Weblog on Riverbed

Once an Alcoholic, Always Free

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 19:52:29 +0300

Disclaimer

This is just my experience with alcoholism. Good advice is hard to give and harder to follow. I suggest you find what works for you and live your life how you see fit after doing your own research.

My drinking problem

The early warning signs were there for me to see very clearly already in 2018 and they did not go unnoticed. I knew what was in store for me, it was only a matter of time. During normal weekdays I would be thinking about alcohol constantly. It was the only thing that mattered to me. I would be counting down the days, hours and minutes until I could have my next drink come friday. At the time my actual drinking wasn’t that heavy (atleast by the standards of the drinking culture where I’m from). Just normal early adolescent irresponsibility, right? Most people go through a phase like that or know someone in their circle who does/has.

In 2019 I moved out from my parents’ place and into my own apartment. That’s when the dam broke. Things escalated quickly and at my worst I was blackout drunk almost every night. I would sit in voice calls drinking and bullshitting until the wee hours of the morning until everyone else had left and I’d pass out on my keyboard and sleep there still embarrassingly connected to the voice chat.

A mountain of empty beer cans decorated my desk and their cardboard packaging carpeted my floor. I would keep bottles of whiskey in the drawer of my nightstand next to my bed, just in case I might need it in an emergency.

When I wasn’t completely plastered I would be nipping throughout the day. Cracking open a beer, ah, what music to my ears that was! I would prioritise drinking over everything and everyone. Once I was helping my grandma with cleaning and conveniently came up with an excuse that I had to go get something while in reality I went back home to have a quick shot of vodka. I was a functional alcoholic.

Those who knew didn’t care and many did not even suspect. On some level even I was in denial. I would jump on every gathering and event as a socially acceptable excuse to drink booze. Like I needed one: I’d show up so hammered that a couple of times at a meetup I would have a drink and then immediately go behind a corner, shove my fingers up my throat to throw up what I had just drank before it would have time to make its way to my small intestine, where most of the alcohol would get absorbed into the bloodstream, just so I wouldn’t get blackout drunk early and could keep pouring that sweet nectar into my mouth. Oh yes, I had done my homework.

This couldn’t go on for much longer.

A story about The Alcoholic & His Little Worm

“Oh you can’t be a real alcoholic,” said Bob. “My uncle drank twice as much just to get up in the morning!” Yeah, yeah shut your piehole Bob.

Pain and pleasure is the common yardstick by which most people measure their lives and most people would agree that if something causes distress and pain then it is a problem and something should be done about it.

What they don’t realise is that an alcoholic suffers the most when he is sober because he craves alcohol but can’t have it. And the more serious his problem, the bigger an alcoholic he is, the more agonizing his torment is the less he drinks.

To people on the outside his pain and suffering do not exist, can not exist, because how can he be an alcoholic if he doesn’t drink? So the alcholic has no choice but to keep struggling alone and when he relapses and has a drink it is considered quite normal. After all he doesn’t drink much. Ah, but the cravings he has! The inner demons he is fighting constantly! The worm in his brain that is always lying in wait, suggesting a course of action, a solution, a way to relax, a pastime, a deserved break, a just celebration, an excuse to drown yourself in as much drink as you can under any socially acceptable pretext.

For hours and hours he debates with himself, with the worm in his brain, trying to rationalise, trying to appease the worm, trying to rebuke it, trying to trick it, begging it to go away and leave him for good. And then he has a little drink and the worm is satisfied and stays quiet, for the moment, because all the while it knows who’s really in control.

To people on the outside this tug of war is hidden. So the alcoholic has no choice but to carry his burden alone and that only makes the company of the worm seem more appealing as his only solace.

And if the alcoholic, by some miracle, manages to rid himself of the worm, root it out, stomp on it, free himself from its manipulation he can’t even share his triumph with anyone else. He can’t celebrate overcoming his struggle with alcoholism because to the people on the outside he never had a problem and celebrating a solution to a problem that never existed could surely never be anything but an utter joke.

Yes, I am bitter. Yes, I am proud and justly so. Fuck you Bob.

How I overcame the problem

By myself. Alone. Without help.

1. The Paradox

Every problem has a root. Big problems have roots that go deep, and by the time they break through to the surface and become visible they have already grown so serious that you are powerless to do anything about them.

How do you begin to tackle a problem like that? By admitting that you can’t; that you are powerless; that the problem is too big for you; that you are utterly helpless to change anything. This paradoxical admission is required because you are in denial and deeply ashamed of the scope of your problem and until you face reality you will truly be powerless to do anything about it. The Worm wants you to remain prideful and expend all your willpower in a pointless struggle against it which you have no chance of winning so that it can keep feeding its addiction. Do not listen to it.

This line of thought is not at all intuitive. Nobody taught it to me, so why and how would I suddenly come to a conclusion like this? One might say it was almost miraculous. In any case I had taken the first frightening step.

2. Orientation

Next thing I did was get a pen and memopad and write down these things

What is my current situation objectively
Why am I in this situation
- Which decisions and concrete actions led to this
- What am I trying to achieve with drinking
- What are my emotional motivations
Where will I be in five years if I keep drinking
Where could I be in five years if I stopped drinking
What does sobriety mean in a day-to-day pragmatic sense

Sounds easy on paper but don’t be fooled. Item 2 was especially difficult and required a lot of soul searching but it was also the most important in terms of understanding myself so that instead of having to battle against an unseen enemy I could focus more on my visible behaviours.

Item 5 might seem pointless. You just don’t drink, that simple. But you have to internalise the whole process, learn to visualise it constantly. Drinking means opening a beer: I am opening a beer. Not drinking means not opening a beer: I am picturing a beer and I will not open it because I don’t want to drink it and I will do this repeatedly because that is the kind of man I want to be: a man who doesn’t open beers because he doesn’t drink beers. You think you know what to do but you don’t. You have to remind youself constantly of the most basic things because you are weak. Humility is key.

After going through the effort to write this painful memo I kept it for a couple of months. Then I discarded it. It was useless to me. I viewed it simply as a tool, as a means to an end. And I was determined never to let things get so out of hand that I would have to resort to that tool again. I let it go.

3. Dichotomy of Control

“About things that are within our power and those that are not.”

– Epictetus’ Discourses, Book 1 Chapter 1

I don’t know how I came across Epictetus but this book fell into my hands at the most opportune time possible. I had spent two years struggling with quitting sugar from ages 15 to 17 and so I had some previous experience when it came to monitoring my thoughts and adjusting my behaviour, but Epictetus, like most of Hellenistic moral philosophy, which is a lot more practical and therapeutic than the speculations that came before or after it, contains many acute insights on the psychology of habit formation, beliefs, freedom of choice and practical tips on how to exercise your freedom of choice, evaluate your thought processes (or impressions), witholding assent to impulses, first chopping them down into smaller pieces to find out which beliefs form their foundation and acting appropiately in accord with “your rational nature”. Afaik modern cognitive therapies like Cognitive-Behavioural-Therapy lean heavily on writings from the ancient world like The Discourses of Epictetus. Definitely a good starting point in philosophy for anyone.

Based on a lecture I was watching about Epictetus I drew a diagram that looked something like this and put it up on my wall

There it stayed for the next couple of years. Pretty self-explanatory but I’ll point out that the arrows don’t go in a unidirectional circle because everything affects everything else and there is constant interference or reinforcement between various aspects of your being/doing.

I would keep this chart in my mind constantly. It was the sole thing that mattered to me. Many a time I would put on my jacket and shoes, getting ready to go out to buy more booze, only to stop myself before opening the door and then getting into an endless debate with myself; pacing back and forth for hours trying to convince myself of why I should drink and then refuting myself, only to come up with another excuse. At times I would grab the door handle almost ready to go but pulling back at the last minute.

Sometimes I stayed sober. Sometimes I went out and got booze. Sometimes I didn’t and instead took off my jacket and shoes, only to a couple hours later impulsively bolt out of the door and proceed to get drunk anyway.

No matter what I did I would review my actions and thought processes either at the end of the day or the following morning and either congratulate or chastise myself appropiately.

Everytime I drank I would repeatedly remind myself that this action leads to reinforcing this habit which reinforces that I should act like this in order to satisfy or cope with some emotional desire which reinforces that my current attitude toward this is okay. But also that if I had to struggle before getting drunk (debating with myself) then I had reinforced the opposing kind of behaviour. If my thoughts are “I do not want to drink” but I still do, eventually those thoughts might become habitual and habitual thoughts might lead to actions and those actions might begin to make me comfortable with emotional discomfort and all these things together will eventually lead to habitual sobriety with healthy attitudes toward alcohol and different emotional coping mechanisms and fears/desires.

Having control over one’s emotions might seem impossible but if you break down every little thing like this it becomes manageable. It does not matter what you did yesterday or what you plan to do tomorrow. What matters is that you do not drink today. At this very moment. Even when you are drinking there are pauses inbetween. In those moments that you’re not drinking usually you wouldn’t think anything of it. But you can subvert expectations and take control by consciously thinking about the fact that you are indeed not drinking at this very moment, even if in the back of your mind you know that the habit is still so strong that you will take another sip soon. Every deliberate choice is a small victory and you get to choose who the winner is: wars are waged on multiple fronts. Between shots or sips from my beer I would be glancing over at that chart on my wall and thinking about these things.

Habits, actions, emotions, thoughts: in the middle of all this is choice. An alcoholic is someone who has a problem with alcohol consumption. If you never drink alcohol you can never be an alcoholic. Pretty obvious. But at some point in their lives every alcoholic had their first drink, their first innocent sip. Nobody can predict the future but without that little sip they would never have gone down the road to become alcoholics. But that little sip was voluntary and so was every subsequent one. Even if you are truly powerless to do anything about your problem or it is too late to make a full recovery, you are ultimately responsible for being in the state you are in; your sorry self is the result of every single action and thought you’ve had or done in your entire life and they’ve all been voluntary. If you are not in control you have chosen to not be in control.

Harsh. I pity Man. You are always free to choose.

4. Boundaries

The exact timeframe in which things happened during this period are a bit fuzzy but after some months I was starting to get over the worst of it, my life was more manageable. I wasn’t getting blackout drunk but I still drank pretty heavily and often more than I intended. Let me have a sip and something in my brain would activate and the cravings were unbelievable.

I saw full sobriety as me admitting that I can’t handle alcohol at all which I took offense to and I was determined to test myself and see if I really can moderate my consumption. To achieve this I had to come up with all kinds of little tricks to fool myself into drinking moderately. 1.) Having the first drink just before the shops close so once I am inebriated and my judgement is impaired I can’t impulsively go and buy more. 2.) Not buying too little since that will only agitate me without bringing any satisfaction and in my desperation I will go to a pub because the shops are closed. 3.) Not buying too much that I will either a) drink too much or b) there will be some left over the next day.

