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

It’s lonely at the bottom

I’ve talked before about how I, and I believe a lot of people like me, fall into a trap of sorts. People who tend to spend a lot of time, perhaps too much, dwelling on things. I suppose being this way is what led me to eventually start this blog. Anyway I used the word “thoughtful”, and spoke about how these more thoughtful people can often convince themselves that they’re more intelligent than all the “sheeple” or “NPCs” or whatever new term might exist. Of course this is a fiction, at least that’s what I was trying to get across before. I don’t really want this post to be a rehash of that one, so I’m not going to spend too much time covering things I already spoke about in the past, but I just have a problem with those kinds of terms and the mindset behind them. The post I’m talking about was called “Thinking about thinking about things”, and it was posted October last year, if you are interested.

I’ve talked before about the probably not actually real roman tradition of the slave standing behind a general during a military triumph and whispering “memento mori” in his ear. This idea that it takes relatively little to convince people that they’re above everyone else, that they’re divine and “better”, is clearly something that has been understood since antiquity and I really do believe that the whole “sheeple” idea is another expression of that, the degree of seriousness is just different. Nowadays instead of great statesmen and military leaders getting that feeling from the roaring crowds cheering their name, you have normal people who commute or whatever who have a sense of superiority over the other people in the train carriage like in that pic I used in that other post. I say nowadays, but actually to be honest the normal day to day citizens of the roman empire or any other ancient civilisation were probably just as prone to such thoughts and the major political figures (or corporate leaders) of today are probably no different than the great figures of the past either.

It really does just seem to be something inherent, at the very least inherent to men. Now this is pure speculation, from someone who doesn’t have any kind of academic credentials whatsoever, but one idea I’ve had is that perhaps it’s an evolutionary trait. See, you kind of have to convince yourself you’re the best in order to justify being the one who reproduces, in an ancient/ stone age ooga booga times kind of environment I mean. Obviously I’m being a bit silly here, but hopefully you understand what I mean. I don’t want to just be another goof online who spouts “redpill” ideas because most of those people are just repeating things you’ve been told before but in increasingly dumbed down and less accurate ways. It’s not even that I disagree with most of it, what people call the 80/20 rule, terms like hypergamy, sexual marketplace, alpha/ beta male, etc etc. all the usual stuff. I’m kind of on board, a bit, or at least I have spent a great deal of time since my mid teens with those kinds of ideas around me. I’m trying to do my own kind of thing here though, and when those ideas influence me I might need to mention them as background, but that’s about all.

As I said I don’t really want to talk about that because having heard it all before, and I’m sure the same is true for some of you, it’s rather boring to go over. Rather I kind of want to build on it a little. See there’s a common thing that gets said, that you have twice as many female ancestors as male ones or something like that. This isn’t just a total asspull from incel philosophers like me (that’s a joke, I don’t have so little self awareness to seriously consider myself a “philosopher”) but something I’ve heard from actual legit academics and science magazines. I think it’s all something we kind of recognise, the whole meme about how women live life on easy mode being an expression of it. I think that it is undeniable that “finding a partner” being an actual difficult task is a male problem. I mean, the way women talk about their future children like it’s just a guarantee is really what gives it away. At the same time though they also seem to not get it, I mean you hear women ask things like “why are men so obsessed with sex” and it’s not a perfect analogy but just imagine someone from a modern first world country who can go to the supermarket and just pick food off the shelf asking why hunter-gatherer tribes in the amazon are obsessed with food. It’s absurd, isn’t it? I guess I’m just gatekeeping hunger now, I mean you still have to walk to the supermarket and pay for the food, people in modern first world countries get hungry too y’know, I’m just clearly a misog.. anti-firstworlder.

I’ll get back on topic in a second though, I’m giving off major incel vibes. I really like that expression btw, incel v i b e s, my friend said it to me last summer when talking about someone. It was when we were away on a camping trip, me and the only two friends I really have. I think I’ve mentioned this trip before briefly, but we were away for a few days and just went walking most of the time. It was also my first (and as of now only, because I haven’t found a good time to take those morning glory seeds yet) experience with psychedelics, but it was a mild dose of 2cb which is itself a very tame drug. Anyway, one of the days we took a really long walk over to this island (connected by a causeway) off the coast near where we were staying and up to the tip opposite the mainland. It’s shaped a little like a diamond or oval, and at this other end there’s loads of crags and cliffs and a lighthouse. It’s really spectacular, the waves smashing against the rocks can come really high up. I’ve actually been several times before with my dad when I was a lot younger. The area, a few hours drive from where I live, is very special to me and I have a lot of memories associated with it which is why I brought my two friends there.

Anyway, we were walking along this big open field just before getting to the end of the journey and were very tired. It was the height of summer, and one of my friends was struggling so much with the heat and a blister he got that he had to stop and me and the other friend went ahead to the café at the cliffs to get drinks for us all. So the final stretch before we got there was this long and wide open field, and we chatting and joking about this guy he knew of. Well, first we were talking about the heat and I said something like “right now I wish I was in Finland” and we were laughing about that and he mentioned that he actually knew someone who moved to Finland. This guy apparently met a girl online, some online dating site I think, and the madman actually moved to fucking Finland to meet her. So that was amusing and he was telling me more about the guy, and how he would often whine about tfw no gf, and that’s when my friend said it. It wasn’t “He gave me incel vibes” or I got incel vibes from him” it was just standalone. He said his story about the guy and then just at the end, like a cherry on top, “Incel vibes” and he chuckled a bit.

It’s a pointless story honestly, but for whatever reason it’s really stuck out to me. I like it a lot, it’s kinda funny in a way. In fact I was almost going to use it as the name for this blog, I’m actually still not sure whether I made the right choice. I think my mood, because of the situation at the time, may have influenced me to go with the title I have instead but looking at everything I’ve written both work fairly well. I mean this very post that I’m writing right now would fit perfectly under either title. On the one hand like I said (and what got me on to this topic in the first place) I’m certainly giving off incel vibes. This is not an “incel blog” by any means, again as I said I don’t just want to repeat things that have been said before because stagnation is death, but those very ideas have clearly had an influence on me and they do leak out. On the other hand, this post is very much me just rambling and the reason for that is indeed my neurosis. I hate to self diagnose, and I know it seems like nowadays everyone has a mental illness, but I think it’s fair for me to say that I’m not completely mentally healthy. After all I’ve been very isolated for a long while, take those two friends I mentioned who were on that trip with me. One of them I haven’t actually seen in person since, and that was like half a year ago now. The other I did see last night, but still I only see him in person an average of perhaps once every two or three months.

I do think being quite secluded most of my life has made things difficult for me in a lot of ways. I get unhealthily attached to people, and I don’t necessarily mean infatuated here it’s not a lower case romantic kind of thing. At least I don’t think it is, it’s hard for me to tell and that leads to further confusion. A lot of people are much more in tune with these kinds of things than me, and I’m realising now that I’ve come back around to what I was initially intending to talk about in this post, in a roundabout way. People like me, who will just endlessly waste their time thinking themselves to death tend to assume all problems can be solved by them thinking their way out. They might think they’re depressed because they don’t have friends or a gf or any goals, but then you’ll listen to some normalfag say something about how they started adding some herb into their meals and they felt better. Or they’ll suggest listening to music, and admittedly upbeat/ high energy music can in the short term affect my mood rather significantly. The weird thing is they just seem to know this stuff, and it’s so fucking alien to me because they’re literally talking about thoughts. Depression is ultimately just bad thoughts, and they chew some ginger root or whatever and something about hormone balance and bang! no more bad thoughts.

Not only does it just come naturally, the idea that if you’re having bad thoughts you shouldn’t continue with them and try to solve things internally but that you should just “do exercise for those endorphins bro”, but it’s not something that bothers them at all either. To me that’s kind of horrifying, that your thoughts aren’t really your own (and this is something that I do spend way too much time fretting over) is a scary idea. That you just need to min-max nutrients and vitamins like life is an RPG and that will literally change how you perceive what’s going on around you is a big deal. I’ve spoken before about religious stuff, and yes I have a very limited knowledge of religious philosophy and theology, but my current way of seeing things as I explained in much more depth in older posts is that God is kind of like all possible knowledge at once. That thought, ideas, etc. are our divine aspect. We are all made in the image of God, at least I think that’s what the bible says, and people take that to mean our material forms, two arms, two legs, standing upright, relatively hairless, and so on are what is meant by that. This is where the whole bearded man in the sky thing comes from and perhaps that’s part of it but I imagine pre-Christian depictions of deities like Zeus/ Jupiter are as well. My point though, is that God is a metaphysical being, the anthropomorphic God is silly and this is why fundamentalists are such cancer. No, it’s thought or reason which separates us from animals. Divinity is immaterial, you cannot touch or smell it. I also see ideas of enlightenment in eastern traditions like Buddhism as getting at the same thing, but again I have even less understanding of those.

If thought is just another part of instinct, which I guess I kind of also contradictorily agree with sometimes because a lot of evo-psych ideas sound rather plausible to me (clearly, after all I was spouting similar stuff myself in this very post), then how can you take any thought you have seriously. It just puts me in this constant state of self doubt, which again I can’t help but obsess over like I always do. It’s quite the conundrum, I feel like I might never achieve any sense of freedom from these thoughts, it can be quite oppressive. I know that these evo-psych ideas have this negative effect on me because of something that has been happening recently in fact, and which I was hoping I’d find a reason to talk about in this post actually just to vent.

So I found out my manager is quitting, she’s been here since I started of course and is the one who gave me the job. I know it’s the boss I work for, but it was her who gave me the interview and I imagine ultimately made the choice for me to start working there officially. So, I’ve been thinking that I should say some kind of thank you for that, but it’s very difficult for me. I don’t speak a lot, I’m not articulate at all or able to just rattle on forever about something like I do in my head or in writing here. I’ve explained it how I see it before, like there’s a cage that I’m trapped inside of when I’m outside with other people and I can shake the bars and scream all I want but my body (the cage in question) will just continue on awkwardly brute forcing through any interaction in a very forced and unresponsive way. The only sign of life is my hands shaking noticeably when I’m particularly stressed. I imagine that some of you, those who came from /r9k/, experience a similar thing although maybe not as severe.

So I decided that I had the right idea the last time and that I should write a letter, a more substantial one this time not just a little note but a real letter. Which is why this post is kind of a hastily done thing, I know I’m no longer holding myself to the weekly upload thing but I still want to be writing something always and this is kind of what I’ve been doing to take my mind off of the letter which is what I’ve been giving most of my attention to. I know it sounds silly, it’s going to be a few paragraphs long, shorter than any post I’ve made here so why is it taking such focus and time? Well the thing is it’s like every line I type I have to redo 100+ times, it’s like a minefield because as I was saying I’ve been isolated for a lot of my life and I have a lot of difficulty knowing the various societal boundaries there are. I really have a difficult time knowing what is and isn’t appropriate, after all this is a married woman. So I’ll admit I’m nervous about it seeming like I’m trying to confess my secret feelings for her or something when (in this specific instance) I’m really not. Yes, the fact that last time I actually did have secret feelings for the person I left the note for might also be causing me to worry this way I’m aware of that too.

I’m just not sure, I know I’m not able to say something in person whenever the last time I see her may be I’m just too much of a coward and I can’t get more than a couple sentences out without spilling my spaghetti. Not just with her obviously, with practically anyone even other guys. I’m saying that because the whole spaghetti meme is usually really only associated with an object of one’s affection, oneitis I suppose. Not that this woman is unattractive, although she is quite a lot older than I am, in fact I think she’s rather aware of how pretty and pleasant to be around men find her given some things I’ve heard her say before. Which is exactly my problem, I can’t help but think that when you’re a good looking woman and have been hit on by countless men since your late teens you must become a bit jaded. Any expression of genuine affection or appreciation from a guy (particularly a younger one) that isn’t an attempt to get something, that isn’t anything other than just a “thanks for what you did for me”, will not seem so. It will appear to be just more of the same, just more empty male words to get in your pants.

It’s back to the whole “nice guys” meme again, you know this idea that “nice guys” aren’t actually nice they’re just trying to get you to sleep with them but in a sneaky way. It’s easy to dismiss those people at first, after all you know you’re actually genuinely nice right? and you know truly internally, you understand your own motivations and they’re not just to “get laid” or whatever a few harpies with the thousand cock stare have to say. Then the self doubt creeps in, all that evo psych stuff you’ve been surrounded by. What if it is all some strategy you’ve adopted without even being consciously aware of it. Is everything I say and everything I think, not actually what I say and think truly but entirely at the whim of the animal I inhabit’s needs and urges? Is free will, true choice, an illusion. Now I’m starting to get into the hard determinism thing, which I have also been thinking about a lot lately after a really fascinating thread on /lit/ but I do plan to make an entirely separate post for that subject so I’m going to steer clear now.

