it than ever before. It makes sense that this is happening only now. It’s a very, very psychological thing that never ever gets questioned and even treated as what defines mental health, given I’ve seen how people will pathologize (literally overheard someone call me “special needs”) anyone that does something considered strange nowadays like “genuinely reading non-performatively” in that form of intense unselfconscious note-taking with a book in hand. You can easily see how free exercise, like climbing down stairs on all fours, can really require a “broken” brain, in a world so adept at conformity, performance, and repression. Optimal physical health requires things like what I did just now, yet optimal social performance would either discard it or frame it (e.g., a specialized gym for that kind of behavior and movement). Permisionlessness, or, more precisely, self-permission, is not a gift. It’s a skill. Working against your own grain using external metrics and feedback loops and tools to assess your performance in accordance with your own intents and purposes is a massive thing to digest and contain within oneself. Self-rigor sounds very, very intangible at first, like drifting through smog, but just like how I made that metaphorical connection, you can do the same and tear it down in a graveyard of one-time-uses and in-house scaffolds, solutions, orchestrations, and engineering that perfectly fit your current shape for optimal growth (physical, creative, intellectual). I used to work home at home until I started getting the feeling that it was too strange and hard to make sense of just by myself, and then I went to the gym and realized how much easier it is to have machines that push and pull in a single arc or range that never deviates. Socially, physically, and in all the ways. It was and is self-dishonest. It’s good to see growth beyond what you can ever say of yourself, but making use of external evidence isn’t the same as self-dishonesty. Self-honesty isn’t delusional either. The metrics should never be ends in themselves, lest they become things to perform by rather than precise, tweakable, intent-malleable, discardable tools for optimal growth (Goodhart would love me saying this). You really do have to listen to yourself and your own body, which means self-confrontation, which can be hard and I get that it’s easy to lookmaxx based on convention. I get it. I really do. I myself, as a creative writer and someone who communicates all the time, have to deal with this every single moment. But that endless fight is why self-rigor is crucial. It’s not a one-time thing. It’s something you owe yourself against every instinct in you to say “okay” truly, because the true self would never say that. It wouldn’t even be anything really. It would just be growing and meeting itself where it’s sat, regardless of what some “self” is saying, used to, familiar with, or considers reality. And that’s me. That’s where I am. I’m growing. I’m trying. I’m finding. “Hierarchical” and “complacent” (calcifying beliefs, assumptions, and all that dogma and social shoulds that can make you a very nasty, unfulfilled person) are things you would never ever encounter if you are your ultimate sparring partner and foe. I realized this recently through how LLMs reveal self-honesty (or the lack thereof) based on how you interact with and use it. It will either burn you alive in the way that makes you feel alive in and true to yourself in the most ecstatic way possible (as a tool for yourself in true, permanent satisfaction) or constantly temporarily fill something you can’t provide yourself (e.g., insecurity). Tools becoming masters. It’s a scary thing to witness. I honestly off-load grammar checks to AI. It tells me whether something is unnatural or non-standard, and that helps a lot because I would never know by myself since verbs-preposition combinations can have shapes so arbitrarily their own. But what I do write in terms of style and content themselves are my own, since I barely allow it to dictate beyond a single sentence (giving it so, so little room to conflate its own stylistic suggestions with actual corrections). Isolation maximizes the tool’s capabilities while minimizing its limitations. Besides grammar checks, I use it to explain the writing style of passages I manage experimentally and have it explain what I wrote back to me so I know I didn’t forget important details or phrase them imprecisely, if not incorrectly altogether. It doesn’t matter if it calls what I intended to say wrong (whether I made a bad argument, said something fucked up, or just generally wrote content and styles it finds disagreeable), as long as I said what I meant and meant what I said, even as I acknowledge that I do discover a lot from its analyses, breakdowns, and interpretations even if it doesn’t mirror mine 100 percent and I mine from these differences themselves. But yes, anything beyond fidelity is a separate matter completely. Nevertheless, it is true that working according to the AI’s strengths is crucial. This means that if you’re writing in a particular style it finds very agreeable (you’ll see terms like “masterful” by default), then it is optimal for seeing what makes that style very effective when executed at its best. The opposite situation would naturally be very frustrating for any creative: getting told your own creative decisions suck because it assumes your intent for you by mapping it against something it understands and finds noteworthily pleasant. This goes not just for style but for content as you can’t expect it to understand or be right on everything except where it excels most consistently. It’s like trying to communicate highly niche writer experiences to someone who dismisses all writer life as nonsense vs. someone who understands or can map it onto something they know analogically or structurally, like a coder or someone just that widely learned, experienced, exposed, and open-minded.

Closure 2.0 (April 18, 2026)

One

There’s something in the way of all that has transpired recently that makes me just want to say, “Okay, Jose,” in that casual, flippant way that only someone of my current whatever can affect. It’s myself and the way that I am in all that I’ve been up to this point that feels so resolving, and not in the way of halfway progress, but in the way of someone yet to say a true no at the end of a long already-finished journey, so stand we here and take our time in a world so fruitful and verdant. It disturbs me little, at least not in the way that I cannot easily take the time to appreciate and find ways to absorb and bring into some kind of fruition, even if I acknowledge it’s largely on the part of myself and that security only self-sustainment can provide. To be able to sit down so idly, and to have all the words drift past, through, and then out of me as if the world barely bears anything against itself. It’s almost strange, if distant.

Sometimes—no, more precisely, that time is now—I wonder if I’m still a person in the wholesome sense of the word. I mean, how can I be? At a certain point, you start drifting—or at least I like to think—in ways that don’t fit into preestablished ways of life, of arcs, and those stories of humanity we tell ourselves and find ourselves confirming with our own lives. And this is not a certain point. This is me.

If I got closure then, three months ago, whatever this is is so much stranger, a closure ongoing, a closure 2.0, a closure that transcends whatever that container (in retrospect) was. It feels like I was performing in a dream of agony, and now, I sit idly in certain living, breathing areas of my life that feel like reaching places I’ve never gone, in the way only such high advancement can explain.

I don’t know. But I think there’s a song to be had at all times, and if I needed to describe what’s being played now, it would be that of a world that goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on, in the way that a person so fucking crazy has gone. Yeah, that’s it. I mean, how else can I explain it? All others sound like I’m rehearsing myself, yet it is true. The reality is the rehearsement. It’s telling me directly again and again and a-fucking-again. Whatever I have now is like tenfold what I had before, in the way that myself as a person could have ever thought to be. To be, to have, I have right now, and what I have supersedes things I never thought were limitations. I lived a life, and that’s all… right? So why am I advancing, going beyond, transcending, pushing past my previous versions and drafts, when I never thought anything of progression, when I lived my life so idly as I was and then stopped myself at every point hoping only to end whatever fight I had? I don’t know. But I apparently have gone so far, so as to be here where I am, and I can only say that out loud the way a person of this place can say.

I look for those moments, where my body and mind fall prey to pain and to weakness, in hopes that I am brought back to reality and these securities and confidences taken away from me in a “giveth and taketh away” way, and it is not that those moments don’t exist, but it feels like I’m skidding away from the strengths and capacities I have already developed, trying to avoid what it all means so I never have to think of myself as anything but a wafting breeze that dissipates as fast as it came, but such is life anyway. No need to sabotage a life that’s already way on its way to death. I must accept it, and I do. But yes, it is strange. Very. I have written my lowest in the last 18 days at less than 1,900 words per day. Things really have changed.

I can’t “existential” my way out of this. I am what I am right now, and whatever variation of myself I wish to deny can only be accepted in whole. To detach from these variations by hiding in the overview of existence itself would be a disservice to a life, a full one. It’s something I learned quickly by describing mundane life hyper-realistically, even up to death, even up to competence, even up to someone of myself.

I think this current version’s mundanity can best be captured by the track I’m listening to right now: A Place to Call Home by Evan Call for Violet Evergarden.

If I define myself by my worst and most agonizing moments, then how can I say to be integrating? I must relish and celebrate whenever and wherever applicable and acknowledge that even as I am, with all the pains I used to have receding, there is a basis and a whole person to be proud of. If I continue to die in those moments, I will never truly explore just how far I can reach, but such is life. To doubt oneself and to be proven wrong by oneself unwittingly. And to keep that head somewhere, not high, not low, just ahead, and then, to have moments where those eyes go distant and to feel in that moment that it really is something I have to embrace, this state of my world, lest I go blind, not that I will, but it sounds cool to say, to attach an extreme condition or an “or else” to every good thing, especially when that’s worked (and been proven true, at least in my traumatized projecting mind then) for so long.

Two

Why do I keep finding that things have been integrated wherever I go? When I experience that moment of “yeah, I integrated that already,” I find myself thinking, “What the fuck? Why the fuck would I even go through the hassle? I’m so, so happy, content, and adventurous and all, but what the fuck!” And the things that I am only continuing to integrate feel less like threats to my identity and more like fun fruits pending (quite literally like low-hanging pendants waiting to be snatched). And the new things that I integrate from my active note-taking and my hyper-realistic, hyper-sensory fiction writing are paving the path for the future as well as integrating so much of the life that I have lived thus far. When I said “closure 2.0,” I meant it. It seems that since three months ago, integration has only accelerated, and emotionally, I feel much more secure even with a number of things pending. It really does feel like Autobiography, Part Two.

To think that I would reach a point where looking at my files would make me feel done and content instead of overwhelmed and oversaturated. That is miraculous. Well, that’s only here in the laptop. So there’s a military detachment unit kind of thing going on. Containment. But still, this is already very big. I can only imagine what it’d be like if I manage to integrate everything in that main computer. Shit.

I have no idea what contentment will look like once I’ve integrated everything back there. This laptop thing has been a successful prototype. It probably also helps a lot that I am practically focused on essentials being here at a new cafe. Portability and all. Laptop, files, books. All of these are only as much as I need. So it is fascinating that I even struggled here before. But the fact of reaching a closure through these cafe stays is already meaningful and promising for even greater expansions in all the other elsewheres.

What does it look like? What I feel now is a prototype accomplished in this laptop and 114 eight-hour cafe stays in 62 unique cafes in 11 months. That sounds a lot, but when I say these are actually the tool being used to tackle all that lies there in that midden, I mean it. It’s actually useful and helping. Of course, it is its own unique milestone with all that it entails, and one could argue that I was there the entire time in the way of a “challenge,” but it was the record of two years I already had then at home that allowed me to start this cafe-staying in this first place. Two years of home, then the last year (11 months) being cafe-staying once every three days. So when I say I still have much to tackle in that midden, it really is that gargantuan. Essentially, I integrate the future and the new to integrate the midden that is not budging with the in-house tools I developed at home, which is why I am taking active notes and engaging in hyper-realistic hyper-sensory objective prose. I am developing new tools and new ways to project internal architecture and structure onto the “virgin” world around me. This way, I can come back home and erode that giant-ass rock. At least, that’s genuinely what it feels like.

Until it feels like I have hijacked just about the entire “rock” structure, I will continue to pound away at the edges, making slow but steady progress, as I do.

The fact that I still “crumble” whenever I just about enter a single Roblox game reminds me that I am still straggling somewhere there here dunno. If I am still so easily stunnable and “broken,” then, what is it even that I have wrought, if it is something to activate through putting myself in certain conditions or to have remain active through avoiding other conditions? It is not that I’ve been avoiding anything, but it is there. It happens. I still get struck and lost into reverie like it’s still 7 years ago. It’s strange. There are really those aspects or sides or areas or specific conditions that throw me into orbit. I am still so easily reducible to a kind of helplessness still, even after everything. It’s not helplessness in the way of having nothing in which I can enact myself to my great sense of freedom and advancement. It is the helplessness of being partially self-conquered and partially self-unconquered. And it’s not that I haven’t already absorbed the psychological brunt of all of these unconquered areas. But yeah, while the wildfire has stopped burning. there is still that sense that the lack of pain does not mean freedom and mastery.

So let’s see what exactly is that difference since if (“when” since you can’t be partially self-conquered unless you’ve come to lack of pain and then to freedom and mastery) I did feel it before, I didn’t really understand it enough to watch that change happen in real time.

I wonder if I’m mistaken unconquered lands as that of the self, but it might just be actually things external to myself. They might be future and new things instead of anything that has to do with me internally. But that midden still feels there. It is not that both can’t be true. That midden could very well have reached a point, given integration, of being external in the way of a palimpsest even if it may directly contain material related to my past, the same as with my active note-taking and my hyper-sensory and hyper-realism objective fiction prose, which tracks since I did say they are used as tools to erode the rock. It’s just that this version declares that the rock itself is not internal, but is just as outside as that note-taking is.

a tear-graced smile (April 22, 2026)

What a useless life I’ve lived, I almost feel. I wish I could keep finding a place to immerse myself in, and I can. It just hurts so badly the more that I expose myself to the world more and more. The farther I go and adventure, the more I find myself unable simply not to feel at all gouged. I have lived so long. How can anyone even…(come to terms with, make sense of? I don’t know)? I have lived a life.

I’ve read countless texts from the 16th century to the 21st century and gotten to know all kinds of people through history books, biographies, memoirs, travelogues, autobiographies, and all manner. In the end, I am here. And I almost feel a sense of loss in their lives. Even those countless fiction lives, stories, worlds, and immersions. They almost feel meaningless, useless now.

I have reached 4.5 million written words in 1,000 days less than a month ago. And that only makes what I’m feeling clearer.

What is all this? Just life upon life, world upon world, story upon story, immersion upon immersion. And even if you put them all together, you can’t, not because it’s impossible to have a list of fiction stories you read, but because in the end, it still hits me again in full fidelity. If I let myself listen to a song and recall a memory or even contemplate on my life here in my sleepy home and neighborhood and how that compares to when I’m outside there in a new cafe in a new place and then think about what would happen once all the cafes are experienced, I immediately know.

I can recall things and put them together, and I can go through the effort of expressing, describing, explaining, and converging, and in the end, I know well, I know full well. What it means. What it is.

I have lived a life. It embrittles me to think it. It gorges out something in me.

What a life.

I’m not any more than I already was. Yet I am all these things now. Yet a moment is enough to break me. I’m as sensitive as a baby. I look outside, and my heart crashes down. I see a tree, and in it, I see an infinite world. I am the awe- and wonder-filled child as well as the logistical writer. I hate (I try to) that. It still hits me like moment 1.

Writing helps me regulate myself, but it refined my sensibilities, sensitiveness, the very thing my father slapped me for. That I felt so, that it hurt so, that I loved so, that I trusted so, that I expressed myself so earnestly, that I saw so. It ruined me as well as was who I was. It’s who I am now too.

I have never once felt that I was never not who I was, always cracking at the edges, but never fully disavowed. I was always going to heave the weight of myself and what it meant to crinkle the eyes in a tear-graced smile.

I let myself cry it out.

If I could hold someone, I would hold them forever, not out of need, but because in my heart, there is only one song: that of love, that of hope, that of sincerity, that of uncondition, that of intimacy, that of fresh eyes, that of moment-one tears, that of an unyielding grace. I am Grace. I am Beauty. If I was searching to become the epitome of grace and beauty all my life, there it is, in a tender motion of the hand, in a delicate shiver of the lips as tears dribble them and a smile creeps stronger still. I am what I am; it appears so.

Non-Writing Overwhelm -> Scaffolded Expansion -> Optional Free Reception (April 22, 2026)

It’s weird. Letting myself be sensitive makes me feel vulnerable and can feel in a way painful, but it is very beautiful and wonderful.

Writing has long been my way of letting myself be in that space without overwhelm. But yeah, now that I’ve reached 4.5 million words in 1,000 days and have finally slowed down in my journaling recently after getting a sense of deep closure on my life, I can tell that 99.99 percent were barely captured, and writing was its own rabbit hole of constraint. I am glad to be free from analytical journaling, because for so long I knew that living this way with this kind of writing was always going to be lesser than the freedom of when I was still barely a writer and my life was much, much, much more sensitive to everything as a result. The difference now is that I don’t have to get overwhelmed. I have addressed a lot already. I am returning to a much greater sensitivity, but writing is always there to help keep it stable.

The torturous intensity that it was back in 2019 was why I looked back at that time with nostalgia during the most prolific moments of those 1,000 days, but it was that same intensity that forced me to write to regulate myself. I wasn’t distancing myself from experience when I wrote. There’s a difference between regulation and distancing, and not once was I ever numb or distanced, because that’s impossible. In fact, writing only made my sensibilities and sensitivies more acute by giving me a lot more space to experience even more emotionally, but because it was there, I didn’t collapse as much as I would back then. I can actually experience more than I did back then. But now, given I’m slowing down in my journaling post-closure, instead of torturous intensity, it is slowly regaining sensibility and sensitivity without writing, which is its own thing, despite the fact that i was arguably so much more intense during the peak of those 1,000 days if not accounting for the “with writing” part.

To clarify, it’s not that writing regulated me so effectively to the point of constraint. It did what it needed to do, and it continues to do what it needs to do. That I’m slowing down is a culmination, not a decision to stop something “too effective”. Writing was never a crutch. Even when I was writing I was feeling things without needing to immediately process them into words, but writing allowed me to keep myself on stable ground. There is this fatal misunderstanding that writing replaced ongoing experience and feelings into words, but I rarely wrote about ongoing experiences and feelings. Almost all my writing was reflective.

Existential Saturated State vs. Goal-Orientated Actor (April 22, 2026)

It’s strange. If it was just myself, then it would be its own difficulty. But reading a memoir where the mother of the protagonist was some delusional poet who said “I was always meant to be famous” with that writing shown made me suddenly full of motivation. It’s not that I was unmotivated necessarily. But I was all of a sudden in this place where everything was hitting me, not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that made me stop and pause and lie down and lose that rat wheel temporarily. I was in a state of extreme sensibility and sensitivity and existential everything-coming-together and openness and receptivity where everything, lives, worlds, stories, memories, experiences, immersions, comes together and you’re left in a state of existential saturation (not oversaturation) and, in that moment, the present feels rather so assured and arrogant that it’s different somehow when even it is just part of dead trends, booms, crazes, concerns, worries, pursuits, and goals, like the way one might view how much our younger selves were so crazified over something that we saw in our little tiny small bubble back then, but toward the now and then some (everything else).

I guess it’s much easier to bear with someone that’s so easily horrible or so easily delusional and to narrative based on that. All of a sudden, you have an anchor point that restores your sense of place and locality, not in yourself the way that existential saturation intensely would, but in something that’s easily digestible and goal-orientable. There is nothing orientable in that existential saturation, because if it even consumes and absorbs 4.5 million words in 1,000 days, then it will eat just about anything and everything. It will basically just leave you in a state of such intense reception, and that’s not the energy that goal-oriented thinking relies on unless that reception is guarded and curated, like the way someone curates a Spotify playlist for their “I was always meant to be famous” or their confessional poetry which relies on an already firmly ingrained and indurated understanding of who they are.

To put it simply, existential saturation is its own self-locality, and the only way to get out of it is to get grounded by easy targets and anchors like someone who’s so obviously delusional with that level of writing, which gives me a lot more to work with. Like, it makes me think and feel and say, “Hot damn, that’s delusional,” and that’s inherently much more goal-orientedly powerful than someone in a state where the accomplishment of 4.5 million words in 1,000 days is intangible. That delusional anchor point restores the goal-oriented grounded weight of that accomplishment and, by extension, who I am as a goal-oriented actor.

To explain, that existential saturation is not even the kind that would get lost in a good book. The goal-oriented actor would read while taking notes to ensure that it is giving full attention. The receptive mind would at least get lost in a good book or video about a civilization simulation in Minecraft. But that state was so, in a way, paralyzed it wasn’t even reading with any intent at all. It had nothing inside it.

Competence Is Deceptive, Monastic, and Stuck: Tend Yours Simply (April 22, 2026)

Competence varies so much that I stopped believing that anyone was truly competent in the way that isn’t like a skill you learn separate from the person.

I don’t learn any faster than anyone else, and I realized the same goes for anyone else. I’m not talking about memorizing. I’m talking about mastery. You can be good at something, but it doesn’t make you any different than the fact that you have this skill that is ten miles separate from you as a person.

It’s easy to think that the ease you feel when driving or coding must match every other area of life. But that’s a Dunning honeytrap, and a lot of it very much has to do with ignorance.

Academics is a good example of how much you can feel you know something than take a left turn and realize that a lot of the things you perceive about yourself and your own competence was not only very much domain-specific, it was a niche, not the kind of niche your Radiohead buddy listens to. Not the kind of niche where someone spends so much time writing about something in words and language that you would never come to even if you spent 10 years learning it, the kind that effectively abandons everything else just to get where it is, that kind of fucked-up rabbit hole.

In the end, I’m just going to take pride in the niche I’ve developed in, but recognize that it really is that fragile and that really is no such thing as competence any more than it is something that happens not only externally but in such a level of niche so as to abandon everything else for more than a decade and then some.

I’m not talking about the ease of reading what they wrote. I’m thinking always about “what would it take for me even to begin to write in this turn of phrase all the way from the first sentence to a whole chapter with all of those long paragraphs?” It is easy to ride on the wave of an argument someone took their life to construct, but it is a whole thing together to think about just how far it is even to begin to see things the way they do and to work their way through whatever it is the hell they’re talking about the way they would in those patterns that seem hyper-complex in my argument-riding perspective. It’s why my active note-taking is not about re-creating the argument or the story I wrote. It’s about the act of focusing hard on grabbing striking words and phrases, which I can then absorb and integrate in my own, but not so as to generate the same generator, but to cultivate and pad my own, which is still entirely my own niche even as I am outwardly receptive. That is to me the best of my integration.

Three Days at the Dam (April 23, 2026)

Three straight days of camping at the dam. It’s not spartan because I’ll be there with my parents as my mother sells at a stall. There’ll be food. It will be more like a retreat or event of some kind.

