OKAY this is gonna be fast and loose! I finished the story of Diablo 4 this past weekend, and was honestly shocked at how poorly the story handles Lilith??? And then I played through most of it again with my friend Ari, and SHE couldn't believe it either! And I can't find any essays on the actual story, so I'm just gonna riff a little on the conversations we had, and be frustrated!

These are just opinions! I don't expect better from a massive corporate multimedia collage surrounding the modern equivalent of a slot machine... but I was still surprised at how floppy the landing is, and how it builds up Lilith just to cast her aside in favor of her father??!!!

Basically this story portrays Lilith as a demon who is probably ultimately lusting after power, but almost everything she says about the state of the world *is factually true." For that, she gets killed. Meanwhile Inarius is absolutely full of shit and part of the centuries-long manipulation of humanity via the Cathedral of Light... and he gets worshipped even though he brings nothing but suffering. The game shows that he's more self interested than anything, but still paints him heroically even as he falls.

And Mephisto, her father, is a KNOWN ULTIMATE EVIL. He is revealed to have pulled the strings all along. And ultimately he gets what he wants, even if it's not quiiiiiite the way he expected. So Lilith is discarded by the end, in favor of re-focusing on the historic villains of the series. This is a huge mistake, in my opinion, both in terms of what "makes sense" in this world, AND what would be interesting to me, as a player!

Basically it feels like somebody up the chain of command said, "It's fine to make this woman the villain throughout, but we're going to end by focusing back on the Prime Evils," which just serves to reinforce the status quo of the game's world as well as our own. Somehow it comes to the conclusion that Lilith consuming her father and taking his power would definitely be worse than just keeping The Literal Embodiment Of Hatred around.

This is so fucked!!!!

(and I acknowledge that none of this matters in the big picture, but my brain is locking on to it so I'm gonna share my thoughts anyway! I'm focusing on this in terms of "does this work as a narrative?" as well as "does this support negative power structures?" but I'm NOT just looking for "plot holes" or whatever. I think there are errors of craft here, but that it's almost definitely a failure of / a deliberate choice by leadership to make this nihilistic story about Good Versus Evil somehow ultimately reify the status quo of Evil???)

(I'm also not interested in "but maybe the expansion will fix it" because that's exactly what they want us to say, so we spend between forty and eighty united states dollars to be let down again.)

QUICK PERSONAL HISTORY OF DIABLO

I was 10 when the first Diablo came out. My dad was into PCs, so he kept our hardware upgraded and would often acquire games for us one way or another. I missed Doom by being a little too young, but played most of the big releases as they came out, despite my family not having much money.

It's now been long enough (LITERALLY 27 YEARS FUCK) that it's hard for me to remember much beyond vibes. I don't usually think of myself as "liking Diablo," but the first two games were huge for me. I played a whole bunch of both; without cheats for as long as I could, and then ultimately turning on invincibility so I could see the ends. I remember being fascinated with every aspect of the first game. Tonally unlike anything else I'd seen at the time; arguably the only horror-adjacent media I enjoyed until my 30s. Played a ton of D2 with friends online.

Then I crossed into adulthood, with all of the disaster surrounding that, and cut myself off from games for a few years. By the time Diablo 3 came out, I had decided Blizzard's game weren't worth even trying because it was apparent how manipulative they had become. The unified Blizzard pipeline (where Warcraft and Diablo were made by 2 totally different teams at first, Diablo accidentally invented the ARPG and the foundations of free-to-play psychological manipulation, and then WoW is basically a mutation of Diablo with Warcraft 3's aesthetic, etc) became pretty gross to me. So I avoided D3 for most of a decade.

I tried D4 when it came out last year, because some friends wanted to play it. I liked the aesthetics, tone, and storytelling in the first few hours. But I remained resistant to its formula, and once I reached The Reverend Mother Prava, I was really put off by the insistence on Not Quite Catholic language.

But this is how they get you! Disliking Diablo 4 made me curious about the D2 Remaster. So I played the first couple areas of that. And then I wanted to know about D3, and over the last year I've played up to Act 5, in my darkest introvert moments. I think I get Diablo 3, as a kaleidoscopic compulsion engine. Its art, in the Warcraft 3 + WoW vein, is really unappealing to me. The story is utterly forgettable. I'm trying to hook in somewhere, and I just can't. Tyrael's quest to regain his life COULD be interesting... but it's really not!

So then they got me FURTHER with the successfully-strange branding of D4's new season. "Loot Reborn." What a joke, I thought. Embarrassing!

... But what did they mean?

LOOT GO LEAN

Basically they overhauled the D4 gear system, very similarly to the way they reformatted gear a year or two into D3. Fewer drops, higher levels, and rearrange the effects so they buff the player instead of diminish enemies. This is a brief gloss based on some reading I did.

I wondered briefly if this could be intentional: start with a Fine but subpar version of the loot systems, and then get attention before the expansion by switching to the Better version. I am guilty of conspiratorial thinking sometimes because the world doesn't make sense, and I want there to be some plan or scheme. I want people and organizations to be smarter than they are. Anyway I mentioned this to Ari, and she said there's no way a game company has that kind of cohesion. Much easier to attribute this to lessons being learned and then lost through the company losing the people who knew better. Because our corporations cannot value their people, and must repeat the same mistakes.

SO ANYWAY they made the game more "fun" to play, as long as I'm utterly depressed and burnt out and in a place where I can zone out to it. As I have been the last couple weeks!

I had started as a Sorcerer at launch, and realized the game felt really floaty and... not-tactile. Tactless? Untactilitous. lol. So, realizing I'm increasingly-sensitive to the sensation of contact in action games, I created a Barbarian. I think of myself as a wizard, but turns out I just want to smash into crowds of enemies. I enjoy the Aspects system, where abilities get modified by gear! It's neat when the Charge forward turns into a big wall of damage that makes enemies explode. Hell yeah. Sure! Whatever.

And I decided I wanted to see The Story.

THE TEXTURE OF CHANGE

I read Film Crit Hulk's essay on the Marvel movies some years ago. My big takeaway was the phrase "the texture of change." Distinct from actual change, those movies work and compelled people to come back again and again by feeling like they were always on the verge of a narrative transformation, using all of the signifiers of character and plot, but then ultimately either maintaining the status quo or moving deliberately toward a foregone conclusion.

Anyway, that's Diablo. Mechanically and, of course, narratively. The loot grinding treadmill is literally the texture of change. Increased challenge, better loot, overcome challenge, repeat. Most charitably, you could say the game generates lots of smaller arcs of challenge-to-reward. And it's also fine to Enjoy this, even if you know that it's just here to be exactly what it is! I remove the judgment from this assessment.

The Eternal Conflict is the setting AND the substance of Diablo. That's okay! If that's what it's for, that's fine I guess! The mega-corporate motivations behind Making Another Diablo are obvious, and I can imagine so many conversations about continuing the formula, making it interesting, but not breaking it.

