Autonomous Bosch

I do not think I have updated this thing at all since I have begun living in New York City. Luckily it remains invisible to most I can use it for whatever.

I don't really even know what to say to make this update make sense in chronology. Since, I have had a 16mm short film play at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. As of this moment, I am working on my second film to show there: an animation.

There are a lot of things that I have done in my life that are there purely for pleasure and joy. Similarly, there's quite a lot that I've done which I am fairly proud of. It has however been a dream of mine since I was young to be a cartoonist. I am in a sort of shock right now that I can simply just do this; and that, in a way, it was profoundly easier than I thought it would have been.

Ultimately, that is what I want this to be there for. I want this to be a place for me to curate very specific things, to flesh out very particular ideas. If I am studying a model or some reference photo, I want to post it here. If I develop scans of film, I want to include them here, too.

To that end, I'm going to post the last photos that I developed; both the 35mm and 120.

Right now, I am using an Olympus OM-1 and a Pentax 6x7. I am filming all short films on a 16mm Bolex H16.

There might as well have been a perfect imprint of a young girl on the wildly unkept grassy hill overlooking the shore of this particular river, just north of her village. She had, since she was a child, escaped to this very place. Sneaking away, she would phrase it, as if she were a convict slyly eluding her captives, as something about it brought her the kind of peace that recontextualized all else.

What would throughout her day be the standard pitter-pattering of busy feet became, in hindsight, sharp stamping of hurried, uncaring feet, mechanically herded into obligation. What would otherwise be petty school-child gossiping became the most blackened, bile-filled backbiting; bird-like chittering transfigured into sharp crow cawing with an edge so fine it would pierce the ears. 

She had always been sensitive to sound for as long as she could remember, but here, a pleasant placidity was never threatened nor disfigured, even inadvertently. Field mice roamed amongst the grass free from falcons, a frog never so much as seized upon a ladybug for a morsel. Even their belly-flopping into the gentle lapping of the river itself seem refined, of sophisticated technique such that no disturbances existed; only things complimentary. 

Most curiously was the mouth of a cave which she had never ventured into, a fear she felt not at all dissimilar from that of a landscape artist afraid of applying the wrong touch of yellow ochre which, when misplaced, would sully the very face of the earth. Still, despite the feeling that it must have been her imagination, she was sure that as she gazed into its maw, it revealed to her ears the sweetest, warming hum, so feint as to be almost undetectable. She had wondered about it for years afraid that a second opinion might contaminate its deep comfort. 

After getting her fill, she returned back home. The thin wood door to her home shut with a hideous creaking as she gently put her soiled shoes to the ground. Her mother was busy, kneading bread for the evening on a wooden block, the same wooden block which she had kneaded dough out for years. The very chopping block beneath her powerful palms was disfigured, warped from years of use. Every fold was done with an experienced lifting and tucking, before violently slamming it onto the board whose uneven edges seemed to strike the counter even harder. It felt wrong to wince at dinner, but the young girl did anyway. 

Her footsteps were light ascending the stairs to her room and yet, there was a step which always sounded as though even the lightest feather were a stampeding pachyderm and it agonized her so. Finally, she thought, reaching her bed with all of its gentle comforts. Just as she went to lay about it, it produces a new, discomforting sound. She expected the soft landing commensurate with fluffy down, yet it buckled underneath her as if a pile of bricks had been dumped upon it.

Lying there, still as possible, the hands of the watch seem to eternally drag, grinding against the ground itself. She would close her eyes, attempting to will the cacophony of life into a dull, droning morass of sound through force of will alone. Yet, just as she felt the power of success, it was violated by the sound of the dinner bell.

At the table, forks and knives noisily clinked and clanged. Dinner plates were sat unevenly, striking ceramic onto the sturdy wooden table. Her mother grabbed a serrated knife and began to saw downwards into the crusty loaf of bread, sending shrapnel flying from its hardened gold and black surface. She took her time, macerating wheat beneath the teeth of the knife. Her oafish father ate with his mouth open, and every time water touched his tongue he sounded as if it were the first time his thirst had ever been quenched. Just as her mother finally sliced the bread clean, the knife struck the counter, and her father, in his refreshed bliss, struck the bottom of his glass a bit too happily onto a dinner plate, immediately shattering it.

