Spoon - The Beast and Dragon, Adored

When I heard this song for the first time at 16, it felt like another dimension. I hadn't really heard this sort of chaotic guitar deployed, nor this disaffected groove, nor this oblique narrative. I've never read the lyrics, I don't know what it's about, and I don't understand half the words. Spoon sits in a perfect socket for me; thudding feet dancing through head-height clouds. Most of their albums can loop forever, and I'll let them.

Prior Things - Hop Along

It's funny that Square has never made a game that actually looks like Amano's drawings

I want to say it again: We do not live in a simulation! But I get where the feeling comes from. It's increasingly difficult to square what we see happening with what is described to us. The sensation of unreality, or of dissociating or disconnecting personally from what we see happening around us during times of immense, distributed suffering... it makes sense. Especially as we are bombarded by narratives that don't match what we see. Even though we know it's bullshit, we have to hear phrases like, "America is the greatest country in the world," "God has a plan," "We support small business," and countless other obviously-untrue statements with bewildering regularity.

The "simulation" that's being described is the false reality of constructed narrative. It's the maddening feeling of drowning in propaganda while experiencing the material world propaganda opposes. So, in that sense, maybe we are presented with a described simulation of some other place.

But we don't live in a simulation. This isn't simulated. It's real. You are real, and so am I. Your consciousness, confusing as it is, is real. This is a real place; you have a real body, real feelings, real thoughts, and real pain. It's comforting sometimes to disconnect from that, but it's a corrosive comfort. This is really happening. The suffering we swim in is real — as is the pleasure, tedium, and so on — and it's happening to lots of other real people, just as much as it's happening to us.

As weird ol' Korzybski said in that recording, it's not that we live in an illusion, or simulation. It's that the process of describing, verbalizing, and generalizing creates an abstraction. And that's the part that's hardest to navigate, especially when that process is hijacked by verbal terrorists who spend ill-gotten fortunes to convince us that what we see is not what is really happening. Millions of Americans think "socialists" and "democrats" want to kill them in the night, when what the people who self-describe as "socialists" want is to make sure those people can go to the doctor if they need to. These are perfect circles of incongruous belief, with no Venn overlap whatsoever. And it is this fabricated disconnect — along with thousands of others, big and small — that can cause our sense of reality as real to short circuit.

It's one of the beautiful curses of human existence that we can identify more with abstractions than what is really happening around us. Right now we're in a phase of human culture where it feels like our stories and abstractions are eating us alive; that it's more important to some people to protect their collection of icons and definitions than to cede even an inch of ground in the direction of our collective well-being and survival. I'm not sure what to do about that in the big picture! But I have a strong inkling that learning to interact directly with the process of abstraction can protect us from manipulation. And that it's really important for us to embrace reality as closely as we can, not to throw up our hands and say it's all fake, so hurry up and hit the reset button.

Please remember we are interested in humanity.

but I want to believe me / I want to believe me / and I've done so much / when I was wrong

Steel Train, "Touch Me Bad"

There are things I've spent quite a bit of time on that nobody's ever seen, and sometimes I reflect on that negatively. Things I poured myself into that seemingly came to nothing. But sometimes you just need a longer viewpoint. In the early 2000s, everyone said Microsoft had "won" their "battle" with Apple because of desktop market dominance. Now, 20 years later, we can see the context for computers expanding far beyond the desktop, and Apple positioning themselves to work up from an apparently simple device into eventual ubiquity. And also, that they both still exist, that they are both among the largest companies ever, and that maybe the battle was constructed for our attention more than anything.

In 2008, it was easy to feel the US had changed irrevocably for the better. A black Democrat president! Control of Congress! The iPhone! We were plunging headlong into the beautiful future. We didn't understand the impact of the 2008 housing collapse, or read the Democrats' response to this as presaging their near-complete ineffectiveness and disinterest in meaningfully improving most people's lives. We didn't understand that Republican efforts to undermine the integrity of our elections were just about to reach a tipping point, or that they would use the specters of race and financial equity to conjure even greater monsters than Bush. Some of us, me included, didn't understand the extent to which power protects power.