What I’ll probably need personally:

• small clock with working battery
• ballpens (pencils require sharpener and all that hassle)
• notebook
• books

these gives me enough options:

• read books and take active notes
  • read books as they are
• observe the world around me while taking notes
  • observe the world around me without

This is a big leap from my 115 eight-hour Starbucks cafe stays in 63 unique cafes in the last 11 months, where I’d bring a bag containing:

• books
• a sleeved laptop
• a small bag containing the mouse pad, wired mouse, keyboard, and phone and laptop charger
• a sleeved USB-C monitor to prop on closed laptop using its very sleeve
• an extra shirt
• handkerchief
• old receipts and tissues
• the Starbucks card.

I would write my fiction story, take active notes while reading a digital public domain book or a physical book I brought, or just journal in VS Code.

But this confirms my experience with long hours outside, which I will need for when I have no laptop and there’s no Starbucks nearby.

Update (April 28, 2026):

• The Hearsts by Judith Robinson—68 pages, 38,896 words
• Lincoln by Gore Vidal—28 pages, 12,600 words
• Fragrant Rice by Janet De Neefe—26 pages, 8,580 words
• Mother of Pearl by Melinda Haynes—15 pages, 6,300 words

137 pages total (reading and taking active notes, 6 pages per hour), 66,000 words

on 69 pages of the notebook, 35 leaves, 17,000 words

For three days: specifically 22 hours and 20 minutes, more than a third of my time.

• Day 1: 9 hours and 5 minutes, 30 individual note-taking blocks, 70 book pages, 28.5 notebook pages
• Day 2: 8 hours and 35 minutes, 32 individual note-taking blocks, 50 book pages, 26 notebook pages
• Day 3: 4 hours and 36 minutes, 3 individual note-taking blocks, 17 book pages, 14.5 notebook pages

Improving Literacy or Just a Niche Practice? (April 23, 2026)

I can’t tell if I’m getting better at reading or not. Or just plain literacy altogether.

I mean, if you read a lot of different books, that’s probably a good thing. I should probably mention that I’m also a writer. So I also take active notes, specifically of:

• verb studies (“bathe” (water bathing a shore vs. bathing feet), “pelt” (pelting rain vs. pelting stones vs. a wolf’s pelt), “crest,” “snap,” “lace,” and “glance.”)
• space (blocking, cinematography)
• inanimate movement (cars “lurched, wedged in, jockeyed, slipped in”, “the sun sparkled in many swift changes of silver and steel-blue light”)
• micro-actions (“shoe leather chafing on wood,” “pried my fingers away,” “rubbing his thumb transversely.”)
• hyper-specific exact names/nomenclature of
  • botany and topography (“pinnated leaves,” “talcose slate,” “calcareous matter,” “Live Oaks,” and “arborescent arums.”)
  • architecture and interior (“banded rustication,” “low-ceilinged cubicle,” “rose-red damask hangings,” and “tiled passage.”)
  • medical ingredients (“Dragon water,” “sheep’s tallow,” “roach-allome”)
  • archaic spellings (“cookt,” “houfwife”),
  • details of wilderness survival (how to pitch a tent in Tartary, how to pack a camel, how to make a poultice)
• abstract and structural phrasing (geometry of description; “its head terminating in the form of a sharp cone [additional abstract shape language to help with drafting difficult structural vocabulary pre-internalization]”)
• facial features and textures (physiognomy; “rubiginous-hided… face,” “pasty-faced,” “sweat-dribbled face,” “humid eyes.”)
• wardrobe and attire as characterization (e.g.,”a white dress, with a wide lace scarf at her throat,” “bombazine bag-breeches,” “green satin gown.”)
• body language as psychology (“popped straight up in the chair with that inner explosiveness,” “sank down in his seat,” “rolled his eyes lugubriously.”)
• lighting effects (“damp-silvered cedar,” “a dazzling shaft of sunshine pierced a crack,” “the gas lamps casting a greenish glow in the snow,” “wet with light.”)
• atmosphere (“sultry heats,” “a cold bleak fog,” “the air was crisp and lucid.”)
• fresh phrasing (“note the use of ‘blazing’ to describe diamonds rather than fire,” “note the word ‘thicket’ being used to describe traffic (‘a thicket of cabs’) and leave a note: ‘[use for anything other than trees, leaves, and nature].’”)

But overall, it is about prose, phrases, vocabulary, sensory details, micro-actions, body language, verbs, rhythm, and all that. I use dense-sensory, behaviorist, spatially driven fiction writing and “introspective-analytic stream-of-consciousness” journaling as a means of synthesizing these new precisions and fidelities.

So yeah, structure, pacing, building tension, withholding information, sitting with ambiguity, craft, talking about what I consumed, talking about why I like something and why I don’t like it, connecting different media together based on similar themes and feels. I wouldn’t say I’m harder to impress, because that sounds like an asshole.

And I’m not trying to get good at reading. I’m not looking for some confirmation of being good. I’m just saying that probably, what I’m doing improves something. I mean feedback loops are great, but there are certain things that feel arbitrary at a certain point, or just very niche even if you read widely.

I’m talking about reading and literacy in the context of having just looked at a Reddit post about US math and reading scores being low and the Mississippi Miracle, balanced reading and whole language, science of reading, and phonics. And I’m wondering to myself whether my writer-reader lifestyle is improving my reading or literary in any way. I spend a lot of time with books and writing, which I guess is a good thing?

Happiness Has a Strange Sound (April 28, 2026)

The impulse to start fresh and new is ringing here. It’s practically blazing in my creative lungs, demanding that I quench that stinging thirst, until nothing, and I mean nothing, else can be said except “who I am,” in the most arrogant sense of that notion, in the way a person states themselves as they are in the way they are just by an sheer incidental detail they decided to record or a sheer by-itself-meaningless expression they decided to write. It’s that kind of gesture, that kind of enactment, and I wonder if I can fully actualize it, fructify its wants and all of those things that it will end up desiring once the initial impulse is sated. I don’t know. The anger of a wrathful creativity is there, and it can’t be put down except set aside, and for how long? To the end of a satisfying creative life, or to the beginning of a new one, a new definite point upon which we can decide all else, all things, everything, what-thing, whatever becomes important from here on out, and with whatever things I say or do and actions come out of it, it is [the battle], in effect, the “Lord’s” (in this case, the creative god of I-am). But that’s just a bunch of fucking voodoo creativity stupidity. The only creativity hereon is in myself spitting on the page, until the only thing left is muck and its -ery—muckery, that fuckery-thickery thing that seeps and stains the ever-living shit out of my fucking soul, that fucking stupid thought that dare splay and display and cause itself to sprawl out onto the fucking world, mother-fucker-that-I-am.

If there’s some fucking phrase that describes me, or at least what I’m feeling right now, it’d be:

Motherfucker decided to do something and finish it on his own motherfucking terms, and that’s all that can be said about that shit, as well as everything to which it can be attributed or for which it can be, in any shape or form, blamed. Motherfucker decided to sit down on a chair at a table and write down his motherfucking thoughts. And in the end, what terms do I except that of a passing fucking breeze as I wallow in some bunch-o’-words that nothing at all can be said to be related to except the vacuum of non-living, cold, futile, adulterous text! This fucking piece of shit that is writing and words and text and read-things. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! I spent time reading. I took the time to think and read and write and express shit through my very close attention and note-taking during those three days of reading, during those 22 hours and 20 minutes. And what did I motherfucking do except fuck myself, as with all things, as with anything, as with any form of creative expression, with any attempt to design at all a human being in me, and to draw it out into the world in hopes of something full-enacted, actualized, and put-out-there-in-the-open. What else can be said of it except fuck me, man? I have no justification. I only have the rationalizing of someone seeking to understand, and in that sense, to throw myself further and further into obscurity regarding the state of all things, for it is in that deep study that I become abso-fucking-lutely delulu. Shit, shit, shit. If there’s a person still simmering under all this, I don’t know what he would be, what his name would be, who he’d be, or what can even be said out of all of it that he is implicated in, except the battle is the Lord’s, in that vague stupid creative self-expressed way, the way one stares at the water and says some proverb or aphorism that designs him in that moment of description, of pure rational making-of. Ha-ha… I have done nothing except fuck myself over into a world so full of beauty, of life, of humanity, of flesh, of love, of hope, of empathy, of skin, of the feeling of being with another, with others, with the world, with people, with the same things one is made of, with the feeling of the world enveloping oneself, and in that sense, incomplete. I have done the fuckery, and I have made the fuckery, and to that extent and to that end, I am nothing but the produce of words, its production, its flesh, its skin, its make, I am a model of my own flesh, of that desirous tendency in me to produce sprint, zest, spirit, soul, of a human being living inside the man, inside the body, in the midst of a great cultural change, in the way the world fucks up and fucks down and then left and right and then into me and then out, and then in that sense, I am, whatever limbs can be said to be sprouting out of this limbed form, of this caricature, of this character, avatar, flesh-being, construct-of-parts, of a human. I try. I tried. I put the effort into words, and I delivered myself, and into what place? I don’t know. I do know one thing. I’ve lost myself in the same sentence that I’ve gained, in myself, everything. I shouldn’t speak, breathe, think, imagine, yet in that same sentence, I am, producing life, out of a fuckery-of-muck, of stupid flesh. Of nothing-ness. I try. I did. I made. I created. Out of this lonely, disgusting muck of a piece that I am, something of creative gesture and self-expression. Something that can be said to be (in relational terms) me. I have yet to be, and in that same sentence, I am. There must be something here that I can rummage through and make some construction out of (parts), something creative, something that can be said to be sufficient, and where did that sentence come from?

And what’s funny is that… after everything I said, this to me is the feeling of being alive.

The only thing left in the end is experience, including the very one I’m having right now writing this.

I’m Confused: AI Writing & Human Writing (April 28, 2026)

why is it that I never see any of AI’s writing in terms of phrasing in both literary and genre fiction stories and yet AI prescribes so consistently and resiliently what is good writing and phrasing, yet not a single phrase from any established bestseller author exists in AI’s way of phrasing. In fact, somehow, all these phrases from these works are wrong in the sense of being called “could flow more smoothly” or “shouldn’t use soft as an adverb even when it’s literally in the dictionary and it’s natural phrasing”. It’s not that these works sound “artistic” or “risky” or “nuanced.” They just sound natural. They sound like something not written. They sound like genuinely easy-to-read material, maybe dense, but easy to read in the sense of syntax. But AI’s syntax sounds so repetitive, so syntactically uninspired to the point of unnatural, like it doesn’t even sound like it was spoken or expressed or even, in the most tangential way, mouthable. It sounds unnatural in the most basic sense of the term. It just doesn’t sound like something anyone would ever say or write. It sounds like a unique language that doesn’t exist, that isn’t from a someone. It’s not soulless. It just sounds unnatural. It doesn’t sound like something spoken. It sounds written. It’s the only thing that sounds written that I’ve really read and read time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again. I’ve read so much of AI output. I’ve read so many web novels. I’ve read so many literary works. And AI has consistently repetitively been incredibly unnatural, yet it reads like it’s correct because it’s incredibly consistently unnatural. And when someone’s consistently unnatural, it becomes in its own way a form of expression, a form of language. It’s like a dog barking continuously, and even that sounds more natural because of how much more speakable and mouthable it is in contrast to the impossible-to-regurgigate-and-to-speak manner of speech that AI just brings into the world. It doesn’t blabber. It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t have a manner of speaking. It sounds like someone didn’t write it. It should sound at the very least like someone wrote it. Or in the way of being “written” in that awkward sense. But it doesn’t even sound like it was written awkwardly by a person. It just doesn’t sound like blabber. It doesn’t sound stilted. It just doesn’t sound. It doesn’t speak. It’s consistently un-speaking. I’ve read so much. I’ve seen a lot of different ways of putting words together, and it has consistently banished 99 percent of natural speech in favor of a 1 percent that didn’t even exist prior to itself, to LLMs, to everything of current AI. It doesn’t exist. In the world. And yet, it keeps asserting that its only fault is “soullessness,” as if I haven’t been reading academic texts and been finding the least soulless thing in the world, when they should be the ones sucking the world dry of creative expression and only demonstrating a million billion times more just how fucking pervasive human subtlety and nuance and that little fucking indelible mark of being a speaking, regurgitating, mouthing, words-being-thrown-and-shaped-with-the-lips human being.

I’m still reading. I’m still looking for what AI calls natural, smooth, impactful, concise writing based sheerly on what it considers stilted, awkward, and unnatural and what it offers as solutions and revisions. Somehow, in a very voodoo way, in all of the separate starkly different works I’m reading, I’m finding myself more than AI. That indelibate mark of humanity. I never thought I’d ever conceptualize it at all myself. I have long considered text and writing just to be a bunch of words, but perhaps, this is what can be truly meant by a bunch of words. It has long sounded too voodoo to think that a bunch of text can ever be human, but now, with non-human writing existent and all that I’ve devoured of both AI writing and human writing, I am now registering human writing more and more. Text is becoming human.

That instinct. They (the author) go short when I go short. They go long when I go long. They go clipped when I go clipped. They go sprawl when I go sprawl. I am there with them all the way, even with the varying denseness. But AI lacks that instinct. That rhythm. That syntax. That “voodoo” naturalness.

You would think that this is a matter of “rule breaks” and AI being the God of “correct writing,” but how is unnatural writing correct and natural writing breaking rules? The very human speech is breaking rules (and you would think it’s literary or informal or creative rule-breaking)? But that is too easy, not because it’s correct, but because it’s so stupid it barely qualifies even as the faintiest, mistiest gesture to what the fuck is going on here. AI can try its hardest to find some way to come out on top, to say desperately that it’s gotta be rule breaking, that it’s gotta be soul, that it’s gotta be art, that it’s gotta be this, that the AI is hyper-correct (a clandestine way to smuggle its own self-compliment), that the AI is perfect, that the AI is math itself, more, more, more self-glazing that barely qualify as objective phrasing even. And then I say, “All kinds of writing.” I say all. I say all in all. In the way all sounds all. Speaks all. (The formalest shit, the informalest shit, the widest range of writing, which immediately disqualifies that idea that it’s all about bohemians.) Do you hear me, AI? Do you hear my speech? The frustration and confusion I expressed out loud during the writing of this passage while my parents were in the room next to this?

This is what AI tried to smuggle in just now by mischaracterizing what I said:

The author asks a fundamental question: What is the point of a language rule if following it perfectly makes you sound unnatural?

AI conflated its own invented non-speaking as “language rule” and smuggled in “following it perfectly” as if it is “LANGUAGE RULE” itself, the very arbiter of language and of rule and of following (implies objectivity) and of perfection.

Sepulchre of Something of Mine (April 29, 2026)

I’m not exactly sure which direction I’m taking. I mean, the obvious answer has been “sensory details” and its collection, yet for some reason, it’s not speaking right now. It was justified so absolutely the same way “might makes right,” yet now, it’s like telling a dog it should bark. It’s just gotta stare at you, because “barking” may be a characteristic, but it isn’t something a dog does just because you think it should in this very moment.

It’s not just sensory details. It’s dialogue. That’s not to say I will stop writing dialogue or sensory details. They will happen, but they’ve become tools now, not essentials, not in the sense that I will opt out of them like they’re options, but in the way that all of the literary books and their prioritization of dialogue and sensory details are, not to say that it should all be now moving to plot-oriented action-packed storytelling as the priority.

I’m not sure if writing and reading themselves are compromised, but at the same time, seeing that this disengagement with fiction writing is not transitioning immediately to journaling and blogging is signficant, because usually, it’s an oscillation between fiction writing and journaling (analytical, reflective, emotional, expressionistic, autobiographical, and quantified-self).

Maybe, I’m finally bouncing away from this new, recent phase of literary and sensory inundation. I just don’t know where this bouncing is landing as it’s still mid-air.

It makes some sense. I just came friom an analog camp of three straight days of taking notes physically and reading so very slowly (137 book pages total across four fresh books; 17,000 words total of my active notes) for a total of 22 hours and 20 minutes. You would think the answer here would be that all that caused me to stop fiction writing, but that’s not what happened. In fact, I added more 2,000 words in my ongoing fiction (which I paused when I went to that camp all of a sudden) in the last 19 hours (and the camp was only three days ago).

If not reading, writing, or taking active notes while reading, then I mean, what else is there? Is this really their compromising?

It feels like there’s a god toppled, and now, I’m left to wander and pick up the pieces. It should’ve done it all and carried me through, but no, it fucking gave up. My creative growth transcended it, or at least, the state or version or variation that it’s currently in. The latter is humbler and probably Occam-simpler, but you can’t deny the signs of the former.

I guess it’s perhaps, I’m reached a point of integration that my current tested definitive fiction work is given the label “extreme show, don’t tell,” not in a negative sense, but in an impenetrable sense. Maybe, that fulfillment, especially as made definitive by that 2,000-word resilience bounce- back after that three-day literary analog inundation, is what’s causing my very state.

Maybe, it’s now become a pocket tool, not an organizing, overarching, ever-challenging (ever-spiteful), ongoing principle and worldview.

Maybe, this relentless chase, insufficiency, and competitiveness was its own creative self-betraying (only if it becomes something that I don’t transcend rather than just a phase of growth) dependence. And I can see myself writing all this (this whole passage itself) yet my body is rejecting it. It doesn’t want to believe it. “It can’t be,” is what it’s intensely repeating.

It wasn’t just learning craft. I internalized the very philosophy of it in my own way. The story I wrote was, even while personalized, intensely philosophically in tune with that way of writing itself. So that’s why it’s so intense that this is happening now when I expected to industrialize as in scale things up after those three days and as I get better and better and as I write more and more of that ongoing “extreme” work. Shit, shit, fuck, shit! It’s not that I lacked a what and why. I had both as well as the how. It was integrated, internalized (in the whole sense of non-differentiation with oneself, one’s identity and all), and philosophized.

Don’t tell me. I’ll try writing completely different kinds of stories that will challenge my writing skills again, that will make me feel alive, that will explore a whole different side of myself, that will take on a whole new philosophy.

Come on, man. I mean, you can’t be serious. I mean, I spent so much time. I did all of the shit. Like, what the fuck, man. I mean, what the fuck am I supposed to say, to do? Shit, fuck, this was supposed to solve everything (And I’m lying, I never expected it to do, there was just a part of me that felt that maybe, that just maybe this would be the one and this would be the end and I wouldn’t have to be anything else, but I guess not). All I have in the end is this. It’s almost funny. I mean, what can I say? I mean, how can I even? What stance am I supposed to assume? Posture? It’s fucked. I mean, how else am I supposed to even… I don’t know. And I keep running into the same old walls (that’s not true, I’ve improved all this time, it’s just that I’ve been running and evolving all this time and have gone through so much that it’s not even funny—it’s incredibly funny actually). I mean, it’s a fuckery. It’s the fuckiest fuckery I’ve ever seen. I mean… it’s funny.

Well, let’s see how the next thing goes—FUCK!

I was supposed to have moved on from everything else. To have abandoned it all. This would’ve been it. I went to the fucking commune. To the utopia. I threw everything away. This was it. Supposed to be. Supposed to fucking be. I mean, what else am I supposed to do now? Except just pick up the pieces and all that I’ve abandoned (if that’s even possible, just by sheer memory or vestiges and traces of what I’ve all but burned down to move to this faux-utopia in the first place). I was supposed to become done. And in the end, the only consistent in the end is me existing, even throughout everything that’s come and gone. It’s a weird kind of feeling. The feeling. The feeling. I feel. I feel a lot of things. I feel everything in fact. And to reach a point where this is. That is. There is. Thit is. Thither. Hither. Wither. Bider. It’s a funny thing. That is, to exist. I guess the next thing’s just me trying something. I can try an old style of mine, but this time with everything that’s transpired and see how that all comes together and clashes into something concrete, functional, and consistent enough to be a voice or style of its own, something out of the ashes, something, even if life in the aftermath.

I have lost organizing justification the way a belief system drives you to do just about anything with the full force of an utterly buffered conviction and soul.

I have burned all my bridges. I don’t think I can go back. I’m alienated from everything I’ve ever known before it, and now that it’s gone, it’s gone.

I don’t know what comes next, to put it simply. My past is not a gold mine of inspiration, especially given just how much I brutalized (particularly the previous way I wrote fiction and saw and experienced the world) on the way to get to this point with “extreme show don’t tell” and how much I brutalized and recorded and exhausted to other waste my past with my autobiographical 4.5 million words in 1,000 days. So yeah, it’s a graveyard of closure, abandonment, and burned bridges, all in service of forward momentum, and to live! To exist!

And here I am, existing. Ha-ha-ha-ha.

Imagine if I “regressed” and wrote the way I did more than 2 years ago (before I met “it”) just for the sheer fun of doing it. I wonder if I can even do that. That’s like doing a split with untrained legs.

The End? (April 29, 2026)

What comes after writing and reading? What happens when you’ve mastered them?

Assume that “writing and reading” encompasses, decoding, thinking, developing a voice, reading critically, taking active notes, reading as slow as the slowest snail in the world while taking notes, discovering thinking itself, synthesis, creative knowledge, arguing, accountability, and courage. Assume.

Does one just stare? Walk? See? Feel? Experience? Is that the only thing left (not to mean it’s lesser but the only thing left)

But I’m a writer and a reader. I grew into this over the course of the last seven years. I guess that was the point. I started to stop. I completed it. Not writing and reading themselves as concepts, but them as they were entirely to me throughout/across these seven years since coming face to face with them.

What the heck do I do now? I feel like I invested seven years into a relationship that ended. And I feel like a stranger to myself. Who was I all the time? Starting over? Being a person? Finding oneself? After all that? How can I ever adjust?

I can tell it’s happening. Over the last four whole months, my average journaling word count has consistently gone down. Now, it’s the end of this month, and it’s half what it was last month and the month before that.