But just because you want people to play the game forever doesn't mean you CAN'T do something more interesting with the story. So I'm not going to buy the argument that the story can't have meaningful events. And in fact, for as drawn-out and flaccid as the story ultimately is, there are arguably consequences to the world of Diablo. But the specifics and ultimate return to the status quo are what irritate me the most.

LILITH IS NOT THE VILLAIN, LOGICALLY OR TEXTUALLY

One of the problems is built into the now-traditional format of Game launch followed by Expansion that extends/concludes the current story. So let's acknowledge that there's no commercial way for us to be "fully satisfied" by the end of this game. Stipulated! That's not what I'm looking for.

It's also important to take our personal cosmology out of it. These are explicitly not our alleged version of Heaven, Hell, etc. So any time I mention any of that, it's purely in the context of this story and its avowed truths!

I'm also going to try and assess motivations SO FAR AS WE KNOW given everything said in the text. Basically it's a foregone conclusion for our heroes that Lilith Must Be Stopped No Matter What. And it's my contention that this is not true given the text of the game! They might be right, but there's a lot to suggest they aren't.

Here's what happens before Diablo 4

• Lilith, the demon daughter of Mephisto, co-created the land of Sanctuary with the angel Inarius.
• These aren't our world's angels and demons; and Sanctuary isn't Earth. This is a universe entirely constructed around the conflict between Heaven and Hell, and it's interesting that Lilith & Inarius created Sanctuary as "another place" to avoid the conflict.
• They gave birth to nephalem, which eventually became humans. So it is Cosmologically True that Lilith and Inarius are the Creators of everything relevant to humanity.
• When humans die, they DO NOT go to heaven or hell. They go to the spirit realm and maybe eventually get recycled. That means any religion proclaiming otherwise is lying / deceived.
• Angels and Demons apparently can't be destroyed either; they can be "killed" but will eventually re-form. So if you want to remove one from the board, you have to trap them. Inarius is trapped in Hell for a while; Lilith was banished to "The Void" or something for a while.
• The games ARE ALWAYS about "Soulstones" which can trap even a big ol demon like Mephisto. When Lorath has a big idea that just might work, lol, it's a soulstone.
• The Horadrim are scholars who SORT OF know what to do about Hell, but are always on the brink of extinction and without resources (except somehow always a soulstone).
• The Eternal Conflict is the battle between Heaven and Hell for control of... basically anything that isn't Heaven or Hell. Humans are caught in the middle.

Then in the game itself, with commentary about whether people's actions make sense given these facts

• You are a mysterious wanderer who is, for an unnamed reason, Very Important. A wolf looks after you in the snowy cave; turns out that's (the avatar of?) Mephisto, Lord of Hatred. He says you're capable of greatness. Presumably you're a Nephalem, but after D3 yelled incoherently about NEPHALEM the whole time, in D4 I don't think I've even heard that word?
• So even though they don't tell us that's Mephisto, FROM THE VERY BEGINNING OF THIS GAME, Mephisto is pulling the strings.
• We learn about Lilith, get fed some of her blood, so we can see "echoes" of what she did before we got there. In other words, there's an excuse for how we can see what Lilith is up to without ever being physically present with her until the end.
• There's this guy named Elias, who was a "good guy" Horadrim, who realizes we're never getting out of the Eternal Conflict using existing methods. He decides that he needs to summon Lilith, the "Mother of Sanctuary," because she's the only one with power and interest in removing this land from the Conflict. Even though he's a creeper, HE APPEARS TO BE RIGHT ABOUT THIS, even if it is risky.
• So he does!
• He summons Lilith, and yeah she's reconstituted from sacrified human blood. Aren't we all?
• Elias takes her to church. She's got the Mannerisms of Confident Evil, but the only way you can push back against what she says is to assume every single word is a lie. Maybe it is! Maybe she's manipulating us, and everyone in the narrative. If so, if a Demon is doomed by birth to only ever do wrong, then okay, forget all this. EXCEPT that there is a long period of apparent peace that she and Inarius created for other discarded beings.
• There's a priest yelling at his small congregation about how they never do anything right according to the Light. That the Light is a lie is Cosmological Fact in Diablo's world. There is no reward for humans after death; they don't go to Heaven or become Angels. So he is a tool of manipulation.
• Lilith shows up, and basically says everything a queer person would say against the church. They just want to control you, the way you were born is beautiful, what they call "sin" is just our true nature. She's using the language of liberation! And IF the game's assertion is that this type of language is a lie, then that sucks.
• Now admittedly this causes the people to immediately kill their priest. But again, here, we've got this abusive priest, part of a system of false control, berating the people for like, drinking and partying. It is my personal opinion that our world would be better if we removed everyone who perpetuates this ideology of harm and guilt. So at least in my book, so far, Lilith is Correct!
• I don't think at this point we know what Lilith's big plan is? She talks about saving Sanctuary and Humanity. Ultimately she obtains a key to Hell and goes in to destroy her father, who I must reiterate, IS THE LORD OF HATRED. She is Correct to do this.
• We meet a Horadrim, who says Lilith must be stopped.
• We meet a bunnnnnnch of church people, who say Lilith must be stopped. They also say Inarius is prophesied to defeat there. This is False.
• We meet Inarius, who is stuck on Sanctuary and just wants to go back to Heaven. He encourages people to worship him, but does literally nothing to improve the lives of humans. A lot like some OTHER gods I know.
• We meet Neyrelle, who is a budding young scholar of the dark arts. She and her mom track down Lilith, I can't remember why. After talking with Lilith, Neyrelle's mom decides to help; that Lilith's cause seems just. Yeah she gets a little Religious Fervor but again, YOU JUST MET THE ACTUAL CREATOR OF YOUR WORLD???
• I'm inclined to give Lilith more credit than Inarius, but maybe that's personal bias. Inarius is shown only to be the kind of distant father who does nothing but harm to his children. Textually, he's a deadbeat. He's HERE on Sanctuary, doing fuck-all. Lilith was banished to the Void, and here she comes saying, "I'm sorry my children, I'm going to fix this." Maybe she's lying! That's a given at this point. Let's work with what she says.
• Neyrelle's mom decides she'd rather follow Lilith than take care of her daughter, even going so far as to cut Neyrelle in order to continue her blood ritual. That sucks! I said, "Damn it must suck to have your mom align with a demon against you. Has she been watching Fox News?" lmao, but also fuck.

Anyway a BUNCH OF STUFF happens, and also kind of nothing happens for a long time. We follow 3 steps behind Lilith, beat the shit out of allegedly immortal demons, and slowly piece together what Lilith's been up to. I'm not gonna track down every little tidbit because then I'll never be done. I'm just doing this from memory!

