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Books: Part 10

There was a thread on /lit/ a few months ago about the book Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, and I was reminded that I really need to write about that one. I’ve been putting it off for so long because, to be honest, it’s a little intimidating. I did read the book through, and I can remember the general points reasonably well, but I’m kind of a brainlet and not at all qualified to talk about economics. I’ve already talked about my insecurity about my intelligence/ intellectual ability before though, I’m not here to do that today, just a warning not to expect anything impressive from what I have to say in this post. I’ll talk about politics, kinda, but not exactly my politics. Anyway, I read this book when I was going through my ebin libertarian phase around 2016 and first starting to become susceptible to right wing ideas. This post is really not going to be much about books either, like several of the posts in this series. I’m just using this book as a jumping off point to talk about other things.

It’s a story you’ve heard countless times, young male visits /pol/ (for me and quite a lot of others between 2014/16) and goes from generic middle class lefty to literal Nazi. Now I’m not a Nazi, obviously, but I am maybe.. fashy? a little bit. I’ve come back around to “left wing” ideas about certain actual policies though, like on economic issues. Though that’s perfectly in line with a lot of “third position” thinking actually. I think that the reason that so many young men go through this “libertarian phase” is because neoliberal or laissez faire economic ideas are the only acceptable form of appreciation of hierarchy/ social structure in the modern day. So this ideology which breaks them out of the bubble they’ve been raised in naturally earns their immediate allegiance, not unlike how I still have a lot of respect for a friend of mine despite how much we’ve drifted apart in the decade we’ve known each other for similar (in a sense) reasons.

This is probably why arguments about politics online very often involve these people, they argue with a particular vigour. I was the same, nowadays I feel far less interested in actually trying to argue about my beliefs. In part because sort of of lost a lot of faith in the idea of politics, they’re kind of a cope let’s be honest. Pol9k isn’t just a meme, there’s some definite truth to the idea as I’ve talked about before that people who are generally unsuccessful tend to drift towards radical ideologies. Of course it makes sense that those who are disenfranchised or doing poorly in life will see the problems we all face more easily, but we can tend to focus on these faults too much in order to escape from our own personal troubles. So if you’re reactionary or whatever, that’s fine but just keep this in mind to temper yourself a little. At least that’s what I’ve done, just trying to have some self awareness.

The libertarian party in the US (the most prominent outlet of activism for the ideology), is an interesting device. It’s a political party that is designed to never actually win an election, but simply to push the overton window in a certain direction. Again that being in favour of free market ideas like free trade, lower taxation, privatisation. This is why in 2016, the first year the party could have made some actual serious progress to becoming a viable political party in the system, they chose as their representative Gary Johnson. A man who seemed to make it his job to make libertarianism look like a joke. Which it sort of is, but not to libertarians. He was also a former state governor, as a member of one of the actual established political parties from what I understand and not the LP. None dare say conspiracy but, it’s funny isn’t it?

Libertarianism is not simply a joke though, it’s also a very deliberate collection of ideas that is never meant to be implemented in reality (as if they could be) but to simply allow mainstream politicians to seem less crazy in comparison. That’s one part of it anyway. There’s also the fact that politicians can push for certain policies under the guise of a “libertarian influence”. There may not be many self identified libertarians in mainstream politics but there are a hell of a lot of politicians who are “libertarian leaning”. So individual policies that libertarians tend to advocate for might be pursued, but of course the more fringe ideas are always ignored. The left are correct to imply that it’s kind of hollow, that the “ideology” is just something propped up by the super wealthy and then argued for by nerds on the internet whose sense of principle is manipulated and turned against them.

There’s also this quirk that many online libertarians have (not unlike internet communists/ Marxists) where they’ll hand wave away the obvious negative effects of libertarian style policies by saying that it doesn’t count because it’s not true libertarianism (or true capitalism/ a free market system) because there’s still state involvement. If only we completely privatise everything, then suddenly charity will actually work and then competition will work how they say it does rather than simply cartelising, and then monopolies will no longer form, etc etc. This in turn allows the politicians and policymakers to say that the left (as in socialists and trade unionists, not progressives) stopping them from going as far as they’d like is the reason for the problems that poorer people deal with, it’s quite ingenious actually.

I’ve talked before about how I think contrarians have a lot of value, because you need people to say things that sound completely crazy to help you realise that there are other ways of thinking sometimes. The libertarian strategy is exactly like this, the actual ideological believers (Rothbardians I guess you can call them) respond to the excesses of capitalism (the gutting of the welfare state, the importing of cheap foreign workers, etc.) by saying that it’s because we haven’t gone far enough yet. If we actually go all the way, eliminate any kind of social safety net or regulations, sell off all nationalised industries, stop enforcing state borders, then suddenly everyone will be wealthy and you’ll basically have the well armed middle class nation where there’s Christian values but also gay people defending their marijuana farms with M16s.

The entire ideology rests on the assumption that government could hypothetically not exist, because all libertarians eventually follow the natural trajectory to becoming “anarcho-capitalists”, but there has never not been government. The idea that the economic system and the government are somehow distinct is quite silly when you actually think about it for a second. The very idea that there is “an economy”, as in a measurable and definable thing, is a very modern way of thinking. In the past the term was really used to simply describe a process, one entirely contingent on various other converging entities. Various ancient civilisations had a complex trade and banking system, standardised currencies, etc. and yet economics as an area of study never developed.

Most of the sciences we have today have their roots in these Greco-Roman or Persian schools, mathematics, and physics, etc. The Romans had a fucking steam engine, they were only a few steps away from industrialising. They didn’t have the agricultural techniques developed in the late middle ages, or gunpowder and various other inventions sure, and the slave economy prevented progression in some respects. Nevertheless, they were a sophisticated civilisation and with what would be considered a complex economic system. Nowadays economics is a recognised area of study, so what’s different?

Now Rothbard himself of course became a lot more hard right in his later years. That is, when it comes to societal/ moral issues, in contrast to his more libertine inclinations earlier on. A path which many of the actual ideological believers in libertarianism, as opposed to the knowing opportunists described above who are really in charge, indeed seem to follow. The trend is frequently remarked upon, by both the left and the far right. So why is this? Well again in my opinion once that appreciation for some sense of hierarchy (which in my opinion is innate, but supressed by state education and the popular culture at large) is made (or remade), it can then quite easily be transferred onto a different “tier system”. This can mean leading to support of military rule or a racial caste system or more esoteric and religious ideas about how people should be differentiated.

I suppose Moldbug is the first, he’s the guy who started the whole red pill meme back in like 2007 or whatever, and the comments section on his blog is where NRx was born. Since him the scene has changed pretty drastically, most notably with the whole racial element being thrown into the mix, but even in his own time before he stopped writing (although he very recently made a return, with the “clear pill” which seemed to just be a recap of his old ideas but we’ll see what he has to say in his upcoming posts) you can see him evolve as he interacts with his commenters over the years. The original blog is dead now, and with it those many comments sections after each post, but apparently he’s working on restoring those too eventually.

It’s definitely worth checking out his writings, maybe just the posts of his that made the most noise, because he was one of the first of the internet libertarians to drop the ideology meme and just say that maybe we should acknowledge that like at all other points in history there’s simply just a raw power structure running the show and not some grand material system that is above any individual or group. He also said a whole lot more, and maybe even what I just said is kind of a mischaracterisation. Just read his stuff for yourself if you’re interested, it’s certainly very interesting and probably relevant to the ideas you’re surrounded with if you’ve ended up on this blog. He’s the guy that started the “redpill” meme, as in he took that imagery from the matrix and applied it to politics. If nothing else he’s worth reading because of the influence he had.

I’m not a political or reactionary blogger, I just talk about myself a lot of the time it’s all very narcissistic, but as I have been around these ideas and personalities for so long they also come up from time to time in my posts. Like today, and I know this post is a complete shitshow I’m working on one that’ll be more well structured and talk about my beliefs regarding various issues but it might take a while to finish. In fact it may end up being a series of posts actually, I’m in the very earliest stages of planning. This post is just something I’m trying to get out because it’s been over a week since my last upload and I started writing it today, hopefully I can finish it up tonight or tomorrow evening and then because I have quite a few days off work early next week I’ll get started on my next post much earlier.

Now Thomas Sowell is more of a mainstream figure than Rothbard, who in turn is a more mainstream figure than dweebs on the internet like Moldbug. He’s written actual books that get used in universities, he’s written for mainstream publications and been on big TV news channels. Yet this book is entirely misleading, it’s less respectable than the more “wishy washy” you might say, or philosophical writings from those guys because it cloaks itself in this scientific garb. It’s a generic and “normie accessible” text clearly advocating supply side economics and claiming to simply be an impartial academic treatise. Acting like economics (specifically that of the “Chicago school”) is some kind of hard science like physics or biology, which is just so absurd. Sure they have a bunch of graphs and things, economics as a discipline might help us understand certain micro economic trends/ patterns.

This book doesn’t have any of those complicated studies and statistics though. It is simply just a series of drawn out anecdotes that just so happen to support the kind of economic policies that Sowell has advocated for his entire academic career and in lots of other books more explicitly. He goes in search of stories that will help validate his point and this search takes him everywhere from Africa to the Orient. You could probably find an equally compelling anecdote to counter every one he has if you had the time and resources. Sure he’s an actual economist, maybe he really believes what he claims will result from what he advocates. It doesn’t matter if he’s just a shill for certain major moneyed interests or a true believer, what matters is that the fundamental premise of this book is dishonest.

And furthermore I think that this entire idea that economics is a mostly settled science is not merely a convenient lie on it’s own but also an idea that is very damaging outside of this book. Again I’m aware that some economic phenomena have been studied and explained (although how they can actually test these things reliably and repeatably is a mystery to me), like hyperinflation, supply and demand, or price controls. After all, they do have graphs and so that means they must be trustworthy. I just think that the idea that there’s a perfect way to run an economy in the most efficient way possible and that it can be proven by “science”, to be an entirely absurd claim. Here in Europe alone we have countries with pretty drastic differences in economic policy that for the most part are doing pretty similarly in terms of how well off the populations are.

There are no major disagreements between different governments around the world when it comes to any other of the sciences. There are no first world countries where evolutionary theory is disputed for example, or the laws of motion. Scientific research and experimentation continues in every field but the settled science is accepted pretty much universally. That’s just not the case with economics, economics really is more a branch of philosophy than what we in the 21st century think of by the word “science”. Indeed, coming back around to libertarianism there is a huge emphasis on muh principles like “the NAP” or freedom of association and so on in that movement. Let’s all be entirely honest, the overwhelming majority of the people who support libertarianism don’t care about the fucking graphs.

All arguments devolve into these weird hypotheticals that try and present various moral quandaries, not rigorous scrutiny of the actual data. And I don’t care about the graphs either, because ultimately there will always be graphs and statistics and charts and polls and trends and all that faggy shit to support whatever system I choose to support for moral reasons. If there were a series of policies that actually lead to more wealth creation and prosperity universally then everyone would be doing it. No exception, if you could just put a supercomputer in charge of the economy (again, as if such a thing really exists) then it would have been done. The reality is that there are simply competing interests, and lots of propaganda.

Politics, ideology, is not about economic policy. When you win, you can do whatever you want with the economy. You can decide what is necessary not because of some abstract principles (or some shadowy hidden interests) but because you see where the problems currently are and respond to them. By “you” here, I mean the regime or individual in charge. Did the tyrants, kings or emperors of antiquity ever worry about increasing a tax on a certain economic category or seizing assets because that would be unprincipled? No, of course they didn’t. What we need is a government that has the best interests of it’s citizens in mind, and can dynamically respond to various situations. But don’t listen to anything I have to say on this, because as I’ve said many times before I am just an unqualified dropout wageslave.

Although to be fair to myself, I do have to say one thing. I got into an argument with a guy in the very thread referenced at the start of this entry about exactly what I’ve spoken about in this post, and I was honestly expecting to get BTFOd because I really don’t know a lot about this subject but that didn’t happen. I know that it’s not a great look to talk about how I totally won this internet argument and then not post a link, but I’m not saying I won anything just that I was actually able to argue my point without being made to look like an idiot right away. You can find the thread in the archives as well but good luck, I’ve been trying but unless you have some keywords it’s almost impossible to navigate them. All I’m saying is that maybe my premise here isn’t entirely retarded, even if the method of delivery has been. As I said I do plan to write some more well planned out posts about some of my views eventually.

So, I’m gonna get rid of this book. I kind of want to hold on to it because it’s a big academic looking hardcover which looks cool on my shelf, and it was also kind of expensive at least compared to most of the books I own. But given everything I’ve said the right thing to do is to throw it into le trash. There’s also another big book about economics by one of these similar types that I own. Human Action by Ludwig von Mises, which I will hold onto because I never actually finished it. It was also rather expensive, again relatively speaking, and also I started it so I feel obligated to go back and finish the job. In fact it was a few years ago when I gave up on it, at slightly before the half way point, so I’ll probably need to restart from the beginning.

From what I remember it is way more “out there” and philosophical than Basic Economics, in fact the book is trying to develop what is supposedly an entirely new area of study called Praxeology. Praxeology is apparently the study of deliberate human action, as opposed to instinctive or unthinking behaviour. Or something like that, lots of talk about rational self interest and that sort of thing. Mises is associated with the Austrian school, who you’ve probably heard of before, so you can tell from there what kind of ideas he was pushing. In fact when it really comes down to it, although many would completely disagree, these books are ultimately pushing a similar agenda which is why I bought both of them while still in the same phase of my development.

Human Action might be a little more interesting, because it doesn’t try and push this meme that the science and the graphs all support my moral system as the best system. It’s just saying that this moral system is the best system because of muh morals. I’m being a little facetious throughout this post, and here specifically of course but my point should be clear. It’s true that I’ve talked a lot about deliberate conscious choice and unthinking behaviour myself in this blog so maybe on a second read I’ll actually find a lot to talk and think about in this book. I’m going to end this post here, I don’t really have anything else to say. Again I know this post is not my best, but I did get to say a lot even if it may be better to say less but more articulately. I treat this blog like a work in progress, I’m trying to get better with every new entry. Thanks for reading.

Link to Part 9

Link to Part 11

How to bee urself and influence people

I’m gonna be talking about Joker, the film that recently came out, so this post will make a whole lot more sense if you’ve already seen the film. And you should see it, it’s really good. I’ll be talking about various plot points and things that happen, as well as the ideas the film brings up, so it’ll probably be hard to follow along if you haven’t seen it. This is not a review, and there’s a whole lot I’d like to say about this film that I won’t be able to fit in this post without it being a complete mess. I could easily write multiple entries about various aspects of this film. I’m seriously considering a second one, but I might change my mind. The entire clown protest plotline has much more to it than there might initially seem to be.

A lot of people seem to think it’s just a generic or even cynical depiction of civil unrest and therefore there’s nothing interesting being said there. I disagree, I think in part that generic-ness is the point actually but I’d need to elaborate on that to really explain myself. So clearly I’m just not going to be able to say everything I want to in this entry, but I’ve been quite “active” in the many threads on /tv/ over the last week or so, so just check out those because there’s been some really great discussion in there. Shocking I know, it turns out that /tv/ isn’t total trash.

Now this blog doesn’t really have a topic, it’s kind of miscellaneous for the most part, but there is one theme you could say that generally can be felt from my writings here so far. I guess you could call it the experience of the loner/ robot, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call this an “incel blog” because I don’t really like that term very much, but I recognise the utility of it. Far more people have heard of the term “incel” than “robot”, it gives me more normie appeal, ironically. I talk about whatever interests me, philosophy and music and so on, but because I am a bit of a recluse and I also talk about my own experiences there is a certain “vibe” to this blog. So I’m going to talk about how the film relates to that, how it resonates with me and people like me, and why. I’ll talk about some of the other aspects of the film to some degree, but in order too keep some kind of through-line I’ll have to restrict myself somewhat. Maybe I’ll write more about this film in future, we’ll see.

See the final act of Joker is so well done, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Of course, the whole film is fantastic and I loved it, but it’s really in the third act that the film truly comes into it’s own. There’s a lot of set up beforehand, and I’ll try and talk about that too, but where this film stands out amongst the various films it’s clearly heavily inspired by is in how it ends. You’ve probably seen all the criticisms about how it’s too similar to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, and it’s true that the film is perhaps a little more than simply an homage to those two films. The plot of Joker is like an amalgamation of the plots from both of them, and the aesthetic similarities are impossible to miss, but I think that those things are rather superficial. The underlying message of Joker, the people it is intended to appeal to, that’s where this film differs.

Sure, Taxi Driver is about a loner and the experience of alienation and The King of Comedy is about a guy who feels ignored and dismissed by society, but Arthur Fleck is quite different to both of those characters. Arthur Fleck really is almost a perfect representation of this particular modern archetype of “the incel“, it’s actually quite concerning how much I can relate to this character. He’s not simply a loner, he’s a mentally ill loner that society abandoned and treated like trash, in his own words. The way this film differs is in how the actions he takes, particularly during the final act, are presented. In Taxi Driver the shootout at the brothel is meant to show the final step in Travis Bickle’s self destruction, and the kidnapping and stand up performance at the end of TKoC is meant to be seen by the audience as a despicable act.

Taxi Driver is about how lack of social relationships can damage someone, but you’re not really meant to be rooting for Travis Bickle when he goes to kill the men at the brothel. TKoC is about how the media props up awful people, which is why the main character is rewarded for what he does in the end. You can almost see Robert DeNiro’s character in Joker actually, Murray Franklin, as someone his character from TKoC could have ended up becoming. Murray is deliberately not very funny by the way, his jokes are meant to be corny (super cats!) and the “APPLAUD” signs are highlighted for a reason in the film. Arthur’s jokes on the other hand, are actually quite amusing, but totally fall flat. So you could even say that Joker is continuing that message, as well as making the point at the same time that what’s actually funny isn’t important, society decides who’s funny before you can even make a joke.

Anyway as I was saying, in comparison to those two films you are actually meant to feel good about the ending of Joker. It’s basic cinematic language, everything from the music that’s played at various points in the final act to the bright colours in contrast to the dingy look of the earlier parts of the film, as well as Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of the character with his open and carefree body language. These are all there to show that this is a positive moment. Joker’s ending is triumphant, and unapologetically so. Which is interesting, because other than a few details the final sequence is basically very similar to a mass shooting. At least if you understand what a mass shooting really is. Arthur is exactly the kind of person who would either do something like that, or fantasise about it.

Speaking of fantasy, this is really what a significant amount of the discussion of the film is about. There’s all kinds of theories about whether he imagined some or all of the events of the film, or if he’s remembering but not quite accurately, and so on. And as interesting as that is, I think any attempt to figure out what “really happened” and what was “in his head” is kind of pointless. It’s fun to talk about, I’ve enjoyed watching the many arguments on /tv/ about it to be sure, but I do think that it’s deliberately impossible to ever figure out. I think all of those various theories are meant to be equally plausible, and I also think that such theorising is intended as well. That’s the point of the relationship with the neighbour woman being revealed to be imaginary, as well as the sequence early on where Arthur fantasises about being a guest on Murray’s show.

They’re both there to show that he is someone who deals with delusions, maladaptive daydreaming, dissociation and so on. To show us that it’s an absolute certainty that some of the events in the film are in his head, and therefore plant the seed that anything else could be as well. There’s more to both the relationship scenes and the scene early on where he imagines being on the show of course, but that is a primary purpose for both of them as they relate to the film as a whole. I think another interesting thing about the Murray scene for example is to show that Arthur really is quite a wholesome and good natured person at first. I mean, the “nice guy” persona can’t be simply a façade if it’s actually the most noticeable in his daydreams.

