Author: ------_-------

Blackpill nights

Something happened to me recently that is really bothering me, I think because it has forced me to see that I haven’t been being honest with myself for quite some time. It’s funny as well because I was talking about a very similar thing happening very recently here, where life will sort of throw me a “free retry” I guess you could call it, every once in a while. And even though it always falls apart, and doesn’t lead to any change in my circumstances, it further encourages my naturally passive and lazy tendencies. Anyway what happened was, while I was working, a girl approached me and asked for my number on behalf of her friend. So in the post linked above I talked about the last time this happened, just over a year ago (among other things, that wasn’t the main subject of the post), and I said it was probably a one in a million event that wouldn’t happen again. Yet it did, although as I’ll explain it went even worse this time around and has led nowhere.

So I was cleaning down the display area in front of the shop I work at and I turned around for a brief second and saw a girl walking up to me, she had darkish blonde hair and green eyes, and a big smile. She waved to get my attention, and then she spoke, “Hi there, I was just wondering how old you were?”. Naturally I was kind of taken aback, I’m used to people coming up to me to ask questions about the public transport routes and timetable because there’s a station nearby and a bus stop, but this immediately felt different. I probably had a somewhat confused expression on my face when I responded, “I’m 21” I said with some hesitation.

Now at this point because of her body language and demeanour, which was similar to that of the Spanish girl I talked about in the other post and other girls in my teens who looking back I was definitely right to think were into me, part of me realised what was happening. Yet I was also concerned that maybe I was misjudging the situation because this girl was really pretty, it’s wasn’t just hard to believe that a girl who was that attractive would ask me out, but that she’d need to ask anyone out at all. Of course she wasn’t, she was trying to get my number for her friend, but her friend was also very good looking. Not quite as stunning as the blonde girl, but if I had to rank them on some kind of objective scale (which I don’t like to do) I’d put them very close to one another. If the blonde girl was a “7”, it feels so gross to number people like this, then the friend was a somewhere between that and a “6”. She looked a little bit like that e-girl that used to get posted a lot on r9k, with the really big eyes and the bob haircut. Certainly all that I said about the blonde girl not needing to go out of her way to try to find a bf or hook up or whatever also applies to this friend anyway. Here’s a frequently posted (and kind of cruel, I feel a bit bad even posting it but I don’t know how else to illustrate my point) chart from 4chan to give an idea of what I mean by those numbers.

aOem4ne.jpg

So I turned back around to put the cleaning things down on the counter, and as I did so she kept talking. “Oh, that’s great! The thing is me and my friend saw you from over there (pointing to where they had been sitting probably) and we were wondering if she could get your Instagram, or a phone number?”. I turned around and saw that her friend had also arrived, she had a straight bob of black hair, dark brown eyes and tan/ olive skin. “I d-don’t have any social media” I said “but yeah.. I can give you my phone number”. The girl who was supposedly attracted to me muttered to her friend “Are you for real?” she was visibly nervous/ embarrassed. The friend didn’t seem to pay her any attention, “Yes, a number would be great!”. I turned to look at the dark haired girl, and smiled. She gave a nervous smile, and then looked down at the ground before looking back up at me again.

I reached over the counter to grab my phone, “I’m going to have to check what my number is, I don’t actually know it off by heart” I said to them. Now the thing is, whenever I get into a social situation that I haven’t had time to prepare for I can freak out a little and so my hands were shaking slightly. Because of this I was messing up the stupid lock screen thing and then I had to wait 30 seconds after failing it five times, and as we were awkwardly just standing there waiting their bus arrived. “That’s our bus” said the shy girl. Without even really thinking about it, I just reflexively put my phone away saying “oh, well if that’s your bus..”. The blonde girl looked up at me, “..oh, ok then” she said with a clearly disappointed tone and expression on her face. Before I even knew it they were leaving to catch the bus and I just turned back around to clean the shop, as the realisation that I’d just accidentally rejected this girl sunk in. “Take care” I heard one of them shout to me, I didn’t turn around to say goodbye back.

There was clearly enough time because the bus didn’t leave for another minute though. I could have easily gone through with it, it’s so frustrating. I remember going back around and inside after finishing cleaning and the bus was only just taking off. In fact the entire thing took a few minutes at most. I was still processing it after they had left, like I said I need time to prepare for most kinds of social situations. Luckily I was closing up, so I didn’t have to deal with any more customers and I remember sitting there inside locked away from everyone and having this feeling of disappointment hit me. I can picture the moment more vividly than I can the actual interaction itself with these two girls. I sat there, with my head in my hands, and all that came to mind was this feeling that I had completely fucked up.

The thing is, I shouldn’t have felt that way. Or at least, if what I’ve been telling myself for the last few years was true I wouldn’t. See I wrote another post about half a year ago where I told the story of this girl I had met online back in 2014 and one of the points of that post was to talk about a realisation I thought I had come to after having spent a lot of time talking with her. Of course another point of the entry was just to tell that story, just like how in part the reason for this one is so I can tell the story I just did. I don’t want this blog to just be me writing about things that happened to me, and when I do I want to mostly write about how those things influenced me or changed how I see the world, but I also do kind of just want to tell the stories. I want someone else to know, even if it’s completely anonymous. It feels good to know that someone else has read or heard about the things that have happened to me, it makes them feel more real. It’s also good to have a record for my own sake, because being so isolated the chronology of things can get a little blurry.

So as I was saying, in that post the realisation I was talking about was that I thought I didn’t want a gf. I think what I said was after talking with her (I was 18 when we stopped talking the first time) I no longer fantasised about or believed I wanted a gf. Now of course I’ve talked about having oneitis on this blog multiple times so that might not have made sense, but I mean in the abstract. There might be a particular girl I know who I find attractive and/ or enjoyable to be around who I’d like to be my gf, but when there isn’t I’m not wishing for a gf. The best way to put it in meme r9k speak would be to say, in response to someone posting >tfw no gf, that I don’t know that feel. I think I also said that it felt wrong in some way, like to even want “a gf” is like searching for a person to fit a pre-made box whereas oneitis (what normalfags might call a crush, although that feels more juvenile) is more like you already have a person in mind and build a box around them. Of course, instead of wasting your time with boxes you should be spending time trying to get to know people, but it is what it is.

Were this true though, I would feel better after what happened not worse surely? See, just like in every other area of my life I’m incredibly self doubting about how attractive I am. So surely being approached by a total stranger, the most overt expression of interest there is, should make me feel good. It’s still not enough though, because even though this has happened twice since I came out of the NEETcave and got my first job, I’m still entirely alone. I’m going to be 22 in a few months, and not only have I never had a girlfriend or lost my virginity, I’ve never had even a moment of true intimacy with someone. There was an east african girl who would sit next to me in classes when we were 12 who would always put her arms around me and grope around my crotch as a “joke”. She kissed me on the cheek when no one was around and once followed me half way home, asking me to “be her boyfriend”. I would laugh and say no, thinking she was just messing with me, but eventually she grew distant. That’s the closest I think I ever was, but there are quite a few similar stories.

There was this pale redheaded girl who would skateboard around the street near where I live with her friend when I was 14 years old. I remember the first time I saw them she just stood there staring at me, and then I started to see them there every Friday evening coming home from school and whenever I went out to see my friends on the weekend. At first they just kept staring at me, waiting for me to say something perhaps. Later, one weekend when me and a friend were hanging out on the same street they both came and sat on the stairs above us and having a really loud conversation. Then, one Friday evening I was leaving to go and stay the night with a friend and they started waving at me, so I waved back. The next morning I was coming home, and they were there again. The ginger girl came right up to me, and asked me how the sleepover went. I was completely taken off guard, and just said “What!” and then ran inside. I never saw either of them again.

A year or so after that, I was at a big birthday party for a family friend and there were lots of people who I hadn’t seen in years. One of these people was an Iranian girl I went to primary school with, who I hardly remembered. She definitely seemed to remember me though, and even though I was giving one word answers and clearly visibly uncomfortable she spent a good portion of the evening just sitting with me in a corner trying to get me to talk. I remember her telling me stories about the time when we were kids that I couldn’t recall, like she’d been thinking about me all this time. Maybe I’m just totally misinterpreting the situation, and she just felt like she was catching up with an old friend, but as I was saying earlier these two instances of being asked out since starting this job have helped me understand past events better. Because I can see a similarity in the body language and general demeanour that both of them had. She would also laugh at unfunny things I said, and kept asking me to dance, but eventually she too got bored of trying.

Now there are a fair few more stories like this, although between the ages of 16 – 20 when I was a total hikki and at some points staying indoors for weeks at a time it became far less frequent. There was a period of time where I was going on omegle most nights of the week when I was around the age of 18/ 19, to be honest in part because I enjoyed getting complimented on how I looked which did happen a lot, but also kind of just to have people to talk to. A lot of the girls on there were pretty shitty people though, and I tried speaking to some of them on skype because they’d sometimes ask to add me there, but they were even more difficult to talk to than people irl are and I’d always end up removing them or being ghosted/ removed myself.

I can only think of one example from that time which I really regret, which was this conversation I had with this short haired Australian girl. I actually think at first I was talking to her with the camera off, but we spoke for a good two hours in total. We talked about her job working as a clown at a funfair/ amusement park and what I was(n’t) doing with my life at the time, I was able to talk to her quite easily and usually I was awkward even with people on omegle but not in this case. When I had to go to, she said she wanted to speak to me again.

Now I actually got the timeline wrong in that post linked above talking about the girl from Italy, I was actually talking to people on omegle before I even first met her. Because I remember I created a skype account to talk to her, and I remember this Australian girl asking for my skype and I didn’t have one at the time. When I said that I didn’t have one she started explaining to me how to create an account in some detail, gave me her username, and then told me to add her when I got the chance. For some reason, I’m really not sure why, I never did. I just have this fear that things will always go terribly wrong, so I never make any effort.

I think I’ve figuratively jacked myself off enough though, no one is interested in hearing me go through every single story like this. What I’m getting at is that I think I can safely say that I’m attractive to women, at the very least a certain subset of them, when I objectively look at all of these events together, but on a different day I’ll feel entirely different. And on top of these more memorable events like those talked about above there have been innumerable minor interactions or occurrences, like compliments I get from certain people, flirty female customers, people staring at me then looking away when I notice them and then staring at me again multiple times. It just doesn’t make sense because according to /r9k/ this kind of thing only happens to women or “Chads”, and I’m neither of those.

I’m not sure if I’ve bought into an entirely distorted view of the world, that being the whole blackpill/ lookism thing, or not. See until I started visiting /r9k/ I didn’t think about looks at all, I was completely naïve, I mean I wasn’t even aware that height was something women cared about. Though I’m 6’0 so I don’t even have that to blame for my situation either. Yet the worldview there nowadays is generally that the way you look is the most defining thing in life. Not just in dating/ relationships, although that area is where it’s most important, but in all areas of life. How people treat you, what opportunities are afforded to you, etc. And it’s not just basement dwelling incels who are saying this as is unfairly implied, it’s been studied and documented. There were mainstream news segments even in the 90s talking about it.

The halo effect is something that is pretty hard to deny, and there have been plenty of studies from official institutions/ universities as well. Which I won’t link, because I’m not going to link something I haven’t read and I’ll be honest I’ve only ever read responses to a lot of the studies on this subject not the actual papers themselves. That is either news sites publishing articles on the subject, or just random dorks on youtube. I’m not an academic and I never claimed to be. Of course most dating sites/ apps have revealed statistics that confirm what a lot of “blackpillers” seem to be saying. I’d check that link out quickly if you are interested, because the original article was removed shortly after it was posted and the archives of it get shut down frequently, for some strange reason.

You can go down that rabbit hole yourself though, if you want, that’s not what this blog is about. I’m influenced by that stuff, among other things, but I’ve always had some doubt. Which is because of my uncertainty about my own looks. Because on the one hand if you fully buy into this blackpill meme you’d say that what I’ve experienced is something only the top 20% of chads do, yet I couldn’t be further from a “chad”. I’m skinny, I’m concerningly pale from staying inside for days at a time, there are bags under my eyes. I’ve been told I have sharp features I suppose. In fact during my omegle days someone on there said I looked like a character that the artist Kaneoya Sachiko likes to draw (the artist behind the image in the header), her stuff gets posted on /r9k/ and other boards from time to time, and I’m not entirely sure whether that was a compliment or an insult. Looking back, I actually look much more like that now than I did at the time with my long hair. Anyway, maybe that look or aesthetic is appealing to a certain set of women, I’m not sure.

After all, I have very little real life experience, and I spent a lot of my later development surrounded by this kind of worldview online. I don’t know how normal my experiences are, the ones I was talking about above I mean, for years I’ve been spending hours of time a day with people who tell me that how you look is the only thing that matters. That women think the vast majority of men are not good enough, that if you’re attractive you literally can’t fail at life, that women have unlimited options and will only settle for 6’4 muscular billionaires who have cult leader tier charisma. Ok I was being hyperbolic on that last point, but supposedly the “top 20%”, that’s the figure that is very often given. To be fair, that OkCupid study does support it, and I’m pretty sure there was a very similar result found out by the stats people at Tinder.

There was a thread someone made talking about this subject recently actually, looks and attractiveness that is, and as it was something I had been thinking about a lot I replied. You can figure out my post pretty easily as it mirrors what I said in this blog entry, but it’s post number 52921078 if you just have to be certain, and someone replied to me with the same kind of thing I’m used to hearing when other anons talk about experiences similar to mine. That I am living in an entirely different world than ugly or average looking people, again assuming that I don’t fit into that category myself. I really just don’t know, as it doesn’t feel like I am experiencing a life too different from theirs.

If that were true why am I still a khv at almost 22 years old. I know this blog entry in particular without the context of my usual posts makes me seem really narcissistic and self absorbed, but I’m really not like that. I feel uncomfortable sharing this stuff, I feel uncomfortable even calling myself attractive (in my own head) on the days I feel like I am. The days where I’ll look in the mirror and think “looking good”. Of course, just as often I’ll look in the mirror and think I was an idiot for letting myself be deluded into thinking that. In that thread I just linked the guy right below me talked about how there are plenty of narcissists who think they’re more attractive than they are, and I’m a bit scared of being “that guy”.

I start to feel that maybe the whole blackpill mindset is not just toxic, but actually distorts your view on the world. This isn’t new of course, I’ve gone back and forth on this while having this blog. In some posts I’ve said I don’t buy it and in others I’ve said I do, this is just the first time I’ve really talked about it in any detail. Because you can’t reconcile the idea that I have been getting the attention I’ve got throughout my life because I’m secretly incredibly handsome (according to r9k) and also that being incredibly handsome means you’ll never have trouble finding a gf, as I’ve had a lot of difficulty with that. Ok, so you can say I’ve never tried, like people say about Elliot or sometimes just about incels in general. Sure I’ve never asked a girl out, or tried online dating, but if I still fuck up when I’m the one being asked out I’d only be even more nervous and spergy were it the other way around. I’m not interesting in seeking out humiliation.