Keeping any alcohol stashed in my home was a no go. If I had a bottle of whiskey somewhere I’d be obsessed with it and eyeing it up compulsively. Before I’d know it the bottlecap would come unscrewed almost by itself. To combat this I tried sticking post-it notes on the cap and if I found myself grabbing the bottle I would first have to tear the note away and throw it in the trash. Granted that only takes a few seconds, but in those few seconds I’d have just enough time to look at the crumpled piece of paper in my hand and think, This is not just a piece of paper I’m throwing away: this is my self-control and my dignity. Usually that worked for a short while before I’d relapse and then I’d try the post-it note method again only to fail repeatedly.

One time–over a year later–a neighbour was sitting outside celebrating midsummer and offered me a shot of vodka. I thought, What the hell I’ll take a nip and go home. As soon as the bottle touched my lips the bottom stayed up till the handle was empty. So much for that. The night turned out very differently than I had intended but long story short: the next morning I woke up in a cold sweat trembling all over, my heartrate was through the roof, I felt tightness in my chest and I had a hard time breathing; for a moment I thought I was going to die. For the next 12 hours I could hardly keep even a glass of water down and I would regurgitate everything solid I ate for the next day or two.

I did manage to sustain a moderate level of alcohol consumption without going too overboard too often but the constant vigilance, watching my every thought and questioning my every move, was extremely draining psychologically so in the end I decided it was not worth the effort.

And despite my best efforts sometimes I would have wake up calls like the vodka incident above that would humble me every now and then and remind me that no, I am still an alcoholic. For a while I really believed in the AA propaganda that “Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic”. And perhaps it was true of me and necessary to think like that at that point in my life in order to reach a point where I could exchange one truth for another. I thought I really would remain an alcoholic forever even if I stopped drinking or succesfully moderated my drinking. But today I don’t believe that is true. I am no longer an alcoholic. I am an ex-alcoholic.

5. Reconciliation

Reconciliation? With whom? Myself.

I hope I have not made all this sound too easy–in fact conquering the booze-worm in my brain has been the most difficult thing I’ve done in my entire life. But the hardest part by far had to do with one of the main motivations for why I drank in the first place. I’m a reserved and introverted guy but I quite enjoy making other people feel good and being an outgoing guy in social situations to make the atmosphere ripe for others to take the center stage–playing the support role if you will. But I can only do that when I am drunk. A single drink is enough to unlock all the locks in my head holding me back. Only when drunk could I feel like I was actually myself. Thus I felt the need to constantly drink in order to constantly be myself.

When I stopped drinking I had to come to terms with myself, my sober self, the self I wished I didn’t have to be. The image that I had formed of myself while drinking was a false one and all my social relations were formed around this other self, and since I had to give up being that person I had also to give up my previous life entirely and accept my limitations and that I might never get to a point in my life where I can be the person I want to be while sober.

But I would rather be awkward me: fearful and quiet and struggling on a “lower level” rather than live a lie and “boost myself to a higher level” with the help of booze.

My relationship with alcohol today

After going completely sober in 2022 for two years I decided to try getting drunk once again in 2024 but it didn’t do anything for me anymore. The whole time I was thinking of other more important matters and fun things I could be doing. I’ve definitely grown out of that sort of binge drinking with the sole goal of intoxication.

I am not of the opinion that alcohol is an evil that must be rooted out absolutely. It has its uses as much as it has its abuses, and while I am certainly familiar with the latter there’s still a world I am not privy to in the former.

After another year of sobriety, in 2025 I’ve decided to approach alcohol from a different angle. Before I mostly drank either a) cheap beer, b) cheap whiskey or c) vodka. With my changed attitude toward drinking I’ve ventured into uncharted territory and had a few bottles of red wine. I’ve been taking my time and enjoying the whole experience surrounding it: making a meal, sipping slowly, sitting down after to read something light. It’s been great, having a glass or two to relax maybe once per season. Laid back and not having any desire to get drunk.

Also it has been enjoyable to confront and sometimes turn on their head the common expectations and myths surrounding red wine from first hand experience. For what it’s worth I’ve gained a new perspective on certain tropes or references to wine across the ages, but the novelty is wearing off quickly and I’ll probably let this experiment fizzle out.

The only downside has been that I’ve had no one to share the bottle of wine with. Like I said: I have no desire to get drunk. I would be content to just have a glass or two and be done for the next few months, but since I now have an open bottle in my fridge what am I gonna do? Pour it down the drain? I’d rather not and so I end up reluctantly sipping wine over the weekend only to end up ultimately pouring whatever remains down the drain anyway. Oh, well.

Nine times out of ten I will decline a drink. But if I happen to be in the mood I reserve the freedom to say yes on the tenth. L’chaim!

Non-24 Awareness

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 17:59:46 +0300

For the past six or so years I’ve had what is called non-24 sleep wake disorder or free running sleep. My internal clock runs at a little over 25 hours, which of course means that since there are 24 hours in a day I go to bed one hour later each night and wake up one hour later the next day.

There is little I can do about it. I can’t just force myself into a normal 24 hour schedule. The longest I can manage is maybe little over a week, if I’m lucky, but then it will leap 7 or 8 hours forward to where it should be, after which it just keeps on rolling forward at a steady pace of roughly +1 hour per day. I make a full trip round the clock every three weeks or so.

It is nigh impossible for me to put on the brakes and wake up earlier, I can only push it forward.

Take a look at this graph

As you can tell by looking at this chart I’ve never had an office job.

The offset is not exactly one hour each day but it averages out and the general trend is always the same: up, up, up. I have tried to explain this to many people and no one seems to get it. They think that I’m just staying up late and say things like “Why don’t you just reset your sleep schedule?” Or “Oh wow, so your sleep schedule is very inconsistent?” No, I can’t reset it. There is nothing to reset. I don’t stay up late. Even if I did “reset” it it would start rolling again. And my sleeping schedule is highly regular, there’s nothing inconsistent about it. I wake up every 25 hours. To put it another way I wake up at n+1 hours every day, where n = the time I woke up at yesterday.

Here’s what a regular person’s chart might look like

Flat as a pancake.

And speaking of pancakes, it’s not only my sleep that is affected. If for some reason I have to force myself to deviate from my usual pattern I’ll feel sick as my metabolism is out of whack; I’m eating when I should be sleeping. It’s awful.

I never thought there was anything strange about this until recently it dawned on me how dysfunctional this is, were I to try and integrate into normal society. To me this is normal. If I wake up at 7AM I know that I won’t be seeing the sunrise in the morning for a while, maybe until next month. But also that soon I’ll be able to read in peace and quiet during the night because I’ll be waking up at sunset and going to bed in the morning (and seeing the sunrise in the evening so to speak). I get to experience all the hours of the day at different points of the day, if that makes sense.

If it wasn’t obvious by now I am a NEET with very few obligations. If I have a doctor’s appointment or something of the sort and it doesn’t align with my schedule I’ll have to pull an all-nighter to be able to hold up my end and show up on time (or at all). Not a very healthy thing to do and I don’t particularly enjoy staying awake for long periods of time. And you’d think that after staying up for a whole day I’d be really tired and sleep for a long time but actually the opposite happens. After an all-nighter I sleep maybe 4-5 hours–half of what I normally do. I’ll feel the effects of my sleep deprivation delayed by a few days.

No amount of exposure to daylight changes whether I get tired or not. I will get sleepy when my body says it’s time to do so. Sometimes I am really sleepy during the day and might fall into a biphasic pattern for a short while. I might also be unexplicably fatigued without feeling tired but I’m not sure if this is related to non-24 or if it’s something else entirely.

As long as I am left to my own devices with no external expectations sabotaging me I don’t suffer from having non-24 and nothing is stopping me from doing normal things. Going for a run, doing chores, having lunch, its’ all the same whether I do it in the middle of the night or at the “proper” time.

Just let me be.

What U Should Do

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 11:38:52 +0300

I do not trust images.

The MORE literate you are the more effective a piece of text CAN be at influencing you.

The LESS pictorially-literate you are the more effective an image WILL be at influecing you.

Which seems more ripe for exploitation?

I can trust text in the measure that I can trust my own evaluation of my literacy.

The meaning of an image is transmitted to you immediately and without consent the moment you see it.

It is transmitted whole as it is and you do not know what it is composed of until you start to dissect it, if you have the required analytical skills to do so.

Text is speech symbolically transcribed and each unit of meaning is separated by time.

Thus the meaning of a text is mediated through time and requires your consent to see it through that you read a text from start to finish.

Analytical skills are a prerequisite in order to piece by piece construct the meaning of a text whole as it is.

The more literate you are the quicker it becomes apparent if a text is propaganda or not.

The more pictorially-literate you are the more apparent it becomes all pictures are meant to deceive.

“An image says a thousand words.”

If a message could be conveyed with ten words would you trust a man who used a thousand words to do the same?

How easy it is to hide an insidious message among dozens of innocuous ones.

How easy it is to twist a noxious message with a thousand flowery words.

A picture of innocence is a page too long.

Behind your mind they whisper the words.

Operation Touch Grass

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 13:40:03 +0300

Uncharacteristically I had set a morning alarm for myself these past few days. Today I woke up a couple of hours after it had went off with no recollection of snoozing. I’d been on a streak of three consecutive good days but I could tell today was not going to be one of those days no matter how much effort I would put in.

I lay in my bed for a few more hours, only half covered by the empty duvet cover; kind of chilly with goose flesh but too depressed to be bothered to pull it over myself. I hate these early morning hours of tossing and turning, unsure whether I’m half-asleep or half-awake.

A thousand half-formed images buffeting me every time I turn from one side to the other; a simulation running in my head of every possible course of action I might take during the day, none of which I would take, and unnecessarily taking into consideration the unexpected and unlikely; interspersed with thoughts of self-loathing and all encompassing doubt.

Blue, blue, blue in a lighter and darker hue, but always it is–blue. If I try and grab hold of one the many thoughts without fail every time it spins me around and shoves me against the same impenetrable wall of hopelessness. I’m surrounded on all sides before my mission has even begun.

At roughly 0730 hours I finally kicked the duvet off to the side, got up, stretched in the darkness and had my customary first thing in the morning: a cold shower. One of life’s consistent small pleasures and usually the highlight of my day. It makes me both alert and calms me down. The racing thoughts hadn’t actually gone anywhere of course; they were just distilled into the one overpowering thought of despair, one huge block of BLUE in the middle of the room that I couldn’t possibly ignore.

After opening the curtains to get a better look at the blue block in daylight I saw that it was raining outside and I almost forgot all about it. It was still there but all my thoughts, good and bad, were weighed down by the rain like the lightest of feathers that became wet. No breeze could lift them up and blow them in swirls around me anymore.

