table nicks and scratches
mercilessly divulged, humanly incarnated, damned to the depths of a deep sea, trite to trite, cause to cause, mercy to mercy, human to human, hope to hope, dance to dance, life to life, mercy to mercy, human to human, endlessly
Childhood
After reading Childhood by Leo Tolstoy, even if he was 24 years old when he wrote it and I'm 22 years old, I got an existential crisis when I thought about it alongside the Ctrl+Alt+Del web comic and the web novel Everybody Loves Large Chests (ELLC) by Neven Iliev while listening to the serene, reflective song muse by the artist "Piana".
It made me write down the following thought: "Perhaps we are bound to stare at the roads, never finding our way out."
This line was inspired by the window line at the end of the first chapter of Childhood:
The fourth and last wall contained three windows, from the first of which the view was as follows. Immediately beneath it there ran a high road...
I think what catalyzed my writing of the line was a feeling that Tolstoy's Childhood was so exceptional in terms of being the kind of "show, don't tell" story that LLM, critics, and people would love so much, in comparison to my own history of writing and expressing myself so much but never to the point of Childhood so as to gather other counter-examples of like Ctrl+Alt+Del and ELLC as a way to make it even more existential and memories of passages I've read from 19th century novels that reinforce just how capable and competent they were in writing "show, don't tell" and how dominant it already was back then, with Piana's music serving as a way to reinforce that sense of resignation and serene "defeat," to the point that I just feel almost disoriented.
I think there was a part of me that clicked, that realized in that serene resignation and defeat that this is really my everything, and this is all that I've amounted to all this time and that what Tolstoy found or had is just not something that I can simply just comprehend. It is not that I want to write that way. It is that I know well that this is what LLMs, critics, and people consider good writing, and I can see it as well now that I've been trained in "show, don't tell" writing just how exceptional they are at this technique. And it just clicked with this convergence of things that yeah, I guess this is it. No screaming profanities. Just a simple "yeah."
It's strange. To refine my description of that resignation, it's basically "I've given my all. That's good enough. What else is there to say? I look at the roads. Perhaps, we are bound to stare at the roads, never finding our way out." That kind of serene resignation. Not anger. Not sadness. Not even madness. Not even helplessness. Just an irreversible sense that yeah...
What difference does it make? I thought there was? I can do nothing. I don't have to do anything. If I knew my entire future like Louise Banks did in the film Arrival, I would be even reinforced, but fortunately, I don't know my whole future. But even then, I can already tell from looking around me at this world, whether at the internet or in real life, that really, I've placed too much responsibility on myself. I've placed too much weight on it. I'm expecting too much. I'm stressing myself too much. Those innumerable web comics, blog posts, web novels, passersby, buildings, and physical books. It goes on and on, and in the end, it's funny that I thought that I was somehow exempt. I am one of those trees in a thicket in a forest in a world. I am barely existent in the way that I think I do. I can just lie down or let myself float in a pool and reflect and see just how null and void all of it is yet how much we just wish that we can just have each and every single one of those distinct serene moments last forever. Yet loss is just something to accept, and in accepting that, we can more readily accept that it really doesn't matter. "What difference does it make?" What I mean to say is that I am Louise Banks doing it all anyway even if I know well that no matter what I do, it will not change the reality that it really is just another day.
Trying to hold onto it, trying to control it, trying to force it. Yeah, I tried, and now I'm here, realizing that I can only cherish the moment as much as I can, accepting that loss is going to come and that some things I'm just going to have to accept no matter how hard I try.
Self-Responses:
why is he like that? "I won't be mad" it is as if he knows.
It is as if this is all they've known their entire life. It reminds me of Johnny Cash's Hurt, specifically the line:
Everyone I know Goes away in the end
Maybe this is what freedom means.
I've lived a lng life, what can i do? Ma, I'm not mad anymore.
I'ved livd to olong
August 26, 2025
Chopping
I wish that I was much more arrogant. I just need to be. I can see all of these feelings that I haven't vocalized but would be very valuable to have out there, because I don't want to live in a world where these feelings and concerns of mine are not at the very least included in the waste pile (not to mean that it is all trash and callous and meaningless, but that it is so messy, blended, irreverent, toe-stepping, eaten, morphed, and remade) that is this world.
The creative and human-expressive rage that I feel is so intense. I can see all these ideas wafting, turning, morphing, screaming, pulsing, merging, and lashing out in my head, but I have kept them encaged and deliberately ghettoed. It is disgusting how much of a tyrant I am of my own sense-o'-self.
The pretense that I feel is self-effacing, and the arrogance that I need is self-liberating. I keep these words tucked until they are ten years in the pocket of some trousers and never produced again save for some random lookie before it is thrown away carelessly like its history paved no road and coincided not with the machineries of this world. I have culled myself and poured my essence in streams of red down the drain, until I watch in corrupted silence at the world (i.e., self life-world) before me that I have inhibited and destroyed by determinative mechanisms of self-delabor (the de-provision of labor as a praxis of the existent self).
I am the Un-God (the non-man, the null-spirit, the flesh-prived ["deprived of flesh" in the sense that "flesh" itself serves as a fitting word to squeeze in the place of "de" in "deprived" as if it contained that much essential meaning]).
Un-creation.