Her mother was furious. Her father was defensive. She began to feel a knot forming in the very core of her diaphragm and its twisting would not relent. Her mother was yelling, her father was limply apologizing. She shed a tear, and another soon followed. Her parents didn’t notice any of it in their noisy furor, and she excused herself again; feeling as though she were sneaking away though her parents cared much less than captors would have.

Again, she escaped to the bank of the river, turning her eyes toward the face of the cave to invite its warm humming. It filled her, so faithfully and immediately, that she could no longer abate her own curiosity. She crept toward it, and every pace pulled from her cheeks a deeper smile as its humming grew more discernible, its warmth more radiant. At the mouth of the cave were footsteps, puzzling artifacts which would have compelled her far more were she not raptured in bliss.

Moving into the vast hole, free of any fear or pain, she felt as though she were experiencing the soul-touching elation of liturgy, bellowing from her mortal coil to the sky on a Gregorian movement to heaven itself. She knew the atrium of this cave was near, that whatever was revealing such a wondrous call was destined to be near too.

A hound was howling. Its fur, matted with mange. From its mouth, blood had been seeping, staining the blued limestone red. Its back was arched, a creature stuck in permanent recoil. The tail, curled around the body, shivering in perpetual fear. Its front, right leg had withered, held up from the earth and convulsing; it looked as if it had not touched the ground in centuries. Terror fell upon her as she again looked at its face, its mouth hanging open, its throat vibrating. She gazed upon a creature of endless wounding. 

How, she thought, her spine tightening, could a creature in so much pain make a noise so beautiful, a sound that could touch her so deeply. She seized, all except for her mind and her neck, too, as she gazed into the hound’s eyes. They were not in pain. They were the most placid thing the girl had ever laid her own eyes upon. Her terror met with confusion, and an impossible violence of resentment came before her. How could she enjoy the crying pain of another? How could the mortifying wail of another be music to her ears? 

She convinced herself that the virtuous thing to do would be to end his suffering, to strike the hound so fiercely it would never know wounding again. Yet it endured, and in its enduring she grew angrier. She would strike, and stomp, and its crying lost nothing of its enchanting resound; it never broke its placid gaze from her eyes. For all the power she placed in her blows, she heard nothing of the sound, nor of the spattering of blood against the walls of the cave.

“Horror” is a word with strong associations but has thankfully been muddied for most; more than likely the truest descriptive essence of progress you’re likely to find.  Even now, if you were to ask yourself what horror actually is, you would circle a litany of concepts. The darkened corner of a room which just feels threatening for some reason, perhaps a teenage memory of being in a graveyard one particularly blackened night. It could be some video of gore which somehow crept into your twitter feed between videos of monkeys, or it could be some conceptual knowledge which you simply cannot forget when you look at someone. 

Regardless of anything said after this point, everyone should be thankful that the horror of violence or bloodshed rarely feasibly appears amongst those concepts. While I’m not about to bemoan the lack of violence, I am absolutely about to bemoan the lack of horror. 

I read a tweet recently where the author diminished the short story form, suggesting that it was intrinsically bad. Out of curiosity, I asked if he had read any horror authors and of course he didn’t. Meanwhile, my current and likely eternally favorite author is Nathaniel Hawthorne, made most famous due to his collection of horror stories in Twice-Told Tales, elevated to infamy by Edgar Allen Poe, the pre-eminent American horror author who also wrote almost entirely in short story form (poetry counts as well). It was very coincidental, as I’ve resolved to only consume horror literary content this year. I feel that horror needs serious re-integration into wider consciousness; that there is still there there, though it is disturbingly relegated to niche avenues rather than being the genre work it once was.