• She goes to find her firstborn, Rathma, but Inarius found and killed him first. She mourns her child and swears vengeance.
• She summons other demons along the way, and their violence toward us is a point against her. But also, we're trying to stop her.
• Either Lilith works on Vampire Rules, or she won't/can't do things that people don't want to do. We see her offer Donan a chance to be a great hero again, which he rejects. She makes similar offers to his old adventuring party, and they take the deals. Everybody we meet explains why they're siding with Lilith, and they basically all make sense. Then we kill them.
• We deal with Elias for a while; he's trying to summon more of the big demons, for reasons unclear to me.
• There's a lady named Taissa who is going to be a vector for Andariel the demon, but she's also a powerful witch, and also she DOES become a demonic gateway, but then everything's fine because of course it is.
• Lilith makes her way to Hell, as it becomes explicit that she's going to destroy Mephisto, who is currently a big weak egg for some reason. Everybody says this would be terrible, including: Lorath, Church people, and Mephisto himself.
• We get demon ex machina'd a few times by the Mephisto Wolf, who keeps offering to help, we turn down the help with words... AND THEN WE DO EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTED.
• This is jumping around but at a certain point Lilith asks why would we side with Mephisto over her? THERE IS NO TEXTUAL REASON FOR THIS. Our character, jarringly, asserts that she won't follow either Lilith or Mephisto. But then, in the way of all "apolitical" figures, she winds up doing Mephisto's bidding and reinforcing the status quo.
• Inarius raises a human army to chase Lilith into Hell. Basically Inarius thinks, BASED ON NOTHING, that if he kills his son and his ex, and maybe even destroys the world they created, that he'll be welcomed back into Hell.
• So he leaves the humans to die, confronts Lilith, and stabs her, thinking she's dead. But nothing happens. So Lilith asks whether Heaven is proud of him. "Did they rejoice?" No, because, "Silence is their judgment." Lilith, among everybody in this story, seems to be the only one who understands abusive familial dynamics. There's no pleasing Heaven; there's no pleasing Hell. Inarius being a guilty little baby leads him to make catastrophic decisions.
• Anyway she stabs him, rips his wings off, and then traps him in the very cool slowly-flowing tormented stone spirits.
• Lilith reaches the shores of Hatred, where some other demon scoffs at her for "returning home" but lets her through because I don't know.

MEANWHILE we've made it to Hell, the story continually prioritizes Lorath and Donan's lame-ass relationship and histories over Neyrelle's repeated suffering (dead mom, faith is a lie, loses her arm for no good reason, etc) while they tell her "just hang in there, and you'll be one of us." It sucks.

• Mephisto repeatedly helps us, and we do what he wants even though he says he doesn't want anything, and we say we won't do whatever it is. This is a place where he's very obviously lying to manipulate us.
• Mephisto says that if Lilith consumes him, that will mean the end of Sanctuary. There is literally no other evidence for this in the text that I've seen.
• Lilith invades our mind through the Sightless Eye, where her voice tries to convince us that if we join her, we will be Sanctuary's greatest champion. There's something special about us, and Lilith wants our help. Again maybe she's lying and manipulating, but what she SAYS is all pretty much bang on. It would make so much sense for our heroes to go, "You know what? Let's help her destroy Mephisto and then deal with the consequences." BUT WE DONT
• Mephisto helps us again, warping us to the palace before Lilith arrives.
• Here's where the story completely derails. Neyrelle, who has good instincts but really isn't an expert, decides to use the Soulstone to trap Mephisto. Why? There's no good reason given. Mephisto says doing that would be a mistake because OF COURSE HE WOULD, but Neyrelle does it anyway.
• Then, somehow, the Mephisto wolf shows up again with another portal to take her away. Why? Mephisto was JUST TRAPPED. This makes no sense. But she leaves and is unreasonably sentimental toward our character even though there has been basically no emotional development between us.
• Lilith reaches the palace, and she's pissed. Basically by trapping Mephisto, we've already ensured her failure. She could catch Neyrelle and eat the stone, but maybe not. She decides to kill us because we rejected her, but we defeat her.
• Her final words are about how she gave us free will, and we've squandered it on a crusade we don't understand, following the Church and therefore Inarius even though there's plenty of evidence that they're full of shit. She appears genuinely sad in the end that she wasn't able to break the cycle of Eternal Conflict. Everything she says here is Cosmic Fact.
• She turns to stone and then crumbles. I assume she'll re-form eventually. But we've thwarted this plan.
• We leave Hell, close the gate, Neyrelle vanishes with the stone, and then we see her walking alone through the wilderness talking nebulously about some plan to take the Mephistone somewhere. But it's all bullshit cliffhanger nonsense, and even though the forthcoming expansion has been announced with a video showing Neyrelle's slow corruption by Mephisto, nothing that comes after will change what has occurred. Also they ALWAYS get out of the stones.
• The world is "changed" because Inarius and Lilith are both "dead," all the faiths have proven to be trash, and so humanity is truly alone in the universe. OOPS!

And finally, as Ari pointed out, NONE OF THIS MATTERS TO US. None of it. The Lilith boss fight comes after the resolution of the main conflict at which point your motivation to kill her is, "because she's going to kill me coz I fucked up her plan to free Sanctuary from the Eternal Conflict." It's such a floppy, deflating end to Lilith's narrative arc.

If Lilith was summoned, killed Mephisto, and took over as Lord of Hatred... literally nothing would change for humanity. We'd be none the wiser. We didn't have to get involved. NOBODY provides anything more than fear and supposition that she would go on to greater harm.

Great harm than THE SOURCE OF ALL HATRED FOR ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY? Fuck, this is stupid!!!!!

WHAT IS IT FOR

Listen all I can really say is: Lilith speaks truth the whole time. She SHOULD kill her dad. We SHOULD kill the priests. Inarius is a little do-nothing so-and-so. Yeah maybe she's powered by Hatred and awakens the Hatred in humans, and maybe if she eats the Lord of Hatred she'll be an even worse Hatred. But so far as I can tell, the game never show us that she's lying about wanting to save humanity and Sanctuary!

Basically she's a confident woman with a liberation politic, and she is thwarted by her powerful father to maintain the status quo. Her crimes are:

• Creating a peaceful place way from cosmic war
• Creating new species of people who live there for a long time in apparent peace
• Angel-Demon War comes to conquer Sanctuary and she's cast out of existence
• Coming back from The Void and telling everybody the truth about how the church sucks, Sanctuary wasn't supposed to be a place of suffering, and that she's going to fix it
• Wanting to destroy LITERALLY ONE OF THE MOST PERSISTENT EVILS IN THE COSMOS who is also her BAD DAD
• Arguably manipulating people into doing what she wants, maybe in the worst reading by mind-controlling them, but again there's no textual
• If anything there's evidence that she can't control people. When Donan says no, she leaves. We're infused with her blood, and even we are able to go, "nope not gonna do it." Maybe the other people are more vulnerable or weaker, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Oh yeah, at some point we kill Elias like 10 times before undoing his immortality. His dying words are to call Lorath a coward who would never be able to accomplish his goals, which as far as I can tell is also a Cosmic Fact.

So, a threat to the obviously-evil status quo is disregarded despite being calm and reasonable, somehow perceived as an enormous threat while everything she says indicates otherwise. She is a threat, to Heaven and Hell. In other words, a threat to Power.

And in Diablo's world, as in ours, Heaven and Hell deserve to be destroyed.

WHAT DOES IT SAY

There's no way for Power to be used for good. The Angels don't do it, and the Demons don't do it. What do I mean by "good?" Well, peace is good. Love is good. Caretaking is good. Truth is good.

