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Memores acti prudentes futuri


You're unsure if I am a loose end or a strand
that waits for you to mend or understand
A few words
"When we describe the Moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness."
~ D.H. Lawrence

"Is the meaning of life defined by its duration? Or does life have a purpose so large that it doesn't have to be prolonged at any cost to preserve its meaning?"

"Living is not good, but living well. The wise man, therefore, lives as well as he should, not as long as he can... He will always think of life in terms of quality not quantity... Dying early or late is of no relevance, dying well or ill is... even if it is true that while there is life there is hope, life is not to be bought at any cost."
~ Seneca

"People will tell you nothing matters, the whole world's about to end soon anyway. Those people are looking at life the wrong way. I mean, things don't need to last forever to be perfect."
~ Daydream Nation

"All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories-- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death."
~ The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes

"The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to me - not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience - that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong site of the road."
~ Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

"It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend."
~ William Blake
TICoSME
Musicalities!
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Naming
Friday, March 8, 2024
I'm searching for a name for something that might be nameless, in the hopes that if a name exists, it will mean some sort of clarity, commonality, control.

If a name exists, it means that someone has marked this path, that this territory is, at least to some degree, mapped out.

But if it's nameless, then it falls to the person who names it to figure out the pattern and give it definition. To write the story that others may follow. It might be valuable work, but it's solitary, and it's of more benefit for those who come after.

I'm not sure I want to keep being the one who names things.

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Time didn't matter a lifetime ago
Friday, March 1, 2024
"The Balance" by Steady Holiday.


I’m not waiting on a miracle to come
Would you follow me into the unknown?
Either way, it’s gonna change
It comes out in the wash now


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Reflections on hospice
Sunday, February 18, 2024
Nursing homes are a waiting room for death. I learned this during hospice volunteering. The people relegated to those places are living in a stale, empty present with no future on the horizon. Some of them sleep all day, waking occasionally only for meals, as if they are practicing for the inevitable.

The director of volunteering told us at orientation that meals are the only thing some of the hospice patients have to look forward to in the day, and thus the only reason they wake up.

When you have nothing to look forward to, what is there to do but wait for death? We have a virtually infinite supply of entertainment these days, but even so, that might occupy some time, but it's nothing to wake up for.

I volunteered for hospice for less than a year, but I think about it often.

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Last post of 2023
Sunday, December 31, 2023
I spent last night being entirely unproductive and compulsively playing Shark Game until past 1am, so I felt like today needed to be a No Gaming day. Whenever I feel like something has gotten too much of a hold on me, I take a break from it.

In the gap left, I ended up doing a fair amount of reading and watching video essays instead. Still somewhat passive activities, but I certainly feel better on the other side than I did about the game. I ended up reading a bunch of articles by Paul Graham, including one about names. There was a section of it that stood out to me:

"There's nothing intrinsically great about your current name. Nearly all your attachment to it comes from it being attached to you."

Although he's talking about company names, not individual persons' names, this part still stood out to me. I have, so far as I can tell, somewhat uncommon feelings about names, and have for at least half of my life. I don't see any particular name as my "true" or "real" name compared to others. I have, as everyone else does, a given name, which I use for convenience, but it doesn't feel like that name is more important than being called RJ or Randy here. It sort of just floats around with the others.

In general, I'm unsure how attached I am to things for the reason that they are attached to me. Maybe it has to do with my brain seeming to be broken in the department that generates familiar feelings. I'm always a blink away from feeling like I don't quite know someone or something that I know I've seen many times before. This has, in effect, forced me into a sort of non-attachment to many things, which I suppose is why I'm so often mistaken for a Buddhist. Even as I write this, using "I" feels very odd, but there's no other way to write, is there? I can't write from the perspective of a non-entity. There has to be a subject to have a perspective to write from, at least in the languages I have any comprehension of.

So. The self is an illusion, as they say. That has at times been my phenomenological reality. Yes, there is a solidity to this physical form I experience the world through, and yes, I have no ability to move beyond this form, and yet, there is no true "I", no single name that intrinsically belongs to this perspective. Any of the many names I have used over my life can serve the purpose of giving others a way to refer to me.

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Etymology and remedy
Thursday, November 16, 2023
"Huggin & Kissin (Acoustic)" by Big Black Delta.

It's strange to hear this stripped down acoustic version of one of my favorite songs. Jonathan Bates looks like he's aged so much. The lyrics to this also sound slightly different than the original studio version. It sounds solemn and worn, an understanding hand on your back as you come to accept the reality that some pains don't end and must be lived with instead. Equal parts comfort and sorrow.

---

I have not been trying to meditate recently, but I have been thinking about the word meditate. I looked up the etymology to try to understand it better.