A brief review of the past ten or so years reveals vanishingly little in the way of effective horror in mainstream consciousness. Hereditary was good, Robert Eggers is a reliably good director but this is a sparse handful of filmography. Even the great horror authors of yore, like Stephen King, have dissolved into mundane political squabbling, indicative of the capacity for modern literature to move out of its myopia into anything more universal than the intrinsic nature of horror to gesture at the inseparable reality of darkness from human nature. By far the most culturally successful horror genre work is more than likely the true-crime genre of online content, which bodes even more poorly.

The genre-work of horror largely exists now in niche domains like video games, metal music, and occasionally some oddity such as Chainsaw Man, a manga currently taking the otaku world by storm. For good reason as well, rarely has something so effectively humanized its characters by consistently goring them. At the expense of turning this into some screed about how things were back in the day, this all feels necessary to establish before answering why it is that horror needs re-integration.

I recently read another tweet by a friend where she suggested that she understood the allegory of zombies, but that the metaphor of the vampire made less sense to her. I viscerally felt as if the vampire made perfect sense, much more so than zombies as zombies carry with them the simplest subtext. It’s this very synaptic thought that I wish to interrogate, because the fact a metaphor feels so obvious to me is its own implication. 

Vampires have rules, interesting ones. There’s the stuff people know of vampires, that they turn into bats and don’t handle garlic or sunlight well. Then there are the rules few remember but are much more impactful: you have to let a vampire in your home. Vampirism, ultimately, requires the consent of its victim to have their home penetrated. Rationally, you just wouldn’t consent to the invasion of course, or perhaps that’s what you’d hope of yourself.

On the other hand, I would and did consent to this in a sense. While lust is often at the heart of the vampire mythos, I did not consent to the simple lust of sex; but to the conflagration a romantic heart is swept up in, such that it dispenses with all responsibility to put faith in abject darkness. I allowed myself to be subsumed by this lust, and I deserve the punishment I receive for it. 

This is the very reason that I felt that vampires made so much sense. I might as well be one now, promulgating the same antirationality that would encourage others to allow themselves to be bitten; to let go of their rational faculties and allow themselves to also be consumed by the lust for romance. I know this is monstrous and yet, I still do this whenever I find myself in front of a self-styled rationalist. My tongue turns silver, I twist others’ arms behind their backs until they submit. Even as I suffer the consequences for following my own lust, I advocate others do the same with no thought to their well being and no consideration to what psychic defenses their rational faculties might be bolstering. It is even funny to think that the very last time such a thing happened, I slept with someone. 

Put simply, I am a monster. I’m conscious of this, that there is not much distance between me and all that a vampire’s metaphor represents, and yet I still have the desire to make others a similar kind of monster as well. Horror is much more than a simple scary story, it is an avenue through which humanity makes peace with its own darkness. Just as I allowed a vampire to sink its teeth into my neck, in my very own home, others will ask of me to do the same. Does consent vanish all darkness?

One book I did not mention earlier is titled the Bonds of Love, by a feminist scholar named Jessica Benjamin. While I find the book optimistic on the whole, the thesis is that submission and domination are subdued and diffuse through-out an intimate relationship; that they are a sort of mutual recognition between two parties which need not necessarily result in abject sadism or masochism. Rather, those two extremes represent a sort of malfunctioning desire for intersubjectivity. Yet, to make this claim, it relies upon some abjectly horrific examples which would not be out of place in the most abhorrent reaches of some pornography website. Not only are the descriptive examples horrifying, but the ambient awareness of this text is also terrifying: that whatever darkness habituates itself as in my cognition and disposition might actually be desirable by another. Indeed, it’s a horrifying thought to consider that the most loving wife would not think of their husband’s ethical action, but rather laugh at his war crimes. 