Unless she is lying about absolutely everything the entire time, these are the things Lilith does. She births a world. A people. A peace. Which is only thwarted because her peaceful domain becomes an appealingly-juicy object of desire for the conquering hordes of Angels and Demons.

We don't have to just take her word. We have the advantage of a Lore-Obsessed series of games, which have documented the history of the cosmos in great detail. I haven't read all that shit because it is mostly so boring to inhabit this faux-Christian perspective, but I went and read a bunch of backstory to explore all this. And we come back again the Cosmic Facts. We KNOW she did all these things. We KNOW she said true things as she moved through this game's events. We KNOW that every other power structure is manipulation and control.

So the most charitable possible read for the end of this story is that, with mommy and daddy dead, humanity can start anew. But they can't. Because Mephisto is still the Lord of Hatred. Hell is still waging constant war on Sanctuary. Heaven is noticeably absent from this entire game's narrative. I know you go to Heaven at the end of D3, but I didn't finish it so I'm not sure what happens. Did Heaven get blown up? Is it even there for Inarius to appeal to? I assume it must be, and I'm not looking it up now because I don't care anymore.

This is a story about a woman speaking truth to Power, and everybody losing their shit and killing her to ultimately maintain Power where it already is. This is a cowardly narrative, neoliberal in its framing of power, convinced that as bad as things may be, there's no way a transfer of power to someone cool-headed and intelligent could be any better. If anything, it would have to be worse.

We also start with Neyrelle as a main character, but she gets shouldered out of the spotlight almost immediately. Lorath is the narrator, because there must be a gravel-voiced man in control of the story. He and Donan, who I cannot stress enough are pathetic little babies who I cannot identify with in the least!!! I DO NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ANYTHING THESE PATHETIC OLD MEN DO. Neyrelle is along for the ride, and she's the one who makes a lot of things happen... but it's from the narrative backseat.

If the expansion reconfigures any of this, great. But I have no reason to believe that it will.

BECAUSE YOU SPENT ALL THIS EFFORT BUILDING UP LILITH

JUST TO THROW HER AWAY

AND MAKE THE NEXT CHAPTER ABOUT HER DAD

WHY IS IT LIKE THIS

Tradition, conservative leadership, etc. Ari thinks the ending is decided early on, so cinematics can go into production long before the game is near complete. Maybe the writers accidentally created a compelling character in Lilith, but leadership said she has to die so we can focus again on the Primes. Maybe knowing that she had to die, the writers chose to make her sympathetic.

Either way, huge games like this are a collage. I'm not indicting any given writer or artist involved in this game. There's some fantastic writing (and some absolute time-filling nonsense), incredible art, tight gameplay (for what is is), etc. I have learned that the likeliest source of Big Problems is, of course, Management.

Games and movies, especially mass-market fantasy shit like Star Wars, Marvel, and the big games, have had a tendency to be about vindicating or excusing Bad Dads. Trying to tell stories about kids and making it about forgiving the parents. All of the Russo Marvels are about Bad Dads. We talk about the Daddification of Games with Last of Us, et al. Aging developers wrestling with their own demons for having given too much of their lives to labor.

This is the daddification of Diablo. They presented a story about two Daughters, and made it a story about All The Dads. It's worse than unsatisfying; it's honestly gross. It's a foregone conclusion, no matter what Lilith says, that she is Wrong. Despite her words. Despite the evidence. Despite avowed cosmic history.

Because the powerful refuse to change.

SHOULD YOU PLAY THIS STORY

No. There's an option to skip the campaign; take it. It truly made both me and Ari like the game A LOT less.

SHOULD YOU PLAY DIABLO 4

🤷‍♀️

WHAT WOULD I PREFER

Lilith should have eaten her dad. Let her ascend to power. Let us see what she would do with it. If the final expanded Act was about "ope, Lilith lied and she's just gonna destroy EVERYTHING now," then so be it. Let her ascend and then fall. Let a new villain rise rather than returning to the Prime Evil well.

More interestingly, what if she was true to her word? Let her eat Mephisto, and then let us ally with her as she destroys the other Prime Evils, and then all the Lords of Heaven. Tear down the cosmos. Kill god. It would be an opportunity for new stories to be told, other axes of ideology to be ground. Keep Sanctuary; show life improving for its citizens as we fight off remnants of the Eternal Conflict. Set Lilith up as Right, as the victor, as the one being willing to tear down institutions for the possibility of a better life.

Then the next Diablo, for there must be another, could reframe the conflict. Sanctuary is a place of peace where Lilith is worshipped, or even where she refuses to be worshipped. Tear down the Eternal Conflict. Stop letting the powerful live when all they do is oppress. Stop letting false visions of forever take over our present reality.

Then find something else to fight about.

and as I close my eyes in a hot bath that can't contain me, what do I hear but Pinkerton's devil whisper, the album I can map so many of my youthful discomforts onto and that now I hear as such a transgender wail, tired of sex and so far away and I'm dumb she's (I'm) a lesbian, I thought I had found the one, and butterfly, every time I pin down what I think I want it slips away

I guess you're as real as me
maybe I can live with that

but I couldn't, I never did live with it, the ghost slips away and she was me, and I'm suddenly achingly sick of it all again, reliving all the living that was so hard because something about me just rubbed people the wrong way

and I get it

me too!!!!!

and I can endure it because I'm good at enduring but motherfuck I wish my life was aligned with any of my beliefs, any of my dreams, any of my wants and I'm trying and I'll keep trying

but we've made a nasty world and I have always known it even when I couldn't say its name

I don't want sex I just want tenderness
I don't want gender I want to feel weightless
I don't want to be hot I just want to want not
and be accepted and held and loved

I have enjoyed all the moments when I briefly felt real
I look forward to a few more if I can manage it

absence cannot be reconstructed
but it can be illuminated

and i'm lit the fuck up

These are all reasons I've stopped myself from writing in the last few years.

According to my New Rules, none of these apply anymore! YAYYYY! (also, wow, I just re-read my new rules and they're really good. I should listen to myself more often!!!)

SO here's my disclaimer:

THE FOLLOWING THOUGHTS ARE JUST FOR FUN!

It's all made up and probably wrong! If something is incorrect or incomplete, that's okay! I didn't mean for it to be otherwise. I'm gonna speculate about What It All Means and it's gonna be strictly about what happens in my head. I don't care what David Lynch or Mark Frost or anybody else "meant" when they made this. I'm not doing "lore analysis!" We are purely in the realm of fanfiction, fantasy, and an exploration of my interior above all else. If you disagree with me on any point: FANTASTIC! wonderful! be at peace

What we're gonna do:

I'm gonna start watching Twin Peaks: The Return, Episode 1, and anytime I feel like taking a screamshot, I will! And then I'll write something that comes to mind. None of this is going to be in order. I'll refer to other things if I need to (I read literally 9 books about Twin Peaks & David Lynch's work last summer, watched or re-watched all of his movies, and have watched & listened to so many other people's responses). I'm gonna spoil the heck out of everything immediately! And none of what I write is gonna be in any particular order, otherwise I'll think too hard and stop! This isn't a book; I'm just posting! Not academic, not formal, not well-ordered, just notes and observations :)

Oh, and I'll refer to seasons 1 and 2 sometimes, but I'm focused on Season 3 as kind of its own thing (with a long strange history). And also, the incredible and terrifying and heartbreaking film Fire Walk With Me. I'm gonna be a little silly, and I'm gonna be a lot serious!