I cannot hear the ringing, because it is so loud that I cannot even tell it's there anymore as something of a part of this world, instead seeing it as the world itself. I have cucked myself.
I can hear myself crying amid the music, specifically Piana's early in summer.
Imagined: "It's OK", I hear, and I am embraced (by someone).
Stanza 2:
I pretend to be callous, unfeeling, hateful (in a callous sense), and unsensitive. But really, I beg to beg. I beg to fall flat on my face and drag these tears into volition, and have them dribble down my chest until I am fully impregnated by a callous sense and beaten down before being lifted up and restored in humanity. I punish myself in my agonic rage—to be one with the people. To be a friend. To be a person. Oh to be a human being creator! Oh to be real, to be genuine, to have a soul! I puke—I rage—I hate. I swallow bottomless blood-wells. I mercilessly devour my sense-o'-self. I mercilessly kill the idea that I am. I murder and smile while I murder. I hurt myself in the process. I break in agonic de-pride (de-provision of pride, "the active removal of all self-worth"). I cuck myself.
Where am I? I stand at the edge, waiting for a fall or for an uplifting. I am waiting.
I pretend not to care, but I care so much. It hurts me. It incinerates me inside. I love you. But I have crippled my emotional capacity for affect and self-expression. This thing that I am, so inhibited, so un-volatile, so non.
I walk with a neutral expression, but around me, I see colors, flashing lights, blurs, faces, emotional highs and lows, mundanities, and trivia. I see a myriad. I pretend that I DO NOT SEE! I PRETEND THAT I AM AN UNFEELING BLIND AUTOMATON. I PRE-TENDDD! BUT I CAN SEEEE! I CAN SEEEEEEEE! I SEE ALL OF YOU IN-DI-VI-DUA-LLY! I SEE ALL OF YOU PEOPLE!
I feel.
It's all so beautiful, but I have chopped myself like a log on a trunk with an ax. I have delivered the final blow and have halved myself. I have tossed myself with the rest of the chopped (logs). I have delivered unto myself this finality, this dissemination, at the cost of a human-whole-soul.
Interlude:
"Hey how are you?"
"I'm fine. How 'bout you?"
"Doing well. Why?"
"Dunno. Haven't really been doing well to be honest."
"Real?"
"Yeah. I haven't thought about my dog lately. And he hasn't gotten like the meds yet."
"Ah, I see. But like, why're you mentioning that. Is that the real reason?"
"Dunno. I actually haven't talked to Sandra about the thing."
"Real?"
"Yeah."
"But besides the dog and... Sarah? What else? I feel like you're still not saying it."
"Yeah, I guess. I dunno. I fucking hate this shit. Like, I fucking hate being alive. I fucking hate the fact that I am. I fucking hate this feeling."
"What do you mean? You hate yourself? You hate being alive as in being you?"
"No, I don't hate myself or hate being me. I just fucking hate dealing with this particular situation, and it's making me feel this way. It makes me hate life even if I know that affect-wise, well, I know that I have gone through a whole range of emotions."
"I see..."
"Yeah. Basically."
Passage 3:
Even now, it is most total wish to become (actualize, to be precise) the fullness of myself, and to do that, I would have to go through a myriad of decision-making:
- Create
- Totalify
- Demand; Perfect
- Synchronize
- Mercilessly Define
- Wage the War of Exhaustion (as it provides oneself the rest one needs, the interludes to one's life, the defining moments that determine whether a thing is sustainable)
- Eliminate (not kill or waste, but ruthlessly cut away according to the definition)
Passage 4: The Culling
I smashed, crushed, ripped, crushed, determined, forced, enforced, merged, and totalified.
I grabbed and then had their entire spectrum bifurcated.
I became a totalizer, a person of self, a total of thing.
Passage 5: Return to Coherence
But self-effacement is the reason that I was able to learn so much. I have grown so much because I allowed myself to be self-effacing and to be OK with not integrating and with being ambiguous and incomplete. Of course, integration is an essential goal: self-actualizing. I mean just in the sense that it is only because I was so broken and wasted that I actually went through the effort of becoming so... grown.
Perhaps self-expression can be its own trap. You decide yourself on self-express. By withholding self-express, you are able to go beyond it, or to over-step it. Even if I should express myself because of the valuableness and have so much to put out there, I know well that suppression is its own incubator.
It's like strangling yourself with a rope, but while the word "strangle" can not only mean "suppress (an impulse, action, or sound)" but also "hamper or hinder the development (which suggests growth) of," if it means incubation, then it doesn't have to be a bad thing. It can be a creative incubation. The pressure (i.e., intent, judgment, and control) just needs to be judged well—an external conflict between self-expression and creative stranglehold.
Even if I want to sing, write, draw, dance, code, and do everything and make sure that I am not strangling myself in any way, shape, or form at all ever, the reality is that I need to be patient. Even if I already have the writing capacity to express so much of myself valuably, I must take my time.
If I will chop myself, let it be constructive.
If I will destroy myself, let it be beautiful. Controlled demolition, intentional wildfire, productive flooding, and intelligent muscle microtears.
Let the self-cucking be an art-form.
Self-Responses:
Their capability in this cri de cœur really underscores what we're missing out on because of this self-inhibition.
August 30, 2025
To be continued...