I don’t know why rain has this effect on me, but I love it. I love rainy days. I dream of moving someplace it rains often; a consistent light rain, not a passing monsoon season. When it rains I am incapable of worrying about anything, I am awash with tranquillity and I find myself occupied with a single purpose: to pay attention to the rain.

I knew I had to get out and walk in the rain, so I wolfed down a bowl of outmeal for breakfast, grabbed my umbrella and headed out. To passersby it must’ve looked like I was beside myself for I couldn’t help myself from smiling like an idiot for the entire duration of my walk. I love rain.

After three quarters of an hour of wandering around the neighbourhood I stopped at the local supermarket. Not to buy anything, I didn’t take my wallet with me, but just to sit down for a while and pay attention to the people in the same way I had paid attention to the rain on this lazy Sunday morning. But since it was a Sunday morning not a lot of people were there so I wound up mostly staring at the ceiling and admiring the store’s cable management up there.

Before I left there came to the checkout a heavyset late middle-aged man, with graying locks slicked back with his natural grease, and he struck up a conversation with the cashier lady who was in her early thirties and seemed to have a passing familiarity with the man.

I wasn’t paying attention to their conversation until I heard a change of tone in the cashier lady’s voice. The older man had some personal trouble and was getting it off his chest. The cashier lady responded with attentive sympathy and hollered a “cheer up” as the man was taking his leave. He left a different man than when he came in.

This probably sounds like the most banal thing imaginable to you but I was astonished. Astonished I say! I immediately thought that had I been in her shoes I would not have had the m4d sk1llz to react in that manner. At best I would have tried to question the man in a manner-of-fact way to offer some quasi-rational solution to his problem. Most likely I would’ve been stumped and just ignored him.

If I couldn’t have offered care to him I doubt I can offer it to myself; I am unable to provide this kind of care to myself and I am not as self-reliant as I’d like to think I am. And I am undervaluing people such as the cashier lady. Up till this point I had thought their antennae was broken when it was in fact listening to something else entirely, and I’m not convinced it’s all noise either.

Is this emotional perceptiveness something that can be cultivated?

My reality consists of objects, ideas and my own self-will (or the nagging feeling of lack thereof). I may acquire objects and ideas by using the world to my advantage but my will doesn’t interact with the wills of other people. No clashes, no conflicts, no mutual goals, no shared experiences, no intertwining of any sort, no meeting. I don’t live in a social reality at all. I live in unreality. Who’s I? Nobody. Without a body there is no life. I think in order not to exist.

I have a cautious desire to know what it is like to construct a shared reality. I have lost myself in a lack of relations. What would it be like to allow another life to enter my world and allow mine to enter theirs? If and how would it alter my perceptions? alter the I who is perceiving? The thought of discovering scares me.

Despite my best efforts I cannot distance myself from this cold and detached way of approaching, but never actually fully apprehending, my own desire for a meeting with another, and I feel like it undermines the genuine sentiment behind it and I despise myself for it. This is not just a vain curiosity: I wish to know if I can become something more or am I confined till death into being who I am because I have a deficiency.

Maybe life doesn’t have to strictly mean other humans. There’s plenty of life to be found in the world. But as I’ve gotten older I feel like I’ve gradually lost my sensitivity to the finer points of life and with it my ability to enter into a relation with the world of things. That’s what I loved most about my brief psychotic episode some years back. The world was filled with potential encounters everywhere with anything. And every time I’d have a meeting I would after the fact get a powerful creative urge to immortalise it and petrify it so that I could enjoy it later as a thing.

What choice do we have but to settle for what is not as fulfilling?

“It was a light spring shower on a Sunday morning.”

Chickenhood in Peril: Crossing the Road

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 06:43:15 +0200

Sometimes, not that frequently but just occasionally enough to keep myself in check, I will stand at a green light at a pedestrian crossing and wait for it to turn red. Why not? I’m not in a hurry, I’m going to arrive a little early at my destination so I’ll have to wait either way. Does it matter if I do it at the end of the journey or before I begin or in the middle?

I don’t wish to inconvenience people (too much) so I’ll make sure it isn’t too busy, but I do get the most confused and confusing stares from people.

If someone ignores a red light and crosses the road nobody bats an eye. In fact it is expected that you do so as soon as you spot the first opportunity to rush over. Anyone that patiently waits for the light to turn green can often be heard mocked for being a mindless rule-follower and incapable of living life on their own terms.

If these same paragons of independence and lawmakers of their own life are for some reason waiting for the light to turn they are the first to accept the meaning of the green light as “you can go now” and are the first to actually go, seemingly too busy for any critical reflection anymore.

Disobeying an authority telling us that we can’t do something is rebellious but restraining ourselves when given license is not?

WARNING: This post will be more disjointed than usual.

Since the last update my mental state took a nosedive off a cliff. Suicidal ideation has been a near constant for a decade, at first emotionally charged and for years now nothing but a dull routine, but recently these fantasies have leveled up in concreteness to the point where I’d consider them plans (sans date) for uprooting my existence from the cracks in the sidewalk.

Atleast I did for a while. My days of long hours of apathy were punctuated by moments of acute despair. I remember one evening sitting down for supper and it occured to me most vividly that I was eating my last meal. I dropped my head in my hands and sat there for the longest five minutes of my life until it passed over. I can’t even remember if I finished eating or not.

Obviously some kind of threshold, a point of no return, has been crossed in some regard a long time ago; a well and weak person hardly need even fantasise about suicide–but I am an ill person and I can’t afford to appear to be weak. I have put on a hard face and any tenderness in me has dried up and I have become bound to snap like a dead twig unless I can find a way to renew myself.

My predicament could easily be seen as desperate beyond reason. But, for better or worse, I am unable to see it that way. It is always too easy to reason oneself out of these kinds of thoughts.

Consider the following. Person A is suicidal but he lacks the know-how to execute his will. Person B is suicidal as well but he does have the knowledge and the means to end his life. If Person B chooses not to kill himself then his conviction that life is worth living is more potent and on firmer ground than Person A’s conviction, which boils down to helplessness and ineptitude; Person B is alive because he wills it, while Person A has not had to have made that choice because he lacks the opportunity.

(And let us forget about Person C who’s never had suicidal thoughts, he doesn’t count.)

What an appealing line of thought! How soundly reasoned!

This was back in February.

Thinking it through in this manner I am erroneously and arrogantly placing all confidence in myself; it is I who triumphs over the desire for death through my own power. But those dark thoughts are akin to an addiction and the first step to overcoming any addiction is to paradoxically admit that it has complete control over one’s own life.

This I find the most puzzling thing about the dichotomy of control. You’re not really even in control of what is internal until you admit that you aren’t in control. Once you do that you are in control but only as long as you maintain that you aren’t in control.

If–and that’s a big if–if you can live with this dissonance then, atleast in my experience, everything will go smoothly and you’ll have the discretion to choose the correct course of action. But once you start thinking that you’re actually in control that is the moment that you lose all control.

Okay, I can accept the paradox that to gain control I need to relinquish control–but where do I put it? “It is suspended in nothing.” Well that doesn’t sound very stable. It’s like hanging up a hat out of habit on a hatstand that has been removed: the hat falls because the hatstand isn’t there. “You cast it upon God.” Well, assuming that I believe, I can’t think of anything more stable than that. And the doctrine that you are powerless to achieve the least thing without God’s grace certainly seems to align more closely with reality than the doctrine that you are in control. But if I try applying this view and live in the manner of a religious man I find it completely fruitless.

If I believe that I am in control but act like I am not, it works out for me but, and this is the crux of the agony, it’s a contradiction that is constantly begging to be resolved. On the other hand, if I believe that I am not in control, then everything falls apart until I begin to act like I am in control, creating a different kind of dissonance by coming at the same contradiction from the other side; at which point, to resolve the contradiction, I again run the risk of beginning to believe that I really am in control, leading me to lose control when my views and actions are reconciled!

At heart I’m a pragmatist. I don’t think there’s a possibility of a comprehensive system for living well. First principles? Cat piss. The complexities of human existence require that you hold incorrect and conflicting views at times in order to more accurately aim at the elusive and ill-defined golden mean. And to even attempt that you need to survive in the first place.

A lot of puffing and huffing and nothing but words.

In complete submission is liberation and once liberated I can start walking on my own, slowly at first, yes, and I will trip and fall many times, but what matters is that I am exerting my legs.

A small consolation perhaps, but a consolation much needed. A consolation that is repeated with every step taken and if I can remember this it is enough to keep me going, whether I am going forwards or backwards.

This spring chicken is not ready to cross that road yet.

After a long consideration I also deleted what little was left of the last vestiges of my “old presence” on the internet. Only this website remains, being my “new presence”. Though I had been thinking of doing something like deleting everything for some years I was still kind of surprised at how suddenly it happened. I had done something irreversible not through a creative act but through negating something that had been. My life did not become lacking in something but had gained a new negative space that elevated the whole composition by making it more soothing to look at.

(The man’s completely lost the plot.)

Forming habits forms chains of habits and that chain helps to regulate and uphold my mental state, so when my mental state starts to degrade so does atleast one habit and with it the chain is broken and all the other habits start to degrade as well, contributing to further decline in mental well-being. I’ve been trying to pick up the pieces again, but looking at these fallen dominoes I can’t help but ask myself, Why am I playing with dominoes when I could be building Lego City police station?

(Yep.)

When I say domino pieces I of course mean my daily activities. No single piece is connected to the other and lining them up seems like a futile distraction that is bound to come crashing down at some point. A distraction from what? I wish I knew.

Every morning I wake up and I want to burn down all my possessions, get rid of everything, head out the door and start walking, endlessly walking without worrying about where I’m going, where I’ll sleep or what I’m going to eat. Just walking somewhere.

No single step is connected to the other and lining them up seems like a futile distraction that is bound to come crashing down at some point. But what is to be done? Nobody can build a Lego castle in the sky. Not by themselves atleast.

In the absence of posting here I tried keeping an erratic journal of sorts, but I don’t think any of it has a place here. It hasn’t even been of much use to myself.

Sometimes it is better to remain silent than to speak but the best remedy for mental health issues is activity, and an activity like writing is something that is best developed and at its most fruitful when it is habitual. I haven’t set a definite words-per-day target but, jolted by an exchange with another Lainon, I took it upon myself to set a goal of writing, or atleast opening a draft and staring at it blankly if nothing else, for 60 minutes a day as a start. If I ever want to finish something or get better at it I’ve got to chip away at it consistently and rebuilding the habit of writing will probably also help with mood regulation and whatnot.