Likewise, I recently read about a theory of development known as “positive disintegration”, suggested by a Polish psychologist named Kazimierz Dąbrowski. What I find fascinating about it is a similarly horrific yet radical departure from common vernacular regarding therapeutic development. The suggestion that psychological tension and anxiety are necessary for personal development, which is horrific enough, before introducing the reality of a failure state: that not everyone will make it. That some will achieve positive disintegration by overcoming overwhelming tension and anxiety, thusly dissolving into the capable person they have become, while others will relent. They might achieve some sort of individuality, but remain impressionable and lacking an autonomous personality. While extraordinarily useful, this knowledge is itself horrific. In that very darkness of the human cognition, it paranoidly breeds suspicion: have I failed disintegration? Are those I love quietly failing it?

Yet, in this a good use case for horror is illustrated, as a failure to integrate this very anxiety means that the grim reality of life remains somewhat hidden. The idea that a man is responsible for the trauma others inflicted on himself is a difficult thing to swallow, yet it is no less true. It is horrible; horrible that someone can hurt you and leave the responsibility for tending those wounds on you as well. 

I would not consider myself a morbid person despite my tastes for consumption, my tastes for creation are almost overwhelming pleasant things. I listen to death metal yet spend my time baking tarts and stippling apples in the style of German expressionists. Occasionally however, I will wonder. Last night, as an example, I had a nightmare. I didn’t know it was a nightmare while it was happening, it had the sort of formlessness most nonsensical dreams have of being just odd images until your psychology can prescribe some kind of meaning to it.

This is going to be the most self-absorbed, narcissistic entry that I’ve written here and it is necessarily so. I no longer live in my mountain home, nor my swampy state. I’m in a place where I speak a different language, where customs are so obviously alien the moment I leave my room.

The relationship that I had to my home is gone. It has now been eviscerated of any domestic quality, downgraded to the status of virtually any other house. Unremarkable, all except that I used to live there peacefully. Over the course of about forty sleepless hours, I loaded up more belongings than I realized I needed into a rented truck and drove overnight across the length of the east coast, from my cozy mountain home to a shared apartment in Jersey City. 

It’s a change so revolutionary that I struggle to fully understand it. Not that the past few days have been exactly adventurous. I took vacation time from work with the express intention of using it wisely to complete this move, most of it has been spent attempt to organize my life once again from the ground up.

Yet, when I wake up, that ground is so obviously alien. Gone is the greenhouse heat of a subtropical mountain environment, the red clay underfoot that slowly stains and usurps all that it touches. Instead, it is the dry heat of a city covered in concrete, similar to that of a radiator which one of my friends so keenly pointed out. Rather than dust which stains my soles and ankles, it is the carbon exhaust from all the automobiles driving down the road. There is no super market nearby, it is a series of bodegas which all have their own specialties I will need to become acquainted with. My old gym, a decrepit iron dungeon, is yet to be replaced though I know I must. The baseball field down the hill from my old home to be replaced with a grand facility in Lincoln Park.

I struggle to comprehend this all immediately, it’s so bewildering. I can at once understand that man was probably not meant to do this so often, in a way it feels as though I have suffered some odd kind of brain damage. I will trip up the stairs to my home and laugh, laugh while walking down streets unknown to me as if I have become deranged. Likely because I have,

What is beginning to concern me however is that I’m not entirely sure it was move here which caused this certain kind of derangement. Indeed it seems far more likely that if I am suffering from any kind of serious disrepair, it comes from the frankly hubristic idea to extend my stay at my old home, believing that I could somehow erect the life I wanted to spend with someone else, yet made newly alone. 

When I speak and interact with people up here, I get the sense that I have indeed suffered a certain kind of deterioration which I cannot really put my finger on. I can’t exactly articulate how I am different, but it is an oddly new feeling–the compulsion to articulate a specific genre of thought which ultimately never had any reason to be spoken aloud, as there was no one nearby to hear anything being said at all.