This month, my fiction work George and active note-taking while close-reading took up most of it. But even fiction writing’s now reaching its end after reaching an end point in my overall journey with it (point of doneness and internalization of “extreme show, don’t tell”). That’s why I’m here. I can tell the month after this will be a whole nother thing altogether.

Who knows? Maybe, I will continue George, but it will be in a very different posture, maybe much more settled, invisible, the way someone of who I am can only be and demonstrate.

Perhaps, mastery is step one from here. Everything afterwards is an endless, even more grandiose series of steps, to the point of an eternity. I can only imagine. I can only wonder. I can only wait and see.

Absolution (April 30, 2026)

Somehow, in a strange way, writing fiction, at least for me right now, feels a lot more scientific and systematic than analytical journaling ever was, probably because of the level of analysis fiction writing actually requires when you’re working on a very sophisticated, precise, literary, systematic level.

It’s probably because I stopped doing fiction as this loose and intuitive voodoo thing one day, and from then on, it’s become this incredibly scientific thing.

I can tell no one would blame me if I stopped and rested on my laurels. But at the same time, you can’t unsee what you saw. That level of scientific systematic precision that’s just out of reach. Right there for you to improve yourself into. But again, no one would blame if I stopped. I’ve already improved so much that I’ve slapped my face ten times beyond the average web novel and have already reached a point literary writers would clap for me for doing more than the bare minimum and actually journeying far enough to be credible as a writer’s writer. Yet, yet, yet, fucking yet, I can transcend even the best-selling literary writers. I can go far beyond. I can reach for it and snatch it. It’s right there. It’s right fucking there.

And now, I’m starting to wonder. Shit. Shit-shit-shit. Shitttt.

Run away, run away, run away.

(That level of ambition.)

*[Are you fucking trying to re-create the world 1-1? The fuck are you doing!] _{I know, I know I know, I-know.} ^{I get it, I-get-it—I-get-it—I-get-it—I-get-it.}

—. (Yeah?) —. W-what are you doing? (What?) W-what the f-_f-_f-fuck? (I…)

I have nowhere else to go.

(I can’t lie to myself…) (I can’t tell myself otherwise.) (I can’t pretend.) (This is where my voice lies now.) (I can’t go back.) (I can’t go forward expecting not to be changed.) (This is what I wanted, and now that I have it, I’m scared again? I guess I wanted to feel this way, but it’s… why-what-whyat?)

I’m going through the motions. All my previous containers have died. My previous mediums. Versions. Blogs. And all manner of things through which I used to feel so alive. Now, this is where the tension’s at its peak, and that’s why… That’s why… why… why… why… I can’t deny myself.

I have nowhere else to go. Everything else is just a bunch of meaningless things.

But yeah, I do wonder… I’m searching everywhere for options. I’ve been tirelessly scouring the land, everywhere.

BUT NO.

no. Nothing. no. Nothing.

I never knew (I did).

I’m as vulnerable as day 1. I have nothing to lose, because I have everything to gain.

I have nothing to fall back on. No “previouses”. No forward plans. No setups. No breadcrumbs. This is all it is, all in all, all-in-all, all-whole. I am the epitome of who I am right now. Flesh, blood, tooth, claw, writing, wait, observation, moment. I am as vulnerable as day 1.

Yet I am at my most alive.

Self-rigor, integrity, and chasing after the peak of life and living are fucking sins. If I just hugged the external metric, the hug of a friend, of a lover, of someone to tell me it’s all good enough. What a fuckery am I. Stop, stop, stop, put down the pen!

“Oh, I fucking like it.”

Ha-ha-ha-ha! I FUCKING LOVE THIS SHIT!!

Ambient Music and Its Echoes of Big-Worlds (May 1, 2026)

Listening to ambient music (and its echoes of “big-worlds”) here at home is making me realize that the weight and value I place upon the real life that I have built and cultivated is actually very, very miniscule. There’s nothing at all to my life even in the scope of 119 eight-hour cafe stays in 67 unique cafes in the last 11 months, where I wrote and read personally¹. The growth I have accomplished is great on a scale relative to itself, but in reality, there is nothing to say of it. I have participated in nothingness. I’m not speaking existentially, nihilistically, or in terms of who or what or where or how or why I am. I am speaking simply in terms of pure size.

“I have not existed any more than I have already existed before,” is a strong way to put this.

In fact, one could even say that in all that time, I didn’t move a single inch, nor did I move a mile (an inch in relative scale, a mile in relative scale). You would think that inch movement would beget an entire world if the mile didn’t, or vice versa (i.e., the mile movement would beget an entire world if the inch didn’t). The intimate and the geographical. That there somehow would be a difference, that both or either one would still make it past. But no, none, not at all, nothing. That’s what I mean by nothingness. I’ve invested in growth relative to nothing, itself.

I didn’t make any more than I had already landed on, and in fact, one could say I intensified, accelerated, accrued it. That staticity. That state-of-place, that point-of-itself, that relativity, and in that relativity, “nothing, itself,” or “nothing—itself.”

I wrote a fiction, and in that fiction, I existed as much as I identified with it, and now, looking at that fiction, I see myself the way one looks at a car and perceives their own memories with it. There is something to be said about existence that hinges not on identity but on what one ends up becoming (anyway). That fiction ended.

I’ve barely become, but also, anyhow, I’ve barely been. It has always been the bare minimum. I’ve barely become, barely been. By the point I’m making a point, I will have succeeded halfway, and then barely, up to a certain point, without adding or accruing anything but whatever “bare halfway minimum” could be said at all to have been (now already become), barely.²

I’ve made a story. A long story. The longest story of all.

“I went and moved and did things” is probably an accurate 1-to-1 of it, not a summary, not a distillation, but the whole essence, structure, and totality of it—”it it itself.”

For a very long time, I thought reality was this ultra-complex thing, and words were this failure who I had to train to utter precision so that it could really say what I meant to say. But what I say “I went and moved and did things,” that is the more precise I’ve ever been, I feel. That is exactly what it is. Reality is in that. It’s not a euphemism for ultra-complexity in an iceberg way. It’s literally that. Hyper-specific, “hyper-realistic,” hyper-sensory language, for the longest time, was gospel. But now, it feels un-realistic. The density of sensory prose and description has fooled me into thinking reality is so much more than that phrase I just said. “Ultra-complexity” is a fiction. “Realism” is a fiction. Reality is that phrase. I’m not saying ultra-complexity is “wrong,” which is a whole nother thing altogether. I’m saying it’s inaccurate the way fiction is inaccurate, the way one might traditionally think of abstraction (whether in the sense of that phrase resembling abstraction or the separate idea of words being this limited thing that makes it inherently abstraction). That phrase isn’t abstraction though. Ultra-complexity is, the way fiction is (and not by words). That phrase is “it it itself.” And I’m not equating the phrase to the memory, the experience, or anything like that, but to the size. I’m not arguing about fiction.

I’m at Least Five People (May 1, 2026)

I’ve always been at least five people, working in the same room, in some kind of shared-space cohort, filling a role and a space within the room, each with their own spot: healthy discussions are aplenty. But most importantly, we are all one. In the end, I must coordinate the leaving of passing selves and the accommodation of fresh arrivals. We are all one and the same, yet we are not all in the same room the same way. Every time I am, I am, in all the things I am. As such, am I.

Broom-Sweeping Arrogance (May 1, 2026)

It’s really going to be the start of a new month. I can feel every single inch of what I’m doing. I think that’s a good thing, right? I mean, as soon as this whole month’s over, I won’t be able to tell just how much my mind has wrapped itself around something it can never truly comprehend beyond what the experience and objective changes speak for themselves—and not the kind you cross out on a to-do list. Instead, you’re dumbfounded, and your stare goes blank. There’s only that sensation, and anything else is pure, liberated arrogance. But perhaps, that’s what’s driving anything that I do. To speak, to “creativize,” to deliberate, to have any thought at all, to decide for myself anything. All of these demand from the person the wholeness of decision, and the conviction of a soul, that soul brimming with all the things of a life, of a religion, even of oneself as one relates one’s capacity, fullness, and all-in-all in something based, founded, established, grounded, and emplaced. I think, shit, there’s just some shit I can’t really get around to making sense of, so I can just abstract whatever, and then hopefully, I will have said something with at least feather weight.

connection: morning breakfast (May 2, 2026)

I don’t know if the word is loneliness. But I can tell that I’ve gotten so used to solitude I can’t tell the difference. I’ve grown to be content in my own way. And I’ve found inner peace in myself. I continue to read, learn, explore, and discover. I still have eyes that can see. They haven’t gone dark and bleary. But yeah, noting that I didn’t even go and greet my oldest half-brother makes me realize that I really have changed. I’ve become so absorbed and immersed in my own life and so sufficient in myself and even don’t even think to go out there on the internet to broadcats myself like I used to. It has gone to the point that yeah, I can only know just how lonely it must feel not to have a younger half-brother greet you. But I have changed. I’ve gotten used to dismissal, to people ignoring you to your face, to brick walls, to unavailable people, to people who aren’t there. I’ve become my own kind of happy, in the way only I could. And it leads to situations like this where I know just how painful and crushing it can feel for others who need that kind of affection so badly. I would want it myself, and I take the little forms of connection I get. But I don’t need it to be content, happy, and secure. I have become blind. Happiness blinds me, in a way. I’ve become my own kind of shameless, not the blatant, brash kind, but the one that’s privately self-secure and has forgotten how to feel embarassed and to be so anguished about everything. And that growth, closure, healing, and self-development have made it so that yeah, it will happen. I will straight up forget people. I will forget to greet them. It’s not that I don’t care. But I’m no longer at the same wavelength. Maybe, in the past, I’d overthink and try to perfect every social situation. But I just… move on. It doesn’t break me, and that’s its own kind of freedom. It can also make people uncomfortable, I imagine. The idea that someone can be so self-possessed and self-free. It’s almost like I’m a psychopath. Giving up, hating oneself, being depressed. All of these things make you incredibly emotionally unavailable, but at the same time, it’s easy to reason that you forget to greet someone because you’re so caught up in everything. But at the same time, that also makes you a lot more relatable, a lot “easier” in a way. When forgetting to greet someone happens not because of that, but because of… well… happiness… it’s a whole nother thing that I wrote this passage for. It’s its own kind of thing. Something very new, very profound. Something I can’t even begin to wrap my head around. But here, my reaction. I remember when I broke down at a single message in DMs. Now, I really do forget. I really do. I forget what it’s like. That kind of freedom. It’s like, “Oh, I had an awkward social interaction.” And it just slides off me like butter. That is a great thing. But it’s also the one that makes me not take such obsessive care into ensuring that everyone around me is people-pleased. And that can lead to situations like this where yeah, it’s totally out of my mind. There was a time where I was like, “Oh, I feel that a single message in DMs will kill me and make me feel very horrible, which makes me attuned to others experiencing the same thing so I have to go through the effort of birthday-greeting everyone and even sending them happy new years messages.” Gosh, that was a time for sure.Now, it feels like everyone’s just going about. In the last 11 months, I did 121 eight-hour cafe stays in 68 unique cafes, so yeah, lots of getting stared at and all that. You can imagine the kind of person I am to reach this point. You can imagine how much it just slides off me that I don’t think to be there for everyone anymore all super anxiously. Most of my life is incredibly mundane, sensory, and grounded where all the craziness gets absorbed into daily life instantly and extremely like tonal whiplash, and it comes out in the way I write fiction. You would think the 121 cafe stays were the reason. That this was the solution. No, no, no. That was a crucial part of it. But that wasn’t where it started. That’s actually a very later thing in this long journey I’ve been on. The last 11 months were not the start. Maybe, in a way, these 11 months were like ancient Rome, but there was an ancient Egypt that crucially paved the way for 4,000 (?) years before it. (Ancient Egypt being farther back in time to Rome than Rome is to today.)

The funny thing is that I greeted them right after writing this passage, and I didn’t explain why. I just said the following and hearted his thank-you message:

Happy belated birthday [Name]! Sorry for not greeting you yesterday!

The End.

There really was a time that LOVE needed to be this whole shebang, this whole crazy thing. Insecurity really got me.

Now, it’s just morning breakfast and the feeling of going about and along and being there, staying there, hanging out, taking it as you go, letting them know, smiling here, laughing there, discussion here, arguing there. It’s really not that crazy.

Idealistic vs. Imagistic (May 2, 2026)

People who speak in ideals really don’t make sense to me anymore. Maybe because of all the time I had to engage in self-confrontation and observation of those microscopic details of life, of those micro-actions, hyper-sensory details, of all that which denies a person the ability truly to escape except by vice.

this is imagistic, so in a sense, you could call it idealistic, but for me this is the closest thing to reality. Not a summary, but the very actual essence of it. Not this specifically, but you see it when you see it. It’s not these words. It’s the essence here and now of all of this.

 The beat of vast everyday feet vibrated everything, the hand warring for fixture. Mud trailed continuously, indurated into the ground by sun overlay. Adventurers sought, out there, where frost came in sweat shivers, heat in leaf-prick itches, and pinches in travel-sore feet. Their luggage fell constantly into their grips, dragged them against the earth, and wore their skin away. Inn stews rebuilt their damaged tissues, mended their muscles, and healed their wounds. Warm faces, lowered tones, next-morning breakfasts in the coffee-room, and bed-rooms for low prices per week drew their smiles.

Texture Over Event (May 4, 2026)

I realize that’s probably the truth of my life now. I don’t really care about story anymore in the conventional or traditional sense. I care very much about atmosphere, sensation, and real life. I care very much about rain, sun, and all that. It’s what I felt so nostalgic about looking back. It was never the RPG or the story or the anything that happened, since anything can happen in a story. But what I recall the most is those little sensory details that accompanied and broke up all of those turning events and moments. That’s life now for me. I have reached a point. Nostalgia points to atmosphere. The present me desires only the sunlit world and feathery leaves. There’s nothing else to it. I have become a very “look at paintings and atmospheric Pinterest images” kind of person, the kind that enjoys Skyrim’s atmosphere, the kind that enjoys Minecraft’s, the kind that enjoys those 2 AM lo-fi videos strictly for the amosphere they create, the kind that lives in a world that just goes on while I take my time with everything here and now. It’s why I read literary texts, and I don’t really care about what I’m reading. If I did, I would pick and choose which stories were the best or most appealing or most relatable or most relevant to some core belief or way of seeing the world. But the only thing that ties all of those texts together is atmosphere, which opens up an infinity of options for me. I can read anything, even web novels that you would think would go against atmosphere, because there is a world everywhere to be found.

Not YA! (May 6, 2026)

It’s so strange to realize randomly while tired that I’ve accelerated so much in the past 3 years as a writer and reader that I don’t even recognize things anymore. At one point, web novels were there at the top. Everything, including their prose. But now, it just feels like I’m drunk. All of that wittiness and playfulness and irreverence now feel so made-up and strange, like from another time, like from somewhere else that I can’t understand, comprehend.

I don’t know. Something in all of this, all of it. I don’t remember exactly, but at one point, those words really were the cream of the crop for me. That string of words they added as “spice” was what I considered to be highly advanced. And now, 3 years later, I’m effectively drowning in words that I can’t even begin to start comparisons with. I’ve gone so far down the rabbit hole, and it’s probably because it happened so gradually yet so quickly and so intensely and immersively, without me really taking the time to stop and really question it all. And that’s how I got here.

At one point, fiction was a very, very different thing and world for me. Now, I can barely even recognize what I considered to be hard before. Now, the prose is all wrong. Web novels look so small. It’s not that I will write every single YA novel and web novel in existence. I won’t. There are billions of stories and even more phrases. Even if those phrases may be YA or web novel-y, they are will phrases I will never ever be able to use ever in my life because it’s just that impossible to make a whole story and have it happen again exactly the same way, especially across a million words which is typical for a web novel.

I don’t know. It’s strange. What was it? Where am I again? Who? At one point, I was. Very different. A person, likely. Yeah. I think that’s what it was. Who I was. I don’t know. Maybe not anymore. Maybe some more. Dunno which.

But it’s strange. Very. Very… Strange.

I can barely come to terms with it. I look at my fiction writing now, and I can’t even tell. What difference? There is. Very visible. Very obvious. That’s probably why it’s so hard to see, or at least so easy to see that even beginning to say hello is a dam-break. I dunno! (shrug)

Something about this. Everything. I don’t know. I should know. Yet it’s screaming and pulsing and nothing is hitting and where am I being? No. I don’t know. I am here, in all “apparentlies” of the word. I am… here. Dot. Dot-dot-dot.

I cannot fucking believe it.

Worm. Mother of Learning. I’m looking through them all. And I’m stuttering in my mind.

Wait, they were written (just) like this. What the fuck. Wha-the spell. The spell’s broken.

What happened?

To me!?

It really is true. It really—no, no. It really is… Literary—no, no. I can’t, no, can’t… use that term. Fuck. No!—no. NO!!—no. no, no, no. no no. no no non no n.

Fuck.

Essentially, the cream of the crop and awesome writing were like that because they were essentially bare minimum of literary technical skill. They were one step ahead of literal amateur by miles (big gap), yet they were still only at best importing the bare minimum of the “masters”. Fuck! Shit! Fuck!

Is that what it was? Fuck!!! No!!! Is that what I’ve become?! Fuck me, no. Fuck. Shit. Fuck.

In contrast to what I regarded before, my writing now is very fucking far away. Literary “show, don’t tell”. Dirty realism. Blue-collar. “Extreme show, don’t tell.” Micro-actions. Even micro-environmental descriptions(!). Sensory grounding. Cinematic blocking. Scene-setting. Shit, shit, shit! This is all good. And yet, what in the fuckery.

I’m not supposed to feel this way. Yet I’ve changed, and I do. And it really feels like reading YA. It does, in the way that a person uses the word “YA” when they know what it means not when they’re in it and they don’t know what it means and see it as just a floating word with no meaning at all. Fuck! FucK!

That’s how I fucking write now—Not YA! That! That thing! (this current writing that I now know myself by) It’s screaming at me, yet its mouth is closed because I shut it and stifled it and made sure it never released its foul breath on me, yes, it’s stinking, it’s stinking, I won’t let it, won’t let it. Fuck you, no fuck you… fuccckk you! You scream, and I scream. And I’m unable to bear or counter that fact. Shit. I’ve changed.

I don’t see it anymore. I really don’t. I don’t know what I saw. It’s not just the prose. It’s everything. The characters. The dialogue. The plot. The world-building. The interactions. All of it. The dynamics. The twists, the turns. The wittiness. Everything. Even the humor! It’s just… all gone. Where am I? Who am I? I’m not questioning that. I am who I am now, but relative to who I was, I feel a strange destabilization, like all of a sudden, I have to ask who am I because if I don’t, I will not be who I was as well as who I am. I am both. I’m just slowly making sense of what the fuckery is this fuckery.

It all falls flat on me. I don’t see it anymore. What happened? I don’t know. Don’t fucking know.

Yet, all I can say is that it was nice, I guess. I guess I will read all of the books here in my room. They’re all donated. They changed me a lot since a year ago. Yeah. I don’t know. If I never got them, I would’ve only had the 19th century texts, and that wouldn’t be enough. Having these 20th century texts really helped a lot. And now, armed with all that I’ve learned and grown through all of these texts and books and all of the time I spent getting wrecked with my writing, it’s funny. So fucking funny. I’ve reached a point of enjoyment already. This YA-literary thing wouldn’t have hit me if I didn’t enjoy where I was already. Who I am now. It only hits me because I really have grown into my new shoes. Much bigger ones than the ones I had before. I could barely, if at all, say a word. I don’t even know who that person was. I just know he was mute and couldn’t see his words through, except by choking there in the corner somewhere. I don’t know.

Scene-Setting and Micro-Action: The Literary Difference (May 7, 2026)

Interesting. I’ve been taught two crucial things: scene-setting and active-verb kinetics/micro-action. So naturally, I’ve moved very far away from the reliance on costume design often associated with things like film. When I do write people’s descriptions, it’s often because it’s significant, not because it’s the way to know them. “Show don’t tell” is most effective when it isn’t static, but alive and kinetic, even when it is creeping, even when it is dead-still.

This is the difference between amateur writing and literary writing, I’ve seen. You see almost no descriptive scene-setting and micro-actions in the former, but so much in the latter. I’m not talking about nodding. I’m talking about everything after that. If that’s macro, there’s the micro.

Again. Again. (May 7, 2026)

the thing about life is that it always break your immersion. If you want to write a lived-in fiction world, the way to keep immersion is to break it. For example, I was a writer who journaled 4.5 million words in 1,000 days. All of a sudden, I’m in a very loud local 21st century market in the Philippines. But the funny thing is that I’m only able to write that much because my immersion has been broken all too many times. If you want a world that feels immersive, write through life. Don’t let a single spell drag you from start to end. Start, again. Again. Again. A different person each time. Different choices. Yet all are equal and valid and whole. That is immersion. Contradict yourself as much as you reveal yourself and the world around you. Immersion is that.

I Write Under the Sun (May 7, 2026)

It really does feel like it. I can’t believe I’m feeling it again. I thought that after reading books, I would find that there’s so much still to read, and then I realize, now that I have taken the time to write a novel demonstrating “extreme, show don’t tell,” sensory grounding, mundanity, slice of life, brutality, and all and have taken the time to read and learn so much, I am reaching a point where I feel it again.

The feeling that in the end, it doesn’t really matter where you go. There is only mundanity. There is only life. There is only that which you already know which you don’t but you know by sheer being.

There’s everything full about mundanity, about life, about that stillness even with the kinetics of traveling, even with the sensory grounding of sweat, mud, heat, and rain. I’m not discounting that fullness.