I know that last time when I left the note for the other girl who left I felt bad after, I kind of regret it now and instead wish I hadn’t done it. The reason though is because I regret having feelings for her at all, because between thinking about how little I really knew her and understanding the way desperate people can delude themselves I realised that my thoughts were kind of “not my own”, which as I was just talking about is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about and being concerned by. This case is kind of different, even with the weird evo-psych ideas about secret unconscious mating strategies it doesn’t matter, because consciously I know I’m not trying anything with this woman. I’ve never had any kind of fantasy, or daydream, like I would have fairly often about oneitis girl. I’m so conflicted, I know it seems so stupid that I’m almost having a crisis over this crap but it’s really kind of more a catalyst if you think about it.

Here’s the situation, I’ve had a couple days to think now. This entire post other than going forward of course was written primarily in one evening, kind of rushed over a few intense hours and now I’ve had a couple of days my head is a little clearer. I stopped writing that letter, but I think I will finish it. I don’t think that I will be giving it to her though, and I will explain. Tonight there’s a gathering/ social thing and the entire team is going to a restaurant and the pub. There was a group card and we all had to leave a short note goodbye there. I didn’t get to say everything I feel I’d like to, but after that and also the goodbye messages in the group text chat anything else would start to feel a little cloying and excessive I feel. Which is exactly the opposite of what I want, see I’ve had time to think and I realised that I was more doing this for me than for her.

I was thinking about it and I realised that I was being kind of reductive by assuming the only desirable role that women can play in a male’s life would be that of a romantic/ sexual partner. See my thinking was that even though I feel quite sad about this woman leaving, because I don’t see her that way, the warm feelings I have for her are something “pure” or “true” or dare I say it “platonic”. Then I remembered what I’ve spoken about before, that maybe because my mother passed away I’m looking for a mother figure almost as a replacement or at the very least to kind of fill that missing need, and that maternal role may be how I’ve been seeing this woman. As I did with that other woman who trained me and then was fired right after I started. Now on the one hand this is quite helpful, it would mean that I’m not secretly and unconsciously trying to long game my way into getting laid which would kind of make me disgusted with myself. On the other hand though it still means that my feelings are conditional on biological or at least psychological needs, so I’m still to a degree not in full control of my thoughts if this is an accurate way of seeing things.

Anyway, whatever is the case I cannot know what other people will think, and I care a great deal about what other people think of me. I don’t have any good reason to assume that were I to write such a letter, this woman would give even half as much thought to these things as I have. It’s very possible that she’d just assume I did secretly have feelings for her all along, I mean I have good reason to think this because of something she said at the last social event. The topic of tips came up, we leave a tip jar at the front of the counter. Now most of the time people just drop change loose change in there they don’t want to keep, and an actual larger tip is less common. So we were talking about those larger tips, I don’t remember exactly why, and she said something about how it’s “usually men”. This is the problem I face, I remember these little comments people make that usually go ignored and I read into them maybe more than I should but I can’t help it.

So, if I leave this letter and that is the assumption made about me then her last impression of me will be forever tarnished, any positive memory of me will be stained by this idea that all along I had some ulterior motive. If she has a similar way of seeing things as I do, and she thinks I’m just a kid looking for a mother figure, she probably would be more understanding at least. Nevertheless that is still an imposition, I’m putting her in a role that she never wanted to be in. This is an adult with a life of her own, I’ve developed some kind of warmth for her because I have very few people in my life and most people in my situation wouldn’t have. It is certainly inappropriate either way, and while at least it would be accurate to be remembered this way it would still be unfortunate. So it’s a 1/3 chance that I’m remembered as… idk a sleaze? or maybe more accurately a failed one (either of which are completely absurd if you know anything about me), a 1/3 chance that I’ll be remembered as a developmentally stunted weakling, and a 1/3 chance that I’ll be remembered fondly without any baggage placed on top..

Wait, no that’ll never happen not in this culture. Outside of maybe certain reactionary circles I don’t think anyone believes there are pure intentions anymore, in fact I think even those people are just pretending to themselves as well. So it’s more like 50/50, and I’m not sure I’m willing to take those odds, when it comes to something like how I’ll be remembered, which as I said is incredibly important to me. Like I said I do still plan to finish this letter, so I haven’t made my mind up 100% yet. I suppose that my decision rests on the answer to one more question, if I don’t leave the letter what will be the impression of me that is left with her? Will I even be remembered. or is this just another person quickly drifting through my life with me as a brief distraction?

A change of pace

I haven’t been on the ball at all lately, I’ve really fallen behind and I’m not quite sure why. Nothing has really happened, in fact I’m actually quite motivated at the moment, but I’m just not doing anything about it. I started my last post, thinking it was something novel and interesting, but while working on it I lost faith in the whole idea. Now this is only a part of it, because I also just became less engaged because the idea was not as good as I originally thought, but I’d say that not having a single visitor for around two weeks might have affected my losing interest. I don’t like that it bothers me so much, and that it’s becoming something I seem to whine about so often, but it certainly is interesting that when my posts are well received (or actually more importantly, just often received) I find it easier to write and I write better. Not that I’m saying I ever write well, I don’t think I do, but what I write is better I mean.

So that post was one of the longest to finish of all of the ones I’ve uploaded, and partly this was because I took a break for about three or four days and didn’t even look at the blog at all. Instead, I’ve been trying to read more, for those few days I read for a good few hours each. The book I was reading was Herodotus’ The Histories, which I bought a copy of (Translated by Robin Waterfield) a long while ago, but dropped it about half of the way in and I didn’t pick it back up until last week. Funnily enough, the second half is quite different and much more focused than the first. So I’ve found it a lot easier to stick with it. The winding first half which follows the first three Persian kings as they build their empire, veering off into various fantastical stories from the many places they conquered, is interesting sure but it also drags in places. I’ve just found, surprisingly, that the story of the invasions of Greece by Darius and later Xerxes was much more engaging.

Anyway, I’ve also been spending a lot of time on /lit/, which is not my usual board at all. I’ve spent more time there this last week than the sum total of time spent during all my other visits. I did originally just go to check the sticky, because I know they have that start with the greeks chart and reading what I was and the fact that I’ve been reminded of when I read The Republic (and probably barely understood it) a few times over the last couple of months I thought maybe now is the time. I ended up just sticking around though, and enjoying it quite a lot. It might sound strange, but I quite liked that there were conversations that I felt unqualified to join in with. Feeling out of my depth almost, it inspires me to read and learn so that I will be able to keep up with the discussion some time in the future. So, over this week I said to myself I would do exactly that.

I’ve mostly stuck to it so far, I’ve definitely spent at least some time reading (even if only half an hour some days) every day since that period of a few days where I finished The Histories. I’ve had to make do with this book I got as a present years ago and never gave a read, The Crying Of Lot 49, it’s awful if I’m being honest but pretty short and it’s something to read until my copy of Thucydides’ History of The Peloponnesian War arrives. That’s the next book I’ve ordered, and I’m not listing all these off just to flex on whoever is reading this so I hope it doesn’t seem that way. Honestly it might sound rather impressive hearing all these ancient greek names, but the books I’m reading are famously written in simple language. Herodotus’ writing is a common choice for people trying to learn to read ancient greek because it’s so clear and easy to grasp, and I’m just reading a translation into English. I do have a MEGA link to all the works attributed to Plato though, which actually is pretty fucking intimidating, and if I get through all of that and actually understand it well then I think I’d have a reason to be somewhat impressed with myself.

So because of all of this, and because I’ve kind of been finding it harder and harder to consistently write a good post every single week, I’ve decided to upload more irregularly. I’ll still try to consistently be writing, so at any one time there’ll be a post I’m working on, but I just don’t want to have this deadline hanging over my head. Instead of feeling I need to rush to finish a post that I’ve been having more trouble with, I’ll just keep working on it longer. It seems to me, that I’ve established myself now on here, I don’t really see anything changing where I’ll suddenly experience any kind of significant audience growth. I might gain a new regular reader every couple months, but I also lose one as well. What I’ve realised, after this most recent long gap without any visitors, is that those few of you who have stuck around this far don’t even want to read a new post of mine every single week, but you probably will check back in eventually. There should be something new, most of the time. In fact it’s already been a week since the mess I uploaded last week, and I doubt I’ll be able to finish this today as I’m working until 22:30 tonight and going in soon.

Another good thing that should result from this is there’ll be no more of these shitty update/ filler posts, like this one. It’s hard to really tell what you few regular long term readers like, but I know that the only “likes” I get from one off visitors are on the posts where I talk about ideas rather than whining about my own life. I mean, I talk about my life and things that happen to me in those posts also sometimes, but it’s a case of me using observations, memories, or dreams as a jumping off point to talk about something more… cerebral I suppose (is that a pretentious thing to say) rather than writing a post about those things themselves. I also prefer those, as even though it is sometimes satisfying to just use this blog as a diary none of the posts I’m really proud of are those kind. There’s this kind of non-story of my life which one might pick up if they were to read through everything I’ve uploaded here, and there’s these one off vignettes which while they also build on one another could be understood without any context.

Well that’s not entirely true, I do write my posts with some kind of prior assumptions about the world settled already. The problem is, I hate talking about something that has been done to death, for the same reason I very rarely watch a film more than once. It’s easy to forget that what a lot of the ideas that I talk about here are built on top of isn’t actually accepted by most normalfags. I’ve spent so many years of my adolescence on 4chan and so on that I forget how different my perspective was before, and how differently I see the world. I’m not the only one who does this, nowadays (and ironically I’m about to state something that is exactly what I hate, an opinion we’ve all heard hundreds of times that is always presented as a new or fresh perspective) it is true that a lot of people, at least online, are stuck in echo chambers. So because of only talking to likeminded people all the time, all the assumptions and nuances of their underlying worldview don’t even come up when they start expressing ideas of their own.

Not that that means anything, even if the whole world is doing things the wrong way it doesn’t mean you should too. I’m not sure that it is “the wrong thing to do” though, in this case. I mean maybe it’s another factor preventing me from gaining more readers, and that’s a shame, but what can I do about it? I’m not making any money or getting anything out of this, other than the very enjoyment of writing and expressing my ideas. If you just want to hear people express ideas you already hold there’s thousands of blogs, and youtube channels and online magazines that will cater to that demand. This ties back into the main point of this post, why I’m going to drop the weekly schedule thing. I’m doing this for fun, I don’t see the point in holding myself to this arbitrary standard that only adds stress to my life when the whole point of the blog is to wind down and/ or vent about things in order to lessen some of the stress I have. So, I’ll be uploading less often but not a great deal less. Other than that, not much else should change.

Solar echoes

First, noontime malaise

It was a school break, and I was stuck at home. This was late spring, so mid way between Easter and the summer holidays which are only six weeks long here. I think at this point I hadn’t yet really become good friends with the two who I’ve mentioned before so that probably puts this around 2009 or 2010. This was before I was allowed to have a television in my room (that happened after my dad moved back to look after me) and I didn’t have a video game console at the time even for the main room so to entertain myself I had this really slow desktop computer which was about a decade old at the time and books/ toys, although at this point I had mostly stopped playing with toys. I suppose I would have been about 12 or 13 years old.

You know how it is, when the sun is out in full and the rays shining through the window reveal all the dust in the air? Well I can remember quite vividly just lying down on the floor in my mother’s room staring at it for ages, and the world seeming quite empty. I could see the tips of the trees outside the window, and buildings beyond that, but it was so quiet I couldn’t really comprehend the idea that anyone was actually out there. The only sound was my mother, in another room, making faint noise doing the cleaning or something. I wanted to do something, the boredom had slowly become more and more suffocating as the day wore on, but every time I began to actually consider some activity that I usually enjoyed I’d end up realising how little I wanted to do it. Say I thought about going to watch television, well it’s all daytime trash or reruns from decade old shows I’ve seen several times before. Or what about reading a book, I often would read for hours a day (in fact it was around this period of time where I gradually began to read less and less) but now I couldn’t imagine anything more useless.

It’s hard to articulate what had changed, because it was a feeling and not a new way of seeing things that I had rationalised myself into. It’s also something that is pretty normal for me nowadays, the significance of this afternoon is that it’s the first time I ever remember feeling this way. You could take anything I usually enjoyed, and I just wanted nothing to do with it. I was just lying there on the floor, those beams of sunlight still burned into my mind today. This memory is of one of the worse days of my life, and while I’ve had similar afternoons hundreds of times now I’ll always remember this one. Sure I’d maybe in a unconscious sense been kind of nihilistic my whole life, that’s the culture and environment I was raised in after all and neither of my parents were religious. It was on this day though, that I truly realised how there was no meaning or point to anything in a conscious way.

At one point my mother came in and asked me what I was doing, “why are you just lying there, you look so sad?”. Of course I had no way of expressing this sudden and overwhelming existential dread that had flooded my entire world, I’m still doing a terrible job putting it into words now, all I could say was that I was indeed very sad. She asked if I wanted to go out and do something together, to go to the park or see a film. I just replied that I didn’t want to do anything ever again. I didn’t even want to be alive in that moment, an eternal emptiness spread out in all directions like the stolid waves of sand of the Sahara. It was the first time I ever remember looking forward to bedtime and being able to get away from the world.