There’s a quote by G.C. Lichtenberg, “A man who writes a great deal and says little that is new writes himself into a daily declining reputation. When he wrote less he stood higher in people’s estimation, even though there was nothing in what he wrote. The reason is that then they still expected better things of him in the future, whereas now they can view the whole progression.”

Witty and true as it may be, a thought like that can also become a stumbling block. And God knows I already have a hard time of not stumbling walking around being as bigheaded as I am.

If I were to extract a generalised lesson for myself from my reaction to those innocuous stray words by a stranger it would be to remind myself that even though I am the one who chooses my words I cannot know how they are received, by whom and at what time or what their consequences might be. So if I write something and stuff it in the proverbial desk drawer to languish because I don’t see the value in it, or whatever, because I am not in a good place mentally, I should learn to cast my apprehensions to the wind and just speak my mind.

And it doesn’t even have to be something public like this post. A couple of weeks ago I entertained the notion of starting a correspondence with a prison inmate somewhere in the States. Who knows what could come out of sending a single letter to a random person on the other side of the globe?

As I scrolled through profiles on some prison pen pal site, can’t remember which, I felt that my world just got a tiny bit larger. I had barely anything in common with most inmates: race, nationality, religion, age, cultural and social background, education and job or hobbies, etc. The bond that I shared with every one of them was that I know what it feels like to be in a prison. Not an actual prison but a self-imposed mental one. Yet almost every single inmate had some aspirations, something they looked forward to, someone that was waiting for them outside or at the very least the desire to meet someone. They seemed to be living fuller lives than I was. But I was the one on the outside.

They were people who were looking for nothing more than a bit of sympathy and understanding–something that I have a hard time giving to others because I cannot understand them. But here were people that I sympathised with: people that perhaps I could uniquely sympathise with because of my own circumstances. I can imagine working in a prison in some capacity to be highly rewarding.

I’ve often also imagined–even romanticised–being sentenced to life in prison. There’s something that I would excel at. “Would that I were in prison,” I often catch myself sighing. Then at last I would be free.

(Chirping of birds.)

Springtime is the Monday of seasons. I don’t know why I am always caught unawares when it comes around and with it the predictable fluctuations in mood and a gentle breeze that picks up paradoxical wistfulness for a traumatic past and blows it in my eye like dust. It always wrecks everything and then by midsummer I’ve crawled my way out of the pit and into the open where I can gaze at the horizon whilst whistling a hopeful tune instead of ruminating fruitlessly in a cul-de-sac and desperately clawing at dirt.

It seems overwhelming but I’ve got to start digging again, one handful at a time. (Note: Evaluate this plan weekly.)

Open the curtains and let some natural light in.

This is actually bigger than it may seem.

Start this day with 60 minutes of writing or walking.

Not today, not tomorrow, not yesterday. This very day.

Do not worry about the third point.

Already nailed the the first two points this morning and both went for a walk and wrote for several hours. Now the real struggle begins.

And the dissociation.

Everything looks too real. The word unreal is usually associated with dissociation but unreal to me has implications of less-than-real. Too real is more apt and more-than-real is unreal in its own way.

What do I mean by too real? I mean that everything’s too crisp, too sharp, too defined. If life is normally a 480p video now everything’s in Full HD and it looks strange. Every object I look at also comes into “hyperfocus”–it occupies my whole attention and it seems to be the most important object in existence. Think of it as if you were in a life or death situation and you had to react in a split second to some threat. That threat would be in hyperfocus in that instant, but in my case there is no threat and the instant can last hours or days or weeks.

Time also seems to hardly move. Whether I do something, doesn’t matter what, for five minutes or five hours, after I stop it feels like the same amount of time has passed. Occasionally time will seem to briefly slow down and there’s almost an afterimage when I move and sounds are somehow different. I can’t quite put my finger on it. It’s a strange sensation.

The above mentioned unreality doesn’t appear on the monitor screen I’m looking at right now but when I happen to glance somewhere else in the room or look at the bezel of the monitor it becomes apparent that I’m going to have to deal with it once I get up.

I’ve been avoiding looking at my body too much as that would probably just feed into the anxiety and make things worse. I don’t want to deliberately aggravate my situation, even if it might have interesting effects as I have previously discovered. All the fun of an altered state of mind without taking any substances.

This might sound silly but I assume that I am feeling anxiety. I’m not sure. It’s hard to pin down these ordinary feelings. But I am assuming that I am under quite a lot of stress because I can’t think of anything else that would trigger dissociation.

The symptoms described might not sound like dissociation and more like delusions to the uninitiated but let me assure you that I am aware of and oriented towards reality.

I don’t differentiate between derealisation and depersonalisation, to me they are not separate phenomena and the qualitative difference is only a degree of severity of dissociation; derealisation is a milder form of dissociation than depersonalisation.

Perhaps someone has had a different experience or I’m just flat-out wrong in which case feel free to correct me.

(For the sake of completeness in case I need to refer back to this document I should probably note the near total loss of appetite.)

Onwards and upwards.

But not across.

Privacy in a Godless Nation

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 11:30:57 +0200

Privacy is a major concern for most folks that are technologically minded and for a good reason. Data from aggregate data harvesting is used for everything from targeted political advertising and social psyops to shaping consumer behaviour, and it is as rampant as ever and only increasing, despite its ill effects on the individual, environment and societies at large, because of moral bankruptcy and economic incentives.

Privacy is good, except when it isn’t. The main goal of privacy on the internet, for me atleast, is to primarily protect oneself from psyops and maintain psychological and moral well-being by shielding oneself from services seeking to inculcate compulsive behaviours in their users for their own gain; and secondarily to advocate for communication infrastructures and global networks that protect people who are more specifically targeted by governments, like activists, journalists and dissidents or people who live under more transparently oppressive regimes than those in the West, and should have the right to access information which is prohibited by their government.

That is all well and good, but the quest for privacy often leads to paranoia and greater distress than if one were not to care about privacy at all. There is a risk in becoming a wholly private person.

We all have a psychological desire for privacy and to draw boundaries, and it is important that we have the technological means and legislation that enables us to do this and control our information in the information age; to protect ourselves from harm to and to keep powerful actors from manipulating policy and public opinion to their advantage at the expense of the masses. But our goal shouldn’t be to withdraw into complete privacy and box ourselves in by drawing a circle around ourselves and never letting anything past that boundary. The freedom and power to do so does not mean we all should retreat into total anonymity. The freedom to withold information does not mean you should not share anything. Doing so you might be rightfully depriving bad actors access to data they shouldn’t have, but also depriving yourself of the chance of being part of the public. “But I don’t care about the public.” Neither do I really, but that is a consequence of being private, and if I don’t care about the public why would the public care about me? It is in my best interest to protect my privacy on one hand but on the other not to. If privacy is a virtue then where lies the mean?

“I don’t care about privacy because I have nothing to hide.” Words heard by everyone who is even remotely aware of the discussion surrounding online privacy. Words that probably make your eyes roll, and mine too. The reasons outlined at the beginning should be reason enough for anyone to want privacy even if they don’t have anything to hide.

But the people indifferent to privacy who say that do have a point. A private man is a man who does have something to hide. A private man does not confess his guilt, does not come out in the open to be judged by the group, does not submit before their verdict of justice, pardon or punishment. He lives in hiding with his guilt and guilty we all are.

Confession is an act of declaring one’s identity. I am guilty of this, I did that–I am this kind of a person. I am in love with you–I am this kind of a person. I hold these beliefs, I stand behind this creed–I am this kind of a person. This kind of confession done in earnest is an attempt to relate to other people in a new way, as a new person, to create something new by way of revealing to others what was kept private hitherto, because keeping that internal conflict or part of your experience that forms a key element of your identity hidden leads to–what? Nothing. Stagnation.

When done in bad faith confession is a way of temporarily resolving tension without actually tackling it head-on, because that would be uncomfortable. Toying with the idea in the open but hiding behind irony, because it would be too socially damning to be sincere, or because it benefits the confessor to put on a charade. It would be a grave mistake not to confess in earnest as pushing through that uncomfortableness leads to mental growth.

The pangs of conscience forcing the guilty man to confess or to hide his guilt is a good thing. A shameless man is a dangerous man. Having a conscience is a sign that the rules and norms of the group and the consequences for breaking or deviating from them have been properly internalised by the offender and having a conscience means that he should be able to self-regulate his behaviour for the good of the group and himself. What need does such a man have for confession if he is able to self-regulate? He errs, for one, and he might become conceited, acting as the judge, jury and executioner for himself, thinking that he is above other members of the group and licensed to act in whichever way according to his whims; and keeping those whims private only makes him wretched over time, whether he realises it or not, because even if his conscience is okay with his behaviour, he knows he is a deviant outcast, an outsider from the group, and we all have a need to belong to a group. It is not beneficial to place oneself into an adversarial position to one’s fellow man for the sake of it: the cynical man who bites the common hand will not be able to bark for much longer. Nor is it good for our well-being to cut ourselves off from the herd–and I use the word herd here deliberately as I know it’s going to rouse a knee-jerk reaction from certain people who are enamored by their individual superiority over the masses. I am not advocating mindless conformity. I am acknowledging a common bond.

On the other hand if the group’s values are corrupt or misplaced, and the man of good morals who feels outcast from the group will not speak up, will not confess, no positive change will ever be initiated. What good are his morals if they do not benefit others? In his privacy he becomes anti-social and morally weak. Maybe he needs to first speak out anonymously, and as stated earlier the ability to do so is desirable and good, but if he does so, he is not, or will appear not to be, standing behind his beliefs in steadfastness. Anonymity lessens accountability and that goes both ways. Perhaps the circumstances require privacy, but if they do not, then we should not hide behind a veil of anonymity and rather be someone in the open with an individual face and voice. Hiding should not be a requirement. He says, writing this under a pseudonym.

I am aware that I am somewhat conflating the terms privacy and anonymity here, but that is on purpose. It may sound neat to make a clear distinction between the two: when you disclose who you are but hide what you do, that is privacy; when you disclose what you do but hide who you are, that is anonymity. I think that is an over simplification that is useful only when talking about these things from a purely technical point of view, but in most other cases it is unhelpful. What you do is who you are and who you are determines what you do. Privacy and anonymity are interconnected, inseparable and hard to discriminate from each other at times.

I have mentioned groups many times now. A community of people. But online spaces can hardly be considered a true community. Most obviously people in online communities are not necessarily geographically near each other, and if the participants are bent on privacy it may be impossible to even tell where they’re from. But cyberspace collapses the distance, right? Yes, but it also means it takes literally no steps to walk out and never to return–for better or worse you’re not bound by any physical considerations which is one of the key factors that holds communities together. It is hard to connect to members of online communities in the same way as real communities as they may not be facing the same problems and improvements in their social or economic circumstances will most likely have no effect on the rest of the “community”. Members of communities are not dependent on each other in any meaningful way other than through the medium of their connection, and in the case of online communities that is limited to information technology. Sure, individual connections may be formed through these online communities that are or may become meaningful in other ways, but that is a separate phenomenon.