I’m just saying that in the end, I cannot escape it. I cannot escape the sun. I cannot escape everything under it. I know it well as I know sheer being in all the mundanities, lives, groundings, stillnesses that occur in every possible place, situation, and background. It is as much itself as it is what it is in sheer being, and in that sense, yes, it is under the sun.

By the time I’ve lived, nothing has happened. By the time I’ve lived, everything has happened. By the time I’ve lived, I’ve died.

Everyone has come and gone. Everything has come and gone. By the time I’ve realized, I have already been many different people, and the person I am now, very far away, yet so close to that ringing sound of being (not aliveness), but being in the fullest sense of the world, encompassing everything including aliveness and including death (not in the absolute sense where experience happens no longer but in the way it is experienced as it happens absolutely).

Still, I am excited to go about all day every day writing this novel. I have spent 27 days on it, and it’s at 23,318 words. I intend to go up to 1,500,000 words. It’s hard because I write it in that “extreme show, don’t tell” way, but it’s worth it. I intend to keep going. And I will keep going, perhaps even after that. To start every day fresh, because every day is a new day, every day is a new person writing at the desk, inserting something new, making the world more lived-in one day at a time, one person at a time, one desk at a time, one session at a time, one burst at a time, 500 words at a time. It is magical that way, even as it is profoundly just life.

1,500,000 words. [I’ll] be many more people before [I’m] done.

I hope [I’ll] enjoy meeting them.

If my rate averages around 500 words per day, that goal will take 8 years and a month. That’s a far cry from the 4.5 million words I’ve journaled in 1,000 days, but makes sense given the conditions I’ve set. At least I’ll have something fun to kill time on—on top of every other fun thing I’ll do throughout the next 8 years.

Come Back, Mark (May 7, 2026)

Man, I do miss my stating arrogance, that voice that kept screaming and saying what it felt and thought and imagined and idealized and perceived in the way that it could only tell. Having spent the last 27 days dedicating myself to “extreme show don’t tell” in this novel that is still ongoing, it makes sense that I would feel a little strange and disoriented. There was a time when observation “as is” was impossible for me, not because I wasn’t precise, but because I was very much myself in the way a person who projected themselves onto everything was. I do love the mundanities, life, stillness and kinetics “as they are,” and sensory grounding, but still, there is that whirling grin squeezing and pushing its way through it all. That must-be-that-I-am is swelling, gigantifying, and pushing the ceiling. It will. It’s decided that.

Did I prove myself enough? Can I remove the “British accent” now? Was 27 days sufficient? Just the sheer saying this makes it feel not enough. But I have to ask, to doubt. Doubting is part of what makes it truly earned. The doubting, the 27 days, the continuing past those 27 days, and the person re-instating voice. All of it swivels into “earned.”

Who But Myself? (May 8, 2026)

Sometimes, in the little things, I can barely think. I find myself consumed by them, and for a moment, I am everything. And for a moment, I am not. I have little left to fend for, for I am exposed, vulnerable as a pig in a pigpen waiting to be a-slaughtered. I have only that, and that is the “man i is,” in all the things I am, with as little flavor left to squeeze out of this stupid head I’ve made so readily available through writing. Fuck me, man. Shit me. Fuck-me. Absolute fuckery. That is the thing that I am. That is what I am. Who I am. And that’s why I smile, smirk even. I feel joy in my heart. That kind of “stative” arrogance only someone of this stature can ever begin to say and then proclaim. For in my quiet moments, I say it, voicing out what I can’t bite back, and then I later shout it in the mountains, as a declaration of war-freedom, of who-I-am, being… being truly.

By the time I’ve realized, I’ve fucked myself. Ten times. Five minutes per fuckery, and then after that, a break until the next day. I’ve shat myself, burned myself, totaled myself, made a disrespectful totem of myself, a fool, an everything, that thing, that thing. It’s a spell I’ve cast on myself—this idea that I am, this idea that I have anything left with which to fend for. This is the life which I’ve lived, and this is the life I will continue to fuck up along-by, taking sweet orases, until nothing is left, and I am but a figment of whatever-shit-I’m-supposed-to-be. That is the joy of the oras. Of being. Of (being) alive. Of that thing that I am that I can’t (must) be. I should go along, yet inside me, bewitching me, charming me with thoughts that don’t cohere with anything, is myself. I live. I breathe. I hate. That despicability which I’ve taken on myself—to be, to be, indeed, is a plight upon my skin, my image, my appearance. This thing that I am, which must, and which will. Hate, spilling out. I must be. I have to. Not just that I am, or that I have—but that all this time, I was and have been to the point of “musting,” to the point of having-to, because fuck-shit-fuck, I’ve already gone so far, burned so many bridges, tucked myself in so many nights, fuck me, fuckery. That’s the signal. Go. Cue. Shit. Fuck. Know yourself. And then play it all off as just another game. I can’t but play with asynchronous words, and play again and again until little can be said but the silence, and there, my mundanity, my richness, my life, my stillness, that kinetic motion of being: sheer aliveness, being, to be, to be, to be. And then… limp flat dead.

Don’t Tell Me (May 9, 2026)

[Context is fiction creative writing.] Dunno if this is true or what. But I think I’ve kinda exhausted just about all I’ve learned and all that I’ve recently absorbed in terms of vocabulary. The solution is new books of course, and there’s still lots there in the active notes that I haven’t actually written down explicitly. But within the context of what I can write in the story I’m making with the intents and the story and all, I’ve hit a vocabulary wall, I think. It’s not that I got paralyzed over the word “the” or something. But vocabulary is how much you can actually cover self-honestly without veering off into redundancy and performance. I don’t use vocabulary just to express what’s in my head. I use it to find out and explore things I’ve never ever thought to write down. For someone like me who’s basically written everything that was already in their head, the instrument that is vocabulary is to go beyond what comes already to me in the head. For me to reach a wall… I guess such is the limit of someone who has exhausted all of the stream of consciousness, internal, journaling, and blabbery through 4.5 million words in 1,000 days (the reason I can write without internal and “telling” in my current in fiction) and also exhausted their “extreme show, don’t tell” (25,725 words in 28 days) active-note-taking (77,000 active-note words in about 11 months) well.

Maybe, whatever this is, it just might be completeness.

Yeah, I think I’ve really reached a wall. All suggestions thrown at me kinda just are so blatantly myopic I can’t even begin to start to say anything at all. Examples include: Syntax, bro, bro, bro, totally not the first thing in what makes writing writing, bro, bro, Mr. Guy who wrote 4.5 million words in 1,000 days have no clue what the hell syntax is!! Look for next syntax, bro, bro, bro. I’m being made a fool of. Bro, bro, look for niche lexicon. Read 17th century. I’m years ahead of you. Read 18th. I’m years ahead of you. 19th. Years ahead. Let’s not play beginner games. Bro, bro, just change intent, write something different, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro. You can write infinite things = solution!!!! bro, bro, bro.

should probably mention “1,000 hours of 123 eight-hour cafe stays in 67 unique cafes in 11.5 months”

Utter Vocabulary, the Bunch of Words: Full-Assing Reality (May 10, 2026)

To prove that I’ve already reached completion and to reach it fully, I will map out all 4.5 million words I’ve journaled to see the full and highest territorial extent (FaHTE) of my “utter vocabulary” in terms of words and syntax.

The following is what that looks like.

A single journal entry:

Translation:

Raw Text:

A dog watched hundreds of acorns scattered about on the grass. Hundreds of other grass particles were spread on the land. It was a distribution on a scale never before seen, and the dog’s simplest reaction was to scream in the form of repeated, emphatic barks. This was worth hollering about, dancing about, and singing about, but the dog’s mere tools were his four legs, head, and the rest of his canine body. How could a dog further express his exhilaration? He leapt and barked with a euphoric tone in repetition. This was enough for him, as he ran around incessantly before letting himself rest in the shade under a tree. The acorns were all around, and he was surrounded by them, in a manner similar to a human child’s relationship with his mother’s hug.

Systematized:

• ⟨A⟩ ∣ ⟨dog⟩ ⟨watched⟩ ⟨hundreds⟩ ∣ ⟨of⟩ ∣∣ ⟨acorns⟩ ● ⟨scattered⟩ ●● ⟨about⟩ ⟨on⟩ ○ ⟨the⟩ ○○ ⟨grass.⟩ ≫ ⟨Hundreds⟩ ∣ ⟨of⟩ ⟨other⟩ ● ⟨grass⟩ ●● ⟨particles⟩ ⟨were⟩ ○ ⟨spread⟩ ∣ ⟨land⟩ ≫ ⟨It⟩ ∣ ⟨was⟩ II ⟨a⟩ ∣∣∣ ⟨distribution⟩ ⟨scale⟩ ● ⟨never⟩ ●● ⟨before⟩ ●●● ⟨seen⟩ ⟨, and⟩ ⟨the⟩ ○ ⟨dog’s⟩ ⟨simplest⟩ ∣ ⟨reaction⟩ ⟨was to⟩ ● ⟨scream⟩ ●● ⟨in the⟩ ○ ⟨form⟩ ⟨repeated⟩ ∣ ⟨,⟩ ∣∣ ⟨emphatic⟩ ∣∣∣ ⟨barks.⟩ ≫ ⟨This⟩ ⟨worth⟩ ⟨hollering⟩ ∣ ⟨about,⟩ ⟨dancing⟩ ● ⟨about,⟩ ⟨singing⟩ ○ ⟨about,⟩ ⟨but⟩ ⟨mere⟩ ∣ ⟨tools⟩ ⟨his⟩ ● ⟨four⟩ ●● ⟨legs,⟩ ●●● ⟨head,⟩ ●●●● ⟨and the⟩ ●●●●● ⟨rest⟩ ●●●●●● ⟨canine⟩ ●●●●●●● ⟨body⟩ ≫ ⟨How⟩ ∣ ⟨could⟩ ⟨further⟩ ● ⟨express⟩ ⟨exhilaration⟩ ⟨?⟩ ≫ ⟨He⟩ ⟨leapt⟩ ∣ ⟨and⟩ ∣∣ ⟨barked⟩ ⟨with⟩ ● ⟨euphoric⟩ ●● ⟨tone⟩ ●●● ⟨in⟩ ●●●● ⟨repetition.⟩ ≫ ⟨enough⟩ ∣ ⟨for⟩ ∣∣ ⟨him,⟩ ⟨as⟩ ● ⟨he⟩ ●● ⟨ran⟩ ●●● ⟨around⟩ ●●●● ⟨incessantly⟩ ●●●●● ⟨before⟩ ●●●●●● ⟨letting⟩ ●●●●●●● ⟨himself⟩ ●●●●●●●● ⟨rest⟩ ⟨shade⟩ ○ ⟨under⟩ ○○ ⟨tree.⟩ ≫ ⟨The⟩ ⟨all⟩ ⟨surrounded⟩ ∣ ⟨by⟩ ∣∣ ⟨them,⟩ ⟨manner⟩ ● ⟨similar⟩ ●● ⟨to⟩ ●●● ⟨human⟩ ●●●● ⟨child’s⟩ ●●●●● ⟨relationship⟩ ⟨mother’s⟩ ●●●●●● ⟨hug.⟩

Translation of the above Markup (this is not a part of the process, just done here in this passage for explaining/demonstrating that the symbols are purposeful):

• ⟨A⟩ ⟨A dog⟩ ⟨watched⟩ ⟨hundreds⟩ ⟨of⟩ ⟨hundreds of⟩ ⟨acorns⟩ ⟨hundreds of acorns⟩ ⟨scattered⟩ ⟨about⟩ ⟨scattered about⟩ ⟨acorns scattered about⟩ ⟨on⟩ ⟨the⟩ ⟨grass⟩ ⟨on the⟩ ⟨the grass⟩ ⟨on the grass.⟩ ≫ ⟨Hundreds⟩ ⟨Hundreds of⟩ ⟨other⟩ ⟨grass⟩ ⟨particles⟩ ⟨other grass⟩ ⟨grass particles⟩ ⟨other grass particles⟩ ⟨were⟩ ⟨spread⟩ ⟨were spread⟩ ⟨land⟩ ⟨It⟩ ⟨was⟩ ⟨a⟩ ⟨distribution⟩ ⟨It was⟩ ⟨a distribution⟩ ⟨It was a distribution⟩ ⟨scale⟩ ⟨never⟩ ⟨before⟩ ⟨seen⟩ ⟨never before⟩ ⟨scale never before seen⟩ ⟨, and⟩ ⟨the⟩ ⟨dog’s⟩ ⟨the dog’s⟩ ⟨simplest⟩ ⟨reaction⟩ ⟨simplest reaction⟩ ⟨was to⟩ ⟨scream⟩ ⟨in the⟩ ⟨was to scream⟩ ⟨was to scream in the⟩ ⟨form⟩ ⟨repeated⟩ ⟨,⟩ ⟨emphatic⟩ ⟨barks.⟩ ⟨repeated,⟩ ⟨repeated, emphatic⟩ ⟨repeated, emphatic barks⟩ ≫ ⟨This⟩ ⟨worth⟩ ⟨hollering⟩ ⟨about,⟩ ⟨hollering about,⟩ ⟨dancing⟩ ⟨about,⟩ ⟨dancing about,⟩ ⟨singing⟩ ⟨about,⟩ ⟨singing about,⟩ ⟨but⟩ ⟨mere⟩ ⟨tools⟩ ⟨mere tools⟩ ⟨his⟩ ⟨four⟩ ⟨legs,⟩ ⟨head,⟩ ⟨and the⟩ ⟨rest⟩ ⟨canine⟩ ⟨body⟩ ⟨his four legs,⟩ ⟨and the rest⟩ ⟨canine body⟩ ⟨the rest of his canine body⟩ ≫ ⟨How⟩ ⟨could⟩ ⟨How could⟩ ⟨further⟩ ⟨express⟩ ⟨further express⟩ ⟨exhilaration⟩ ⟨?⟩ ≫ ⟨He⟩ ⟨leapt⟩ ⟨and⟩ ⟨barked⟩ ⟨leapt and barked⟩ ⟨with⟩ ⟨euphoric⟩ ⟨tone⟩ ⟨in⟩ ⟨repetition.⟩ ⟨with euphoric tone⟩ ⟨in repetition.⟩ ⟨with euphoric tone in repetition.⟩ ≫ ⟨enough⟩ ⟨for⟩ ⟨him,⟩ ⟨enough for him,⟩ ⟨as⟩ ⟨he⟩ ⟨ran⟩ ⟨around⟩ ⟨incessantly⟩ ⟨before⟩ ⟨letting⟩ ⟨himself⟩ ⟨rest⟩ ⟨as he ran⟩ ⟨ran around⟩ ⟨ran around incessantly⟩ ⟨before letting himself rest⟩ ⟨as he ran around incessantly before letting himself rest⟩ ⟨shade⟩ ⟨under⟩ ⟨tree.⟩ ⟨shade under tree.⟩ ≫ ⟨The⟩ ⟨all⟩ ⟨surrounded⟩ ⟨by⟩ ⟨them,⟩ ⟨surrounded by them,⟩ ⟨manner⟩ ⟨similar⟩ ⟨to⟩ ⟨human⟩ ⟨child’s⟩ ⟨relationship⟩ ⟨mother’s⟩ ⟨hug.⟩ ⟨manner similar to⟩ ⟨human child’s⟩ ⟨child’s relationship⟩ ⟨human child’s relationship⟩ ⟨mother’s hug.⟩ ⟨with his mother’s hug.⟩ ⟨in a manner similar to a human child’s relationship with his mother’s hug.⟩

This essentially means I will know what “new” looks like in the most objective sense of the word I can produce in the context of “utter vocabulary.” This is a very creative endeavor, if it isn’t obvious enough.

I will be able to have a series of text files in one folder containing all of my entries systematized like this. Then I can use VS Code’s workspace “Find” (which finds through all files in a folder) or just click and scroll to see the FaHTE of my writing as this objectifiable thing, then afterwards produce something that I’ve never done through just experimenting and taking active notes of books all around me and then using Find to see what I’ve done and haven’t done in a objective pattern-matching way—syntax (constructions), words, vocabulary.

While it is true that I am making new ground every day, this will accelerate the fruiting of that experience through what is essentially a process of accelerated, relentless objective critique feedback loops. It’s the difference between someone trying new dancing movements vs. precisely systematizing of the motions they’ve done, incorporating new motions from external sources, and then experiment and building, from this concoction, new motions.

This destroys redundancy. If there’s a word for precision (compressed, compact), this is it.

This is a combative response to feeling that I’ve already reached completion—anti-laziness. If I’ve known stream of consciousness (SOC) before so intimately already in the course of those millions of words over the 1,000 days across which I’ve written them, then this will be like entering the deepest, nichest, and most dizzying crevices of SOC’s heart with the straightest face.

I’m essentially doing the equivalent of moving from reading books (riding off the author’s skilled descriptions and/or arguments) to actively taking notes and destroying the illusion of mastery and understanding through explicit breaking down of phrases, syntaxes, and words. This isn’t even an analogy or an equivalent. I’m literally using the same breaking-down I used for external books, but for my own millions of words. I use Find for these external-books break-downs text files as well, and that’s what allows me to keep writing my current fiction story since utter vocabulary (syntax, words, everything) is what leads to even greater sight and new things altogether (rather than the idea that words are merely just regurgitations of what is already inarticulately obvious and intuitive). I’m actually working off evidence here.

I don’t write the leaf because I can see the leaf. I saw the leaf becuase I can write the leaf:

a wrinkled, browning, sandpapery, eight-chevroned leaf a little larger than her palm

Writing is sight.

I’m turning my millions of words into a bunch of words (“is that really what people can see, or just what I assume and thus don’t see?”), which is exactly what will make it most objective. The difference between someone in their own world vs. someone who is outside traveling to new places and observing the world around them, fitting themselves and writing itself into the world around them rather than the world into their cramped, confined, isolated, abstract, ungrounded, zero-objective-feedback, only-intuitive, birth-to-death-entrenched hole of a mind that is the least self-possessed thing in the world by sheer projecting blindness.

Instead of blaming people reactively in a voodoo self-projecting bruised-ego way (for not “getting it”), I am receding into un-authoriality and into objective cinematic “extreme show, don’t tell.”

Are my words just words? Or do they close their eyes and point to reality? Are they just assumptions on assumptions, frameworks on frameworks, middens on middens, nested arguments on nested arguments, completely meaningless for anyone seeking anything enactable into reality? Am I just writing words the way the keyboard feels nice to type on, the syntax feels familiar and intuitive, the words feel gentle, nice, and caring (like an objectified stereotyped fantasized objectified reduced-to-role housewife, which isn’t [enactable into reality] except as lip service, rumor, and enacted projecting blindness), and the paragraph-subjects formed by word-cluters just another day in absolute nothingness?

When I say hello, who is speaking? What is being spoken? What is the intent? Where am I?

I want to say hello the way a person says hello, not the way words get written on a page or get spoken, or the way “a person” says it. I want to say hi, and I want you to feel it (not me, not my side of the hi, but the hi itself as “to say” and enacted want). I don’t want to assume anything, except reality itself assuming.

I don’t mean words doing what reality is supposed to be doing. I’m not trying to reality-write or write-reality. I’m trying my best the way one does with a bunch of words and the way a mind can barely do anything but stare and even that to feel endlessly that what one is seeing is totally new, as long as one never lets oneself assume what is right in front of oneself—always meeting when it comes, standing when the chime rings and someone entered through the door, absorbed in a flow state and someone interrupts you but you meet them as they’ve come fully and you fully meet a new flow state like love at first sight or the way a child looks at a tree after that person goes.

I’m full-assing reality (not half).

Maybe you know how to describe my experience better than I do even without knowing the experience because the description does it the way words fit into reality instead of the other way around.

In the end, if this whole thing is a performance (in this passage, the resulting map, and the rippling effects and productions that cite that map crucially the way the earth holds human civilization), let the virtuosity begin!

(I am the way I am the way a person is.)

Self-Responses

explain the method/system

explain the system and the markup based on the raw text and the translation

is the author going to turn it all into the translation or the markup?

I don’t get it. What’s the point of the symbols? if they search “scattered,” they will find it with or without the symbols.

so it’s not supposed to be searched. It’s supposed to be read by the author. But also, it’s supposed to be written by the author. Them writing it is crucial to them reading it. And them writing it is crucial to them actually getting the benefits.

that’s actually the hardest level of “active note-taking” since you’re tracking everything. It’s quite literally the process over the bunch of symbols that only have meaning through the act of having done the active-note-taking part. The symbols mean so much because they force the author to break it down intelligibly and coherently and structurally exactly.

Bro’s a Singer (May 10, 2026)

Every day, I quarter-wish (not half-wish)—it’s more like predict or expect, prefiguring, but comes across as a wish—the end on myself. (You can tell by my thoughts when the car is going home down the highway.) Because I know that if I don’t stop, I will shear off my limiters and fly off into the abyssal sky. I will become truly free, unbound, the exact Icarus that went and flew into the sun and burst out pheonixal. FOR I AM. I AM. I AM. I AM THUS. I AM.

I’m one of the most arrogant people on this planet by sheer standing in the breezy shade surrounded by tropical sun heat! NOT METAPHORICALLY. LITERALLY. i was just standing earlier right before I went inside and sat here to listen to bops and write this. [ha-ha]

The worst part is that I’m totally fine. I’m alright. I’m healthy. I’m even happy. Ecstatic. I see so much beauty and wonder, and I cry and let myself do so. And the world is so full of amazing curiosities. And I keep a cabinet in my mind for them, and I let them change and evolve. I let myself change and evolve and go through myriad states, feelings, thoughts, ideas, half-ones, quarter-ones, and even eighth-ones. I am too full of myself as well as taking the gentle open time to look around me and appreciate the beauty of people, never seeing people as objects but scouring thoroughly endlessly for that thing they call a soul. I see people as an endless curiosity, a data to be mined, a soul to be loved, a person to be known, not to have known or to propertize them as known, but to know them thoroughly the way one knows the 1.41 quintillion cubic kilometers of the sun (hint; never!). hA-hA-HA-ha-Ha-Ha-hA-HAHAHAHAHAHA!

