The Universe Is Like An Algorithm

The universe is like an algorithm. However, this idea anthropomorphizes the universe because it suggests that the entity, which we consider to be all-encompassing and cosmic, actively perceives each and every one of us.

The universe being “like an algorithm” merely compares itself, in simile form, to a form of data collection which studies inputs and outputs to discover processes. To be clear: the universe is not an algorithm; it is like one. We can observe that our routines create patterns around us, and those patterns almost temporarily blind us from seeing alternative outcomes or realities, other than the ones we want. Fairy tales have taught us that seeing is not believing, and if we will it, we can have it. But, alas, first came Buddha who said, “Desire is the root for all suffering.” What was being referenced was immortality, pleasure, and material goods. We also have Taoist teachings about acceptance–and how we should be more like nature, accept our fates and our lives, to not aspire to aspire, and simply wait for aspiration to reach you. Then your spirit will live eternally. My tone might sound nefarious or judgmental; however, I intend only to be extreme.

I often wonder about what it means to be present. I question how much time must be spent in the present to be at peace. The stories we tell are part of the past. Even as we create stories, they become memories. Therefore, the more effort we put into remaining planted to the Earth, having wanderless thoughts, in control, there are no more sounds left to sing. Inspiration and complacency, or rather, acceptance, somehow live within the same idea. The algorithm which we call a routine becomes first nature where two things occur: panic or indifference. There is a possible third outcome, but it is much more complex in that it requires the individual to actively pursue a life that attempts to achieve enlightenment. The more we wait for the aspiration and inspiration and peace to reach us, the more we are distracted by the novelty in which we live: reality. We have nowhere else to turn but to the signs and symbols we rely on and “receive” from the universe. Unique to us. It sounds so bleak when considering how hopeless we can be, so we search for a reason behind what matters to us so as to avoid suffering.

For example, one day, a newly discovered song might make its way into our library and thus suddenly play everywhere henceforth. At the grocery store, in cafes, at the bank, the clubs and bars, at the truck stop, and on aisle 7 of the craft store. What came first? Our awareness of the song, or the song's existence before it came into our perspective? Had the song been playing all along and we had just never noticed it? Like an algorithm, the universe reads the personal data that we put into it, which later becomes the words we speak and manifest. We are fed ads and signals from the universe that serve as our definitive responses to the spirit of the Earth.

But the signs are always there; we just do not have the capacity to see them because we do not need them yet. Did our awareness precede the song's existence, or did the song persist, a hidden melody until unveiled by our perception?Sometimes the things we need most are there all along, but because we are looking in the wrong direction, we are blind to an alternate reality that might suit us. Sometimes we do pick up the signs but do not understand the words… yet.

If rest is what you need, what you desire most, and for the first time in your years of existing, you find a deck of affirmation cards that emphasize how to live an anti-capitalist lifestyle, what would you do? This deck of cards reminds the reader that they have the right to rest and feel unabashed by doing so. We assign meaning to whatever it is that we find most convenient. Flip the script any which way, and we can locate the precise moment in time something was “meant” for us. But can we really? A cigar is sometimes just a cigar, and that is what we gather from it. Maybe that is the lesson. On this rock which feels so vast and unafraid to be, to die, to exist. A tree does not look at its neighbor to ask them, “Why are we here?” “Why, brother, do our roots twist together to support each other. Is that love brother?” Life is nothing but the intangible becoming tangible, being made handleable. But everything dissipates, fades, dies, becomes dark matter within the chasm of the galaxy. So why then do we know so much? How can we be so sure? So right. We mistake how much we feel for what it is that is truth and fact. We are not our thoughts or feelings. We control them, even the ones that are uncomfortable. We are not our bodies.

We are not our soul but a soul existing within, existing within, existing within our minds within our bodies, within our thoughts, feelings, words, names, clothes, houses, world, city, culture, solar system, galaxy, universe, all folding in on each other like a house of cards, and we are… What are we left with when nothing is left? When everything goes back to the way it once was–nothing. Star dust? A single-celled organism floating in space until we start again.