For so long the image of those dusty shafts of light pushing past the gaps in the curtains was stuck there in my mind, and gradually the sun more generally began to take on a negative aspect in my mind. I realise now that maybe that had some impact on my becoming a night owl for a time, as I began to stay up later into the night and wake up later. Of course while I was at school this was difficult, but over the holidays and after my mother passed and I started skipping school regularly it got worse and worse. A sunny day reminded me of that particular afternoon, and the many other afternoons like it that followed. It’s light there to illuminate, to reveal what I didn’t want to see, but the warmth and energy blocked by the windows and curtains.

Second, interlude before the gloaming

Now this was about a year ago or so, I think early February but maybe it was very late January. It was one of my first shifts at the bigger shop, as I’ve explained before there are two shops I switch between and one is big (relatively) while the other is small. It wasn’t the first time there, I did my training there and as I started over the Christmas break I had a few shifts there while there weren’t many people out and about and the place was less busy than usual. This was the first time it was “back to normal” though, and as it was so early in the year the sun was already beginning to set as I started my shift. I was doing the evening, which is my favourite one to do.

So I head to the shop to switch over with my co-worker, the orangey haze outlining the skyline all around me. I arrive and then remember that I had accidentally broken one of the keys for the main office we drop the money off at after every shift. So after that I had to go there briefly, before it got busy at the shop and get it replaced, and then go back again of course. It might seem silly but running these little errands, for a real job, for the first time in my life felt quite nice. I mean, in a way I had a feeling like I was finally becoming an adult. The tangerine glow, the maturation of the afternoon sky, felt rather appropriate at the time and still today when I think back on it. The shift wore on, and the last light faded away, but that memory stuck with me.

Third, the long awaited dawn

So spring just broke recently and it has been a long time coming. I already mentioned in a previous post that I fell into a brief fit of paranoia regarding my job, and while it wasn’t entirely unwarranted, after finding out it mostly was I realised how silly I looked. I don’t really want to go into it, now I realise how silly I look. I already half regret my very early posts for making me look like such a pathetic faggot even though in other regards I’m happy with them and having this blog generally is a positive thing for me. The point is that I was in a bad mental state, and this was all right at the end of a very dark winter. It really did begin to get to me after a while.

I was getting no sun at all, even for the few hours of daylight we had there was always a heavy cloud layer blocking it from really coming through. It took a while to really get to me, really the last couple of weeks of the winter, but eventually it clearly did. So I began to obsess over this imaginary conspiracy against me, and I hadn’t spoken to either of my friends in a few weeks either so I also started to get the usual thoughts about them enjoying life and having fun without me. I know it’s weak, and feminine, to be so easily brought down by such thoughts but I do have these moments of weakness.

I also started to get headaches most evenings, this was just the last week or so of the dark times but it was awful. I just had no energy, I stopped doing any exercise and I think I’m still reeling from it now because my motivation hasn’t quite come back. I mean this very post is mediocre and I’m only finishing it because the premise I started with was a good idea I think and I’ve committed quite a lot to it now. Nevertheless it’s already a few days overdue my usual weekly upload date. I’m just going to get to the final part of this and take a day before starting something entirely new.

So I had a few days off of work, four in a row actually. I didn’t go anywhere, I didn’t really write much or read or even listen to any new music. I didn’t do any exercise, and I was eating very little. Every night these headaches would kick in, and I ended up going to sleep rather early just to get away from the world. Eventually it was time to go back in to work though, and the first thing required for that was to wake up at a reasonable hour. I got up, and then had to shave. I don’t get much facial hair, just a bit of uneven/ patchy stubble after a few days and then it stops, and I think beards are pretty shit tier anyway. That alone felt like I was being cleansed, I mean sometimes when I haven’t shaved for a while I can literally “feel” my skin if that makes sense. Like it’s this thick layer on top, but after a good shave my face feels fresh and even more sensitive. I can feel the wind more, etc.

So then I left, and as I’ve mentioned before I walk through a park to get to work. It’s this small and very thin sliver of green, that somehow very few people seem to know about. I’ve noticed actually more recently more people appearing there, so maybe that’s changing, but for years and years I’ve been walking there and seen little or no people at any time. It’s really out of place, I can’t quite think of the right word for it but like anachronistic except instead of regarding time regarding geography. It’s like a brief portal into the countryside, with a small meadow and even that rustic kind of uneven fencing with the little plank midway up for stepping over in one section. Anyway, as I was walking up the path I felt it, the heat of the midday sun, something I hadn’t felt in months. It was the perfect timing, coming right after that week, it reminds me of that adage “it’s always darkest before the dawn”.

The feeling didn’t last that long, not even for the rest of that day, but the moment was special. I’ve been thinking about the sun a lot since then, that’s what inspired this post. I know it’s kind of shit but hopefully you can see what I was trying to go for, and appreciate the idea. Maybe the sun will continue to be something I talk and think about, in some way.

Some stuff

The last thing in the world I want to be seen as is false or insincere, but unfortunately being unwilling to do certain things I might consider so really limits my potential. See I want a larger audience, as I’ve said before not much more so than now just a few more people, but so much of the advice or methods that are given for helping with that feel wrong in some way. I’ll take one thing I’ve seen suggested, which is to directly address the reader. Now until now I haven’t ever really done that, maybe in a couple of specific instances but not as a general rule. I don’t open up every post pretending that I actually know any of you people. I’m glad you all keep coming back, and I’m glad that what I have to say resonates with you, but I won’t pretend you’re a personal friend of mine when that just isn’t the case. Doing so apparently is a great help though, people like feeling like there’s some kind of relationship between them and the person who’s blog or video or whatever they’re viewing.

That’s why every major youtube video (I’m talking normie sphere youtube, not a three hour lecture on bronze age cloth production or something) or blog or whatever starts with the now infamous “hey guys” and ends similarly with the person telling their audience how much they mean to them and similar crap. Now perhaps, in the case of certain larger figures who have a community develop around them and other interesting people within it that’s not entirely dishonest, but they were doing that before that point. See there’s this weird “fake it till you make it” scenario here, where you have to pretend that the few visitors who you know nothing about are a real community of people you actually know about and care for personally in order to actually get such a community, at which point it becomes accurate. Now again I’m not really aiming for a “community” myself, but I have always said I would like more people reading what I have to say than I do currently and I would like if people left comments and actually shared their thoughts on my posts.

Getting viewers, just any viewers, doesn’t mean anything. I want to specifically get the kind of people that, like I said, actually feel like what I have to say resonates with them in some way. So in a way saying that I want a larger audience isn’t entirely accurate, rather I want what I currently do to gain a larger audience. Like I said in my entry right after New Year’s Day, there are certain changes that would cause this blog to lose the identity it has developed. Suddenly shifting to a more friendly vibe, and starting off every entry with “hey guys, how are you doing today?” would not only just seem insincere to those of you who have been here for a while but would feel forced and unnatural for me. After all my instinct when starting was to write the way I did then and still do and to consciously change to a new style for the sole purpose of getting new viewers or getting the one off viewers that sometimes drop by to stay feels wrong. Well that’s not entirely true, there are some things I’m willing to change and others I’m not. I guess what I’m trying to find out is what separates the two, why do some changes to help grow the blog not bother me while others do?

Let’s take another example, something else I’ve heard is to always end with a question or even several questions. Now I’m not against the idea entirely, after all I do sometimes ask questions throughout my posts. Usually I’m using them as a device of rhetoric rather than actually seeking answers, but still I’m clearly not against asking questions as a rule. The problem is that again it’d feel forced, not as much as with the whole directly addressing you all thing sure but still enough to bug me. See, if I have to remind myself to end off with a question every time it’s just gonna feel weird. I’m not really saying anything at all here, this post is a complete mess. The thing is I started writing something entirely different a few days ago and had to delete all of it. The idea really fell apart and so now having thrown away days of work I’m just trying to get something out so I can maintain my weekly schedule. I’m not saying that what I’ve been talking about today isn’t something that I think about, or that has been on my mind, I’m just not able to articulate it very well right now. Looks like another dud week unfortunately, a shame because I’ve mostly been really happy with what I’ve put out over the last month or so. I do want to quickly make another point about the idea of ending with a question though.

See it’s a little like what I was saying earlier with regard to addressing you all directly, in that there’s this funny “fake it till you make it” thing going on. See, I say “audience” and “visitors” and similarly vague things, but really there’s just three or four (maybe five, it’s hard to tell because of the one time visitors) of you. I can end with a question, but it’s clear that none of you are interested in commenting or responding or you would have done so by now. Which is fine, I’m the same I actually never comment on youtube videos or other blogs or anywhere other than threads on 4chan really. So if I end with a question, I’m just asking a potential audience which doesn’t exist yet. Maybe it will never exist, but I do feel like if I was able to find a few people who truly care about what I have to say in half a year then hypothetically I should be able to find more given just how many people there are in the world, and that keeps me hopeful.

I don’t really know exactly what it is I want, I’m unwilling to make any meaningful changes but unhappy that I’m not finding more people who want to stick around. I’m not sure if I actually magically had say ten new regular readers within a month whether I’d feel any better. I mean when I actually write these I half pretend I’m writing them just for myself. I know that people are reading them of course, I’m conscious of that fact, but on some level I haven’t fully realised it. Maybe that’s another reason why openly addressing you, whether it be you meaning all of you together or you the specific person reading this right now, feels weird to me. I’m not sure what to say, what do you think?

Anyway, there’s still more good stuff to come (if you agree that some of what I’ve written for this blog so far was good) so I’d stick around even though there will probably also be more duds like this one as well in the months ahead. I don’t really talk about my own life so much anymore, as I did when I first started this blog, but despite what it might seem I’m actually doing really well right now. It’s been a dark week, I fell into a fit of paranoia regarding my job and the people I work with, but my suspicions have proven to be entirely unsubstantial. As the first days of spring finally hit, some much needed sunlight was shed on the situation, allowing me to realise how hasty I had been. I also stopped sharing my pleb tier entry level taste for the most part, but just in case anyone cares I’ve been listening to Alt-J a lot lately and also I’ve been getting into Death In June over the last few weeks. I also took this photo, the one used as the header image, earlier this afternoon. It’s not often you can see the moon so clearly in the middle of the day, and I thought it was pretty.

Looking backwards, looking forwards

Reading one of my earlier posts recently I made a connection that I’m sort of surprised I didn’t make way back then. I mentioned once I have this recurring intrusive thought or daydream of poisoning homeless people. Not any particular homeless individual, in fact I think the idea is that I’d specifically avoid the ones I know. See there’s a few who hang around near where I work, and sometimes I’ll give my tips or some of my tips to them after closing up. They’ve all come to recognise me when they see me now, there’s this one guy in particular who is very friendly. When I have to take the bin out to the sheds at the end of the shift and there’s not much room he’s helped me get it through the door a couple times. Yes it’s just a gesture, I can manage it easily enough and he’s there because he’s come to expect some change when seeing me ultimately, but nevertheless I appreciate it. I quite like these people, even if most of them probably rightfully earned their current situation, and I wouldn’t want any harm to come to them.

That’s the funny thing really, and I suppose I already did this bit in that very same earlier post so I won’t go on about it, but while I will judge these people for their poor character and decisions I don’t necessarily dislike them. On the other hand the strawmen I’ve conveniently just made up who would say I’m a nasty and ignorant person for doing so do tend to. Like I said I’ve already mentioned it before, but there’s a real disdain that most people have for the homeless and it’s a very visceral thing. It’s really a feeling of disgust, and it makes sense because they do often smell but it’s more than that, almost like they sense that their poor fortune might rub off on them. Even when I don’t have change or don’t want to give my change to one of them I’ll feel a bit bad and will always acknowledge them if asked, so many people just ignore them entirely. I mean completely blank them, they’ll be walking right by and definitely within earshot but they just pretend not only like they were never asked for money but like the beggar doesn’t even exist.

I said something else in that very same post as well actually, an insight which I lost as soon as I had it. I was worried when going back to reread some of these earlier posts that they wouldn’t hold up and would seem stupid and cringy but that’s not the case, unusually for something I’ve written and revisited after some time. There were a few things that I did in those earlier posts that I’ve decided to stop doing because of those reasons, but the general ideas and message I stand by in almost all cases which is what I’m talking about. Anyway, I said in that same post that ignoring someone is not something people do to those they don’t care about but actually to people they have a problem with. It’s not disinterest, if you’re being ignored it’s not because the person really doesn’t think about you, it’s a minor act of aggression. Not like being punched in the face or even insulted of course, but in principle it’s the same if not in degree. It’s a deliberate act, I think were my exact words.