But I think it might be interesting even if, like most of my dearest friends, you haven't watched any of it! You can let me know if it is. I'd like you to relax your assumptions about what this thing is, because I think it's one of the most interesting televisual things ever made! Please respect my interest!!!!

All right, so I got a greek salad, some hummus, and some kinda juice I forget which kind. Pull up a snack, and let's fucken goooooooooo

CONTENT WARNINGS FOR DISCUSSIONS OF

violence against women, sexual violence, violence in general, trans issues, dysphoria, body horror, systematic oppression, existential dread, suicide, drugs, depression... a whole bunch of rough stuff!

BASIC ASSERTIONS

I re-watched The Return about a year ago, after I had formally recognized that I'm A Trans but hadn't really talked about it with many people yet. When I reached the point where Laura Palmer (who "died" as a senior in high school but is still present in various ways) says, "I'm dead... and yet I live!" I actually started crying. Because for various reasons, known and unknown to me, I've described myself as a ghost since my senior year of high school. A lotta shit went wrong for me that year, but most of it was, in retrospect, tied PRETTY STRONGLY to my increasingly-fraught relationship with ME OL' GENDER that it would take me another decade and a half to work through because our culture sucks shit, and because bad people maintain power by denying us self-knowledge.

Anyway I've said many times, with depressive clarity, that I feel like a ghost. Like my life lost meaning and coherence circa puberty, then BIG TIME during the last year of high school, and that I've been ever more depressed, dissociative, self-loathing, and distraught with each passing year. Good things have happened, wonderful people have loved me, and I've had plenty of happy times. But there's a deep substrate and painful gravity of loss, longing, and misalignment running under everything I've done for over 20 years. Longer if you count — which I do!!! — being bullied out of my personality, by my family and community, from as young as I can remember for being Not Masculine Enough and Absolutely Neurodivergent. Go fuck yourselves, small-minded bigots!

Or as David Lynch's character says in The Return, to David Duchovny's trans character, "And when you became Denise, I told all of your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die!"

FIX YOUR HEARTS OR DIE

So, when Laura Palmer says she died, and yet she lives, I pointed at the screen like Leo #2 in the plane movie. (The turtle is Leo number one.) And for the rest of the watch, I was Thinking About Gender. And wow, uh, you sure can read Twin Peaks as a series of stories taking place in a subconscious or dreaming mind, trying to surface the truth of being a trans girl while it is repeatedly shut down and repressed by trauma and forced masculinity!

And then I read Lou Ming's essays about Finding Laura via dreams, watched some of David's other work through the same lens, and my brain went all kinda places. I'm not gonna be prescriptive or diagnostic about another person. But for me, there is a tremendous amount of illustrative gender dysphoria and discomfort throughout David Lynch's work, including the shattered bliss of impossible lesbian desire in Mulholland Drive, the view-from-the-closet fascination in Blue Velvet, the absolute and terrifying prison of masculinity in Lost Highway, the deep outsider dissociation and mechanized discomfort of occupying the man's role in Eraserhead, the somber acceptance of being physically wrong and never understanding why in The Elephant Man, the emotional paralysis and stunted possibility of being a man in need of connection in The Straight Story, all the way to a kind of ecstatic release into actualized feminine chaos in Inland Empire.

And then there's The Return, which is a summary and mutation of everything that came before it.

Again, I'm not saying this is what Twin Peaks "IS ABOUT," nor am I saying anybody involved "is trans" or has any knowledge of that perspective. There are, unfortunately, a lot of ways and reasons to become fucked up about gender and interpersonal relationships here in the curse of humanity. But I'm saying that it has been helpful and fascinating to me to read it this way, annnnnnd that there are A LOT of ways this reading works:

THESIS STATEMENT

Laura Palmer is a trans girl who 'died' by going deep into denial as she crossed into adulthood, and that Twin Peaks in its entirety is Laura's internal landscape trying to solve the mystery of how "she" died, the trauma and avoidance in a repeating cycle of preserving the empty "self," and why everything has gone so painfully and terribly wrong without access to that truth.

Because that's what happened to me.

THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE

electricity, orb, atom bomb, clouds, good text I like it

All right so I'm gonna make some assertions. This one is based on a premise from this extremely good set of essays, Find Laura, by someone called Lou Ming, who unfortunately appears to have died last year. Starting this is absolutely inspired by his writing, including the format of just watching the show and talking about it in order. I'm going to approach it from a different angle than he did, but there's a lot he observes in there that I found VERY INTERESTING and will be building on here!

One of the questions he asks is: "What if everything anyone says in Twin Peaks is literally true?" DL's work is renowned for being weird and zany and impossible to truly understand. Some people think that's fun, other people think it's bullshit! I've been through every stage. BUUUUUUT as soon as Lou asked that, I felt the tumblers in my headlock spin around rapidly and snap into place. So let's keep that in mind. We might not know what a given statement means, but let's assume that somehow it's true, not just some wacky thing David made up to be mystifying for its own sake!

So after the Rancho Rosa production card, the first thing we see is flying wildly over this zigzag floor. We, the viewer, are here to begin with.

Zigzag becomes red curtain.

The other thing Lou Ming asserts is: the hidden narrative of Twin Peaks is that everything we're seeing is part of Laura Palmer's subconscious attempting to process a trauma she's hidden from so deeply that she can't face it.

All that we see on the screen represents Laura trying to remember while simultaneously repressing the memories of her trauma. When she can finally accept the truth [...], she can live as herself again. In other words, Laura Palmer is not literally, physically dead; she’s so traumatized that she can’t accept her reality.

BING BING BING hello, that is the transgender experience calling, as always, from inside the house!!!

(I'm deliberately omitting the part where Laura Palmer is sexually violated by her father. Not because it's not important, but because I think the depictions of violence against women in this series are really important, right at the heart of this thing. I want to be really careful about how I discuss that; I'm not used to trying to talk about it! It's not what I want to focus on right this second, though I want you to know that I know!)

this guy is important lol, and not just because he's "the hero" of the original show. but we'll get to him

Not as important as her. This footage is from the end of TP season 2, back in 1991. One of the coolest things about Twin Peaks is that it started out neat, became a big mess, and David came back and made the last episode an extremely strange and resonant piece of television, including this assertion by the Dead Girl Who Lives, Laura Palmer, that she would see Agent Cooper (and us) 25 years later.

AND THEN THEY FUCKEN DID IT THAT'S SO COOL

(there wasn't really a master plan, but the fact that it worked out this way is just one of the neatest things)

okay and then she says, "meanwhile," makes this well-known gesture, and then the film freezes. Fades to black. And comes back up on the cloudy air above Twin Peaks.