It’s almost like exactly what I was talking about in my entry about The Little Prince, and this other post, where I discussed how I’ve always had this desire to not simply appear but truly be innocent and I guess kind of childlike. Maybe even naïve in a way, or cherubic. Is it starting to make sense why I loved this film so much? It’s like it covered everything I’ve talked about in this blog and that I find myself thinking about in my free time. I know that it’s a major pedowood production, it’s going to make hundreds of millions of dollars, but it really feels like this film was made for me. It touches so many of the things that define my life. I’m worried that this entry is going to just end up with me linking to everything else I’ve ever written, because it just hits every single issue I talk about on here. There’s so much in this film, if I wanted I could probably write an entire post about each scene.

Anyway I kind of got off track, so there are people who think that every scene is “in his head” other than the very last where he’s talking to the psychiatrist in the asylum, and he’s telling her the story in that scene. Or some people think that everything after he gets taken off the medication is a delusion, and some say he really did steal the sign himself and the very first scene of the film can’t even be trusted. I’ve heard that the scene where he kills those guys in self defence on the train is the point where he starts imagining things, or remembering wrongly. I’ve heard that maybe everything after he puts the make-up on is imaginary. Someone said that maybe he got caught in that scene where he steals the documents about his mother in the asylum, and from that point on he’s just making the story up to the psychiatrist after being locked up in Arkham.

I’ve also heard it suggested that there is no specific turning point, but that there are more scenes that are delusions than the ones we know for sure to be fantasy simply peppered throughout the film, and of course there are various different ideas about which ones those are. Basically, every single scene in the film gives you some reason to doubt it. On the second viewing (I went to see it a second time, and I’m considering trying to go one more time) having had the time to think about all of this, you really do feel this constant uncertainty throughout the entire experience. It’s a defining characteristic of the movie, and you may see where I’m going with this. I can’t think of any other films that have done such a great job of creating this effect with the medium. It’s incredibly well done, and there’s more too.

There are a quite a few things that happen in the story that usually I would dismiss as simply plot holes, but I actually think in this case they may have been deliberate. Again, to further create this uncertainty or doubt which just emanates from this film throughout. For example, we know that Arthur’s mother was institutionalised for allowing Arthur to be abused by her boyfriend and also for showing the exact same tendencies as Arthur when it comes to delusions by imagining this secret love affair with Thomas Wayne which produced Arthur. Yet the documents prove that Arthur was adopted, so he isn’t the son of Thomas Wayne. Then you start to think, if he’s adopted how can he have inherited the same delusional tendencies and other mental illnesses from his mother.

This is why a lot of people theorise that Thomas Wayne actually managed to get documents forged saying Arthur is adopted, and Arthur actually is his illegitimate son. He’s certainly a very powerful man, who could have something like that done. There are indeed a few clues left to imply that there really was an affair, and that Wayne had Arthur’s mother put in the asylum to shut her up, like the signed note from him on the photo which is written in different handwriting to how she writes his initials on the letter. It’s very conspiratorial though, it’s far more likely that Arthur was simply adopted. These are just more seeds of doubt, planted to further make you feel like you can’t trust anything you’re seeing.

This film is like a jigsaw puzzle, but several of the pieces have been damaged or broken so that every time you think you’re starting to piece it together you realise something is simply “off” and you can’t quite place it. The answer is just out of reach, and everything seems mostly normal but clearly it’s going terribly wrong for the main person involved. Now, in my Addenda post which I wrote around the time of the one year anniversary of starting this blog I talked about exactly this. This feeling of doubt or uncertainty is something that follows me around constantly, my ability to even trust the reality around me has slowly got worse over the years in parallel with my increasing level of isolation. This film has actually recreated one of the defining parts of my life, in it’s own way.

That entry was a response to loads of previous posts I’d written over the first year since starting this project, so I don’t suggest you read it unless you’re one of my long term readers (which most of the people reading this won’t be as I intend to link this entry on /tv/ and maybe /r9k/ as well) here as it will make no sense. Actually I don’t really expect many people to click on any of the links in this post, I’m just including them because it’s a useful way to show why this film resonated with me so much. It’s probably the same for a lot of the people who likes this film, even if they’re not as conscious of it they are able to intuit a lot of the things I’m talking about here. So think of the links in this post like a literary technique rather than something you’re implored to click on, but if you want to that’s great too. I’m always happy to make new friends.

Speaking of losing touch with reality, there’s another scene in the film which relates to this that I found really interesting. Actually, it’s one line in particular that Arthur says that I’m really talking about. It’s during the second visit with the therapist, who unfortunately is one of the characters who didn’t get what she deserved. He says “some days I’m not even sure I exist”. Now this line reminds me of something I’ve spoken about in several different posts here before. I’ve often said that one of the reasons I write what I do, and specifically try to write about the things that happen or have happened to me, is to fight the doubt I was talking about a second ago. By having them written and recorded, and knowing other people have read them, it helps this creeping suspicion I often get about my own memories after some time has passed.

I often wonder if I myself suffer from delusions, far more mild than anything like Arthur (and perhaps his mother) suffer from, but it’s still a concern. I often wonder if maybe my memories are wrong, in my post Blackpill Nights for example I wrote about a series of events that I can remember very vividly, yet I can’t shake this feeling that maybe they didn’t happen like I remember at all and my ego has just manufactured or at least altered the memories as some kind of coping mechanism. To deal with the fact that in reality I’m a total loser, by fooling myself into thinking that I’m actually something I’m not. I suppose if this is the case (although as I said, these memories are all very clear in my mind to this day) it’s similar in a sense to the “I’m smart but lazy” cope you often hear, but in regard to something other than intelligence.

The therapist really does deserve a treatment similar to what Arthur’s mother gets by the way, notice how the first time there’s any kind of warmth or care in her voice is when she talks about a problem Arthur is facing that she also suffers from. That being the funding to her office being cut off, which means she’s going to lose her job. Until then her voice is totally cold, she doesn’t give a single shit about Arthur. His own therapist, and she doesn’t care at all. He realises this, pay close attention and you’ll notice his tone slightly change as he asks her if she’s ever actually listened to him. “You always ask if I’m having bad thoughts… All I have are bad thoughts”. It’s a great line, and I like to think the subtext is that in that moment he realises something that I myself realised around the time I started this blog.

I wrote a post pretty early on which was a total mess, titled Riding a train of thought. I’m not just trying to be modest, it really is pretty awful like most of the early posts I wrote were. I was still finding my footing at first, I would say I really started to hit my stride shortly after the New Year but I started this blog in September 2018. Not that I’m doing anything special here, but I’m happy with it for the most part. Anyway, in that post and then later in a sort of follow up I talked about this realisation I had about what it really means to ignore someone/ be ignored. People like me, use whatever term you want (loner, loser, outcast, reject, etc.) will often talk about how they feel invisible or ignored. This ties in with that feeling that you’re not even sure you exist, as Arthur puts it, but there’s more to it.

Elliot Rodger remarked in his final video that people always treated him “like a mouse”, and if you go on /r9k/ you’ll find similar complaints all the time. It’s a trope at this point, people like us feel ignored or left out. The normalfag response is usually some bullshit about being less timid and having more confidence, and sure that plays a role but here’s what they’re not telling you. You being left out, or ignored, it’s not just because you’re quiet/ not being noticed. It’s something they’re doing on purpose, to harm you. People don’t ignore people because they don’t care about them, they do it to people they actively dislike. I’m not saying it’s comparable to actual violence, but it is a passive aggressive form of mental abuse. Especially if it’s been a chronic issue for you throughout your life.

So I actually think this scene has more importance than maybe people realise, if my interpretation that he is making a similar sort of realisation in this scene to the one I had is correct. It’s where the character starts to realise that maybe that niggling feeling that he’s been wronged somehow actually has some merit. We all have this feeling, people like us. Those incels you hear so much about who are maybe less intelligent or inhibited will express it in a way that makes them look entitled or stupid, but actually they’re not wrong. They just aren’t able to articulate what it is they’re feeling properly, and in turn this gives fuel to the normies who say that people in our situation deserve to be here. That we’ve been pushed away by society because of some personality defect, or because we’re bad people.

Ironically, it’s exactly because most “incels” are actually pretty good people that they’re so easily convinced that perhaps they’re not. Which is why if they ever do werewolf and go wild, it usually takes a decade or two. It comes after realisations like this, something happens to make them understand finally that it really never was their fault. So of course they’re angry, and of course they lash out. That’s why this scene is important, because a switch is flipped where he no longer blames himself. Notice the body language when he delivers that “all I have are bad thoughts” line, it’s a change from everything up until that point. He’s starting to care less, he’s able to lose that meekness for a moment. It comes back, but it’s the start of the process.

This is similar to where I am I think, I’ve had moments like that scene before. I have a customer facing job, and some of the people who come through the shop can be quite rude. Usually I just take it, I’m a shy and weak person, but there have been a few cases where I pushed back a little. I’m not sure why, and it’s not something I can choose to “activate”, but somehow in a few instances I have somehow developed a spine. And people do change their demeanour towards you when they realise they can’t fuck around anymore, I’ve got to admit. I don’t want to be that kind of person though, I think that’s what’s holding me (and others like me, and Arthur too) back. I actually truly want to be a nice person, it’s not an act or a ploy or anything like that. Despite what people may say.

The real turning point in the film though, is when he kills his mother. After that, he truly does shed this timid persona completely. It’s the point of no return for the character. And yes I think she got what she deserved. This isn’t me being edgy, again going back to talking about cinematic language the scene is clearly a positive one in a twisted sort of way. You’re meant to see it as a good thing that he is finally able to remove her overbearing presence from his life. The scene is much lighter than the shadowy and murky gloom that you get on screen until that point. Even the other scenes in that same hospital room are much darker, so it’s clearly by design that there’s a change in this one.

On the one hand there’s the interpretation I’ve heard a few times that this scene is evoking some kind of religious/ Christian imagery, a bright or even divine seeming white light shining out in an (up until this point) otherwise very dark environment. In this scene Arthur dies you could say, and is then reborn, not unlike Christ himself. Maybe that was the intention, but I think it was something more simple. In my opinion the darkness that covers the first two acts of the film is simply representative of Arthur’s depression. By killing his mother, the root cause behind all of his problems, he is able to shed that.

I’m pretty sure that he decides to kill himself at the same point that he decides to kill his mother as well. He gets the invite for the Murray show in the scene right before see, and we know that even as late as when he sits down in the seat to talk to Murray he was probably still only planning to shoot himself. Now there are a lot of stories of people who have decided to kill themselves, who’ve claimed that after making that decision they became much happier. They still go through with it, because they know that the depression will return if they don’t, but something about finally making real plans for suicide just clears the heaviness away.

It actually reminds me of something a person I know told me about my mother, who killed herself when I was around the age of 14. I’m not bringing this up for pity points, it is actually relevant. On the very same day that she did it, I was away visiting my dad, but in the morning she went shopping to buy the gin she needed and she bumped into this family friend. Anyway at the funeral he was there with the rest of his family and telling me and my dad about this chance meeting with her, he said she had seemed really happy. So happy that he couldn’t even believe the news when he heard it at first. I’ve heard quite a few anecdotes like this from people on 4chan, or in news stories and so on. You probably have as well, it’s a well understood phenomenon I think.

The scene ends with the sun shining in through the window as Arthur stares out of it with his head craned upwards slightly, and from this scene onwards the film remains quite a bit brighter. The next scene is in his apartment on the morning of the Murray appearance and it’s the first time we see what the place looks like during the day time. There are a couple of daytime scenes earlier in the film, the first scene where he gets mugged and beaten of course, and when he visits Wayne manor, and the establishing shot of Arkham Asylum. Those scenes somehow still have this darkness to them though, and they’re all quite cold and sterile. The scene when he kills his mother, and then after in the apartment when he kill the fat guy who gave him the gun (assuming that scene is reliable), are the first time we see any sunlight that isn’t blocked by smog or clouds in the entire film.

Now, I said earlier that I think Arthur’s mother got what she deserved, and I meant it. I don’t think I need to explain to a bunch of ebin redpilled gamers on the internet (and I’m aware that that’s the kind of people this blog appeals to) why single mothers are fucking awful. The facts speak for themselves, and this film is certainly attacking single mothers, which is a good thing. However, again I’m going to have to disagree with the point I’m seeing quite frequently made that the subplot with his mother is primarily there to criticise single mothers. Rather I think that’s a secondary concern, and the real point is to talk about the negative effect of overbearing and mentally ill parents and also how demoralising it is to be stuck with them after adulthood.

Or maybe I’m just noticing it because that is my own experience, again I’m going to link to another of my posts I’m sorry. In a post during early summer called Kinda late in the game, I talked in some detail about my relationship with my dad who has lived with me since my mother passed away. It’s a long post, and not exclusively about my dad but it’s the only one where I’ve talked about our relationship in any real detail. Anyway I think the similarities between my father and Arthur’s mother are quite clear, and so I understand very well the resentment that Arthur is feeling when he puts that pillow over her face. I’m not saying I want to kill my dad or anything edgy like that, after all my dad never let any of the kind of awful abuse that Arthur experienced happen to me. I’m fortunate in that way, I was never abused or mistreated physically as a child it’s true.

I would argue that having to put up with my dad and his clear mental illness, which I talk about in that post, could be considered mental abuse though. And the fact that I am forced to remain living with him, because I’m the owner of the flat (apartment) as I inherited it from my mother and he refuses to leave. Even though I’m 22 years old, and could afford to live on my own without him. He is receiving government gibs, while I actually work. I’m kind of being held hostage, even if I was able to find friends or a girlfriend I wouldn’t be able to bring them here because of him. I remember I stopped inviting my friends to visit towards the last year of school because I was embarrassed by him. He’s a fat alcoholic who dresses like a fucking homeless person and talks to himself loudly so I can never even have peace and quiet in my own home. So yes, I admit I got some vicarious enjoyment from seeing her get smothered with the pillow.

So after he kills the fat guy from work, he finished his make up and from here until the end the movie is just a joy to watch. Both times I saw it I had a huge smile on my face the entire time, it was beautiful. I was basically reacting pretty similarly to how he was in the scene the header image is taken from. I wasn’t laughing out loud maniacally but I think I felt similarly to how he did when he was watching the destruction around the car as I watched the events of the ending play out. That’s why I picked that image, and why it’s my favourite scene in the film. It’s a great scene, the music choice is perfect and the reaction he’s having just makes so much sense. It’s lovely seeing him truly happy for the first time as well, isn’t it?

As I’ve talked about, a lot of different suggestions have been made about there being a point in the film after which he is simply imagining everything that’s happening. I never talked about the one that I’m most inclined to agree with though, and that would be that it’s some time before he kills his mother. In the scene right before that, we have the “sixth sense” style reveal where he realises he was never in a relationship with the woman down the hall. We never see what happens, but it’s definitely implied that he may have killed her. So maybe it’s after this, or perhaps he was caught while inside the asylum getting the documents about his mother, after all we never see how he escaped the place. Either way, somewhere along the way just before the final act I think may be the point where it happens.

I’m not convinced though, it’s still most likely that the events of the films simply happened as presented. What’s undeniable though, is that everything from the chase sequence through to him standing above the crowd in that fantastic slow zoom out shot, plays out exactly like the kind of fantasies I frequently get lost in. I’ve always daydreamed, but as I have got older and become more disappointed with my situation in life they have definitely become more frequent and detailed. It’s another aspect of this breaking down of the barriers between reality and fantasy that I was talking about before. When I was younger I’d just imagine myself in a situation, now I’ll imagine the entire scenario that leads to such a situation playing out as I walk to work or something like that.

Now these fantasies or daydreams are all quite different, but they almost always tend to have me turning into some kind of important figure. Someone who people look up to, someone with great power or influence, or something like that. My speculation is that it’s some kind of unconscious coping mechanism to deal with the fact that I’m very low in the social hierarchy, by allowing myself to live as someone on the top in some area of life for a while. I don’t know, it’s not like it’s in my control these daydreams happen to me, so it really is just baseless speculation. Either way, I’m pretty certain that most people in a similar life situation as me experience something similar. And these daydreams get pretty weird, like sure in some cases I’m just a dictator or a king or something generic like that, but just as often the story will be much like the plot of the final act of this film.

After all, it’s pure catharsis watching the ending play out. He outruns and outsmarts two police detectives who’ve been harassing him throughout the film, he gets to go out on stage on the show he’s definitely fantasised about going on before, he gets to tell the whole world about his problems through that show, he gets revenge on the guy who humiliated him publicly, and then a literal personal army loots and burns the city and saves him from captivity before raising him above the crowd like a hero. The film goes from zero to one hundred very suddenly, given that he was just a jobless shut in before he put on the make-up. The way he reacts in that car scene, the one where White Room by Cream is playing, is probably exactly how I would react if one of my own elaborate daydreams were to actually start happening around me.

Of course that’s never happened, but I’ve certainly been thrust into crazy/ unexpected situations before and funnily enough my reaction is usually laughter. While on the topic of laughter, I thought how his condition was dealt with in the film (pseudobulbar effect, it’s a real condition) was really well done. Some of those early scenes where he looks like he’s not just physically pained by it but also humiliated are so hard to watch, I honestly felt so sad for him. His eyes are so expressive, in those scenes where he gets the laughter attacks you get that feeling that he is reminded that his life will never improve and that he’ll be stuck like that forever. Because while I don’t have any such condition, I know that in moments of physical weakness like when I get ill I’ll often find it harder to keep up the usual pretence that things will get better one day. It’s in those moments that you’re no longer able to lie to yourself.

It’s so nice how after he manages to shake off all the dead weight and crap that’s been dragging him down his whole life those laughing fits no longer look painful, he embraces them. On Murray’s show, in the police car, in the room with the psychiatrist at the very end, he finally sees the funny side to life. As corny as the line was, he really did begin to see his life as a comedy rather than a tragedy and he’s much better off for it. I wish I could do the same, I have moments where I can laugh at the absurdity of it all sure but they never last. Like how after Arthur kills the three train guys and it seems as if he finally has some life force back in the scene where he quits his job and smashes the punch clock, but it fades. Then again after the second therapist visit, but it fades. It always fades away, I don’t know what I can do.

The laughing was also used to great effect in the scene where he is at the comedy club the first time, where he’s taking notes. I think a lot of people simply read that scene as showing that he’s out of step with the rest of society, because he laughs at different points to everyone else. Like I’ve said about a few scenes now I think this is all true, but the scene has more to it as well that I haven’t seen anyone comment on yet. See I think it actually ties in quite well with the ending sequence in that it is further proof that Arthur is a man lost in fantasy. The scene is there to show that he doesn’t actually want to be a comedian at all, he doesn’t even like or find the stand up he goes to see to be funny. He’s just chosen comedy as the route to getting some attention and recognition.

I haven’t actually talked about this before on here, so there’s no post to link to for this one, but when I was a bit younger (maybe early teens) I also thought I wanted to be a comedian. My dad used to let me stay up late when I visited him and often we would watch stand up recordings because that’s the only good thing on TV around midnight. I probably didn’t even get half of the jokes, but there was something very alluring about the admiration the guy on stage would receive. I also think that showing Arthur being entirely unamused by the sex jokes is a really clever and tasteful way of implying that he’s probably a virgin/ romantically inexperienced.

Similarly to how he doesn’t really care about comedy as anything other than a means to an end, he doesn’t care at all about the protests and the clown face movement he inspires for anything other than that exact same reason. I thought it was really clever how they have him throw the mask he borrows during the chase scene straight into the trash as soon as the police officers are dealt with. They’ve outlived their usefulness. It’s just a perfect way to symbolise it, they’re just normalfags to him he couldn’t care less about their troubles. Most of the people in those protests, they’re just as likely to walk over him on the street as Thomas Wayne would be, fuck ’em.

I really can’t help but think that if not the director then some other important people on the team behind this film are /ourguys/, the film is just too anti-normie, it almost feels like we’re being pandered to. Take the first scene where he has the full costume and make-up on, as he walks down the hall and then later when he dances around the city and on those stairs. It can’t possibly be a coincidence that they chose a song by Gary Glitter to play during that sequence. I don’t think there’s a musician who is more hated by the general public, particularly here in the UK where they won’t even play his music on the radio, but he’s also hated in the US and anywhere where his music would have once charted. Which it did, he was as mainstream as you get once. A chart topper, society’s choice.

