Terminal Lucidity

An RSS reader was the key to breaking my Discover page addiction. The Redditification of writing needed to be nipped in the bud. I don’t want to be concerned with upvotes.

Stormy weekend ahead. I’m an hour into the Elden Ring DLC. Respecced from mage to melee. Occult Nagakiba build goes hard. I also just got a handful of Dandadan manga. My wife wants me to wait for the next season of the anime, but I need to know what happens.

I’m not much for meta-blogging, but I’m finally happy with this page. You might notice the name change. And I think the short-form suits me well. It’s clean, and only the ten latest posts will display on the home page. The rest will be in Archive.

I’m considering a getaway over Halloween. I’m feeling Redwood National Park for some dramatic scenery, but we’ll see. For tonight, the plan is to get stoned and watch Perfect Days.

木漏れ日. A Japanese word that describes sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees. Think of the dappled, shimmering patterns of light and shadow.

It elicits that longing, almost nostalgic feeling deep in my core. It speaks of transience—the fleeting beauty of nature and the interplay of light and dark.

I imagine autumn woods. Eyes closed, face turned toward the slanted light of a dying sun as it teases its way through the branches. It dances across my eyelids as I breathe in cool, crisp air, the languid sigh of the forest itself.

It’s an invitation to pause for a singular, beautiful moment that will never exist again.

I’ve been dreaming of retiring early, selling all my shit, and slow-traveling S.E. Asia. We're close. Plans have been made; the pieces are coming together.

But now there's Mei, our little Bombay void. She was VIP at the shelter, a cat nobody wanted. And now we’re all obsessively in love with her.

Considering the strict quarantine protocols and the stress of constantly moving between countries, dragging her along would be unreasonable and cruel. It looks like I’m going to stay in the U.S. because of a cat.

I can't make this shit up.

Philosophy for a rainy afternoon. When I learned Peter Wessel Zapffe was Norwegian, I wasn’t at all surprised. In his 1933 essay “The Last Messiah,” Zapffe suggests that human consciousness has become grotesquely overdeveloped. We are animals made intolerably aware of death, suffering, and meaninglessness.

He uses the image of an elk gone extinct because its antlers grew too large. We avoid a similar fate by cutting ours off. We isolate by collectively suppressing talk of death and the absurdity of existence. We anchor with religion and convoluted systems. We distract with work, media, and shit like this very blog. And we sublimate, turning the horror into something a e s t h e t i c like philosophy or art.

He proposes a Last Messiah who doesn’t preach another flawed ideology or religion as metaphysical opiate, but rather reveals to us the biological mistake itself. He teaches the suffering-producing organism not to perpetuate itself.

The takeaway? Cut your balls off and let the human animal fade into the dark.

We can give Texas back for all I care. Let Mexico and the Native Americans pick their parcels. This place is a fundamentalist shithole.

The Texas Senate race has everyone all hot and bothered. The core of the debate? The candidates’ preferred version of Jesus. Talarico is leaning into hippie Jesus, while Paxton is all about that supply-side Christ.

Am I the only one who thinks this is fucking madness? We have very real and imminent issues to address, but instead my lawmakers want to argue about an itinerant Jewish cult leader and failed messianic figure from 2,000 years ago.

Abrahamic religion is a cancer. We’re cooked.

Despite my tendency to wax poetic about revolutionary politics and the evils of free-market capitalism, I’m just another tool trying to get that bag. My hypocrisy knows no bounds, but at least I own it.

I have a C&P exam today. I’m already on the dole, but even a 10% rating will put me at 100%. Permanent and Total. Set for life. I’ve spent years fighting the bureaucracy, and the finish line is in sight.

I traded my youth and my sanity for this. Committed unspeakable acts against humanity. Played the pawn for a shadowy cabal of oligarchs and sociopaths. I’ll kindly take my pittance and be on my way now.

It’s a curious thing. An uninvited traveling companion, a creepy houseguest. I think I’d prefer a poltergeist to this tedious kind of haunting. That’s okay, friend, I didn’t like those dishes anyway.

But no, this demon is much more intimate. It stretches languidly along my spine, like a spoiled house cat, one hand on my brain and the other in my gut. It plays deep jazz cuts with my receptors – a serotonin sax with a dopamine bass line that really brings it home.

Twenty years without anything felonious, and yet the cravings arise. I see a stupid GIF of someone smoking a cigarette and my stomach knots with something akin to lust.

This is a ridiculous life.

We don't truly appreciate the fact that a substantial number of otherwise rational adults believe in an omniscient creator god who watches you pee and judges your sex acts.

Personally, millions of years of animal suffering that serves no purpose, redemptive or otherwise, is proof enough that a loving god does not exist. Quite frankly, if the Abrahamic god were real, I would be morally obligated to reject it.

A spectre is haunting America – the spectre of Christian Nationalism. In the highest echelons of government, there are people who eschew their democratic responsibilities in favor of bringing about a purported apocalypse – from Huckabee’s heifers to outright Zionism.