And what it was is what continues to be: life and death over and over again. Until we use up all of the sun's energy, in epochs, eons, we humans might not even see it occur. And what then? What next?

Newsletter: Give A Fucks

I often struggle with remembering to breathe, a fundamental aspect of our existence. A prick behind my eyes signals impending tears; my throat tightens, and my nose stings. I'm moved by things in ways I can't fully comprehend—both good and bad.

Occasionally, laughter triggers tears, a momentary relief in feeling accepted. Yet, deep down, I care more than I admit; my emotions, like a wooden nose, have grown miles ahead, with a tree house built on its bridge by neighborhood children.

My internal dialogues resemble a toddler navigating truth-telling with a parent. Fear of ridicule or the need to apologize for feeling hinders my honesty. Why do emotions exist? I don't summon them willingly, and they often overstay their welcome, lingering like bad breath or a socially awkward friend. Ideally, I'd swiftly usher negative feelings out of my life, akin to expelling an intruder.

Feelings, at times, feel useless, unsolicited, self-created nightmares. A dream of a box, conjured by my mind, startles me upon opening, even though I'm the architect of the scene. Emotions surprise us, revealing different versions of ourselves like changing outfits. Choosing the right emotional "attire" for any occasion, akin to donning a metaphorical scarf and calling it happiness, becomes a skill not taught in school. Emotional regulation remains a taboo, a conversation reserved for private moments, resembling the discreet handling of personal matters in the bathroom.

Let's be brutally honest about our head standing tendencies. Ever get the urge to pull a ridiculous move mid-conversation or fabricate an elaborate tale about the secrets stashed in your drawers? Not the scandalous kind—more like the space where forgotten dreams mingle with rogue pens and half-baked project post-its. My junk drawer, a metaphor for dreams deferred, echoes the struggle between desires and the relentless call of financial, administrative, and capitalistic chores. If we laid bare the buried parts of ourselves, we'd realize our suffering isn't a solo act; it's a collective symphony.

Shifting perspective is key. Those abandoned dreams? Consider them archives of ideas that met their natural end and transformed. The uncompleted novel? It's not defeat; it's your evolving taste outgrowing past concepts. Art, like us, evolves, and some ideas need time to mature. Don't beat yourself up if that novel is still halfway done three years later; it just means your taste has refined.

Now, this perspective doesn't excuse slacking off. Artists navigate phases—inspiration, work, a block, and sometimes, contemplating quitting. Van Neistat's 'Artist Resentment and Gratitude Diagram' in "Why Veteran Artists Don't Quit" brilliantly captures this rollercoaster of emotions most artists ride while creating.

Commencing with the grand ambition of birthing "the thing," the artist vows to triumph over any hurdles. Next in line, meticulous preparation ensures no interruption due to lackadaisical material gathering – because no masterpiece was ever made with a shortage of glitter glue, right? Then, as the artist delves into the nitty-gritty work, resentment kicks in; the frustration of juggling success-related chaos (shows, press, interviews, networking, and the necessary evils of small talk). Cue the wall – that inevitable obstacle every artist encounters. While rookies might hit it and slump, seasoned artists scale it, chiseling through distractions to unearth inspiration on the other side. This brings us to the grand finale: completing "the thing." The last act? Appreciation, not just for the art but for the entire tumultuous journey – the testament to an artist's resilience and strength. For a raw and inspirational dose, check out the video here. It's a rollercoaster, but hey, what masterpiece wasn't?

A Stoned Throw Away

I took the longest drive after rehearsals…ok maybe not the longest drive, but I did take a couple wrong turns on purpose so I could drive longer.

I think I understand what Slightly Stoopid was referring to. High drives are my favorite (don’t harsh my mellow). The newly renovated house on the corner reminded me of the tooth paste bottle caps from that Willy Wonka movie, where eventually a house was built from them. The dad I think built some sort of sculpture, a replica of their house I think. The model was made from those same defective toothpaste caps, the awful the no good the unwanted discarded.