Reflecting on things, I realize that I was living a life incarcerated to some degree. It is true that the physical world was my oyster in a sense; I was free to pursue whatever projects I desired, to labor at whatever it is I desired, but only up to a point. Such a life is virtually no different from being interred at a gulag. Am I somewhat of a more accomplished baker or cook? It would be fair to say that it’s true, but will my neighbors feel my presence missed? It’s doubtful. I’m not proud to say this, but it’s that reality of a man alone and I feel some odd sense of guilt about this.

Last night, my friend and room-mate made a roasted fennel and beetroot salad with roasted salmon. It was so delicious, and I’m thankful that I’m deeply sleep indebted as it was profoundly touching. I have been responsible for the vast majority of my own meals over the past year. Had I been realized, fully conscious of mind, in total control of my faculties, I would have wept. What an unbelievable privilege after a year wholly and utterly alone just to share a laugh with someone, to look at another’s eyes and smile widely in disbelief that this is just what life is like now. I laughed in mild disbelief typing this up just now. When I think about the fact that I have in my possession a friend who do genuinely cares for my wellbeing, who I have some existing intersubjectivity with such that we are allowed to be so comfortable around one another as to share meals, it puts a lump in my throat. 

When I was six years old, I suffered a world of injury. When I tell people they don’t believe me, that in the same year I somehow managed to get six staples in my head as well as lop my bottom lip off in a car accident. None of it is too terribly obvious now, my facial hair grows slightly strange and I have a scar across my skull you have to focus intensely to feel.

The staples came from walking into a head injury really. I was on a school playground, not paying attention to where I was going. Existence in my own world was brutally concussed when some playground instrument cracked my skull open. It’s kind of horrifying to think about it in retrospect because I have no working memory of it at all. When my older brother or mother tell me about it, I kind of don’t believe it happened. At least not until I think about all the times I’ve almost walked into traffic just not paying attention.

The car accident, though completely dissimilar, feels similar still. I was just not wearing a seatbelt and my head impacted the dashboard, such that my teeth tore through my lip clean. That I do remember. Some vague sense of pain erupting in my face, bleeding and not really understanding what was going on. I remember the EMS showing up and promptly assaulting them because I saw flashing lights and thought they were going to take me to prison. That’s no place for a six year old boy!

Anyway they caught me and put stitches on my mouth. I remember also parts of the aftermath. I could never stop scratching at my mouth, picking at my stitches. I spent a lot of that year bleeding, bleeding from the head in particular.

I’ve been injured a lot since, and it feels like mostly the same stuff. I’m thankful that I’m desensitized to the sight of my own gore, it would certainly make life a lot more difficult than the calm manner I approach the sight of my own viscera. I’m even thankful that the many times I accidentally bash my head into things these days is heartily laughed off. The pain is present for sure, but it’s happened so many times now that the pain is somewhat superfluous. Just the cost of living for an inelegant person.

At the same time, I still feel an embarrassed regret; a real diffidence to engage at all when I am supposed to be elegant or refined. I told someone I wanted to see ballet and just tonight she sent me a beautiful video of a ballerina. Her body moved in a way that is completely believable and yet a world apart. It was arresting, but just as it was arresting it was also alienating to envision myself as a set of eyes in the ampitheatre, watching the individual fibers of her muscles expanding and contracting as she puts on such a stunning display. It’s almost an absurd proposition, we don’t live in the same world. 

It rained today so I did none of the mechanic work I needed to do. Instead I got started on carving a fat fox.

People want me to show my progress which is flattering I suppose. It’s motivating and such but it’s weird to know that the things that I am doing to cope with a broken heart are all things people see as interesting, thoughtful, entertaining or whatever. I am not acting thoughtfully, I am not really feeling anything at all.

When I wake up, I begin producing something, manufacturing something. There is no grand plan. I am carving an animal because I hope to send it to someone. I hope to send it to someone with a well-drafted letter, meticulously lettered, inked, and painted. I am learning all of these things, a great labor in the hopes that eventually it will be put to good use. 

I have always disliked Georgia O’Keefe so I feel like I very much deserve a comment like this. It is just unimaginable praise, I seem to be getting this a lot recently and it is kind of making me nervous. I’m using “nervous” because I am unsure exactly what it is that it makes me feel, perhaps something similar to cognitive dissonance.