The song, Rock and Roll Part 2, is this really upbeat and energetic glam rock track, and it plays during the first scene where you see Arthur/ Joker truly comfortable and at ease with himself. He is the protagonist of the movie, so clearly the intention is that you should be happy for him during this scene, and that’s the song they choose. It’s just too perfect, and obviously I’m not pro-paedophile but I suppose just because I spend hours every day on 4chan I probably have unknowingly interacted with hundreds if not thousands of them over the years. This scene is a real “fuck you” moment for the character, after being beaten down and trod on by society, instead of hiding away (or crawling inside a fridge..) he walks out with his head held high. This song pisses off all the right people, that being basically everyone with some stock in the future.

In a better world perhaps I’d be just as infuriated as everyone else simply by hearing Gary Glitter’s name, but at this point I kind of enjoy the butthurt he causes. And you best believe the controversy was expected. You know what, maybe even the trauma he caused to his victims might mean they actually became decent rather unlike the mass of intolerably self interested normalfags you’ll encounter in any busy city in Europe or North America. Ok, maybe that’s a little too edgy. To clarify, paedophilia is one of the worst crimes imaginable and indeed it’s implied that Arthur himself is possibly a victim of it. He’s certainly a victim of violent abuse as a young child, and in my opinion severe mental abuse as well as I’ve explained.

In that scene though, when the song plays and he’s dancing down the stairs, he’s just so carefree and comfortable in his own skin at last. It’s empowering, if I’m being entirely honest with you. It feels wonderful, I was just beaming from the moment the song starts and you see him walk down the hall right until the end of the movie. It’s great how they express this transformation through dance as well, through his movement. The dance on the stairs is totally fluid because he’s completely comfortable in his own skin finally, it’s also in time with the music that plays over the scene so it’s vibrant and full of life. This is in contrast to the scene much earlier in the film when he does that weird jagged and stilted dance in that poorly lit bathroom after he kills the three guys who attack him on the train.

That earlier more awkward dance reminds me a little of how I might dance when I’m home alone or something, I really have to wonder how someone could have known to include this stuff. It’s not even really a dance, more just slowly contorting and twisting out of time with what’s happening around him. See “people like me”, we tend not to enjoy or feel very comfortable dancing. The idea of dancing in public, while others can see, may be terrifying but a lot of us are so repressed we still feel awkward or wrong doing it in total privacy. Because dance is the most instinctual and ancient kind of expression available to us, the most unsophisticated. People like me, people like us, we’re out of tune and at all times uncomfortable in our own skin. I’ve gradually become less like this, maybe I can dance a little more easily with no one around to see now, but that bathroom scene was immediately familiar to me.

It makes sense that after killing those guys, which is a liberating moment, he does this dance. There are a quite a few dance scenes, and each one becomes slightly less awkward and janky as the character himself slowly loses all reason to maintain the meek and pitiful demeanour he’s had his whole adult life. The dance just before he goes on stage with the intention of killing himself (meaning he’s lost any fear of judgement or repercussion) being the most graceful and serene of all of them. There’s just so much depth to this film, it really has taken me by surprise. I was expecting it would be enjoyable enough, and all the memes surrounding it would be amusing, but it’s actually really resonated with me. I really do need to go and see it a third time before it’s out of theatres.

The sorrows of young anon

As I’ve already explained in another post back in January, in the summer of 2014 I met a girl on /r9k/ and we became quite close. I try not to think about “what could have been” too much, about how I probably threw away one of the few true opportunities for happiness I’ve ever had, but from time to time I can’t help but be reminded. It might not seem like that’s how I feel when you read that post, because I focused quite a lot on where things went wrong. Indeed the ultimate message of it was that I didn’t want to deal with that again, but when it comes down to it I was far happier back when we were talking regularly than I have been over the last year without her or anyone else to talk to. Having no one to talk to, or confide in, is unbearable. It’s hard to even get out of the door and go to work every day when you have literally no support or encouragement in life.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I have this blog as an outlet, but there’s no feedback or engagement. That’s fine, if you don’t feel comfortable commenting or responding then that’s cool with me, it means a lot that you simply enjoy reading my stuff. I’m glad to have each and every one of you. The only reason I even know that there are some of you who keep coming back however is because it tells me the countries you’re from on my stats page. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the same person, after all it doesn’t give me any actual information about any of you like your IP address or even more specific a location other than the country. However, I think it’s unlikely that a different guy from Serbia, Mexico, India, The Netherlands, etc. is coming back every week or two.

More likely I have a “fan”, or maybe just a morbidly curious individual who enjoys watching my slow descent into madness and despair, in each of these countries and a few others. I also get a lot of views from the US, so I can assume with some accuracy that I have a few regulars who live there but most of those views are just one time visitors. A lot of those one time visitors are from search engines, for some reason my post Volcel gang manifesto (which was obviously a somewhat tongue in cheek title, given the content of the entry) in particular seems to bring in lots of people that way. Of course I’ve also mentioned the reader thing before, but I’m pretty sure that most if not all of those of you who’ve stuck around long term are from when I’ve shilled on /lit/ or /r9k/. And of course with these posts I’m not just simply talking, I’m often trying to make it kind of entertaining to read or at least engaging. I’m trying to work on my prose, but there’s still a lot of work to do.

Anyway, last week in a moment of admitted desperation I e-mailed this girl again asking if we could talk. If I’m being honest, and I haven’t said this to her because of reasons I’ll get to in a second, I was kind of hoping that maybe there was still a chance for something between us when I sent that first message. I know how much of an awful person this makes me seem, and I can’t really argue against that. I threw that opportunity away, life doesn’t tend to give you second chances and given the stupid reasons I had for pushing her away I don’t deserve one anyway. Nevertheless, as I said I still think about her and I keep going back in forth in my mind about whether I should have somehow done things differently. I’m a lot more uncertain about my feelings than that other entry might make it seem, indeed in part what I said in there was probably a cope. Not to say it was untrue, but I was trying to convince myself that I didn’t have as much regret as I really do regarding the whole situation by focusing on the negatives.

I think she can tell as well, that I was hoping for some second chance that is, but she has a boyfriend now so that’s not going to happen. And after having a little while to think about it, maybe that’s a good thing, or not I don’t know what to think. I think she still cares about me, it’s hard to ever completely stop caring about someone (though not impossible I’ve learned), but I’m pretty certain there’s no romantic interest on her part anymore. That’s fine. This is the third time we’ve been in contact and last time there were no feelings, I don’t think, on either her part or mine. In fact she had a boyfriend last time we spoke as well, but she didn’t tell me about it until last week. I’m not exactly sure I understand why. She said that she never told me because she was scared “it would ruin things between us”, but there wasn’t anything between us at the time.

I really wasn’t thinking of her in “that way” last time we spoke, because I was maybe slightly obsessed with one of the girls I worked with, as I’ve talked about already on this blog. I won’t say it was something I never thought about, as I’ve been saying I’ve always had slight regrets about how things turned out all the way back in 2015, but I had no intention of making any effort to pursue something at the time. The boyfriend from back then is not the same one as right now. In fact I think I have an idea who the older boyfriend is, because the first time we were speaking she had a friend she told me about who asked her out apparently. It was a friend she’d mentioned quite a few times while we were talking to one another, again this is in 2015 I know it’s a bit difficult to keep track.

I remember her telling me out of the blue one night how it happened, I think it was around summer so roughly a year after we’d started talking. If I remember correctly, although I might be wrong here as it has been a while, for some reason they were not going to be able to see one another for some long period of time. Maybe they were going to different schools, or something, I’m not sure. Anyway she told me that she’d told him “no”, that she’d rejected his advances. This was around the time I think it was becoming quite obvious to her I was losing interest, so some part of me had a suspicion that she just made the story up to try and get me to do or say something, but now I think maybe that’s the same guy and the story was completely true. Maybe the story isn’t made up, but her saying no to him is, and that’s when they started going out.

I don’t fucking know, I’m really not interested in this gossip magazine tier normie shit. It doesn’t change anything either way. There was a situation or conflict or something with that boyfriend from before and the guy who is now her boyfriend as well, it may have even spread onto r9k a little, but I’m not going to go into that stuff because I’m pretty certain she would have a problem with me talking about it and anyway it’s not really anything to do with me. So again I will admit I had hoped that there might be something there when trying to get back in contact this most recent time, but after speaking to her for the last couple days knowing that isn’t going to happen, I’ve still found it really helpful. Since speaking to her again I’ve really been reminded just how much more bearable life is simply for having someone to actually talk to.

Not just to vent to her about my own problems, of course it’s really nice to finally have someone hear the problems I’m having, but that’s not what we talk about most of the time. It’s just nice to talk about completely mundane things, day to day stuff like what’s happening with her studies or at my job. Occasionally I’ll talk about those things here, but most of the time if I can’t make an interesting post from it I won’t. Just knowing there’s someone there, paying attention to me, I’m so scared to lose it so quickly after getting it back. It might seem weird to say, but I quite like listening to her troubles as well. I quite like that someone trusts me enough to talk about more personal things with, and I’m no therapist but I like to think I can be of some help. She’s certainly helped me a lot, just by being there and hearing me.

We even briefly spoke about how she could maybe help me with some art for this blog. I offered to pay to commission something but she said she’d never want that. Just maybe something she could do in an afternoon, to use as the header image. I’ve thought about how it would work, because usually I just try and find an image after I’ve written my post that I think is somehow appropriate. I would feel a little uncomfortable trying to tell someone what to do, so maybe a better idea would be to send her a copy of the draft before I upload something and ask her to just draw what she thinks is appropriate. Or we could talk on video chat and try and figure something out together, that would also be a good reason to finally do that after saying we would so many times, assuming she still wants to.

See usually when I just choose art or photographs or something from online I can’t always find the right image. I have a way of choosing what to use that I think works well, but it’s not possible to always find exactly what you’re looking for. Sometimes it’s probably easy to see the connection, other times I’m a bit more cryptic, and sometimes I’m just trying to use it to make a joke. I use the titles in a similar way as well, some are pretty straightforward obviously like any of the series’ I do, but other than that I’m just trying to make things a little more interesting. She has a very specific art style, one that wouldn’t really work all of the time, I just think it would be nice if she could be part of this thing in a small way. She seemed to really like the idea as well, although now who knows what’s going to happen. I’m slightly concerned she might not be too happy if she ends up reading this post, because she has read some of them.

She was so nice about my writing as well, maybe nicer than necessary because I’m not just playing modest when I say that I have a lot of rushed and not so well written stuff uploaded on here. I’m very proud of some of what I’ve put up of course, my recent entry in the Books series about The Little Prince might be one of the best things I’ve ever uploaded here, but then the next one after that (my most recent upload) was fucking terrible. She seemed genuinely interested to read through everything, and again even though I’m glad there are people who keep checking back here it’s not the same as actually hearing someone say they want to read everything you’ve written. It’s nice to have some affirmation, I have got a couple comments saying I should keep going before but it’s really nice when it comes from a person you know.

I don’t think she’ll actually read everything like she said, although to be fair I saw on my stats page the other night that someone from Italy had visited the home/ archives page a load of times so maybe she really did end up reading through a lot. We spoke a bit about a few of the first things I wrote on here as well, so maybe she wasn’t kidding and plans to eventually read through it all from the start. Either way I’m going to try not to mention it again if we keep talking. Of course I’ll tell her when I’m writing if it comes up in conversation and if she does decide to help out of course I’ll send her stuff then, but I don’t want to link her a specific post again. I started to feel like maybe I was being a little pushy, that I sent too much. She’s the kind of person who wouldn’t tell me to stop if it was annoying her, so I’m just going to stop myself.

She likes to send me music links quite a lot, we both share a lot of music recs to one another. We don’t have the exact same taste of course, but we do tend to like a lot of the same stuff and she’s actually given me some really good recommendations in the past. The other day she told me about this album Awake by an electronic musician called Tycho, and I’ve listened to it like maybe ten times since then. It’s really good, and I’d probably never have found it if not for her. There’s one track on there that really reminds me of the soundtrack to the game Mirror’s Edge actually, I think the chord progression (god I hope I’m using that term correctly and I don’t look like a pseud) is very similar at one point but then it goes in it’s own direction. Anyway, it’s just been so nice to have her there again.

I haven’t forgotten how that stopped being the case last time, how talking to her went from being the highlight of my day to being a chore as the months went on. The reasons for that are actually pretty easy to deal with however, in fact we’ve talked about how to prevent that. Basically, I was always too shy to just tell her I didn’t want to talk some days. I began to find it really hard to get anything else done, and so I’d make excuses not to talk. If I could have just told her that some nights I didn’t want to talk, and that didn’t mean I didn’t still enjoy her company generally, maybe both our lives could have gone quite differently. Anyway she’s a much busier person now, so she doesn’t even want to talk most days either. It’s funny in a way, that I could probably have saved things from falling apart just by having a backbone. It’s not funny, it makes me want to sink into the ground and die, but you know what I mean it’s also pretty fucking funny. XD

We did talk quite a lot about what happened before, including some stuff I didn’t know about like the aforementioned secret boyfriend. In fact she read the post linked at the start of this one that I wrote about her, I linked it in the original e-mail I sent to her. She was really understanding about it. She can be quite a reticent person unless you really push for more information sometimes, so maybe what I said hurt more than she’s willing to admit. I know from what she’s said in the past that she’s had some issues with her image and self confidence and I hate that I probably contributed to that. I hope that what I said in that post didn’t contribute even more, I mean she said to me she already could tell that I kind of lost interest when seeing her the first time all those years ago, but maybe actually seeing it written in my own words makes it more real. It’s something she said to me that made me start to think this, the last time we spoke on Wednesday night.

She said that she thinks maybe I only contacted her again because I’m desperate. It really hurt to read that, not just because it’s not true but because of what it says about how she views herself. It implies that she thinks I’m only talking to her because I have no one else. If I had a girlfriend, or even was still in regular contact with my friends, she seems to be suggesting that I wouldn’t want to speak to her. I’m not saying there’s not some truth to that, maybe I’d have felt that it was best to leave whatever happened with her in the past if I had more going on in my own life, but to imply I don’t care about her or just want to use her is completely unfair. I don’t see us talking again as me settling for her company because I have no one else to spend time with, I’ve shared more with her about myself than possibly anyone else I’ve ever known just because we used to speak so much. She’s certainly one of the few people I’ve opened up with the most.

Now the reason she said that, to provide some context, is because a few days after we started talking her boyfriend decided he was not comfortable with me talking to her again. Which I understand completely, I imagine I would feel the same if I were in that position. In fact I feel quite uncomfortable in my own position in this if I’m being completely honest. As I said it is really nice talking, but then a few times she’s mentioned this boyfriend and all I can hear in my head when that happens is a bunch of meme loving zoomers from r9k calling me a cuck. I’m not sure, am I being an “orbiter” here? I hate those fucking guys, you know who I mean. The people who swarm around certain e-girls and obsess over them, I think they’re completely contemptible. Some part of me is a little worried that maybe this girl now sees me in the same way those e-girls view their orbiters.

Now I know that it’s not quite the same, because I could have ended up with this girl once if I hadn’t been such an unbelievable coward or caught up on my own weird hang ups. Indeed, towards the end during the first time we spoke I actually felt bad because I was worried I was treating her like a female orbiter. That makes me sound like an absolute piece of shit, let me explain. I just mean that because I was too scared to tell her that I’d lost any romantic interest, but I kept talking, I kind of felt like I was stringing her along. I thought that if I just held out until we met maybe I’d somehow begin to feel different again, but more I was just scared to say something. Indeed she seems to have felt similarly because she told me she didn’t feel guilty about ghosting me the first time around because of this, and she shouldn’t that was the right response to how I was acting. As much as I wish it hadn’t ended that way, I can admit that.

Still, I can’t help but feel like I’m doing something wrong now. To be talking with someone, and rather intimately, who does now have a partner. In large part it is because of what there was before, I mean it’s not exactly unusual to have friends while you’re in a relationship. If there never had been anything between us in the past, it wouldn’t be a problem. She has other friends, presumably some of them male, and I imagine he doesn’t have any problem with that. I didn’t care at all that she had friends who were male, like the one I mentioned earlier in the post, back in 2015. It’s also maybe because I’m single, and not just that but perpetually so. If she had a male friend in real life, who had a girlfriend of his own or at least a normal dating life, I don’t think he’d care about them speaking.

I spoke with her about this, that hypothetically if I had a girlfriend in my own life (yeah, I know it’s a ridiculous premise pls be nice) maybe it would be less of a problem to keep talking. This was when she was telling me that maybe we shouldn’t talk anymore, in fact I hate to admit this but in a moment of weakness/ fear that I was going to lose her again I even said I’d sign up for online dating and try to find a girl that way if it would mean she wouldn’t abandon me. Even though I have a lot of fundamental problems with online dating in principle (that I spoke about in that post linked above actually, Volcel gang manifesto), when I got scared I kind of just lost all of those concerns. In retrospect, I realise how absolutely mad I sounded in that moment by the way.

Although I have to say, since that conversation I have begun to think about the idea of online dating again. I still agree with what I said in that post, and that the day I willingly sign up for something like that is the day what’s left of my innocence dies. Yet maybe I don’t have any other solution to this problem I have, I complain about being lonely but there is this pretty simple solution available to that. After all, outside of online dating I really don’t have any other options because I never meet new people any more and I can’t exactly rely on another girl approaching me in public like has happened before a couple times. It’s possible it’ll happen again, but just as possible if not more so that it never will. It’s not exactly normal, I mean in this country it’s pretty fucking rare for a guy to ask a woman out in public, a total stranger that is, never mind the other way around. That’s just not the culture, in fact I remember my old manager (from Romania) remarking on the fact that “no one ever flirts here” once.

The problem with Tinder or some lesser known thing like it is that it would be pretty fucking humiliating if I tried it and never got any matches as well, after all I have no photos of myself at all (well, there’s a few group photos from when I’ve been out with my coworkers but I can’t use those) so I’d have to just take a photo of myself and use that. And I imagine if you have nothing but a poor quality selfie on a site where most people have a whole set of photos of themselves doing actual interesting things you’ll be at something of a disadvantage. I’m probably not going to do it, I’m very intimidated by the entire idea and I still have all the same problems with it I talked about before. It’s something I’ve just been re-evaluating my stance on a little bit, that’s all.

I need some input from someone else, to tell me if I’m being silly about this or if my position from that post before makes sense. Another reason (or maybe another COPE) that I’m not an orbiter I think, is that I talk quite a lot about my problems, and she seems to respond quite genuinely and want to try and help me get better. That is, finding people and being less lonely, but also getting at deeper issues I may have. I think I already mentioned this but this isn’t what we talk about most of the time, however I do have a tendency to turn a normal conversation into another thing to get upset and moan about. It’s a problem, I wish I could keep it to myself more often, although sometimes it is nice to just vent.

To a real person I mean, someone who can respond in real time. It’s hard to explain what it’s like to suddenly have someone who is actually supportive, and who doesn’t seem to judge me. Someone who’s care and concern isn’t conditional, it’s like having my mother back or a sister I never had. Well, of course it’s not quite the same because of before but there’s a parallel there. The best example to show this is that I don’t feel uncomfortable with her reading this blog, but there’s no one I know in real life who I’d show what I’ve written here to. The things I’ve said about some people, jesus. They can never know, not until I’m dead anyway. Her on the other hand, I don’t worry at all about what she might think. I just don’t feel judged, it’s odd, and having someone like that in your life is incredibly reassuring.