…

I love catching moments of myself doing things I’ve done a million times. Remembering how awkward and different pushing a door open with my hip felt at first, and admiring the fluidity of the current moment. The “Inter-connectedness” of things and how knowledge carry’s is fascinating. I remember winnowing seeds for the first time and recognizing how similar it was to hand grinding weed. We hold the same postures completing tasks completely unrelated but physically similar in some way. No one taught us what would feel most natural to us—life experiences and instinct differ from individual to individual. 

The transference of physiological movement knowledge becomes unconscious at a certain point. I pick up a quarter differently than the next person. We know how to shift our weight and dexterity based upon the texture of a surface. It’s almost like having a fingerprint, or a type of walk, each of these things share their unique qualities that will never change and that are distinct to us.

The weight and active states of our bodies do also play an important role when regarding posture or weight bearing, or hunching. We become aware of the pure mass of things. After interacting with an object long enough we gather sufficient data which we store and remember. Those data tell us just how hard to kick open a cabinet, or a door, or the perfect angle to throw a bucket so that its contents spill out and propel the receptacle away. We just get used to things. This idea can be boiled down to muscle memory. We do a lot of things without thinking, and without telling ourselves to, but it’s because we are constantly just reacting, or adapting to our environments. When we become conscious of the way we behave we gain better control over ourselves and our surroundings.

…

Connect on a human to human level—eco fascism is bad, do not simply shrug yourself into inaction.

…

Things to remember to always have and keep: 

Love

Joy

Drugs 

And sex

…

We fill the voids of silence with sounds that can be called words, called conversation. If the tail end of my last sentence falls with the intonation of gentility and quiet, I expect to receive just that. Introspection is peaceful, and often my mind can get clouded as I begin a silent meditation and it is interrupted with more speech. There is a version of me which exists only within my head and it’s calm there, the peaceful place of my own body: a temple. This mind palace has halls and corridors which I explore with a trailing hand, grazing the walls with my curiosity, peaking around each corner with anticipation. Something stops me from opening the next door…

“And where did you grow up?” 

I pull the answer from a different part of my brain. Respond. Talking again, having a conversation and I find my face forming a smile, my hands moving enthusiastically, my chest breathing out what sounds like a laugh. I finally catch up to my body and fill in the gaps. Instead of seeing myself from an internal perspective…the inside looking out, I take up the space where the external version of me exists. Here i begin see through my eyes and not from the side stage of my peripherals. It’s like I’m split into two: the intangible and the visceral. Within is where I find comfort yet simultaneously, I need to lose myself.

The Year 2020

We stood front to back watching the fireworks shoot off into the sky behind the bay bridge. 

Five. Four. Three. Two. One! 

Happy New Year!!!!! We exchanged a kiss and entered the year 2020 without any fuckin expectations of what would occur. We danced all night, we spent our first night in my first apartment in SF. Life seemed easy, real. I waited, with youthful spirit, the obstacles I’d soon come to face. SF was unreal, it was a lonely place in the beginning. 

“Acid for the Children” became my best friend. I explored coffee shops, and kava bars, I walked to school everyday and worked mornings. Then tame impala happened: I discovered the night life in SF—I was finally 21 but that day I found my independence. The listening show was, what I consider, to be MY first night in SF.

Tamia became a single unit. We walked down mission, my feet killing me, three new strangers who I have now become good friends with somehow. The make out room, how I miss it so, how I danced and kissed and drank so many nights away there. 

I met Xxx months ago, where he lied about his daughter being his sister. The night of our meeting became a night of ER freak accidents and first dates, I can easily say that was one of the poorer decisions this year. Then came (xxx) and the romantic escapades, the drunken nights and infatuation was unlike any other. Firsts, they are harder than seconds and thirds because you are forced to feel every bittersweet emotion that follows the end of that first experience. 

The listening show taught me about drinking. I had done the dance with alcohol before, we were good friends, had a relationship, but, we created a marriage —once the pandemic happened. 

Life was unreal, it was perfect, it was new fresh, fun, exciting, it was all I could imagine life to be, and then it became not. It changed. Xxx came back into my life, hard. I created a new friendship with him, he became a sibling, a confidant, a partner in crime, Xxx and Ooo, the three muskateers. 