I have tried being an artist, when I was a boy I really wanted nothing more than to grow up to be some prolific illustrator or an architect. I loved playing music, I loved reading and writing. I played many instruments live, piano recitals as a child and death metal shows as a teenager. I wrote for a few different publications in a professional and amateur capacity about all sorts of things, mostly music. I continued to draw and even attempted painting the longer time went on, but of course I never managed to make anything of it. Frankly I never managed to make anything of the “arts” as it were.

I had thought this because the idea I had of an artist was not at all dissimilar from what the “creative class” is now: people who are very good at monetizing their expressive means. I simply do not know how to do this, it is some understanding that I lack. Yet I am discovering the more I live on my own that artistic output is actually very much important to me, but the shape it takes is much quieter and much more interpersonal.

Of course I cannot paint and of course I cannot draw. I cannot play music that would provide the auditory backdrop for ballet dancers. The art that I am interested in is domestic, it is directly inspired by others and though its output enriches my life, they are but totems dedicated to my relationship to others, and then thusly to them. 

I read the words “high value male”, “low value male”, and of course their gender counterparts and unfortunately understood immediately what the author was intending when she (yes, she) wrote them. 

Rather than focus on her, I want to state that there is an ongoing distaste I have for the adoption of the language and rubric of economics in with the intention to make an order of something foundationally chaotic, almost expressly for the purpose of gaming it, but especially love. The sublime component of life that mankind desires is foundationally antirational and any attempt to withdraw from it some kind of observable order that proves something is folly. 

What is being revealed is not even the preference of the analyst, what is being revealed is the post hoc rationalization of the analyst here. The very idea of applying the theory of economics to interpersonal relationships is to create value in a way that successfully taxonomizes things like status, interactions, and behaviors. It is not difficult to understand how the longer these things can be modeled enough to be quantifiable, the more a very real, alive organic component is exsanguinated from the possibility of a relationship.

It is, at best, a very poor resolution method that we can use to make something that is irrational make sense to us. We want some way to reconcile a fundamentally antirational relationship with what we hope is a coherent and consistent theory of self.

I’ll reduce things a bit more: what people are attracted to in others makes zero sense. There are few things more common than people realizing this and then accepting it, that they have a type that is embarrassing or low-status and feel some sort of shame about it. When it comes to love, from the pure, initial stages of raw attraction to another human being and even into the future, where two people decide to parent a child together against the reality of entropy itself, these are deeply anti-rationalist behaviors. Reason has no purchase here.

I even find myself guilty of deferring to this philosophy when I am not aware what rationalist gears are turning in my brain. I have been talking to someone recently who I very much admire, in fact I think she is lovely. Our conversations have been sparse but warm, I find her to be very sweet and inspirational in a sense that sounds way more romantic than it actually is I feel.

What I am realizing though is that as I give in to these small fits of inspiration, I realize I am beginning to fear her, and that fear is manifesting as this same idea of being a “low value male” speaking with a “high value female.” This talk is deeply dehumanizing so I’ll state things a bit more plainly: I am an uneducated and unrefined dirt person who was literally born in a swamp. Meanwhile she is a lovely and intelligent young woman, when she spoke to me about her feelings on sculptures it left my heart racing in some way that is difficult to describe. I wish I could’ve listened to her talk to me about them for hours, I immediately wished to be with her in a museum to experience them with her. When I have an idea that she likes, it encourages me to work to complete it. I am nervous to tell her this, although I must and of course will, but I am conceiving of things as it being an interaction between a high value female and a low value male because I have an end which I need to rationalize, and that end is not saying anything at all; of fulfilling the secret psychic worry which is that of course she would say no, what reason would she have to say yes?