I think this is why being “ghosted” bothers people so much, there’s this explanation that it’s because you realise how little you mean to them but that never sat right with me. That’s not what’s happening at all, let’s go back to the homeless people again for an example. See, the smartly dressed cubicle cucks and their heavily made-up female counterparts have to make an effort to pretend the beggar asking for help isn’t there, it’s undoubtedly a conscious act. They feel insulted that someone so gross and stupid (according to them, not me) would even speak to them, and again like I said in that post months back the deliberate ignoring of them really translates as “fuck off” or something like it. Being ghosted is no different, they’re basically saying you’re unworthy of their time and should fuck off. It’s not that you don’t matter to them, it’s that they have grown to dislike you or be annoyed by you and this is their way of saying so.

I’ve noticed as well that being ghosted seems to bother robots and people of a similar mindset even more so than it does normal people. Which makes sense when you think about it, because what is the thing that really seems to define a robot? Other than the obvious I mean. It’s this feeling of being ignored, of being left out. It starts young, and I literally cannot think of a single example of one of these people who doesn’t share this experience. I have had this experience, if you read MTW you’ll see that Elliot Rodger had this experience, it’s one of the most common things to see people lamenting on /r9k/ and in my very brief time spent checking out other spaces online populated by similar people I’ve seen it there as well. I mean you might think that this should mean they’re desensitised to it but I don’t think so. I think that it’s like irritating a wound, see a lot of these people retreat away from the world in their youth, which is partially what stops them from being properly socialised. The desire for companionship being so strong though, they search for relationships with other people online. The time away from the world has allowed for some healing, but then these online things break down as they always seem to and the scar is reopened.

I had another post very early on, my second or third, about school shootings. I feel like without the whole build up the hot take I have on the subject doesn’t have the same gravity so I’d say if you’re reading this and haven’t checked that one yet you should read it before this, but it’s not crucial. Essentially, I see school shootings/ mass shootings in general as performance art. The problem is that the message of the piece is not something I think the performers (the people doing the shooting, whether it be Elliot Rodger or the Columbine kids or whoever) are consciously aware of. I will say though, something I didn’t say in that post, that the increase in such events or at least the increased reporting of them is an interesting development. See take the example of Columbine, everyone always assumed they were bullied losers but they were actually relatively normal. They had a group of friends, one had a girlfriend I think, this is something that surprises people. It surprises people because it makes sense for school shooters to be losers, after all who is it who fantasises about doing that kind of thing? Even if only as an escapist fantasy, and they’d never actually do something like that, just like how I would obviously never actually harm the homeless. It’s kids who are bullied, kids who are meek, kids who struggled to find friends.

Now though, and there’s been a new one since that post actually but I haven’t taken the time to really read much about the story, you’re seeing a lot of these shooters more explicitly identify with this role or be identified with it. I’m not really here to talk about just shootings though, I think it’s bigger than that. After all, there was that guy Alek Minassian and he certainly fits in with this despite using a vehicle to attack the public rather than a firearm. So we all kind of know that it’s “losers” and now a more recent term “incels” who are the kind of person to engage in this sort of thing, even when it’s not, if you understand. Incel is a really interesting term, and I’ve had another idea for a post just regarding the term itself and why it over all the similar ones has come out on top in the public discourse recently, but right now I just want to talk about one particular thing regarding the term.

It’s something I’m sure I’ve talked about in a previous post, but I can’t for the life of me find it so maybe I never actually got around to that one. Does the term incel describe a kind of person, or an ideology? I mean of course it describes a person but I mean is it merely a person, is any young man who can’t get laid an incel? Or is it a young virgin male who also believes specifically in the usual things that are associated with the term incel? So, does being an incel also mean you have to be in that whole world of Chad and Stacy, of the blackpill, of the very term incel? I mean there’s the idea of the “hopecel” (which is one of the funniest words I’ve heard in a while) going around, which describes someone who would generally fit the incel archetype but doesn’t buy into the whole “blackpill” idea. The thing is, hopecels are considered a variant of incel (by incels, who are the ones who coined this amusing term) which leads me to believe that according to most people who would identify themselves as an incel it’s not about an ideology. To these people it is just what it says, a portmanteau of involuntary and celibate, someone who can’t get laid.

The problem is whenever incels are spoken about in normie media outlets they are identified as an ideological group. Even a terrorist group, lol. Any article on the subject from a major news organisation or even just a buzzfeed kind of thing (glorified blog that operates within the overton window) makes the preface that they’re not talking about all virgin men but merely the people who believe in the toxic/ misogynist/ hateful/ delusional or whatever other meme buzzword they have ideology professed on incel forums and other such places. This then filters down and nowadays the term incel when used in general public discussion also means this. So the question is really, what is this ideology? To me if there is one right now, and I’m not sure there is, it’s basically just a variant of the same “redpill” stuff that’s been here for over a decade. It’s really not much different than what PUAs, or MRAs or MGTOWs and so forth believe, other than a few admittedly crucial differences. It’s a lot like Marxism in a way, you have socialists and anarchists and Leninists and so on, but they all see one another as comrades when push comes to shove.

These crucial differences are, at least from my understanding, the “blackpill” and the acceptance of violence. So the blackpill is essentially the idea that it’s fucked and there’s nothing you can do about it. I don’t know if Eggy’s video is the actual first use of the term but it certainly was the point from which it entered the meme lexicon. It’s kind of spread to certain alt-right circles, you see some of those e-celebs use the term but it’s taken on a slightly different meaning when they use it, thanks to the pol9k pipeline which I’ve already talked about before. It’s ultimately the same feeling, hopelessness, just applied to politics. I’m not going to go on another several paragraph long tangent about this, but I’ll quickly say that there are even within incel circles different ideas about what the thing to be “blackpilled” on even is. It doesn’t matter too much, the only thing that matters is that the blackpill has been taken, and now you see how hopeless your situation really is.

I think this is what leads into the second thing, the acceptance of violence. Now most people who identify with incels obviously aren’t violent and thuggish, if anything I’d argue that meekness is much more common amongst them (us?) than the public at large. Statistically speaking an incel is less likely to murder you than a normie, I’m not kidding. What I’m saying is that you’ll never get any kind of condemnation about what Elliot or Minassian or the most recent guy who killed those women in a bank did, in fact you’ll find jeering and celebration of it. This is in opposition to the people who identify with those other associated “redpill” groups I mentioned earlier, who will always claim that they condemn violence. I’m not saying this as a bad thing, I’ve done the same over and over in my time on /r9k/ if I’m being honest, laughing and joking about the victims of various shootings. In fact the picture I think I’ll use for the header image on this is a screenshot of my post from the infamous “some of you guys are alright” thread, if I’m honest I’m not 100% convinced that Mercer actually made that thread and it’s not just a coincidence but it’s certainly a likely possibility. I do find it kind of satisfying, I probably gave that impression on my other post about school shootings too. It feels like a kind of twisted justice has been had when I hear about one of these mass shootings, and I know for a fact that a great many people feel the exact same way.

Until that post about school shootings, or the idea I wrote about in it came to me anyway, I couldn’t properly explain why. After all the people who die in these shootings aren’t even the actual people who excluded or bullied the shooter (if he was bullied that is) in many cases, so it’s not like he’s getting revenge. The people are random, but of course as I explain in that post that’s the point. What unifies everyone who has “taken the blackpill” is this feeling that the thing holding them back from happiness and companionship is out of their control. Whether it’s how they look, or their meekness and lack of proper socialisation as a child or whatever, it’s random, or at least it feels random to someone raised in the individualistic culture we inhabit. It feels wrong to even be angry at the people who did exclude you, after all you’re told over and over that to expect to be treated well or even the same as everyone else is entitled. Again though, going back to the other post I was talking about, ignorance is deliberate. Which should bring me back to where I started this post.

Back to poisoning homeless people, hopefully you’ve figured out the connection already. Just like with a mass shooting or running your vehicle into a crowd, the beauty is in the randomness. Now I can kind of retroactively appreciate why this weird fantasy appeals to me, and again I want stress I personally wouldn’t ever actually leave little poisonous drinks around for hobos. There’s just something about the idea of truly random violence that has a kind of beauty to it. There was a thread I saw a few weeks ago on /r9k/, it was about some crime that had happened and how the perpetrator was found because of his relation to the victim. I don’t remember why it was made, but there ended up being quite an interesting point made about the perfect crime.

The perfect crime you might say, is one without any discernible motive. This example was given by an American, he said what if he were to buy a gun and travel to a different state and then shoot someone at random. Then dispose of the weapon, make sure no fingerprints or DNA evidence is left behind and never talk about it. How plausible this actually is I don’t know, but it’s very interesting to me that it was someone from /r9k/ who would think this way. Again, this idea of randomness of the victim comes up. Just another anecdote that stuck out to me. I think there’s really something to this, and I think that while it may just be unconscious now a very interesting potential development for the “incel community” if there is any such thing will be when people start to become conscious of this.

Nothing lasts forever

Ok, I’m trying this for the second time. So I’ve just recently finished reading the book Travels In Nihilon, which I mentioned I was reading a while back and I should have been finished with a while back also but I’ve not been reading very much. Really just for about 15 minutes a day, I need to try and include reading more as part of a new restructured routine I think. Anyway, I said I might have something to say about it so here we are. It’s quite funny how I found out about the book actually, I searched my own blog title up on google to see what would come up one afternoon and there was another site/ blog with a similar title. I wouldn’t recommend it, it was just hipster trash but there was a post about the five books that most influenced the guy and this book was one of them. I don’t remember the others and while I’ve been able to find that blog again I can’t find the specific post about these books. Anyway from the brief description the book seemed quite interesting. It sounded like it would be worthwhile to give it a read given the kind of things that were on my mind at the time, so I found a copy on Amazon and ordered it.

Now “nihilism” is a tricky word, because my understanding of what it means seems to be quite different to the author Alan Sillitoe’s definition. From what I understand it’s essentially a lack of belief, not necessarily religious belief but belief in any kind of worldview that presents a greater meaning or purpose to you. I suppose it’d be more accurate to call that existential nihilism, but this is another great example of my concept of the cultural definition. What might be referred to in academic circles as existential nihilism, is just called nihilism more generally and even by those people as a shorthand. I’m not sure if this idea of mine is my own, or I’ve picked it up from somewhere else without realising. It certainly isn’t a wholly unique idea, and I’m not sure if the term “cultural definition” is the best thing to call it either. It’s funny too because the position is in a sense quite opposed to my usual outlook, I mean you could argue that it’s “democratic” in a way. It doesn’t have to be, I personally haven’t said that either the public consensus on a definition or the “official” definition of a word that would be in the oxford dictionary say is the more “true” version. All I will say is that it seems like most people would say so, after all given enough time the official definition will change or at the very least a second definition will be added to the dictionary.

I would say usually there is more complexity in these official/ older definitions of words and terms as a general rule, and as more and more people have become literate this simplification of language has sped up. Now obviously there are cases where both the cultural definition (or maybe I should call it, consensual definition? or functional definition?) is similarly nuanced and even more so than the older version. It’s not just standalone words even, look at the example that got me started on this tangent. Existential nihilism as an idea, has just become “nihilism” at least according to most people who you’d meet walking around on the street. There’s also moral nihilism, and political nihilism, etc. but those ideas are only covered by the new “nihilism” in so far as a symptom of this existential nihilism that many people feel is very common nowadays and is referred to simply as “nihilism”. Maybe I’m not explaining this very well, what I’m saying is these other nihilisms have all been tied in to one because of this simplification of language and this in turn limits our potential understanding of things. Now those other equally interesting and separate concepts are seen merely as different aspects or facets of the same one thing. Which is not even necessarily something I disagree with, in this particular instance in fact I would actually say I do agree with that to an extent, but the problem is that that’s not just another thing to consider it’s the only way of seeing things for most people, because of all these different ideas being shoved together under the word “nihilism”.

The thing is, the word “nihil” in latin from which the English word nihilism comes just means “nothing”, but we already have a word for that in English which is of course “nothing”. It seems to me there are two kinds of word, there are those that describe something completely material/ physical like a tree or a chair and translate easily, and words that describe things that are more abstract or dare I say metaphysical which of course are much more difficult to translate. Now obviously the word tree or chair is also an idea, the platonically ideal chair is whatever Charlemagne’s throne and a block of ice with a fur blanket on top that an eskimo sits on for supper have in common, and they both are ultimately a flawed but physical example of “chair”. The word exists to help make sense of the physical world, as opposed to a word like say (keeping on topic here) “nihilism” which may affect our behaviour in the material world but is not trying to describe something within it.