So then I think that perhaps my experiences are actually a lot more normal than I was led to believe, which is hard to admit because it’s not like I don’t want to be secretly incredibly handsome, I just don’t think it’s actually true. Not only that, but it’s not like I’ve got anything else going for me. It’s a very easy cope to fall into because when you’ve got to my age and you haven’t ever been able to form a relationship with a woman, you have this voice in your head constantly telling you how useless and worthless you are. You’re nothing. It’s true as well, you’ve been metaphorically told you don’t deserve to exist by women, as a collective. Because of course there’s contraception so sex nowadays doesn’t necessarily mean birth, but it still represents it. You’ve been told that your genes, which are you in the most fundamental sense, shouldn’t continue.

Then I go back again because the exact opposite has happened, I’ve been so close so many times, and on top of that without making any effort myself. Not necessarily close to sex, some of these stories are from before I even hit puberty, but to intimacy or young love which are representative of it you could say. Most of these stories are from after puberty though, and the two most recent ones couldn’t have been any clearer. If a girl was asking to go out with me, it means that she was willing to sleep with me, in fact it means she wanted to. It means that I am desired, so why do I still not feel like that? Why do I feel like the most undesirable person on the planet? Why am I still alone? I’ve just thought about this now, but those two girls the other night were probably talking about me for some time before coming over. Maybe that’s not even the first time they’ve seen me, or at the very least the dark haired girl might have been past before. I wonder what they said, maybe if I knew it would help me.

I’ve tried to figure out what kind of girl it is who I seem to attract, by thinking about what it is that is shared by all the ones who’ve expressed interest in me in the past, but they’re all so completely different. Some were very shy while others were really extraverted and outgoing, some were complete turbonormie/ stacy tier and others were weird e-girls. Every single one of them was from a different ethnic background, from a pale redhead to an Ethiopian, how diverse! So, I don’t really know what I can do. I’m at a loss, to be quite honest with you fam. All I can say is that it’s kind of freeing to just be honest with myself, I am upset about being lonely and unwanted. I do wish I had a girlfriend, I don’t know why I feel like a bad person for admitting that. Maybe I’ve internalised this idea that because I don’t have one, I therefore don’t deserve one, and so I feel bad for wanting something I also unconsciously feel I don’t deserve. I’m not sure.

I don’t really know where else to go with this post, I’m tired and I think there was more I wanted to say, but I’m sure I’ll find a way to talk about it in another post if it really matters that much.

Books: Part 4

I finished reading this very small (about the size of my hand) book about the film director Wes Anderson recently, and so I think now is a good time to try and do the next part in this series of posts. That pile of books has been in the corner of my room for a really long time now as well. I’ve just had a lot on my mind, of course this blog doesn’t have a stated topic or theme, but I do tend to talk about a certain set of issues fairly frequently. The thing is that’s just what is on my mind most of the time, it’s what occupies my thoughts and it’s what I care about right now. I find it hard to write the posts that are about something different, like these ones, when I’m so preoccupied with other thoughts. The last post I uploaded was the longest I’ve ever written I believe, yet it only took me a couple of days to write. I’ve started writing this post and stopped, and deleted stuff and tried again, and so on, for over a month. I’ve got quite a few free days this week though with nothing whatsoever to do, so I’ll do my best. It’s not that this isn’t something I want to do, or am enjoying (I’m very happy with the other posts in this series) I’m just having a bit of a hard time right now focusing on anything.

Ok, so this book was was an interesting insight into Wes Anderson’s influences and the themes and feelings that repeatedly come up in his films, but I wouldn’t say it has made me much more interested in actually watching them. The few of his I haven’t seen that is, I’ve watched almost all of them at this point. Because the thing is, I’m not really that much of a fan anymore. I have watched a lot of his films as I just said, and I think he has a unique charm and visual style, but I’m kind of losing interest in him. This book was a gift, I didn’t buy it for myself, my uncle gave it to me along with some other books for Christmas. This isn’t even the first book about Wes Anderson in particular that he’s given to me. While this one was rather small, the other was rather large. As you can see from the header image, I’ve taken a photo of them next to each other because I don’t know what else to put there. So he clearly seems to think I am a big fan, and I can only think of one reason that might be.

This is that I just don’t say very much, which means that people seem to give more weight to the things I do say. At least, those few people who know and care that I exist. Which isn’t a bad thing necessarily for reasons I’m sure anyone would understand, I hate when I’m not taken seriously, but it does mean that sometimes people seize on the things I say too firmly. This is a perfect example of that, I’ve perhaps made a few somewhat positive comments about the director and his films over several years (while watching them with him, my uncle himself and his family all seem to like his films much more than I do) and now I guess I’m his number one fan. I will say I do think The Darjeeling Limited is a great film, but as much as I might have enjoyed the others I’ve seen they haven’t stuck with me.

The writer of the little pink book seems to have a very strong attachment to Wes Anderson’s films, for every one there’s a memory attached. She repeatedly associates them with certain periods in her life, times where things were going well that she reminisces over, or when they were going poorly and his films provided a certain comfort. Now maybe this is seen by some as the pleb tier way of appreciating art, it’s an entirely emotional and instinctual appreciation rather than an intellectual one. Yet that is how most of us decide upon what we consider our “favourites” to be when talking about art or at least popular media. My posts about The Cure were very similar, in fact even more so because while the woman writing this book does have some knowledge about cinema and technique and that sort of thing I know nothing about music. In the book she does still talk about how the films were made, I couldn’t have done the same even if I wanted to. I talk about the music of course, those posts aren’t just 13,000 words worth of nostalgiafagging, but it’s not technical at all. I don’t know what notes and chords and time signatures etc etc. are. I can just say things like, “the spiralling sound created with the guitar on One Hundred Years is really cool”.

So as I said I kind of had that experience with The Darjeeling Limited, far less intensely than the writer of this book or what I have had with other things, but I certainly remember it fondly. For reasons that shouldn’t be hard to figure out if you’re a regular reader, a story about estranged family members going on a journey together through a beautiful tropical world. I don’t know if I’d enjoy it the same way today as I did as a young teen, but it did stay in my thoughts for a while. The rest of Wes Anderson’s filmography just does nothing for me though, maybe this is a tired analogy but his films are like candyfloss. They’re certainly very pretty and enjoyable, and a great deal of care goes into the making of them, but there’s nothing substantive or nourishing contained within. You don’t feel much better, or much worse, once you’re finished with it. Just a very brief feeling of satisfaction, that wears off before the credits close.

So the question is what do I do with these two books? I don’t like throwing away gifts that I’ve received recently, and I did get this smaller book only half a year ago, but I’m not going to read it again and other than the section going through Wes Anderson’s various artistic influences I don’t think I gained anything from reading it. On top of that, now I know that I’ve already been gifted two very similar books like this (I’ve only briefly flicked through the other one, but it’s the same sort of thing) who’s to say I won’t just be gifted another next year. Will I just have to throw away another book about the director every year, is this going to become some kind of bizarre yearly ritual? On top of that, I’ll end up wasting so much time (not that I use my time well anyway) reading these books because I feel bad throwing a book I was given as a present away without reading it once at least. I’m probably going to have to make myself read this other bigger book before I can give it away without feeling bad, but I will be giving it away. I’ve decided, and of course I will also be putting the pink book in the throw away pile as well.

A fair few of the books I have were presents from my uncle, and all of the ones to do with cinema. See he has a film studies degree I believe, or something to do with cinema, and so that has always been something I’ve been able to talk about with him. I don’t see my uncle and cousins very often, at this point I really only see them once a year for Christmas despite them living only a short walk away, but even when I was younger and seeing them much more often I never was that comfortable around them. I’m almost as awkward and stilted when interacting with them as I am with my co-workers or with the regular customers who recognise me. So talking about and watching interesting things is one of the few ways in which we can “bond” I suppose. I see my uncle more often than the rest of his family, I didn’t explain that too well just now, we tend to go to see a film every few months.

So I think because we talk about this so often he has the impression I’m more interested or passionate about cinema than I really am, as I was saying earlier. Whenever he mentions that I should reconsider my decision not to go to university, which is pretty often, he also mentions that perhaps doing a film degree would be something I’d enjoy. See him and my mum were from a very middle class background, where “going to uni” isn’t so much a decision to make but something that’s spoken about as just another part of life. I can quite clearly recall my mum saying things like “.. and when you go to uni” fairly often. My dad on the other hand was from a poorer and more working class background up north and so he didn’t have that attitude, but he wasn’t my main carer for most of my development as he and my mum split up when I was only two years old. Then when he had to start looking after me at the age of 14, I realise now I gradually became more and more opposed to the idea of higher education. I already talked about his poisonous influence in  a lot of detail in my last post though, I don’t need to beat a dead horse here.

Anyway, in particular we both quite enjoy a lot of the old European westerns from the 60s and early 70s, that is to say they were shot and directed in Europe but of course set in the American wild west. So over the years I’ve been given a few books about those as well, and I’ve already gotten rid of a couple in the past so there are only two left. One by Alex Cox the director, which I will keep, and another which follows a very similar structure to that one but is far less engaging and in depth so I’ll give it away. Now almost everyone will have heard of the phenomenon of “spaghetti westerns”. Even if you’ve never seen any of them, you know who Clint Eastwood is, you recognise Ennio Morricone’s signature sound, you’ve heard about A Fistful of Dollars and Django, and so on thanks to cultural osmosis.

What people don’t realise is just how many lesser known “spaghetti westerns” were released. In total it was something like 500, over only a decade and a half roughly. Now most of them were very derivative, and even the most famous ones by Sergio Leone which inspired hundreds of rip offs were themselves very “inspired” by the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa, but there are loads of gems as well. 10,000 Ways to Die, which is the book by Alex Cox I mentioned, goes through a lot of these lesser known releases and reading about them before going on to watch them either on my own or with my uncle has been a lot of fun. In fact, I was lucky enough to go and see a showing of one of the only two (or maybe three) original surviving film reel copies of The Great Silence by Sergio Corbucci with him, and that is a film that will always stick in my mind. It’s not my favourite film ever, that would be Brazil by Terry Gilliam, but it’s one of them.

The funny thing is, I actually first watched Sergio Leone’s “dollars trilogy” not with my uncle but with my dad. My dad plays the guitar, and so when he first started looking after me he would often play it and one evening he was playing a piece from the soundtrack to For a Few Dollars More. So I asked him what it was, and he told me about it and these films and the next day he went and bought copies of the films and I loved them. I must have mentioned this to my uncle, which he was happy about as he had actually written about one of the films for his degree I think, and so whenever I went around to visit (this was when I saw still in my mid teens, and going there frequently) he had a different one for us to watch.

My dad and my uncle never got along, they’ve always disliked each other and I’ve always been stuck in the middle of it. They’re not brothers, he’s my mother’s brother, and I can remember quite vividly me and my mum being invited over to visit for Christmas when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old and my dad being distinctly not allowed to come. When my mum asked why, she was told “I just don’t like him”. Not that my dad is any nicer, the amount of vitriol and filth I’ve heard him say about my uncle from such a young age is frankly disgusting. As I said earlier they are from very different backgrounds, so my uncle is very middle class and passive aggressive about it while my dad is much more crude. Since my mother died they have had to interact a lot more, so nowadays they’re cordial with one another but all the resentment is there just under the surface. My dad thinks he’s being looked down on, he’s always had a chip on his shoulder about it, but in this case I would agree that my uncle probably does and always has.

The result of this is that I can’t help but view anything that happens involving both of them as some kind of weird power game, or at least being suspicious of something like that. I hate it, and it’s mostly because my dad is genuinely mentally unhinged and paranoid and has felt the need to tell me about his delusions my entire life. Many of which focus around my uncle, naturally. In fact for a good couple of years he seemed genuinely convinced my uncle had murdered my mother, I wish I was fucking joking. He even went to the police station with his “evidence” and was laughed out of there, of course there are certain police officers that are out to get him he believes so that doesn’t mean anything. This is the exact kind of toxic shit I was talking about last week, he’s fucking poison. I’ve had this crap in the background since before I can even remember, I could write a 10,000 word post going over the many different wacky scenarios and conspiracies against him he thinks there are or has in the past. I’m getting completely sidetracked though, my point was that I always had this niggling feeling that maybe my uncle was trying to “steal” that thing I had with my dad watching these films. After all I started watching these films with my dad, but now it’s more of a tradition with me and my uncle. I’m just not sure what to think.

Link to Part 3

Link to Part 5

Kinda late in the game

I’m going to be responding to a youtube video I saw recently, it’s from this guy called Monday (a pseudonym obviously) and I know I have always tried not to mention e-celebs and internet personalities by name but this video really helped me stay sane and I want to talk about it. I want to grasp onto it and not let go, I’m scared that if I forget this feeling that I’ll slip back into the dark pit I’ve been stuck in this last week. Now I’ve been watching his videos for a good four or five months now and some of them have been really helpful, or at least thought provoking, but I think this just found me at the right time. He has several channels, but one in particular where he specifically talks about what I guess he would call “the foreveralone phenomenon”, and the video I just saw was on that channel. Now this video, I saw it at the end of what has been a particularly difficult day for me. So I was kind of on the look out for anything that might help me feel better, and perhaps that means I’m finding meaning or a sense of hope that isn’t really there because I’m just desperate, but it feels a little bit real right now and I don’t have much else.. so I’m going to write about it.

Ok, so I’ve tried to explain what happened several times over and had to keep deleting it all so I’m just going to give the briefest summary possible of what happened today. I had a long discussion with my dad, almost seven hours, I told him all about the many ways in which I feel resentful towards him. I told him that I blamed him for me turning out to be so weak willed and spineless, that I blamed him for me losing most of my friends, and because of that I felt like he was also indirectly responsible for me slowly becoming completely isolated and cut off from the world. Now we talked about all of that and a whole lot more as well, and I just felt worse after the conversation was over. I only want one thing, I want him to leave. Now I know how that sounds without the proper context, but I have kind of explained my rather unusual living situation in this post, so maybe give that a read it’s very short. In fact it’s one of the worst posts I’ve ever uploaded, but it’s the only time I’ve talked about my living situation here so it’ll have to do.