I married alcohol, but it was an abusive relationship. It would try to talk to me, gave me warnings within that I knew I should have heeded. I ignored them. They became more prevalent, my mind began to wither, my heart began to rot, my liver began to give out, my body was exhausted. This poor tired vessel was treated like a sewer. 

I met “the musicians”. Life changed again, I found a beautiful group of souls that have painted colorful pictures of imagination and creation. Minds that have gardens of colorful tulips blossoming from their ears. Faeries and Gypsies, hitchhikers and activists, lawyers and high priestesses, tax men and pianists. All of the traveling I’ve done throughout my lifetime can be completely disregarded when compared to the journey I’ve embarked upon after meeting these people. 

George Floyd, Breona Taylor, I heard your names in my sleep, not dreams or night terrors, I do not wish credit where credit does not deserve to be. Because someone’s death should not be a dream, it should haunt us, their names are remembered.

The virus took over like a deadly disease, because that’s what it was. The elections happened and it was like the whole world heaved one big sigh. Whether of relief or preparation of the years to follow, but the four year era is over for Trump. The asshole. 

No amount of convincing could have prepared me for the year 2020. A failed relationship later, a new one ensuing, a whole life ahead full of promise and uncertainty. Still I’m skeptical when I wake up every morning, as if this motivation will leave me, as though there will be some catch, as if my feet will slowly descend upon the cold floor for the first time in a year—but I am resilient. Old habits die hard, we’ve spent more of our years entwined within the hustle and bustle of life that it will be easy for most of the population to forget what this pace of living feels like. Never forget. 

Highlights

One of the coolest nights of my life nights to document: a two joint rotation with Xxx and Ooo, sitting cross legged in a triangle atop my bed...speaking minimally, smoking maximally, listening to good music and riding the invisible wave”

Sitting under the full moon with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the city scape, sitting near the shore on a drift log singing along to redbone in the dark, looking over at xxx “peanut butter chocolate cake with koolaid” grin on our faces and good feelings 

The night I was leaving xxx’s house, only slightly intoxicated, in love with the solitude of the night. The quiet, empty streets, feeling the feeling of appreciation for life. 

Paying Off These Parking Tickets

As I lurched into my car this morning I saw an envelope on the floor of the driver's side. Within it lay a blue and white parking ticket folded up neatly, slightly water damaged from the beach mist. A rush of several thoughts came to mind, but with a sigh I finally said aloud: “FFFFFFFuuck”.

I began to think about the thousands of dollars I owed this city. Debts. The bleak idea of paying off my parking tickets was far easier to bear than the true act of doing so. In a few months, when the bills have stacked, or perhaps when I wake up to a boot on my car and then soon find myself looking up at the sky with anguish, because that was the last possible thing I could've handle that day, I might just begin to shovel out my money. Author, Mark Manson, wrote about the nihilist perspective. He described it as us finding comfort within our individualistic definition of life's insignificance and how on the contrary, it is exceptionally important to keep hope. In Manson's book, Everything is Fucked, he discusses hope and the ways we place value within something, whether it be ethically or emotionally, and how essentially, 'hope' is our own choice. In other words, we are unique in our ability to deem something more, or less, important than our peers, like our personal goals, which give us hope of a before and after story. We are able to see, by the results of our product, how successful we have been, and this success is personal, no one can decide when a work has fulfilled its duty, whether that duty was to help the world, or just help us.

In finding a "purpose", or rather, something we'd like to achieve, life begins to have a meaning, because we have something to work towards. These personal goals are ever changing, we must be mindful of this fact because the ability to change our minds does not equate to failure, or indecisiveness, despite us interpreting it that way, but do not fear. When we commence a project we are met with obstacles, sometimes that obstacle can be ourselves, when we do what feels good rather than what we should do (remember, what we decide is important is solely up to us...we don't have to do anything), and other times the obstacles are out of our control. We may run into health risks that tell us we can no longer work towards being the athlete we always wanted to be. We may live in a city that gets wiped out and flooded by an unprecedented veering river, forced to rebuild from scratch, putting present plans at a standstill. Remarkably, the human desire to survive, not just to survive but to live, forces us to stand up again after falling down 7 times, and this hope, our ability to want to achieve something, will be what drives us hardest. To put it simply: sometimes goals can be unattainable, out of our hands, and when this occurs it is important to be adaptable.