On a recent drive, I passed two gun shops and three churches within four city blocks. Priorities. Memetic death cults; brain worms force-fed into the minds of children. The old image of a quaint, pastoral faith, a mere moral code, was always an illusion. We're all in danger.

空 假 中. I have that middle character in mind – the truth of conventional reality. Inherent temporality forces an incessant dynamism; existence on a spectrum of never-now, only was and will be. That is, until it’s no more.

This movement through the phenomenal, what drives it? Is there a name for what underlies this relentless forward compulsion? It’s appetite.

Violent fusion in the heart of our star emitting light snatched out of the void by outstretched hands of green, roots slurping nutrients from the decay, feeding in turn the beating heart of prey before fang or knife tears it apart for the blood (life is in the blood), for the sweet proteins and carbohydrates that keep the synapses firing in this lump of sentient meat.

Breathe. Even your breath is ingestion of molecules that enliven, carrying energy ever forward in the ten directions for no real purpose at all.

Everything is hungry.

You eat, work, fuck, and sleep – all for what? It’s just your nature. You take from something that takes again in turn.

Life feeds on life feeds on life.

So brave of you to reject AI. I mean, we would never know if you didn’t plaster a “No AI” badge on your blog, so thanks for that. Now we can be certain of your artistic integrity, your place on the right side of history. When Skynet goes live and humanity becomes subservient to the machines, you can go out knowing you resisted.

I see it most on the so-called IndieWeb and echo chambers like Reddit, this anti-AI circlejerk. Oh, you didn’t use AI to write your latest rambling post about your half-assed philosophy or the birds you saw in your backyard? Well, thank the gods. What a disservice to the arts that would have been.

And then some of you go so far as to put warnings on your pages: My writing may not be used to train LLMs. I’m sure there’s a developer at Anthropic throwing his hands in the air, exasperated by this enormous setback. His day is ruined. Progress is stalled.

Oh, and this was not written by AI. Does that make me authentic now? Dorks, the lot of you.

Those who can’t do. I’ve no respect for them. Heresy, I know. Give me all your hate. I don’t care. I’m tired of pretending they’re heroes. Here, they are the lowest common denominator, bottom of the barrel. It's a job anyone can get when nothing else works out.

Blame the feral children? I’ll give you half credit. But I’ve seen you in your classroom. You think the phone ban keeps you safe, but the kids are clever. Coward drunk on your measly authority, you belittle with one breath and demand respect with the next.

Oh, you have a certificate to teach science? Then fucking teach it. Instead you hand out Chromebooks and tell them to listen to AI-generated lessons while you scroll TikTok at your desk. COVID methods long expired.

Public schooling is akin to breaking a wild horse. It’s spiritual castration. Generations of eunuchs eager to obey the bell and show gratitude for a union lunch.

Every generation looks back and shakes their head at the next one. Look at them, with their long hair and marijuana cigarettes. How quaint. But the days of puritanical hand-wringing are long over. It isn’t a moral panic that elicits my disappointment, but rather a realization that the young are well and truly screwed.

I owe my son an apology for my part in his birth. On the cusp of manhood, the scales are falling from his eyes, like that fraudster Paul on the road to Damascus. Public education is shit, the environment is collapsing, we’re ruled by oligarchs and pedophiles, and technology is being leveraged to fuck us mind, body, and soul.

Look around. The population is fat, sick, and stupid. All according to plan. Fuck a car; I think I’ll get him a vasectomy for his sixteenth. Antinatalism is the only moral stance that matters today. We’re the Earth’s Stage IV cancer.

Everyone is scrambling to find a place on the spectrum. They plant their flag with stupid smiles and parade their mundane neuroses around as autism. Look at my quirky mental illness. The whimsy of misfiring synapses. The romance of chemical imbalances.

Shut the fuck up. You don’t need a semicolon tattoo or an awareness lanyard so people on the bus can force the smile usually reserved for three-legged dogs and deformed babies. Being bothered by loud noises is not a personality.

Desperate for an identity, you force yourself into a minority. Find a hobby and embrace the fact that you’re fundamentally unimpressive, a boring wage slave who will perish in obscurity like the rest of us.

Too bad that isn’t enough for you, but no one cares. Your life is the "–" carved on granite between your birth year and a rapidly approaching date with death.

Brevity is the soul of wit, or so said the buffoon.

Without imposing an arbitrary limit, I want to embrace the short form. Verbosity is a disease. I was infected by a philosophy degree. Unstable old men cowering behind rhetorical obfuscations.

So many of these blogs scream 00s MySpace. Today I’m feeling: Anxious to the sounds of shitty emo. Performative, sprinkled with desperation, reeking of loneliness. We collectively agree to hold our noses and upvote. Enjoy your dopamine.

Today I will wear the mask of a good father. Beneath it, only a Valium hangover and a nicotine craving. We reap what we sow.

I stumbled upon this post about Unstory, who is characterized as nihilistic, contemptuous, and often intellectually sloppy.

First off, brother from another mother. Any of that could've been written about me and the nonsense I write. Hell, I've been called those to my face.

Second, I shamelessly stole the theme. Fight me.

I've deleted all my old posts. It was time for a reset.