I can’t leave, so if I want to be able to try and even start to build some kind of a life he has to be the one to go. Yet he never does, he promises month after month, year after year that he’s making plans to move out and let me have some independence and yet he’s still here. It’s horrible, and I feel bad because as much as I do have a lot of anger and bitterness towards him he is my own father and I’m not strong enough to force him to leave even though I could legally evict him. He has to choose to do it, and if not I’m going to be his age (55) before I can even start my life. That thought is soul destroying, and I don’t see a way out. I’m incredibly “far behind” my peers in terms of the standard set of accomplishments people are generally expected to be working on throughout their lives, and I can’t get started catching up (although I don’t ever see myself on the “standard” path, but just having some kind of life where I feel in control and have something to work towards/ a goal) as long as he’s still around. I mean I could, I could move out and find a place of my own but I’d literally be throwing away several hundred thousand pounds. Also like I said, every time I start to get desperate and say if he won’t leave I’ll just have to he promises again that he will actually leave soon and then I spend another six months to a year just in my room waiting for him to leave so I can fucking do something.

I don’t know if I’ve actually mentioned this story on this blog yet, it might not have come up, but I told him for the first time in the conversation today about this incident which happened to me not too long after I got my job and I think it illustrates what I’m talking about perfectly so I’ll mention it here. I was working a sunday shift, and this Spanish girl came into the shop and asked if she could plug her phone charger into one of the sockets until her bus arrived. Now she was kind of looking at her phone most of the time but also kept stopping to talk to me and for whatever reason I found it surprisingly easy to talk to her. Usually I have a lot of trouble talking with people, women especially of course but it’s certainly with other males too. I can quite vividly remember this one moment where I corrected something she said, and she just gave me this incredibly warm smile while looking directly into my eyes from only a foot away. She was pretty too, not stunning by any means but I’m sure most guys would be perfectly happy with a girlfriend who looked like her.

Then just before she was leaving, she pulled out this big notebook and opened it out on the desk right in front of me and asked me to write down my phone number. So I was a little confused, and I was starting to explain to her that if she gets lost or something it would make more sense to actually call the british transport police rather than me… and then she started laughing. Only then did I actually realise she was asking me out, and she must have assumed I was joking but I really did completely misunderstand her at first. The idea of it was absurd, I actually remember laughing openly immediately after realising what she wanted because of how out of left field it was. Which was probably misinterpreted also, as me laughing at the “joke” she thought I had made.

See this kind of thing doesn’t happen to me regularly because I’m never around women, the idea of getting a girlfriend or even just losing my virginity is always distant, it could happen but it’s not going to be tomorrow, or next week or in half a year. Yes I meet the customers but I’m pretty sure an attractive female customer asking for my phone number is a one in a million event that won’t happen again. The reliable way that most guys find a gf is through a social circle, that’s also the way they find friends more generally speaking and frankly jobs and opportunities as well. Life stems from this nexus in almost every regard, and if you don’t somehow plug yourself into one and instead fall through the cracks it can be incredibly difficult to get by.

Anyway that incident in particular is unusual as I said, but it’s not the only time something similar has happened. I mean, some kind of interaction that has left me convinced that the female was interested. This isn’t me trying to brag, despite what r9k says you don’t need to be chad to attract women, by my age something like 96% of men have lost their virginity. I’m talking about this because it has a greater point, which is that it happens just frequently enough that I never change. It’s why I never fell into this total hopelessness about it that some people on r9k seem to have, because every time I’m getting close to accepting that I’ll just always be alone something like this happens to remind me that I could have had a chance if only something went differently.

Yet nothing ever actually works out, take this example in particular of the Spanish girl. She texted me later that evening, and wanted to meet. I said I couldn’t do the first suggestion because I was working that day, then I made a suggestion and that was “too long to wait”. She was apparently only here for a few weeks, so I don’t even know what her plan was but I kind of felt like my time had been wasted so I deleted her number and the conversation thread. I was also kind of developing oneitis for my co-worker, the one who had a boyfriend (although obviously at this point I wasn’t aware of that) of the two I talked about in my very first few posts. So perhaps that somehow affected how I acted in that situation, I can’t know but it’s a possibility.

Well I just think that it’s kind of an interesting parallel, nothing ever actually happens in my life and I’ve made no progress in any regard. Not just in finding a girlfriend, in any area. See most people are not “go getters” from the start, they have to realise that life isn’t going to come to them, but there are people in the world who don’t need to do anything and it’s easy to convince yourself that could be you. It takes a long period of things not going your way to motivate most people, at this point I’ve read countless stories from normies who claim to have been “robots themselves once” and they always talk about how they had to hit rock bottom first, and in my case especially I think my ability to get excited or motivated is diminished. I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean the region of the brain that governs that sort of thing is somehow damaged, but I’m going to get into that later in this post when I talk about the video.

Now every time it gets really bad and I start to reach this breaking point that a lot of people need to get to, something happens to prolong my lethargy. A girl shows some kind of interest in me, which convinces me I don’t need to make any effort because eventually if this keeps happening I won’t spill my spaghetti or somehow fuck it up, and I never grow the spine to take matters into my own hands. Whether it be online dating, or trying to go back to study, or find some kind of career. I probably will end up alone and with no accomplishments. I’ve also got some other problems with online dating that I’ve talked about here, if you’re interested. So I consciously recognise this, but I don’t feel like it really is that way.

As I say, something prevents me every time from hitting that point where I recognise this reality on a deeper level. Yes I know this doesn’t reflect well on me, a stronger person wouldn’t just keep up the inertia that is slowly destroying them, but obviously I’m not a stronger person. I’m like the frog that’s slowly being boiled alive, but every time I start to perhaps figure out the water is heating up the water is cooled down slightly. There’s a big difference between being able to consciously recognise what is happening and being able to actually reroute these damaging thought patterns. It literally is biological, there is something deeper. I’ve tried for half a decade to “think my way out” of this way of living and I can’t do it.

So in the discussion I had with my dad I brought that story up for a different reason, it’s only upon reflection after talking with him and both things being on my mind that I had this eureka moment where I realised there was this pattern in both areas of my life. There is a big difference as well, in the case of him constantly promising to leave he’s deliberately stringing me along rather than me perhaps stringing myself along you could say in other regards. On top of that, it is my own father doing this to me so there’s an added feeling of betrayal. Because we all understand that as a parent the one thing you should prioritise is the success and happiness of your offspring, I don’t think anyone would disagree.

Yet if I actually expect him to live up to this I’m called entitled, I’m blaming my parents for my own character faults, and I’m the kind of person on which that kind of line of thinking actually will work. I’m very self critical, I’m always trying to make sure that I’m not just “coping” or lying to myself. Yet when I really think about it, this kind of pattern started when I was in my early teens and he had taken over the role of main carer. I actually can accept that it’s kind of a “bad look” to blame your parents for all your troubles in life, but surely it’s even more pathetic and shitty to blame a young teen who is in your sole care for them failing on the most fundamental level.

The reason I mentioned the story with that girl when talking with him was because at one point he asked if I thought I’d find a girlfriend soon, the implication being that would perhaps make me happier, and I said I found it incredibly unlikely. Now maybe it’s because I just never talk about this sort of thing with him, the subject has come up maybe three or four times ever, but he seemed really surprised that I would say that. So he kept trying to move back to that subject, and I guess I thought that that story would better explain. It’s not that I don’t think I can find a gf, it’s that I don’t think I will. Again I mean I don’t rationally see it happening, of course in some sense I still feel otherwise but I’m somehow aware this is self delusion.

I don’t see myself changing certainly not while I’m still living with him. As I said I’ve become a very resentful person and I just get angry when I can even hear him in the other room. I’ve been getting violent intrusive thoughts more and more frequently over the last year or so. He said to me that in these trips away he takes a couple times a year I don’t seem to change, but I’m going to need to be away from his poison for longer than that to get better and in fact I actually am noticeably more productive and happy when I’m away from him for more than a week. Here’s an example, despite the whole situation that I was going through last time he went away right around the start of this blog I wrote almost twice as many posts in that month than most since. It took a while to return to normal as well, as I wrote quite a lot in the second month as well, and then after a few weeks of him getting home this depressive fog settled over me again.

Anyway, the conversation accomplished very little. My dad is more aware now of how bitter I am towards him and he says he’ll try to find a job and a place to live but I can’t help but feel like in a year’s time he’ll still be here leeching off of me and the government teat. I’ve just lost all respect I once had for him, and it’s really sad because there was a time when I was a small boy where I respected him more than anyone else in the world, and I remember what it was like. The only interesting turn the discussion took was just before I decided I couldn’t stand being in the same room as him anymore, we started talking about my lack of motivation. I mean generally speaking, and also how that coincided with the period of the last five years where I feel like I’ve been on this downward spiral into total isolation and apathy.

Now obviously my lack of motivation or desire to do anything is something I’ve struggled with trying to overcome for as long as I’ve experienced it, but I’ve never really spoken about it with a real person. Not in depth I mean, I’ve only really been able to vent about it and talk about how to perhaps overcome it with people online. Even with the girl I talked about in this post, I never really got to talk about it much despite the fact that I was quite concerned about it at the time having just dropped out of my A-level courses because of it. I mean we did, but not really, I’ve never been able to have a conversation with someone that was in depth. I’ve never been able to get someone else’s opinion on my specific version of this problem. Like I said though it wasn’t that helpful yesterday either, and I kind of gave up and just ended the talk but it did serve to remind me that this is the crux of it. This lack of drive, it’s what everything else kind of rests on.

Yes, I still do hold my dad’s poor parenting responsible for me losing my friends/ turning down the invites and attempts to pull me along with him that one friend in particular made. I think if I had a social circle I would have found it easier to just push through with my education and I would be working on something to this day even if there was this underlying lack of willpower. I suppose, the isolation basically intensified it quite drastically. If I’d had gone along to these social things, met up with this friend and all the new people he was trying to introduce me to I would have maybe even found a girlfriend by my late teens in the same organic way that most fucking people on the planet do. I’d have probably gone on to university after finishing my A-levels, and met more people there that I liked. I think I’m always going to feel like he took that away from me, but I am still young as people love to remind me and while I can’t go back and redo life the “normal way” I can try and solve the deeper issue. I can try and fix my brain, and this is the conclusion that I came to after watching this video I said I’d talk about.

See my dad’s perspective when I started going into detail about this problem I’ve faced for the last half decade was that there wasn’t really a problem. That I don’t need to have motivation, that I only think of the idea of working towards a goal as something I should have because of social conditioning or something like that. Basically he had the most typical cynical Gen Xer take on it you can imagine, the exact kind of toxic attitude that makes living with him so fucking unbearable. He also kept focusing on the university example I used, it’s like he’s incapable of abstract thought. He is not a very intelligent man, if that wasn’t already clear, and I hate saying that but it’s true. I was using that as an example of something that many people do aspire towards, getting a degree (something he actually did himself, a law degree, even though he did nothing with it) is a goal for many people. It could be travelling, or starting a business, or having a family. These are things that people live for, these are reasons they get up in the morning. That’s what I don’t have.

The problem is I’ve tried, I’ve thought about all of the standard things like those I’ve listed and some more unusual ones and they all just sound really shit. Every time I think I’ve found something that could be “my thing”, I start to instinctively pick it apart and think about how it would be pointless and unsatisfactory if I actually pursued it. The thing is, most people today in the western world have been raised as godless epistemic materialists. It’s incredibly rare to find someone who has a sense of true or objective meaning or purpose, now you’ll quite frequently be told to “find your own meaning”. And that right there is the difference, somehow most people are able to do that but I can’t. Ennui is the unfortunate side affect of prosperity, and you see that all around you, but it doesn’t make most people practically catatonic. It’s not normal, it’s actually very unhealthy and it’s destroying me as it has destroyed my dad. The difference is he isn’t consciously aware of it, he thinks that this living death is normal which is why he doesn’t care that it’s happening to me.

It’s the video that made me realise this, see in it this Monday guy talks about a conversation on his discord server between two men and they seem to end up talking about the same issue. One of the guys talking doesn’t know what he wants, just in life generally speaking, and the video explains how that is actually not just normal but incredibly concerning and unusual in a way that is better than I ever could so I really think you should watch it. Anyway like he said, if you’re 14 or 15 and you don’t know what you want to do with your life that’s one thing, but it’s in the years following that where you go on to find out. I’m 21 now, nearly 22, and I’ve made no progress. In fact I’ve regressed, because I had some kind of idea that I would try and pursue a STEM subject in my mind during my teens and now I have nothing.

It’s not just these two men on his discord server though, and they were men, he specifies in the video that they were on the older side. This is the exact kind of behaviour you see on 4chan, I actually mentioned it in a post here recently I’m sure but I can’t be bothered to check which one, you go to 4chan to have any “big idea” be torn apart and revealed for the dumb gay stupid silly waste of thought it really is. People talk constantly about how it’s like the crabs in a bucket mentality, that people want to just bring others down to their level. Well I now think that’s not quite accurate, I think this is just how the kind of person who ends up on 4chan or at least on a board like r9k is all of the time. We are both the crab trying to escape, and the crab pulling him back down at the same time. This ability to shoot down ideas is just something people like us have got really good at, the neural pathway for it is particularly strong.

In fact in the video he goes on to talk about brain chemistry, that’s the real meat of it. He mentions an article, which I wish he’d been able to find and link to because I couldn’t find it based on what he says about it in the video, and it is about this woman who through brain damage lost her ability to experience emotion. I think that’s perhaps an exaggeration though, because it seems rather ridiculous to entirely lose the ability to feel emotion, but I’m pretty sure what he meant was that the region of the brain responsible for emotion (the limbic system) was the damaged area. Now what’s so interesting is that this led to her being unable to make decisions, she lost the ability to have preferences you could say. Now her case was extreme, she couldn’t make the simplest decisions we do in day to day life like what to have for dinner, but the point we can take from this is that the two things are inseparable. As he says in the video, without feelings we can’t make decisions.

So then the logical next step is that perhaps people who suffer from this lack of motivation also have damage in this region of the brain, and it is interesting that a lot of what he calls “FAs” and maybe I’d call incels or robots do seem to experience this. If you did a Venn diagram of both lack of motivation and “identifies as incel/ FA/ robot etc.” it’d probably look more like a simple circle. Now he talks about child abuse specifically, and the link between childhood abuse and FAs is something he’s talked about in quite a few videos, but I’ve never experienced that. It’s interesting, and worth talking about, but I haven’t experienced it and talking about it won’t help me which is what I was focused on at the time when watching the video. I did however have an experience which does parallel this phenomenon of “emotionally shutting down” that supposedly is very common for children growing up in abusive households. My mother’s suicide.