Anyway. I'm just reminding myself that things aren't necessarily the way they seem this year; or that they won't stay this way. That, at a personal level, there are hundreds of projects and thousands of ideas I've left scattered in my wake, panels and cones burning off on reentry, and it's really easy to look at any of them and simply regret. There are things I've poured hundreds of hours into that very few people have ever seen, for various reasons.

In 2013, I started listening to the Insert Credit Show podcast. In the years since, I've become friends with and done work for several people from the show. This is an obscured overview of one of several(!) huge documents I've filled in trying to redesign Insert Credit's site since... 2017(?), as a volunteer, exploratory project. Each of these blurry rectangles is a whole or partial site layout.

For the last couple of years, I regarded this as a failure. I've felt bad because it never launched. But that wasn't on me; it just wasn't time for them yet. Now it's time to finally make it, and I'm trying to arrange everything else so that I can make it happen in the next couple months. And I can look back and recognize the effort that went into these designs absolutely made me a better designer, and that there's a long way for me to go, yet.

This is just one of many things that I've held onto as failures for the last few years, which now one way or another are revealing some small blooms, if not full, edible fruit.

I've been through professional hell over the last couple years, and spent a lot of time looking into the unfocused distance fearing I was totally ruined. Maybe I still will be. Money is a fuck. But time is long, and I didn't die last year, and I'm not gonna fucking die this year if I can help it, and I'm going to do what I can to help the people, projects, and causes I believe in.

Here's an unrelated, good song:

A wired article about neurodegenerative disease.

I don't feel like myself most of the time. I haven't for a long time, and it's not really getting better. And since I don't anticipate ever being able to afford to get an MRI, we'll never know if it's a physical degradation in my brain. Since I can't afford thorough psychological investigation beyond discount talk therapy and basic medication, we'll never know whether it's due to old trauma, new trauma, depression, attention, anxiety, or just the persistent torment of being a compassionate person enduring poverty in the decline of the world's stupidest country. Since I can't afford to go to a general doctor, we'll never know if it's a thyroid problem, or some other tiny gland malfunctioning in a way that makes me listless, disinterested, self-recriminating, and unable to sustain most emotions for long enough to do anything about them.

I get angry when I see a question like, "How do we know what the self is?" But that's because I used to have such a clear sense of myself, and I still feel that person within me, but I'm not him. And nobody clear has stepped forward to take his place.

I'm sorry for not being a better friend, relative, partner, and colleague. I'm really, really trying! As hard as I can. But I need some slack. Because a lot of the time, when I see a text from a friend, I just can't answer, even when I want to. When I've hurt someone's feelings, I can't face them, because I don't have any explanation. When I can't meet someone's professional expectations, I just shut down, because I can't justify it. I want to do all these things. I want to be present. But it's been taking everything I have just to keep working enough to possibly pay my bills, and to try and have some moments of relaxation and fun along the way. Which is what I'm going to keep doing.

But I read something like this and really wonder. Is this why I don't feel like myself? Is my brain devouring itself? Have the more enjoyable aspects of my personality been cauterized by repeated disappointment? Or is it just so god damned unpleasant to live in this place, at this moment, in this world of fairly clear solutions to problems both small and large, none of which can be implemented because we are drowning in virulent ideology swarming through the petri dish of forced-precarious humanity? WHO KNOWS?

Anyway, I'm honestly trying my best. I'm doing "okay!" I'm making my own meaning and trying to believe in it as best I can. If I get better, which doesn't seem likely for various reasons, then wahoo! But if I get worse, and less able to be someone we'd all like to recognize as "me," then I'd just like to state for the record that I really do like being Nick Splendorr, when I can be in a room of people laughing and sparking ideas together, or deep in a book that connects me to an electric mind, or singing and smiling on a stage in front of a room full of people. When I can stop being alone in my mind with myself, whoever the vengeful bastard is. That these and other pleasures are so infrequently available is just something we all have to deal with!

I wish we had the privilege of simpler lives that make any kind of sense. In any case, I appreciate very much those who have and will share their time with me. Y'all are great.

My ills are reticulate
My woes are granular
The ants weigh more than the elephants
Nothing, nothing is manageable
So couldn't we skip the valedictories?
I can see a door there
Shut it and forget my number
Cause I'm hard, too hard to know
I don't cry when I'm sad anymore, no no