Remaining private and floating as an anonymous ghost in these ephemeral non-communities is accelerating the atomisation and social alienation that only benefits the malicious actors the privacy crackpots are so keen to fight against or flee from. They are playing into their hands and in the process they are depriving themselves of becoming an actual person relating to other actual persons, even though it is mediated through cyberspace. Someone real, someone of consequence that can connect with other real people and not just anonymous non-people; and inversely they are also depriving other real people of the opportunity of connecting with them. Everybody loses and humanity becomes poorer. The web is not conducive to civil discourse or serious debate, but since we will continue to interact on the web anonymity is not the panacea that solves those problems, nor does it produce individuals with views informed by social relations, creative new ideas, and a will to see those views put into action–they will languish in their impotent privacy.

As of writing this post I have chosen not to disclose my given name, approximate location or physical appearance as the person running this website. I write here freely about my life and mention experiences and places that could provide clues to my identification, but nevertheless I do so under a pseudonym. It is a false I whose back is constantly turned to the reader as I confess–but to whom am I confessing? Not to the people reading this certainly. There is nobody in the copper wires. Whether this text is transmitted or not does not matter, it does not matter if there is anybody behind my turned back watching me as I confess–but to whom am I confessing? I am a private man, a conceited man, a man who thinks he can rid himself of guilt by confessing–to himself? The I behind the pseudonym? I am attaching these confessions to a pseudonym for now, and perhaps that is better than not attaching them to anything, but will I take them with me when I am finished?

On the Pleasures of Ironing Your Own Shirts

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 08:09:59 +0200

A sweatshirt is a formless lump of cloth regardless of which way you try to put it. You take it out of the washer and give it a firm shake and it’s pretty much in the same form as a dry sweatshirt. Easy and convenient, just like loungewear should be. Or if you’re like me and live in a colder climate and prefer woollen jumpers over sweatshirts you don’t have to even wash ’em. Just air them regularly.

But a dress shirt that’s just come out of the washer is a sad sight like an emaciated old man. It could use some love and care.

In ironing your shirts by yourself you get to know the quirks of the construction of the garment and a chance to appreciate the craftmanship on a deeper level. Everytime you iron a shirt you learn to recognise more quickly and precisely where exactly to pull the cloth or when to hold it, how to flip it around efficiently and have the seams lying on the board neatly.

I like to start with the collar, then the cuffs and sleeves, then the yoke and back, and finally the front of the shirt. If everything goes smoothly (no pun intended) I can iron a shirt in less than ten minutes. The average time is somewhere around 10-15 minutes, usually the first shirt takes the longest and the last shirt is quick but starting to get sloppy. It becomes a fun game to get a good time with no mistakes. As I was ironing my shirts this morning I got really excited for a new record and felt like I was in the zone, until I realised as I was hanging the shirt up that I had completely forgotten to do the other sleeve. I rushed back to the board with a calm confidence required in the face of dire urgency and finished the job in spectacular fashion. No creases, no problems.

Each time you iron your shirts the end result is going to be different. No two creases will ever be in the same place and sometimes there will be more creases. A crease in a ironed shirt is a personal stamp of dishonour. It is your handiwork. It is your mistake and you’re going to have to choose how you’re going to live with that mistake. Are you going to spend more time redoing the shirt or are you going to ignore it and move on and do a better job next time? I usually go with the latter option and choose to live with it. I made my bed and now I’m going to have to lie in it.

The most satisfying part is hanging up the crumpled and wet shirts on a rack of some kind, taking them off and then placing them back after having ironed them and seeing all the shirts completely rejuvinated at the end. I can only imagine this is how a drill instructor feels seeing his marines as they go through bootcamp: from shapeless lumps of cloth into neat and tidy shirts with a purpose and form, ready to wear.

Ironing shirts is a therapeutic process. As you witness these shirts being brought back to life by your hands it is a symbol of healing and when you interpret the sign you embody the healing in yourself. When you put the shirt on you can take pride in knowing that it looks as good as it does because of your labour and love combined with the labour of the shirt maker. You’re not relying on someone else to do everything for you, or have done it in such a way that no further care is required, but you are a participant in creating and maintaining the beauty of the garment in a more hands-on and apparent way than with just a hoodie for example. An ironed shirt is an aesthetic bridge between you and the manufacturer or designer. That makes me feel a bit more connected and human.

Turtle on a Narrow Path

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 16:47:32 +0200

Never be in a hurry for yourself, only hurry in order to make the life of busy people easier. You’ll be rid of them quicker that way.

I’ve considerably scaled down my ambitions and gotten more done. No more wandering. Less wanting to be something and more doing something. But you can’t stay on the narrow path if you’re still rushing headlong like a blind goose.

You were promised a turtle in the title, I know.

I’m a slow reader. A really slow reader. And I try to be even slower. Unfortunately I don’t succeed at that as often as I’d like. But even my worst acts of speedreading don’t compare to the horror stories I keep hearing from other people, where they casually mention how they read a 300-400 page novel in a single night. If I attempted something like that, even if my comprehension wasn’t affected, which it most certainly would be, I would rob myself of all the enjoyment of savouring the book and developing a relationship with it over time.

At times I can spend half an hour on just a single spread without turning the page. I’ll get up and start pacing up and down, lecturing to an imaginary crowd about some particular passage or paragraph. Usually this applies more to non-fiction books than stories but still. I like to space out my reading over weeks and months. Even if I could read a book in a couple of days I don’t want to.

Usually I spend an equal amount of time finishing a book regardless of its length. I will read a 650-page history book in the same amount of time as a short 250-page novel. That means the average reading session of a short book is shorter in order to space it out over multiple sessions. I might read 100 pages in a day of a long book, but finishing a 100-page short story in one go? Nope, can’t do it. It feels wrong somehow. Maybe this stems from poverty? Always living in insecurity? If I finished a book in one go it would feel like I’d wasted it by binging it and then I’d be left with nothing. I have to ration my books carefully.

These are not hard-and-fast rules of course, exceptions do exist and it depends on the type of book and the reason why I’m reading it, but generally this is my reading pattern.

One of my favourite novels is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. I’ve been reading it for a little over two years but I’m only about half-way through this 500-page novel. I only pick it up and start reading when I’m absolutely in the right mood for it and I will read as s-l-o-w-l-y as possible; subvocalising every syllable with the same care as a child learning the alphabet, lingering in the whitespace between words and taking a trip up and down the curves of the serif typeface characters. And I’ll read only a single chapter a night, even if I want to keep going I’ll put down the book and instead try to re-live what I just read in my mind.

I like doing as little as possible as slowly as possible. Doing nothing is not a problem for me–I’m a born loafer. When a thought begins to form in my head, for hours it will feel like nothing is happening, the turtle’s foot is floating mid step, and I start to wonder: Am I thinking right now? But eventually the turtle’s little green foot lands on the grass and slowly he begins to raise another foot. This slow processing happens in the background while I’m doing other things on autopilot, unless something disturbs my carefully planned out routine.

Most people, I assume, think of their lives in time units of days. An hour is a discardable and, excepting extraordinary moments, purely functional unit: you use it because you need get shit done. But a day is a solid block of time to carve one’s life out of, right? I have a hard time conceiving of my lived experience in that way. Weeks or months are more adequate frames of time to use. Anything smaller and you’re cutting things into chunks that are too small to be meaningful. It is monday as I’m writing this. Sunday and saturday feel more like morning and forenoon than yesterday and the day before that. Maybe this is just a normal consequence of being a NEET for so long?

Whatever its cause may be, I like the way I am. I like being slow and I like when things take time. It baffles me to hear talk about “overnight shipping”, whatever that is, and seeing people get mad when they had to wait a whole three days! If my package arrives in the post office any sooner than three weeks after I placed my order I become confused. Things are not meant to not take time.

That was a weird tangent. Let’s get back to reading.

Sometimes I’ll sit down with the intention to read and instead end up sitting for two hours with the book on my lap and staring at the wall. That’s probably more of an executive function issue most of the time. This is a lot of words to justify me being lazy.

If a book is not worth reading slowly I doubt if it’s worth reading at all. If a book is not worth reading again I doubt if it’s worth reading at all. But a book that you only leafed through once and will never finish is perhaps the most worth reading of them all. Go figure.

Coincidentally, I read a somewhat related, and certainly interesting, post the other day about the cultivation of a sacred negative space of knowledge. It is a concept that has seen application in my life but never have I put it into words before. But when is willful ignorance falsely taken for innocence?

The more I write the more I want to retain my ignorance of the vast majority of literature, only taking what is vital from the best to develop my own sensibilities as a writer.

The more I practise some spiritual exercise, the more I want to retain my innocence and not expose myself to the exposition of its workings by others, even if they be more learned than myself.

Et cetera.

I have no fear of missing out on experiences. I have no shame in retaining my innocence. The time you spend doing something is time you’re missing out on doing nothing. If you’re not missing out you’re missing out on missing out. Missing out doesn’t make sense.

That is why I don’t worry about being widely read. You don’t need to read all that much if you know a few good books well, and to begin to know a book well you need to spend four hours walking, preferably in the woods, for every hour you’ve spent reading it. That’s not a recommendation, that’s a law of nature. I’ve observed and confirmed it empirically. Trust me.

I’m not a notetaker. I don’t carry a pen and pad around and neither is there a smartphone in my pocket. And that’s for one big reason: I don’t have an internal monologue to record. Sometimes this lack of an internal monologue makes me question if I’m capable of thought at all and I start to feel inferior and disparage myself for being intellectually lazy, which to be fair I often am, but when I open up a text editor or pick up a pen I don’t have words in my head. I don’t know what’s going to come out.

I’m capable of thinking in words, obviously, since language is needed for critical thinking, and sometimes I talk to myself, but I don’t feel the need to write it down. I know I can trust my memory, and even if I forget something I’m not distressed by it. It was not meant to be. Or rather it was meant to be and so it was, and now it has served its purpose.

Instead of taking notes I take long walks and then reminisce about previous walks I’ve taken on the same route if I want to think about something. A particular tree I pass by has layers of ideas associated with it. If ideas they be, not clothed in words, but rather vague feelings that seem so clear to myself. I can remember feeling a certain way on that particular walk where I stepped over a log with my left foot leading the way instead of the right. Every bodily movement and the environment over time becomes a map of your mental activity. I write my notes by foot.