Now I’ve said before that I’ll probably write a whole long post about that situation, and I still probably will, but this isn’t that post. I’m just mentioning it because, as I said, there is a very interesting parallel. See immediately following the news I remember how I almost didn’t react to it. I don’t just mean externally, that I stayed calm while emotions were raging inside me, I mean I somehow suppressed almost all feeling. It wasn’t a decision I made, it was like the autopilot took over. I was going through the motions, there was a funeral to plan and the matter of where I was going to live and who would look after me and I basically didn’t experience any emotion at all for days. I remember going to see her in the chapel of rest, I think that was the first time I felt anything and it was difficult because at the same as this realisation that she really was dead and I’d never be able to speak to her again was hitting home I was also going through the horror of seeing a corpse for the first time.

Ever since then I’ve had long periods of very little emotion, which always culminate in a period of a few days to a week of rather intense depressive episodes I guess you could call them (although I must say, I am not diagnosed with anything) which are kind of like low tier panic attacks that are drawn out over a longer period of time. That’s what the last week has basically been for me, and why all these thoughts I decided I had to tell my dad about were dredged up. Now there is a slight difference, rather than slowly learning to suppress my emotion over a long period of time like many abused kids seem to do, it kind of happened in a flash for me. I do think that the ultimate effect seems to be similar though, after all I’m very similar to a lot of other FAs or incels I think.

So at the end of the video I went to check the comments and one of the comments someone left struck me, it said “I want to want something”. Now I know he was probably just trying to be poetic, but I got to thinking and actually that is a perfectly noble goal. If you really are somehow damaged, and the more and more I think about it the more it makes sense, then to want to fix yourself makes the most sense. It also might finally provide me with that goal I’ve been so desperate to find. In fact I think it already has, I think this is going to be “my thing” at last. My thing will be, the mission to restore my ability to identify my thing. Once it’s complete, it will of course naturally lead right into whatever burden I find for myself next.

I use the term burden, because that’s what I want, a load to bear. Yet if anything realising this has made me feel light in a way I haven’t in a while. I don’t want to go overboard now, I’m still the same person as when I started writing this post yesterday evening (I also wrote the vast majority of it last night too, I’m just trimming it and finishing it up tonight), I’m still just as bitter and resentful. I’m still stuck in this small bedroom as I have been for close to six years, I spent my entire day in here today other than to get food, but I do have a feeling of hope that I can do something here. In fact the specifics of my plan going forward are what I’ve been thinking about and reading about while in here today. It’s something I was actually already on the right path towards before I had a major setback, psychedelic drugs. As any long term readers will remember, I was growing a crop, or whatever the right term is, of psilocybin producing mushrooms a few months ago but it got infected with mold spores and the entire things was ruined. It went a bright yellow colour, and only some very tiny little caps seemed to have appeared on the surface of the mycelium mat.

There’s been a lot of fascinating research in recent years into the effects of these drugs and they really do seem to have long term affects. There have been studies where people who have been trying to give up cigarettes for decades are able to do so after a few psychedelic sessions. This means that they literally can rework your neural pathways, which is exactly what me and people like me need. It’s these trained habits we have, of picking apart every decision, that need to be unlearned. Now I have to be careful with the terminology here because I’m not a neurobiologist obviously, I’m a layman. I don’t think I’m saying anything that is untrue or misrepresentative of the results of these studies but I’m not able to accurately explain the minutia of it all. You should look this stuff up yourself if you’re interested, it’s not hard to find.

On top of the stuff about the reworking of your established mental patterns, there has also been a lot of research into the effect of both psychedelic drugs and MDMA and substances similar to it on depression. Now I don’t know if this suppression of emotion I experience is “depression”, it does seem to fit the description kind of but it’s maybe more like a particular strand or variation I’d guess. The point is these drugs, especially if taken in the right circumstances, can permanently alter your brain chemistry and shape. These aren’t just something you can take to feel differently for a while before going back to normal, like the idea seems to be in drug culture.

Speaking of drug culture, I know that a lot of robots will have a kneejerk resistance to what I’m saying because they have a lack of respect for people who take drugs and it’s completely fair because I do as well. Potheads, junkies, crack addicts, even just clubgoing normies who engage in recreational drug use are all people I have very little respect for. Nevertheless, if there’s something that will help me fix myself I’m going to take it, and you should as well. In fact I often rant about normalfags who go to r9k to give their shit tier advice, it’s like a pet peeve of mine, but I’ve always felt like the normies who advise we take psychedelics are the most sincere of the bunch.

I don’t know if this will work, as I said I did have this plan before and it didn’t go well. The difference is, last time my idea was something like “perhaps these substances will help me out somehow” and now it’s more that I’ve set this goal of fixing myself and these drugs seem to be the best means of achieving that. I’ll admit though that I’m kind of putting all my eggs in one basket, the problem with that expression though is what else can you do when you only have one basket available? Now I don’t ever get any comments, so it’s probably not worth me even bothering to say it, but if you have read this far and you think you have an alternative suggestion by all means please tell me about it.

California dreamin’

Five years ago, on this day (if I can get it uploaded in time, two days to go), Elliot Rodger took to the streets of the small California town of Isla Vista with revenge on his mind. You might think that revenge is the wrong word, in Isla Vista he was targeting complete strangers (although people forget that earlier that morning he had also murdered his roommates) not people that had personally wronged him, but I have already explained this before here. The post you’re reading right now is going to be more specifically focused on Elliot Rodger, but building on that post. I also think most people don’t understand who Elliot Rodger was really, even those who obsess over and/ or celebrate him. So perhaps this post will provide a new perspective.

Elliot Rodger is almost the perfect example of what I was talking about in that post, in that everything that we actually get directly from him is part of this big performance. It’s fitting I suppose that his father was a filmmaker, although in Elliot’s case the performance isn’t entirely fabricated like a major Hollywood production that his dad would work on. No, he is performing but he’s performing the role of Elliot Rodger. There’s a very weird sense of derealisation to the whole Elliot Rodger experience when taken as a whole in fact. He expresses his true feelings but when on camera this is clearly not the person that most people he knew in real life ever met, he shares certain information in his manifesto but excludes other things that we’ve since found out about and are just as important, and of course during the shooting itself he was attacking representations of those he wanted revenge against rather than the various named individuals who bullied him or made him insecure or in some way were remembered negatively by him.

I’ve read his manifesto My Twisted World multiple times and I suppose what I (and everyone else) have always missed despite it staring you in the face is that it isn’t a manifesto, but neither is it an autobiography. Or at least it’s not merely an autobiography, there is something more to it. You might argue with this, after all he ends the document with a few pages on his supposed new political vision, that’s the definition of a manifesto. This vision is of a world that resembles the one from the Gor novels if they were run by Ramsay Snow. I’m talking about the Ramsay from the ASOIAF books, not the show adaption Game of Thrones who is quite a different character both superficially and in motivation/ desire. If you want to know how the book character looks, think of Advanced from the youtube documentary Shy Boys IRL. Now I don’t know if Elliot ever read any of the Gor novels but he was certainly a fan of ASOIAF and GoT, and he quite liked that character as well even using that name on some forums. In fact I’ve heard a rumour that he filmed a review of the most recent book in the series (A Dance With Dragons) but never uploaded it to his channel, or it was there but kept in private mode.

So was this absurd image of women kept in permanent servitude, chained up and used for breeding purposes alone, really something he seriously saw as a feasible future for humanity? Does anyone really think he actually believed he would pile up mountains of skulls and shed rivers of blood? I hope not, because it would be rather silly to take something so precisely written at face value like that. So on first reading (or watching, he provides us with a very similar hyper-violent vision in his last video from the night before the killings) I suppose it’s understandable to do so, he deliberately presents himself as delusional throughout the story, the most well known and memed example being of course when he talks about a period of time where he became obsessed with winning the lottery. Yet I must remind you that it is all deliberate, we know it’s deliberate because there was plenty of stuff he left out of the manifesto that has since been dug up by people. That is what I meant by saying it has been staring us in the face all this time, that My Twisted World is not just a manifesto and or an autobiography. See what is a manifesto, it’s an expression of intent. Before Elliot we didn’t think of mass killers when we heard the word we thought of political parties, in fact it’s funny how since Elliot included a manifesto as part of his whole project other shooters have started to do the same.

This is an aside but I’ve been writing up another post recently which talks about the old spaghetti westerns from the 60s and early 70s and while there were around 500 of them made there were only a few big trendsetters. Most famously of course the Sergio Leone films, but a few others, and what would happen is they would introduce a new kind of trope and then all the hundreds of copycats would try and include it. So in 1964 the world was introduced to Clint Eastwood’s infamous silent gunman Manco, and soon there were scores of stoic quick shooters in cinemas across the world. The second time The Man with No Name appeared he was working with a smartly dressed older gentleman played by Lee Van Cleef, and it wasn’t long before older mentors/ sidekicks were appearing all over the place, in many cases also played by Lee Van Cleef. If you take the mass shooting as a new performance tradition as I suggest it is in my other post on the subject, then the leaving of a manifesto is one of it’s tropes. There’s a lot of talk about how superhero/ comic book movies are the new spaghetti westerns, but I think that mass shootings have just as solid a claim to that legacy.

Now going back to the what I was talking about, My Twisted World isn’t a manifesto. No, the document is just another part of the performance art piece that is everything Elliot Rodger did publicly following the 20th July 2013. If you’ve read MTW before you’ll remember that as the night where he was beaten, robbed and humiliated. Now his youtube channel was also started after that date. Thanks to some helpful anons in a thread today I was able to confirm that his first video was uploaded on February 10th 2014, some time after he had finished healing from getting beaten up, and it was during that healing period where he started planning The Day of Retribution.

The Day of Retribution is not just a specific day though, and I know I’m beating a dead horse here, it is a grand art project with a deliberate message. That message is not merely “I’m angry about not getting laid!”, but rather that life for people like him is one that makes no sense. You’re given conflicting information, you’re told things you know are lies, and after long enough periods of isolation the whole world around you starts to seem a bit off or weird. I’ve actually been meaning to write a whole post about derealisation, and it was while thinking about the subject that I finally think I understood Elliot. A manifesto is a mission statement, it implies intent but it isn’t a vehicle of it, it doesn’t do anything itself. As I’m sure you’re aware though, I think that MTW does achieve something, and I think it was designed to.

Believe it or not it isn’t actually referred to as a manifesto within the actual document itself, there’s no subtitle or subheading where the word “manifesto” is used. No, only in the filename of the original PDF file he released is the word actually used. So here’s what I think, I believe that he kept that word in there as a reminder to himself. The filename is something he would see every time he went to open the document to keep writing on it, and as I’ve explained a manifesto is a mission statement. He was making sure that every time he went to keep writing he would be reminded that he was working towards something.

In his videos he’s clearly playing a character, all the ones where he’s standing in front of the camera anyway. He walks with a ridiculous swagger, he grabs his expensive designer shirt and accessories to wave them in your (figurative) face, he makes these silly smug and self satisfied facial expressions, he’s of course complimenting himself and talking about how great he is constantly, it’s like he’s trying his hardest to play the biggest “Chad”/ alpha male caricature he can think of. He’s going all in, and frankly while he was admittedly kind of short he was certainly rather handsome, enough that the character isn’t entirely unbelievable. If you didn’t know any better and weren’t paying attention to the subject and context of the video, you might very well just take this guy at face value. Yet it’s impossible to ignore what he’s talking about in these videos, that’s what makes it all so jarring. You have this overconfident Californian rich kid, who you’d assume has no trouble with girls whatsoever if you just saw him walking down the street, whinging and moaning about exactly that. It’s surreal, and I now see that this is deliberate.

MTW is full of contradictions, some passages are full of statements that imply a self loathing on his part and then the very next page he’s talking about fabulous and awesome he is, the supreme gentleman. He talks about his many insecurities, about how he hated being shorter than all the kids in his class, about how he always wanted blonde hair (and of course, we are all aware of his obsession with blonde haired women), about how all those “obnoxious brutes” were getting laid while it seemed like most people didn’t even acknowledge he existed. Then he goes on to talk about how perfect he is, how he’s got all these fancy items of clothing, a better car than anyone else at his university, or college as they call it in the US. He likes to mention that he’s descended from the aristocracy, and he was originally born here in England.

Again, if you take the “manifesto” at face value then sure he just comes off as deluded. Yet now I’ve gone through it a few times and really thought about this I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s meant to create a sense of derealisation as I said, it’s like in American Psycho where in some scenes Patrick Bateman is a narcissistic maniac who thinks he’s better than everyone and in other scenes his whole ego is at risk because he doesn’t have the best business card in the room. Now Patrick Bateman the character is deluded, it’s implied that he hallucinated all the murders, but the writer of the original novel and the director of the film aren’t.

See he says something that is incredibly revealing in his final video to us, “you always treated me like a mouse”. This line is deliberately there as a “character break” for those who would pay attention to show he was nothing like the Elliot from his videos that everyone knows him as, the bravado and bluster was a fiction. The line also further adds to the many disparities and contradictions which are used to create the sense of derealisation and disconnection from reality that runs throughout everything he released before the shooting. It wasn’t this line that really made me see this though, no it was actually some footage that he probably didn’t even know existed. I can’t find the video right now, only a shortened version, but there’s footage of him from the Hunger Games premiere (his dad had worked on the film), and there in the company of other people do you actually get to see the real Elliot Rodger.

He’s not a self confident, wealthy, west coast pretty boy. He’s a timid and, in the eyes of normalfags, weak and contemptible individual. He also reveals this side in the few videos on his channel where he interacts with other people, all of which have him behind the camera other than one very brief and unintended interruption from a car driving past. In fact, he actually very quickly tries to get out of shot as the car comes by, but those brief few seconds before he manages it are enough, you see his body language and demeanour change immediately. In those videos where he’s talking to other people, there’s one in particular where he returns to a park he has fond memories of visiting as a child, you can’t see him obviously but his tone of voice is completely different. All taken together, the videos on his channel, the candid footage of him, the remark about being treated “like a mouse” and the picture of what his day to day life was actually like if you pay close attention to My Twisted World and don’t just focus on the wacky highlights, a quite clear picture of who he really was comes to the fore.

Every time Elliot is brought up on r9k, every time there’s a thread about him, some fucking moron thinks he’s making an original statement by saying that he wasn’t like robots and that they shouldn’t relate to him. It’s been five years and they’re still ironically so self absorbed that they don’t consider that their basic fucking opinion might have already been considered before, but that’s not important. They say he was a narcissist, he was a dumb deluded rich kid who thought he was owed sex and affection. I don’t want to get into the many many stupid hot takes various normies have had about Elliot Rodger, but this one in particular does kind of relate to what I’m talking about. Because he did kind of play that character, so it’s at least understandable to think that is who he really was, at least if you’ve only seen a few videos or maybe just skimmed MTW once. If you’ve seen all this extra stuff, if you’ve read through some of his many forum posts and social media updates like I have, you should have a better understanding.