What I’m saying is, the word “nihilism” is not the English translation of the word “nihil” from latin. Perhaps when it was used as a component of these other terms it was closer to being so, take the concept of moral nihilism for example. To best explain moral nihilism (or at least what I think it is) I’ll actually go back to the example of the chair. So like a chair, all the real world examples may be flawed but share in common a certain “chair-ness”. Well a rather common view nowadays is moral relativism, which is similar in that according to this perspective there are certain different moral frameworks that exist but have some kind of universal “moral-ness” to them. Moral nihilism in comparison would deny that there is any such “moral-ness” at all. So you see how the evolution happens, or seems to have happened obviously, I’m not an etymologist I’m just an uneducated shut in so don’t take my word for it but you can see how it might have gone. “X nihilism” is generally a rejection of whatever “X-ness” people suggest there is. So the word is more similarly used to the latin “nihil”, “X nothingness” or “nothing X” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Existential nihilism isn’t really something that you can just sum up in a few sentences, but I suppose the general idea isn’t too difficult to understand, it’s in the name after all. Essentially, the idea is that existence has no meaning or anything at all really. We just are, inexplicably, and for no good reason at all really. How strange it is to be anything at all, as Jeff Magnum put it. Now of course, seeing as existence kind of covers.. well everything. It kind of makes sense how this one idea in a way consumed all the others. It’s understandable why people might believe that falling prey to this existential nihilism might lead someone to be distrustful of any kind of authoritative worldview at all. This is why, I think that all of these have come to simply exist together under the umbrella word “nihilism”.

Now, a lot of people (often reactionaries or religious types) who are scared of nihilism taking hold in the public consciousness or even lamenting the fact that it already has in their eyes, will go on to suggest what they think will be the result of it. Generally, you get images of a violent and chaotic world. A place where the people are ruled by fleeting fancies, and immediate urges. Naturally any kind of order or regimentation falls apart, and the idea of working towards a long term goal is an impossible one. Certainly if there’s not a very real and material long term reward for holding off on fully pursuing immediate hedonistic desires. I’ll take the example of this large football stadium I live near to. Now I’ve lived near it for most of my life, close to a decade and a half, and to this day when walking past it it still feels impressive. I mean you have to be there in person to get what I mean, it’s more than just a big building it feels fucking imperial. Especially at night and when it’s all lit up. Whether there’s crowds of people on a game day swarming around it and revealed by it’s looming presence for the tiny creatures they are or on a normal evening when you can really feel almost invincible up on the plateau the thing is built on knowing you’re in a city with millions of people and yet all alone in this huge open expanse.

See the builders who worked on that, a great deal of them probably support a different team or maybe are even foreign workers who don’t care about the sport at all. That’s fine, I’ve never cared about football either, but my point is that these football stadiums are the great monuments of our time. Now it’s certainly preferable to live in a civilisation with the wealth to build big majestic buildings like this at least, but it’s still lamentable that they are no longer built for the higher reasons the great wonders of the past were. Yes, slaves and hired workers were required to build such structures (The Great Pyramid of Giza, The Hagia Sophia, The Taj Mahal, Hadrian’s Mausoleum, and even The Empire State Building) in the past but the difference is that these structures were monuments to the very civilisation that birthed them. The people who own these stadiums today are foreign oligarchs who care nothing for the nation that hosts the thing, or even for the actual game of football in many cases, just like a lot of the builders as I said earlier.

These stadiums (and of course it doesn’t have to be football, in the US it might be baseball or that weird version of rugby where they wear armour, Canada it might be hockey, etc.) are what we might call private sector works. Now of course the private/ public sector dichotomy is a modern idea, and you can’t directly apply it to the past but you can in some sense describe a lot of these older buildings as “public sector” works. I mean sure often emperors and kings funded these projects themselves, but their wealth and the government treasury were often the same thing. Can you even imagine a typical western democratic government decreeing any kind of monument or great building be built today? Of course not, yet people do want that, why is the Trump wall such a huge selling point after all? You can’t have multi generational projects and term limits at the same time. That’s how you really know that nihilism has taken root, when your society has no self confidence, no desire or will to project itself onto the world. When you believe there’s nothing special about your culture to celebrate (with monuments for example), no long term vision, but just a demoralising and ugly day to day pragmatism.

Which finally brings me back to what I was trying to say right at the start, and onto the actual book. Like I said, the author’s definition of nihilism really doesn’t seem to be accurate at all. My understanding of the word is what I have gone through already, basically what would more accurately be called existential nihilism. The author’s definition seems to be describing the symptoms, or more accurately what some people think might be the symptoms. It’s like someone describing a fever as malaria, when you can have a fever just from a bad cold or a bunch of other illnesses. “Nihilism” as it is used in this book really could be substituted instead with the word “chaos”, at least that’s certainly how it seems at first glance. Here’s the premise of the novel. There is this country/ state which is called Nihilon and the government of Nihilon is intent on pursuing “””nihilism””” as a policy. The blurb describes Nihilon as “a little known country, whose life and economy are based on nihilistic principles”. Now how this actually plays out in the book is that the government does all it can to create as much chaos and contradiction as possible in every regard, so there are laws demanding that you never be caught driving sober, and manual labour is seen as women’s work, and so forth.

Now going back to what I was talking about earlier, in a rather ironic way not only is the definition wrong but the use of this wrong definition makes the fictional Nihilon in one sense quite the opposite of a nihilistic nation. The policy of perfectly regimented chaos (as it’s literally referred to at one point in the novel) requires far more self confidence on the part of the ruling elite, represented by the shadowy President Nil, than any of the great and powerful empires of old and even the pathological and idealistic states of the 20th century. Think Best Korea, The Soviet Union or The Third Reich, and Nihilon is just as authoritarian if not more so than any of those places. The level of oversight required to enforce this state of chaos is immense, people’s lives are micromanaged in every way.

Now the book is set a good two decades after this regime has held control, and so naturally people have begun to adapt to the mayhem. The average citizen of Nihilon by the time our characters arrive is a bipolar petty scam artist with a sociopathic disregard for human life. There’s one passage in particular that really illustrates the level of control the government has. One of the characters is on an airplane and chatting to the guy next to him as they’re arriving in Nihilon, so before they even arrive but the airline is owned by the government I believe, and at one point after the stranger says something he shouldn’t a voice barks out at him through a speaker on the back of the chair in front of them telling him to stop. It’s claimed that the voice is President Nil himself, although no one actually knows what he looks like, regardless I think that illustrates the situation quite well. It reminds me of the telescreens from 1984. So throughout my time reading the book this was kind of on the back of my mind, the government isn’t pursuing a policy of nihilism, that’s a contradiction in terms. Not only that, but this is one of the most ideologically single minded regimes imaginable if anything.

It’s not until reflecting after I was finished that I think I really understood what the author was truly trying to express. See the plot of the book is that the main characters are sent to this mysterious country to write a tourist guide for the place, but while there a civil war breaks out between the government and the “forces of law and order”, a rival faction who claim they want to restore those very things. The main plot culminates in this assault by the forces of law and order on a facility in the mountains from where the government of Nihilon planned to send a rocket ship into space with two “lovers” in order to broadcast to the world the first ever example of sex in space. It’s a huge symbolic thing, again reinforcing how much vision this government has, and they’re unable to stop it in time. Nevertheless the forces of law and order still manage to take control, President Nil flees and the daughter of the old president of Damascony (the name of the region before it became Nihilon, also following a civil war a few decades earlier) is made queen.

Now President Nil himself appears only twice in the story, or three times if that voice in the airplane really is him. The first time is already quite a way towards the end, just before the assault on the compound in the mountains, and it is revealed that the whole thing has in fact been orchestrated by him. That’s the twist of the story, or one of them anyway. It’s already revealed earlier on that the guidebook mission was a cover, and that the main characters were unwittingly set up to play a role in the rebellion, but it’s not until this scene right near the end that President Nil is revealed as the actual person behind it. So this is shown to the reader, but the characters themselves don’t meet the man until the very end, the last couple of pages of the book. This scene is as the characters are leaving once and for all.

See after the new regime settles in it quickly becomes apparent that nothing has actually changed, immediately there are a bunch of new equally zany and inane laws passed as the ones from before only this time in the name of honesty and virtue or some similar expression. It really doesn’t come as much surprise, as during the earlier parts of the book it’s made clear that the people fighting for “law and order” and the nihilonian forces are basically indistinguishable. They’re the same feckless idiots and self serving swindlers as every single person in this god forsaken country. The very attack on the compound is emblematic of this, a completely insane event with legions of sportscars smashing against the walls and the queen being carried into battle in a medieval style litter, etc. It slowly becomes clear that this is just a big game to these people, like football teams the one they ended up supporting was arbitrary.

See then it starts to become clear, and as the characters are trying to get the hell out of this now clearly irredeemable shithole they have one last encounter before getting on the boat home. As they are just about to leave, there are explosions in the crowd and the characters dash into the boat for safety. All except one, Benjamin Smith, who is probably the most developed of all the characters in the book and the one with the most ties to Nihilon having fought in the first civil war when the place was still known as Damascony. He sees the man in the crowd, who we the reader know to be President Nil and as he goes to kill him President Nil smiles. Here’s a quote from this last passage of the novel, just as the explosions start to go off. “It was like a volcano erupting, a spectacle which showed Benjamin – though only for a moment – that Nihilon was a country for which nothing could be done, a part of the world that could no more be covered by  guidebook than a jungle could”.

You see, President Nil smiled because it was in this moment that he knew he had achieved his goal at last, and he could die knowing that. He knew that because he saw the realisation in Benjamin’s eyes, that Nihilon had now actually become nihilistic in the true sense. I don’t mean that it had become chaotic, as I thought at first when reading the book the author meant by that word, I mean actually nihilistic. Remember what I said earlier about how some say a similarly orderless and nonsensical civilisation may be a result of a society that falls prey to nihilistic thinking, well President Nil seems to have almost done the reverse. By artificially creating such a world, he’s selected for the people who of course would thrive in it. The civil war was his big gambit, to see if all his hard work had paid off, and he was right. His long term policy it turns out, truly was nihilism after all. The only question really, is why he had such a goal.

 

 

Another quick one

I feel like I’ve come up against another brick wall, and this one has hit me much more suddenly than the last. Right back when I started this I had so much to write about, and I did. For the first couple of months I uploaded a lot of my best stuff so far, and I was uploading way more frequently too. I was writing for hours every day, it was new and exciting and I had a lot I needed to get off my chest as well, and to be fair I had more free time as they’ve been giving me more work since the winter really got going. I did slow down though, and I also uploaded a few mediocre entries for the sake of keeping to at least something new every week. I was worried that it wouldn’t end, that the enjoyment I had for this at the start wouldn’t return, but then over the last month it has. I’ve been really starting to enjoy it again, the last post especially might be the one I’m most proud of out of all the things I’ve uploaded. If not it’s certainly up there, and it’s definitely the best quality post. Not that you can really measure that in any objective way, but you know what I mean. It’s the best example of what I’m trying to do here, that and a couple of others are the ones I’d show as a representative if asked, not that anyone ever would.

See that period before was really concerning for me, I began to worry whether I had again got myself into a situation where I was expected to spend hours of time on something I found arduous and boring rather than the enjoyable hobby it should be. Very similarly to what I was talking about two posts back actually, where I’d started off enjoying chatting with that girl and then began to hate it, I thought that maybe I was growing to hate this. It never happened, but there were a couple of weeks where like I said I just forced myself to put something up rather than letting a post come together organically. Because of course, part of me thought it might never happen or at least that it would take a while. Of course none of those posts have been very good, and maybe it would have been better to just post even less often but I really really don’t want to go less than weekly. I’ve already gone into why before, but basically it’s because I’m scared of losing the few regular visitors I do get. I think I’m on three or four now, so back up from my lowest point of one but still a tenuous amount. As much as I am doing this for myself, I am also doing it to be heard. Not by a large number of people, but some. I write these because they will be read by someone, and maybe give them something to think about or just hear me whine idk..

I was going to force myself to write something again this week, I finally finished the book I was reading and was going to talk about that but it’s been six days since my last post and all I’ve managed is a couple of paragraphs. It’s not even that I’m not interested in talking about it, I just can’t right now for some reason. I remember at several points while reading the book there were things that stood out to me and got me inspired to share my thoughts. This post about the book, which I’m sure I’ll get around to eventually, was on my mind during those times. I think I mentioned I was planning it in my head in the post I made right after New Year’s Day even. I have both specific ideas for posts I intend to make down the line and the random moments of inspiration and yet I can’t do it again. I hope this doesn’t last as long as the last time, and next week I have a lot of time off so perhaps being stuck inside for four days in a row will get me writing but at the same time it can also be rather demotivating.

As I said before, I feel like I’m navigating my way through the black land. The thing is I don’t really know where I’m trying to get to, and I’ve been here so long I forgot what it’s like in happier and brighter places. I get a glimpse every now and then, the star poking through the sooty cloud layer, and it gives me energy to move and push on. This time a month, another just a few days, etc. The doubt always creeps back in eventually, where is this new path actually leading, further in? If I just stay where I am I’ll definitely get nowhere, and the evil things that lurk here begin to close in also, but I’m just so tired of this whole charade. I stay put and the shadow grows ever heavier, something somehow pulls me out of it and I begin a new but ultimately futile journey which ends with me once again alone in a cold and dark pit. Is my goal to get free, to escape from this place? If so why would I ever have come here in the first place, did I stray from the right course by accident or deliberately? It seems a mix of both choice and circumstance led me here, but I don’t know how much of a role either played. I don’t remember anymore, all memory of my time before being here is a blur.