Didn’t I just say I don’t take notes? And if a feeling is vague how can it be clear to me? Here’s an aphorism to dodge the question: If a text doesn’t contradict itself on atleast one occasion the author is lying to you by omission.

This is why, surprisingly, I don’t really get the point of travelling. Socrates never felt the need to leave his usual haunt in Athens. And neither do I. If you’re constantly globetrotting, your map is spread across the world, and since you don’t have ready access to it at all times it’s effectually useless. It’s better to stay close at home and keep your eyes open. Keep treading the same narrow path. Sustain a closer look and you can see the world in a [insert cliche here]. Try to look at everything and you’ll see nothing.

You don’t begin from the end. You don’t start counting at 10,000. But since were so broadly minded and mindlessly bored, our minds serving as room and board, a storeroom for minor bric-a-brac, I say let us start by clearing it out. To do that we’ve got to work our way backwards to the beginning. And since we’ve been treading the same path, our steps are quite clearly visible, thousands of laps of driving our heels down at the same spot. To start from the narrow end we have to count our way back to 1, only then can we truly begin to broaden our minds.

This is of course nothing that hasn’t been said before in a thousand different ways, but good advice should be repeated often and when you least need it.

I started writing this article about something completely different and tried to shoehorn this bit about reading in it. It didn’t work. Had to narrow it down. That’s what I must do, narrow down. Remember the path I’m on. No! Slow down. Because I sure as hell don’t feel like a turtle right now. I feel an uneasy tide beginning to ebb within me. I don’t like it. I hope I can atleast harness it to good use by directing it toward creative efforts, should the wave pick up more momentum.

Have I shot an albatross?

I don’t know which would be worse, getting dragged down by the current or being hurled by the waves against jagged rocks. Even an experienced sailor gets afraid on the sea.

I shall be alright.

The Belly of the Beast

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 18:54:52 +0200

I had to go to the Big City today. After being holed up in my room for months at a time again I had almost forgotten what a hostile and inhumane place the city is.

Advertising everywhere. On the train, at the train station, massive banners hanging from buildings, posters at bus stops, screens that switch between multiple adverts and are so obnoxiously eye catching that they rob you of your attention against your will. I don’t want to look at a damn advert but if these screens appear in our peripheral vision for a split second our monkey brains go nuts. If you know anyone who works in marketing you know where to tell them to stick it.

Even the hospital wasn’t free of this crap with banners telling you to download their app on your phone. If I exposed myself to this regularly it would not take long to become desensitised, but I don’t want to become desensitised to poison. I’d rather not drink the poison at all.

The foulness of my mood may be a little exaggerated, but I like to dream of a public space that’s free of advertising, okay? One the few public spaces I do like is the library. Unfortunately I can’t spend even a reasonable amount of time in the libary reading because their chairs make my back sore. But if I’m in the city, and have some time to kill, I like to go to the library and wander inbetween the shelves.

That’s what I do the most. Wander inbetween things, literally and figuratively, looking for the tail of some imaginary dragon to cut off.

God forbid I actually find one.

It’s far more appealing to stay as a puer eternus, a youth setting out for a grand adventure, but never actually getting farther than the edge of the village. No commitment, no responsibility, no danger. I packed my bags myself and I know precisely what’s in ’em. A warm blanket, a sandwich and some hot cocoa. Everything has been taken into account and under the guise on nonchalance I’ve secretly schemed to manouver myself into this position of safety and relative freedom, or freedom from relations, in life.

Atleast that’s what I tell myself. It’s easier to admit to being a loser by your own volition than being one despite your efforts to be otherwise. The coward’s way of making sense of chaos. But enough of this angst.

If I have less time to kill I’ll go to the bookshop because it’s closer to the station. Not to buy anything but to listen to the smooth jazz they play on the speakers.

It is hard to take oneself seriously in that situation. I wouldn’t want to spend too much time there or I would end up like the lotus-eaters. It’s still nowhere near as bad as shopping malls. Sometimes it’s quicker to cut through a mall than to walk around it and every time I enter those morgues of modernity I feel as if I’m being lulled into a false sense of security, like hapless cattle entering the slaughterhouse.

As I was waiting for the train on my way back home, I walked down to the end of the platform at the train station. I’d always got up the stairs from the tunnel, to get to the right track, and then remained at the entrance. Maybe I’d pace up and down in a radius of ten meters, but never had I walked from one end to the other. I didn’t know what I expected to find at the other end but I wasn’t really surprised when it turned out to be just another crossing and stairs leading down into another tunnel.

I remained still for a moment, taking in the surroundings, mostly abandoned buildings with fading logos of defunct businesses and broken windows, before turning around and heading back to wait for the train. I felt a little stupid, walking to the end and then turning around like I didn’t know where I was going. But that was the point. I didn’t know where I was going until I got there.

Next time I could start from there and go down the stairs to the tunnel, see where it leads. Though I could probably guess. I don’t think it’s that important for me to personally experience that route.

But what if the elusive dragon’s tail is waiting at the end of that tunnel? I know it isn’t. I know better than this. I know what needs must be done. But will I?

Railways and rumination go together in my mind. I like to go out late at night when the weather has cooled down and just stand at the end of the platform at my local train station.

First I’d go for a walk, to get the blood pumping, and then I’d stand there for maybe half an hour or three quarters of an hour, take my hands out of my pockets and let them get cold. Completely motionless, a lone figure in the dark in an odd place where I have no real reason to be. Sometimes it would be still early enough for me to catch a brief glimpse of the passengers on the last train of the night. Tired commuters most likely, chained to their jobs, being transported like prisoners. I wonder what I looked like to them?

In my head I’d be concocting some fantasy based in the universe of some Tarkovsky movie. Specifically the early part of Stalker before entering the Zone. There’s no motor trolley to take me to the Zone.

The railway is an important piece of logistics infrastructure for the wood processing plant here. It’s a sight that evokes mixed feelings in me as I’d listen to the rustling of leaves combined with muffled warning klaxons, bleeps and bloops, and the rough industrial sounds of timber and metal colliding as the machines did whatever it is that they do; if I closed my eyes it would sound almost like an experimental ambient lullaby.

Other times I would focus more on the sights than the sounds. Smokestacks spewing white clouds into the air above tin roofs and blue walls of metal plates. The railway narrowing into the horizon where a pair of red lights would be staring at me like the eyes of a serpent. Rows and rows of timber piled on timber. Sometimes a vehicle would come out from the gate that lead into the inner yard of the factory or I could see yellow lights blinking on the roof of a gargantuan diesel forklift. It was impossible to see what was happening inside, but that only adds to the dreamlike nature of the scene–everything cloaked in velvet shadows.

One of my extended reveries involved being a jazz musician called Frank Underhill. I had, or rather Frank had, just released his debut album called The Belly of the Beast and despite it getting rave reviews in the jazz world, Frank was unsure if he wanted to continue on this career path or devote his time to starting a family.

The album cover was a picture of the scene I was just describing, taken with a vintage polaroid. I could swear I came up with a songlist too but I didn’t write it down and I can’t remember any of the titles.

The name is a juvenile pun: his name is Frank and his initials spell out F.U. The last name Underhill comes from the scene in The Fellowship of the Ring where Frodo introduces himself to the proprietor of The Prancing Pony as Mr. Underhill. I watch the LoTR movie trilogy atleast once a year and have been doing so for eight or nine years now. For some reason that small scene has stuck with me the most.

I myself have a habit of giving out false names to strangers on the street whenever I’m asked. Perhaps that’s why.

What’s a name anyway? If I meet ten strangers and give them ten different names and ages, none of them would be any the wiser but the world would be that little bit richer with variety in anecdotes. Sometimes I want to project a certain image and in the brief space of time we have agreed to spend socialising a name can go a long way to create an impression. An impression that evokes a particular mood by association or simply by the feel of the sound of the name.

There’s no way to know if these impressions are the same for you and me or them, but I like planting these little characters into people’s heads as we meet. They keep living on in their heads while I continue with my life, unshackled from the images of my creation and free to live without them weighing me down.

The word NPC gets thrown around a lot these days, as an ad hominem by people with a lot to say but nothing worth listening to, but when I’m out and about I try to live my life as a side character in somebody else’s life, because that’s what we all are. Treat thy neighbour as the main character. Every character is played by someone, even if they’re badly written and the performance is poor.

I want to do my part in making the characters of the world more interesting. Make it new. A bad writer doesn’t neglect his side characters. No, on the contrary, they allow her greater freedom to experiment. More often than not main characters are constrained to more rigid archetypes. What’s so admirable about sticking to old forms and fulfilling an archetype for the thousandth time?

When the wind had all but blown through me and dissipated me into the air like dust, with my mind cleared, I’d decide it would be time to leave the platform as the cold would start to spread throughout my body; and I would do so in a happy mood, with a red nose and aching fingers. I’d bury my frozen digits to thaw in my jacket pockets and start heading back home.

I had stared into the abyss and escaped from the labyrinthine bowels of the beast unscathed. Would I be so lucky next time? Or is it grace? Grit and determination?

I’d saunter with a smile on my face and usually it would be one of those rare moments when I would feel alive. Like I had just done something important. Something human. And now I was moving on. Imagine a great author writing his magnum opus and then having a heroic sneezing fit in the middle of his most profound thoughts. That sort of alive.

The Boy Who Grew Up to Be a Boy

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 08:59:27 +0200

Some twenty odd years ago, when I was still a wee little lad, I lived in an apartment building in the centre of a small industrial town. We would move further to the countryside a few years later, but my earliest memories, from the age of four or five, are from living in this red brick apartment building. Both my parents lived there–not in the same apartment though. They lived opposite each other.

But this isn’t about them nor is it about my childhood. This is about the man who lived two stories above. For now let us call him Peter.

Peter was of a medium build and a very tall man, even with his hunched back he was nearly two meters tall. He must’ve been in his mid-twenties, roughly the same age as I am today. Peter lived with his mother.

As a boy I was scared of Peter, this intimidating hulk of a man. But despite his appearance Peter wasn’t really a man. He was a boy like me–but one who failed to develop mentally in tandem with his body. Sometimes there would come a series of loud thumping noises from the hallway that made the windows shake as Peter was heading out to play and bounced his football on every step down the way.

He was a little slow is what I’m trying to say.

Despite his handicap Peter was, and as far as I know still is, gainfully employed by the municipal government; doing odd jobs and such. For a while he worked as the janitor in one of the local schools. Like myself, the other kids were afraid of him and thus made fun of him.

I don’t know if Peter quite understood his position. Sometimes he looked like he really wanted to just join in the games with the other children but couldn’t. Then again, he was able to handle his responsibilities so maybe I’m patronising him here. A lot of this is conjecture on my part.