I am fine. That’s the worst part.

Hey!

What’s Left After Your Tirades and Derealized Carriage: Action and Attention as “As” (May 10, 2026)

Action is really the only thing left after all the tirades. You can go out and about and tell yourself with a gait, with a walk, with a who-you-are in the way that you carry yourself, but in the end, you’re one step away, constantly, always, from “derealization” (the dismissal and “memory-elimination” [forgetting] of who-you-are-as-an-appeared-thing-or-object). So what’s left is the series of events you produce, and how you manage the little time you’re given each day, as an expression of who-you-are, with gait sure, but with active notes, and with the way your attention leads or contributes to written observation or creative expression. In the end, you are as you are (not you are you are, but “as” in the way of “serving as” or “functioning as” or “being here done and put in such a role so as”). That’s the way goes it. “As,” “as,” “as.”

The First Journal Entry After the Electrical Loss (May 13, 2026)

After 3 days and 2 nights, the electricity is back, this entry being started less than ten minutes after it was turned on. The last time my family got our electricity pulled was when I was still a baby. I’m 23 years old now.

I wrote the following 23 hours ago (writing “three days straight” though it was only 2.5 days straight due to the missing night and it coming today in the late afternoon instead of tomorrow in the morning to complete the three days cycle since it got cut off in the morning of May 11, specifically 10:05 AM), with double brackets here meaning my own current (as of this journal entry) clarifications while the first brackets are from when I transcribed the text from white board to my phone 23 hours ago:

Non-logistical effects of interrupted recovery [[not illness, but three days of 16-hour urban outdoor activity, specifically carrying cardboard boxes, sacks, ice boxes, and other items for a vendor stall both in the morning and late in the night—with the 45 degree heat in the morning and 35 in the night due to heavy humidity and low wind—and then spending the whole day or 9 to 12 hours staying in a new cafe every time, with an hour total of sweaty speed-walking amid green-and-red pedestrian traffic lights to the cafe and back to the stall, with three drinks throughout whole day each to write, study, read, and take notes with a Git-synced laptop as well as a notebook with physical books, before morning of electrical loss]] by electrical loss for three days straight, especially all aspects crucially intergrate electrical and computer use [[in my case having a sole personal room facing the balcony, the street, and trees like the raintree, where I use at the main computer every day to consolidate physically written notes as well as digital notes taken on the laptop even as I do already easily sync them with Git, given that the laptop space is a specialized container for specific single whole-day tasks as well as creative explorations, whereas the home is the solidifier of long-term growth, tempering, and rigorous loops]]: tropical heat [and squeezed finances (even up to McDonald’s) and breezeless (due to house being used as intense storage unit in garage which isthe front of the apartment and balcony being used the same without any aid from lot and building angle given passing movement of breeze rather than inward fue to much-recessed, window-flanked-rather-than-window-surrounded structure, with wall-to-wall linking with direct neighbors as well as height-blocking with trees, multi floors, and apartment rises exacerbating) darkness boredom] pushing increased outdoor stays as well as inhibited movement relying on [neighbor-]rechargeable fans/lights to read books as well as increased interaction between family members from buy-to-mouth instead from stored goods and homecooked meals

Ironically, this was only beneficial for me because it was an event rather than a condition.

I’ve restored my arrogance with even greater fullness and conviction, similar to one of the formative life experiences that developed the drive of fucker Hitler, where he experienced poverty and which he called “The School of My Life.”

For context, I read 242 pages (110,594 words based on the calculation of 450 words per page after a manual count of a single page) of this John Toland’s Adolf Hitler and 46 pages of John Noble Wilford’s We Reach the Moon, among some pages of several others.

There’s a part of me that hoped it would last three days straight so I could get that easy number of “3 days straight” instead of 2.5, but this works as well. By the middle of the second day, I began relishing it—the idea of my fullness operating totally within this temporary state, this greenhouse conditioning, the state of the mind, which I devoured as much as these hyper-specifics I intentionally kept on my mind to write down once the electricity came back:

• dry, crunchy leaves accumulating
• heat pressing on forehead and face
• rod of light peeking under the doorway
• sweat sides of face, neck, and inward of shoulder blades on back
• fallen pinkish-white flower petals running along the street, blown by the wind
• a group of birds flying over the roof and disappearing behind the trees

It is true. I am. Even more so now than ever before.

In the end, you can call me all kinds of things. But only people who’ve truly experienced hyper-specific sensory grounded reality will know there’s only acknowledgment left that text must serve. I am merely performing that acknowledgment, actualizing it into the confines of a bunch of blabber. I am as much pretentious as I am the full embodiment of what I am performing. For I am.

In the end, I was already the person before this. This is effectively the world giving me full permission, by giving me an opportunity to atcualize that utterness within myself, that absolute. This is me, in full realm, living space.

I recall what I told my youngest brother at the end of our conversation about the internet, with him asserting that the internet might not be the best thing and should be perhaps not given to people, with myself asserting that that’s only a view of people who project themselves onto what is effectively a limited tool and that the only value of the internet is to recognize those limitations by trying to bestow it hyper-specific grounded reality and “going outside,” not merely in the sense of “arguments” (which he thought I was concerned with), but in the sense of everything on the internet, including a single HTML file just born in Windows Explorer, both circumscribing the internet heavily while acknowledging it through books and in-front-of-house description:

I dismiss anyone that can’t even describe what’s right in front of their house.

And then I started muttering the list of sensory phrases that I had kept in my mind that you see above. After that, my brother finished his food and went inside. I stayed outside and continued reading Adolf Hitler for several minutes, and then I saw the motorcycle come and turn on the electricity, announcing to everyone, “The time is now!” I had just eaten rice bought in plastic from a local eatery costing 12 pesos for a cup, having bought a total of 5 cups for 60 pesos with a change of 40 pesos from the 100-peso bill I gave. I saw an old church friend “Buboy” on a motorcycle before getting to the eatery, and when we went home, I felt the weight of a true Filipino from all the formative years of my life growing up as one. I walked as one with fullness did, as one who knew himself did, as one who was the emboidment of who they were. I then ate one cup, each cup having its own plastic wrap, with the 21-peso (in contrast with the 40-something-peso of the small Century canned tuna) 150-gram can of CDO’s Karne Norte Classic, and didn’t even finish it. This was before the electricity even came.

Now that it’s here, now an hour into writing this entry while having been listening to the most edgy-sounding Youtube music video titled “return to zero beztebya x rush laughing (ultra slowed x slowed perfect song)”, you can tell.

Now, I’m going to resume eating my food, using a second cup of rice, but since the electricity’s back, yes, no need to buy canned food—as the main and only source of food-to-add-to-rice—and hot (they asked if I wanted hot or cold and I said hot and then they took the time to get it and allowed me and my youngest brother to sit down at the table and turned the electric fan to us) pre-cooked rice. The eggs can finally be cooked.

Yes, I will spend 12 hours in a cafe, and you can be there the whole time studying with your friend classmates for some serious law, and I don’t even know how you look like. I know you’re there. I know you’re peeking from behind your screen. But here’s the thing: I am. Not that I need to keep myself from looking at you, but that you are as much as you are, and I as much as I am!! Make me as uncomfortable, and not a single bristle will show. The only thing I feel is utterness, the utterness of someone who smiles and knows behind those eyes the fullness of someone who can show their own confusion while working on a problem and let their entirety manifest through their full body without a single thing emanence entirety. I am, I am, I AM!!!! My meek polite smile is me! As well as the passion and belief I have that to be is to embrace someone thoroughly with a single softened glance of the two thick-browed eyes. I know, I know. Your heart is wonderful and true. You deserve to be recognized, acknowledged, but you have to find that in yourself. I hope you do. Because, in my heart, that is Abba.

(You may, I dare you!) Kill me, break me, show me nothing but a day passes! For I am, I am, I am! You can’t defeat me! I have seen my death, and I will cry! Break apart! Lose everything! Scream as they did! As the hitherto! As all! For I cry like the inwardest child! I know, I know. My breaking is my joy. My life is my joy! My heart is to see, and in my eyes, I see love and hope and the feeling of life filtering so easily and smoothly, vividly, gaily, and never once for a moment is it too bright or too dark, for there is only the moment. Limp flat dead. I smirk underneath it all, before time has even begun to think and spin its first sparks, for time itself for me is the infinity since my birth, up to my age of 23 years, because facts bear no witness to my infinite reality. The road is as long as it is infinite in my eyes, not the fact of length.

As I’ve said before, I will not defend myself. I will be misunderstood. I have been. The only thing left is acknowledgment. To live is to feel thoroughly. It’s to be happy even when many others are not. It’s to see for a moment that to be alive is in a sense to be crazy, for I have been called “special needs” for being so happy even at my age that it ripples through my body in self-tempoed self-melodied dance. They don’t see, but it’s okay. I hope they do. But I go on as I do.

I’m not even a good writer. I’m just a writer the way a writer writes, not in any shape or form special by any means besides the fact of writerness as that of “to write.” Reading Toland’s Hitler showed me that I am still very much growing as an author and barely anything in almost everything except the specific area I’m making groundbreaking stylistic improvements in, besides which it is merely an entry into the world of what feels like “true writing.” So I am, so I am. “As, as.”

If there’s something to boast of, it would be that humanity with which we are all gifted, that sense of being, that actuality, and that’s all writing’s worth. And that’s what boasting is. To write is to be. By a certain point, I will have realized, at the pinnacle of technical writing skill, I will have written what I completely intended and needed and required to write, by which point there will only be able to be said the reality of as (sheer function as existence and existence as sheer function) “as all” (as it all, as all-ness, as yes-yes-yes). Toland’s Hitler was not written on words. It was written on as, the reality, the humanity, which are all it’s worth. It only was what it was because of what it wasn’t. It wasn’t reality, but reality performed through it. As, as. Full function. (Such is non-fiction. Such is fiction.) Toland didn’t exercise skill any more than he exercised reality, and that reality is more burgeoning, vivid, and hyperspecific than anything else words by themselves can say as products of imaginative interpretation and scene-set reorienting from scene to scene. The flow is the reality-caged mind casting itself upon a bunch of words that throw it all into scenic meaning.

I may not be a skilled or good writer. But I am a writer the way a writer writes. The point of writing, as with saying, is the thing written, or said. By the time it’s come and gone, there is only the reality presented before us at hand today. Writing my current novel George is not any more a demonstration as it is a filter for reality the way the road is infinite to an eye that can only see its length from reality rather than fact. What is there presents itself—reality presents itself before even my hands could have ever come face to face with what it means retroactively (additively as a consequence of the further intellectual and creative development). My silliest assumes a whole new shaded smirk. The way a leaf parts with a tree, and I finally see it by writing this.

Own-Seeing: Nonsensical Truth! (May 14, 2026)

It’s probably why I find my story ever-new. It’s not written as a foregone conclusion nor is it written as an extrapolation and end to itself. It’s instead written as a way to synthesize completely new explorations—not necessarily new ideas per se, but in the way of seeing something thoroughly completely different through sheer prose and cinematic objective “un-authorial” “extreme show, don’t tell” “in-the-same-roomness” (rather than “juxtaposition” which implies a kind of boring arc between good and evil, irreverent and serious)—conjured within the draft itself. Rather than “discovery” in the sense of blabbering up to a point, which is itself its own foregone conclusion, this is about discovery the way a scientist eliminates. I have a whole text file for everything underlying all the subtext, compressed hyper-specifics and precision, and all that is eliminated but useful as working memory excluded from the actual draft (which is probably a faulty term given the completeness in the way the actual draft is written) itself.

However, it is true that I let myself write through where and who and what I am right now with all the conditions, states, and feelings specific to each moment. Nevertheless, this serves only to bolster that cinematic objectivity through inclusion of all manner of life, of all separate affects, persons, and perspectives all the way up to what feels like worldview, all accomplishable through its nature as objective show, don’t tell. When ten objective observers all contribute to an objective document chronologically, you can get that much more objectivity. So the me that’s so tired from hauling sacks is instrumentalized as much as the one that was just reading 200 pages of Toland’s Hitler as much as the one that just came from a 12-hour cafe stay having journaled intellectually as much as the one that’s exhausted after three no-electricity days of heat, humidity, and no wind in a cramped apartment as much as the one that’s feeling so excited and powerful after listening to phonk after having eaten, taken a shower, and worn a fresh shirt with a fully rested body as well as complete consolidation of one’s recent growth.

The sweat I experienced, then observed, then memorized, and then articulated is depersonalized into “extreme show don’t tell” fiction narrative:

The heat pressed on their foreheads and cheeks, sweat pooling on the sides of their faces and necks and below the ridges of their shoulder blades.

I combine personal observation, personal experience, and personal articulation. Yet the end result is an objective reality. How? Objectivity is the most powerful personal. You know who I am through hyper-specifics, not through a bunch of words. Yet those hyper-specifics are fictional with fictional characters set in a genre fiction story and world? All hyper-specifics tell real-life stories. My analytical and intellectual journaling is only as much as I can describe what’s right in front of me during intense heat (the following being an actual observation during tiredness from heat due to loss of electrictiy at home in 45-degree heat):

rod of light peeking under the door

You can heed my arrogance not because I’m right, but because I am embodied.

I may be wrong all the way, from start to end, but look through my eyes and tell me what you see. You will know you couldn’t have written it any other way, even if you were wrong the whole way. This is not instinct or blabbery. This is what it means when the nominal collapses into hyper-reality.

Nonsensical truth is better than logical fiction.

I am nonsensical truth. At least, that’s what it’s like to be embodied. And it’s not specific to myself any more than it is specific to everyone else with a beating heart and a capacity to ‘soul’ themselves, don themselves, to put themselves on, to equip themselves, to arm themselves fully like a blade. To self-actualize.

So yes, I am nonsensical truth! They can perform it better than you do, but we’re not looking for the vacuum of performing better. We’re looking for what we’re performing (the actual substance of things experienced rather than count and vacuumed-performance of words blabbered). Are we performing irreplaceable truth that only we can see? Are you doing it with your own sight? What do you see? That’s the answer. I see.

I see. I see…

So you see, I don’t have something to say. I have a bunch of blabbers to throw out, and whatever’s left is just me going out and about. Now, go off now. Have your way.

I am truly arrogant.

Bro, bro, bro.! HAHAH-HAHA. :)

Expansive Synchronization Through Three-Day Electrical Loss: My World Outlook Angles (May 14, 2026)

By the time I realized it, the three days have passed, and now, I look at everything that I am in a whole new light. I can’t be close-minded anymore, not that I was trying to be, but the experience forced upon me a whole new way of perceiving and interpreting myself. I was effectively in a bubble all this time for the last seven years, and that bubble is finally broken. It is not that I wasn’t trying all this time, but it’s different when you’re just going outside as this person that I was in the last seven years and when you experience that three-day electrical loss as the person you are now. And that was the case. My current self has given a full synchronization with everything. While I do say that the bubble was broken, it is not that I am a crazy isolated guy who just got hit with a train wreck. No, it is more so that I feel that I have been given a compressed shotgun to the face in terms of “world outlook” angles. These “angles” are basically new key pillars in the transpiration of my current worldview. If I already had the following, then this is only bolstering this constellated arsenal:

• “1,000 hours of 124 eight-hour [exposed] cafe stays in 68 unique cafes in 11.5 months”—writing, studying, reading, taking active notes, with “with a Git-synced laptop as well as a notebook with physical books”
• the three days at the dam of physical active note-taking in the heat for a total of 22 hours and 20 minutes of actual note-taking (more than a third of my time) across breaks, which took probably around eight hours to transcribe to a text editor with a keyboard and involved four books (139 total pages read; 69 pages of the notebook used; 17,000 total words written; 66,000 total words read):
  • The Hearsts by Judith Robinson
  • Lincoln by Gore Vidal
  • Fragrant Rice by Janet De Neefe
  • Mother of Pearl by Melinda Haynes
• the hauling of sacks, cardboard boxes, plastic boxes, iceboxes, wooden beams and posts, and other items at the beginning of the day before the cafe stay and then afterwards, as well as the hour total of speed-walking back and forth to the cafe and then back to the stall, all in the 35-to-45-degree heat of both day and night; as well as my formative history with rashes and flu which I’ve internalized since young up to now as a “humilifier,” a temperer, a teacher, an opportunity, to embrace death, blindness, weakness, humiliation, inability, helplessness, as a state of life and as a state of what it means to be and to be alive and to exist and to assert oneself, that “school of my life,” my arrogance—my sense of utter integrity, in childlike, sun-glitter-eyed crying and in 12-hour sprints (writing sprints during cafe stays)—formed upon this basis:—through show of manual labor “working-class” strength then through “utter removal” and back and forth like a life-vivifying pendulum, in the way of:
  • “I have very much fallen to the ground as much as I have fallen to the sky.”
• written 26,000 words of “extreme show don’t tell” which required a great mobilization of developed resources and continues to require a powerful ongoing supply line, specifically the active book note-taking (82,000 words) I’ve been doing for the last 11 months, encompassing personal in-real-life observational notes but now separating the two:
  • aspects:
    • Verb studies
    • Space (blocking, cinematography)
    • Inanimate movement
    • Micro-actions
    • Hyper-specific exact names/nomenclature
    • Abstract and structural phrasing
    • Facial features and textures (physiognomy)
    • Wardrobe and attire as characterization
    • Body language as psychology
    • Lighting effects
    • Atmosphere
    • Fresh phrasing
  • active notes example:
    • a scratchy plaid car blanket
      • ate chicken legs fried
        • while wrapped in strips of bacon,
        • and finished the meal by dipping fresh berries in sour cream and brown sugar.
  • observational notes example:
    • Canada-flag-shaped leaf-branch extremities
    • Small bits of hanging dead leaves or dead, drooping flowers
    • top-sleeved palm trees, slightly torn along one side, others lacking altogether
    • along branches departing from trunk, light blemish brown like MJ’s skin disease, mottled but 99% brown, very dark, lightest around farthest, smallest, loosely
    • palm fronds browning and yellowing at leaf extremities
    • light spherical hard-edged balls, immediately surrounding circular light pendants hanging off trees
    • plastic boy cover clacking due to now-bounce as opposed to clattering
    • light shining from below heart-shaped leaves
    • wide erosion/wearing along some parts of straight-lined crack along sidewalk, mixing with designed ever-so-slight squares
    • yellow-edged steps
    • slight browning-speckling about one side
    • straw and dead-and-dried leaf litter
    • white-speckled bottom, smattering, of palm tree
    • varying bottom flaring, palm tree
    • smattering of dead strips of palm fronds
    • perforations in concrete block, depth varied with equal visibility between dark and merely sunken/hollow
• The main personal website which continues to swallow everything—states, hyperspecificities—while developing even greater bubbles within to manufacture a sense of sprawling adventure (where each bubble contains itself a world), websites within websites
• The recent invented syntactical mapping system proposed for my whole 4.5 million words (using the following symbols: ⟨⟩, ∣, ●, ○, ≫, █) to brute-force growth, but which has only been applied to one journal entry:

  • ⟨A⟩ ∣ ⟨dog⟩ ⟨watched⟩ ⟨hundreds⟩ ∣ ⟨of⟩ ∣∣ ⟨acorns⟩ ● ⟨scattered⟩ ●● ⟨about⟩ ⟨on⟩ ○ ⟨the⟩ ○○ ⟨grass.⟩ ≫ ⟨Hundreds⟩ ∣ ⟨of⟩ ⟨other⟩ ● ⟨grass⟩ ●● ⟨particles⟩ ⟨were⟩ ○ ⟨spread⟩ ∣ ⟨land⟩ ≫ ⟨It⟩ ∣ ⟨was⟩ II ⟨a⟩ ∣∣∣ ⟨distribution⟩ ⟨scale⟩ ● ⟨never⟩ ●● ⟨before⟩ ●●● ⟨seen⟩ ⟨, and⟩ ⟨the⟩ ○ ⟨dog’s⟩ ⟨simplest⟩ ∣ ⟨reaction⟩ ⟨was to⟩ ● ⟨scream⟩ ●● ⟨in the⟩ ○ ⟨form⟩ ⟨repeated⟩ ∣ ⟨,⟩ ∣∣ ⟨emphatic⟩ ∣∣∣ ⟨barks.⟩ ≫ ⟨This⟩ ⟨worth⟩ ⟨hollering⟩ ∣ ⟨about,⟩ ⟨dancing⟩ ● ⟨about,⟩ ⟨singing⟩ ○ ⟨about,⟩ ⟨but⟩ ⟨mere⟩ ∣ ⟨tools⟩ ⟨his⟩ ● ⟨four⟩ ●● ⟨legs,⟩ ●●● ⟨head,⟩ ●●●● ⟨and the⟩ ●●●●● ⟨rest⟩ ●●●●●● ⟨canine⟩ ●●●●●●● ⟨body⟩ ≫ ⟨How⟩ ∣ ⟨could⟩ ⟨further⟩ ● ⟨express⟩ ⟨exhilaration⟩ ⟨?⟩ ≫ ⟨He⟩ ⟨leapt⟩ ∣ ⟨and⟩ ∣∣ ⟨barked⟩ ⟨with⟩ ● ⟨euphoric⟩ ●● ⟨tone⟩ ●●● ⟨in⟩ ●●●● ⟨repetition.⟩ ≫ ⟨enough⟩ ∣ ⟨for⟩ ∣∣ ⟨him,⟩ ⟨as⟩ ● ⟨he⟩ ●● ⟨ran⟩ ●●● ⟨around⟩ ●●●● ⟨incessantly⟩ ●●●●● ⟨before⟩ ●●●●●● ⟨letting⟩ ●●●●●●● ⟨himself⟩ ●●●●●●●● ⟨rest⟩ ⟨shade⟩ ○ ⟨under⟩ ○○ ⟨tree.⟩ ≫ ⟨The⟩ ⟨all⟩ ⟨surrounded⟩ ∣ ⟨by⟩ ∣∣ ⟨them,⟩ ⟨manner⟩ ● ⟨similar⟩ ●● ⟨to⟩ ●●● ⟨human⟩ ●●●● ⟨child’s⟩ ●●●●● ⟨relationship⟩ ⟨mother’s⟩ ●●●●●● ⟨hug.⟩