Let’s just stick with the example of online dating, say I actually do decide to go through with it and I manage to get someone to agree to go get a drink or whatever people do after meeting on those sites. I’d feel a thousand times less scared to go, knowing that I’ll be able to talk about it if it goes wrong with her afterwards. And even before I went, just having her encouragement would probably make me far less worried. Which in this specific example probably means things are less likely to go wrong. It’s not just this example though, it’s really anything. I went to a gig the other night, the first time I’ve ever been to see a live music performance actually. The main band playing was Deafheaven (for a soy-metal band they’re actually pretty good), but there was another band called Touche Amore, and a third called Portrayal of Guilt.

Anyway, the show was a lot of fun and I had a great time, but I was terrified before going. I went with a friend, the one who doesn’t live in the same city as me, but nevertheless I was genuinely deebly goncerned the entire day before going. We had some cans of cider before going in to help chill out a bit, and two beers inside, and again once I actually got there it wasn’t bad at all. I’m not even sure what I was worried about, no one even cared to mess with me or whatever I was scared would happen, they were just enjoying the show. Yet that fear almost stopped me from going, the only reason I went was because I’m so unbelievably desperate these days for company. If I’d been asked to go do something like that even a year ago, I’d probably have said no, indeed I’ve said no to offers like that quite a few times in the past.

How much easier would it have been if she had been there to talk to me beforehand? Not even necessarily the same day, just at some point leading up to it. Yeah, I know I’m pathetic and weak and it’s embarrassing that something like that is so much of a big deal for me, but that is how I am and I can’t change that. Not in the short term anyway, and not on my own. I don’t know if any of you have seen the show Welcome to the NHK (the anime, I haven’t read the manga or the original novel), although given that I have a 4chan based audience I’m sure some of you have, but I guess I’m in a similar position to Satou. That’s the main character, and he’s worse off than me to be fair as he’s a complete hikki NEET and 24 years old at the start of the show I think, but his position is quite similar to mine.

There’s an episode where he goes back to university to consider applying for a course after dropping out years before, and how he responds in one scene in particular reminds me so much of how I was feeling before this show last week. That scene is one of the best ones in the show, honestly I don’t like a lot of the melodrama that happens towards the end of series. The early episodes are the best, they really demonstrate the mindset of someone who has ended up in that position really well. I was only ever a complete NEET for about 5 months (or a year if you include the time where I was volunteering at a charity shop for 8 hours a week) and I think I was already starting to go a bit loopy towards the end of that period. In that time, it wasn’t unusual for me to go two weeks in a row without leaving my flat once.

Anyway, the show is a show and therefore needs some kind of plot. So Misaki is introduced, a girl who for some reason decides that it is her mission to try and fix Satou and change his hikikomori ways. At first they begin a series of therapy-like sessions, and then she tries to push him to start rebuilding some kind of a life slowly. Again, the show is a show and so there are complications along the way, but that is the basic premise. At some point fairly early on Misaki seems to be developing into a love interest character, which makes sense, but interestingly enough that never goes anywhere. Instead, the feelings they are both developing seem to dissipate after the events towards the end of the series, and the ending of the show has them come up with a more formal agreement. Where they plan to continue to both help one another, and push on with life, as long as the other does the same.

You can probably see why I’m bringing the show up in the context of this particular post, the parallels are easy to see. Of course, I’m wary of making the comparison because you could misread me comparing this girl I know to Misaki as me saying I simply see her as a tool or means of helping myself. That’s obviously not true, as I’ve made clear throughout this entry I do genuinely appreciate her and want her to be happy. And we don’t spend all the time talking about my problems, the positive benefit of having someone like her to talk to is just a little similar. The effect of having her around to talk to, is somewhat comparable to the result of Misaki’s efforts to help Satou. It’s like poetry, it rhymes.

Every Friday on /r9k/ they have a thread dedicated to this character, Misaki Friday has been a tradition on there since before I started visiting the board, but most people in there seem to misunderstand the point entirely in my opinion. People will talk about how they’re “waiting for their Misaki” to come and save them, but Misaki never really saved Satou. Also I’ll say it again, the show is a show and so some spur was needed to get the plot moving. In real life no one is going to come and find you and fix all your problems, I had to find this girl the thread is about myself all those years ago. At the same time if you have no support network or people to rely on in place you are going to have a far harder time sorting yourself out than most people ever will. That alone won’t fix anyone, but it sure does help.

 

(not really talking about) Books: Part 9

In an earlier entry in this series I said I’d probably write a whole post about a certain book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Well I realise now I have less to say about it than I thought, but I’ll try and give it a short post. So this book is about an autist, not an autist in the way that the term is used online on places like 4chan but an actual person with autism. A fifteen year old boy living in a town not too far from London, with just his father. The book is written from his point of view, almost like a mock diary, so you also get a view of his various idiosyncrasies. The chapters for example, are not numbered normally but rather only the prime numbers are used, because Christopher (the main character) really likes prime numbers. He also struggles to accurately interpret facial expressions, or tone of voice. He also likes things that are well ordered, in particular he likes patterns. He also likes lists.

Now it’s funny how the term autist is used on 4chan, to describe people like me. That is, anyone who struggles socially. Although since getting a customer facing job I’ve become a bit better at holding eye contact, making small talk, and so on, I am still pretty awful with people. The thing is though, I’ve never really had trouble understanding people, or picking up on social cues and nuances. I’m actually quite the opposite of autistic, even if my worst social moments may externally resemble those of someone with autism the internal mechanism is entirely different. I am overly self conscious, I’m too aware of what others are feeling and thinking and what the social subtext is rather than not aware enough. The result however, does seem superficially similar. That is, between robots and high functioning autists, people with Asperger’s for example. Which is what the character of Christopher is, or at least on his way to becoming. After all he is still quite young, although older than I was when I first read this book.

That’s basically the germ of an idea I had for this post, this analysis or investigation of how the term autism is used in a slang way on 4chan (and the internet more generally speaking). Yes of course it’s older than that. You can find films from the 80s where autism (or sperg, autist, ’tist, etc.) is used by school kids as a generic insult for nerdy/ awkward kids. Online though it’s really taken on a whole new life, so to speak, there’s a lot you could say about it. I think it’s really interesting that in fact a mind that works in some ways exactly oppositely to how certain autistic people work (in a figurative sense, not necessarily in terms of actual brain structure. I wouldn’t know) creates a very similar outward result. I’ve known people with actual autism, a good friend of mine as a boy for many years was autistic, the way he thought was very different to how I did.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about lately actually, after a certain awkward chat with one of the customers a few months ago I was trying to go over it and find out exactly what I was doing that weirded people out so much and I realised that from an outside perspective I really do come off kind of like an autist. For example, I’ll respond to “small talk” style questions very literally. Now I know that the unwritten rule is that you’re not really meant to answer those questions but answer a question they didn’t ask you. Like, if someone asks what music you listen to, instead of just naming the musicians you like in order of most listens on your device you’re meant to talk about some music related thing you’ve done recently or something like that.

I know this from observation, I’ve seen small talk when it goes smoothly and this is exactly how it goes. I’ve also read stuff online about this, it really is a good thing to know, but for most people it’s just muscle memory essentially. Because they were properly socialised I suppose and I somehow was not, but for me I have to remind myself to do this shit (and this question avoiding thing is like one of a million different stupid rules) and I have to do it in what is for me a high stress situation as well. I know that it’s pathetic that a simple conversation is “high stress”, but it is what it is and I can’t change that. So instead, when push comes to shove I just act on instinct instead of trying to “follow the rules” and I actually answer people’s questions… like a fucking autist.

I also don’t want to feel like I’m trying to dominate a conversation, I feel like if I just talk about something only semi-related to what was asked the person will think I have an agenda and then they’ll be resentful and talk about me to others or whatever normies do. I’ve experienced gossip since starting this job, they all get along great in person but then have complaints about the exact kind of thing I just mentioned and things like it. So I’m not imagining it, if I want to get along well with people I have to ironically kind of annoy them. It’s the only way, you have to have some kind of presence. I’m a people pleaser though, it’s my weakness, so it’s like going against my programming.

So I have to learn these rules, but for most people if you pointed out these specific “rules” they wouldn’t even know they were following them. In fact, they’d probably think you’re pretty fucking weird for even giving this stuff so much thought. For them, they neither realise they’re doing a dance every time they engage with one another, nor have the self awareness that they’re all equally as pushy or forceful in conversation as they complain about everyone else being. If you’re autistic you may have the lack of awareness, but you don’t understand the “rules”, and if you’re like what we might call a robot (or a foreveralone maybe, I’m really not sure what to call myself) you’re very aware of how people will judge you and resent you. In fact you understand these rules more explicitly than any normie, but you’re too self conscious. The ultimate expression of these internal processes, how you appear to the normie, looks rather similar in the end. You’ll try so hard, and get so far, but in the end, it doesn’t even matter.

I have two contrasting examples, that may illustrate my point. On the one hand let’s take a famous person who is diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, Greta Thunberg. And btw I do not appreciate all you meanies on 4chan (/pol/ in particular, not that I spend much time there these days) being so horrible about this little girl. I don’t care if she’s a government plant or whatever you believe, she’s a qt pie with a good heart and you can leave her alone. Joan of Arc was a puppet for more shadowy forces too, Greta will be a similar kind of spiritual figurehead for the new eco friendly reich that will soon arise. Anyway, you look at this interview with her and you can quite clearly tell that she’s not quite socialised normally.

She’s reasonably confident given that this is a 16 year old girl from a small irrelevant European country on a huge American news show, but she’s still a bit “off”. She doesn’t really hold eye contact when answering questions, she seems to look down a few times when making a statement like she’s not quite sure of her own words. I’m not great at analysing people but it’s just clear that she does indeed have autism. Now to contrast I have this interview from Robert Smith I saw recently at a Japanese music festival. There’s a new Cure album coming out soon, so I’ve been watching any new interview that comes out for information about it, and this one I’ve watched quite a few times because it reminds me so much of myself. Indeed if I had to try and give you an example of how I am in person (at least until I get comfortable around you), I would probably suggest this video.

Anyway, I’m pretty certain Robert Smith does not have autism or any associated mental illness. I’ve read a lot about him, probably too much, and I’ve never seen any mention of something like that. Yet, that interview is incredibly similar to the one with based Greta. The stilted speech in particular is what really strikes you. Now Robert Smith is no robot (if you want a robot musician, that would be Nick Drake), he’s happily married and the frontman of an internationally famous rock band, but there is some similarity. He’s certainly a gentle soul, and had only a few things gone differently would easily be another guy on /r9k/, that’s why his music resonates so much with me I think.

This post is a total mess, I’m not going to try and pretend otherwise. The quality of this blog is really all over the place, some weeks I’m really proud of what I’ve written and other weeks I’m hesitant to even go through with uploading the post I’ve got. Maybe I should upload less, I have come to this conclusion before but I always end up coming back to this weekly schedule. And to be fair, some months I do have a post I’m proud of every week, but more often I simply rush things through and that is a problem I have. Now I do have some interesting ideas in the works, it’s not all bad news, but maybe I’ll try to break away from this weekly thing again. I’ll see, clearly I have some kind of compulsion to keep writing every week but maybe when I feel like a post isn’t working out instead of doing what I’m doing here and complaining about my post being bad to extend the wordcount I’ll just give it a few days and try and make something worthwhile or delete the thing and skip a week.

I’ve also had a really stressful week, there’s been a lot of stuff going on and I may write about that but I’m gonna wait until I know how things end up first. I’ll see what happens, and then perhaps I’ll decide what to do. I also have another idea in the works, for a different post that I think could be a lot of fun for both for me to put together and for others to read, and I’m gonna see Joker next week so maybe that will give me something to talk about. It’s certainly made a splash in the usual circles I tend to frequent. So, it’s not like I don’t have plans. I’ve read back through a lot of this blog over the last couple days, because I wanted to find a few certain entries to show someone, and that’s really reminded me of how much of a mess this blog is. For every post I’m really happy with, there’s a rushed and low quality one like this as well. I think that compared to the early days I’ve improved a lot but there’s a lot of work to be done yet. If I want to make this thing into something I can be truly happy to have worked to create.

I’m not keeping this book btw, if that’s not clear. I read it many times over back in the day, I’ve talked about this before but I would read and re-read the same books multiple times in a row often and this was one of those. I possibly read this one ten times or more, sometimes I’d finish it and just start back at chapter one the same night. It was like a friend, but those days are over now.

Link to Part 8

Link to Part 10

Books: Part 8

All grown-ups were children once – although few of them remember it.

The Little Prince is a book I’ve had since I was a small boy. I remember my mum reading it to me when I was maybe six or seven years old, over about a week, before bed every night. I particularly remember the couple of days where we were at the point in the story where the prince is travelling to various small planets, the imagery of it has stuck with me my whole life. I’m not the only one either, I’ve seen it show up in all kinds of interesting places. For example, there’s a company in this country called British Gas (natural gas in this country used to be nationalised, hence the uninspired name) and they had an advertising campaign that ran for years which blatantly ripped off that whole visual concept. If you’re interested just look up “british gas planet home” on youtube, planet home was the name of the initiative. I have to admit some of these ads were really well put together, even if the entire thing is incredibly manipulative as most advertising is.

Anyway, as I was saying this planet hopping part of the book is incredibly memorable and comforting, the idea of us all having our own little planet like the Prince does really tugs at a lot of the feelings I’ve talked about before. That we might all have our own little world to escape to. The rest of the book I have to say however, I remembered far less well when coming back to read it again recently. It all came back to me as I read through it (it’s a very short novella, you can finish it all in an evening) of course, but I was surprised by how much I was being reminded of. Only two things had really stayed with me, the planet hopping section and the personality of the titular character. In a sense I’ve been trying to emulate this character my entire life, since before I read the book myself at least but maybe that time it was read to me as a little boy impacted me more than I consciously realise.

Now it’s not like I woke up one morning and decided to try and method act as him, rather I’ve always admired the various characteristics that make this character and have tried to be like that myself. I didn’t even have the actual character of the little prince himself in my mind while doing this most of the time, it was actually only in re-reading the book just over a month ago that I really noticed the connection. Somehow there’s been this disconnect, where on the one hand I’ve had this personal conception of the character in my mind and always admired him, and on the other this person I would like to be, and yet I didn’t see the clear parallels. I didn’t see that the archetype that the prince represents, is the same one that I have (again, not entirely deliberately) tried to model myself on as I’ve grown up. Now I don’t even find myself trying, at this point in life (I’m 22) I have for the most part simply become this type.

When you’re growing up, there are all these different things pulling you in various directions. Competing impulses, who you spend time with and how you should respond to various circumstances for example. The choices you make during this period of time, will essentially define the kind of person you’ll be as an adult, at least in my opinion. I’ve talked before for example about how I was always kind of fascinated with lonely figures in fiction even when I was quite young, and hadn’t ever really experienced loneliness yet, and always saw something of myself in them. I think what I said in one post was that I could kind of sense that even though the circumstances hadn’t allowed for it yet, those kind of people were the most like me and I would end up like them. Again, perhaps this was even started when I had this book read to me all those years ago. I won’t ever be able to know if this is the case, but it would make a lot of sense.

The little prince is one of those characters, very possibly one of the first I encountered in fiction, he lives alone on his planet for who knows how long until the rose arrives. Sitting up there in his home in the sky, you can’t help but think of this golden haired young boy as a divine figure. The parallels with Apollo are certainly hard to miss. Because of this lonely existence of his, there’s this melancholy in everything he says and does that you can’t miss. I definitely have that now, and in fact it’s probably one of my worst traits, and I imagine it plays a role in people keeping away from me in life. It’s a vicious cycle because the two things both reinforce one another, whichever came first is rather irrelevant. I didn’t always have this offensively gloomy aura though, I think I used to kind of put it on a little. I had romantic ideas of despondent young men and world weary old souls who hate company in mind. And I, only half knowingly, shaped myself in their image.

The prince is quite unlike most of those sorts of people (fictional and real) in one way though, in that he also has a wonderful brightness to counterbalance it, that youthful naivety and openness. I was going to say it’s paradoxical, but actually in thinking about it that’s not right. These two elements of his character are not contradictory, in fact it makes a lot of sense that they would come hand in hand. By being apart from the world of “grown ups” of course on the one hand there is a sadness, but there is also the fact that you haven’t been exposed to a lot of the things that make men cynical. This is also something that I’ve tried a lot to emulate, possibly in part as a reaction against my father who is a very bitter and cynical man. He is also quite a loner generally speaking, but more like the Travis Bickle type I was referring to earlier, jaded by experience.

It’s possible that there is a genetic component, my surname which I share with my dad (and grandfather, and great grandfather, etc.) is an occupational one. That is, it originally described the occupation of the person who held that name. There’s loads of names like this, so a lot of people can figure out from their surname that their ancestors for some time would have been Blacksmiths or Stonemasons or Butchers, and so on. And these professions were kept in the family, you would have done what your father did and his father before him. I don’t want to give my name here, I like keeping semi-anonymous online, but the occupation my surname implies my ancestors (in my paternal line) engaged in would have been a rather solitary one. At least from what I understand about it, I could be completely wrong about all of this, but it does kind of make sense. Traditional professions seem to have gone hand in hand with certain character types, or at least over time they bred a certain temperament.

Back on topic though, I’m not like my dad or these more embittered and resentful types. I am reluctantly judgemental of people, because this modern world requires it, but I also do always try to suspend any prejudice I may have about a person on first interaction. My instinct, or perhaps that’s not the best word as it may be a learned tendency rather than a natural one as I’ve been saying, is to be trusting of a new person when I first meet them. I do generally assume an individual I meet is a good person until proven otherwise, whoever they may be, unlike my dad who does the opposite. This is more like the prince, he is open to others so much so that it kills him.

Fortunately my openness hasn’t killed me yet (or maybe unfortunately), but it has hurt me. It’s an old trope that people like me are easily taken advantage of, and even though I’m very reclusive I’ve still had that happen on more than one occasion. Only in one case has it seriously negatively impacted my life, and even then I got over it pretty quick, but nevertheless it did happen. I could even write an entry or two for this blog about these events, but honestly I don’t actually dwell on these memories too much. I’m not resentful about what happened, in a strange way it validates this view of myself I have and so I’m kind of glad things happened the way they did. A lot of people feel incredibly insulted when they feel like they’ve been taken advantage of, they hold on to that resentment their entire lives, but I suppose I’m too preoccupied with other unhealthy mental fixations.

So yes I have this sadness about me, but I think I also have a rare benignity (although I feel a little weird saying that about myself) that radiates out as well. Again it may seem contradictory at first, I was just saying that the sadness that sometimes shows through this affectionate exterior tends to keep people away. Yet people do tend to like me a lot at the same time, somehow. People have always described me with words like “sweet”, “kind”, “innocent” and so on. Which of course always only reinforces this self perception I have of myself, and seeing as it’s what people respond well to encourages me to embrace this aspect of my character even more firmly. Basically, the people who know me are glad I (and therefore, people like me) exist, but they don’t actually want much to do with me personally.

One time at work this guy came up to me while I was sitting out in the front of the shop. In the summer sometimes it gets really warm inside, so when it’s not busy I just sit outside. He sat next to me, on the ground looking up at me a little as I was on the step, and smiled. We had a brief conversation, he was having a bad day because he had missed both a train and a bus and was therefore very late getting to where he needed to go, but I mostly just listened because I’m incredibly awkward and never know what to say to people. He left after a short while, when his bus arrived, but before leaving he told me something. He said that just staring at my face helped him calm down (very weird thing to say), and that he could tell I was a good person.

Now it’s pretty unusual for someone to be this explicit, and I think he might have been high on some drug, but the general sentiment is not too unusual a thing for me to inspire in someone. And the thing is, I like it. Maybe I’m even somewhat delusional, and that I’m actually entirely wrong about other people’s perception of me. It’s possible I’m just projecting out what I want people to think, but then something like the story above happens and that stops the doubt for a while. Again usually it’s not as clear as that, often just a comment from one of the customers or a feeling I get from how people treat me. I feel like I have more to say but I’m lost for words and I’m really veering off topic.