But in reading Manson's book I was not thinking about my goals as much as I was these parking tickets and how they will matter as a before-and-after scheme in my life (I have yet to find any beneficial outcomes). Therefore, I have deemed my debts to San Francisco 'insignificant' for two reasons:

One, this city has so much fucking public transport funding, SFMTA reported a yearly estimate of 90 million dollars in revenue, (which is hardly being used in the right way) that I do not feel the inclination to contribute to its corruption and misuse of my "hard earned tax dollars". Sorry, but the city does not need my money. We don't even know where it goes! The only thing allegedly for certain is that the people giving me the tickets are being compensated with the same money I was forced to cough up. Talk about life being a bitch.

Two, my silly hippy belief on how stupid money is. Currency amounts to something and is nothing. It is little numbers sitting within a virtual world changing from a 4 to a 5 with the swipe of a plastic card. I mean, there are wars happening, does my parking ticket matter to anyone besides myself and the meter maid who's decided they had had enough?

Similarly, I began to think about all of the people I was indebted to, but a different debt, the good kind. In creating a life with purpose it is important to live by a few principles: community, care (meaningfulness), and emotion. With indifference life degenerates. When we have no values or strong beliefs we begin to lack reason or rationality behind our decision making. Imperative to our interpersonal relationships, care and emotion help us create deeper connections and allows us to discover things about ourselves.

I finally learned how to delve deeper, whether that was through conversation, poetry, or personal growth, I began to coax myself out of the protective shell I had once created. I quickly found myself inspired by the people around me just by listening to their journey's and the tribulations they faced while on them. Life had opened up! I was given hope, and because of that I became capable of withdrawing myself from the bleak and cynical perspective I was so wrapped up in. Not to be confused with comparing myself with my peers, instead I realized my problems were my own, and based on my community's success approaching their own struggles, I learned alternative ways to do the same. Reader, the first step to self development is not telling yourself there is something wrong with you that must be erased. You are valuable, you are important as is. Instead it is by the desire to improve a characteristic within us which might have caused someone harm (yourself, or a loved one), and with this desire tough questions need to be asked; about the way we react, how accountable we hold ourselves to our mistakes, and most importantly: 'Am I wrong?'. After mastering this the world expands...and also shrinks.

The older we get the better we get at coping. We know what to expect when things go awry, and we get better at finding solutions faster. Problems get harder, we get stronger...smarter.

I'll pay off these parking tickets someday...but today the problem is that I want to do it tomorrow. As the famous pirate Jack Sparrow once said:

"The problem is not the problem, the problem is your problem with the problem...savvy?"

Hunter S. Thompson: Crazy Bastard!

And for the first time in a long time I felt like I was in total control. I stood on a piece of curved wood with black tape on its surface which gripped the bottom of my feet. Four wheels barrelled down the side walk, with every kilometer it became more obvious to me how close I was to being bucked off of this wild machine. Total control. Even as I added another body to the equation, our feet alternating between each others legs like a dangerous ladder I felt like I could do anything.

"Faster or we'll die!"

It made no sense, none of it made sense. I was struggling to remember what had been of me 5 minutes before this moment. Had I really just seen a friend after a two year hiatus? She told me she was back looking for a bag of donuts, or some roundish pastry of the sort. It seemed sensible: retrace the steps...to find the black bag...which held the donuts...go back to the dingy dive bar on the corner of 25th and S. Van Ness... This train of thought reminded me of the way we had just run out of the bar like mad men, as though we had committed a crime. A crime had been committed, admittedly, by none other than me, a criminal. Cuff me officer! I think I am still drunk.