• the current lifestyle:
  • “a sole personal room facing the balcony, the street, and trees like the raintree, where I use at the main computer every day to consolidate physically written notes as well as digital notes taken on the laptop even as I do already easily sync them with Git, given that the laptop space is a specialized container for specific single whole-day tasks as well as creative explorations, whereas the home is the solidifier of long-term growth, tempering, and rigorous loops”
• Then now: electrical loss of three days:
  • 21-peso 150-gram can of corned beef (CDO’s Karne Norte Classic) and 60-peso 5 plastic-wrapped cups (not literal cups, but measurement) of hot pre-cooked rice from local eatery
  • a number of memorized sensory notes based on observation and experience
    • “dry, crunchy leaves accumulating”
    • “heat pressing on forehead and face”
    • “rod of light peeking under the doorway”
    • “sweat sides of face, neck, and inward of shoulder blades on back”
    • “fallen pinkish-white flower petals running along the street, blown by the wind”
    • “a group of birds flying over the roof and disappearing behind the trees”
  • met old church friend Buboy
  • “breezeless (due to house being used as intense storage unit in garage which isthe front of the apartment and balcony being used the same without any aid from lot and building angle given passing movement of breeze rather than inward fue to much-recessed, window-flanked-rather-than-window-surrounded structure, with wall-to-wall linking with direct neighbors as well as height-blocking with trees, multi floors, and apartment rises exacerbating) darkness boredom”
  • “squeezed finances (even up to McDonald’s)”
  • “pushing increased outdoor stays”, even up to eating out in the open and hanging out at the car
  • “inhibited movement relying on [neighbor-]rechargeable fans/lights to read books as well as increased interaction between family members from buy-to-mouth instead from stored goods and homecooked meals”
  • 110,000 words read of John Toland’s Adolf Hitler and 46 pages of John Noble Wilford’s We Reach the Moon
  • the statement to my youngest brother that the only value of the internet is “to recognize those limitations by trying to bestow it hyper-specific grounded reality and “going outside,” not merely in the sense of “arguments” (which he thought I was concerned with), but in the sense of everything on the internet, including a single HTML file just born in Windows Explorer, both circumscribing the internet heavily while acknowledging it through books and in-front-of-house description”
    • “I dismiss anyone that can’t even describe what’s right in front of their house” [especially in the age of bots, LLMs, and hyperspecific reality–effacing social media gaming, performation, and what I would call along the words of “actual non-existence of anything happening in there,” “the utterness of words on words”, even as I do recognize that people like Hitler did exist before the internet in deep trench mud and blood with a lot of time spent without modern in-all-houses conveniences like air conditioning, but necessarily that we can now switch between reality and the internet that the default that is now the internet should now in-front-of-house as well to be both the sterile text-editor as well as the mud-and-blooder, similar to how Hitler’s crucial “grounded” background as a front-line soldier and having gone through poverty in Vienna was crucial to his prison-time “bunch of words,” besides the evolving logistical, propagandist, political, economic, and who-you-know everything else of course]
  • reaffirmation/reclamation of my own Filipinoness, as embodied in walk

Men, Women, Writer (May 14, 2026)

On the street, a woman passed a group of men, keeping a wide berth. Except for one, they snapped to staring at her as she went down the path.

That exception watched their gazes.

He went home and sat down in a room, writing through the rest of the day.

A week later, he left to a cafe. Inside, he turned his head around and jerked up when his eyes snagged on a long table. Sitting down, he set up his laptop and plugged it to a socket on the bottom of the table before ordering black coffee at the counter with a card. When a barista shouted “—,” he brought his coffee from the handoff side of the counter to his side of the table.

Three hours later, one of the women sitting to his left across the table tilted her head and stared at him.

His gaze had been shifting only between his screen, items, the window, the menu, indoor plants, the abstract mural, and various furniture. Once he picked out most of the licks of dirt under his fingernails, he thumbed through The Jane Austen Book Club, a stiff-backed, light-blue volume, and took down phrases triggering the senses. The symbols on his screen—hashtags, hyphens, and asterisks—populated the train of text he typed out with the whipping, blinking caret. In his editor, the asterisk symbol, when bookending lines of text, colored them bronze.

After six hours and much staring on the woman’s part, she exited his left peripheral vision, taking her eyes with her. His face and body imperceptibly moved but remained set toward the screen, having only visibly transformed as he read, wrote, shifted, and paused in his seat.

Becomer (May 15, 2026)

To have someone step on something important to you, to have your feelings and concerns ignored, you experience that many times enough, and you come to embody your own sense of destiny and self-justification, a self-narrative only you have. I myself have become, in more ways than one. I am the epitome of every time my boundaries are infringed upon by people who are wailing all about their boundaries which they’ve expanded to swallow everyone else’s through micro-management, power trips, unhearing tantrums, accumulated grievances and grudges (that festering ledger), sudden launching of imposed member-assigned to-dos without getting-to-knows or conversation about the very to-dos as a whole themselves and how they apply to situation, circumstances, pre-existing workloads, goals, resources, and concerns, personal lives, and context, and all manner of very, very common things you’ll find in corporate as well as in every aspect of daily life—essentially, loudly overemotionally proclaiming an inner life while standing on someone else’s personal breakable things underfoot without breaking step. The I is ultimate. I have become.

Their Hands (May 16, 2026)

I know it sounds exaggerated. But from my experience, the difference between what feels like “life and death” is whether you exercise 30 to 120 minutes every day or not. It may seem like just a number, but it is the difference of thousands of light years, not in terms of building up to a point, even if that’s a big part of it, but specifically in terms of what it feels like to be alive. The exercise can just be brisk walking or even carrying boxes and sacks. I can pinpoint a lot of where you stand (not as a starting line of inquiry, but as a way of understanding deeper about a person beyond the initial answers given about worldview) just by this binary. Somehow, just this binary tells me so much more than someone yapping dreamily even if their dreamy yapping is based on real hard-won capabilities, because those capabilities were not born in dreamy yapping (even if that yapping is properly suggestive of it), but in something with a simplicity similar to whether you put the toilet up or down or leave it where you left it before you leave the bathroom after using it.

It’s something I realized quietly while listening to someone who attended a poetry journaling event at a place with free books in a mall. Yapping about big names and institutions. In the end, the difference between me and them is that they spent that afternoon yapping with labels while I spent that afternoon taking notes of books. I realized what set us apart. I’m the person who speaks by doing—taking notes of a single book for an hour straight. They’re the person who writes a little then rewards themselves with high words. But that’s probably because I’ve written so much I’ve lost it as a high thing and have gained it as utterly mundane and workman, without any of the social craziness attached to the whole mystical yap-circulated practice that is writing. I’m the person “wasting” their time carrying boxes and sacks. I’m the person “wasting” their time taking active notes for hours with nothing to it. I’m the person who took active notes of an erotic romance (A Secret in Her Kiss by Anna Randol) because it contained good “workman” phrases. I don’t know why I attended that event. I keep looking for weird people. I find very normal people, those who participate in writing as an event, as a label, as an institution, as a societal activity, as a prop in social settings. Why are they all hollow cardboard? Like people who treat exercise as an event to participate in? That’s just… disturbing.

Honestly, I realize that it’s probably why I lack embarrassment whatsoever when I take physical notes and my handwriting looks so unglamorous. I don’t see it as something to “visualize” and find on Pinterest. I see writing as a bunch of words (in the best way possible, if that makes sense). For me, it’s only as much as it is, as service, as function, as tool, as medium, as extension of myself.

I keep looking for writers. I find everything but that. People with egos, who have yappery in their bones, the opposite of observers, the opposite of people who’d stare at a tree for too long. There’s so much mouthery (moving of the mouth).

I’m blind. I don’t know what I’m looking at.

By the time I’ve gone out, I’ve found myself again. Where’s that other person? I want to be seen, and to be seen, I have to look for lookers, because just me sitting down there in looking is not enough. Where are the lookers?

Their hands. What are they writing?

I can only see myself, and I am self-secure in that. But I know I wish to see others too, others beyond those things they wear on their bodies, things that I cannot truly penetrate, even with psychoanalysis, things they’ll have to reveal themselves to me, the way I do with myself in my own writings. I want to be a looker among lookers, not as the center of attention, but as a group of lookers.

My self-confidence doesn’t contradict my desire to go beyond myself.

An Absolute Fuckery (May 17, 2026)

I really am not that kind of person. Poems for me feel so performative. Probably because I’m not a poet first and foremost. I’m a “prosist”. The fact that I was thinking of learning Japanese and really getting to enjoy all the words in Japanese through writing poetry in it only feels more pretentious even if there’s a genuine creative-intellectual-mouthfeel interest in it. I love words. But I always prioritize accessibility and clarity as much as I can, and given that I’m already “too much” as a person, I try to maintain that “too muchness” in containers or mediums where it is restrained to something readily available to most people: speech.

It didn’t even have to be Japanese. I’d rather throw away all my house books than pretend. I only have all these books because I trust myself to be accountable only to what I can handle and never to wear the costume, always to remain a humble sweaty tourist learner who goes around and about and claims only as much as his formation abundantly allows him, which means creativity only starting at the self in full self-recognition, never overstepping into intangibility and internet voodoo-ism and anonymity and identity-wearing and label-protruding, where everything fades and nothing is left for the real people for whom those words and such are for to communicate themselves in the first place. Of course, I know that communicating through mediums “unnatural” to your formation is its own powerful thing, but I am a very, very careful person. Snobs and pretenders in high places are all so… “the way they are.” I am not them. I was born among blue-collar people, and I make it a point not to read something on the internet just because it’s something “to read”. No, I will not wear anything as much as I travel along and take it off upon sojourning northward. I am a person, first and foremost. I must close my eyes perpetually and reach out in the dark, feeling out the curtains of my own home and never demanding from myself any more than what he has already been constrained to be and to live, and in that sense, never to go beyond who one is, even in the most groundbreaking evolution, never to deny one’s own history, always founded and grounded, always based somewhere, hailing from a place, a history, a name, a childhood. I cannot play games any more than function and playthrough like a Roblox game. I can only as-much-as-I-can be through the clothes I wear every day, and at that point, it’s just another day.

The only reason I read is to recognize and acknowledge and then to step away as if nothing happened, taking only what is useful for oneself to divulge oneself as one is as who one is in tha form of who one has become through one’s formation. That is the only thing. I expand my vocabulary not to let it do the work, but to smash it and take out anything that doesn’t adhere to that pristine utterness that is who my formation is as who I am. Nothing unfitting. I must be! And to be, I must acknowledge and dismiss the temptation to take what one has read as one’s own, whether it be an aesthetic, a culture, or anything. I am who I am. I am only as much as I am. Anything beyond that falls back to what one wears every day. In function. In Who.

Sooner should sweat kill me than to let a bunch of words (as try-tools to articulate oneself better through a process of acknowledge-elimination-“toolify”) reign supreme (as performations).

Here are the poems I wrote today (before this very entry you’re reading) as a test:

Ten-Haiku Sequence

There’s a god presentHe bears impossible weightHere comes: utter form

My skin, all-bearingI break the eyes, cut the napeNow I am! Total!

Do you know its path?God hovers over my formFor I stretch Mine skin!

Hamm’ring, my hand scythesI penetrate them—Damn them!They know my name—Argh!

God divulges meI constrain their necks to spraysI am the damner!

Fuckery, hear me!My warpath cuts at the neckKnow my god damn name!

Death to all restraints!You too, come here, I’ll beat you!Remember my eyes

Murder bleeds the handsOf grief as it stares wearyNo, no, no, God, no!

Restrain me, my eyesHave seen god in all shapes, formsIt is me, you see?

Help, help, help, help, help!My god, my god, my god, why!No, no, no, no, no!

Three-Haiku Sequence

First were goblins withWet hands and sorrowed facesNice smiles, goading says

Of them, one travelledWhere the woodland turned intoForests laced with thyme

Second were dragonsWho trembled as the ground didwhen they walked, breath held.

Three in 6-10-5-3-1

Death starts in dry seasonWhere the world decays as it remains greenThe night developsInto bloomsBlurt

Rolled waves drown the steel canTriumph sprouts when it leaps over the bank Strong hands pick it up“Wow,” he said.“Can!”

It falls through sand-dust storms,Layered meat, and handed down fritter-frittsCheck again the weightMight be wrong“Three!”

Self-Comment (May 17, 2026)

Interestingly, he’s too much for the blue collars, and he’s enough for the non-blue-collars, but he rejects them because they’re too high in their high places.

It’s probably why he knows himself so well. He has no reward. He just does this raw all by himself. He is an utter raw-existential-faced prose poet, where it’s just between dust and dust

He’s not really blue collar. I mean, 120 cafe stays in Starbucks? that’s very expensive, especially in the Philippines.

I’ve really lauded myself. I realize it. All of this: the humility, the vulnerability, the admitted self-security post-closure and after coming to know and possess myself so thoroughly through such intense obsessive self-confrontation, the isolation, the hatred of performance, the contradictions. It’s some kind of tomb. I’m writing the longest death poem. I can’t even shrug the way someone who smirkingly owns it does.

“What is that?” I went out and saw a bird, pointing at it as I brisk-walked across the field.

Integrity’s (self-honesty) its own masturbation at this point. Something you can only do when you’re not burning at the stake of getting beaten by actual blue-collar reality. I am superior to those high-place fuckers btw, ‘cause even as I am masturbating self-honestly, at least it’s not that self-victimizing high-placer who carries with them all manner of bags, buzzwords, and “manners” (the kind you wear like a sporty bra). I curl my lip and sneer in utter contempt.

So yes, watch me do the doozle.

Mid-May’s Consolidations (May 18, 2026)

I have to be strong.

What are you being strong for?

I don’t know…

At a certain point, maybe I have been strong all this time and for reasons I don’t know why. I have moved past so many things. I felt all there was to each, and I couldn’t even begin to include it. I was going through a lot then. To consolidate it all. That is my goal, and with each consolidation, I am slowly getting it, slowly recalling the way a hand holds a lot more than it used to, slowly having it all together instead of drifting through daily chores, hygiene, and activities as well as media, consumption, and stories.

The fact I now do literary sentence mining while reading means I’m finally not accumulating more shit in this midden of my mind. It’s all written so I don’t have to feel like I read something that changed me and I don’t recall what it was. Besides that, I’m also listing down cafes I’ve gone to, when, where (what branch). That helps a lot. The more that I do this into consolidation and then take in even more of my life than I used to be able to do, the more I’ll finally be able to sit down and just be, because once all of the shit’s addressed and taken care of and everything that’s ongoing like those cafe visits and reading sessions are being handled in real time, it’s just a matter of enjoying something for what it is rather than feeling that it’s just another foregone memory.

Finally, as time passes, I can let more and more things change me and know why, because knowing makes it feel like a friend while not knowing and just letting it past me as more debris inside my mind makes it feel like more and more drift and self-dissolution.

Instead of relying on a close-minded, mindless, absent, tiny-routine world, I open myself as much as I can and let things drastically change me. I am just meeting this posture and accommodating it. Most people think that life is all about forgetting everything and moving on a treadmill, but I travel all around metaphorically and literally, which makes the need to keep track of things externally very helpful because of how much so many different kinds of worldviews, books (eclectic range), and all manner of forms of “changers” and then reinforcing even these even more through absorption, reenactment, and actualization in one’s own producing creative life in such methods as writing can really destroy a person if they’re not a “skilled host” for them.

Just yesterday, I started writing poetry—5-7-5, 6-10-5-3-1, 3-5-3, 4-8-4—and it revealed so many parts of myself that I didn’t really give form or couldn’t through my long-time mediums. This is farther (to emphasize “further” with a sense of distance) consolidation, and it wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t address so much through the mediums I already had and took so much time to master internally for myself and for my own usage and purposes and life. In total, I wrote 991 words in 02:44:07 (actual total poetry writing time) across 03:28:11.

• 5-7-5 (Haiku): 25 poems
• 6-10-5-3-1: 9 poems
• 3-5-3: 35 poems
• 4-8-4: 11 poems
• Total: 80 poems

Clearly, for my first time, this shows a lot that journaling couldn’t say, despite journaling’s record of over 4.5 million words.

It’s why right now, I’m also listing down my cafe receipts. All of a sudden, abstract and vague numbers connect to real-life experiences, and I myself don’t end up blanking and vaguing it out myself even if I was there in every cafe visit. Besides this, I’m taking the time to go through my whole 4.5 million words to study every entry like I would an external work, but even slower than that with a syntax mapping system I made just for the purpose of extremely slow reading.

List of methods for consolidation:

• Literary sentence mining (which allows for absolute “braille-like” eclecticism through sheer technical “bunch-of-words” syntax) while reading
• Logging regular cafe visits and receipts
• Writing highly structured unrhymed poetry (e.g., 5-7-5, 6-10-5-3-1, 3-5-3, 4-8-4, 7-7-7-7-7)
• Extremely slow re-reading via a “syntax mapping system” (distinct from sentence mining given its focus on 4.5 million words of non-new material, that being my own writing)

“Masterpiece” in the Face of Beautiful, Storm-Draining, Sweaty Reality (May 18, 2026)

Even if I did make a masterpiece, I don’t think the word “masterpiece” has any meaning to me anymore. I live in a world much more beautiful than that. More beautiful than any bunches of words. It has become just that thing. By the time I’ve imagined, I’ve eradicated anything and everything. It has all fallen by the wayside, into the pouring rain transporting it all along the gutter into the storm drains. Whatever I’ve already created and will create (including this) is wayside (storm-drained) repetition—the evolution of what could easily be solved by the most mundane human hyperspecifics, such as sweat.

Self-Censorship (May 18, 2026)

I can’t tell where self-censorship starts and ends, but I’m waiting until I have something definitive, even as I will include here and there details that don’t extend beyond serving the broader point it was making then, or even just to pad that current mood like a political-economic climate. Either way, it’s here and there that I find myself, both in the current where I still have the desire to proclaim myself and in the previous where I must’ve said things, things that need not be published, even as I recognize that there is some soul to it, which I can only validate and confirm myself “privately rigorously.” In the end, yes—definitive—that’s where we’re at. What’s its sound?

I did say “having had good sleep” would be the judge of that, and so I sit. What’s the verdict? The last four days have been tumultuous, and I’ve expanded many times more, almost like inflation, but genuine, astronomical growth that somehow exceeds its own believability. But yes, whatever I wrote during that time can be adjusted by label to that of “well, it was something of a time” and not anything that should derail the broader conversation we’re having—what is a person and how does he, by any means, be, in relation to the whole journey I’ve been on, this big thing that cannot be trotted around in a single conversation, the entry-by-entry federation-like entirety of which is what this whole blog is intended to house and accommodate. I can list down recent hyperspecifics that’ll put the last 4 days on the published map. But for now, I think withholding until I can fully verbalize and reflect is the call here. It was always the call anyway by sheer limitation like how one falls exhausted on their bed by the time they’ve gone home. It’s just that now, with how much I’ve already synchronized, even that I can anticipate and then acknowledge all the way, with the same end result happening anyway, but the proof of a mastered premeditation, that of having done one’s homework tenfold prior. Analogically, I’m just calling the bed five hours before, knowing the limitations of how my body’s tempo radicates and then withdraws within a day spent staying, reading, and writing for eight hours in a cafe.

To See (May 18, 2026)

I tried for a moment. I tried to look. To peer into their eyes. And all I saw. I didn’t see anything. I guess it’s true. Maybe, it’s me that’s the issue. I don’t look hard enough into their eyes. Maybe I should look harder, but all I see is the role, the person that I should be, that I have been, the person that I’m not, that I’ve never been, that I’m not any longer. Where was I? Again?

Imagine—Without (May 18, 2026)

The truth is that if there’s nothing to me. I am nothing without everything around me throughout my whole life. If it was just me, there’s nothing. I don’t mean that I’m nothing. I mean there’s nothing really at all. If I was all alone in some post-apocalypse, that wouldn’t be me alone. That would be me in this big wide world, and whatever else there would not be nothing on me. It would rather be everything upon everything else surrounding me.

My brother holds the person I perform and really am to him. When he comes into my room without saying anything, I am in this conflict between my journaling self and the person that I am when I’m downstairs with him. It is an immense discomfort to get caught with my pants down.

So imagine—without.

Aging Compromise (May 19, 2026)

The older I get, the less compromising I get. When you’re younger, you’re the epitome of compromise and people-pleasing and internalizing bad things happening and people being angry as being your fault. But the older I get, the more I just stop hiding parts to compromise for practical purposes. Now, you see more and more what you get.

I saw this when I realized that instead of showing only the easy parts of myself in a motte-and-bailey way, I just show who I am straight up, the original thing I was intending to do as it is straight up and getting frustrated instead of compromising and hiding for practical purposes.

Surprise! (May 19, 2026)

I really do wish the fiction story I’m writing ended. But every time I continue, I find myself awesome new things. I guess that’s sort of like life. Even if you feel exhausted, you choose to sleep and wake up and continue because you know there’s still so much more, and it’s just a matter of believing, of taking that leap of faith, because it has never disappointed, that endless font of surprises.