So why did he play this character, what was the point of it all? Well, I think it was in order to elicit that exact kind of criticism. That people would take this false persona, or at least this version of Elliot that was still in some sense the same person but also drastically different from who he was truly, and claim that it was his personality or character that was the reason he was lonely and miserable. The great irony being that of course if he actually had the balls to be the kind of person he was in his videos he would have never had any trouble whatsoever with women. If you’ve spent any amount of time thinking about these kinds of things, and if you’re a self identified robot (or incel, or foreveralone, etc.) then you have, you know this. Elliot really was just like you, and don’t let yourself be misled to believe otherwise.

I’ve talked before about normalfag “”””advice”””” and why it’s completely useless before on this blog, and I think Elliot came to a similar realisation. It’s not hard, I think most of us see through it that’s why phrases like “bee yourself” and “fake it ’til you make it” are memed so much. If it were so easy to fake it until you make it then Elliot from the videos would have been Elliot Rodger the real human bean, but as I’ve done my best to show in this post he wasn’t. So often will you hear people telling robots to be more confident, confidence is the key. PUAs and “manosphere” types are the most overt about this, they’ll literally tell you to act like a douchebag or a “asshole” as you say in the US, and it does actually seem to work out for them doesn’t it? It’s not just them though, even completely standard tier normies who live entirely within the overton window will tell you “confidence is the key”, “be assertive”, “be a man“. Even die hard radical feminists who rage and scream about how toxic gender roles need to be done away with find quiet/ creepy men repulsive.

There’s the thing though, they find you repulsive, and why on earth would someone want to help someone they see in that way? It makes you start to reconsider the supposed advice they’re giving you, if you don’t already see through it. So after the shooting happened suddenly that’s not the case at all, suddenly being overconfident and appearing to have a positive self image is actually the reason he was failing to get love and affection. As I said before all the contradictory statements and ways he presented himself were quite meticulously planned in order to create this sense of derealisation, like you can’t trust anything. Well he did it again, he got hundreds of thousands of people to start saying the exact opposite of what they had been saying before the shooting without batting an eye. Proving quite effectively I think that these people never wanted to help you, if anything they want to hurt and mislead you. I don’t want to hurt or mislead you, I love you. Happy retribution day!

The rise and fall and rise again of Anon

I’m struggling to think of anything interesting to talk about lately, and I’m also finding it hard to write the next part of the series going through my old books, but I do have something I’ve been thinking about maybe writing for a while. That is an update on what I’m trying to do here with this blog. See when I started I wasn’t quite sure what I had planned but whatever it was things have slightly changed. You can see for yourself the difference if you care to look through the posts from the first couple months. See in the beginning it was more autobiographical, I was talking about myself a lot more and even when I wasn’t I was still being more personal. So I would talk about what music I was listening to and the few actual things that were happening in my life, the kind of stuff you associate with the term “blog” funnily enough, but I stopped all of that because it felt kind of cringy and forced.

So when I first started I had a few entries that were basically just “my diary desu”, and they were all pretty awful other than the first one. I actually started off that post by saying that I was going to be using this blog as a diary, which is pretty embarrassing looking back. I’m not a 12 year old girl, I don’t need a diary, and the fact that I was so conceited as to presume anyone in the world would give a shit also makes me cringe a little. However in my defence, as you can tell if you’ve read that post I was clearly in a weakened state of mind at the time. Also that first entry, despite being a little self indulgent, was a pretty good one I think. It served it’s purpose, it was really helpful for me to get it all out, and I think I did a good job of finding the right balance between being impassioned and intelligible. I feel a bit weird wanking myself off so much about it, but people did seem to like that post so I think it’s fair to say it was a good one.

In fact if it hadn’t got such a good response from other anons for that initial main post I might have just ended it there (the blog I mean), but on the other hand because people did like it I perhaps tried to recreate it when I shouldn’t have. Like I said all the other entries like that were pretty bad, just as narcissistic but far less interesting and insightful. In fact I kind of had a feeling that would be the case before it happened, in the third post I wrote (which is a perfect example of one of the bad ones) pretty soon after that one linked above I was already planning to try and do something else with this blog, which is why I then went on to write that post about school shootings which was the fourth post and the one that has basically set the tone for this entire “project” from that point forward. However I still wrote quite a few more shitty “diary entry” style posts after that which were all bad and I’m only keeping them because I like being able to see how this thing has evolved.

So speaking of that fourth post, that’s a perfect example of what I was talking about in the opening paragraph to this one in that I kind of feel like it’s crucially flawed because I felt the need to keep that personal/ friendly vibe even though it doesn’t really fit. In fact if anything it takes away from what I’m trying to get across. The joke at the end about the song I was listening to feels out of place, especially without the context of the other posts I’d made so far. As a standalone piece of writing it doesn’t work because of that sort of thing. I guess I thought that I was putting a bit more personality in there, and in the specific case of mentioning a song helping to explain the kind of mood/ vibe I was trying to get across. I worry sometimes that people might miss that, I talk about things that are serious bidniss but it’s funny too. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying I’m funny, I’m saying I find things funny.

Now talking about myself or trying to be kind of tongue in cheek isn’t necessarily a bad thing in every case, but it has to be done right. I just don’t think I had found the right balance yet, maybe I still haven’t and I’ll feel the same about what I’m writing at the moment in half a year, but again I’ll keep all my posts up because I like seeing how this thing has evolved. Both in regard to the actual subjects I talk about, because of course I reference back to things in older posts a lot, and in terms of the structure and style of writing. I don’t know if I’m improving “objectively” because I don’t get any feedback, I’ve had two comments in my entire time writing, but I just feel like as time has gone on my posts have only become better examples of how I actually think and want to come across to people. Well not exactly, there was a slump for a few months where I kind of hit a wall and I was feeling like my best work was behind me, but I think since last January I’ve having a pretty good run.

Now I will almost certainly still talk about events in my life, both current and in the past, but only really as a means to talk about something more interesting I think. It’s nice to have the option to vent and just have someone in the world to hear (or read) what problems I’m going through, and so hypothetically there’ll be a post like that down the line, but I have a pretty fucking boring life so it’s not that likely. Speaking of using an experience as a jumping off point I have an idea for a post about a certain film that came out at the end of 2017 and I’d probably have to talk about my specific experience watching it (twice, and at the cinema alone one of those times) in that post. I know I said at the beginning of this that I didn’t have ideas, I started writing this yesterday and this idea came to me today.

Now looking back at my initial introductory post it seems like it still works just fine, but again it kind of has that kind forced friendliness/ jokiness and that just sets the wrong tone. I also notice looking back at it that I was maybe a bit too optimistic about the potential audience I could get for this. See I’ve already talked about this all before but I am a little disappointed that so few people want to stick around, and that I never get any comments. I mean it’s weird because most of what small audience I do have are people from r9k so it’s not like they don’t have opinions of their own on the things I tend to talk about. I was kind of hoping that there would be interesting discussions in the comments, that I could recreate a sort of microcosm of the few interesting and thoughtful threads that used to be more frequent years ago. Those threads used to feel like a good discussion between friends, and the experience with this blog instead of being like that as I hoped is more just like me sending a series of long e-mails about my opinions.

I know that people are hearing me, and I know that if they’re coming back they at least think my takes are interesting. The few times I’ve just openly shilled and tried to tell people about this elsewhere I’ve been given a positive response. In the thread I was talking about last time I not only got a really positive response in the thread itself, I also got the most views in a single day I’ve ever had. Maybe I should just shill more frequently, I’ve only actually done so maybe four or five times, and every time I get someone who sticks around for a while at least. It just feels a bit slimy and gross trying to advertise or openly beg people for attention. Because I do this for free, I don’t own the domain and so I cannot (and do not wish to) make money off of this, it doesn’t feel that bad but it’s still not something I feel comfortable doing.

In a way it’s kind of analogous to that thing normalfags always say about how “you don’t ever approach women, so why do you expect a relationship?”, I’ve noticed they really like to do this when Elliot Rodger is brought up. Well we all know how ridiculous that kind of point of view is if you look at the implication behind that statement, that all or most relationships start from a cold approach, of course they fucking don’t almost none do. So perhaps I’ve unconsciously recognised that parallel and that’s why I have this very prideful attitude regarding trying to “promote” or ask people to visit my blog. You’ve probably heard the expression “the cream rises to the top”, the idea being that things of value will just be recognised by people through some kind of force of nature. I guess I’m stupidly holding on to that, and because I’ve been here writing and have found so few who are interested in what I have to say maybe it really does mean what I’m doing isn’t very good.

I hope that’s not the case, there’s nothing more pathetic than someone with no talent or ability throwing themselves against a brick wall week after week deluding themselves that their brilliance is just unrecognised right now. I really never want to be that person, it’s why I can never really commit to anything. I really struggle to stick to anything without positive reinforcement and even then I usually doubt the nice words I receive. I’m surprised I’ve continued with this for so long, it’s quite fun I suppose and I have a lot of free time with nothing else to do. Nevertheless part of me does think that perhaps I am doing something valuable or at least interesting because as I said whenever I do ask people to check the blog out there are always some new people who think so. In fact I’ve only ever done so on 4chan, where almost everything gets shat on and torn apart and I’ve never actually had a single bad thing said about what I’m doing. Not even something mild like that it’s a waste of time, as I often fear myself. I’m not sure what to think.

The vanguard

I’m afraid I’ve been unable to make a coherent post about the subject of the thread I’m sure a few of you reading this recently found this blog in. I got quite far in, I had a good three or four paragraphs written at one point, but I just kept getting lost down these stupid tangents about the validity of surveys that claim to represent a greater population and stuff like that. I wasn’t able to actually look at that particular study, because you need to create an account on some site and I don’t want to, but I read the shitty Washington Post article the graphs were from and was unimpressed. You can look for it if you want, but I’m not going to put a link just so they can get a few more shekels and they’ve found a way around people putting their articles through archive.is as well. Anyway other people in the thread already pointed out a lot of the problems with the study.

So there’s this idea that there’s a rise in people not having sex, and in particular young men. What’s amusing is that it has only recently become something that is no longer fringe to talk about, as I said there was a Washington Post article talking about this. If you’d even suggested such a phenomenon existed a few years ago you’d be seen as a weirdo virgin or something. I mean the thread yesterday (probably not yesterday anymore by the time I finish writing this), minus the mainstream article (and study it talks about) linked, wouldn’t have seemed out of place in like 2014 or 2015. People say r9k has changed, but it really hasn’t, there’s another thread up right now again about the exact same thing. Now back in 2014 or 2015 I would have kind of just gone along with the same assumed reasons for this (and every problem) that are always posted several times in response to the OP. See it’s like a weird game we all play, redoing the same conversations over and over, like a pantomime. For whatever reason though, maybe because I’ve been away from r9k for a good few months and thinking about other things, I had a different take this time.

What I wanted to get around to saying, the point I planned to end on, is that I think a lot of people actually want this to be true and are therefore willing to accept the result of this survey without questioning it. Which gets into a deeper issue, in fact maybe doing this in reverse will help me explain myself better. By the way I just want to say I do believe there is an increase in people not getting laid or whatever, I’m just wary of going overboard. I think it’s probably less than people think, and I also want to make a distinction between some beta normie guy who doesn’t get laid very often and an actual khv or incel or whatever you want to call them. I care about the latter, they’re my guys, I don’t really care about the former. Yet both would be lumped in together by this study, and a lot of the incels who want to feel less alone in their plight will go along with this as I’ve said. The distinction is important because, even if you’re the opposite of me and you think incels are scum and want the other group to be happier, you’ll help neither if you try to help both.

For me to explain why I need to first talk about what it is that defines this plight or experience of inceldom. So oftentimes there’s this joke that is made, how can incels exist when prostitutes exist? HAHA GET IT? Now none of the people it’s aimed at take that seriously, but I don’t even think that most of the people who make those kind of jokes do either. Some do however, you do get people trying to make the same point not as a joke, but they’re a small minority of people. You know the type, the kind to say something like “dude sex is just putting a penis in a vagina lole how can you care so much about it?” thinking they’re making some kind of clever point.

Sure you might say that using a term like “incel” kind of does make it more about sex, and can you blame people for assuming therefore that’s the point of the term, but I think the success of that name over others is more for gatekeeping purposes. I did intend to write a whole post about that but I never got around to it. The thing is those things were being said before when these online groups were using names that left them more open to infiltration like “foreveralone”, “TFL” (which is a bit before my time) or “robot”. Even on r9k which was kind of adjacent to those spaces, though people will deny it because it wasn’t always that way, the term robot did after a while (around 2013 or 2014) kind of become another synonym for this kind of person. Now “robot” as a term certainly doesn’t mention sex and yet this point came up even there.

No the thing that makes an incel isn’t the fact that they’re not getting laid, it’s the things that result from and the reasons for them not getting laid. That’s what they talk about, that’s what they bond over, that’s what matters. It’s not really the lack of sex itself, defining themselves by that is sort of a way of them filtering out people who aren’t going through the same things. Because the problems that they have, like I said, are either leading to them being unable to find sex and companionship or are a result of that. See before when using other terms you always got infiltrators and by putting this filter up you can kind of take away the ability for those people to infest and destroy another place to talk and bond.

After all, what is sex about really? To me it doesn’t seem to be about the act itself, frankly I think that’s something you can take or leave, although I will admit I do seem to have a rather low libido. I fell for the nofap meme for a while, and while all the posts and videos I’ve seen about it talk about how it’s incredibly difficult and you get all these urges, I had no difficulty at all. I could easily never do it again, maybe it’s because I’m depressed? I’ve also just figured it out from hearing people talk about how much more desirous they are both in real life growing up and online, maybe there’s something wrong with me I don’t know. Multiple friends back in school told me that I seemed kind of asexual, which isn’t true it’s not like I don’t want to, I just don’t need to.

So I’m not saying that incels or robots or whatever new term may come into use don’t care about sex, I’m kind of an unusual case. My experience is of r9k, I’ve only actually visited incels.me a couple times to lurk and the same for any other forum or imageboard of the same variety like wizchan, and yes there are always a lot of threads about sexual frustration but I’m convinced that that’s not what most of these people are preoccupied with. It’s a secondary concern, but if you spend hours every day in this place you’ll end up talking about secondary and tertiary concerns after a while. These sites are where people go to let off steam, they talk about all kinds of things.