I remember what it was like early on though, my spirit was weakened very gradually. It didn’t happen right away, I believe I even thought that in some way I was better for having ended up here. Like it took something to end up here that most people didn’t have, pride and delusion go hand in hand. Stupid people and boring people never end up in such places, but I see now that the boring one is me. I’ve done nothing but aimlessly wander around not developing at all, and the point at which I diverged from everyone else gets further away every day. Let’s say I can find my way back, if that’s even what I want now, and that alone takes some time. Well even then I’m at a place most people have long moved on from, and therefore still just as alone.

I’m not just talking about the thing I was talking about last week here, although I suppose that is what has brought all these thoughts up again, I’m talking about every aspect of life. It’s funny though, I talked about PUAs last week and this metaphor is quite appropriate for them in a way. You know, because the thing with PUAs is in many cases they’re chasing after the people who left them behind long ago. Even the ones who go on to be incredibly successful with women are eternally unsatisfied because they will never experience young love. If you look past the greased back hair, stained leather jacket and ripped jeans you’ll see the same lonely kid who spent too many summer afternoons indoors. It’s really quite sad, and I know I can’t ever end up like that. There aren’t many other options though, I mean where can I go from here? I’m really not sure, I just feel so hopelessly lost and not only does it seem like no one cares it’s beginning to feel like I’m actually resented for being such a loser.

I’m struggling to even stick to a coherent point, I’ve just been hit over the last week with this sudden influx of bad thoughts. It’s like you get on a train of thought and within a short few days you’ve seen all the usual scenery from the window. I’m just having a hard time right now, and I’ll try to make a better post next week. It’s a shame, I really have felt like I’ve been on a roll the last month. I think this is just going to happen sometimes.

Volcel gang manifesto

So, I said I’d talk in more detail about online dating. I’ve been told, a few times, that I’ve never actually made any effort to get a girlfriend/ lose my virginity. Mostly by “helpful” normalfags online but also once in person. A lot of the time online it isn’t specifically aimed at me, because I rarely ever moan or whine about not having those things anymore for reasons I kind of talked about in the last entry. Rather it’s aimed at “robots” or “incels” and similar kinds of people in general, who I do associate with. There was one specific post I read, unfortunately it was a while ago now so I don’t have a screenshot and I have no idea what thread it was so I wouldn’t be able to find it in the archives. The guy had made this thread, one of those ones you see fairly regularly or at least used to, saying he was the one who had the right advice that would help us out of the situation we’re in. It’s the kind of thread, the kind of person, who the whole bee urself meme was originally made to mock. Anyway, of course people reacted accordingly and insulted/ berated him and were just making jokes about the whole thing and I was going to give up on it and find something else to entertain myself with but then an actually rather interesting exchange happened.

At some point someone made what I think was quite an insightful comment, he said that this advice never worked before with incel/ robot types not necessarily because it was bad advice generally speaking. Clearly it worked for some people after all, but it assumes things that are true about the person giving advice are true about everyone. Now I’ll try and explain what he meant, or my interpretation of what he meant anyway, using the most well known of these little nuggets of normie wisdom “Just be yourself”. What they really mean by this is, stop being so inhibited (as if it’s so fucking easy) around other people, especially those you don’t know very well. Which there’s some truth to, it seems like when you’re shy or awkward people sense that you’re hiding something. Which I suppose in a way you are, you’re not being yourself dare I say and people can sense how contrived everything you do is.

The problem again, is that it’s not something you can just turn on or off. I can’t just act how I do around my close friends or on my own when I’m around other people it’s physically impossible for me. At least for the moment, although it’s starting to feel less and less possible that there’s much I can do to change that even in future. More importantly though is that underlying assumption that if you are somehow able to get over that, you’ll just be accepted and liked for who you are. There’s no reason that someone wouldn’t still be ostracised for their political beliefs, their social attitudes, etc. Given the tendency of people like me to gravitate to extreme ideas I’d say it’s actually fairly likely. The important thing to remember here is the assumption, that’s what I’m talking about. It’s not just this one example either, all the usual advice these kind of people share has it’s own because of course it’s all sold as universally applicable, which really means it applies to no one.

If you want to find out what it is specifically they are assuming is universally true, it’s the thing that actually makes these hot tips and tricks they have work. So of course in the example I chose it’s actually being likeable and not frightening to normalfags with your weird views on things. You might think I’m being unfair, that of course no one really thinks that everyone is a boring normal faggot like them. After all, they are aware that extreme beliefs exist so naturally people also exist to hold them. Fair point, they would agree with that if pointed out probably, but I think on a day to day basis they underestimate the amount of people who they would consider weird and feel uncomfortable around hugely. I could be completely wrong, but I genuinely believe they think of such people as a tiny fringe group. Of course this specific “be yourself” (and of course all similar statements) line is given by a particular type. I guess they’re what people might call a turbonormie, at least that’s one term I’ve heard used for them. This is most people, who just engage with the world in a very superficial way. People who talk about the weather and wear fast fashion. Yes that’s kind of a strawman or caricature, a modern archetype even, but that doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate. It’s a composite, so obviously it’s not going to describe any one of these people that well but don’t pretend you don’t know the type.

The thing is, people use advice that worked for them. So for someone who was kind of always one of these people but just was maybe a little socially awkward or shy as a kid being themselves worked. Maybe they were part of a certain clique or social niche while at school, even one of the ones who pride themselves on being different like the goth kids from southpark. See they think that because they were different in a very shallow way from most of their peers, that they’re similar to the incels and actual social rejects who remained that way into adulthood. The difference of course being that what made them different was fashion, and I’m not using that word to necessarily mean clothing (although of course, oftentimes that was a part of it) but rather something that can be taken off at any time, rather than something fundamental.

Then you have failed normies or alt normies or whatever other of these silly little terms you want to choose, people who can blend in reasonably well but are a little “off” maybe. Think of someone who has always been able to make friends, has had a few relationships, etc. but also has a few “weird” ideas. Of course “bee urself” didn’t work for them, but another little chestnut of advice these people will give is “fake it till you make it”. Again, because it worked for them. They were able to stay composed and appear normal long enough for it to happen naturally, so of course everyone must be capable of that. You know, and on and on it goes for all the various different kinds of people who think they’re helping you by just repeating what worked for them. They obviously don’t really care about you (not that they should care about people on the internet they’ve never even met, but they shouldn’t pretend to either) and are just looking to feel good for “helping” people. I got so sidetracked I completely lost my train of thought..

Right, the thread I was talking about. So in response to this comment, about how his advice might not be universally applicable and in fact might actually only work for quite a small group of people, instead of having a moment of self reflection he decided to double down. They were going back and forth for a while, and as these people always do when slightly pushed back on start calling you things, incel, loser, etc. So much for the whole good samaritan routine. Honestly the fact that they’re so quick to jump to those specific kinds of insults makes me think they’re there really just to feel less pathetic for a little while, and the contempt they really have is revealed in these moments. It doesn’t really matter though, what I’m trying to get to is a particular thing he said at one stage in this whole thing. I don’t remember the exact wording, but essentially it was something like “you’ve never even asked a girl out before, you’ve never even tried, it’s not my advice that’s wrong you’re just a coward”. The reason this particular example of something which as I said in the first paragraph is something people like me are accused of often, is the last part. I’m not going to try and disagree that I’ve never actually tried, because it’s a fair point, but I will disagree that cowardice is the reason. Well, maybe it plays a role, but it’s definitely not the main reason that’s for sure. See, I myself used to agree with that. I have for a very long time seen myself as a coward, but I think over the years there have been a few situations that I would have handled quite differently were I one. With anyone I was willing and able to be honest with, I would have openly referred to myself as a coward maybe even as recently as a year ago.

Which finally takes me to what I actually was intending to talk about when starting this, online dating. See we now have a way of getting into the “dating game” or whatever you want to call it, with the risk or scary part removed. Yes you still might be unsuccessful and be rejected indirectly by having no one “like” or match with you or whatever, but it’s all totally impersonal. The actual genuinely scary, terrifying even, prospect of asking out a girl you barely know or even a total stranger and very possibly getting shot down and/ or humiliated is completely done away with.  By the time you get to any kind of interaction it’s been established there is a mutual attraction between the two of you, and by the time you get to meeting in person you’ve established you get along and have had time to get a little more comfortable around them. I don’t need to explain this, it’s the selling point. I’m just trying to stress what I was saying as much as possible, that we have an example of a way to bypass the scary part.

The thing is though, I’m not on any online dating site/ app. In fact I’d be more likely to cold approach a woman in public like the PUAs do than sign up for online dating. Both are very fucking unlikely of course, I’m not saying cowardice doesn’t play some role, but it’s clearly more than that. I’ve been thinking for a long time about what it could be, but it’s a tricky thing. What I think, is that it’s not so much that I have a problem with the modern idea of “dating”, but rather that there’s something different about the first relationship you have starting somewhere like that. I’m talking about on online dating especially, but also just asking a girl out in person. See the modern idea of “dating”, of serial monogamy if you prefer, is unbelievably cynical. The entire premise is that you will have several failed relationships, it’s not just expected it’s literally a given. Now people who have become cynical can get on just fine in a cynical system, but those of who have yet to lose our idealism not so much.

Now what makes online dating different, other than the safety I already talked about? Unlike other spaces for “dating”, it is explicit about it. Sure you had speed dating events and stuff like that but they’re a novelty, most people go to clubs and bars and places like that. So online dating managed to make the entire thing seem even more contrived, and there is the real issue I think I and presumably some other people like me have. See, the other way people meet as adults is they might ask out a colleague, or someone they share a hobby with. Sure, they still have to ask and that’s a scary prospect especially if you’ve never done it before, but the idea doesn’t feel wrong in the way that “dating” whether it be online or irl does. Going into the world with the express purpose of finding a gf, feels really wrong to me and I can’t explain why and that really bugs me. I think I even may have spoke about this before.

In fact I definitely did, I don’t remember exactly which post but it was not too long ago. I think the phrase I used was it gets under my skin, and it really does. People don’t say “I want to be in a relationship with this particular person” they say “I want a girlfriend” or I want to be in a relationship”. I don’t want to repeat myself if I’ve already talked about this, but it’s something that keeps popping back into my thoughts. Modern dating, the phenomenon that is taken to it’s ultimate conclusion with these shitty dating apps and sites but has existed in some form since the 20s, feels unnatural and of course like I said cynical. Even the example of the more naturally occurring relationships have that cynicism, the culture at large unfortunately also asserts this idea of the inevitable failed relationships for all, but that’s just the way of the world I suppose.

I also was about to go in a different direction there, so I’m going to go back a bit and do that. See the idea of being part of that whole cynical world might seem bad enough, but for that to be your first experience of romance is even worse. Most people’s first experiences, their first relationships, happen in their youth. Of course, these fall into the natural side of this dichotomy I seem to have set up here today. Kids and young teens can’t go to clubs and bars and they’re surrounded by each other all day because of school so they just do what they’re designed to do naturally. Most of them anyway, and those who don’t never seem to be able to get over it. Young love is almost universally seen as something special, it’s held up as this fantastic experience that can’t ever be replicated later in life. Nothing lives up to your first they always say, it’s the rite of passage for our current age. To know that you will never experience this is really fucking hard to accept. To know that the options might very well be either remain alone or join in with the bitter charade of modern dating is never going to go away. Especially because I can think of a few times where I got rather close, in fact there’s one particular memory that might stay with me until my dying day where I was literally only a few words away. I know from my time talking with similar people that a lot of them have similar memories.

There’s this film, Whatever, which is based on a book of the same name by Michel Houellebecq. I haven’t read the book, or any others of his although I’ve been told I should. In fact I was recommended some of his books by the girl I was talking about in my last post. Anyway there’s this scene in the film which is set in a nightclub, you can find it on youtube really easily if you’re interested, and one of the two characters (an older man, speaking to the other main character who is basically an incel) gives a short speech talking about the same exact thing. Of course it’s put much more poetically than in this post, and it’s a good film, so that’s why I’m mentioning it. Think of it like a wound, or more accurately just a hole, and after a certain point there’s nothing that can be done to heal it.

Think about the PUAs, people always say they’re trying to compensate for something or they’re broken in some way, all these platitudes without ever really saying what it is. I think it’s this, I mean I like to go on about modern archetypes and the PUA who was a loser/ really unsuccessful with girls in his youth is a huge one. Maybe it’d be more accurate to call it a trope even. More importantly though, are the audience for this kind of thing. Because the pick up artist community, is essentially maybe at most a few hundred men selling some kind of variation of the same scheme to millions. These few hundred, are in many cases an example of this late bloomer trope. Now the lesser known faces, the guys who just pay for the online courses or go to conferences of whatever these people do and then go out into the world to “pick up”, they’re who I’m really talking about. See, what they’re paying for and what “pick up artistry” is when you really think about it, is a revenge fantasy.