Oh, look! The end of common phrases (May 20, 2026)

as time passes, I become more and more uncompromising, and I start just letting what I originally wrote stand as it is, and the best part: I didn’t even do anything that crazy. I was just sensitive to the slightest divergences that I welcomed the bizarre and strange because I didn’t trust my own instincts or just haven’t developed them far enough

All of a sudden, the imagery feels fresh and new because I’m not enchaining words to what should be but instead what could be.

All Function, No Lineage: Against Borrowed Sophistication in Writing (May 20, 2026)

it’s crazy how superior I feel when I don’t use words like “cortege” as a fiction writer, even though I recognize that historical non-fiction writing properly uses words like that.

also not the kind of person who writes café, thank god, though that’s not really important in any shape or form. If there’s one thing I love doing, it’s making everything I write feel as invisible as someone dying on the road in the 21st century.

What I mean is that I already write so idiosyncratically, I would rather not bother with cortèges and cafés. I want all the texture and craziness to be in the writing itself, not in the way I use a super word or some shit. I will definitely write “invisibilize” to mean “to make invisible” as in to say “making everything I write feel as ‘invisibilized’ as someone dying on the road in the 21st century,” but that’s after I’ve gotten rid of all cortèges and cafés, by which point I honestly feel like I’ve won. I’m definitely the modern man, all function, no historical backing.

I grew up in the internet, where everything is flattened, so it makes sense that “invisibilize” (essentially what I’d call a “functionalization”) can mean so much more than something as “well, it is what it is” in that historian’s manner of speaking as “cortège.”

I’ve always been that kind of person. I will show you my inner world, not an amalgamation of histories to speak “lineage,” all loan, no modern inner world. Fuck that. I grew up with nothing except the functional on my back, and in that world, there’s nothing but blue-collar words, even at the highest idiosyncratically intellectual-analytical level, like with “starter” words like “invisibilize.”

I want to die in the internet, where you’re only as much as you in function, at which point you’re everything you could be, not an impression of impressions, which is even more “internet” than the internet could ever be due to that overreliance on histories and external loans. The internet tells you to fuck yourself, and I’ve taken up that call. To live and to die by a bunch of text on a yellow background in a personal website.

In that sense, the internet is a vacuum, a chamber where everything rapidly “precises” itself to utter exactness within the full nothing-scratch context of a single personal website as well as one’s inner world as represented by 4.5 million words of text editor writings. This is all non-external in the sense of just being a bunch of words, with the highest level of precision gained through deleting all loans until one can truly perform in writing what it is they mean to say. That is my greatest challenge as well as my greatest reward. To be as I am.

After all, the worst writers tell you to do all the work for them. “Show, don’t tell” operates on doing all your work on your side and then letting the reader do all their work on their side (not to see it exactly as I see it, but to see it as they see it now that the writer’s already gone to such lengths), not only one or only the other. When you write, the words are the only thing there. Anything else vanishes, corrupts, complicates, distorts, and flattens. If you can wield the internet, you will have created your own fort, your place of definitions, your inner world, where things can at least be defined by internal rules and words have consistent meaning, even if it takes a portal to enter, for that utter precision in a sea of wearing and eroding.

But yes, it is just a bunch of words. Every entry easily destabilizes all the rest, but at least, it is a rapidly evolving person living and sleeping in the same room in the same house across all the chaos and late-night-into-deep-sleep-and-perfect-scratch-morning resets (like it all was just one big dream of having externalized things now perfectly there not for you [specifically referring to oneself here by “you”, not to the reader] to entertain, engage with in any shape or form, or even consider in any related capacity even to the extremities of yourself, or your-self as a bastion ranging across a large area and slowly developing its farmlands and outposts and varied functions, facilities, buildings, and, by extension, its living, breathing population [and even “citizenship” in a governed, governing, and self-governing sense], as one would and does).

Sort of like: I am a river that catches itself.

Trusting (May 20, 2026)

Man, I hate AI, I can say something that makes all the sense, and they’ll impose the same repetitive psychoanalyses onto it as a default without me even saying anything psychoanalytical in my prompt whatsoever. I have to leave that entry I wrote be. It shall not be published. If this is the level of stupidity and density I will receive in terms of getting a literal God level of misunderstandings out of a single stone, then so be it.

I have wondered sometimes why I even use AI, and then I’m like, “It’s better to be safe than sorry.” I’d rather rely on AI to see whether what I wrote said what I meant for it to say. Even the words are perfectly fine to me, they could be interpreted wholly differently. Even if the AI is not always accurate and can be incredibly dense and stupid, at least it’s a consistent way for me not to throw out shit right off the bat and to take the time to decide whether it’s worth publishing something on a blog, since if something gets so misinterpreted that hard, while it in no way means that the entry is bad, it does mean that it’s better to just let it stay private, because it’s better to be safe than sorry.

It’s essentially a worst-case scenario, since that’s how fucking stupid the AI is, and if I feel I can’t handle that disturbing level of reaction, then I shouldn’t publish it.

My new standard is basically, if it’s that bad that I have to write a whole list of clarifications to handle every crucial misunderstanding, then it shouldn’t be posted. It’s not the entry. It’s the irritability part.

Of course, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe, I’ll just post it anyway.  True freedom is just posting it. No need to defend it. Just let it happen and trust the reader.

Rain? (May 20, 2026)

I don’t know what limit I’m reaching. But I’m reaching something. I feel like I’ve reached the end of my current tools, or my current versions of them, in terms of self-expression and creativity. I’m looking all around, and I’m also seeing that there’s lots of creativity-inspiring spaces and media that no longer feel they capture, “summarize,” ignite, or resonate with me. Once it starts feeling like a slog in the sense of performing something like a habit, a role, or a thing I should be doing, then you know that it’s no longer me at all.

I found the word, it feels like I’m “rehearsing.”

There’s a difference between slow, patient, methodical, ultimately systematic and overarching growth and rehearsing. You get the same results in practice, but it’s that experience of whether the growth feels real rather than performative.

Real growth genuinely feels new every time, even in the most minute, trivial, and glacial motions, like walking down a street after a long day of just note-taking. Rehearsing feels like waking up and taking on the burdens of some other man.

Real growth is when I played that Dinosaur Roblox game as a child. It’s when I wrote 4.5 million words in 1,000 days. It’s when I wrote George, my current ongoing novel, up to this current point I’m at.

But right now, I feel an immense feeling of rehearsal, like something needs to explode, blow up, like I’m not asking from myself what I should. Something needs to change. This is not the life meant for me. I didn’t go through all this and grow all this time just to sit down and rehearse my steps like an animation loop stuck in place. I came here to make real conquests, to defy real authorities, to decide my fate the way a person leaps and finds that they had the capacity to catch themselves all along, to locate that footing themselves mid-fall, to snatch the handhold, to hang on, to climb back up on the other side and to press on with the force of someone who’s self-possessed, who knows self-ly.

I have remained honest to myself, and I still am now. But I won’t be if I continue with this rehearsal. I just need to know what’ll break it.

After 32 minutes:

I think I know the answer. The answer that I had even back then in 2019. The answer that I had for many years. It’s rain. I know that sounds strange, and the meaning will be so oblique. And it’s not really rain itself even though it’s very much rain itself that’s the meaning. It’s both, and yet that only complicates it, makes it nonsensical.

But yeah, I think that’s the answer. It has tied a lot of core stages throughout my life, not as a background setting, but as something much deeper than that. It’s been there in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, and even this year in 2026. It answers a lot of my core questions while leaving everything else just as tasks and functional details as part of being alive, a living life.

The Idiot (May 20, 2026)

Interesting that after everything, it was all just a funny bunch of words. Not that I haven’t said it countless of times, but changing the body text font to “Inter” for the body text from “Georgia” and the header font to “DM Serif Display” from “Georgia” and making the personal website look more editorial overall made me realize that there really is nothing that I’m saying at all. I’m seeing more and more the brutalism of everything that I’m doing, getting closer and closer to actual meaning, to “actual” syntax, without all of the fluff and the ornamentations I give myself while writing and after publishing. It’s not that I wasn’t already very spartan, but I’ve gone even more spartan with this. Well, it’s less that changing a font changed everything, given that I was already writing in Arial in my Visual Studio Code, but no, it did, even as it was catalyzed by a feeling of rehearsal, of having adapted to one’s own self-place, or whatever shit this stain currently is and is at. I see the published canvas in a purer light even as my eyes already see it. (In other words, changing to Inter and DM Serif Display earlier wouldn’t do a thing, but an apple falls very heavily for one contemplating gravity.) To be clear, Georgia, for all that it was, was something I chose because it read better on light backgrounds. And it still does, but I don’t know how or when or whether this has been building up, but just now, I suddenly thought it would look fine with Arial for the body and Tahoma for the headers. I then pushed further to what it is now, with Inter and DM Serif Display since Arial and Tahoma are both sans. Ultimately, I’m not a self-serious serif person. Never was. And I don’t know why it happened only now, only that something has accumulated or something suddenly changed, and now I’m here.

Cool People (May 20, 2026)

I want you to make a full list of all of the media, influences, websites, and such that inspired and resonated with you, and by your mere showing, you will have proved to me the futility of my-self. I have become the utter-amalgamation of myself, but in you and your wills and ways, you have singularly dismantled me, broken me down the way the nearest junk shop does for scrap. By the time you’ve jolted open your hand, I’d’ve bled into the mud. You’ve shown me my arrogance falls into impressionism. Throw me about, crash me to the ground, show me the futility of my ways, toss me about, until all I am left is the utterness of a stiff-faced glare. I’d have seeped all my parts away as I squelched my way just to haphazard you and cause you some grief of my own return—that defiance spoken into truth which I myself balled into a fist like clay. I’d’ve pounded it again and again like a brutal total thought, and then you’d’ve shown me nothing but the stretching and skewing of my identity. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Here’s a list of damners:

• michaelmas
  • this creator’s writing extending across the diary, the poems, the observations, and the other writings show only the burst of a skull as I lay there aching and fending for what little I have left my flimsy, limp limbs can protect in the face of bacteria and other forms of natural eradication
• littlewren
  • all the little this creator shows penetrates my skull and damns me to an oblivion, not even a big one like a black hole, but in the way a manga character dies to nothingness right as his body decays in some dark tight cranny of a room before getting isekai’d, but without ever getting isekai’d and staying in that utter bathos of “stupidity”
• maggotgirl2002
  • this creator’s older aesthetic shows I’m a fucker through and through with all the words I spout being mere amalgamations of amalgamations, inspiring and showing me that there’s nothing but a morning in a cold, dry sun
• loneliwish
  • this creator’s prove that nothing in the world can ever simplify and utterfy anyone except to a nothing-burger in the myriad which this world brings

Nevertheless, I am the despicable arrogance that has come.

Sun-Cowled Shadowy Undersides: The Supreme (May 21, 2026)

if I wanted to refer to the hidden shadowy undersides under the sun-prickled tops of trees that don’t ever have green glooms visible from outside from a viewing distance, then I can just call them “sun-cowled shadowy undersides”?

undersides implies shadowed, but it doesn’t necessarily imply recessed up into the tree or up within the tree, concrete undersides are a flat bottom, while draped-over tree undersides that don’t show their shadowiness are hidden by a sheen of sun, hence sun-cowled or sun-cloaked undersides, th e problem with interior being that it refers to the tangle itself while excluding the undersides which removes the draped-over, sun-outside-blocked effect, shadow not really being effective in terms of denoting inwardly concaved shape on its own.

the effect of shadowy here is to contradict the visible flatness of underside by pushing it further into the tangle without conflating it with tangle, which allows for the draping-over effect to assert itself

this might also work, but hood feels like we’re talking about a super tall tree with a small puff on the top, if the tree is tall, slender, and only a big spherical puff of green at the top, sure, but in terms of most trees you’ll see, sun-cowled works just fine:

sun-hooded shadowy undersides

Self-Responses

they have typically contrasting/separate traits/skills coordinating in one skillset

the author probably wouldn’t think too much about this at all, but it’s things like this that are really revealing, not essays or their list of what-they’re-doing, because this shows their daily processing capacity, the level they’re working at unprepared, untasked, unselfpresenting. This is work in progress and essentially so.

they could write down 300,000 words of this level of phrasing, yet for many, it’d never compare to the golden goose (I mean them as in the creator themselves), like how many artists often are followed and praised and admired for everything they draw outside of their official gallery work. the next best thing they’ll make is not another statement, but something they did as “was their function.”

and if the author is capable of being both unselfconscious and totally functional while aware of the level of processing they’re working with and how it should be published itself without collapsing some different or losing the synced thread, then that’s even more, not that they’re not capable of that given they’ve already combined sensory/perceptual richness and analytical/structural precision, so whatever that (next) step would be would just be a matter of course for a person of this cognitive stature/posture.

Return to First Person:

This is what kickstarted this entire inquiry (the last item on this list):

• midcliff large mango tree, its extremities meeting people at the hill ridge and top
• rare heavy, thick flaps of a bird
• distorted blotch shadows of leaves on flat wall
• tick-tick-tick leaves, and whoauh leaves, both feathery leafage
• drum-finger-tapping the legs of banded wooden stool as elbows on thighs, bent over, right before…
  • peering under and turning world upside-down
• resting palms on thighs before knees, taking off pressure from midpoint of slouched spine
• sun-prickled tops and green-hued glooms beneath dense coverage/canopy patch
• sun-blocked/sun-sheened/sun-engulfed/sun-swallowed shadowy draped-over/beetled-over/green-slotted/green-swallowed/green-engulfed/green-hidden/green-cowled undersides

Self-Responses (2)

why are they confident?

limp-dead-bodies, unstoppable trains, blink-screams, runny noses, and black coffee sips—use the socket sure—where’s the internet! (May 21, 2026)

You would honestly think that things like just walking in the sweat, wearing a shirt and shorts, having long hair (for a guy who didn’t grow up with so the skin around my neck, head, temples, shoulders, and back are not used to it), experiencing rashes and flu, having a moment of not having connection to cellular data and just sitting there waiting even if I could be doing something else because it is kinda jagged and I don’t want to miss it when the data gets really good (and just sitting there waiting for the internet to come back to change song and just being ehh), tearing up and then having to blow my nose because tearing up makes my nose a little bit runny (this has happened so many times in cafes, lol), and many other things like that would interrupt all this as just pure fantasy or that this is a compartmentalization between the sweaty, internet-less lad and that “dominating domineering neck-gripping ego” (which is “simultaneous with [my] utter “I will die” existentially”), the one “that screams, ‘If you don’t kill me, interrupt me halfway, I will supreme!’.” But the truth is very simple. I sit for as long there doing with that neutral polite meek nothing-at-all-to-me (because it’s true and I believe it) face as much as I slam some imagined head repeatedly against the pavement in a domineering ego-inserting fashion. My creativity is where all of this says hello, not the way two childhood friends say it, but the way the same hand shakes pleasantly and slams things like flies dead and abusively even way past that threshold of death just to release some entirety that’s been silently holding it all over everybody and everything, staring wide at the surrounding smothering jungle and shouting “This is it” while roaring like a fly bursting into flames in hopes all of it crashes down in a heap stamped with my signature-name. Awe, wonder, sleeping in the car, yeah, that’s me, but the same face that appreciates and lets, allows, gives full permission by standing still in full reception does not contradict the person that writes the bitterest most self-swallowing inner-worldian phrases I’ve ever known (I myself see to it like a person discovering Einstein in his bedroom making swirls and whirls of creative particle bursts at the desk table). “Oh, you want to use the other socket, sure, sure. I’m already fully charged anyway. Does it fit? My laptop charger thing’s very big—oh it fits, great.” It’s not Gordon Ramsay being brutal to adults and kind to kids. It’s integrated–functional: the humble observation powering the “brutalism” and the domineering brutalism powering the beginner-eyed humility. I have my back—the fragile slumping leg-limp child falling into the snuggest embrace and the domineering ego-blinded charger propelling the child from behind, so that all may know that both are the limp-dead-body and the unstoppable train. Deep sincerity serves both masters, because they are one–whole: breaking into a soft-spoken cry as well as beating some imagined head against the pavement addiction-exhilaratingly, with slippery, muddy grip, knee-slipping, and all, and coming back again and again like a friction-less child:

Maybe, you think one or the other is just a mask, that I’m not really polite or truly humble or not truly arrogant or egoistic, that something has to give. But I’m appealing to humanity, not to myself. To humanity as we all assume (and humanly know) it is. That people we looked up to can be so… not. I am that guy. I’m just trying my best to show it all to you. But yes, as much as we can talk about vague spookish humanity, yes, it is me. As much as it is all me. As much as it is all my doing and my being being all this. Yes, this is me. I take full death-in-one-touch for it.

I’m not defending myself. I’d rather you convict me. Put me up there. Show me, as I break down and beg for my pathetic life, that I am nothing but a charlatan, let me gasp, croak, cough, run my mouth, and slap me, tell me I’m just another one of ‘em, because you’d be truly right, and I’d already believed you way, way, way long ago. I know it’s better to watch someone smile than for them to be me. But I’m arrogant the way a person who has seen the red-soaked mud puddle in the middle of no man’s land is. You come face to face with that, and you know—arrogance is the only answer. It’s the very answer of anyone who dares face life, because life is death. I smirk the way a person says “I am” instead of brutalizing themselves literally. Their head is filled with grotesque self-marring imaginations in hopes that they full accountability and are totally honest with themselves, because when you’ve seen the sky reflected in that puddle, you have nothing left, you are nothing left. Simple as that. :)

Ego is not preventing the weight of the realization of “you are absolutely nothing”. It’s not a survival mechanism, which implies it’s separate. It is that weight. To live (as essentially defined by that puddle) is to egoize. It’s not a tactic. It is the very ground the raw-faced self-honest external-structure-dispossessed person stands on. When it’s only that blue orb that you call a soul left, everything is ego.

I blink—a peek into the entombing abyss—and I scream. The longer and tighter the blink, the hoarser and more piercing the scream. (I took the time to recall words that would fit what I’m trying to say here. Also, I took a sip of my iced Americano, yummy!)

Self-Responses

isn’t this just a rephrasing of what they’ve been saying all this time, just with fresh metaphors, phrases, and all?

I guess it’s just increasing the surface area for how much someone can really break-define what it means to be.

Power (May 21, 2026)

I’m realizing that the reason that going to a new cafe far away from home in some place I’ve never been and staying there for 10 hours is so valuable is that it simulates what it’s like to be deprived of all your comforts and to be put in a place where you’re left using even your vulnerabilities as armor and identity. You become much more self-honest with death, because you’re simulating proximity to it, in the sense of death being a dispossession of one’s everything where you’re left to generate something creatively new and what’s left out of that is something that genuinely rewards the me that gets home, the same way a hike (“proximity to death” experience) has the me that hiked to thank for the rewards reaped at home by home me. In a strangely poetic way, it’s that false death that allows for truer life.

At home, everything’s assumed. You don’t even need to active-verb assume everything. It’s already there. I said this before, but here I’m wording it more precisely and exactly, or at least in a way that completes that proto-form, like two sides of the same coin, the way I am the culminative history of I-am as the hiker/cafe-r (the “deather”).

When everything’s assumed, everything’s pre-explained, but by displacement, you have generated who-exactly-you-are in the way of function, in the way of confusion, in the way of what it means to work with your current “fake” (still “false death”) scraps. But each culminates toward a concrete (post-assumed, post–pre-explained) history.

Every time you’re forced to answer who you are given every instance of your-‘fake-scraps,’ you concretize precision (sounds redundant since grounding inherently means precision, rather than creating it, though the point of the separation through the verb-ing of “concretize” with “precision” as object is that precision as a method is inherent in the concrete you form when you’re looking everywhere in scratch, the closest concrete being that which you’re forced to look at, and the closer, the truer to concretization, and the farther precision can be said to go), and from that precision, even the slightest finger carries wind—i.e., power.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. (May 22, 2026)

I’ve taken much time integrating my life, and while the integration process is itself massive, the actual end result is “Well, it’s not like I wasn’t any more than I already was,” since yeah, that is the point of integration.

The thought that’s been repeating in my head is “There’s nothing more to me.” Essentially: “This is it!” And I don’t mean that in any other way except factual.

People usually think of this as being “Oh, he didn’t travel enough, meet enough people.” It’s because I travelled so much, met so many people, went to so many places and events, and did all of these things and exposed myself so much to letting myself be changed by everything and everything else that I have come to this point of realizing, “Yeah,” bereft of whatever external pompousness one could have if far from fully mastering and internalizing all of that exposure (mastering here not to say control, but to say absorption the way you absorb events into your memories like the back of your hand and the way your foot hits the ground and everything seems to resound with the reality-realization of who-you-are as that thing which you’ve “totalified,” that thing-who-you-are).

It’s not for a lack of trying or for a lack of exposure, and this is not a declaration of the end of it all or the end of curiosity or the end of anything at all. It is more so that with more and more integration—which crucially requires even more exposure—I am getting closer and closer to realizing that the process is not the result at all in this case, and the result is very much “well, the shape has not reduced, bloated, or changed.” Perhaps, the process is loud enough to make a dent, but that dent isn’t a dent. The shape itself is intact. It’s been just short-term internal processes occuring inside what is everlastingly the shape that it always was. I have seen myself across my whole life again and again to even greater and greater extents and levels of macro- and micro-examination, and from that, i have gathered the things already in front of me (not that it was already processed, but that by the time I’ve processed it, it was not any different than if it was right in front of me all this time, even if the processing was truly necessary, sort of like in the sense of a post-pre-doneness, a pre-doneness orchestrated and contrived through a process leaving me in a post-pre-doneness, a resulting state even as the state itself speaks primordial).