So if we take everything literally, we are now being shown things that happened in the meanwhile.

This first shot of the foggy air is different in episode 1 from all the rest; we've got this glowing orb (which we know is Laura, somehow, later) but in the rest of the episodes, we fly INTO Laura's translucent photo!

Here's the same shot in episode 2:

Okay now here's something that I was SO DELIGHTED to see Lou Ming point out, because I had thought of it and was also ready to dismiss it. But he says:

The opening credits begin when Laura’s image has faded away. The fact that the camera will literally pull our POV into the head of Laura Palmer at the beginning of every episode from now on is so direct a visual metaphor I’m almost embarrassed to mention it, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it mentioned elsewhere.

YEP. But it's the kind of thing that like... we tend to process as abstraction? Or as... as a special effect. As just a thing that sometimes happens in televisual media. Sometimes there's an overlaid image! Often to remind us of something. And it would make sense to be reminded of Laura Palmer at the start of these episodes, because David asserts repeatedly (and so does the show) that Laura is the the pivot point of everything we see.

But David Lynch doesn't use editing or special effects in the usual way. I mean this! I've studied it and you're gonna have to trust me, but part of what makes his movies "feel so weird" is that the camera doesn't move in ways we expect. Techniques are used, but the timing is off, or the placement is strange. And I think David has a very literal image brain, combined with a tendency to also see very strange things. So there are lots of examples in his films (and we're calling TP3 a film) of camera movement being actual abstract movement, not just for "cinematic effect" or drama, but as like... a game mechanic.

AND his special effects are really weird! I saw some people talk really negatively about some of the effects later on in The Return, because they "look cheap." I don't think so! They look strange, but that's different. Things like Laura taking her face off and showing something weird moving around inside — it looks "fake" because, YEAH THAT'S NOT A NORMAL THING THAT CAN HAPPEN. And I think the unusual look is deliberate (or at least I choose to view it that way, who knows what DL is thinking and I already told you it's not important to me) because it helps reinforce the strangeness.

(Realism in televisual media is overvalued. Animation and effects should communicate feeling and meaning, not strive to trick us into seeing the unreal as real. This is why the animated Disney movies, which were mostly created playfully by expressive (many queer) artists about feelings, are flawed but utterly untouchable by the "live action" aka entirely-computer-generated remakes, which are about.......... distorting our sense of reality? Subduing us with Spectacle?? Perpetually recolonizing the imagination??? ANYWAY NEEDLESS TANGENT but I told you I'm just typing stuff)

There are several prominent depictions of things overlaid on top of each other that I think convey meaning, not just transition. Cooper's face speaking over the "climactic battle" scene towards the end. Trees overlaid on dark roads (I'll get there). Even later in the opening, we go off the side of the waterfall, water overlaid with waving curtains, overlaid with zigzag floor, fading to black, and then we're off...

So, let's take it literally. Things shown visually blended are the same thing, or are very closely related. That's cool! Maybe a kind of wave-particle thing. And in this shot? We see a bunch of things overlaid: Laura Palmer's high school photo. Fog, literally the air around us. Trees, the forest that means so much in Twin Peaks, which I read as the subconscious darkness from which everything emerged. The sawmill, transforming raw lumber into usable material. Ghostwood Forest, colonized and cauterized by white humans, still a precious enough resource that Audrey chains herself catastrophically to the bank vault to prevent its further commodification, finally cut down to build a massive prison. This is all hugely important! And it's not even all subtext!!!!!

Here, we're being shown, all of this is Laura.

And as an image of Coop staring at the camera is overlaid halfway through Part 17, we hear his slowed & deepened voice say, "We live inside a dream."

OR MAYBE NOT, who can never be sure?

WE ARE A DEAD GIRL

If you know Twin Peaks well, some of this is going to sound obvious. Maybe it is! Let's take a closer look anyway.

One thing to remember is: Laura's dead. We're looking at dead girl, sitting and talking with an alive guy, in some space that isn't "the real world." Laura's strange speech is filmed in a really cool way: they filmed everybody talking and moving in reverse. And they didn't have computer editing in 1991, so they actually came up with a way to load film into a camera so that it was physically filmed backwards!! That rules.

But why is it like this? Again, maybe David just "wants things to feel weird." And it sure does work! To me it feels like there's a translation layer; these reverse-reversed shots, which also use strange wording, are like the dreaming brain communicating with the waking. Dale's not reversed; he's the only person who ever speaks "normally" in this red-curtained room (what they call The Red Room, or as Bad Cooper says later, "what they call the Black Lodge," meaning that's not what these places are actually called. And names matter). Why? He's our perspective? He's the Agent of decrypting these messages. He finds this place, gets trapped there, is duplicated and ethically-mirrored, and stays here for 25 years. As we're about to see.

After we enter the fog, crossfade to A Smokestack. Part of the Mill, I think!

It correlates with this shot from the Original Series opening:

Except now the smokestacks are dead, everything is still and surrounded by fog. Then where the original series really dwells on the interior of the factory, the sharpening of blades and casting off of fire, the Dead Mill crossfades to the High School. Both quintessentially American factories, attempting to turn out uniform products compatible with the needs of business.

Season 1:

Season 3:

If crossfading indicates connection, then I'm not just being hyperbolic! I think this is kind of the core of Twin Peaks, and especially Season 3: the violence committed by the United States against everyone, including its own people. Particularly by impoverishing us, financially and morally, and keeping us from being Our True Selves so that we'll continue the cycle.

It's been 25 years. How much have things changed from the tragicomic soap opera suffering of Season 1 up to now?

OKAY focusing again on S3 E1, we see the girl running and crying (with blue socks and collar) in slow motion, and then the trophy case featuring Laura Palmer's senior photo.

THIS LITERALLY JUST OCCURRED TO ME, but Laura is on display here as a trophy. Like a buck's head mounted to the wall (like Buckhorn, South Dakota), she is dead and preserved. An ideal. An idea.

This is one of many many things that has an obvious surface reading; it's normal to put photos of students in the trophy case, right? There are others alongside.

But IF we're inside Laura's dream, the dream of being Laura, then this huge picture in the dead center of the trophy case is pretty ominous.

And again, we move slowly in on the photo, and then the title is overlaid across her eyes, the Jane Doe lightly obscured.

What's the correlating shot in the original credits?

Oh, just the industrialized sharpening of blades. Machines designed to turn beautiful, natural life into construction materials.

If Laura is the raw material — what's the product?

△△

MORE TO FOLLOW...

Unfortunately, I do not have the mental energy to explain. I can simply point at this and raise my eyebrows repeatedly. Mostly the second paragraph.

I also really appreciate “an uncanny sense of crisis and of security, of crisis in security.” “things were coming to seem more entirely material than ever and, at the same time , more spectral and estranged.” That’s a pretty accurate description of my life experience!