By calling it a fantasy I’m not saying it’s unrealistic, I’m reminded in particular of this one short video by one of these guys I saw a long time ago when I would occasionally listen to these people. I don’t remember exactly which one, and they all look and talk and dress the same anyway, but it was a video by this famous PUA talking about why you should cold approach. Now maybe I’m too trusting because anyone can go on the internet and tell lies, but for some reason I actually do believe that a lot of these men are telling the truth about the level of “success” they have with women. I mean sure I expect they’re embellishing somewhat but I don’t doubt that they’ve had lots of hook ups with very pretty girls. So anyway quick summary, the guy described himself (rather short, average looks, high pitched voice, etc) and said that he has been with various models and actresses and “10s” and YOU CAN TOO IF YOU FOLLOW THESE FIVE SIMPLE STEPS! I’m half joking, but no he was trying to sell his course or something anyway I’m sure.

There was one insight I got from this though, see he said that before you got to that point you had to get rejected a lot. This isn’t unusual, they all say this, but maybe this is a trend with me I’ll have to hear something many times before I notice it. What stood out to me, that for whatever reason hadn’t the other times I heard this, is that it’s exactly like a certain rather common cult practice. See in order to become the “new you”, you need to break down everything about who you currently are. You need to lose every aspect of your current identity, like I said you need to be completely broken down and humiliated, in order for something new to be built in it’s place. So, you can either force yourself through the gauntlet of rejection until your pride is completely smashed or you can refuse to take part and not lose who you are. I always like to bring these full circle, so often the conclusion these accusers make is that if you never made the effort that means that you’re not actually an incel, you’re a volcel. I’m not sure because I’d be happy to have a relationship if it were to occur naturally in the way I was talking about earlier, even if it’ll never be the same as what could have been, but if that’s not an option then I guess you can call me volcel.

A story

It’s been a really long time since I felt “tfw no gf”, in an abstract sense I mean. Of course I’ve had oneitis, recently in fact, which indirectly led to me starting this blog. That general feeling though, not since maybe a couple years ago or longer even. I think actually it’s around the time I developed a friendship/ weird thing with this girl online. Funnily enough we met on /r9k/, just before both of us turned 18 because we both have a birthday in the same month. This was in late 2014, so a bit more than a couple years actually. I remember the thread, it was one of those ones where you fill in this template. If you have spent a significant amount of time on the board you would probably recognise it if you saw it. You fill in some basic information about yourself and then the bottom half about your “ideal partner”. I never actually filled in the template, I was just scrolling through the thread and seeing if there were any girls. Of course there always are a few, their posts stick out like a sore thumb because they have ten times as many replies as the normal posts. We had a brief interaction in the thread and for whatever reason got along well enough that she gave me her e-mail address and we started talking there.

Now I have to say I would never do something like that now, not because I’m any less lonely but something about that behaviour feels pathetic to me. It felt pathetic then too to be fair, so maybe I am a little more content with loneliness now idk. The point is, I was younger (not even 18 yet) and while I had been visiting the site as a whole for a while I wasn’t really a regular on /r9k/ yet. I still felt kind of like a newfag, I was still careful before I made a post and generally probably posted way less often. I still hadn’t fully been immersed in the “culture”, if you can call it that. I certainly hadn’t got to the point I was in early 2016, when I left the board entirely for almost a year (around the same time as I stopped talking to this girl actually), where I felt like the board had almost become a home to me. I had to leave, because I knew it was having a really toxic effect on my state of mind, but it was difficult. I stayed away for a good year as well, and while that feeling remains it’s not quite the same, though neither is the board. I’ll always have quite fond memories of that period of time, of 2015. Although that might have something to do with the fact that it followed 2014, which was a really shit time for me.

I’m getting distracted though, what I’m saying is that this behaviour was something uncharacteristic of me. In fact I engaged in a lot of similar behaviour like it that whole year honestly. There was a period of a few months where I would go on omegle every night, and while it wasn’t really so I could try and talk to girls as I more enjoyed just chatting with the anons there, that was definitely also a motivator. I exclusively stuck to the r9k tags during the period of time I was there, and these threads would regularly hit bump limit so there was a small “community” and familiar faces I would speak to often. In fact there were quite a few creepshots taken of me and posted in those threads, and one or two ended up on the bigger graph images from the period. Occasionally I check the threads when I see one (they still appear from time to time, but never live long), and one with me on it was still being reposted a few months ago, so it’s not just me who remembers that period of time fondly. Regular compliments were nice too, I’ll be honest, I kind of pretended I didn’t but I really liked it when people would say nice things about me. Of course, I was incredibly insecure, and that definitely was part of why I spent so much time with these people. Even then I felt a little separate though, sure all of the regulars eventually got to recognise me but I still felt apart from them all in some way. It was like I was kind of forgettable, I was on the periphery of that whole scene. It’s weird because you’d basically go on and have a series of one-on-one conversations but the entire time the thread would be up and this more meta conversation would be going as well. You’d be talking to someone and then see a post by them in the thread. It was strange, for me anyway. There was also drama, and a lot of people wanted to talk on skype as well. I added a few of them, but for some reason there I was much more awkward and everyone gave up bothering and ghosted me as soon as I stopped going on omegle every night and being part of that whole scene.

It’s been a while now, so I don’t know if I have the timeline exactly right, but from what I remember I started going on omegle and chatting with the people there (often with my webcam on, of course) almost immediately after promising this girl that I would speak to her on camera/ video chat. See, going back a little, after a few days of talking over e-mail we eventually started chatting on skype because it was easier. I actually created an account just to talk to her, because up until this point I was really not into any of that kind of thing. I had been going to 4chan for years, but I never had any “online friends”, I never joined a forum where you have a username and recognisable identity, etc. I didn’t have a steam account, I only played vidya on console and mostly only used party chat and spoke to people I already knew irl from school. I did use social media while at school, but I deleted all of that the day I finished secondary school and still haven’t changed my perspective on it even though it has only become a far bigger thing in the life of your average westerner since then.

Oh, yes I remember now. At first she didn’t actually have a webcam, she had an older computer without one built in and had never bought one separately. So it wasn’t until after quite a couple months of chatting fairly regularly (I’d say that for the year or slightly longer we were talking we’d speak for an average of maybe five or six hours a day) that she was able to get one. Of course, we’d already sent a few photos of ourselves to each other at this point with messages and stuff. This is where I have to admit something that I really even now feel shitty about. See even though the original thread we met in was explicitly about finding a “partner”, very shortly after we first started talking and the subject came up she told me she wasn’t interested in finding a boyfriend. Now, I didn’t say anything about this and mirrored the sentiment. “Yeah, me neither” or something like that. Of course this wasn’t true, I was a 17/ 18 year old boy who had ruined every opportunity for intimacy ever given to him, but I did genuinely enjoy talking to her and while I until that point had been under the assumption that there was some kind of “thing” like that implied because of the circumstances of our first meeting, I didn’t mind that much. I had someone who was genuinely nice and who seemed to actually find me interesting and would go out of her way to talk to me. I was happy to have an actual friend especially as I was feeling like I was being left behind by the few friends I had irl. This conversation also happened after we’d been talking for a couple of weeks, so if I’d really cared so much I should have been more forward, but of course I didn’t yet.

I did eventually start to develop quite strong feelings for her though, shortly after this, despite not even knowing what she looked like yet. Then one evening after she had supposedly been drinking with her friends she half “confessed” her feelings for me over a bunch of skype messages and I did the same a few days later with this really long and looking back very cringy message to her. I didn’t explicitly say I wanted her to be my “internet girlfriend” or anything like that, it was more vague, but amazingly she responded saying she felt similarly and had after all been being honest that evening while drunk. So after that we shared some photos of ourselves and she decided to get a camera. This was also the first year my dad started this trend of leaving for a holiday for a few weeks so I can have the place to myself. He’d been away for a few days at a time, but I remember this time in particular as he was leaving for a few weeks which was longer than ever before.

It sounds like it was all going perfectly well for me, I’d have the place to myself so I would feel comfortable talking to her without anyone around to listen in on me. Because of course I never told anyone about this, well that’s not true I did mention her later to one friend but that’s it, something about the whole thing felt quite shameful to me. Kinda how I was saying earlier how it felt pathetic. Like I couldn’t get a girlfriend or even friends in real life, and I didn’t want anyone to know that I was talking to people online. I could write a whole post about this aspect of my psyche honestly, I’ve tried already actually. My pride I suppose, it’s the same reason I’ve never even considered online dating despite the fact that I know it could probably get me (anyone really) laid within a week. I don’t know why, but I guess at least unconsciously I’d rather remain a virgin than openly state that I want a partner/ relationship. To have to admit and ask for something, not just a gf but even help in any area of life, is incredibly difficult for me. I’m going to have to talk about this in much more detail some other time, because I’ve got so much more to say.

I know how it sounds as well, the paragraph above I mean. It reads like total cope, like something someone would say rather than admit to themselves they’re just unattractive. Maybe it’s true, I’ve got a lot wrong with me but being lacking in self awareness is not one of them. It’s very possible that the real unconscious motivation is for me to just avoid potential rejection. Again not just in “dating”, but in all areas of life. Like how I stopped going into school, and didn’t show up for all my exams, perhaps because I knew I was too stupid to pass them anyway. Or at least that I was scared of that being the case. I don’t think so though, well actually I do think that also is part of it but I don’t think my lack of success with girls/ women is because I’m unattractive. I hate talking about myself like this, because it’s easy for it to seem like I’m saying something about myself that I’m not, but I can think of several examples of females who were definitely attracted to me. Superficially I mean, but then after actually interacting with me and experiencing my criminally vulgar shyness as Morrissey once put it, they lose all interest. In fact tying back in to the actual topic of this particular entry, after we swapped photos the girl became noticeably more warm and friendly. Not that she hadn’t been before, but it’s funny that the opposite happened in my case. Which takes me back to what I was actually saying, the thing that I still feel bad about.

I know this is going to make me look like an awful person, but the moment I saw what she looked like I lost some interest. Speaking of superficiality right? I just wasn’t attracted to her and I couldn’t get past that. It’s not even that she wasn’t pretty, because she was and I said that to her at the time, but she was just quite different than I had imagined and it felt weird. I don’t mean I lost interest in talking to her, this was a couple months after we first started talking and we kept talking for a year almost after this. I know it might seem like I overuse the term, although it’s really more accurate to say I experience the feeling too much, but the oneitis I’d developed was before I even knew what she looked like. It really was because of the person herself, and so in my head I had naturally created an image of what she looked like. Kind of the exact reverse of the case from my first post on this blog, where I knew what the person looked like but created an imaginary personality. I’ve already told that story, but of course I knew some things about her and similarly I had a basic description from that original graph and some conversations about what this girl looked like which is what I used to manufacture this image in my head. Now ironically, I would say that the girl from more recently is probably less good looking, but something about being there in person makes that matter a whole lot less. I suppose it was more disappointment that she didn’t look like this imaginary character I’d made up in my head, than lack of attraction.

Anyway some part of me gave up on the idea of anything more than an internet friendship with this girl, but she didn’t feel the same way, or at least that’s how it seemed. I could very well be wrong and perhaps she was never interested in me. It doesn’t matter now. I think that part of my motivation for going to omegle in the first place was the same as it was for me checking that thread with the charts. So I kept putting off talking to her on video chat because I was worried it would be really awkward or something, in fact I never did in the end.. I never was going to initiate it and she never would either, but she did go in those threads and see people posting the creepshots they’d taken of me from omegle. Which she understandably was bothered by, and she’d get really upset and I would feel awful. The whole situation was a fucking mess, also after a while the conversations became less enjoyable too. The format, text messaging essentially, is really limiting and you can’t express emotion or humour well at all over text. There was a language barrier as well, she spoke/ wrote English well but as a second language (she was from Italy) and so while that wasn’t a problem at first, when trying to talk about more complicated things it became difficult. I know that I get people who read these blogposts that aren’t native English speakers, I wonder sometimes if some of the points I’m making are missed and how I can best prevent that while still expressing myself the way I feel works best.

I also started drinking quite a lot in this period, I’d just turned 18 after all and I started because it made it much easier to relax and be normal when on omegle. My dad went away three times that year, I remember I brought my mattress into the main room and basically only left it to get food or go and buy alcohol. I would stay up until 5 or 6am, because a lot of them were from the US and a different timezone, and wake up after midday the whole time. I was still in school at the time, but I maybe went in for four or five days over the entire few times he was away. Also, when I was drinking I would also be more relaxed talking to her, and we’d talk about meeting irl and her visiting me here. I never really expected it to happen, after all a flight nowadays is pretty easy to arrange and cheap, if we wanted to do something like that we would have. It’s not that I didn’t want her to visit, in fact I thought about it a lot and thought that it would be the thing that would save whatever it was we had. I suppose even then I was aware that my weird issue would disappear if I met her in person, because it would almost be like seeing her for the first time again.