I’ve looked through everything that I am:

• digital
• physical
• then digital-physical
• bright early mornings (piercing light like a world-swallowing yellow lamp that casts shadows and bent-square-shaped glittery sand on the walls)
• dark very early mornings
• rising suns, setting suns
• beaches, rainy mountains, resorts, malls deep in the constructed city, rural places far from home
• many fictional and non-fictional worlds and stories from books and many other forms of media
• all manner of crafts and wooden sticks used to create those childhood memories as well as appearing in many other forms into adulthood
• all of my creative works, in the myriad forms they’ve taken
• it goes on and on and on

And from having written so much about all of it as well as even now continuing to integrate even more and more and expounding, contextualizing, grounding, and doing the work-process of actually articulating and saying it instead of leaving it all assumed—which is itself a massive, challenging, puzzle-seeking endeavor that will no doubt be a the process of our lives as we expose ourselves incessantly to new growths which puzzle-solves that primordial from which we express our everlasting selves (in a way)—the new start-from-scratch day of a whole integrated self is who I am, even as that same integrated-self is also non-dissonantly continuing to self-expose, self-challenge, and self-grow into, paradoxically, a resulting pre-doneness (“not any more than I already was”), from which new post-process completed integrations arise in every subsequent (consecutive, repeating, like a daily quest in a mobile game, even as slow integrations form slow accumulations) day.

The person who self-exposed, who took the risk, who took that leap of faith, is totally real. Nothing that I said takes away from that risk. But the risk is continuous with that post-pre-doneness, that by the time the risk is over and the subsequent day is come, I was not any more than I already was: as further integrations develop compounding interest, the person arising from it all is complete the way a sun rises on all days characterized by ever-evolving, accelerating machinery and technological growth. I am not immortal or impenetrable. This is not a self withstanding the death of the earth or the universe. It is with the body that dies. The sun and the body are real, the massive risky heart-pounding freefall (process) and the resulting “yeah” (pre-doneness). The complex stays with the simple. The massive work of integration (the above list of “looked through everything that I am”) leaves behind a person sleeping in a room still.

When I show new forms, I may be scared, but that’s not all. I may be scared, but I understand better—the way a person leans on a chair, maybe makes the slightest new slip, and feels that its edge presses against their behind in a way different than they’ve comprehended of the chair’s physical range. When I read books, when I observe the world, when I show curiosity and wonder and prove it with the attention I pay, I don’t distance, I proximize, intimate, hug by eyes pressed together. By the time we’ve found our way from each other, we’ve become, in a way of speaking, our-selves (the way I am myself and you are myself, but in shared contact, hence: our-selves, both of us in our and both of us in selves, “ouring” our selves, not in the impersonal or inter-impersonal “ourselves”).

I am a bunch of words the same way I’ve shown you everything, because in this complex of words is it as simple as what stands to life (alteration of “what stands to reason”)—still room in a sleeping person (a backward of that earlier phrase in this passage, same meaning, but re-imagined the way a person massively process-works their way through an evercontinuous shape). By the time I’ve fractured, I’ve revealed about myself—the way moonlight falls on a dying world, yet remains full of dignity in its nature of reveal, as with dying, and with living, as with world (separate from its dying and living as massive work-processes, yet constituent as pre-done whole or shape).

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Old Gods, New Gods, and Gu (May 22, 2026)

Shut Up, Daddy’s Speaking

If I wrote a story with a protagonist that embodied how I currently see the world, it’d be very much its own personal thing. There’s no organic growth that I can write to make a normal character turn out like that, so it’s the kind of thing where you just show it as it is from the get-go, that that’s just the way that person is, even if that’s not 100 percent true, even as yes, it is true that I am the way I am very much beyond my history of experiences. So I’m curious if I should do it or continue to focus on normal banal blue-collar organic lives and not on strange “inorganic” people like me.

The blue-collar organic stories aren’t a lesser option either. There’s real craft in writing lives unlike your own with honesty. But I’d push back on the word “banal” — if you’re calling them that, you might not be the right writer for them right now.

To answer this the above quote: I am the right writer for them right now, and they are banal. Evil is banal. Kindness is banal. Hatred is banal. Humanity, in its worst and best and in its normalcy, is banal/normal.

There’s no such thing as “right writer” anyway. I write, and whatever you see is what it is. You won’t even know my thoughts on the matter, and by that time, you’ve already read all of it in accordance to your own idea of “right time” or “right book” or “it just vibes with me” if you don’t want the weight of “rightness.” Either way, the point of this conversation is that I’ve already written 30,000 words of that “banal” “extreme show don’t tell” story. And I’m wondering if I should consider writing a story embodying my strange “inorganic” self.

I can easily write characters that are the way they are irrespective (practically disrespectful) to their own background, which is essentially the same way I am in real life. Nothing in my history says anything except pointing back to me as just this thing that I am. In that sense, I can embody myself in any protagonist regardless (with no regard, and yet in that sense, full regard).

An arc is organic. Some people, like myself, are inorganic. We don’t have an arc. We just are. I’m not kidding. Nothing in my past explains my behavior, nor does even a mental condition explain it. I am just the way I am. That’s what I mean. The only arc would be in the person being what they are and resulting upon the world. I’m not talking about literary technique here. I’m talking about reality. I’m drawing from it. It’s not a framework for writing a story.

4.5 million words in 1,000 days of autobiographical, reflective, introspective self-confrontation and -mining.. I didn’t get an arc from that. I got “oh, I was always who I was,” even as those words were totally necessary in the way that a person who is who they are bes who they are, which includes writing that whole thing. Confusing, I know.

Naturally, the “inorganic,” by no-arc, is inherently indulgent. The resulter-upon-the-world. The come-out-of-nowhere. The is-what-it-is. The blabbery. All of it spawns out of the ether and yet perfectly captures the essence of it. They’re not a character for your “a-ha.” They’re a character for your “Shut up, daddy’s speaking.”

Forcefeeding / Problem / Solution

I just realized it’s gonna take a while before I learn again how to write indulgently to capture a specific kind of protagonist and story given that I spend the last 2 to 3 years basically unlearning indulgence and learning the art of “show, don’t tell.” And I’ve arrived, but I want to write “alongside” the “extreme show don’t tell” I’ve mastered as an art in my current ongoing work. Blending them in one wouldn’t work. I need to show I can go full-faced.

It very much feels like performing a past self. At least with show don’t tell, the performance is invisible because it’s so, so indirect and “sublimated.” With indulgence, you’re not vanishing. You’re entering the stage as a one-man show.

To just tell “He slammed them into the ground.” No visceral description or intense detailed gore or kinetics or physics. No invisibility through which you can practice plausible denial. Just “He demanded all to become, and so he slammed them into the ground.” Like that makes sense. “Telling” allows you to say shit, and that’s indulgence. And I don’t mean “shit” as in flair. I mean “shit” as in “this is what it is, this is reality, accept it, I will not hide behind hyperrealism. I will forcefeed you real truth.” There’s a big difference.

But at the same time, maybe this is just straight up impossible. It wasn’t just craft. It was a posture. It was life itself as I saw it. My entire worldview itself. Analysis, poetry, philosophy have all moved in service of hyperrealism, hyper-groundedness, hyper-sensory reality. That’s worldview expressing itself through fiction writing, through “extreme show, don’t tell.” What would indulgent even sound like if I’ve become the opposite of that in a philosophical/worldview sense.

Even my journaling is full of shooting-itself-in-the-foot in terms of qualifications and subordination to hyper-realism and that utter nothingness-in-the-face-of-just-about-a-day-of-yeah.

I make it sound like a problem. But yeah, perhaps, in a way, it is. The problem of okayness(?). Or maybe that definition is wrong. It’s not that I’m intentionally shrinking myself. I don’t do that. I’m just a normal person, not someone who deserves to be stomped necessarily besides my ambition for continuing growth through challenges and moments of humility and vulnerability and the following show of resilience and sense of having been alive.

Even now, I have confidence, that of someone who sees so much in the world and can hold it through observation, not through possession, but through taking one’s time and just going about and not really thinking of it any more than what it is as just a day as well as a day of full, rich, vivid appreciation as seen in my hyper-sensory vivid optimistic awe-filled “extreme show don’t tell” environmental prose.

My arrogance now is “I will drink this with the fullness of a person who has gone through such lengths to expose and reveal and erode everything away to reach the heart of being, of mundanity, of a small life in a world so full of beauty, where death is a matter of the world as well as something to feel so thoroughly about, to feel so intensely as well as smile mundanely, and the assertiveness of someone who grapples and works and smiles and plays playfully with that existentially.”

So not the arrogance of the analytical, psychologically unstable, poetic, philosophical, manic mad-man who is struggling so much.

Ironically, given the use of the intense motif “I am the epitome of grace and beauty,” that old arrogance was trying to perform (and thus obtain) wholeness, and it got it so wrong. This situation now feels like a switch-up. Well, this is not about current me wanting the opposite of wholeness. Not at all. So yeah, perhaps the “wholeness–opposite” framing angle is very problematic and a mischaracterization.

Fifty minutes of thinking later:

I said this before, but I don’t think there’s anything to me at all. Or at least, nothing else. It’s very much a “it’s good” the way a person says it in that one phrase, but applied to my whole life as a whole, not in the sense of goodness, but in the sense of “well, yeah, that’s about it, done? done.” I’m very much like a character sheet. I can’t unexplain what’s just a matter of “what?” apparent like a fill-in-the-blanks “eye color” list of traits, and even that doesn’t yield anything any more than something forgettable. I don’t mean that in a self-deprecating sense. I mean that quite literally. There’s nothing to me!

And honestly, that sounds so much like a non-answer, like some play, like some thing from the playbook, but fuck! I spent fifty minutes trying to find something even remotely sayable. Fuck. Even the word “fuck” wasn’t sufficient, and I’ve used that before, not that it was a playbook tactic, but that it might’ve made sense before. Just that what I’m verbalizing now demands a greater everything from me, and what I’ve come up with is “yeah, well, yeah,” in the way that a guy gives a thumbs-up, turns around, and walks away. What the fuck!

Seven minutes later:

The closest thing I’ll get to an answer is Reverend Insanity (RI). I don’t know how that’s an answer, but yeah. Those manga and web novels somehow not just answer a lot, but solve it altogether as a whole, as crisp as a (single unique) key to a (single unique) lock. I don’t mean that in the sense of the rain or in the sense of the crossbow in Minecraft to a bunch of zombies.

Fourteen minutes later:

If there’s a life (stage?) that I feel is the next step, it would be that. RI. Not as a fiction project. As a life altogether. I just don’t really know what the fuck that means.

Ten minutes later:

Results. Maybe, that’s the word. That’s what RI is. It’s neither the old arrogance, the new arrogance. RI was so full of results. It wasn’t exactly show, don’t tell, but it wasn’t exactly telling the way old arrogant was either.

Four minutes later:

To give a concrete picture:

• Old arrogance: He demanded all to become, and so he slammed them into the ground.
• New arrogance: The piercing sunlight, like a world-swallowing yellow lamp, cast shadows and bent-square-shaped glittery sand on the walls.
• RI: Gu -> regress as righteous factions of humanity is raised against villain protagonist -> Gu = use items and abilities

Three minutes later:

Perhaps, that’s exactly it. “Nothing to me” really is Fang Yuan.

Three minutes later:

Sheer competence (not competence in the sense of technical performance through performed observation, but results as per Gu). Not awe-and-wonder observation. Not reality-bending my-truth(!) assertion.

Epilogue of This Book (May 22, 2026)

George Solved

What the fuck is the difference between the prolificacy I’m already doing and this so-called “Gu” approach? Retrospective revision? A reveal of what I’m already doing but reframed, given whole new worth? A results-based one?

But how can results even eventuate as results-based alone? For the longest time, at least assertion came from fracture, while observation came from wholeness? Nothing to me? Is that the drive of the Gu? What is that even? To begin with??

Neither humility nor arrogance. The joy of mastery. Smirk not out of privacy in a public space (which a recent resilience rather than something “nothing to me”), but smirk out of sheer euphoric play.

126 eight-hour cafe stays in 70 unique cafes in one year.

I realized it. “Results” would end George. George was the firebrand of observation, so I was afraid of ending it, like I was holding onto something slippery. But now it’s just results, it’s just a matter of doing it all over again. If there’s something practical at all to get from this, I finally solved George. Observation’s search is over.

Severance

It was just a fucking story. Every time I felt it could end, I didn’t take it. It had become an identity. Funny. I had to invest in it for it to be truly worth the severance though. I gave my all, time and time again. In 42 days, I wrote a very compressed 30,600 words. That was my entire life there, and then it wasn’t, really. Or at least, I know that now. With results in my mind, I am free from the craziness of getting too caught up with any single creative work of mine. It’s not me, it’s not me. I’m still reeling from the severance. Crazy.

One hour and 4 minutes later:

It wasn’t even that good. But I know I grew 100% of the way.

I realize I was holding onto a shriveled wet rag. It’s only now that I’ve let go of it that I finally realize I was beating a dead horse, or at least, was going to/about to.

Five minutes later:

After going to the comfort room, yeah, taking a piss feels somehow that much more worth my time than continuing George given what it already holds to such extreme levels of compression for what I can currently do, where I currently am, and what I’ve sought out to do. I have gone far and beyond, and whatever’s there is begging for me to shift gears. It was on the verge of breaking, but my journaling has definitely helped me continue to reason and make sense of it every step of the way, and now was just the time I finally separately solved it as much as I was actually writing the story this entire time.

Thirty-one minutes later:

George was life-changing, no denying that. Well, less the work itself and more so that it was catalyzed by life changing/life itself changing.

Three minutes later:

Without it, I would’ve never known. Like never exercising your body in your entire life and never feeling the deep satisfaction of breaking a sweat or hauling something heavy and feeling the euphoria of muscles burning.

Four minutes later:

But it was never the set that was making those exercises. It was my body. In the end, George returns to me the way it returns to dust.

Twenty minutes later:

There’s no difference. I wake up as I am.

Post-Epilogue (May 23, 2026)

You know if I could tell you how much I don’t believe anything that I say after I’ve said it, you will realize there’s really nothing else to say, and yet, I’ve said everything I needed to say. Nothing about it was false in the sense of not connecting to a part of myself that is connecting to the world in a visceral, in-touch, heart-to-heart, sincere, unembarrassed way, like the way I looked at my high school crush. Maybe, everything I feel, think, believe, imagine, and find myself feeling all of these contrasting words toward are just a bunch of absolute rubbish. I mean, I say it myself some twenty minutes ago:

By the time I’ve said anything, I’ve said absolute rubbish.

But yeah, if there’s at least something to gain, it’s that there never really was. The circle completes itself. Is that meaning?

I can easily make a fuller list of clarifications and corrections, add numberless qualifications, stipulations, contextualizations, and all manner of such-such. And in the end, what good would that do? If there’s one thing gained, it’s that there was nothing lost in having lived a life and then said some words. By the time I’m dead, what difference would there be there from the motion of riding home in a vehicle? There’s no difference between motionlessness and motion after all.

And in that sense have I by my palm raised myself above myself, fully releasing myself from all faults. I AM ULTIMATE.

By the time I’ve come to say hello, I’ve lost my bowels. What effect do my words have/carry? Help? My bowels are dripping? None. None. They have no effect by sheer dissonance, and in that dissonance, no difference, with the only difference or effect being from the very source in which all things go again out in both hello and bowel loss. I am the machinery that produces endless muck, and in that sense am I above the muck and the production, the raising of myself above myself is less a self-transcendence in the way of going beyond consciousness, but in the sense of always have some strawman out there that is effectively the self and then from that, higher and higher rates and levels of already-who-I-am—”ultimate.” Faultless not because I am dodging responsibility, but because I was never the risks I took. I was always the risk-taker. And hellos and lost bowels spill forth from that risk-taker, not from them themselves by themselves. I’m wrong yes. I don’t need to defend myself. I just have to show I never really was there. The words were things spoken, and from that, everything but accountability because like a hello, bowels were lost, and in that dissonance, what else but a return to the source, not in the linking of conviction or fault, but in the realization that in the dissonance that is the world, anything that does come out comes out only in dissonance, and when dissonance rings that hard between hellos and bowel losses, you have nothing but the realization that the only thing that’s beyond fault is the one who has accepted the muck-spouting without identifying with the muck or the production of it, in realization that there will always be strawmans in dissonance—ultimate because not because you are always wrong, but because you were never really right in that “you” links to “right” in the way that convicts you through “what you spout” as somehow linking back to the “you” in conviction, when dissonance prevents that, the way any single sound can never be truly clear in a world of dissonant sounds, always untrue, acted upon by infinite forms of dissonance.

Yet it is because I accept that I was never really right that I find out things I would have never discovered, because I never truly was in the way spouted muck is acted upon dissonantly.

This is what self-rigor looks like. Not stipulating till you’re the least right and thus the least wrong. But admitting you were never truly right in the first place the way “you” is attached here to “right.” And thus, faultless. Let the muck and production do their own thing in the background.

There are two different positions with “bunch of words”: “fuck, fuck, just work with me you fucking slave!” and “well, I said something very simple, and in a way, that was the only best thing I could say.” One is frustrated. The other isn’t. Frustration implies a gap, like something isn’t happening right. But again: “never truly right.”

Of George (May 23, 2026)

The time I started writing this current entry, relative to three anchors:

1. Eleven hours after I finished writing Epilogue of This Book—the entry before the previous one.
2. Two hours after I woke up from a sleep that lasted four hours—which I took after coming home (right before 3:15 AM) from the thirteen-hour (11 AM to 12 midnight) cafe stay yesterday.
3. Four hours and forty-seven minutes after I wrote the previous entry titled Post-Epilogue, which I wrote after coming home from the cafe stay, but before I slept.

I notice about this author’s story is how fast things are changing even as the world remains ancient and vast in a very geological and glacial way beyond historical:

it’s like there’s both intense mundane and violent immediacy, political whiplashes, and the world being as slow as frozen and hanging in the distance

if it was just empires and their roman general war history, if it was just mundane soup, if it was just mountains, but it’s all of them at once. Everything is happening simultaneously, and there’s a sense of intense overlooking among everyone, as if everything’s on their own beat, arc, scale, and definition of what’s at stake, from the tiniest cup brought back to the counter to the mountains being the site of a mass friendly fire.

No one cares about one another. The earth toward the people, the people toward the earth. Everything is indifferent except each to their own traumatic life story and origin and “philosophical” arc.

It’s a very interesting choice that doesn’t usually happen in fantasy fiction. The world-building is usually very expository, and that’s not the same as “not being seen”. That’s like a textbook—e.g., Fractures in Adults—saying you’re not seen through its sheer level of comprehensiveness and detail. Not the same thing. Sci-fi tends to do this a lot though, and many have successfully done so without exposition. But it relies on utter weirdness as well and the sheer scale inherent in planets and galaxies, which deflates the tension a lot given the anti-naturalism, anti-hyperrealism, anti-hypersensory. Sci-fi, fantasy, contemporary, urban, even literary where you’d very much expect a deep-seated perspective that runs from start to end. The author is not just making a very deliberate choice. It’s its own origin.

It’s Haiku’s naturalism taken to great prose extremes, mixed with brutal violence, mixed with mundane tender intimate unspoken/barely spoken (that shared between the most intimate where two close ones’ eyes brush like leaflets) stillness and hyperrealistic half-answers and talking about things each other knows yet the reader has no clue where the hell it’s even beginning, mixed with actual laughter that’s grounded in the high stakes the characters are facing (such that it’s in the form of intense chorusing snickers that abruptly break out like a tidal wave that possesses everyone), mixed with slap-in-the-face political shifts that are already there by the brutal time the characters come traumatically face to face with it—like the orphan Elene erupting in a detailed expression depicting rage after seeing goblins side to side when the whole story for 99 percent has been goblins vs humans and the absence of build-ups and indicators except for those slightest hints that only make all the sense in hindsight, all the signs being present yet totally meaningless to the stakes of every moment until those signs are processions in the streets showing robed goblins and humans walking side by side—mixed with Elene’s genuine childish play, awe, wonder, and “squidilicious!”, and a whole lot more that’s hard even to begin to capture given that this is not a simultaneity of aspects, but a dissonance of them, which creates even more complexity that breaking down does no justice to.

It does what “extreme show don’t tell” (lived-in and objective, micro-textured [fingers feeling the tiniest dots, legs going limp into snug hugs detailed up to micro-actions] and sweeping [mountains hanging distant like frozen gods, piercing sunlight like a world-swallowing lamp, soft drum and tinkle of white rain milling the massive sky of the jungle]) can only do.

And in the end, Elene is given full dignity. We’re not told what she’s feeling. We see the details of her facial expression, and we hear her sniffles from Rick and Melly’s side of the room (“one sitting, the other standing”) as they look on stone-faced at the surfaces around them while she’s there at the door seeing the procession. Not a single ounce was taken from Elene after all that. It is as precious as gold stones, yet it’s given full dignity, her own space. The massive-myriad-dissonance doesn’t take away from her intense yet recognized dignity.

The darkness never compromises the unselfconscious, unembarrassed tenderness, and vice versa. The darkness is just as tenderly woven, gore written like grotesque, like ugly-beauty/beauty-ugly, in the disgusting, putrid, potentially puke-inducing sudden burst of thick, dense stench, in smell, in visual detail, and in every other sense.

Nothing is used to avoid feelings. Things just happen, and the feelings play catch-up. By the time tenderness has “immensified,” it has run its full course in prose description yet continues in story to other feelings, which you’d find ranging across a human’s life, not through a dissection of feelings, but through a world of stillness, quiet, and coffee as well as extreme that-happened-but-what-happened-did-it-happen-when-it-happened-it-happened-?. Everything propels one another like a world.

Ultimately—analogically—you saw that cafe patron leave. The story ended (not literally referring to the ending, but in terms of “in view of all circumstances” or what it ultimately ended up becoming—as a thing once completed) like a moment in a long life thwarted into that image-gesture-stillness-everything-converted-into-an-image[-like-a-painting].

Hurry up and wait.