Anyway I wish I felt like explaining the Big Thoughts that happen when I read stuff like this. I don’t, and it also doesn’t feel like it’s worth the effort. BUT OH WEL

And suddenly again how normal it is that everything's screaming green, that everytree's swaddled in mutebright leaves. Through the chart of glass or the impenetrable gas of that most fair, their shuffling and huffing is enticement and grace.

This is nowhere near enough, and leaves are allwhere near their ghosts, who folded and fell and ascended to the xylem hall of heaven — which is spring — or the winged stomach of heaven — which is on the move — or the downy grey fuzz of freshloam surl, earthy kids ready to roar slowly forth with tender shoots from stomped-on mounds.

The cat's claw churns the earth.
Inventured farmhands rake the weeds.
Being this lonely sure is hard work.

In the spirit of constructive assertion, I'm gonna improvise some New Rules/Goals/Hopes!

I will not be afraid of what people say about my art!

I have become terrified over time of what people will say when I put art into the world in any medium. And not without reason! My own mother said I sounded "insane" after publishing a short essay in 2016, but luckily/complicatedly I realized by the end of that year that my family was not good for me, and cut them out of my life. HOWEVER, that's just one of many instances where eager little (and big) Nick published something and received outrageous negative responses. And I struggled to build enough of a "thick skin" to brush that stuff off, mostly because I was poor, unmedicated, and fucking suffering for years!!! Fuck you if you've ever been anything less than helpful when the tender shoots of my creativity have tried again and again to emerge from my scorched interior.

That probably doesn't apply to anybody who would read this (who even are you?) BUT, still I say to protect myself, fuck you! I am brilliant and insightful and funny and have a creative mind unlike any other and I've encountered so much fucking friction and setback in my life. Unstable footing for most of my adult life.

SO EVEN THOUGH THAT'S STILL THE CASE, I have identified that if I'm not writing, I'm dying. I exist primarily in my voice, for better or worse. And I've become my own jailer, just to avoid the possible whiplash of having an enjoyable time writing, posting it online somewhere, and having somebody say exactly the wrong thing to me. If it happens, I am resolving to respond with protective venom, rather than spending the next year going "were they right though? am I stupid/insane/annoying/ignorant/????"

Because the people I trust say I'm not. I tried to trust some of the wrong people for too long. If your family doesn't love you and treat you with dignity, get the fuck away from them. If randos don't understand your writing, they aren't the target audience.

(ASIDE: if you're being a fucking bigot though, you ARE wrong and should take criticism to heart. these rules do not apply to racists/bigots/terfs/conservatives of any stripe. y'all all gotta shut the fuck up and let the rest of us save the world and live in peace. you grew up wrong. I'm not sorry. get entirely out of the fucking way 😜)

Write without worrying about being ""CORRECT""!

This is a major hangup and inhibitor! Unfortunately for me, a lot of what I've wanted to write about are interpretive responses to other people's art. That means Opinions get involved, and people feel strongly about their things! Including me!

I made the mistake of couching that writing for a long time as "solving" or "explaining." Oops! That's a masculine form of assertion that I want to discard! Hugely important tweet I saw a couple years ago said something like, "When women make up something about a story they like, they call it Fanfiction. When men do the same, they call it Lore Analysis." And I have been so guilty of this!!! And it sucks! The thing that you can do as analysis is really cool and fun, but what I don't want to do anymore is assert that I've "figured it out" or "cracked the code." I was in that trap writing about House of Leaves, etc, a decade ago. The desire for correctness (born out of academic do-gooder training AND harmful family dynamics where my parents got very angry when their Correctness was questioned AND [...]) is unnecessary here. It literarily doesn't matter.

I have stuff I want to write about several topics, including Twin Peaks and Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. Hell, I've got a book or two worth of interpretive connections I could still write about Mark Danielewski's books. But I haven't been able to DO it, or enjoy it, because of this specific form of fear about being received uncharitably.

SO, I intend to write more about these things, and I'm gonna start all of it with a disclaimer that it's all made up, probably wrong, and just for fun. For some reason I want to take myself seriously (a true desire for dignity and recognition built on familial disrespect, when I should have just been a fucking improv comic at age 18). OOPS! Even if I do take myself seriously, nobody else needs to know that! Play along, or go fuck yourself!

I guess I've gotten more cynical and harder-hearted in the last few years, but CAN YA BLAME ME? This shit's ridiculous but at least I'd like to enjoy myself, being inside my own mind, A LITTLE and if I have to construct somewhat unreasonable defenses, well I'm sure as shit not the only one!

But I'm not Jokerfied... I'm Harleyfied. 😎 Casting off the abusers, sure a little chaotic, but god damn it I'm trying!

SPEAKING OF WHICH:

I will be honest with and about myself!

I've dealt with an unbearable burden of self-loathing that's only increased since puberty. And SURE that includes plenty of true catastrophe and external sabotage — not to mention living in the Saw Movie Hellscape of the Untenable States of Ahfuck. Can you imagine if I'd been born in a country with fucking healthcare and a social safety net??? WOWWWWW

But anyway, oops turns out I'm trans! FUCK! Seriously, FUCK!!!!!!!! God damn it!!!!! I have ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS been utterly uncomfortable with masculinity, and chalked that up to being a nerd, sensitive, thoughtful in a way most men are allergic to. And I am those things. But ALSO OOPS nobody taught me that Transgender was even a thing growing up, and I was so busy dealing with Everything Else that I just put aside Gender as a thing. Other people had Gender; not me! It was always "a group of queer friends... and also Nick!"

So yeah this has been a huge issue for me for as long as I can remember, and LORD did I do a lot of work to ignore it, and myself! But I had a series of events in late 2019 that destroyed my entire life as it existed before, and that included a deep moment of connection with a trans friend where I went, "Uh oh!" And then everything blew up, then covid kicked off, and I couldn't really even afford to pay rent for a couple years. Fuck!!!

So anyway I got a better-paying job about 2 years ago, started talking to a counselor specializing in Gender, and reading about other people's experiences. And was immediately like, "Ah shit ah hell, now I gotta deal with THIS TOO????" and the answer is yes.

Guess what else? A few years ago I started taking antidepressants. WOW, IT'S COOL TO WANT TO LIVE! I got diagnosed with ADHD and started treatment for that about 9 months ago. WOW, I LOVE BEING ABLE TO DO TASKS! And then I started estrogen in March. WOW, FEELS PRETTY COOL AND ALSO COMPLICATED! And then I took some diagnostic tests and tested to be pretty firmly on the autistic spectrum! WOW, THAT EXPLAINS A FEW THINGS!