I can paint a picture of the scene:

With only the 8 ball left on the table, my shot for the game sinker, corner pocket, lined up perfect, my American IPAs sat warm in my belly while I was in the middle of what could have been a cowboy showdown...and my guns were both drawn.

No. Fucking. Dice. Man.

Scratched, and so I took a seat on the floor right where my feet had been poorly positioned just two seconds prior. Before I had time to think I was being ushered out the door by my friend who was tenderly convincing me that I was innocent. But I wasn't innocent! I had just killed a man back there! My dignity was still in that shitty bar under the billiards table with that scratched cue ball. I had to be put out!

I was drawn out of my flashback by the mere proximity of my face and the pavement.

'Too close,' I thought, especially after my incident in Madrid where my freshly healed black eyes and crooked nose would preferably choose to not endure another slam for the next 47 to 102 business days. Anything after and it's up for discussion.

Having made it a short two blocks back, I hung halfway out of the third story kitchen window, my girl friend and I piecing a Parliament, (filthy congress, filthy senate), and discussing loudly what our hypothetical Europe plans would be for October. Dreaming of the terraza's of Barcelona I sunk deeply into my heart, as I do, and forgot that the night was supposed to be about fun. Being drunk and being drunk in love can cause the brain to do involuntary things. For a short while the loudness of my friends voice turned into white noise in the background of this movie I called "my life". While I overlooked the cityscape, at what appeared to be all of San Francisco in their backyard, I felt like a sewer rat, or perhaps something more poetic...a beach gull flying over the skyscrapers willing myself onto one of the wings of a big metal bird roaring up above.

And I sang to myself:

"Up above the world so high...like a diamond in the sky..."

...I have to get out of this place while I still can and save myself. This place. This city?

A few hours later, I was found hidden away sleeping on someone's couch, drunk and jet lagged. Today I need coffee, water will do. Smoke break soon…

On “The Power of Thought”

One of our only responsibilities in this world is to ensure the safety of the mind from harm by the mind.

Succumbing to it is a type of weakness and a representation of indisposition. Subscribing to a disorder only encourages the minds power, which is harmful, over itself, most importantly, over us.

Lingering Emotions

Sometimes things don't pan out the way we anticipated, even when things are seemingly perfect. We are spinning on this Earth just to live, breathe, eat, sleep, and give.

To Y/N:

I miss you and us. I feel resentment because your life seems to have worked out for the best. It angers me because you reveal a sense of complacency which I wish were empathy instead. I know perhaps you are demonstrating your remorse in other ways: offering to buy lunch, beers, small gestures which may also just be within your nature to enact. I feel as though, however, you want your cake and to eat it too. If I give away the part of myself you desire, I feel like I will further lose myself to you, and the idea is that I should be learning to find myself within...myself. On the contrary, I feel like not doing so results in the same. The same guilt I used to feel arises within me: that by sparing my body I am harming your well being. That by sparing my body I am not demonstrating reciprocation of your "love", of your "care". As I write this I understand the delusion behind infatuation and the way it forces us to blame ourselves for the insurmountable. I feel I have not been honest with myself, or you. I apologize for being bitter and mean, I take longer to process my emotions. I love you. We will be friends forever, and I do adore your talent and charm. Thank you.

Laughter lingers before me, but my hands do not reach to grasp the origins of it. They simply hang by my side, sans intention, removing themselves from before me and slowly inching to bind together behind my back. Tied down by my own mental discourse, but I am not its slave and will not fall victim to it. This plume which writes words that I control is absolute. I put letters together, form my own thoughts, these thoughts slip like the ends of sentences slipping from my grip. Phrases are not written in reverse, as I read and write this I release this emotion onto the page and bid it farewell. I stand propped on one leg, the other foot crooked like a flamingo. Hands shake, but write more freely as I admit what provokes my sadness.

Rebirth. You are here.

Life’s Shitty First Drafts

Things do not change; we change.

Henry David Thoreau

What happened to us? Maybe it was a YP (your problem) and not a MP (my problem), but it could have also been that we simply outgrew each other.