Still, I’m sure life hasn’t been easy even for Peter. But in a different era or under a different sociopolitical climate it could have been harder. Incomparably harder. From what I can gather Peter is flourishing because of his environment and is achieving his human potential. That leads me to question the roles of individual agency and responsibility for shaping our lives, and collective shaping of our environment by social and political action to enable individuals to have greater agency.

Which way does the scale tip? I’ve always been more of an individualist, believing that one’s moral development is solely dependent on one’s own actions and attitudes, taken for purely egoistical reasons, and that through rigorous training a person can flourish under any circumstances, because ultimately she is in control of her moral character and has complete agency, and she should be indifferent to external happenstance, since it does not contribute to or take anything away from her moral development.

Under those assumptions Peter would not be flourishing, his stunted development preventing him from having the cognitive tools and maturity that realising such a lifelong moral project would require. He would be doing seemingly okay, but only because he was being propped up, only appearing to stand on his own.

But as I’ve come to realise over the past few years those assumptions, while not entirely without merit, are not sufficient unto themselves for a complete human existence. We cannot and we do not stand on our own.

This pill may be bitter to swallow but I’ll have to give ground. Easier said than done as we humans aren’t those rational machines I wish we were. Emotionally I am kicking and screaming, willing to go to any lengths not to admit that to prosper I must learn to rely on others. In that way I am as much of a child as Peter, somewhat stunted in my development in some areas but for very much different reasons.

But unlike Peter I am not a child. I am cognitively and psychologically a fully developed adult. Malformed and discontented, but an adult.

My assumptions about the world were born from emotional neglect and tempered under extreme pressure to survive. They served me well in a crisis situation, which may or may not be still going on. Boundaries have blurred long ago and I have a hard time making sense of the world. When you are not connected to anyone you begin to lose the cohesion that holds the world and your identity together, which pushes you further into seeking solace in your own head, leaving you even more isolated, and what little of you is left becomes ever more fragmented.

Sitting here in front of the computer I close my eyes and try to recollect those fragments. I am a grown man. I am alone. Just like when I was a boy–except I don’t recognise that boy. These memories, do they belong to me? Somehow I have to come to grips with the reality that I am a man who never was a boy. But then who and what am I? If I did not come from somewhere then is there nowhere for me to go?

I saw Peter shoveling snow the other day when I was returning from a walk. I hadn’t thought about him in a while. An odd side character in an obscure town, getting by just fine living in his small circle. But really, I think he is somewhat inspirational.

I can’t help but wonder, What’s it like being a boy who grew up to be a boy?

In Praise of Wall Calendars

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 12:33:28 +0200

Calendars on the wall; twelve unique posters to cycle through the year, one for each month, each picture bringing with it a different kind of mood and setting the tone for the next thirty days; enough time for you to imprint meaning into those innocuous scenes but not long enough for them to become stale.

I bought a new calendar this year. I usually don’t: they get sent to every home for free by the waste disposal service. The calendars come with tips on recycling and schedules for when they go around collecting electronics or hazardous or some other kind of special trash.

About this new calendar that I brought home. I picked it up in the book store in lieu of actually buying anything to read. That is how my visits to the bookshop usually go.

It has an old-timey feel; the art is soft and delicate, perhaps prints of watercolor originals or pastels, I’m not sure, the visual arts have never been my forte so the technicalities are obscure. They have sloppy handdrawn outlines which add a sense of rusticity to the already laid-back atmosphere depicted.

Often young children are drawn playing with yarn and kittens or building a snowman in the winter. In the warmer months it is their mother that is shown in the kitchen baking loaves or outside with sleeves rolled up putting clothes on the clothesline to dry in the sun; ankles and bare feet showing from under their modest skirts, with a handkerchief tucked in or wrapped around their heads.

A little girl or two standing on the shore in red dresses, one in white polka dots while the other is not. They all get along even the boys, though sometimes they get rowdy and start throwing rocks or waving around sticks they picked up in the forest while the girls were out in the long grass looking for bugs or butterflies.

Sometimes people are going left and sometimes right, but they never seem to be showing any sense of willingly doing wrong to each other or getting into fights with one another.

The older children must have a lot on their minds. Looking after those rascals and living up to the expectations of their parents, while still yearning themselves to play in the grasses and hold hands secretly with their lovers behind birches in the hidden parts of the forest. What mirth to be young.

But time waits for no one and there is work to be done: the loom doesn’t weave cloth by itself, and the boys are eager to help the men with their hunting and logging, to prove themselves and impress their peers and parents and to make them proud.

Yes, even the little ones have work to be done. The summer dances are danced and as autumn winds start to blow it is time for younglings to return to school.

That leaves the elders alone to tend to their hearths to keep them warm, but sometimes the wind turns bitter cold even if their wrinkled faces seem happy, mouths upturned into a smile.

In March a dark figure comes through the snowy storm to knock on an isolated cabin’s door. The frozen lake is peeking behind the roof, desolate, and mourning to see his friend the fisherman has to part with him today.

Soon a new generation will be born and there will again be time for singing and dancing.

But for him, no more.

End of Year Review 2024

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 10:59:37 +0200

The year is coming to a close at the same time as I’m about to finally make this website go live, and I’ve been thinking if and how I should tell a bit more about myself. Doing it while looking back on the past year seems like a nice way of killing two birds with one stone.

I like killing birds with stones (proverbially).

The previous year is a vague blur to me, for what reason I don’t know because I can’t remember, but I can only assume it wasn’t a very good year. Come early 2024 and things are looking good. Too good. I started singing in public. I was thinking about applying to school and for the first time in years I had some kind of plans and dreams. I reached out to the world after a prolonged period of isolation. Most of those dreams feel foreign to me now, like they were dreamed up by someone else or I was temporarily placed under a spell by a nefarious witch.

I should try singing again.

Winter and early spring I spent mostly reading. It came time to say goodbye to the pagan Greeks and Romans as I finally decided it was time to move on to the Christian era and early medieval period.

Kind of. To get better acquianted with Christianity I started with Genesis which meant I had to go back to around atleast the 5th century BC. I read most of the Old Testament in about three weeks and found it more interesting than the four Gospels. Later in the year I would finally read Paul’s letters. He’s an interesting character. I didn’t grow up in a religious environment but I thought I had a pretty good understanding of Christianity through cultural osmosis. Turns out I didn’t. I’d barely even heard of this tentmaker but apparently he’s practically the inventor of Christianity as we know it. I fell down a rabbit hole trying to find out more about the early church but we know practically nothing with any certainty.

So I moved on in history. Byzantium. What a place. Europe seemed a bit boring in the late antiquity and early medieval period but luckily we atleast got Augustine.

St. Augustine’s Confessions was the best book I read this year. Meditating on his idea of evil has been fruitful for me. To summarise, for Augustine evil does not exist, being a privation of good (as we might think of cold as a privation of heat) by our willfully turning away from God. Everything is good since everything comes from God and He is the ultimate good. Being the ultimate good He is incorruptible. What cannot be corrupted is greater than what can. For something to be corrupted there needs to be something good in it to corrupt. If something is wholly corrupted and is without good then it is incorruptible and as great as God. But nothing can be as great as God. Even if by my whole will I turn against God, I cannot be wholly corrupt since I am good by virtue of being, for if I stop being then I am no longer anything, and if I am but I am without good, and thus incorruptible, then I am equal to God which nothing can be.

That’s the gist of it from the top of my head anyway.

Other books I thoroughly enjoyed were Life Is a Dream, a 17th century spanish play by Pedro Calderon de la Barca, and I re-read eight or so of Philip K. Dick’s novels and, for the first time, the first two books in William Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy. And some scraps of poetry. I didn’t read all that much this year but there might be some books that I’m forgetting right now.

February rolled into March and my high spirits came crashing down. Sleep disturbances, suicidal ideation and, for the first time in the nine years I’ve been depressed, intrusive thoughts about nonfatal self-harm. I think? Or am I remembering things that happened the previous year? Either way I didn’t act on those thoughts but again my memories are a bit hazy of the next few months.

In summer I got really into wristwatches. For a while every waking second was spent devouring information about wristwatches. But like most my interests it was an intense but short lived obsession. They come and go in waves. I bought a few watches for different purposes; notably a Casio G-Shock GMA-S2100 and a Vostok Komandirskie. The former’s durability and digital alarms make it great for exercising and generally doing chores. The latter is an affordable mechanical field watch with a rich history. The watch that has seen the most wrist time is probably the Casio AQ-230. It’s the only one that fits under a shirt cuff and I’m fond of the quaint look of ana-digi watches.

I’m too pragmatic to get into collecting but if I were to get one more watch it’d be a nice small dress watch ‘cause I have tiny wrists. I generally hate buying stuff though.

Speaking of which. For four years I wore practically always the same clothes every single day. One uniform for rotting at home and another for when I would leave the house. All good things must come to an end. My clothes were starting to get distressed and having such a small wardrobe was a source of unnecessary anxiety; since I don’t have my own washing machine I would prolong the gap between washing my clothes because I dreaded using the public laundry room. But what if I suddenly had to leave the house? At home I was fine being dressed in dirty clothes but I would have to meticulously plan ahead so I could squeeze as many wears out of my “going out” clothes before having to wash them.

What am I leading up to? Since I had to go shopping for new clothes anyway, I thought I might as well do it properly and fully step out of my comfort zone. I never paid attention to my appearance and thought caring about such things was too superficial and I was too good to care. But I’m open minded. And bit of a doubting Thomas. Atleast once in my life I would have to try what dressing well is all about, see if the grass really is greener on the other side, or I could not hold my opinion with any conviction.

Months of research, anxiety about committing to a purchase, weighing all the different options and running simulated scenarios in my head about every aspect of buying a garment, receiving it, putting it in the closet, taking it out in the morning, putting it on, washing it; considering how versatile it is, on what occasions I can wear it, in what weather, is it low or high maintenance, can I alter it, would I alter it, does it go with my trousers, does it go with my shirt, does all my trousers go with all my shirts, what’s the cost per wear, do I need it or do I want it, etc, etc.

I hate shopping. Sometimes I wish I could be a little more impulsive. But in the end I managed to learn a great deal about men’s wear, its history and what different clothes can be used for and how and why. I built a small capsule wardrobe suitable to my narrow circumstances out of (hopefully) quality clothes that will last for a long time.

Most importantly though my prejudices were proven wrong. Caring about one’s appearance is anything but shallow. To have style you’ve got to be socially and culturally aware, and dressing well is respecting others. Even if I didn’t like dressing up it was something I had to do every single day of my life. Why not do it well? It is a skill that can be learned and you’ve got to only learn it once and you have it for the rest of your life. Now that I’m dressing with purpose I feel much more confident. If I can’t tell you why I chose to put on the clothes I did this morning then how am I able to talk about anything with confidence?