So here's the thing: my dumbfuck family and this cursed nation kept me from getting tested for any of this stuff until my 30s. No help, no accommodations, no understanding! Just so many people, from as early as I can remember, calling me every derogatory word for being queer, hyperactive, disorganized, and neurodivergent! I was 7 years old and people lobbed "gay" and other slurs at me because I wasn't sufficiently masculine. "But I'm not attracted to boys, so that can't be right," thought every trans lesbian egg ever, including me! Everyone I've ever met has looked at me at some point and said, "You are one of the strangest people I've ever met," and I just shrug and laugh and make it a joke because

HUMOR
IS
MY
MASK

And I managed to goof my way through life, struggling so hard to be "functional", while constantly running up against difficulty after difficulty. Especially around communication, where I learned to be so careful and that's good sometimes but also: SO FUCKING EXHAUSTING

SO GUESS WHAT FUCKERS

We got ourselves another autistic adhd trans lesbian computer programmer over here, HELLOOOOO, I dunno if I wanna change my name some day but you can use she/her pronouns about me IF YOU WANT and otherwise WHATEVER WE'LL SEE

and honestly I'd just like to ask for your help and love and accommodation because the last few years have been so hard on me and being social during all of this shit has just been a nightmare so much of the time. All of these "new rules" are related: I have not felt SAFE or HAPPY being MYSELF and while being open doesn't necessarily increase my SAFETY in this FUCKED UP STUPID WORLD OF MILITANT TERF DUNCES AND HEARTLESS FUCKS, I've at least

GOT
TO
BE
REAL

And if you don't like it, LITERALLY BYEEEEEEEEE

It's all made up and the points don't matter! I just want to enjoy what's left of the improvisation

buy it on bandcamp and support my little rock bubbies

i'm hilarious, i'm unbearable, i'm shedding yet another, i'm buried alive, i'm a three-year sunray smiling down on one more barren rock, wondering where all the people went, I knew them when I was only seven minutes old

i think poetry is stupid, it's my favorite thing, i'm the cork suffocating the teeny ship, i'm the howlwind crooning through another craggy afternoon, i'm verified, i'm illegal in an increasing number of states, i'm resentful of having been born in an age where there's medicine enough to have saved me from calamity but no cure for dragons

i'm the ice cracked by a footstep, i'm so hungry for love, i'm the coral watching killer waves refuse support groups, i'm literally begging, i'm an innovative paper that decides whether your words deserve to survive and i will evaporate every last bastard cry

i'm

i'm scurrying under the fridge, i'm the brief bloom of youth, i'm the tornado picking and choosing my favorite flavor of house from a gift-wrapped city, i'm not even an office i'm just a felt-stapled partition and i only get to see the backs of thumb-tacked baby photos

i'm a new kind of tired. i'm the fourth smokestack, just for show. the world would look wrong without me. i'm wondering how much better if we didn't keep losing our best to despair. i'm bawling. we're still here

PUP — "THE COAST"

NOW YOU KNOW
WHAT'S EATING ME

YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

PUP — "OLD WOUNDS"

YOU KNOW I'VE NEVER BEEN GOOD AT ANYTHING
EXCEPT FOR FUCKING UP AND RUINING EVERYTHING
AND I'M SICK OF IT!
IT'S SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING!

PUP — "Can't Win"

I'm feelin' pretty good right now, but I know these feelings too well. I really appreciate how much this album blasts forward into the fun zone, while capturing and redirecting all the vicious self-recrimination of the depressed and impoverished. The whole album is one of the most constructively cathartic I've ever heard.

GOOD JOB, PUP

OZMA — "BAD DOGS"

fuck yeah, it's ozma time again. I've been hollering to this album since 2003.

jimmy eat world — "polaris"

i'm going to live on the hill that jimmy eat world is one of the great rock bands

the juliana theory — if i told you this was killing me, would you stop?

I still love this album, allllll these years later. Playing this live with my high school rock band is a very happy, satisfying memory :)

(though for the record, I felt it so deeply because I kept trying to say it was killing me, and unfortunately they did not stop)

"to the birds that sing in cages" — michael flynn (not that one)

Beat back the night
Tell it to leave you alone

Writing used to be the most natural thing in the world to me. I wrote notebooks-full and novels-worth of letters, diaries, lyrics, stories, and poems, throughout my life into my 20s.

The less pleasant my life got, the poorer my wallet, the longer my various biochemical conditions went untreated while material conditions failed to improve to compensate... it got harder and harder to access the free flowing of words.

My own voice. Disgusting to me. Painful. Recriminative. I didn't believe in my own thoughts. Didn't want to write letters because what was the point? Just to tell someone who cares about me how bad I felt? To write another story that turned into self-destruction? To write a song nobody was going to hear?

I miss it. Desperately. Always. But when I start, in any medium besides a vague live journal-style post, it hurts so badly immediately. My heart races, I flood with anger and regret and despair, at all the lost time, at my lost life. It hurts. I can't describe how badly it hurts, and how venomously angry I am that my enjoyment of my own mind has been taken or lost. I truly hate it in here, y'all. And when my voice, my heart, comes out, it is furious. It can't believe this is still going on. That the happy-hearted, creative little kid has turned into a resentful, stymied, old bastard.

... See what I mean?

Anyway, I want to write letters to people I've let down or let go. Not to justify myself, but to explain that they didn't do anything wrong. That it's just me, suffering primarily in silence, confused and lost and hurting, unable to communicate clearly.

I've been accosted too many times for my words. I've written from my heart and had my life literally ruined, harm done, attacked by those who were supposed to care for me. I've also written things that have made other people happy, entertained, informed. Sometimes the same things. I haven't had a stable enough foundation of confidence to withstand the criticism, deserved or not, for a long, long time.

Sara once wondered aloud why she so often fell for emotionally-unavailable men. Meaning me. I said, "I don't know." But in my heart I was screaming, because I wasn't born this way. I was made, damaged, beaten, coerced. The friction of so many meaningless, moneyless days. The insistent and abusive control of my parents, who only loved me when I did exactly what they wanted. The partners who misinterpreted me despite my best efforts, out of their own trauma and suspicion. My naive belief that if I just kept trying to make a connection with someone who was dead-set against me, that a bridge could be formed. A childhood surrounded by friends, family, and people who clapped for my clowning, giving way to an adult life cut off from the world, trying and too-late escaping my family, sweating in rural Georgia for no reason besides literally never having enough money to entertain moving elsewhere under my own velocity.

Anyway. I can write this, and hope that it will give way to writing more directly and constructively to a person, instead of generally to whoever still clicks to this webpage, despite everything. Instead I'll go back to work, where communication is draining my energy, where again for some reason I can't get people to really hear what I'm saying, to believe that I know what I'm talking about, that maybe the reason I seem so strange and threatening is because I do know things they don't, and that I am, as usual, several steps ahead and falling increasingly behind.

I want to believe in my life. In my voice. I don't right now. This is just barking at the window. I'm trying to find my way to myself. I've been trying for almost 20 years.

the weeknd — "out of time"

"stay down" — silversun pickups

Smothering our sons and daughters
Some swim, some float
Washed out of particular seas

I wanna swim in a beautiful ocean
Feel waves with low emotion
A little change, a little hope

Some words ring better than others
Limiting the sounds we mutter
Some sing, some don't
A little piece of a beautiful world
Once said and overheard

Just another sign
Best to keep that body down

the velvet teen — "no one gets the best of me"

Yeah, some say that this life ain't the only one we get
I once claimed that I'd found myself when I'd only been chasing my own silhouette

So point the finger at whom you like
Or raise your head and curse the sky
It makes no difference
That's why I never could decide