I'm talking to you Marissa, Ike, Holly, Angel (one and two), Valerie, and Raymond, Charles, Elizabeth, and Justin, Zeke, (reader you aren't required to read or retain each name listed) Kaleb, Alice, Jean...

But maybe it's not that we have outgrown one another, and instead it is my self involvement that was a causal factor for our demise. The prioritization of my own happiness, enjoyment, or peace has led me on a long, lonely, nomadic path. We all had things in common, we once bonded, and might still do so, but to me keeping a friend is truly hard. I can't bring myself to blame adulthood (despite wanting to), or believe that the wages of aging and increasing responsibilities help contribute to our shitty friendship patterns. Frankly, I have not decided whether I love people or hate them, an opinion which is synchronized with my own internal self love/loathing. I can be cynical, I can be lighthearted and gentle, cruel or kind; I am capable of personifying all these traits: things I have learned from living and creating so many different friendships. We tend to unintentionally absorb characteristics from the world around us.

At the most pivotal moment of my life I made a choice which led to a lot of pain. At the time I did not foresee what the cause of my actions would be, but in two years flat I would begin to observe the results of a life I had obliviously built. By the same hand which writes this blog I fell victim to its alcoholic escapism and retrophiliac nature as the blow would make its way from the table into my nose and Janis Joplin's remastered version of Kosmic Blues played loudly in my ears. I let myself slip into the hands of two equally damaged and jarring individuals, being shaped into a sharp edged, kinda pudgy, awkward mold who stood there like a naked monkey: afraid and itching. Shifting my weight from one misshapen foot to the other, I restlessly lay myself into my grave each night, only to wake up with the moon again. How many years has it been?

Ten years of wanting somebody to love me. That movie love, "I got your back, call me anytime" love, mind reader love, tea on the back porch love love. Back then I just wanted someone to love me...enough. I thought I had finally achieved that, in some demented way, those two friends of mine were as sad and lost as me, but we were each lost in such different ways. I was battling crippling substance abuse which caused depression and guilt, we all were, but tack on our personal issues and a global pandemic: we were living in the shittiest self victimizing rom-com rock drama and we could not decide who the lead actor was. As a result, I just began to hate all my friends, as a projection of my own self loathing, but it made things easier. No one could tell, however, I silently suffered, like an animal of prey, falling more deeply into a toxic relationship with myself. I hear that blaming people for our own shortcomings is a sign of a lack of accountability and bitterness. I forgive You. I forgive me. I have chosen to let go and forget that feeling and shed the rotten skin which I was gifted, taken from a place of rotten souls, (as I write these words I know it's only for the sake of their poetic justice).

And yet, I waited...still longing to be loved back. I still long to be loved. I still long to be longed for, longed for by You, whoever that is at the moment of me publishing this. My mind whispers: "You cannot welcome love in if it does not exist within you." I love the Earth. In a nihilistic manner I am skeptic of my love for my parents, but I do love them. I love myself, and that sometimes comes with preconditions. My predispositions on self-love arise when I am alone, (sometimes not even then--I too often desire not being alone). I feel happiest when I am alone with tasks to occupy the space and time. I want to be in a room surrounded by people but I am tired. That's all. I am tired. Tired. Tired. Tired. Tired. Tired. I have written the word so many times it's begun to look like tried, losing its meaning.

This part of life sucks, with a capital S, and from what I gather, it gets slightly easier...to deal, but not less tiring. I wish I could be a tree, a plant, an animal, a blade of grass, something that only existed to exist. After all, our sole purpose is to nourish the land, despite the fact that we fail at this time and time again, however, we are not very different from the natural world. When we are all dead and gone the mychorrhizal fungi will envelop our brains, suck out the knowledge, transform it into nutrients, and give life back once more. Until one day "we" (nature not humanoids) are reborn from the same Earth we died upon. I guess when I put it that way we are a lot more like animals than previously perceived.

I vow to make the most of my regrets, never smothering my sorrow, but tending to it and cherishing it until it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

"...and the blue bird carries the sky on its back."