I don’t need to go over every little detail of that period of time, my original plan for this post was actually a look back at last year, because we started talking again and I realised that without the context of who she was and what had been things wouldn’t make sense. I then started the post writing about something else, but maybe because she’s on my mind it ended up being about her anyway and now this has just become a look back at 2015 instead. I don’t know if I’m still going to do the one about last year, I don’t really like how this one came out, but I’ve written so much I don’t want to go back and start something completely new now. See, after a while it must have become clear to her I wasn’t as interested in talking. In fact one of the last important events from that whole situation illustrates it perfectly. She asked me one evening about that long post I’d made right at the beginning expressing my feelings for her, the one I’d sent before I even knew what she looked like. Out of the blue when we’d been talking about something entirely different, she just asked if I still felt the same way. I said I did, but it must have been obvious to her I wasn’t telling the truth because I just said something like “yeah sure, whatever”. Shortly after that, maybe a few weeks or just over a month, she stopped replying mid conversation. I’ve got to be honest I felt relieved, because by that point it had become a chore to talk with her. While at first I had really enjoyed it, gradually I realised how limited the scope of potential conversation was with her. Now ghosting someone is rather cowardly, but not even being able to do that and just continuing to talk to someone when you’ve begun to hate doing so like I did is even worse. So, I’m glad she did and it should have been left at that.

So going back to the start, I think after this point in my life I realised that a girlfriend wasn’t really what I wanted. I mean, the platonic ideal of the “girlfriend” is far from what I want. I’ve been trying to explain what I’m getting at here for nearly an hour and deleted all of it, I’m really struggling to explain myself. Here’s my best attempt, imagine an alternate universe where after sending me her photo for the first time she had turned out to be exactly the person I had originally pictured but in all other regards was exactly the same person. Of course instead of losing interest my feelings would have only intensified, but the person would have still been the same. Eventually it’d still be just as boring to talk, the greater effort I admittedly probably would have made to try and meet her irl would have been in spite of that. Who knows what might have happened, but if I had somehow ended up in a relationship with her I wouldn’t have grown to enjoy the conversations we had I’d have grown to put up with them. And this is the person I’ve probably been closest with, out of everyone I’ve ever known. If even talking to her became boring, then there might be no one for me. Because of course I’d rather have a girlfriend than be the lonely loser I am, but I haven’t daydreamed or fantasised about having a girlfriend since then. It’s not something I pine for like so many guys in similar situations to me do, and I know that while I’d feel better I’d still feel unsatisfied. That is what I’m trying to say, I think I finally got it. The thing is, after hours and hours every day for months eventually you run out of things to say.

There were a few other important things that happened that year, things that affected the development of my worldview I mean. Like a brief period where I became rather obsessed with Elliot Rodger, I’d read My Twisted World in early 2014 right after the shooting became international news, but then kind of forgot about him for long time. Then on /r9k/ he was talked about constantly and I kind of got pulled in to that world. Very close towards the end of that year there was a series of threads with a few hundred never before seen photos of him being dumped, and those threads (while they were active) are some of my favourite memories ever. I know, my life is a joke. Some other stuff as well, I just want to get this out now though. I’ve been reading through all my posts, from the start of this whole little project, over the last few days. I’m surprised by how good I think some of them are, usually anything I write sounds really cringe/ embarrassing even only a few days later. None of them are perfect, I think all of them have one or two things that are a little annoying, but generally speaking I’m really proud of some of them. In fact I feel a little like I’ve lost something, that there’s nothing quite as interesting or well written as the best few from the very start. This post is a total mess. I might try and put some kind of archive or something like it so that scrolling all the way back through everything I’ve written here isn’t the only way to see the older stuff.

It’s funny, she always encouraged me to write but I don’t think I’m a very good writer, I would just do an even worse job of expressing myself in any other medium. On the other hand she was always drawing, and I actually had some art of hers as my desktop background for a long time even after we stopped talking the first time. I thought about using it as the header image for this entry actually, but I’ve decided to do so without asking her wouldn’t be right, so that’s why I left it without one this time. See I’ve been tempted to send her a link to this blog a few times since starting, to show her that I finally decided to start writing like I said I wanted to, but now after this post that would probably be a really bad idea. I’m conflicted, maybe I’ve completely misunderstood things and the only way I’d find out would be to hear what she had to say. I don’t know how good her memory is, or if she’d be honest. Maybe feeling insulted by what I said about her, she’d just say whatever to try and hurt me back. I do think that she’s a good person, for the most part, certainly one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. I really do wish the best for her, she was always a little troubled. When we started talking again it was clear she was no longer interested either, in that way I mean. She clearly has feelings for someone else who she met since the first time we were speaking, and they actually lived in the same city so had met in person, and I suppose it was obvious I had some feelings for my co-worker even though I never said it to her. She would talk about him a lot, and when I got really upset about my co-worker leaving she could probably tell why it hurt so much. The conversation was more like something between two old friends, and at first it was really nice catching up and hearing about what she’d done in the time between talking. However, the exact same thing happened as the first time and after a few months it became a chore again and I started making excuses to not talk some days, and so did she I think. Then soon after she stopped bothering to reply, clearly sensing I had stopped enjoying talking to her again or because she had become equally bored with me.

 

 

A humble but durable legacy

The previous two evenings I’ve come home from work with the intention of relaxing by getting to work on a new entry and then after writing for a couple hours I’d read a little and head to bed. Yet both evenings I came home and ended up just scrolling through the catalogue right up until it was time to get some sleep and finding maybe one or two interesting threads the entire time, staying up later than I planned yet achieving less. There’s this image I have in my head of myself sitting by the glowing heater otherwise in a dark room, with a warm cup of chamomile and my laptop in front of me. Crafting a new entry that cleverly weaves several ideas together in a way that is both intelligent and poetic. Yes, I know it’s rather silly. It keeps me going while I’m there though, dealing with the various characters that come through the shop. It’s fair to say I have a romanticised idea of what it is I’m doing here, in a weird way I’m kind of aware of it and see it as being not entirely “truthful” yet at the same time I can’t shake it off entirely either. It’s in my nature, I’ve always done this. It’s more than mere “cope” as well, because I did it back when life was good. When I was a small child, when the world was still mysterious.

It’s hard to give examples of this because it’s more than just how I describe things, although that is of course a huge aspect of it. Even if I were to force myself to use the most mundane language when talking, in my mind there would still be a certain beauty to all the more mediocre things in life. Well, until I actually get around to being personally involved in them that is. Take this other example, my job. I’ve described it as a shop, and that’s close but not entirely accurate. There’s two different locations and the office, I’ve mentioned this before. What I haven’t mentioned is that the smaller shop, the one I’m still sent to most of the time is really more of a box/ kiosk. Here’s a drawing of the layout, to give a better idea. It’s a simple sketch, of course it looks nothing like the actual place without the colour and things all over the walls and in the front, but it gives a good idea of the size and shape.

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So, as much of a big deal as I made in that one post about why I was always being placed at the smaller shop I actually much prefer this place. I have a stool to sit on and a small heater, and I can listen to whatever I want to. Lately I’ve been listening to The History Of Rome podcast for a good couple hours at the start of my shift there before it gets busier later in the afternoon and then I’ll just put some music on. I think I mentioned I was restarting that in another post here, well I’ve just got past the point I got to last time which was the end of Marcus Aurelius’ reign and the transition of power to Commodus. I can have free hot drinks from the machine, coffee (which I only drink in the morning) or hot chocolate or a herbal tea. I’ve spent days in there when there were thunderstorms and heavy rain, or pretty dense snowing (not that it ever snows that heavily here), and in the middle of the summer when the sun was beating down, all while reasonably comfortable. I even had a conversation with one of the customers the other day about this. He said he saw me sitting there with a bored expression and that I should be glad boredom is the worst thing I have to worry about while working. He was right, I’m really glad I found this job honestly. The worst it gets, at least at this smaller place, is a period where not much happens and I’m just daydreaming. Amusingly enough also recently I saw a poster on a wall while walking to work advertising some kind of scheme or something and it said “Want to get paid to daydream?”. My immediate thought, given I had had that conversation the same day, was that I already do.

So I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the job, in fact after I’ve had a good few days not working (which happens often because the schedule changes weekly and I only do four days on average, so often I’ll get three or four days off in a row) I look forward to going in and not being stuck at home anymore. At the same time, when I’ve been working for five or more days in a row because I have days at the end of one week and the beginning of the next it does start to become a slog. My point anyway is that for wageslavery, it’s pretty fucking /comfy/. When I write about it it makes it seem even better, and that’s really my point. Because of course when I’m there while I am aware of how fortunate I am I still feel like a wageslave of course. As soon as I leave though, every time despite being there for over a year now, I can’t picture the place without the romantic lens distorting things.

In the podcast I’ve been listening to there’s an episode called A Day In The Life, where Mark Duncan (the narrator/ writer/ guy behind the whole thing) goes through an average day for a citizen of the eternal city itself during the Pax Romana. The height of the empire, the period you probably think of when talking about the glory and prosperity of Rome. Well the picture he paints in some ways resembles my own life. I sit there in what is essentially the modern equivalent of a market stall and receive coins for what I sell. It really hit me when I was counting up the coins at the end of the day, see when we finish we take the coins out of the till and separate them into various plastic pouches to bring back to the main office. I just realised that two thousand years ago, not just in Rome but in cities all over the world there would be plenty of people just like me counting up the coins for the day and putting them into pouches. Pouches of leather rather than clear plastic, of course. Whether I like it or not as well, the city I live in also has a very “international” character. It’s like those posts people will make, with the meme arrows. Ywn be X person at Y point in history living an easy but /comfy/ simple life. Except, I actually kind of am doing that. I’m still a fucking loser, but in this one regard life is pretty good. I suppose, and see this is me doing that thing again, I’m continuing a legacy that goes back millennia. A simple unskilled city worker, it may be an ignoble profession but it’s outlived many more prestigious ways of making a living.

I know this is a shorter post than usual, I just can’t really think where else to take this subject. I think I got across what I really wanted to already, and hey it’s still about as long as a usual post on most of the other similar style blogs I’ve seen around. Not that that means I intend to usually have shorter posts like this, I enjoy the longer ones. Again sticking to the whole idea of this post, I have this nice image in my head of someone spending an evening with my newest entry, getting /comfy/. I know I don’t have many people regularly coming back, but I like the idea that I’m giving someone something to look forward to. Not that any of my posts are quite long enough to take an entire evening, at most maybe the longer ones might take half an hour if you’re really taking your time. It could be a nice part of it though, and if you stop to think yourself and respond in your head (because no one ever actually responds with a comment unfortunately) to what I’m talking about it could last longer. Anyway I’m rambling, which I know is what I do here but it’s not really leading anywhere interesting. I suppose I could quickly talk about one thing, just because I got reminded when typing that out. I’ve been thinking more about the title of the blog, I’ve considered shortening it. Or, I’ve considered that perhaps one day I could. See I am admittedly rather neurotic and I don’t see that changing, and I do ramble a lot which I also don’t see changing, but I do believe that one day it will no longer be fair to refer to myself as “a mess”.

There have been some setbacks, the shrooms I was growing have been contaminated with mould for one (the photo I used for the main image is of what became of them) which is a real shame because I thought they could have given me some interesting insights and also inspiration for this new hobby of mine. I suppose I could try again, but if I do I’ll wait until the spring because the cold weather also caused a lot of problems. It was tricky keeping it both warm and well lit, and I think that also led to the failure. I’m also considering the peyote cactus, which is even easier and less tricky legally to get here. It will take much longer to grow and prepare though. I haven’t been reading as much as I wanted to be, I’m reading the book Travels In Nihilon at the moment. It’s a novel telling the tale of a group of travellers sent into the fictional country of Nihilon in order to write a travel guide and how they get caught up in an insurrection. The country is a kind of hypercapitalist/ libertarian fantasy, but of course unbelievably corrupt and spiritually desolate. It is bordering a heavily militarised and equally shitty socialist state called Cronacia, with whom it is locked in a seemingly unending war. When I finish, perhaps I’ll make a post regarding my thoughts on the book. I’m enjoying it though, it’s a nice easy read to get back into the swing of things with and fits well with the kind of things that have been interesting me lately. Oh, and I’ve been listening to Still by NIN a lot lately. I avoided it when going through the whole band/ project’s discography because I thought it was just another one of their many remix albums with more recycled material. The second half is all new, and pretty good too, though. Plus the redone songs are also quite a different experience this way. I’ve got some good ideas for a couple interesting posts too, so that’s something for us all to look forward to as well.