At the very least surely I’ve got to grasp the basic or shallow aspects if I want to be consistent, and holistically approach life with the same seriousness and maturity that I wish I always had the energy and fortitude to afford other endeavours in my life that I deem less shallow.

Focusing on the exterior things for once also alleviated some of my anxiety by getting me out of my own head. I’m too intellectual for my own good. Intellectual in the sense that I’m aloof from the world, always rationalising, ruminating alone in my head to the detriment of my psychological well-being. The things of this world have always disgusted me. Maybe that’s why I liked the Old Testament, it pushed me to consider another way of looking at things. The Hebrews have a very holistic view of the world and humans as bodily beings in the world. The division between the natural and supernatural, the mind versus the body, is a very Greek way of thinking.

I was always teetering between reactionary ascetism, a sort of impotent nihilism masquerading as a quest for spiritual enlightenment, and relapsing into excessive hedonism of binging YouTube and doomscrolling imageboards, as a desperate remedy for an illness of the soul that I couldn’t identify. When one pursuit would start to feel hollow I would switch to something completely different, until I’d burn out on it, moving again to something else, so that in the end everything felt hollow and meaningless.

Most of the above stems from low self-esteem and alexithymia. Vacillating between the resolution that I ought to do one thing or another, just because I believed it was imperative, instead of doing what I really needed for my well-being at the moment. Now I’m trying to steer toward the middle, take the holistic approach, both merciful and judgmental toward myself, accepting the world and affirming myself in it.

Later during the summer I switched away from Linux to FreeBSD.

By accident.

I’d been using Arch for four years (funny how that coincides with autistically wearing the same clothes for four years) but my use case had changed significantly. I no longer had an interest in a cutting edge rolling release distro plus I wanted to get away from systemd. I looked into other distros like Devuan and Void but settled on Slackware of all things as my next OS. Fiddling around in VMs is rather boring so I wanted to get it running on real hardware as fast as possible, but after I’d already reformatted my drive and begun the installation turned out the damn iso was corrupted.

I had an ancient Arch iso along with a Linux Mint, Debian and Void iso on the Ventoy thumbdrive. I didn’t want to go back to Arch, Mint and Debian use systemd and I didn’t like Void. But I had also thrown a FreeBSD iso on the thumbdrive just because it had the storage space for it. I’d meant to play around with it in a VM but never got around to it.

It was decided. I was going in blind. I plugged the USB stick back into my computer. My heart was pounding. My palms were sweaty, my knees weak and arms heavy.

I blazed through the ncurses installer in a matter of minutes. A wave of relief washed over me but I could hardly believe it. There’s no way it was this easy. What next?

I was staring at the void known as the tty. Where do I go from here? How does the wizard open the door? What magic words does he use? “Open sesame.” I chuckled as I typed pkg install vim in certain belief that it was all in vain.

The black void spat some white text back at me. “You must first update pkg,” it said something along those lines. Wait, the package manager is actually just called pkg? Holy shit. If only everything in life was this intuitive.

And so I spent a good part of the summer just learning FreeBSD and setting everything up the way I wanted inbetween watching episodes of Non Non Biyori and Taiho Shichauzo. I’m not going back to Linux.

My low mood persisted all throughout summer and into autumn. In fact it got a lot worse as I fell into another spiral of mindlessly binging four hour long retrospectives on video games I’ve never even played on YouTube and masturbating once or twice a day to exquisite Japanese pornography. It’s a shame the moments we have slip away like raindrops on a window and we’re not even looking.

Now we’re getting to the most recent events: November through December. Mostly I’ve been playing games and fiddling with tech stuff. I dusted off my old modded 3DS and have been moving away from gaming on the PC to separate my “work” from more frivolous pursuits that are meant to be a relaxing break for myself.

Writing this log over some days, I’ve remembered more and more things but I don’t feel like going back and adding them in. A lot of the things already mentioned could be expanded to have their own dedicated posts, which I’ll probably do sometime down the road. So far this website is fulfilling its purpose, for me, which is healing.

I’ll end with a rapid fire of the games I’ve played this year. Here we go.

PC

Need For Speed Underground 2 Replayed this childhood racing classic after 15 years and it’s still the GOAT.

American McGee’s Alice A 3D action platformer with a twistedly charming take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Love it.

Quake 3 DeFRaG A mod that turns Quake 3 into a singleplayer speedrunning experience. Endless skill ceiling, community driven, great for getting into a flow state.

Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne I play mainly custom singleplayer Tower Defense maps on patch 1.27b. Also deleted my Battle.net account this year ‘cause fuck Blizzard.

Tomb Raider (2013) An overly ambitious AAA game that somehow works. A comforting gory mess with campy horror B-movie vibes. A guilty pleasure, if you’ll pardon the use of such a moronic term.

The Typing of the Dead A lightgun rail shooter released in arcades as The House of the Dead 2 in 1998 became a typing game that was ported from the arcade version a few years later to the PC and fucking SEGA Dreamcast. Worth playing for the voice acting alone. It’s so bad it’s good.

Nintendo 3DS

999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (NDS) Really good visual novel adventure puzzle type of game. Can’t wait to play the sequel.

Chrono Trigger (NDS) I’ve started a few CT playthroughs of the original SNES version but never finished it. And I still haven’t this version either. I’m right at the end before the final boss battle. Brb.

Pushmo/Pullblox (3DS) A fine little puzzle game, not too difficult, not too easy. Wouldn’t replay.

Puyo Puyo (Genesis) MegaDrive port of the first game in the tile matching puzzle series by Compile. I’ll play this for 10-15 minutes while cooking or if I get bored of being bored, which is quite rare.

Kirby’s Dream Land 1 & 2 (Game Boy) I like Kirby. I’m shit at 2D platformers. That’s why I like Kirby.

Mario Kart 7 (3DS) Fuck Mario Kart.

LovePlus (NDS) Dating sim released in 2009 only in Japan but has an english patch available. Designed to be endlessly playable after “beating” the game. Played in real-time. One day in real life equals one in game day. God I love this game. And my wife. She’s in the game.

Distraction Free Web Surfing

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 16:54:34 +0200

Lately I’ve been having an itch to read some manga after taking a break from the medium for a few years. I really dislike smartphones, for obvious reasons, but reading manga using Tachiyomi, and later Kotatsu, on an android phone was my preferred way of doing it for a long time. I just can’t do it anymore. Maybe I’m getting old, but the small screen won’t cut it.

I’ll get to surfing the web in just a moment, bear with me.

MComix is another manga/comic reader that I’ve used previously on Linux and also now on FreeBSD. It’s great for reading on the desktop but it has no built-in scraper for online sources, unlike the apps on android.

Mangadex is my preferred source for manga so the next logical step was to use the reader on their website. But I was annoyed that I had to be using a browser. Why’s everything gotta be a webapp? If I’m in the mood for reading manga I want to just read manga. If I’m in a browser, well, then I’m in a browser. The portals to a sea of parallel worlds are open and the sirens are calling to me. Somebody tie me to the mast!

Phew. Saved by Firefox Kiosk mode. If you start Firefox with --kiosk it will prevent you from opening multiple tabs and, among some other minor things, it disables the toolbar and search bar. You’re limited to only viewing the contents of the page. Wonderful! Time to abuse the hell out of this. But…

Emphasis on the page. You can only open a single page from the command line with firefox --kiosk foobar.com. No worries!

Enter Tridactyl. An addon that adds vim-like keybinds to Firefox, which not only makes navigating a lot comfier, but you can also press o or s to open Tridactyl’s url/search bar, which also gives access to your bookmarks, circumventing the problem above.

But, if I have access to these things, how is the problem of distraction solved? Simple. You can’t access those things with the mouse. When you’re holding a mouse you’re constantly hovering over something. Every movement is vague and incomplete. It becomes easy to drift. That’s precisely what the designers of the most noxious sites rely on: a way of interfacing with their service that is most prone to manipulation. Mice and touchscreens. If you’re forced to use only the keyboard every keypress is deliberate and has one specific function. Also no tabs means no multitasking, and no multitasking means more focusing on the task at hand.

Obviously having a dozen tabs open at once is sometimes useful, like when you’re doing preliminary research on something and want to skim through a pool of information, gathering data and then narrowing it down; to see if it leads to better resources; or maybe to some other topic, or software project, you didn’t know existed, to be looked into later. But for using individual webapps or looking at websites this is the ultimate distraction free browsing experience, without using minimalist browsers like suckless' surf browser. You can enjoy all the benefits of having an adblocker while surfing the bloated web with a bloated browser.

Addendum

Almost immediately after writing this I stopped using the Mangadex webapp reader and just started scraping the site with mangadex-downloader. I also ditched MComix in favour of plain MuPDF. As simple as it gets. Everything said about kiosk mode still applies.

Addendum ii

On a similar note of keeping things simple, I’m eagerly waiting to start exploring Geminispace after I clear up my to-do list a little bit.

Writing Is the Absolute Worst

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 16:32:38 +0300

In the process of writing I’m hopping from one thought to another, now this way, now that, until I have a section that can be considered as a whole in itself. Then I go back to it and look at the form of the whole section, which I didn’t intend, and it informs the next thought that starts the process all over again until I have multiple sections comprising a complete work.

When a work is complete I’m ready to throw it away. It is old and obsolete. Writing was an experience, the work that remains just a memento, and I’m not a sentimental guy. I don’t keep mementoes. Or to put it simply, the process of writing is transformative and the product of writing is, at best, merely informative.

But that can’t be. Reading the products of other people’s writing has been an incredibly transformative process in my life. Why then can’t I stand reading my own introspections put into words on paper?

All the other arts produce objects that can be considered more or less separate from their authors. Shapes and colours, the building blocks used in the other arts, are found everywhere in nature. A prose work is inherently more tied up to its author because language is exclusive to humans.

The language used in building prose is the same speech that we use in everyday life, unlike the language used in poetry, which makes poetry (atleast good poetry) more objective in some sense than prose. A prose piece stays subjective to the author by virtue of it being prose, a snapshot into her psychological makeup at the moment of writing. A poem, being constrained to a different ruleset and distinct from our usual mode of using language, becomes more objective even to the original author as time goes on.

A prose composition is meant to communicate an idea clearly to others, unlike a poem which is meant merely to delight by illusion, music and mystery. I have no audience, no listener or reader, to communicate to. Thus I have no need for the products of my own writing. I can tap into my own subjectivity and get the latest updates about how I perceive the world, delivered to me in an instant. A prose piece is post hoc, and to delight myself I can surely think of better pastimes than to scribble and soliloquy.

Nay, perhaps I feel uncomfortable reading my own prose because I’m a fledgling writer and this is all just an elaborate cope. When does prose cross the line and purple becomes poetry?

All prose is suspect.