I’m going to hold on to this book, it’s so short that I imagine I will certainly read it again some day. I wish I had more to say, but I’m not interested in the usual things that come up when people talk about this book. I’m not here to tell you about the importance of “embracing your inner child” or whatever silly interpretations people have that you can find a thousand other articles and blog posts already telling you, I think that kind of analysis really misses the point. Frankly I think that a lot of people use a distorted interpretation of such a message to justify behaviours that aren’t very cute or childlike at all, but are actually rather obnoxious, impulsive and solipsistic. People do all sorts of things that are very much adultlike, under the guise of “childlike curiosity”.

A lot of articles and essays I was able to find tend to say that the purpose of the two drawings right at the start for example, is to show how with adulthood we lose our imagination. Later the various people the prince visits on his interplanetary tour are there to show that as we grow up we tend to become much more focused on the mundane, and that we lose an ability to see with our heart rather than our eyes. Indeed that is a line that another character says, or something very similar, the fox. Now I agree that this is the purpose of these parts of the story, but then there’s this leap that everyone takes which I can’t understand. That therefore we should reject growing up, and remain perpetual children. That all will be well in the world should we simply remember how to think as children do.

I don’t see it, and frankly that would put a rather positive tone (sickeningly positive that is, very hippie-ish) on a book which for me is punctuated throughout with melancholy. I think rather that the book is a lament, for as sad as it is to lose this childlike nature it must happen. The message is not that we need to try and get back in touch with our childlike nature at all, but that we all must grow up. As sad as it may be to say so. Indeed the narrator manages to survive the crash in the Sahara not because he learns once again to see the elephant inside that hat or some equally kitsch plot point, but because of his mechanical knowledge and experience. His personal specialisation is what defines him, just like the man on the lamp post planet is defined by his role. To be sorrowful about something, to have this sorrow be the message of a story, is not necessarily an argument for resisting it.

I think that this book serves people of all ages. To the very young it is this wonderful tale that follows laws only a young child could understand. Flying to different planets with the help of migrating birds, talking plants and animals, being sent across space by a snake’s bite. To the older child/ young teen, it serves as a reminder to enjoy what remains of your childhood years and savour them rather than being so desperate to grow up. It shows you that the freedom you associate with adulthood is not what it seems, indeed in many ways you’re freer at this time than you’ll ever be. Being somewhat grown at this point, you might not take the ending passage with the snake so literally. Indeed if this book exists to mourn the necessary death of childhood, and the prince is the archetypal child, what might this ending symbolise I wonder?

Then to the young adult, still struggling to adapt to adult life, you might have the realisation I’ve had on my most recent reading. That as sad as it is to move on, to struggle against becoming an adult is futile. You’re fighting against something that will always overwhelm you in time. As for older people, I can’t help but be reminded of the quote I took from the dedication note in the book and posted at the start of this entry. Perhaps one day I’ll need reminding, and so for that reason I plan to hold on to this book for now. It’s such a charming story, and it does mean a lot to me. This copy in particular, with it’s browned pages and bent corners, has been part of my life for such a long time. I can’t get rid of it, and as I just said I do believe that I will still have some use for it yet.

Link to Part 7

Link to Part 9

Socrates the Diligent

I’ve recently finished reading Conversations with Socrates, which is the name for the Penguin Classics collection of Xenophon’s four Socratic dialogues. Translated into English of course, by Robin Waterfield. In this post I’m primarily going to talk about two of the four works in here, Memorabilia and Oeconomicus (re-titled in this collection as Memoirs of Socrates and The Estate Manager respectively), only however. And in fact I really think they should be placed together as one work, but I’ll get around to explaining why I feel this way later. Now please bear in mind, you few readers I have, that this is not an essay and I am not an academic. I’m just a brainlet with a lot of free time, and so I’m simply giving my thoughts on these works as I go through them.

In life you’ll often read a lot, and then forget a great deal about what you read. My Books series is really driving that point home for me as I am struggling to recall a lot as I go through all these books I read years ago. My goal in writing about the books I read going forward is that I will be able to take what thoughts they inspire and make them more permanent, so I have something to return to that can jog my memory. Hopefully as well, even though I am not studying philosophy as I said but simply reading it as a hobby, some of the insights I have will be of interest to anyone reading this. And even if I do look like a complete idiot who is totally out of his depth, it doesn’t matter so much because this blog is anonymous.

So I’ll quickly talk about the other two works in here, just to give an idea of why I’m not focusing on them. The first one is simply very short, it’s essentially just a pamphlet that was primarily written to counteract the propaganda against Socrates that was going around after his trial and death. At least, this is how Xenophon perceived it but we weren’t there so who can say for sure what the truth was. It seems in particular he was trying to present an opposing perspective to one given by another pamphlet that was circulating in Athens at the time, written by a certain Polycrates. The work itself is a short dialogue, featuring Socrates of course. First in conversation with one of his followers, Hermogenes, where he explains that he went into the trial fully expecting to be condemned to die and content that he lived a good life.

Then going on to depict his speech in front of the jury and an exchange with one of his primary accusers, Meletus, which is where Xenophon takes the opportunity to argue against the accusations being levelled against Socrates. That’s not to say that the speech is entirely fabricated, certainly there would have been one, but we know that Plato’s account of the very same speech differs quite drastically so why assume one or the other is the more accurate of the two? In fact I believe it makes sense to assume that neither were accurate, or that they were even meant to be intended as so by the readers of these dialogues. After all, the entire literary genre of the Socratic Dialogue (and that’s what it was, a genre) doesn’t seem to have ever tried to suggest that the various different versions of Socrates used as characters were representations of the real Socrates and what he believed.

One of the only things that we can say we know for sure about Socrates is that he questioned people, and he associated with the kinds of people we might call intellectuals. Even if it was because he spent all day arguing with such people, due to his associations he eventually became a kind of figurehead in the eyes of the regular Athenian citizenry for this group. This probably came to a head when he was literally portrayed this way in a play, written by the comic (closer to what we’d call a satirist today perhaps) playwright Aristophanes, called The Clouds. The play still exists to this day and you can read the script if you’re interested, there are translations online that are easy to find. It’s not entirely about Socrates, he is a secondary character in the play.

In this play he is presented as someone who takes money for lessons, something which Plato, Xenophon and I believe even Aristotle (who was born after Socrates died but would have still known far more than we do today about him) claimed he refused to ever do. He’s also used to express the ideas of various other philosophers that existed at the time, but reduced to absurdity, so as to make them all look like a bunch of old fools with their heads stuck in the clouds.. get it? There has been a lot written about how the trial was not so much about Socrates, but rather about sending a political message to this group, many of whom had anti-democratic views. Plato (one of Socrates’ followers and therefore also part of this loose group of individuals) certainly puts some of the blame at the feet of Aristophanes for Socrates being pushed into this role, but he also portrays Socrates and Aristophanes as friends in one of his dialogues.

Now here comes my own speculation, I think that the response of this disparate group was to create the Socratic Dialogue format as a way of memorialising Socrates. The dialogue format more generally speaking is a great way to flesh out a philosophical concept after all, because you can present various perspectives, and now they had this character (who in the eyes of the average citizen was just a stand in for “smart guy”) to be the character who asks the most pressing questions and has all the right answers. This was not only a fantastic way of getting complex ideas across though, it was also a message sent in response to the one meant by the execution of Socrates. “Us and our ideas will long outlive you and yours”. Again pure speculation, there’s absolutely no evidence for it whatsoever, but it’d be cool.

I will say that it seems that it was really only those who were friendly to Socrates, rather than this entire group of intellectuals, who developed this genre at first. However if my little theory has any truth to it, the effort paid off because the style did take off. Soon all kinds of people were writing such dialogues, people who never met Socrates. Aristotle supposedly wrote some, and even as far ahead as the early middle ages the format was still being used. So, I kind of went on a tangent there even though I said I would hardly talk about these other works. You read my blog title though, I ramble. I don’t plan these out I just write down my thoughts as they come, nothing more.

So anyway my point is that just because this first dialogue in the collection describes a much more real event than most of them, it doesn’t mean it’s any less like the other works in this genre. This is not meant to be a depiction of the trial of Socrates, which Xenophon wasn’t even present for as he was off fighting in Persia at the time, but a fictional work based on the event that was written with the goal of defending against the slander that was going around about Socrates. Or at least what Xenophon thought was slander. It is an attempt to rehabilitate his memory, which in my opinion is admirable.

The other work I won’t really talk about is the Symposium, again retitled in this collection as The Dinner Party. This is the most self contained work in here, and also the most similar to one of Plato’s dialogues. In fact it’s apparently very similar to a work of the same name by Plato, and they both primarily deal with the same subject. At least on the surface they do, and that subject is love. Now I haven’t read Plato’s Symposium yet, but from what I understand it is an examination of what love is. Even though most people haven’t read the work, the term “Platonic love” is something we’ve all heard before. It’s a common phrase, at least in English. So I have to assume that his conclusions somehow align with what is meant by that phrase, which generally means a love that is true or pure in a sense. I guess I’ll find out soon enough, when I read the work for myself.

Xenophon’s Symposium is really only using the subject to further define his idea of the “truly good man”. Among other things that is, the work describes an entire evening’s events (which makes it quite historically interesting, I certainly enjoyed reading the descriptions of the food they ate and party games they played, and so on) and several conversations. The discussion of love is just the one that is most fleshed out, and it takes up a significant portion of the text. He makes this quite clear, in the very first paragraph he explains that the purpose of this work is to present how a truly good man behaves not in serious activity as in many of his other works, but in a more recreational one. In this case a dinner party, or symposium as they were called.

This idea of the truly good man is Xenophon’s real core philosophical idea, and even though he uses that exact expression over and over it wasn’t until the end of the Oeconomicus that I really “got it”. The reason being that the Memorabilia is presented similarly to the Apology, the work I talked about at the start, in that it claims to have been written to defend Socrates’ name. The first of the four “books” that it’s divided into is an introduction explaining that the purpose of the work is to present through various short conversations why Socrates was in fact a truly good man and not the nefarious character people were making him out to be in the period following his trial and death.

Unlike the Apology though, which was short and concise, this work goes on to explain why Socrates was in fact a truly good man in excruciating detail. Really, I have to be honest, this work (which is by far the longest of the four) was incredibly dull and took me a really long time to finish. As I said it’s mostly a collection of many short conversations between Socrates and other Athenians, including some names I recognised from the books I read about the Peloponnesian war. He talks to Pericles and Alcibiades and some other characters, but most of the dialogues are between him and his followers. Plato of course, but many others who’s own writings are now completely lost.

A lot of these conversations are almost certainly made up, in fact the translator’s introduction points out that some are provably made up because they feature Socrates talking with people about events that happened after both their deaths. Now I don’t think the translator gave much of an opinion on this, but from my perspective this tells us that it was a way for Xenophon to communicate the real purpose of the work. Because everyone alive at the time would have known this, and as well as this there are conversations in here that are more intimate like between Socrates and his own sons, that Xenophon couldn’t have possibly been around the observe. The real purpose of the work I think, being to give a thorough description of what a truly good man is, and why.

So the Memorabilia is split into four “books” as they’re called, but really the separation doesn’t make much sense. The first book I can understand being made separate, as it is an introduction of sorts that doesn’t feature any actual dialogues. The others however, while they all start by saying they’ll focus on one particular thing, are all over the place. For example, Xenophon opens the second book by saying he will now talk about how Socrates practiced self discipline in all areas of life. The thing is, there are many conversations which aren’t really about that in this book, and there are conversations which you think would relate to the stated subject that are left for other books. It’s all over the place, totally unfocused and hard to follow.

There is actually speculation that this isn’t the original structure, and that the text has been re-edited by some other individual in the centuries following Xenophon’s death, or even that there may be additional writings that were part of the work that have been lost. It would certainly make a lot of sense, and in fact as I said I think that the Oeconomicus may have originally been the final book. If not, then it should have been because it clarifies the Memorabilia so well. In fact from what I understand scholars do believe that it was originally part of the work but then Xenophon decided to turn it into a work of it’s own. Because it starts with no introduction, but rather like the various other shorter conversations in the Memorabilia. The first line of the Oeconomicus is “I once heard him discussing estate management…” which is a line he uses over and over to introduce a new conversation in the Memorabilia. It’s his way of saying, and now on to the next example.

The Oeconomicus is much more focused, and it is split into two parts. The first is a conversation much like all the others in the Memorabilia, between Socrates and one of his followers. And the second is framed within the context of that first conversation, as Socrates retelling a story from his younger years of when he met a man known as Ischomachus who was a wealthy estate owner/ farmer. This is where it really gets interesting, because up until this point Xenophon’s description of a “truly good man” essentially lines up with a kind of generic traditional/ conservative view on how to live. That’s why I haven’t really explained it in this post, because it’s something you’ve already heard before.

Of course, Xenophon was one of the earliest prose writers in European history so we should be a little forgiving, but to a contemporary reader it does feel like you’ve heard it all before. So even though I’m kind of that way inclined personally, and I found myself largely in agreement with him when he had Socrates talk about the things like exercising restraint and self discipline, I did find it quite boring to read about as I said. I also think that Socrates came off much more like a lecturer than the inquistive character that we tend to see him as thanks to Plato’s portrayal of him. He does ask a lot of questions in the Memorabilia, but for the most part they’re very leading questions that are all trying to move the conversation to where he can make his final point. A lot of the people he talks to don’t have much personality either, outside of a few notable exceptions most of the followers are presented as yes men who kind of just go along with whatever he says.

So the second conversation is between a young Socrates and Ischomachus as I said, and on the surface the discussion is about how best to run a farm and make it profitable. It’s not particularly hard to grasp that this is an elaborate analogy for how to live what Xenophon would have considered the life of a truly good man. Through it he talks about the different but complementary roles of men and women (ever heard that one before?), the way to behave around subordinates and superiors, the importance of physical fitness and discipline, and most interestingly of all about how conscientiousness rather than either innate talent or learned skill is most important for success.

As well as all that however the work is also kind of an extolment of the virtue of the profession of farming/ agriculture, which is something Xenophon clearly has a great deal of respect for. He seems to think of it as one of the most noble professions, and as well as this he also thinks that it is the most natural. A large portion towards the end of the second conversation deals with Ischomachus explaining to Socrates that you don’t need to learn agriculture, it’s essentially in your nature already and anyone with a little common sense can hypothetically have a farm as profitable as someone who studied the subject of farming for years. Now of course, this isn’t quite true as we now understand that agriculture took a couple hundred thousand years to develop, but that’s not important.

His point of view, is actually one that a lot of conservative minded people still seem to have today funnily enough. Which is that rural living is more natural and healthy, and city living has a sort of hazy and hard to define but clearly damaging affect on both the body and soul. This final part of the work has a fair bit of detail on farming techniques, which does drag on a little, but it’s not a treatise on agriculture really. Someone couldn’t read this book today, and then understand how to run a farm. However the analogy still works, because the greater point he’s making is worth hearing. Which is this idea that those who pay attention and actually put in the work they know is required, possess the truest virtue.

This is where it all comes together, and why I think that the Memorabilia (and to a lesser extent the other works I talked about) works so much better with the Oeconomicus to clarify it. Because this idea, which doesn’t really come up until this point, is the through line that connects everything else he says about what makes a good or bad person. When I got to the end of the Oeconomicus, I was able to retroactively appreciate the Memorabilia (which I had disliked when reading it) a whole lot more. As I’ve said it was kind of all over the place, very scattershot and even the translator pointed this out about it in his introduction. Now though, it’s all tied together and it makes a sort of sense. There’s an underlying philosophy to Xenophon, and if you were to have say only read one of these works you might have missed it. I certainly would have.

Now I don’t entirely agree that this one characteristic is what makes a good man, I would say I disagree with Xenophon actually because that’s very reductive, but it’s interesting that he does. Conservatively minded people do tend to score higher for the trait conscientiousness when taking personality tests and things like that, it’s not the most reliable thing in the world but it’s something. I’m also reminded of one of my older posts, Thinking about thinking about things. It’s from very early on so please forgive it being such an unfocused mess, but in there I kind of talked about this trait without really naming it. In thinking more though, conscientiousness really does describe what I was talking about back then, among other things.

It’s funny because it’s something I’ve been thinking about a bit lately, which is why when I was reading through the Oeconomicus I had this “aha!” moment. There was something that happened that got me thinking about this exact subject, and I was thinking about trying to write a whole post about it but then I kind of got distracted as you might realise if you’ve been following my recent uploads. See I live with my dad as I’ve said before, and a few weeks ago I was making a sandwich for lunch and I decided to put some lettuce in there. So I picked some leaves off and went to wash each leaf in the sink, and my dad came in and saw me and then laughed about how I wash each lettuce leaf individually. I’ve always done it this way, and I’ve even explained why when he’s mocked me for it before.

The reason being that simply holding all the leaves under the tap together doesn’t clean them properly, it’s not exactly hard to grasp. Also if you just tear a bunch of leaves off of the whole plant you ruin the ones you don’t take, which is exactly what he always does, and if you carefully pluck the few leaves you want one at a time this is avoided. It seems silly when I explain it like this, and of course when I explain it in person it sounds even more funny because it’s an odd thing to talk about, but it’s not like I put a great deal of thought into it. Whenever I reached the age where I was able to make a sandwich for myself, I just developed this way of doing things.

It’s such a insignificant event, but it exemplifies the difference between myself (and I think I can be described as rather conscientious) and my father. Once you notice the difference you see it everywhere, when I wash up the plates and cutlery I take slightly longer than he does, but almost every time he does it he leaves bits of food and stains on things so they need to be washed a second time and I never have this problem. I spend a lot longer in the shower, but I feel like I need all the time I take to wash myself properly. This can only mean that, at least following the standards I hold myself to, he’s not washing properly. Mostly though this temperamental difference shows itself through very small things, the way he wipes down a counter or how he’ll leave crisp packets and used napkins lying around for days.

This and a thousand other things I am starting to realise may have played more of a role in the issues I’ve had with him since we started living together after my mum passed away than anything else. I find him disgusting to live around honestly, and I hate to say it because he is my father and it’s not like I don’t love him like any other child loves a parent. This post isn’t for me to vent about my relationship with my dad though, already done that, and may again but not today. My point is that we are fundamentally very different people, which is odd because a lot of people tend to be very similar to their parents, and the difference is really primarily because of this trait. Now imagine if I had to live with someone like this, and I didn’t even have that familial bond to temper my resentment about his slothfulness.

That is how someone grows to hate a certain kind of person, and in time to glorify their opposite as well. In response to this negative reaction, one might put undue emphasis on trying to be as different from that person as possible. Indeed I have myself done this to an extent, over the last seven years since we’ve been living together. I’m trying to psychoanalyse a two and a half thousand year old man, but it’s something to think about. I also don’t like it when people use philosophy as self help, or to try and interpret something in their own life, that’s not what I’m doing. It’s just funny that I was thinking about this subject myself, and then this quite similarly minded writer touched on the same thing. He really does, the thing underpinning his ideal figure of the truly good man is this diligence.

It’s not like it doesn’t make sense either, it’s very easy to understand why he would see things this way. It’s not a guarantee, as my own failures go to show, but this trait almost certainly is a requirement for success in life. The kind of inattentive, easy going attitude that Xenophon’s Socrates rails against is a characteristic of peasants and slaves. The disagreement I might have is that perhaps too much importance is granted to this quality, and other things are also important. Not to say Xenophon praises this to the exclusion of everything else, but it is of primary importance to him. Or at least, that is how it seems. The other disagreement I have is that this can be learned, I don’t think so. I think this is a core personality trait, and that nothing can really be done to change it. I don’t think most people would want to change for that matter.

Pilgrimage for a feeling

The experience two weeks ago (described in my last post) is still on my mind, but not in the same way. At first I was just desperate to relive it, to not forget it, and I’m glad that that feeling was there to inspire me to write my last post. I’m quite happy with how my last post came out, but that worry or concern is over now. In part because I went back again last sunday (I’ve now been five times in total, and plan to regularly visit as long as I live nearby) and had an experience that was very similar in some regards, and so I actually can hypothetically relive the feeling or something like it again. In part also though, because time has simply passed. And as well because I was able to record what happened, and how I felt about it at the time, so I am not concerned with that initial moment being lost.

