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

Fiona Apple - "Hot Knife"

I could NOT be more excited for her new album!!!!! If you didn't spend time with The Idler Wheel... then hang out with it this week and increase your anticipation!

I recommend Aniara very strongly. Be warned: like The Lighthouse, it is about being confined, cut off from the rest of humanity, and things getting worse. I don't know why the two movies at the top of my watch list were thematically-linked with the imperative to isolate, but I'm grateful for them. Looking at art with a perspective on my present situation is usually helpful, even if the art itself is intense.

Additional warnings: sex, suicide, the unseen deaths of children and adults, active engagement with despair. But additional recommendations: The most important characters are all lesbian or queer women, and even though bad things happen to them it didn't feel tropey to me. Fascinating sci-fi setting and details. Beautiful language. Constructive-feeling reflections on real-life difficulties. An important movie along several axes.

Mary Ruefle, "On Fear," in Madness, Rack, and Honey

I suppose, as a poet, among my fears can be counted the deep-seated uneasiness surrounding the possibility that one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility. Part of what I mean — what I think I mean — by "imbecility" is something intrinsically unnecessary and superfluous and thereby unintentionally cruel.

[...]

I asked the poet Tony Hoagland what he thought about fear. He said fear was the ghost of an experience: we fear the reoccurrence of a pain we once felt, and in this way fear is like a hangover. The memory of our pain is a pain unto itself, and thus feeds our fear like a foyer with mirrors on both sides. And then he quoted Auden:

"And ghosts must do again / What gives them pain."

It is interesting to note that this idea — fear's being the ghost of pain, or imaginary pain — figures in psychological torture by the CIA; in fact, their experiments with pain found that imaginary pain was more effective than physical pain — poets, take note — and thus psychological torture more effective that physical torture. Here is an excerpt from their Exploitation Training Manual, written in 1983: "The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. For example, the threat to inflict pain can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."

Although I have never been bitten by a dog, I am scared to death of them, as I am of all living creatures, including myself and my own fragmentation in the long hall of mirrors.

James Ward, future British psychologist, broke with religion as a young man in 1872, but found himself a bundle of reflexes over which he had no choice and no control. He said: "I have no dread of God, no fear of the Devil, no fear of man, but my head swims as I write it — I fear myself."

What do I means by fear? Why I mean that thing which drives you to write, but let us step out of the foyer, and back onto the street, back down the road, and make our approach somewhat more slowly.

[...]

Dread. I like it better than the word fear because fear, like the unconscious emotion which is one of its forms, has only the word ear inside of it, telling an animal to listen, while dread has the word read inside of it, telling us to read carefully and find the dead, who are also there. But I have not used the word dread in what follows. I have used the word fear. And fear is an older word —

But she shows all, candid and upright,
unto the last projecting fire and death,
and, turning to the others, I cry out
my pain of pains beholding Doris’s death:
There is protection from near everything,
from fire and damages by storm and frost,
oh, add whichever blows may come to mind.
But there is no protection from mankind.
When there is need, none sees with clarity.
No, only when the task is to beat down
When there is need, none sees with clarity.
No, only when the task is to beat down
and desolate the heart’s own treasury
of dreams to live upon in cold and evil years.

— Aniara, 26

Seldom do we take the slightest note
of our majestic wonder of a boat,
and only during sermons at a grave
does this world dawn on us as all we have;
then come a multitude of black thoughts flapping
through these vaults that hold us bound
filled with the echoes of a prior life
and threading an outlandish void of sound.

— Harry Martinson, Aniara, translated by Klass, S. & Sjoberg, L.