I believe in love as this thing which revolutionizes the human spirit. When I say this, I do not say that I believe it the same way one believes in fairies or mermaids. When I say I believe it is something which revolutionizes the human spirit, I say this because I have felt it. I have felt the moments of antirational integration where the need to understand a system completely dissipates; when it completely dissolves into mundane things like the desire to simply be seen with someone. To say that it is transformative is an understatement. The idea that there could be some strategy, some sort of game to arrive at such a blessing is a hilarious absurdity, and I say this as a very out-and-proud Machiavellian.

Before work, before gym, before today, I was very ecstatic to write something about being mindbroken by the sublime. 

Now that I am home, sweaty, slightly stinky, belabored from a long day of work, I realize that this is a task better left to tomorrow.

There were some nice things about today, and I think I’d rather just communicate them here. Two longtime friends had some late Christmas gifts arrive, one in the form of a Victorinox deboning knife which I will use tomorrow to excise the bone from a whole pork shoulder. I want to try some recipes that I think would be lovely for a picnic, and though pork confit pirozhiki sounds complicated, it’s actually a perfect vehicle for leftover pork confit which, from a whole shoulder, will last for almost a week. 

Another dear friend, someone more influential to me than perhaps she knows, sent me an adorable letter. Of all the letters I’ve received, hers had something of a unique signature that is difficult to disclose. If character was a perfume, it would have been drenched with it. Our enduring friendship has always pleased me and it’s because of things like this.

Tomorrow I will of course spend more time learning to code, but I also intend on reaching out to a friend to talk about Catholocism and Protestantism. It might sound a bit odd, but I’m always overly-conscious about private correspondence with women in relationships so I hope I don’t come off as anything other than interested purely in the discourse on the subject at hand with a friend.

I also want to make a galette de rois, some bastard offspring of a butter-crust pastry and a cake. Traditionally it’s supposed to be filled with a pastry cream, but I much prefer the idea of filling it with something else. I’ve thought raspberries or blueberries would be nice, blueberries especially as I enjoy the blue and red stains they produce on a crust.

Had an excruciatingly horrible day that is a case study in how things can compound. A torturous day at work that continued to spiral deeper and deeper into a grinding, mindless cavalcade of meaningless exchanges, hard not to focus on how awful 2021 really was for me. I am the most heartbroken I have ever been in my life and I am struggling day by day to pick things back up and move forward. Even though I worked as hard as I possibly could to improve the material conditions and labor for a future I believed in, none of it worked out.

Not only did none of it work out, in the wake of that catastrophe, things just got worse. I put things I cared about on hold, put making the job change on hold because there were more pressing emergencies. In making my life much more lean, what I accomplished was habituating myself in a sort of squalor where margins are so thin that growth feels impossible because there isn’t anything to invest.

It culminated when I saw a tweet from someone I quite like, saying that men do not have their heart broken. I remember being so furious that I came close to responding to her, and just as I went to spew pain-invoked ‘righteousness’ I glimpsed a what felt like a very dire reality. She is saying something to this effect because she is also a heartbroken creature. I have no issue with her, I don’t even know her well enough to issue her any sort of poor charity. The reality of things is that I am in pain and she is in pain. What I came close to doing was allowing myself to writhe so violently that I would claim collateral, which I simply do not want. 

I am working on it. Progress is of course slow going at first and it might be slow going for quite some time. I have a lot of work to do to make up for a risk that simply did not pay off, and though it feels like the world is bleak and my broken heart is manifesting some ugliness or bitterness, I feel as though I truly do lose everything if I allow this to continue; if I do not become aware that I am behaving the way I am behaving not because I find it good or virtuous or necessary, but because moments of thoughtless being act as some salve to distance me from the reality of the apocalypse that I simply must survive through. 

Life feels awful. I tried my best and it wasn’t good enough. It is easy to spend an afternoon feeling what is less of my heart sink further and further into despair, but I can’t give up and I cannot allow myself to be distracted. Indeed I need to become better at letting myself be less distracted. I need to work harder and I need to become better. I need to resolve this hurt longing that seeks to overpower me from reaching for any control I might have over my future because it is simply a poisonous illusion.

