This website is directly connected to my brain, it is a live feed of uploaded thoughts and impressions during the day and defragged dreams at night. Every image seen, word read, and concept obliquely understood appears as-is and without the inhibition or editing of self-awareness which necessarily distorts deliberate expression. You can rotate cubes in your head? That's cute. Try hosting a whole website in your brain.
I have some sort of sickness, as yet undiagnosed, which, owing to its nature, becomes less and less definable as it progresses and deteriorates. I suspect this ailment is from mold and tap water. Perhaps mold has infested my lungs and excreted some sort of sludge to fill in the holes in my brain. I think, too, it is some sort of punishment for my Past Transgressions. Was this fog ever-present, or is it merely clouding the memory of my experiences? I remember feeling this way for a long time, but it is like being in a house full of smoke, trying to look out the window, and determining that everything else must be gray and obfuscated, too. You can't say for sure one way or another because maybe the whole thing really is up in flames. All you know is: you're in it, the window is nailed shut, and it isn't clearing any time soon.
I am trying many Methods to unclog and flush my toilet brain: Cut caffiene. Quit drinking. Cut gluten. Low glycemic foods. Three minute headstands every morning and yoga that targets my neck and back. L-theanine, turmeric, omega-3, vitamin d, magnesium glycinate, probiotics, ashwagandha, brazil nuts (selenium), b12, liquid aminos. Cpap. Meditation, naturally. HIIT. SSRIs (citalopram). Intermittent fasting. Sleeping less. Sleeping more. Netti pot. Nasal sprays. If you have any more suggestions, let me know. I need a brain plumber.
There is a broader mind virus which is expressed in individuals but is intangible as it also exists interpersonally and thus can't be treated on an individual basis. There's no patient zero; this sinister thing has been percolating and bubbling up collectively for years and by the time anyone could catch it it's too late. It's a self feeding, autonomous thing. What is its nature? I couldn't tell you. I'm too far in it. All I can tell you is there's no fucking quiet, no matter how far out you go. The little wooded pockets in and out of town are still clouded by the sounds of a thousand inane cars driving back and forth and a pair of weekend catholic HR managers listening to Brad Paisley on their raffled waterproof bluetooth speaker. Even if you could get far enough away, even when you put in the highest grade wax-covered earplugs you can find, the sheer velocity of the ever-present sound feedbacks incessantly in your greenhouse head.It's like some actual physical manic parasite ricocheting off every wall in your skull. And yes, you can learn mindfulness, it is certainly possible to sit still enough for it to lose momentum and you can experience brief moments of respite. But always the self-perpetuating sound comes back, lest you drill a hole in your head to let that pressure out. It's worked for some people, I wouldn't know.
The other day, on an impulse, I drove to my hometown to see my dad's grave. It was only a couple of hours away. My phone wasn't charged, i hadn't eaten, i was low on gas, and i had to work the next morning, but something told me to go. so i went. I'm trying to follow my intuition more and stay away from the trappings of analysis paralysis.
It wasnt that big. I felt delirious the whole way up and i wasn't sure what i wanted with the visit. I've been feeling some pull towards my dad and my roots. God, my birth parents, my real parents, this inextricable line threaded through my childhood and if you turned me inside out you could see it holding me together like the inside of a pillowcase or whatever. I knew not to build up the visit in my head, that i wouldn't have some profound revelation, but i still kind of hoped for that. Like it would offer me closure. It is so far the culmination, but not the end, of my knowing the transience of everything, that there is only one reliable thing, and that thing has many names.
When i was only fifteen minutes away i thought i might have to turn around. I don't know what was wrong with me, or what is wrong with me currently, but i felt some sort of episode rearing its head, and i saw myself pulling over or going to the hospital out of state or driving home and riding it out but i knew i had to see this thing through, this thing that was nothing anyways, this thing that couldn't be nothing if i didn't complete it, that would manifest like a tulpa if i didn't relieve it.
The last time i had gone had been on an impulse, too. It was the first time i had been back since i'd moved away over ten years ago, and the first time i had visited my dad's grave in maybe fifteen years. I didn't want to see anyone, I just wanted to see this place that had so influenced me. I wanted to see how the reality of the place lined up with the skewed allusions to it in my dreams.
This time i went straight to his grave and the street to access the cemetery was still under construction. I sat with him for half an hour in the cold, not really knowing what to say or ask and although i knew there wasn't anything i was "supposed" to feel i felt there ought to have been more of an implicit understanding of what to do than what i had. And still it was difficult to leave. Probably even more so this time because i had gone all that way and it had been so long since i'd been there or talked to him and didn't end up saying much of anything. I relayed as many memories we shared as i could to him, which didn't take long. Funny things like the time i threw his shoes out the window so he couldn't go to work. Sad things, like the night he died, when i could tell something was wrong with him but as a kid i couldn't pinpoint what it was and i didn't have enough experience to know to do anything with it anyways. I don't feel responsible, nor do i wish we had spent more time together. I just wish i could remember the time we spent together more.
Everything I remember now of him is a memory of a memory. The memories are like stories that have been translated and retranslated so many times that while the essence is still there, on the whole the stories probably look nothing like the source material. It's like remembering the story as it is told but not the actual experience of the thing. That i could recite and exhaust all of the memories of the most important person in my life in such a small amount of time . . . Perhaps his significance lies in his brevity. I don't know how long it's been since I've forgotten his voice. I don't recall ever remembering that.
I didn't feel like he, specifically, was receiving anything i was saying. I have beliefs which I will elucidate later, it is not as though I believe he didn't -- but I didn't feel it. That's okay. He's outside of time now in some other form much beyond our ability to articulate.
Going the last time I finally understood the many ceremonies surrounding death. Though you know in the ground nothing remains of him, it's just a palimpsest, there is a weight to being in the place where the material that was his body now rests. Maybe you have to be looking for it, maybe it is just the manifestation of expectation. I don't think so. I simultaneously understand both that in death he is not a shadow tethered to that spot, that he or the place he resides is as accessible there as anywhere else; and that there is some significance to that place, that it acts as something like a shortcut there. I didn't feel it as viscerally this time as I did then, maybe there was poor reception because of the clouds, I don't know. But I knew that in some capacity there was much more to him than the body there in the ground that we grasped so desperately at and that his death wasn't merely the cessation of brain signals. He died in the room when he had the stroke and had left his body long before that body was plugged into the machines that kept the mechanics of the thing working so we could worship and beg and cry at it like it could reanimate and still be him.
Here is a List of Things I Like:
Now, I did consider just posting all of my socials to further distill my personality, but the whole point of this is to get away from the Endless Feed. Maybe I'll post my discord. If you really want to talk to me though, I have hidden my current address here. Come on over. I could use the company. You could, too.
We're worried about you.