This will be a sort of follow up post, which I said I might make. I’ve tried going about this in quite a few different ways, but failed at every attempt. I tried explaining/ elaborating on certain things I said, and then after deleting everything I wrote a few times because it just didn’t work I tried writing about why I couldn’t or shouldn’t be explaining things, but that was a mess too. This made me think that maybe I shouldn’t even do a follow up post, maybe what I’ve already written regarding that experience is enough, but then why do I have this feeling that I should write a follow up? In thinking about the answer to that question, I realised what I should write about.

The answer to that question, is that this event has changed my perspective on things. I’m not saying I’ve had a drastic change in my worldview, but it’s an important event that will almost certainly affect my life going forward even if only in a few very small and insignificant seeming ways. I’m going to be going back there frequently as I’ve said, that’s already a change to what has been my normal routine for years. I haven’t spent an entire day inside for probably over a month now, because first I was going to the small park nearby and now I’m back to work and visiting this larger park on my days off. The real significant change however, is that I’ve decided that the pursuit of aesthetic experiences like that one is a valuable endeavour in and of itself.

Those few hours were the best I’ve felt, the happiest I’ve felt, in a really long time. Certainly since my first psychedelic experience, shortly before starting this blog so just over a year ago, but if we don’t count that then maybe since I was 15. None of my more recent “experiments” with psychedelic drugs have had such an effect that’s for sure. No, I was happy because everything came together so well, it all made sense. Not rational or logical sense, but aesthetic sense. Why would that music, and that weather, and that part of that park in that city, and those people, create the feeling they did? Maybe you could explain it scientifically, perhaps there is a reason that you could potentially uncover for why people find beauty in the places they do, and why it can be quite different for different people. On the other hand maybe that question shouldn’t be asked, lest we unintentionally lose something that makes these experiences so special.

Of course there’s objective beauty too, there are things that are almost universally considered beautiful and probably for some evolutionary reasons, but I’m talking about the second kind of beauty. Maybe beauty isn’t even the right word, but either my vocabulary or the English language is lacking. The second kind of beauty that really is subjective, where one is entranced by a certain sight and another person next to him is entirely unmoved. Sure that could hypothetically be explained as well, as in one day we might have the technology, and understanding of memory and psychology, necessary to understand and even predict what aesthetic elements will have what affects on what people. However we don’t have that right now, and I’m glad for that again because I fear that excessive scrutiny (ironic I know, as “excessive scrutiny” could easily be an alternative title for this blog) can potentially dampen the effects of experiences of this sort.

A long time ago, when I was quite young, I had a friend who lived in a very big house in a really nice part of the city. It wasn’t actually very far from where I lived, a fairly short walk away from the place behind the town hall I’ve mentioned before (there are several because lots of parts of the city used to be separate towns before being incorporated into the city), but still much nicer. Anyway, on the way walking there once me and my mum took a slightly different route than normal, because as I said it was a nice area with lots of greenery and nice trees and buildings. Somewhere along the way we walked past this one enclosed crossroads area that I felt kind of similarly about as I do about this area of the park I’ve been visiting a lot recently.

I don’t know why, and I was about seven or eight at the time so I was even less equipped to explain my feelings than I was last week talking about the more recent experience of this sort. All I really knew what to say was that I liked it there, and something about it made me feel nice. I insisted we return, I made my mum take me back there going home just so I could stand there for a while. I made sure we went back there a couple more times in the following weeks, but gradually the feeling was lost and then it just became like any other normal street. I tried to figure out what it was that made it so nice, but I really couldn’t, I was just a small boy. I’d completely forgotten about this until recent events jogged my memory though, it’s been many years since I’ve even thought about this place.

It’s possible that in time my appreciation for this little part of the park I’ve found will also fade, as it did for that little spot by the crossroads. It’s a much larger area, and in this case the feeling is more complex as there’s also the music and everything else I talked about, but I believe eventually it will lose what it has. As I’ve said I’ve been there several times since, and testing things out for example time of day (I’ve been there after dark, earlier in the morning, etc) and day of the week, or weather, what music I listen to, what route I take or where I go to sit, etc. So you can view this place like a mineral deposit, and all these factors as the means of extraction, but ultimately the feeling I’m trying to “mine” will be exhausted.

So that implies that novelty plays a role in this, and I already talked about that a bit. I referred to my last post as an anniversary celebration of sorts because it has been a year since I started this blog and the first serious post I made was very similar to the one I’m reflecting on here in that they both describe a walk I took. Well I said in that old post from a year ago that seeing all these places in the city that I had seen before was a very negative experience. Even places that had nice or pleasant memories attached, just made me feel ill when I saw them. And that this very positive experience I got from seeing an area that despite being very near to where I live I couldn’t recall, was almost like an inversion of that first experience.

The thing is, at the very same time I would say that another part of what made the experience described in my last post what it was, was a feeling of familiarity. I can remember it still very clearly, that even though I didn’t remember ever seeing that place before, it felt very familiar. In the post I talk (on multiple occasions I believe, although I did not end up including everything I wrote initially in the final draft) about how I was reminded or brought to thinking about my childhood and my grandparents. I was also brought to thinking about another park, some distance away which was near to where I lived when I was first born and until I turned five years old. So it wasn’t so much that I actually was remembering this area, which would have probably not been pleasant, but that through it I was able to remember other areas and not be upset by it. In fact quite the opposite clearly.

This very familiarity I can also remember feeling back when I was visiting that little shaded crossroads area. Even though it, just like the park more recently, was somewhere I hadn’t been to before. In this older case of the crossroads I don’t really remember the effect talked about above either, where I was reminded of other places. So there’s more behind this feeling of familiarity than that. Although that certainly does play a role. The only thing I can think of, is that when I was very young all places were new to me and so finding somewhere new is what reminds me of being young. The very feeling of unfamiliarity, of seeing a place for the first time, is what I find so familiar and comforting. Of course during your youngest years most places you visit are being seen for the first time, but as you grow up and stay put that happens less and less.

So I went to this thing last Saturday, I don’t want to get into the details. I did consider writing a post all about it, but I’ve decided not to. Quick explanation for context though, I returned to a place I last visited when I was 14 years old for a big celebration I was invited to by some family friends (the same ones from south America I mentioned a few posts ago) and where the incident with the Iranian girl mentioned in my Blackpill Nights entry took place. She wasn’t there this time, not sure if I’m glad or disappointed, but for other unrelated reasons the evening was just pretty miserable for the most part. I didn’t get home until it was starting to get light out either, so I had very little sleep that night which is something I’m getting concerningly used to, and I woke up the next day feeling tired and still quite sad.

Now, usually when I’m really feeling shitty and I just need time to move forward so I care less about the current situation, my cope is to look at the art of Moebius. Jean Giraud is the artist’s real name, Moebius is a synonym that I believe he only used for his science-fiction and comic book work, but that’s where the best stuff is. I’ve talked about the artist before, I’ve used his stuff in header images (like in this very post) before, and what I like so much about his work isn’t something I can easily explain. All I can say that it has a unique beauty to it, and that the worlds and locales he creates are able to draw me in like no other similar artist can. Of course I’m able to appreciate great works of art, I’ve used le old European meme paintings when appropriate as header images as well, but this old French illustrator from the late 20th century with his simple style just appeals to me more than anyone else.

Even though his style is slightly cartoony, it feels less like a static thing I’m staring at and more like a real breathing universe being captured than any other science fiction or comic book artist’s work does. More than any other artist full stop for that matter, and it probably is in part because of his work in comics. I’m not sure if there’s even a specific technique or method that he uses to accomplish this, but when I look at his best stuff I’m there… figuratively. I’m not thinking about whatever is happening (or not happening) in my own life, I’m not even really thinking about “real life” at all. I realised something though, while looking through some of my favourite stuff of his I have saved (it’s mostly splash images taken from graphic novels he worked on and stuff like that, I don’t think he released very many standalone titled pieces), which is that I also get this feeling of familiarity I’ve just been talking about from his work.

I only really realised that it was the same feeling, because of this recent park experience. If I hadn’t had that, I would never have even thought there may be some connection between those crossroads from oh so long ago and this artist’s work. Or any other time I may have experienced this feeling, I’ve been really searching my memories trying to remember if I have but I’m not getting much. I’ll talk about the one other memory I can think of in a second though. Back to what I was talking about, you might wonder if novelty is important why haven’t I got bored of Moebius then. Well, first off I don’t look at his work very often at all. I have as much that is of good quality that I can find online saved, but it’s really only something I’ll actually just pull up to simply look at a few times a year. If you’ve ever seen his stuff posted in a /comfy/ thread on /r9k/ though, it was probably me.

More importantly all his stuff is difficult to find online. There are very few high quality prints floating around, if you go to /wg/ you’ll eventually see all of them, so most of his stuff I haven’t even seen yet, but every once in a while a new one starts circulating. If you really want to see most of his work, you’ll need to buy physical copies. That is, graphic novels he worked on or trade paperback collections, and so on. Even then a lot of his stuff still hasn’t been translated, he was French and mostly worked on French comics, but if you just care about the art maybe that doesn’t matter. There are also some albums of his stuff which collects only things like big splash pages or has certain panels with the speech bubbles removed that I’ve heard are pretty good.

I hadn’t actually bought anything of his until very recently though, in fact that same morning when I had this realisation that his work was somehow providing this same “resource” as the park had was when I finally decided to just go for it. I’ve always avoided it since finding out about him years ago, because I just don’t really buy graphic novels anymore. I used to, I still have loads from my last two years of school when I was 13 to 15 years old. Me and my friend would go to this huge shop, Forbidden Planet, every Friday after school and I bought loads of graphic novels and comic books over the course of those visits. Then when I turned 16 and we drifted apart I gradually lost interest. In fact I really should get rid of most of them, maybe they should get an entry in my Books series.

So I was sitting there, and I just decided on a whim that I should buy something he worked on. I decided on The Incal, which is a graphic novel he worked on with the film director Alejandro Jodorowsky (I’m not going to go on a whole tangent talking about this guy, look him up he’s also done some very cool stuff. I recommend the film El Topo, and the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune) and probably the most famous comic series he was involved in. I was following the very thing I said earlier in this entry, that aesthetic pursuits are an end in and of themselves. His work provides me with something that I can’t find easily, and I’m going to pursue this feeling wherever it takes me.

Now I’ve focused a lot in this post on this feeling that I’ve described as a kind of familiarity, but clearly there’s more than that. I also love Moebius’ art for other reasons, as I talked about very briefly, and during that visit to the park a couple of weeks ago that feeling was just one part of the experience. There are other things in life, places and music and artwork, that can provide those things as well. Or some combination of them, and what I mean when I use this term “aesthetic experience” is the experience of stumbling upon these things. I’ve got a whole list of potential ways one could seek out such experiences, some much grander in scope than others, but I’ve decided against simply listing them off otherwise this post will end up twice as long as it should because I’ll inevitably end up going down a long tangent trying to explain my reasoning. I do however, have a vague plan to perhaps make a few posts for some of the individual things on this list.

Now for the last thing I wanted to talk about. Which is that arguably, these experiences are not too different from certain drugs (as I did kind of talk about last time) in that these encounters do seem to lead to an altered state of consciousness. If you accept that when you drink alcohol, or take LSD, the experience can be described as an altered state of consciousness. Then you have to also accept that how I was feeling two weeks ago in that park, was an altered state of consciousness. I was experiencing and responding to the world around me in a way that I wouldn’t do during what you might call mundane circumstances. Yet the only thing that was different from say, my walk to work, were the visual and audial differences.

Whatever the case, this experience recently has really affected me and I can’t say anything certain yet, but it may entirely change the path I’m taking in life. Or, it might change nothing, both very possible outcomes. I am aware that it might seem like I’m just jabbering about nothing of any real meaning, but if you read through the last two posts and didn’t think so then I hope that you can find some similar experience out there. Thank you for reading.

An unintentional anniversary entry

Ok, now in this post I’m going to be writing about an experience I had today in some detail. Today is Sunday the 1st of September 2019, but I certainly won’t finish the post tonight as I’m going to try to get to sleep in an hour and I’m working until late tomorrow night. Nevertheless, so the post doesn’t have weird pacing or become convoluted I will continue to write all of it (apart from a possible addendum, although I might just do a follow up post, you’ll understand why shortly) as if I were writing tonight. You might wonder why I don’t just wait a couple days and start this post after having had some time to reflect, but I fear that I might wake up tomorrow and already have lost this experience to doubt. By starting tonight with it still fresh in my mind I believe I might be able to have something permanent that will allow me to bring myself back in some way to how I felt earlier.

So to start, I woke up this morning having finally had a decent night’s sleep after two four hour nights previously (my insomnia has been especially bad the last few weeks), and therefore I was a bit groggy because I had been getting acclimatised to less sleep. The sky was also much more grey and overcast than it has been in a while, so I was going about my morning routine but it was both colder and darker than what I’ve been used to. I wasn’t even entirely cognizant of it at the time I don’t think, as I said I was groggy and feeling off, but the flat (apartment) just felt different. I did my usual thing, cup of tea and a shower then breakfast, and then I took my clothes out of the washing machine which I had loaded right after waking up, and hung the stuff up. That might be another reason the flat felt different, all the doors had sheets or duvet covers hanging from them, or those things together created the effect.

I decided I would leave at around two o’clock to go to the small park right nearby to read for a couple hours as I have been doing lately, but my dad reminded me that the park would likely be shut as there was a football match at the stadium right near where I live today. They lock the park up because otherwise people would leave beer cans and food containers everywhere. Sometimes they forget though, and so I decided I would go anyway and if the park was locked I’d simply go for walk for a couple hours. In fact my thinking was that a walk would be preferable as it might help me get to sleep easier having used up more energy.

As soon as I stepped outside of course, I saw it was very busy with people. The building I live in is up on the podium but most days it’s practically deserted. There might be a few tourists, maybe kids skateboarding or people jogging, and people from the same building as me coming and going, that’s really it. I’ve been living here since the age of eight though, so I’m usually not at all surprised to see an army of football supporters swarming around me when I go outside on a match day. And I wouldn’t really say I was surprised today either, but about an hour or so before leaving I had looked out from the balcony and it had seemed a lot less busy than I was expecting, so I was unprepared you could say. When I walked out there I was just ever so slightly taken aback for a second.

I know these details may seem unnecessary by the way, but as I kind of explained already I want this post to be something I can return to in order to help relive the experience I’m about to get to writing about when it inevitably fades from memory. These little reminders of how I was feeling throughout the day will, I’m hoping, aid in that. Yes I’m putting this up on the internet for anyone to see, and hopefully whoever reads this gets something from it even if just an interesting story, but this time I am writing for myself primarily. Usually there’s some idea of a reader other than myself, albeit an abstract one, I have as my priority.

Going back in time very briefly, on Thursday I met my uncle at a restaurant to celebrate my birthday. It wasn’t my actual birthday on Thursday, but I was busy on my actual birthday so this was just the only other day he was also free. It was really nice, in fact the waiter was probably one of the friendliest waiters I’ve ever met in my entire life. He was funny, and actually stayed to chat with us a couple times, and at the end of the evening he gave us a free shot of limoncello each on the house. So, that combined with the half bottle of wine I had made me quite drunk and that’s probably what started this latest series of bad nights. I’m not sure why, and this is definitely a new thing I’ve noticed, but it seems that after I drink a significant amount of alcohol it actually causes a lot of difficulty for me when trying to sleep. You’d think it should be the other way around, and it used to be, but not anymore.

Anyway, he gave me a few presents while we were there including two CDs. He also gave me, two science fiction novels. Of course, I haven’t used a CD in years and my laptop doesn’t even have a disc drive, but I said I would listen to them. One was Surfer Rosa, the first Pixies album which is great but I’ve heard many times. The other, was Swordfishtrombones by Tom Waits. Now, I’ve heard of Tom Waits before but never listened to anything from him, so I decided that for this walk I would listen to the album. I didn’t take the CD, perhaps I’ll listen to it some day, but I have spotify so I just let it play as soon as I got out of the door with my phone and headphones.

Now as I said, it was busier and for a second that shook me. That went away quickly, but the self consciousness that I always get around crowds remained. In fact it wasn’t so bad at first, I put my headphones on and started the first track on the album and it was as I reached the big bridge I need to cross to get down to street level that I really started to become aware of all the people around me. I think I saw my shadow on the ground in front of me and found the silhouette looked funny. To explain, I was wearing these heavy grey wool East-German military trousers from the 70s that I bought pretty cheaply second hand. The thing is they were probably always quite baggy, but over time they’ve become far more so I believe. Now even with the belt pulled tightly they can look more like tracksuit bottoms or those unbelievably ugly things I’ve started to see in the last few years with the huge crotch area, joggers I think they’re called. In the silhouette it actually looked like I was wearing something like one of those things.

On top I was wearing something like what I almost always wear, a green and white casual button up shirt (in this case with a check pattern, but half of the ones I own are just one colour), and my light blue jumper. Which, obviously made for a kind of stylistic mismatch and I became painfully aware of this on the bridge and began to think that everyone was staring at me. Usually I wear fairly loose fitting wool or cotton trousers, I have a couple pairs of cords that I really like in particular, and they tend to fit much better into my overall style. Usually with the military surplus trousers I’ll just wear a shirt on it’s own tucked in, to go for a more consistent “fashy” or at least militant look. My usual style 90% of the time though, is more idk /comfy/ I suppose. In this case I felt like I looked like a complete freak, but I just tried to listen to the music and pretend there was no one there.

Speaking of the music, I wasn’t really enjoying it at first. It’s a very strange record, and of course now I think it might be one of the best I’ve ever heard but on very first impression it was quite weird and a little abrasive. I walked down the stairs from the bridge and towards the small park to see if it was locked, and it was, so I just followed the road in the direction I would usually take if I were walking up to visit my uncle and cousins. It was actually a lot more sunny and warm outside than it had been earlier that morning, so some way up the road I paused the music and took my jumper off. I also had a bottle of water with me, and I drank some of that. I stayed there for a few minutes, just across the road from a small primary school.

Eventually I put the music back on, and continued in the direction I usually go in. The plan at this point was to walk around a fairly large park I usually need to cut through to get to my uncle’s place but that I haven’t actually spent any real time in in probably 15 years. I was not sure I wanted to though, because it would just bring up loads of old memories. And as I’ve explained before in my first proper post for this blog (and one that was quite like this one), even nice or happy memories can give a me a rather unpleasant feeling in my stomach. So instead of following the usual route, at some point just a short while before getting to the park I went up a road I’d never been up before. It was quite sunny, and I needed some more water, so I decided to find somewhere to sit down.

Luckily, this road I was walking along was pretty short and it came to a T-junction after a minute with a very nice and quiet road with a low railing I could sit on, on the other side, blocking off a little grassy area. As I walked up this road before reaching the one with the railing by the way, I had found the first song I was able to kind of enjoy. I’m probably not going to really talk about the specific songs in great detail on this album at any point, for me the album as a whole provides a very special experience that any individual track couldn’t give. So I can’t tell you the name of the song I was listening to at this point, because I don’t know it, but it was early on and noticeably more groovy than the ones previous.

I didn’t really have much of a plan at this point, I was still considering going to that park actually. I opened my bag to get my bottle of water out, and I also decided that I would take my jumper which I’d been carrying and just put it in there as well. So the bag has two main sections, and I almost never used the front one but I thought it would be a good place to put my jumper this time. As soon as I opened it however, a grasshopper jumped right out and into the middle of the street. I’m not sure if it was in my bag, and if so it must have been in there for a few days, or if it had jumped from the grass behind me right as I opened the bag. That would be quite the coincidence though, and it was acting very odd just laying there on it’s side on the pavement so I’m thinking it had been in my bag and was very weak because there was no food or sunlight in there.