No, to have not had sex means that in some abstract way (because of contraception and birth control and so on) that you have been deemed unworthy of existence. Because it is ultimately just the means of reproduction and while most sex being had in the western world today isn’t for that purpose it still is recognised in that way in a figurative sense. People have not evolved to conceive of sex differently than they have for the last couple hundred thousand years in a few decades, they can only recognise consciously that “safe sex” isn’t the same thing. Not that this stuff is even something most kids give any thought to when they’re first starting to get into relationships anyway. We all unconsciously recognise that you’ve essentially been deemed unworthy of passing your genes on, that who you are in the most fundamental sense shouldn’t be a part of the greater human project going forward. Yes, nowadays more in a metaphorical sense but that doesn’t really matter.

I mean why is there such a huge obsession with the word “virgin”, generally speaking here. I’m talking about society as a whole. It’s an incredibly common schoolyard insult, it’s almost an inevitability that someone gets called it in any internet argument (quite fitting that it’s recently been systematised you could jokingly say by the “have sex” meme), it’s something no one wants to be called. Do I really need to explain this to anyone? That losing your virginity has become the rite of passage for the modern age. Which is also why it’s only really an insult used against men, because having sex is only an actual challenge for men. Not that it was always this way, the word virgin used to be used only for women, think of the 72 virgins that are promised to muslims in paradise, and yet that has gradually become reversed and now the word is almost masculine gendered you could say. Isn’t that interesting? I’m sure I could go on a whole long tangent about it.

See, “I want to lose my virginity” is a phrase that is very common among teenage boys. It’s not “I want to have sex, I want to experience what it’s like” although I’m sure they all do. No, of primary importance is “losing your virginity”, because that is ultimately what makes you a man in today’s world and the respect you earn is what matters more so than the act. A lot of robots refer to themselves as the bottom of the barrel, or something similar, omega males, the dregs of humanity, the bottom 1%, and so on. Now you get men who are uglier, who are mentally and physically weaker, who are more awkward, who are more cowardly, more bitter etc. than a lot of them, but they are men. Those men are the ones who are getting laid less often, they’re the growing demographic.

The percentage of young men not having sex may have gone up (although I will say again, even that is being exaggerated I believe) in the US and seemingly across the rest of the occident, but the number of male virgins isn’t really. I can’t find the exact stats, frankly it’s impossible to find a study with both a large sample size that also has an accurate demographic representation. At least, for a layman like me with no academic qualifications or access I can’t find anything that I really think is that trustworthy. Yet, all the smaller studies and things I find and have seen posted over the years do pretty much universally say that over the age of 25 something like less than 1% of men are still virgins. So just because similar numbers are so universal across all of these surveys and polls and such I think we can say that is close to accurate. I think we can say that to be a male virgin past your early 20s is incredibly unusual.

Now I’ve talked about school shootings and similar kinds of violence a few times, and I think I have a unique take. Now I never endorsed it but I will be honest I wouldn’t do anything to prevent it either if I somehow could. Yet I’ve been thinking, maybe some people actually do understand these acts in the same way I do. Now this is a bit “out there”, and I’m not even sure I believe this myself but it’s something to consider. The term incel only really became a mainstream thing around last spring/ summer, but it had been in use for many years before that, in fact I’m pretty sure Elliot used it. This sudden change is of course because of Alek Minassian, who openly referred to himself that way. So after that there was a big scare and it was funny for all of us to see the cable news boomers trying to make sense of chan lingo as always, but I think this time was different. The hacker known as 4chan has been getting segments on news channels for a decade, but this actually took off among real people. Incels, a group that no one seems to be able to define, were apparently a terrorist group now.

So there was some buzz about that for a while, you can say it was a trending topic… ugh, but then it died down a bit. Now a little time has passed and you start to notice mainstream publications like The Washington Post (but there are others, I remember a Daily Mail one specifically) all coming out with articles about this supposed decline in sex rates and specifically among the young male demographic. It’s almost like an attempt to pacify this small group of incels by leading them to believe they’re part of a larger group all suffering from a specific modern phenomenon rather than just the same tiny subsection of the population they always have been. No, such a phenomenon may exist but the incel situation is something separate. The only change for them is the fact that thanks to the internet they can now get together and form communities of a sort and that may lead to some kind of intellectual evolution regarding how they see themselves and society, which as you’re all aware we do live in.

There doesn’t really seem to be any kind of incel ideology despite what a lot of clickbaity youtube videos and news headlines might imply. At most you could maybe say that a lot of self identified incels, which aren’t necessarily all of them, believe in some idea of the blackpill. There’s also the whole lookism thing which I think is very interesting, and certainly no one else is talking about it, but maybe it’s seen as more of a big deal among that community than it really is. Or a better way of putting it would be to say that a lot of incels gravitate to it as the single explanation for their predicament and I just think that’s not the case. There’s rarely one single explanation for any phenomenon in life.

Now it’s pretty far fetched to suggest that there’s actually a deliberate conspiracy going on, I don’t honestly think that’s the case. It’s weird that this is suddenly a more mainstream topic, but if there was a real agenda you’d think they’d put a bit more effort in. I mean I’m just a dumb wageslave writing these extended effortposts in my free time and I was able to write something more substantive on the subject. No, there’s probably not any conspiracy for you to find here. It’s just funny that there could be, and going through it illustrates something. That the incels are likely to be more docile if they don’t realise how tiny and despised they really are.

 

Books: Part 3

Travels in Nihilon is a book I bought recently, and wrote a whole post about as well a few months ago, so I don’t have much more to say about it. Embarrassingly I’ve only noticed that insert/ edit link feature just now, brainlet moment… Anyway I’m hesitant to throw it away because it’s such a recent purchase, but I also think it’s likely I will read it again some day. It’s a short novel, and I found it quite charming. It has a very early 70s british science fiction feel to it, if that makes sense. Even though it’s not really a science fiction novel, I mean it could be described that way kinda, if you’re reaching. It reminds me of the first coloured episodes of doctor who (the few that I’ve seen) and it also very much reminds me of another book that I’ll talk about, Rebecca’s World by Terry Nation. Sometimes the best way to describe a feeling is with colour, so think mauve and burgundy.

Quickly though, I’m going to take the opportunity to say something about that other post linked above. One of the main things I talked about in it was this idea I’ve been kind of arrogantly putting forth as my own, of the “cultural” or “consensual” definition. It’s not a complicated idea really, I’ve just always noticed that many words are used slightly differently than how the dictionary says they should be. Or at least they evolve and take on a different meaning in some cases. It goes back to a discussion I had with my friend when we were about 14 or so. We walked past this bakery and I saw a pretzel, and I called it a “giant pretzel”. See, nowadays here where I live anyway “pretzel” is associated with these tiny things you can buy in packets. The big baked bread thing I saw had the same shape, so I called it a giant one. Now my friend told me that the original thing that was named pretzel in Germany whenever it was initially created looked a lot more like the “giant” one than these mass produced little things you can buy.

I didn’t think much about that discussion for years, until starting this blog actually. One of my first posts was about school shootings and the difference between the colloquial use of the term and the official definition and how that’s used to mislead people. Or at least that was one of the things I talked about. I still think what I have said was worth saying, but I regret implying or suggesting that this observation is particularly unique. I do think I came to it independently, I just don’t think that it’s terribly impressive. I imagine it’s something that’s just apparent to most people, and not something they consider as worth commenting on. I could be wrong though, maybe this is just my self doubt talking.

IMG_20190426_143435

Rebecca’s World is really quite strange, and it’s funny that I also mentioned the early Doctor Who episodes (which are nothing like the show that exists today, assuming it’s still running I haven’t watched it in a few years) because the writer Terry Nation was apparently also involved in that show, and was the mind behind the daleks which I would imagine are the most famous monsters from the show. Now I used to love this book, it was a gift from my uncle’s partner (they’ve lived together for over a decade and have children but never actually got married) and she’d had it since her own childhood and I remember reading it and rereading it many times over. It’s essentially just an adventure story, think something like Alice In Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz. A little girl gets lost in a strange world, and with the help of some new and unusual friends manages to eventually get home safely. What I liked about it so much was how surreal and colourful the world was, and the many illustrations that accompany the words are fantastic. In fact I’ve taken a few pictures to use throughout this post, because I couldn’t find any of the illustrations online anywhere, and they remind me quite a lot of some of the work of one of my favourite artists Moebius. I’ve used one or two of his works for header images here before as well.

IMG_20190426_151307

Now as I don’t remember the book very well I don’t have much to say about it, nor do I even have a tangent I could go off on inspired by it. Sticking to the main point of these posts though, this is the first book in the pile that I’m quite conflicted about. On the one hand, it is just a children’s book and I doubt I’m going to get much use from it. In fact the only real reason I can think to hold on to it is because perhaps one day there’ll be someone I want to give it to. If that’s the case though, I could probably find another copy on Amazon or whatever equivalent there is in the future. I know that this specific copy would be more meaningful, after all it was a gift to me and I’d be passing it along further, however even if I give it to a charity shop I’d still be passing it along. It is a little damaged, so there is a chance they’d just throw it away, but I wouldn’t ever find out. I’m just thinking how likely it is that that would actually happen, that there will ever be a child for me to pass it along to. Honestly if this book is going to send me down that rather upsetting train of thought than perhaps that alone is good reason to get rid of it. Not that I do look at it often, the last time I read through it was over a decade ago. I think the right decision is to let it go, even if it’s a difficult one. Here’s one last picture from it.

IMG_20190426_143443

Speaking of the surreal I also have a copy of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs that I never did manage to finish. In fact I didn’t even get through the second chapter, supposedly they can be read in any order but I started at the beginning. I just found it unbearable, same with The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon which I also only managed to finish one chapter of. On first glance both books seem rather similar, although I’m sure that there’s someone who could explain why they’re not. After all Thomas Pynchon is celebrated as a literary genius and The Crying of Lot 49 is considered a masterpiece of postmodern fiction whatever that is meant to mean, filled with subtle cultural and philosophical references. Whereas William S. Burroughs and Naked Lunch in particular doesn’t seem so widely appreciated, there’s more of a cult following there although Naked Lunch is seen as something that broke new ground.

They seem rather similar to me, both books have a plot that comes secondary to the various asides the authors go down. You must have heard the expression “read between the lines” which suggests that if you pay close attention you’ll realise that there’s more to a text than what is immediately apparent. In the case of a novel or short story, perhaps that would mean there are certain themes and ideas that underlie the plot. In the case of these books it’s like those things have been dredged up and brought to the forefront, while the plot sinks below the surface. Anyway I tried with both, but I couldn’t make any progress. Some part of me doesn’t want to get rid of them, because they’re both kind of respected and held up as something you should read. I imagine they’re in a lot of lists of books “you should read before you die”, you see those all over the place. I also don’t like throwing away gifts and The Crying of Lot 49 was one, and recently too my uncle gave it to me for my birthday I think last summer, but I just don’t actually think I’ll ever read it. I think they both can go.

I know this is quite a short entry, and at the rate I’m going this could drag out to another three parts, but I’ve just been working a lot this week and also doing a lot of very early morning shifts so by the time I get home I don’t have the energy to write. It’s been over a week since the last upload though and if I don’t just upload something today it could just be there as a draft until Friday. Maybe next post will be about something else, and then I’ll come back to finish going through these books later down the line.

Link to Part 2

Link to Part 4

Books: Part 2

Poem For The Day is a poetry anthology, as you can probably tell from the title. It presents a poem for each day of the year, including February 29th. It’s not really my book, it was one of my mum’s books, I’ve just held on to it for some reason. That’s going to be changing though, because this is one of the ones I will be getting rid of. I’ll probably donate it to the charity shop, along with all the others I decide I don’t want to keep anymore. Now I was very close to throwing this one out last time I went through “pruning” my book collection, but I kept hold of it for a reason that is rather similar to what I was talking about at the end of the last post.

Poetry as an idea is held in very high regard by a lot of people, but I’ve just never been able to really appreciate it. Or at least I don’t feel like I have, there are a few (and I really mean a few, a mere handful) poems that I really appreciate and have enjoyed or found helpful in some way, but even with those I feel like there’s something I’m missing. The very structure of poetry is something that has always seemed overwhelming to me, there are all these complex rules and different things going on at once. Metre and iambs and line breaks, I just don’t know where to start and I’ve always felt very restricted by it. I think I mentioned before me and my friend both wrote things of our own, and I never paid attention to any of those kinds of rules. I couldn’t explain to you what makes the structure of the sonnet form for example, I understand why the more intuitive aspects of poetry appeal to people like rhyme and the use of symbolism or imagery but that’s it really. Conjuring up a pretty picture, or a rather frightening or unpleasant one for that matter, isn’t a technique exclusive to poetry however. Anyone can do it, it takes no real talent. The best work, or at least what seems to be considered so by those who know what they’re talking about, does far more than pair similar sounding words.

I don’t have any interest in writing poetry though, I just want to be able to get the same enjoyment from reading it that so many other people seem to be able to and I can’t. That’s what I’m getting at when I talk about how restrictive it can be, it requires study to enjoy it. No other art requires that. Yes if you have an understanding of the complexities of say music theory for example, you will gain a far deeper appreciation for the music you already love (whether it be a famous piece from the classical period or a pop song you have fond memories of), but you do already love them. You can be a layman and find beauty in any of the other fine arts, and in fact that initial response you have to a particular work might be what inspires you to learn more.

I have another poetry book that I will be keeping however, it’s The Puffin Book of Fantastic First Poems. See my mum, unlike me, did seem to genuinely like and enjoy poetry. Both reading it and writing her own. In fact she had a collection of her own published, and my uncle and I were recently asked for copyright clearance by the national poetry library on some of her work. There are a few copies here at home but they’re with my dad’s books. Thinking back, I imagine she bought this puffin book for me in the hopes of inspiring that same love of poetry she had within me. To be honest, looking back it does seem that at the time she was right. I have very fond memories of this book, I can remember distinctly how much fun I had reciting my favourite ones over and over. That’s the reason I’m going to be keeping it, I know I said last week that I shouldn’t let sentimentality stop me from holding on to things that I don’t really value, but I do really value it. There are definitely other books from my childhood that I remember fondly which I will be getting rid of, because as I said I don’t plan to return to them and I doubt I’ll have children to pass them on to. I do return to this puffin book every few years though, and I think having that portal back to my early childhood can be helpful sometimes. It’s not just the poems contained inside, it’s the delightful watercolour illustrations, it’s my name scribbled on the inside of the cover, the tears and slight damage.

