One day, a couple of years ago, I was high on an edible and reading posts on this website. I was looking at the posts of our dearly departed pjackk, specifically, back when he was still here, and (being high as shit) I started thinking too much and too deeply about them.
A lot of those posts resembled the kind of thing I post on this blog. I remember thinking to myself, sometimes pjackk posted as if Harry du Bois had a blog - there was a surface level irony to it, a kind of slapstick schadenfreude in the suffering of a shitty and pathetic fool, but recurring themes of alcohol, confusion, grief, bodily deterioration, failure, loss of agency, the immanence of the lost future within the decrepit trace of the past, and beneath it all, an unmistakable animal drive towards continuance and desire in spite of immeasurable suffering...
And I thought to myself, if Harry du Bois had a blog, what else would he post? What would he reblog? If he were on this site, what would his online presence look like?
And so I made a blog called "Shit HDB would say" and queued up some posts, including more than a few of pjackk's.
Being unemployed at the time, I dedicated myself to this endeavor. I was less concerned with accuracy than with high-volume approximation, using regression towards the mean to paint in the details. It's okay if he wouldn't always say everything I say, as long as he would unmistakably say a lot of it. It was the spirit I was interested in, not the word - an organism and not an organ.
Over time it grew on me like a fungus. I spent long periods searching for appropriate materials with which to sketch out my vision, reading every new post I saw through a lens of, "Would he say this?" until it became an automatism.
Ceaselessly, I asked, without realizing I was asking: Is this him? No, is *this* him? Is this one him? What about this one? What do you see in the inkblots of unemployed shitposters? Do you see him? How about now, do you see him? Is he there? Is he there in this post about accidentally pissing and shitting yourself to death? What about this one about homoerotic shame? Do you see him yet? Where is he? Which posts trace his outlines? Can you find him? The irony of the obsession, of course, was not lost on me.
And, of course, I leaned into the persona "as a bit," because you should always keep doing the bit, otherwise it's not a very good bit at all. The most scathing rejection is that of the author, so I spared myself any form of disavowal. I didn't need anyone's approval, not even mine. I wasn't interested in perfection, I was interested in the truth - in the broadest shape of a thing - as it lies in the punchline of a good joke.
Over time it snuck into the way I viewed the world. Snuck into the way I viewed mysel(f/ves). Couldn't turn it off. I looked in the mirror and I found myself wondering, do I see him here? Would he do this? Would he become himself through an obsessive quest of self-emulation? What kind of specimen would intentionally grow a psychological tumor such as this on their own mind? Would he do that? As a perverse form of self-harm? As a bizarre expression of self-desire? And, if he paid a lot of attention, wouldn't he notice he was doing it to himself, too? Wouldn't he catch himself in his own snare and tighten the knot until it was a searing point of unbearable self-awareness? Wouldn't he pry his own skull open like a tin can just to look for himself, inside himself? Wouldn't he do it publicly, as some kind of performance, for attention and praise, or notoriety, or love? Wouldn't he feel a complex mix of shame and pride and irony and inevitability about it all? Wouldn't he subject it to endless internal analysis just to make himself feel smart or validated?
It was kind of poetic. Beautiful and sad. And darkly funny, of course. Skating across the noosphere on a self-deprecating joke about having sublimely fucked and pathetic vibes and occasionally wanting to shoot myself in the mouth, but in the same passages, finding a recognizable outlet for unspoken things I had seldom even acknowledged. I had made an accidental crossing at the intersection of kayfabe and brutal honesty. Every thought, no matter how sacred or profane, became colored by it - the past, the present, the never-was, the always-will-be. It started as a bit. It is not a bit anymore. It was never a bit. It will always be a bit, and always has been.
The world started to change shape around me - for me, intimately, unspeakably. Its edges pressed against mine, gripped me gently even though the touch was painful.
My body became a new glove, ill-fitting but mostly in good condition, a new interface for something very old. Instead of wondering at being a puddle serendipitously sitting in a pothole shaped just for me, I became a pothole coincidentally measured by the volume of rainwater that fills it.
The thoughts of others became a landscape I had to inhabit in order to live. The thoughts of others had always been a landscape I needed to inhabit, but it was never actually a thing I needed at all. The world-as-it-is sits wrapped in words I learned elsewhere. "I" is a word I didn't coin. But someone did - and here "I" am, named by it. It was never about approval - only about naming. Regard. Detection.
But the words for myself were wrong. The words that most felt like me - like the word "me" does - didn't describe the person they should have - weren't localized to something I had ownership or complete control over. The problem was in the words, the borderline, not in myself or in the world. The world loves me, regards me, detects me, and I the world. There is no borderline at the juncture there.
A cut defines a border. The cut was not in me, was never in me, nor between me and the world - but "I" am the cut, "the bit" is the cut.
Does that make sense? Do you get it now? You can't stop doing the fucking bit.