From Wikipedia:
From Latin meditatus, past participle of meditārī (“to think or reflect upon, consider, design, purpose, intend”), in form as if frequentative of medērī (“to heal, to cure, to remedy”); in sense and in form near to Greek μελετῶ (meletô, “to care for, attend to, study, practise, etc.”).

I had no idea what a frequentative was and had to look that up, but it's basically the form of a word that indicates repetitive action and has to do with not being able to quantify something, e.g. walking is an undefined number of steps, but it's the continuous action noun form of walk. I'm not a linguist, so if my descriptions are not the best, that's why haha.

Anyway, I have been thinking about "meditate" in the sense of "meditating on an idea" and now as contemplation as a repetitive and unquantifiable act of healing. It's no one thought that composes the remedy, but the process and the flow of it all. Circling back to ideas, expanding upon them, and turning them around to see them in different lights builds bridges in the mind, and all these bridges together become structure, scaffolding in a universe of formless chaos. And peace is... sense in the midst of the roaring void.

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Jumped the gun [DP]
Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

If you know it, enter it; or, ask me for it.

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To demand
Sunday, September 17, 2023
From The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma by Annie G. Rogers:
At first words are babbling streams of sound. And though very young children play with words and sounds in turn-taking rhythms with others, they don't use language with the purpose of communicating. But as a child begins to see that words can make things happen, can call forth specific responses from others, she is able to make what Lacan calls "a demand." This is a request for recognition of what she means and for a response that affirms she is loved. Lacan distinguishes between the physiological needs of our earliest infancy, which of course, must be met for the child to survive, and the ideas of a demand. Provided with food and warmth, yet without recognition or any evidence of love, a child with become lethargic, stop growing, and even die. The capacity to make a demand for something, and make herself understood, is crucial to a child's sense of being loved. But making a demand requires a risk; the other person may not understand, or may understand and say no.

The last line is the crucial one here, I think, although the author doesn't expand on it.

The risk of making a demand that is not met can be terrifying, devastating. For a demand to be repeatedly unmet is annihilating. I am talking about demands as defined in the quote, not a demand like "I demand to speak to your manager," of course.

What does it do to one's sense of self to never have one's meaning recognized? Even the most philosophically-averse people are dependent on meaning. We understand ourselves only through the initial recognition of others that provides an organizational framework for the sensory stimuli we intake. People in psychosis who live in a subjectivity so divorced from that of others that they cannot be understood are trapped in isolation. They suffer tremendously.

To be understood and rejected is similarly painful. As children we need to be told no sometimes, to learn boundaries and how to live harmoniously with others. An unreasonable request that is denied is something one can recover from. There are some things we must accept in life, and acceptance really is the only answer. As an adult, things become more uncertain at times. A demand in one interaction that is denied might not be in another. So how do you determine when to let go and accept that you will not get what you asked for?

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Promises and punishment
Friday, September 8, 2023
"I Lied ft. Allison Ponthier" by Lord Huron.

I bore a flame that burned a thousand suns for you but it died
Told you I could never love somebody else but I lied


---

I wonder what the value of a promise is. I get the impression that it used to mean more than it does now, but has been watered down by overuse in common language. Giving your word to someone seems closely tied to honor, but that concept too feels almost obsolete and absurd in the modern world. "Honor" in this context is good reputation, but reputations don't seem enduring when the flow of people is endless and communities don't stay static.

In this neoliberal world we live in, there are few types of official punishment, and most revolve around money. The bulk of punishments I can think of are fines, though there is jail time (and then prison, or even execution) for more serious crimes. I guess community service is also occasionally included. All else may fall under the umbrella of "cruel and/or unusual". I think some level of cruelty is inherent to punishment, though. After all, it is meant as a deterrent. It doesn't make sense to punish someone for something they couldn't really avoid, so I understand not wanting to inflict undue cruelty on a person in such a position. For situations outside of that though... I'm unsure. I don't mean to suggest I support cruel physical punishments like cutting off hands for thieving (although it is interesting to speculate about what effect that would have if it extended to embezzlement by, say, Wall Street bankers). I do wonder why public shaming isn't state-sanctioned though. Maybe because shaming will happen anyway, so there's no motivation to make it official? Or is it because it's considered barbaric? Or ineffective? I'm inclined to think that it would be less effective in a world of decreasing communal ties, but community erosion is a relatively recent phenomenon compared to whenever public shaming went out of vogue.

---

Was feeling pretty crappy earlier, but I got a workout in and that helped a lot. Funny how much that seems to fix my brain up. It doesn't make it 100% better, but the difference is still significant. Maybe I just have to work out every day for the rest of my life.

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