That I was reading these poems aloud, back when I first got this book as a child, is I think what gave me such an appreciation for them. After all poetry is meant to be spoken ultimately, not read. Again there’s this romantic idea people have of certain poems that are special to them and that they’ve memorised being something they can repeat to themselves in times of great peril or distress. Providing them with a sense of hope, or at the very least respite from the darkness surrounding them, like the shining light of Earendil’s star in Frodo’s phial. Or there’s the image of ancient greek hoplites reciting long passages of the Iliad to their comrades on the eve of battle to remind themselves of their noble ancestors. Poetry is this thing we all have great respect for, but it never seems to quite live up to the hype. Or maybe this is just another reason for me to feel like a stupid person, it’s hard to tell. Maybe anything other than poems for little children is too complex for me, or maybe if I’d have grown up in a time before thousands of TV channels and millions of youtube videos I’d have developed differently in this regard.

There are some “real” poems (for adults, or whatever) that I like too, “On A Portrait Of A Deaf Man” is one I’ve returned to quite a few times over the last half decade. In fact for one of my final GCSE exams (those are the tests we take around the age of 15 here) I wrote an analysis of it. If I read what I wrote for that today I’d probably be quite unimpressed with myself, after all I was only a teenager with a much poorer understanding of things than I realised at the time. However I think that maybe the fact that I had to spend a lot of time really thinking about every line might be why I was able to develop an appreciation for this poem when I so rarely can.

The poem itself is an elegy for the poet’s (Sir John Betjemen) father, so if you are a regular here you’ll understand why it resonated with me. I think what’s so special about it is the honesty, there’s no hiding the grief felt by the poet here. One heartfelt expression from someone still grieving, is more helpful than a hundred people who’ve “been there”. You can feel it in the way he keeps returning to the gruesome imagery of decay and rot, I know how those thoughts can torment someone following a death. My mother wasn’t buried she was cremated, but for me the way she looked when I went to see her in the chapel of rest wouldn’t leave me. Several times a day every day for months, this image of her corpse would pop into my head. I was terrified just to go to sleep at night. It was horrific, she didn’t even look like the same person. They had tied her hair back in a ponytail, she never wore her hair like that. The state of mind of the poet mirrored my own at the time so closely, it’s remarkable really. The regret he expresses for things left unfinished also stuck with me, it was really helpful at the time and even reading it again nowadays I find it comforting.

I’ve spent way too much time just on these two books, when there’s a lot to get through. I tried with this daily poem idea, but I just couldn’t get anywhere. For a few months once I did read the suggested poem every day, and I felt nothing. It was a chore that I gained nothing from. Maybe I’ll be able to slow down mentally one day, and take my time and try to find what so many others can in poems. If I do, I imagine I will seek out a collection that touches on themes I care about already rather than a book like this one which seemingly has no consistent idea running through it. The poems inside could have been picked totally at random. I do have one more small collection of poems, it’s a tiny little thing. The Lord Tennyson edition of the English Poets in Pictures series. It’s a nice book, certainly the oldest I own as it was published in 1941, but after thinking about it I have decided I’ll be getting rid of it as well. I’m just not going to actually read it, I already know. If I were to keep it, it’d be as decoration, and I don’t want that.

Ok, moving on to something else now. I’m going to talk about the Harry Potter books. I own all seven, and this extra little book of short stories set in the same world. If I’m being honest I’d already made my mind up on these from the start, in fact it was me seeing them collecting dust recently that made me decide to finally do this clear out. I’m never going to read them again, and even if I do have kids one day I don’t think I’d want to give them these to read. Not that I’d have a problem with it, there’s nothing offensive or unhealthy for a developing mind in them, there’s just nothing especially meaningful or useful either. I’m not sure what the point of any of it is, what is the “message” you’re meant to take away from these books. Maybe something about friendship, I will say that because the books went on so long they were able to show friendship in a way that is quite unique. I think that, more than what some people speculate about how J. K. Rowling included a lot of traditional archetypes and ancient themes (possibly not entirely intentionally) or whatever, is what really appealed to so many people back when the Harry Potter phenomenon was really at it’s height.

See I was a little late for that, I went to a midnight release for the final book when I was about nine or ten with a friend of mine (and our parents of course) and I hadn’t even actually read all of them yet. I actually read the books in the wrong order, because I already knew the basic story outline from the films that were out at the time. It was that midnight release that got me interested in reading the books actually. I read the later books, then went back to read the ones which had films out already. By the time the “second phase” of Harry Potter mania was at it’s peak with the last film release I was already kind of over it. The time period where I was really a “fan” was in between these two moments in popular culture. What I remember appealing to me (at least consciously) wasn’t these ancient motifs that thousands of essays/ blogs and youtube videos might suggest as the reason behind the series’ success, but the little character moments.

These books are character driven ultimately, that’s what the common thread is between it and the thousands of other copycat stories in the torrential storm of crappy YA novels that followed the success of Harry Potter. There are also certain tropes, and story beats too, but the appeal really is in the characters. They feel like friends to a lot of the people reading. If I wanted to be snide I’d say they’re glorified soap operas, but that would be quite reductive as they’re obviously more than that (some anyway), I’ll say instead they both satisfy the same desire. Not only that, but they also all buy into this all too prevalent meme going around nowadays of the “relatable, flawed character”. That’s what I don’t like. I don’t mind character driven stories, or stories more generally speaking. By that I mean stories told for the sake of telling a good story, I hope I didn’t give the wrong impression earlier talking about how there didn’t seem to be any “message”, sometimes there doesn’t need to be. A good adventure tale is a perfectly valid thing.

In fact a good counter to the Harry Potter books (and all the copycats) as far as character driven fiction goes would be the A Song of Ice and Fire books by George R. R. Martin. Of course, they’re better known as just the Game of Thrones books after the TV show (and first book) today. They are absolutely character driven, the very structure of the story is a series of POV style chapters named after the person whose perspective you’re getting. The style of writing is even slightly different in each case to further bring you into the specific inner world of each character. The collection of any one character’s chapters is usually a self contained story of it’s own, especially in the later books, but they also weave together and in that you see the complex nature of the feudal hierarchy that is fundamental to this story. Reading it you really get the sense of this delicate environment of unwritten rules about who can say what and to who and under what circumstances. The complexity of the world and specifically the relationships between everyone (which the show completely dropped after season 1, and could’ve done a better job of showing even then) is what makes these books so compelling.

Now there’s so much more to these books than that as well. The very presentation of such a political and social system is obviously also a way of him criticising it and others that he considers analogous. Which by the way I don’t necessarily agree with, in fact I think from what interviews I’ve seen and read I might quite fundamentally disagree with Martin on some crucial things. Religion, social organisation, human nature, politics, gender roles, all things that these books touch on. As I said though these books aren’t really about any of those things, rather Martin himself is about those things and therefore they can’t help but come out in this incredibly complex world he’s built. The world and plot come second to the characters and their development, it’s clear upon reading that even some major plot points that could have a crucial affect on the ending of the story were only thought up during the writing of the later books. Yet he’s had an outline of where the major characters will grow and develop from the start.

Now the characters in this story are certainly mostly “grey” in a sense, but I don’t think any of them can be considered relatable. In fact the attempt to make these characters this way in the show is one of the many reasons for why it has disappointed so many people. To be clear George is just as on board the bandwagon of hating on the traditional presentation of heroes and villains, morally perfect paragons of virtue fighting against real evil, because god forbid people have any kind of figure to aspire to emulate right? Nevertheless he doesn’t fall for the “flawed protagonist” and “sympathetic villain” memes, there are no main characters or antagonists really. There are characters who are set up to be, and then you end up in their head several books later. You’re not meant to have a favourite, if anything I think you’re meant to feel a bit alienated. This system the characters live in, it’s so different and the characters have a mindset that really does seem closer to people from the middle ages than people alive today. I’m not saying that the books are able to completely recreate the complexity of medieval courtly life but they do a pretty good job. Yes the characters might deal with insecurities and feelings and desires that people do today, but it expresses itself quite differently.

Now go back to Harry Potter, the characters are just like normal people, they’re your friends. They’re the people you grew up with, in more than one sense for a lot of people who were around a similar age as the characters when the books were coming out. Harry Potter is an archetypal “flawed protagonist” as are the major secondary characters (although weirdly enough, Voldemort is actually quite a traditional “truly evil” antagonist), they’re literally schoolkids who go through all the usual ups and downs that people go through at that age. Sure they’re thrust into these fantastical circumstances with all kinds of crazy creatures and bad guys to stop but that stuff is kind of secondary. In fact the surrounding plot and world seem to be even less important than in ASOIAF. J. K. Rowling just seems to have grabbed any and every kind of folkloric myth she comes across and shoved it all together. This is where all the ideas about her tapping into some kind of Jungian mind meld or whatever come from. It’s just not true though, the reason these books are so loved is not because a bunch of modern teens felt some kind of spiritual pull from witches and werewolves, it’s because in some sense they see the main characters as friends.

There’s this quote I remember hearing that was attributed to Nietzsche, but could be fabricated, it doesn’t matter really. It was about Thus Spoke Zarathustra his famous novel (which I haven’t read, in fact I’ve read nothing from Nietzsche) and he was talking about how he felt it had taken on a life of it’s own. The idea was that the book had grown beyond him, that when he read it back to himself he felt he gained a new insight. His own work, that he had written with great care as a means of expressing his own views, was now teaching him something new. I just thought it was funny, because the way people like me who haven’t actually read his work conceive of the man is as someone who everyone has a different interpretation of. The many different explanations of what he believed and was trying to say can sometimes seem wildly different, yet these people who might completely disagree with one another both on Nietzsche and everything else, both think that there’s something of great value to be found in his writings.

Now I’m not comparing ASOIAF to any great philosophical work, it is essentially just genre fiction and I know that any “real intellectual” would sneer at it just as much as they would at the Harry Potter books. All I want to say is that I see a very similar thing happening. There are a lot of blogs and youtube channels which are dedicated to talking about and analysing these books, on top of that there are a lot of political, philosophical and miscellaneous ones who have also made posts about them, and the interpretations vary quite a bit. For every worthwhile or interesting one there’s ten morons who have nothing of value to add (like me) but that’s the case even with actual “real profound works of literature” also. Even though George R. R. Martin himself is pretty explicit about his views, there are people who will argue that they interpret what the book has to say about things such as politics or philosophy entirely differently. The books have kind of outgrown him, and George isn’t just a guy who has opinions, he’s a guy who has strong opinions. He was an anti war activist in his youth and an atheism advocate, and many of his other short stories from the 70s are far more explicitly political. On the other hand J. K. Rowling from what little I do know about her seems like a very fair weather friend to any cause she associates herself with. She’s just on board with the consensus of her time for the most part, which for now is social progressivism and economic liberalism with cushions.

I think that this is why despite both books (or at least both stories) occupying a similar role in popular culture, one inspires all these interesting people to read and re-read the books and come up with all kinds of interpretations and the other does not. That’s why I’m not going to ever read the Harry Potter books again and will be giving them away, and why I am very much looking forward to the completion of the story of ASOIAF and will read them all again some day. I also realise now that I’m going to have to split this post up into more parts than I thought last week. I hope this was an enjoyable or interesting read.

Link to Part 1

Link to Part 3

Books: Part 1

I like to throw things away, to clear out clutter and old things I’ll never need or use, it’s quite satisfying. What’s funny is that I find cluttered environments can be very /comfy/, piles of old books and stacks of notes, weird ornaments, wooden chests or boxes lining the hall. I find bare and minimalist home interiors generally feel rather sterile and uninviting. Yet over the last four or five years I’ve been slowly (or more like in a few short frenetic sessions, spread months or years apart) turning my flat and my room in particular from the former into the latter.

When my mum passed away I moved into the room that had before been hers because my dad wasn’t willing to take it, and he moved into what had been my room until then. I had a lot of stuff, and it was over the few days it took to move everything that I really recognised how much crap I had. I’d been in that old room since the age of about 9, and along with bringing all my old toys and things from where I’d lived before I had collected quite a lot more. Wherever I was in there, a distraction was literally at hand at any moment. I could be lying on the floor in the middle of the room, or at my desk with the really old and slow desktop computer I used to have back then, or sitting on my bed, and just grab one of the books or action figures strewn across the floor.

The first things that had to go were all my toys, and this stage I suppose is pretty normal. Most kids reach an age where they decide it’s time to put childish things aside. Just like that line from the bible about becoming a man, and although I wouldn’t call myself a man even today I no longer saw myself as a boy either. Now it wasn’t easy to just discard these toys of mine because I’d developed quite a little universe for them to live in, every one of them had a story and they all had stories they shared together as well. I took them all together in a bag and gave it to my dad to take to the second hand shop, with this romantic idea in my head that they were going off together for more adventures, although in reality who knows. I imagine they were mostly sold separately.

I used to keep all of these toys in several plastic boxes (or at least I did in theory, as I said they spent most of the time everywhere in my room but the boxes), I had actually had them my entire life I believe. They were bought before I was born by my parents, blue, green and orange. I threw two of those away as well, and several other plastic boxes and containers that I had been keeping other things in, mostly stationery stuff like pens and pencils but also paint brushes and art supplies. So at some point, maybe now we’re at a year or just under since my dad moved in, I decided that all these boxes and what was in the ones that were still full all had to go as well. See I hadn’t actually used any of this stuff in years, I had long since lost interest in arts and crafts and that sort of thing. I was still taking art classes at school, and enjoying it for the most part, but in my own free time I had no desire to spend my time on that sort of thing.

I remember in particular I had these watercolour pencils which came in this lovely metal case and had a beautiful painting of a forest on one side, presumably that had been painted using the same pencils. I think they perfectly exemplify exactly what bothered me so much about all this stuff I had. As I said I like clutter, and “things”, but not just any old things. They have to be meaningful and valuable to me, not valuable in terms of market value or whatever (although the two may coincide, things that take more care or time to produce generally come at a greater cost) but rather in terms of how much I want to and am glad to own them. It’s not something that can really be measured or graded. The fact that I could so easily throw so many of my things away, shows how little value they had to me for example. It’s not that I’m unsentimental, I had memories attached to some of these things or at least they had been the decoration to my childhood, but that’s not quite the same thing. This is why the pencils are such a great symbol. I remember my mother buying them for me when I was very young. I remember the few times I had used them, and I remembered them always being there on the shelves, and when it came to it and I was throwing them out I did feel a tinge of melancholy. More importantly though, I knew that I wanted to be rid of them. It was like they were a weight, holding me down in the past.

Modern life is buying lots of things rather cheaply and then buying some more, if you’ll pardon my pretentious attempt at pithiness. That idea of value I was talking about, it’s hard to define no matter the circumstance but in the specific one I inhabit especially so. That being a modern, consumer capitalist, first world country.. or something idk. Ideally, I want to be proud of every single thing I own and glad to have it. When you’re surrounded by a sea of junk though it’s hard to identify and distinguish the things you value (in the sense that I’ve been using it so far) from everything else. This sentimentality for or attachment you have to a lot of stuff you grew up alongside just because it’s familiar can feel rather similar to the feelings you have towards something you truly value. These pencils are the perfect example because they really were of no value to me at all, if anything I had “negative” value for them as I wanted not to own them, and yet I found it hard to throw them away. I hadn’t used them in years, I never planned to again, yet it was still sad.