I experienced the first snow storm of my entire life. When I woke up this morning, everything outside had been covered in inches of snow. It’s marvelous to behold.

The unfortunate part of it is that my power had been knocked out. The home that I rent regularly goes without power with the slightest rain, but the energy company I have to use sent out mass communications today saying not to expect power for quite some time.

It got down to thirty degrees in my home. You don’t really respect it until you get there, but I appreciate now that I know firsthand there is a coldness that can become so oppressive that it’s difficult to move or think.

It also makes me appreciate how simple quirks can become important preparedness. My experience cooking over campfires kept me well fed, likewise my obsession with blankets enabled me to hibernate through the worst of things.

I’ve been getting in the habit of writing all my prayers down recently and it serves as a meditation on prayer itself. I should say that I don’t pray with any sort of irony, I am a Christian and I believe I am of course praying to God. I also find it a very helpful way to work on hands like gothic textura quadrata and beneventan minuscule, so I’ve been writing in those.

I’ve long suspected that prayers contain within them an artistry, the only poems that I have ever been genuinely moved by are the ghastly utterances of old men praying, perhaps my first exposure to the isolated platonic ideal of male “sensitivity,” whatever that means. The tender sincerity that they display when observing and focusing on a single subject stand amongst the most beautiful things that I have ever heard.

The beauty is a function of the meditation itself, something I’ve been reflecting on. Prayer has a methodology, at least the Christian prayer. There are many delineations of Christianity as everyone knows: orthodox, catholic, protestant, even more delineations amongst the latter. As an example, Presbyterians believe in predestination, something with a significant impact on the conceptualizing of free will under Christian doctrine. I bring this up to discuss prayer.

I never pray for specific outcomes. I do not pray to be made rich, I do not pray to make people love me. When I am praying, I am asking for things to aid and assist me. Courage, discipline, wisdom, deficiencies that I observe in my character or circumstance. Yet, in order to ask for such things I have to identify a lack of them at all. 

Because of this, prayer takes on a quality of divination. It allows me to place myself at a specific distance away from reality in a cognitive sense, where I am better able to consider the circumstance divorced from everything but my spirit (whatever that means). This quality of being able to project yourself some space away from catastrophe or strife or struggle proves to be a near-meditative state of being where a very intense private honesty is not only encouraged, but incentivized.

Though I think the most endearing component of writing prayers down as opposed to voicing them out loud is that they are no longer disposable things. A prayer voiced is tossed into the wind like scores of words said with no purpose, nor meaning, nor intent. They lose definition the way all memories lose definition against the grinding onslaught of time and new information. When they are written down, returning to a crystalized instance of the past in complete detail provides a chronology of the dialect, and in it, the miracles of a prayer answered are made more glorious as their form is given a more complete depth.

Recently I have poured a lot of money and elbow grease into getting my truck back on the road. I dislike being sedentary, I dislike having the world outside closed off from my interaction. Not only did I put in the work and the investment I have also prayed. Not just that I would have the wisdom to approach these problems efficiently as well as the strength to handle it ostensibly on my own, but that the Lord would consider my fortune and extend to me some form of grace that perhaps I could not know the shape of before I had seen it. 

The Lord’s response was a phone-call from my older brother, asking me if I would like to buy a motorcycle from him. In that moment, the Lord supplied a vision of the future moving forward that was so elegant as to not just withdraw from me a sigh of relief but one of deep inspiration for the future. I called out to Him and His answer was of such a unique fit to not only my needs but my unknown desires that it leaves me wanting to laugh and laugh and laugh.

Here and there I find myself enchanted with someone and I find it unbearably vulnerable to tell them this, though I feel that I should. Maybe I will in some time but that’s neither here nor there.

There are few things that I find inspirational quite like people. Art is lovely, but nothing takes me over with antirational joy quite like the contours of another person’s heart or character being revealed to me. It makes me want to become closer in a way that feels disgusting in some way I cannot really put into words.