Luckily there was no one around really, the street was almost completely empty, you couldn’t tell that there were thousands of football fans only five minutes walk away. In fact I think I did forget, because thinking on it I don’t remember even being aware of the game for the entire afternoon until I was walking back home and back amongst the crowds again. There was one woman who was walking in my direction, but I wasn’t really paying attention to her and when she walked past me I was still staring quite intently at the grasshopper. I squirted a little bit of water at it, to try and get it to move or something, and it jumped a little but that’s it. I decided I would walk in the opposite direction from the woman who had just walked past me, going wherever she had come from.

I didn’t want to leave the grasshopper in the open though, where he might get stood on or something, and I felt a little responsible for his current weakened state as I probably had unwittingly caused it by taking him out of his natural environment. I got up, put my headphones back on, and started the record where I had left it. Using my bottle I moved him in the direction of the grass, the only way to get him to move was to nudge him at which point he would jump in the exact opposite direction. After a few attempts, he landed in the grass and I felt comfortable leaving him. I must have looked like a complete madman from a distance, and in fact as I was leaving an old brown guy (probably Arabic/ Muslim) crossed the road and stood exactly where I had been, stooped over and peering into the grass.

I crossed back over to the other side of the road, I’m not sure why thinking back, and started walking. The road reminded me a great deal of the area my grandparents (on my mother’s side) used to live in before they passed away. I haven’t been there since I was seven years old so I only have a vague feeling of what it was like, but there are some places I go to where that same feeling is evoked. This road, was one of those places. I’m surprised I’ve never seen this road before, there’s even a primary school on this road that I had no idea even existed before. I was not really paying much attention to the music at this point, but I know I still wasn’t really into it. The road went on for quite a bit longer than I expected, I’d always assumed when looking up at it while going to visit my uncle that it was not even a road but just a small car park or enclosed housing area.

I walked up for a while, and as I got further up it seemed to get a little busier. Some cars drove past me and there were people on both sides of the road. There was a guy walking right behind me for a while, but he turned down one of the side roads at some point. I also remember it getting more “wild” as I got further down. At first there were just a few trees, and then there were trees lining the road, and then it felt like there were branches coming right out in front of me and it was almost like I was walking under a jungle canopy. Then they began to thin out again after I kept going some more, until it was just like it had been on the other side. The last thing I remember seeing on this road was a hotel, on my left hand side. It was a very run down looking place, but it reminded me of the various small B&Bs and hotels I’ve stayed at around the country while on holidays with my dad when I was quite young.

I was reaching the end of the road when I saw a busy main road in front, and what looked like greenery on the other side. By a main road I mean one with no shops or things like that along the side, with a narrow pavement, and cars going fairly fast. Not one you’d want to cross other than at the actual crossing. I was half thinking about turning back at this point, I had an idea now of where I was and I wasn’t sure that was where I wanted to go. I was right in my assumption, that the greenery in front was the park near where I work, but I kept going anyway. It’s a huge park this one, and I’ve walked all around it possibly a hundred or more times, but still not seen much of it.

The main road I was on was also one I know fairly well, but I actually find it quite pleasant for some odd reason. As I explained it’s a pretty empty road with no shops or anything, just some houses (some of which are quite nice to look at) and more cheap hotels like the one I described earlier lining the one side and the park fence on the other. Nevertheless, this little stretch between the pedestrian area where I work and the area on the other end of this road, has some aesthetic appeal to me that I can’t quite explain. I decided to turn right, and walk in the direction opposite from where I work for reasons that should be clear, and follow this road. I was debating at this point whether I should try and cross over and go for a walk in the park or just follow the road indefinitely.

I know I passed a bus stop at one point, and I sat down there for a minute to think about what to do but couldn’t decide. Slightly further on I saw some railings on my right and on the other side of them a small stone courtyard about 20ft below. There were some tables with lots of toys and other odd pieces of junk, and two fat women sat behind them chatting. I realised there was some kind of yard sale, and then in front of me appeared an older woman (my guess is she was in her late 60s) trying to speak to me. I paused the record again and took my headphones off. It turned out she was also somehow involved in the yard sale below, and she asked if I wanted to go down there. I made up some excuse about how I had somewhere to go, but I think it was clear I had been wandering aimlessly because she repeated “somewhere to go” to me with a knowing smile and then laughed. It was a warm and understanding laugh though, not a bitter one. I saw the stairs leading down, and a sign for the yard sale, as I walked on and put the music back on.

Looking across the road I saw there was a small entrance into the park, and as I moved my head back to face forward I also saw there was a crossing right in front. I know this is a weird detail, but it’s memorable that I noticed the entrance first and then the crossing. I decided that this means I should go into the park, like it was a sign or something. I went to the crossing, pressed the button and waited. As I was waiting a woman came and stood to my left, I believe she had come from a side road just behind the crossing. She was walking a small light brown sausage dog, presumably her pet. She had a rather bright pink jacket on, and straight black hair, and in my opinion she looked quite Eastern European/ Slavic. That is, her facial features reminded me of people I’ve seen who are from that part of the world and I do meet quite a few of them where I work. That being said, I never spoke to her or heard if she had an accent so this is complete speculation.

The light went green, and we began to cross. The dog was running ahead as much as it could, and as she turned to enter the park it yapped quite loudly and excitedly a few times. I was able to hear it over the music, which says a lot. I was walking fairly slow, so I saw this from behind. I walked through the entrance eventually though, and the picture below this paragraph is what I saw. Well not quite, it looks a lot more flat in that image but try and imagine the hills in the far distance as slightly more elevated. There are also wide open fields on either side as you can kind of tell, so it was a lot more “full” if you understand. I was immediately struck by how nice it looked, the photo really doesn’t do it justice actually, and I stood there for second just taking it all in. I hadn’t ever been to this section of the park I realised, I’d never seen this part before even though it’s close to the end that’s near where I live.

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Now just ahead of those hills, and basically all around in any forward and leftward direction, I was surrounded by areas of the park I had seen many many times, but somehow this little patch I had never come to before. In fact you can’t see it in this photo, but in person standing at the end of this short path where it splits in three directions just over the hills in front you can spot bits of the playground poking up. I stood at this point, and deciding to go forward towards the area I recognised I pointed my finger in that direction with my thumb up like a finger gun. Before going forward I looked around and saw the woman with the dog standing quite close by (just past the tree on the right in the midground of the photo) standing there facing me, she looked at the hand gesture I made and then very quickly up at my face before turning around with what seemed to me to be an almost disappointed expression on her face and walking off in the opposite direction.

I know it sounds totally ridiculous, but in that moment it felt like she had been waiting for me. See when anyone (but especially a pretty woman) shows me some kind of recognition, or even just merely appears to have done so like perhaps in this case, I can’t help but slightly obsess over it. I imagine this is something quite common for a lot of young men, and possibly some women as well, where you’ll end up reading far too much into a simple interaction with a stranger. She wasn’t the prettiest or most attractive woman I saw that day, but because of this brief moment she was the only one that really left any impression on me. There were other people both male and female that I’ve been thinking about since seeing them this day, but only in retrospect and more as part of the overall experience I had here rather than in relation to myself.

At first I didn’t think too much of what had happened with this woman and I simply continued forward as I intended to without really giving it any thought. As I said and as you can see in the image, at the end of the short path there is a three way split and I took the one that goes forward and slightly leftward. I turned left completely very shortly after though, and basically just walked up to that pavilion structure that you can see in the top left hand corner of the photo. I was planning to sit down on one of the seats there, but a woman and her young daughter got there before me and I thought it would be weird if I sat with them. Instead I just stood in front of it, on the far side from the perspective of the photo in front of a little panel which had some information about the park.

I stood there reading that for a couple of minutes, and then I walked just slightly further to the left where I had a view over the entire main entrance area of the park. This area I have seen and walked through many times, but I’d never seen it from this angle. It was a really pretty sight, and I stood there for what felt like quite a while, but was more likely only a minute or two. See it was around this point where things began to get a little weird, particularly my perception of time. I’m partly wondering if my recollection is just wrong, because there’s a few tracks around the middle of the record (one which has some bagpipes, one which sounds like a marching band, and one which sounds “French”) which I’m sure were playing at around this point. The thing is, they start right after the song I described as “groovy” way back when I was still with the grasshopper.

Now I also realise that the whole walk between the grasshopper and where I was at this point was actually pretty short, but it felt like it had been quite long. In fact in total the entire experience of my time at this park felt like it lasted hours and hours, but in reality I listened to the album twice only and it’s about 40 minutes long. So I was actually only there for an hour or so, as I started the album the first time after leaving my flat not after arriving at the park. I think part of this feeling is that the weather changed quite a lot, so it was sunny when I arrived at the park but then became quite overcast while I was there (as it had been earlier that morning) so it gave the appearance of early evening when in fact it was still only around four when I left to return home.

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For some unknown reason, and thank god for it whatever it is, I decided after standing where I had been for a while to loop back around and instead follow the rightward path from that three way split way back when. So I did so and I was greeted with what you can see in the photo above this paragraph. Not exactly, because this particular photo I took on Thursday the 5th not Sunday like all the other photos, but it’s still the same location for the most part. There has been a slight change, but I’ll explain that later. Again of course it doesn’t quite capture the beauty of it, I’ve tried my best but no photo really can recreate what it’s like here for me. I really do think it’s one of the most visually pleasing places I’ve ever seen in all my time living in this city, but most of my photos don’t capture that at all. Still, I’m including them just to try and give some idea of what it looks like here.

I followed the path, with the original one I entered the park along on my right, and again my timeline is all messed up but there’s a track which has a wooden sounding instrument (maybe a xylophone?) that I’m pretty sure was playing as I followed this path. Now the three previous tracks which I’ve just described I loved, they were the ones where I first really started paying attention to the album. Which is why I’m sure I remember correctly where I was when they started playing, but who knows as the experience from this point forward keeps getting weirder as I said. So I look up around after a while and realise that this path look beautiful, and so I had to stop and take the first photo I took that day.

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Now I think this photo is one of the better ones I took, but (and this is the last time I’ll say it) it still doesn’t quite capture what it really looked like to me at the time. I do remember waiting for it to seem clearer, but thinking back I don’t know why I did that because part of what made this sight so beautiful to me was the people. There were married couples walking with their children and everyone just seemed happy. Honestly I’m seriously wondering if this experience I had was somehow related to the LSD I took a few weeks ago, because in retrospect it was very much like what I’ve heard low/ micro doses of acid can be like. This isn’t just something I’ve considered since though, later on during this experience I wondered the same thing.

Of course that’s impossible, drugs don’t work that way, at least not LSD. It doesn’t stay in your system dormant for weeks only to suddenly hit again, at least not as far as I’m aware. Yet that is exactly how the experience began to feel, and it really started as I walked down this path. I suddenly began to not worry about any of the usual things I worry about, or care about the things I often fret or obsess over. Instead of the feelings of sadness I nowadays get when seeing happy young couples, I was just pleased for them. They added to the beauty of this long path, their smiles and warmth were like another colour alongside the bright yellows and blues and greens. I saw people, and I saw life and I felt life. I felt alive myself, I felt like I was somehow rejuvenated by the life force of these people all around me. Happy people enjoying a beautiful Sunday afternoon, one of the last this summer perhaps.

There was a woman wearing a long red skirt and a white blouse just happily reading on one of the benches as I walked past, two married couples pushing prams with other small children running alongside, some old people just sat on one bench chatting together, and so on and so on. People just out there existing, despite everything. People in groups, people on their own, I was almost vindicated myself for being there. I didn’t feel like a weirdo as I sometimes can when just walking around the city, I often feel like everyone else is out there with a purpose, but this time I felt like everyone around me was out there simply for the sake of it just like me. And it was so lovely, I really don’t ever want to forget the feeling. In fact I want to feel like that again, I want to feel that way forever. The way I felt while there, for what felt like hours but again was only about one hour or slightly longer (again, this distorted perception of time is very much like a psychedelic effect), is how I want to feel for the rest of my life.

So I got to the end of this path and on my right was the area you can see pictured in the header image right at the top. In front of me was this big open area which the path led directly onto which you can kind of see a little bit of in the foreground of that photograph, and beyond that another path kept going further forward. Running right across this big open section was a small group of ultra orthodox jewish girls, at least I think they were but they might have been Mormons or something. There is a community of them who live around this area though, but it’s weird I’ve never seen them allow their children to just go out to the park on their own. I thought it was against their rules or something, especially the daughters. Some of them were very small, and I’d say they were all somewhere between the ages of 7 to 14. They crossed and seemed to be heading out of the park going past that café with the red garden umbrellas and pretty lights.

I continued forward and crossed to the other side of this big open area, and ahead of me was what you can see pictured below this paragraph. I began walking in this direction, and I was suddenly reminded of the woman in the pink jacket walking her dog. I began to wonder if this was the direction she had gone down, and then I started thinking back to that moment and her facial expression. I decided I didn’t want to go that way anymore, not actually because of that woman but because for some reason it didn’t have the same aesthetic quality that the area I was in had. It didn’t have that unfamiliar familiarity. I decided I quite liked it where I was, and that I should take some photos. So I took the one below, and then I looked across the path to the other side and saw a gap between two trees and some buildings behind them that I thought looked quite good together.

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Those little girls were back, instead of leaving the park it seemed they wanted to go in the direction that I had chosen to avoid. They all stopped for a while right under the gap I wanted to take the photo of though, and one of them in particular stood there staring at me while I had my phone held up. I don’t know what she was thinking, perhaps that I was taking a photo of them? I wasn’t, and eventually they did keep moving, but the one staring at me was the last to leave. It took me a while to get a good photo after that, and I know I said I wouldn’t keep saying this but even the one I did get doesn’t quite show you what I saw. In person I found the old fashioned 19th century style house and the modern looking half built towers behind were juxtaposed quite nicely. I’m clearly not very good at photography, but you’re not following this blog for my photos.

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So while all this happened the loving and contented feeling I had walking up that wide path lined with trees had only continued to intensify, and I was enjoying the music more and more as well. There’s a very slow piano song that plays pretty close towards the end of the record which I can remember started around this point in the walk, with Tom Waits himself crooning over the twinkling piano, and I was completely struck by it. This was probably the beginning of the “peak” if you want to liken this experience I had to a trip. I think this was where I decided that this might be one of the greatest albums I’ve ever heard, and it felt like I’d been listening to it for hours already even though as I said that’s impossible as the album is 41 minutes long. I took the photo used under this paragraph which is the view I had while this song played, and then the one in the header and then began to head back towards the path lined with trees I had walked up.

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So honestly from this point forward I’m not really sure what my plans were when I try to think back, maybe I was intending to come home but I don’t think so because I was so happy. Truly happy, not happy as in pleased or happy thanks to some good thing, but simply happy. Entirely unperturbed for the first time in living memory, I was just alive and truly so. I existed in that moment and that moment stretched backwards and forwards in time eternally, all the usual concerns that worry me constantly about things I’ve done or things to come were evaporated. They never even existed, I had forgotten all about them. Or maybe not entirely, because I was aware of what it was like to be that way as I am normally and that how I felt right in that moment was unique and unusual. I just found it quite amusing, how I’m usually so bothered by other people and things that can’t be changed and the millions of other silly things that my usual angst is rooted in.

I looked at my phone, as I said I felt like I’d been listening to the album for ages and I was sure it must be coming to an end. There were two tracks left, a short janky spoken word kind of thing (there are a few of those on the record) followed by a very minimalistic instrumental piano piece which felt like it lasted an hour again but is actually only a few minutes long. See, I was following that path backwards and I saw this big open field to my left. I had seen the field right after arriving in the park of course, it was on my right as I entered and the woman in the pink jacket had cut across it, but I hadn’t really paid it much attention until this point. It just really stood out to me in this moment, and so I turned off from the path and walked right out into the middle of the field and began to walk along it to get to the entrance I had came in through.

I don’t think I was quite aware of it at the time, or I was in one sense but in another I hadn’t noticed if you understand, but the weather had changed quite suddenly. It had got a lot more cloudy, the sky had gone from blue to a murky grey, but I thought it made the place look even better. In fact it added to my confusion around the time, as it looked a little like what it might look like during early evening when it begins to get dark. Of course it wasn’t, much later (or perhaps, only a little later..) when I was just about to get home the sun came out again, but while I was there at the park I really felt like it was evening. I was aware that it was actually only four-ish, but yet also felt like it was six or seven. Aesthetically (and yes, I will be using that word quite a few times in this post) it was early evening, I felt the vibe of early evening. Not just because of the weather, because of the way people were behaving and how they felt to me.

I saw a guy with a beard and a grey hoodie on the side of the field right near the fence and the road on the other side, lying on his back and snoozing between two small trees. Apart from him though the field seemed empty, and as I got to the end of the field I turned around and looked back at it and I just couldn’t imagine anywhere I’d rather be. I was in love with this field, this whole small area of the park, I had to stay a while longer. The final song on the album ended, and I decided to restart it from the beginning and listen to it through again. This time I enjoyed the earlier parts of the album far more, in fact this second experience of the album was so special I fear I might never quite enjoy it as much again.

I became quite overwhelmed, I knelt down in the grass facing outwards and took my bag off. I pulled my water bottle out and drank almost half of it. I then put it back in, zipped up the bag and threw it to the side. In front of me was a dandelion, I instinctively picked it and blew on it to let the little white heads fly. Something I did all the time as a little boy, but that was a long time ago. I threw the stem away, and pushed my right arm into the ground and lent on it. I felt tears, not an excessive amount but just a slight water around my eyes. I don’t know how long it’s been since I cried properly, or even just slightly like today in that field, but it felt lovely.

I started laughing, like an idiot probably but I didn’t care at all. There was no one around anyway I don’t think, but at the time I wouldn’t have minded even if there had been. The reason I laughed was because I heard this line, one of the lyrics to one of the early songs “and I was in bad, need of a shave” which Tom delivers in this really comical drawl. There was something about that line, coming in during this very intense emotional moment, that just seemed incredibly funny to me. I threw my head back, and I really must have looked half mad, and then I stood up and decided I had to have photo to remember this view of the field. It was starting to fill up ever so slightly by this point, there were two people throwing a ball back and forth and another guy walking towards me through the field as I had been.

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This photo may just look like a normal empty field, and I’ll admit I wouldn’t be impressed by it if I were to stumble across it online somewhere like you reading this blog have. It’s only special because through it I can somewhat return to that spot, in that specific moment, under those specific circumstances. I’ve been thinking how to describe this experience, it’s not a spiritual or mystical experience at all even though those were the first terms that came to mind, no I think I can only describe it as an aesthetic experience. Something about the various elements when put together elicited something within me that is indescribable. The music, the odd weather, the specific people I saw, the little events that happened to or around me, all of those things and more came together somehow in a perfect storm.

It would have to be me as well, I imagine someone else with their own memories and sense of what sights sounds and senses are pleasing would not have the same response to these various elements. Perhaps a similar feeling could be had, but in a very different environment. So elements isn’t the right word, perhaps qualia works better. A complex interaction of various qualia that just managed to break me out of the gloom and existential dread that I usually live with. I actually made a thread on /r9k/ about the experience right after getting home, and perhaps it does an even better job than this post will of capturing how I felt as it was written so soon after the experience, but what I said in that thread was that I think I may have been “not depressed” for a few hours. I have experienced something similar to this on occasions, but it lasted a few moments rather than a few hours and was much less intense.

I’ve mentioned that I was paying more attention to the actual lyrics this second time through the album, but I wasn’t really focusing or doing so deliberately. Rather, certain lines that I found amusing or relevant to the moment just popped out at me. They seemed unavoidable, like that line about being in bad need of a shave. It’s not just the line itself either, his delivery is perfect on every song. At times funny and cynical, and at others very high spirited/ convivial, and again at others he would be rather sombre as on the piano tracks. It didn’t seem erratic though, it all blended together to create this wonderful record that paints such an incredibly evocative picture of the environment that produced it.