So that was good enough for me for quite some time, I had cleared out a lot of junk and things I didn’t use and also got rid of my toys. It wasn’t until a good couple years later that the urge to purge returned, but return it did. Now we’re in the summer break just after I had gone through the first year of my A-Levels (and dropped out, as I mentioned in the last entry) and I remember quite well I was just sitting in my room with nothing to do one afternoon and I started looking through all the piles of papers and textbooks that were piled up under my bed. See I’d just been throwing everything under there since I’d moved into the room. School textbooks, homework I’d forgotten to hand in, drawings and shitty poetry and weird notes I’d written to myself, just piles and piles of this crap. So I spent several hours a day, for a few days, going through it all and then immediately tearing it all up and putting in several huge bin bags to throw out. That wasn’t enough though, I looked at my old bed which I’d had for years and was starting to fall apart and I decided it should go as well. I took my dad’s screwdriver and I loosened all the planks one by one until there was just a pile of wood. I’ve slept with just a mattress on the floor ever since, so for about five years. I put a mat underneath it to keep it aired well and also I turn it over every weekend and change all the bedding of course.

So a pattern was developing where after a long period of time I’d throw away quite a lot and replace it with nothing. I had in my head this kind of pseudo-buddhist sounding idea that the attachment I had for these things was unhealthy and I did have a minimalist goal in mind. I felt like they were a liability, that the mere fact of owning something that could potentially be stolen or damaged made me weak. There were other things I threw away in a few other sessions like I’ve previously described. I got rid of a lot of old photographs, and I sold a lot of my old videogames and DVDs. I threw away a lot of clothes although I obviously did replace those, but now I have a much smaller and more deliberate wardrobe. I could do a whole separate post on the subject of clothing, frankly I’ve been meaning to since the early days of this blog but haven’t found the right way to do so, there is a lot more to talk about on the subject than you might initially think.

The one last thing I do need to mention though, before getting on to the actual task I had in mind before starting this post, is the books. I probably got rid of 60-70% of the books I owned, some time in 2014 I think. I threw away enough of them that I was able to also throw away the book shelf I was keeping them on and move what was left onto the other more general shelving unit I have. This was a little later down the line, and I had kind of dropped that minimalist ideal and was closer to the perspective I have now of just wanting to own only things I was proud of or glad to have. It was mostly children’s books to be honest, I don’t regret throwing any of them away, in fact I kept a lot more than I perhaps should’ve.

Which takes us to where we are today, see I threw away a lot of YA and younger children’s books which I’d been given and never read or only read once but not cared for much, but that’s mostly it. A lot of those kinds of books come in long series as I’m sure most people are aware, so for example I was really into these books when I was pretty young (maybe seven or eight years old) which were about the adventures of a kid called Jiggy McCue and his friends. Each book was a different adventure, and there were about ten or maybe more of these. Now that was a particularly big series, most of these were trilogies or sets of three or four, but after getting rid of all of these book series that I hadn’t read in years I realised how small my “library” really was. It was mostly just padding, the problem was the sentimentality which hadn’t stopped me before was harder to overcome this time, and because of it I kept some books which I know I’ll never read again (and as it’s unlikely I’ll have children of my own, so nor pass on to them) simply because of the fond memories I have from them.

Now it’s taken me a lot longer to just get to this point because I’ve been writing very little lately, and even though I’m no longer uploading a new post every week I still don’t want huge gaps between new posts, so I’ve decided to split this into two parts. There is one last thing that I was planning on talking about in this posts though so I’ll end this first part with that rather than going through the books and in part 2 I’ll do the sorting. My plan is (appropriately, given the title of this blog) not just to list the books I own, because that would make for a rather short post, but to use them as jumping off points to talk about various things.

Right, so all this talk about books lately, and specifically physical copies of books, has really made me think. See, from the time of the oldest examples of writing until as recently as two decades ago if you wanted to experience literature then physical copies of the work you are interested in were the only option for you. Nowadays, you can find most of what you may want to read online for free relatively easily. Of course, specialist things like maybe medical textbooks or very obscure works you might not be able to find, but most of the things that most people are interested in reading (even just among bookish types) are easy to find online. If not for free, then you can still save space and a lot of money by using an e-reader. For a lot of the reasons that one would choose to buy a book, going digital is objectively the better choice.

On /lit/ there was a thread recently where this guy claimed he had decided to “start with the greeks” and had spent nearly £1000 (or maybe dollars, I don’t remember) on Amazon ordering copies of various translations of classical works. Collected plays, history books, philosophical texts, and religious stuff. Now it’s highly likely that he didn’t actually do it, although what a fucking madman if he did, but still you do get a lot of people who will spend quite a bit all at once because they like the idea of owning and reading a lot of books more than they actually enjoy reading. Someone actually said something like that in the thread. Or at least, people who have this romanticised view of themselves after they make these purchases as autodidactic hermit philosophers, and I’ll be honest I’ve caught myself recently almost falling into the same trap.

The thing is, with these new cheaper and easier alternatives these people are revealed. If you really want to read as much as possible then why would you spend more money and time waiting for it to arrive or having to go to the bookstore yourself. It makes no sense at all, sure people give silly little explanations when pushed, like “staring at a screen too long, especially before bed, is bad” or that physical copies “feel nicer” but these are so transparent if thought about for more than a second. If physical copies are nicer you can still go to a public library, but well then you wouldn’t have a cool shelf to share a picture of in the weekly “bookshelf thread” on /lit/, and that just cannot be.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that bookish types/ bookworms are generally more withdrawn or reclusive people. I’m not able to actually justify that statement, but the stereotype is as old as Emperor Claudius at least if not older so that surely counts for something. So I understand that not only do people who spend more time at home want to make this environment they spend so much time in nice to look at and be in (as I said right at the start of this post, I also understand a big collection of old books and things can be cosy), and also that if they have a nice home environment then that can sort of retroactively justify them having not spent much as much time socialising and having fun with people in their youth than they perhaps wish they had. I understand that and I’m not attacking anyone, I just think that self awareness is important and we should think about why we want the things we want.

All I think is that bibliophilia is quite superficial, it’s an aesthetic choice, fetishism even. You don’t have to actually love literature or reading to “love” books, and these recent technological developments make it more clear. There’s only one argument I’ve heard that doesn’t feel completely hollow to me, and it’s funny because it’s also kind of built on the changes in technology that have taken place over the last few decades. See, nowadays we have more distractions than ever and it’s very easy to never end up finishing what you’re reading. You might have a PDF of a book on one tab and just leave it for months. If you actually spend quite a bit of your own money on a book on the other hand, perhaps that will make you more inclined to “get your money’s worth” so to speak. Anyway I’m not saying that buying and collecting books is a bad thing to do, I just think it’s good to think about these things.

Link to Part 2

Fell for the IQ meme

Unease, I can’t escape it. I would say that it’s the only constant in my life, the forms just morph or intensify. I’ve had a really tough week, but at the same time it’s been really easy. I’ve had four days off work, I’ve had all the free time I need to write, yet it’s now sunday evening (a week since my last upload) and I’ve got nothing. It’s not that I haven’t tried, it’s not that I don’t have things I want to write about or at least did want to at one point. I’ve just not been able to actually do it. I’ve been thinking a lot this week, about all my failures and about how silly all of this is, and it’s really hard to sit down and write when having such thoughts. I suppose I’ve just been reminded of how much of a midwit I really am, and it’s difficult to feel confident sharing anything when you’re in that state of mind.

See at the thing last sunday (which actually went really well, this spiral of insecurity I’ve been on started after saying goodbye to everyone) one of my co-workers mentioned that she’s writing her dissertation for her degree at the moment. I think I remember her saying it was an English degree, although there are all kinds of those so that’s not very helpful. Anyway, even though I knew she was a student already as she mentioned it the first time we met when I was still training, I guess I didn’t really know it until that moment. Now, I always feel bad saying something that might be insulting or rude about someone who has only been nice to me, but if I’m being honest this girl seems to fit the “thot” archetype in some ways. Not just in the way she looks and dresses, but in the way she communicates, after all these things kind of go together.

To be more clear what I mean, because that term is used in two different ways, sometimes just as a synonym for bimbo/ sloot/ etc. updated for the 2010s which is not the version I’m using, and on the other hand to describe a certain and very specific kind of person that has only really existed for the last decade at most. It’s of course a young woman but with a certain style of dress that contorts their body into a pretty uniform shape, and a particular kind of make-up use, but also it’s the way they seem to interact with the world. It’s hard to really find the words to describe it, but I suppose I’d say it’s like talking to someone who is only half lucid. It’s more than just the words they use, think of someone who only engages with the world through the various artificial constructs and systems we use to make sense of everything. Not that to do the opposite and oppose any kind of systematisation is necessarily “clever”, but it’s like someone who never went through that phase that I imagine a lot of kids go through in their early teens where they will obnoxiously point out how everything is “a social construct”. It’s this weird feminine stoicism you could call it, where they just sort of take things in life at face value without giving it too much thought.

I’ll give an example, an ironically rather appropriate one given the subject of this post. Some months back we were switching shifts and she asked me what A-levels I took (A-levels are the qualification you study for at the ages of 16 to 17 here in the UK, although it’s isn’t unusual for people to take three years) and I told her that I took Physics, Chemistry, Maths and Psychology. Now her reply, which I can’t recall word for word, went “oh wow those are really hard how did you do it?” or something very similar. I then told her that I didn’t, I failed the first year and never went back to try again. That’s not important though, I mean it is actually because I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week, but for this specific example I mean. See it reminded me of how I used to look at school/ education before I went through the phase I was just talking about above. I suppose I saw it like a collection of various completely distinct subjects. See they call them subjects and you have different teachers who are trained to teach each one, and of course you have to take different kinds of tests, but in “the real world” knowledge isn’t separated into subjects.

See when I did go to do my A-Levels, the physics and maths curricula specifically were heavily reliant on one another and the chemistry course also was much easier for the students taking those two courses. The reason I was taking them after all was because I was advised to by a lot of my teachers from secondary school, including the ones who had taught related subjects, and I took their advice because I had no clue what I wanted to do and I just thought those subjects were the most impressive to do well in. I’m getting off course though, or at least I’m jumping ahead a little. See, I never completed these courses as I’ve mentioned. After a few months I started skipping lessons, something I’d never done back in secondary school, and the last third of the year I was there I was going to only two or three lessons a week. I didn’t even turn up for all of the tests when they eventually came up, not that it would have mattered as I did absolutely terribly in the ones I did go to.

Now, this co-worker of mine (and I know it’s unhealthy and kind of gross to compare myself with other people like this) was for some reason impressed by this when I mentioned it as I’ve said. Or at least she was impressed when first assuming that I had completed the courses in those subjects, although I don’t think it’s unreasonable of me to assume that (given I was advised to take them by teachers of mine who had themselves done so in their younger years, and that I was allowed onto the course at all) I potentially could have passed if some circumstances been different. It’s impossible to ever know what could have been, and part of me is inclined to say that any assumption about how I could have got through it if say I still had the environment I had at secondary school (that is, friends who were also studying along with me, teachers who truly believed I was capable and liked me, someone at home to actually enforce some fucking discipline and make me study, etc.) is just a cope. After all, no one with a shred of self awareness wants to be that guy who claims to be “smart but lazy”.

I’m also aware that I really really don’t want to be stupid, my sense of identity and my pride has always rested on this conception of myself as an intelligent person. There could be all kinds of reasons for this, but I believe that being told I was clever over and over as a kid and really right up until that year I started my A-Levels by all my peers whether it be teachers, relatives or the other kids in my classes is the primary factor. So knowing that this matters so much to me I have to be on a constant watch because I’m very weak to being convinced that I am in fact just as clever as they told me I was. It’s like I was talking about last week, and have several other times, about the story of the slave at the roman triumph. There’s a reason that imagery resonates so well with me, and it’s because I have to constantly have a similar voice in my ear to keep me free of conceit. I’ve always disdained unjustified arrogance, nothing makes me lose respect for someone more quickly.

This of course only became a problem when I went to do my A-levels though, before that I was always just about able to maintain this delusion of a great intellect I supposedly possessed. Maybe that’s hyperbolic, I never really considered myself to be especially brilliant just quite a bit more quick witted than most of the people around me. This kind of goes back to an early post I uploaded and I don’t want to repeat myself. Basically, I became very good friends with this guy in some of my classes and I think he had a similar view to me in this regard. We would basically LARP as intellectuals, we talked about political ideas and philosophy and poetry, but it was all very superficial. Neither of us actually knew anything at all about what we talked about, we were nominally left-wing/ Marxists because that was what we perceived as the position of the academics we so idolised, but neither of us had actually read any theory. Not that we didn’t read interesting and difficult things, at least for kids that age, I remember thinking I was so cool for having read The Iliad and Odyssey at 12 years old (The E. V. Rieu prose translations) for example, god I really cringe when thinking back on how I used to be.

We both even wrote some stuff, him more than me though. One of my poems actually ended up being used as a sort of prologue/ opening thing to a novel that one of my mother’s colleagues was writing actually. I’d completely forgotten about that, I’ve just been trying to find the book online this afternoon since reminding myself of that but I don’t know for sure whether it was actually published and I’ve forgotten the woman’s name now along with the title of the book. I think the last time I saw her was at the funeral, she told me to keep writing..

To bring things full circle, I just want to say that my co-worker really isn’t that important here. These feelings were under the surface just waiting for a reason to come out, and that exchange last sunday was the excuse. I could be entirely wrong in my judgement, I hope I am, it is true that appearances can be deceiving and because I’ve never really taken the time to get to know any of my co-workers I haven’t had enough of a chance to really tell what they’re like. At the same time though, the judgements we make about people are rarely unfounded, and don’t forget that people choose to conform to a certain “type” in order to deliberately indicate what kind of person they are and what their social role is.

Or at the very least what social role they want to be seen as having, and dissimulation is certainly the reason for that in some cases. It was just kind of shitty to realise that this person I (again, very possibly entirely wrongly) judged as not especially clever was still far more accomplished in an academic respect than I am and probably ever will be and therefore more intelligent. Even if I for some reason completely change my position and decide to go into academia and manage to succeed, I’ll still have failed the standard path that so many people have trod with ease. That being of going to school, and then straight on to uni. That doesn’t just make me a middling intellect, which itself would have bothered me greatly to realise as a kid, but maybe even worse.