This is probably stuff that has been said about it many times over already, but think of the seedy underbelly of 70s New York and LA. I know I said I wouldn’t mention the songs individually, but there is one I have to talk about. The song Frank’s Wild Years, if you can even call it a song as he doesn’t sing but really just talks over a perfectly appropriate accompanying piece of music. Every line oozes this exact aesthetic. His voice all gravelly like from chain smoking for decades, that same sense of humour (my favourite line is “they were so happy” it’s delivered with this very amusing and bitter irony) and the way he describes it all. The colour and odd details, the self cleaning oven and specific restrictions on Frank’s loan. It’s just fantastic, it’s so good. It’s more Bukowski than Bukowski ever was, at least from what little of his stuff I’ve read and listened to. Frankly I found Charles Bukowski didn’t live up to the reputation he has, but Tom Waits lived up to it for him.

I think what made this song stand out to me so much on second listen, was again the combination of it with other responses I had to my surroundings. See for a while I stood there at the edge of the field peering in, just enjoying the music and the sight in front of me and this feeling within me. I was worried that if I even moved it would all come tumbling down, and I’d be normal again. I eventually decided to walk though, the reason I had come out was to walk in order to get to sleep later after all. So I stepped forward, and made my way across the field slowly. I found myself looking to the right, over the fence and across the road was this old red brick house. A really run down looking place, I wonder if anyone even lives there. With the music though, with this song and the world it brings you in to, I saw an old building just like the one Frank lived in. I can see it being split into apartments, a grizzled middle aged barfly stumbling home on a Saturday night with a cigarette in his hand fumbling with the keys to get inside.

I should have taken a picture of the house, but thinking about it I’d have the same problem as with all the other pictures I took. I kept walking across the field, past that guy in the grey hoodie still sleeping. I walked past the guys playing catch. I just took it all in, it was so peaceful. At the very end of the field was a blue tent, and a guy sitting next to it. He looked kind of beige with a completely bald head and heavy eyebrows, my guess would be he was Turkish or perhaps Greek. Does he live in this tent? I don’t know. In fact in my picture of the field, you can kind of make out the tent at the end. At least, you can if you zoom in on it. I got to the end, and turned back again and walked very slowly back across the field to the start. The same piano track (not the instrumental one the record finishes on, the one that played as I took the photo in the header) began to play as I reached the end of the field I had entered the park at again.

I stood there at the end of the field again, and two children came in through the same entrance I had and began to play at the corner of the field around the same place the pink jacket woman had cut across. I supposed it was probably time to head back, I just didn’t want to leave though. I really was, so happy. Not a conditional kind of happiness, just happy. Behind me were two people, one was a slightly overweight woman and I think it was a man with her but I can’t recall for sure. They came from the field on the other side of the starting path, and as I began to walk across the main field so did they. I don’t think they were a couple, but I’m not sure why. I just had this feeling that they were actually relatives, that they were family. I don’t know how, but I could just sense that from them. I wonder if this is how normies are most of the time, if they can sense things that I can’t. The nature of relationships between small groups of strangers, the intentions of people. Maybe when people talk about someone seeming friendly, or creepy, they really can get that from a person. An intuitive sense, and for some reason I was able to access the same ability here.

They had a little black dog with them as well, it was very small almost as small as that brown sausage dog had been. It had long curly/ woolly fur (at least for a dog) and it was incredibly fast. It ran around quite far ahead of the people with it, it wasn’t on a lead, and then would run around in circles and loop back around to the two owners. At one point it ran ahead and tried to bite or catch a pigeon, which I started laughing at probably quite loudly. I looked to my left and saw the owners had walked ahead of me, I was walking really slowly, and they seemed to be laughing about it as well. Further up the field I saw a guy and his Asian gf lying down on a blanket or quilt thing, he rolled over and gave her a hug, before then they led there staring up at the sky. It was very sweet, although I couldn’t help but be a little amused by how much they fell into the stereotype of the nerdy looking guy with Asian gf. He was a little overweight, wearing a white graphic tee and glasses, with a bit of a beard. I think she had a grey hoodie on, and purple leggings.

The tent guy was still sitting there, and I turned around as I reached his tent to cross back and finally return home. I was aware that it was only around five o’clock, but I was also still in that weird state where I also felt it was coming up to sundown. Somehow this contradiction didn’t matter at the time, in fact it didn’t even cross my mind. You may remember earlier I briefly mentioned a woman wearing a long red skirt and white blouse who had been reading, on one of the benches along the tree lined path. Well she had stayed there reading this whole time, I noticed her both times walking up the field. In fact I unintentionally captured her in the photo of the field, maybe you can only see it if you zoom in like with the tent, but on the far left hand side sitting on one of the benches she’s there.

Now though, she had walked into the field herself and was just lying on the grass on her back, with one leg out to the side. I passed by her, she was just to the right of me as I went by. She reminded me of myself during this break from work, when I would go out to the park nearby to read. I couldn’t help but feel like a loser doing so, not that I wasn’t enjoying my book or the park, but I couldn’t shake this feeling that I wouldn’t choose to do this if I had other options. I felt guilty for feeling this way, and I didn’t want it to be true. Seeing a pretty young woman doing something similar, who I think I can definitely say has other things to do should she so choose, kind of made me think that perhaps I would still have chosen to do so after all, were my options more numerous.

The final instrumental piece had started, and so I realised that the experience must soon end. I got to the end of the field and looked back as the song played out. I began to feel quite sad immediately, and thought about staying longer, but decided I should go as I was getting hungry. The song ended, and I turned around to go out and leave through the entrance I came in by, but I decided to turn around and look one last time at the field. I had decided I would return, but I was not sure if returning again would allow me to have a similar experience. I looked out over the field, saw the red and white woman, and the sleeping hoodie guy, and the guy with his Asian gf in the distance, and then out into the field walked the woman with the pink jacket.

She seemed to notice me right away, she slowed down and tilted her head to one side as if she was checking to see if I was the same person from earlier. I wasn’t sure at first if it was her either, so I did the same thing which is why I realised that’s what she was doing. Then she smiled at me, and continued to walk towards the entrance at the same slowed down pace. I don’t know why, but even though that couldn’t have been a more obviously friendly act I was worried she might think I was some weird creep who had been waiting for her the whole time or something. We saw each other at almost the exact same spot respectively as when I had seen her last you see, although of course I wasn’t waiting for her, and had hardly thought about her. Because of this, I decided to walk through the park some more and go out through the entrance further down near to where I work and then go home as I do after a day at work instead.

So I did, I began to head in that direction and as I was doing so I looked back around and saw her leaving through the small entrance we had both come in through. I began to think that she must have been walking that dog for ages, my friend has a similar sized dog which also seems to be similarly energetic, and he walks it for about ten minutes at a time. I felt like I had been in the park for hours, as I’ve repeatedly said. I looked at my phone and realised the album was only 41 minutes long though, and the sun was also starting to come back out slowly. I was still cloudy, but a little less dark. I guess one walk for about and hour and a half is the same as several shorter walks throughout the day, but more importantly seeing the album length kind of started the process of breaking me out of this weird trance like state I had been in for that hour and a half.

So I was walking down with the other field mentioned at the start when I entered the park on my left. That is, it was on my left when I walked in, although it was also on my left as I was walking home too. It was also a very pleasant thing to see, and there were a lot more people in this one. In particular I noticed another woman reading, leant against a thin tree right on the other side near to the fence and road with a costa coffee cup by her side. And as well, a large group of guys (maybe 15 or 20 in total) a little further along all chatting and laughing together. I got to the end of the path, and into a more familiar area of the park that I’ve been through many times before. I walked out through the entrance, and I just remember thinking that this had been a really interesting day to end my work break with.

I walked out into the street and saw it was filled with crowds of people, everywhere you looked the streets were packed. The football game of course, I had completely forgotten about it. To be fair, from where I was in the park you wouldn’t have been able to tell there was a huge match that day no more than a couple of miles away. It’s amazing actually, how drastic the change was from one side of the park gate to the other, like crossing between two worlds. And so I began the last part of my walk home, navigating the crowds and slowly returning to my normal mental state as the sun came back out in full and revealed that it was actually only the beginning of late afternoon.

When I had looked at my phone to see the album length a little bit earlier on, I had decided to play Frank’s Wild Years a third time, and from there on I just let the album play out, but it ended as I was still walking home and as the mood was over I didn’t feel like playing any more of the record. I listened to a few songs from Bona Drag (a compilation album from Morrissey’s early solo career), Everyday Is Like Sunday and then the next few songs after that in the tracklist. I don’t really know why, because I haven’t listened to anything from Morrissey in probably a year or longer, but I was just reminded of that specific song and felt that it was appropriate. So that was what played as I arrived home, and then as I walked up the hall of my block of flats (apartment building) the very last remnants of whatever it was I had went away.

I got in, and I went into my room and I felt terrible. I’ve been thinking about this day ever since. I said I would write this post as if it were the same night, which was when I started this post, but I’ve finished the description now and shall try and make the addendum as quick as possible. This has easily become my longest post on this blog, and I don’t know if I’ll ever even write another one that ends up being half as long as this, but seeing as this was one of the most interesting experiences of my adult life maybe that’s appropriate. In a weird way this mirrors my first post as well, or my second but the first real post (linked right at the start of this actually), in that it’s also describing an experience I had mostly just walking around a certain part of the city. I wrote that post, and had the walk it’s based on, last September as well.

I’ve been back to the park since, I went on Thursday afternoon at the same time. I played the same record, which I deliberately avoided listening to between the two visits even though I really wanted to thinking that I might somehow ruin things, and followed the same route both getting to the park and while there at first. The first thing I noticed was that the field has been taken over for some motorsport festival that’s coming up soon, so most of the field was inaccessible due to all the equipment and things being set up. It was a grey and cloudy day, as you can see in the second photo I posted (not including the header) which was the only photo I took this second trip. You can also see more of the equipment for this festival on the edge of the image, I tried to not include it but it was impossible.

Other than that though it was still very beautiful to me, this area of the park really does stand out for whatever reason. I didn’t have the same experience, in fact I know I didn’t because I remember going to the same café and seeing a young couple in there and being quite upset by it. Not in the way Elliot Rodger would get upset, I wasn’t angry or motivated to squirt orange juice at them, but just kind of saddened by it. I think seeing young couples doing mundane things is what gets me the most, more than public displays of affection or sex scenes in films or the many other things that often people on /r9k/ say makes them sad. No, for me it’s seeing that next step in adult life that I was never able to get to. Just going to get lunch with your gf.

Seeing the way they smiled at each other, seeing them just chat together over the menu. It really ruined my mood, if I’m being honest. Whereas if I had seen them on Sunday, that wouldn’t have been my reaction, this is when I knew that despite the fact that I did feel happier here than at home I still hadn’t achieved the same state as I did on Sunday. I think what really stood out was how much the girl reminded me of one of my co-workers, the one who you may remember me mentioning started around the time I started this blog. They didn’t look alike, they looked similar-ish as they were presumably both from the same part of the world (eastern Europe) but they looked quite different nevertheless, no it was more the body language and demeanour. They also dressed quite similarly, this girl in the café had a style that instantly reminded me of my co-worker. It was odd.

I went out of the park, to stand on the street outside near the entrance to this café. I considered going in there for lunch, I’ve never been to a café or restaurant on my own before but it is a lovely looking place. I didn’t go in, but I’m thinking about going back. I’ll certainly go back to this part of the park again. I’m kind of obsessed with this experience, part of the reason I’ve let this post become so long is because I feel like once I finish writing it that’ll be my last connection to the experience gone. I’ve been thinking about it constantly, before I go to sleep every night I’ve been looking through the photos I took to help relax.

I think that this second trip goes to show that my hypothesis has some truth to it at least. That all the various little things, together with my own baggage and personal aesthetic values, somehow just came together and kind of knocked me backwards a little. I’ve since listened to the album a whole load more times, at work, walking to work, at home, and it really is fantastic. That first experience was something else though, I think maybe next time I’ll listen to a different album of his maybe that might help bring me closer to this place again. Maybe I’ll only listen to a record of his for the first time while in this part of the park. I’ve also considered taking acid while there, I still have two 100ug tabs left so I could take just one or even perhaps a half tab for a more mild experience. I just want to feel like I did that day again and I’m not sure if I ever will.

Country walk

I think it’s time for a slightly different kind of post this week, see I was two and a half thousand words into another one of my sad little rambles and I realised that the whole shtick is getting a little old. The problem with those kinds of posts as well, is that if you don’t finish them all in one sitting it’s hard to maintain the momentum. They kind of just pour out of you while you’re in an emotional state, and it’s hard to come back the next day and try and recreate that feeling. It’s also not usually very nice trying to get back into that mindset either. So, I’ve deleted that post and instead it’s going to be positive vibes around here this week. Unless there are a series of drastic changes in my life soon, there will certainly be more sadposting from me in future don’t you worry, but not today.

So, a few days ago I went for a little walk in the countryside, and it was such a lovely day. You really do realise just how miserable and unnatural city living is after only a few hours away from one. I took a few photos as well, I wish I had taken more now but I will post the few that I have throughout this entry. The header image is of course also from the same set of photos. There was a nice bridge I crossed over a small river, that I regret not getting a picture of. There were some swans that I tried to take a photo of but I couldn’t get a good one, for obvious reasons I didn’t want to get too close to them. I might post the one I did get if this post ends up going on for a while and I run out of photos. Swans can be vicious bastards if you piss them off. Once when I was little I was on a small boat going down one of the canals near-ish to where I lived at the time and a swan chased us for about half a mile. It was a motorboat so it went reasonably fast, but the thing just flew along the surface of the water right behind us.

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I also saw quite a few cows as well, in fact immediately after walking past the trees in the photo right above (it’s hard to see, but the river is just to the right and I walked right along that for most of the time out there) I came to a field and that’s where they were. They were just grazing out in the open, there didn’t even seem to be anyone around in charge of them. I’m not sure if they were actually farm cows, because the area I was visiting was a reserve it’s possible they’re just left to roam around freely and aren’t kept for milk or meat. Which is nice, I may not have mentioned this before but I’m a vegetarian (most of the time) and I was raised vegetarian completely for the first ten years of my life. I’ve always drunk a lot of milk though. Anyway, my guess is that the cows are more like an exhibit for visitors to look at.

It’s a little odd walking around in such a place actually, because you can’t help but be aware that it’s kind of artificial. The trees, and streams and animals are all completely real of course, but it’s a recreation. This area I visited was farmland not too long ago I believe, there was a sign saying something like that if memory serves. There was a hilly area which I started along at first, before circling around and back along the river for the later two thirds of my walk, which supposedly had very poor soil quality and hadn’t ever been farmed. The lower area though, that would have been divided up into fields all growing one crop each like most of the country is to this day. This change probably happened within the last 50 years, restoration efforts are from what I understand all quite recent.

Whoever owns the land now, probably the local council, has tried to recreate this idealised vision of an untouched landscape, but of course in order to accomplish that a great deal of touching was in fact required. I’m not complaining exactly, It just feels a little odd. You’re walking through this area that looks like The Shire, for which Tolkien of course took southern England as his main inspiration, but yet you know that it’s been designed that way. It’s simulated, it’s like walking through a museum exhibit in that it’s deliberately been crafted and you can tell.

They also have a few nice old fashioned houses around (like in the next pic), and sure they are real houses that have people living in them, but they’re not actually old. I could be wrong, but from what I understand they’re just as new as the rest of the local developments. They’ve been designed in the style of a country house from the middle ages, I think the Tudor period, but they aren’t actually surviving buildings from that far back at all. It’s like a simulation of England as tourists perceive it to be. Go a few miles in any direction and there would just be modern towns with modern buildings or structured farmland with modern farming equipment. There were also a couple more contemporary looking houses which I saw to be fair, but those were closer to the edge of the reserve, I have a photo of one of those as well.

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It was a beautiful walk though, the weather was good, and it was very easy to get to sleep that night. I know it’s been a while since my last upload, but the trip I’m describing was over a week ago now, I’ve just been kind of finding it hard to stay motivated as I predicted. My point in bringing this up is that this was right after I was having a lot of trouble with sleep. Nevertheless, overall this month has been quite a productive one even if the last week and a half hasn’t been. Not only will this be the month with the second most uploads so far I believe, but I also uploaded my longest individual post so far early this month, and then an even longer one a couple weeks later. Not to say that having a longer word count for the sake of it means anything, I don’t see the value in trying to pad things out unnecessarily, and I wasn’t trying to do so with either of those posts. I just feel a sense of improvement/ accomplishment in that I’m getting better at writing and exploring whatever it is I choose to write about.

Back in school I always struggled to reach the word count for essays and homework assignments, because I was always so straightforward. Partly of course that was also because I just wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible (and yet now I do something fairly similar as a hobby, funny that), but I also did honestly struggle with trying to elaborate on a point. Reading some philosophy and non-fiction in the time since has helped me understand the importance of reiterating what you say in different ways, what I don’t understand is why no one taught me this and how it just came naturally to other people. I always assumed that you should try and be as concise as can be, and I still do think that if not careful you can end up being excessive in doing this. In fact I might end up talking about that (exhausting a point, beating a dead horse, being overly repetitive, etc) in a post soon, when I finish what I’m currently reading.

Anyway, that and the difficulty I had with finding a good starting point were what handicapped me the most I think. Even though I always did well in English lessons and in my GCSEs, I think I could have done better. Anyone can write well if they put in the effort, it’s not like mathematics which requires a certain raw intelligence I don’t have. I do sometimes wonder if instead of going for the sciences when I went on to do my A-levels, I might have done better to go for a more “literary” path. Frankly I couldn’t have done any worse, but I’m not just talking about grades I think I would have actually enjoyed myself more as well. Again though it’s time to change the subject, my tone will become noticeably more melancholy the more I stay on this.

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So hopefully I’ll recreate something like what it was like for me while taking this walk with this post. I don’t remember exactly what it was I thought about as I went along that day, it has been over a week now, but naturally I must have been thinking about something. I remember that just like above though, whenever my thoughts turned negative I did make the effort to stop that train and put my mind to other things. You can’t run away from reality forever, but it’s nice to take a break every once in a while. Whenever I needed to do this, I would take a moment to simply admire the scenery without thinking about anything whatsoever, so a little like how I’m using the photos to break up the subject changes.

I always say I’ll go outside and go for walks more often, but I never do. Well I clearly do on occasion, but not anywhere near as much as I could or should. I have been going to the park most days to read this week though, as the weather did indeed get a lot sunnier as I thought might happen and there are a few people who think I went away on holiday who might be a little suspicious if I show up to meet them looking as pale as a ghost. So my main intention has been to get more sun, but now I’m thinking I might just continue to do this after I go back to work solely for reading. I thought it would be quite depressing, but I’m actually enjoying it a lot. It makes my room feel a lot less like a prison as well.

I’ve only had one day this entire holiday where I spent the entire time inside, which is not at all what I predicted. I’m still on my own, and it’s only for a couple of hours a day, but it’s been good. I have actually had more things to do with other people than I expected as well on this break actually, mostly because it was my birthday. I went out to a restaurant with my uncle one evening, and I had a lovely time. I actually ended up seeing some family friends (who I’ve very briefly mentioned once before on this blog) from south America on two different occasions. Once for my birthday and once for the birthday of one of their cousins.

Quick summary, when I was in nursery about the age of three I became friends with a girl there and our parents became quite close friends after that. So I’ve known the family and they’ve known me since I was very very young. In fact the girl who I originally became friends with, has a sister a few years younger who I’ve known of course for her entire life. The younger sister actually said something about how she sees me as almost family on one of the two evenings recently. The thing is, sometimes I’ll see them several times during a month but it can also be several months at a time where I won’t see them, which is why I wasn’t even expecting to see them during this break. I almost ended up spending the day with them a few days ago but I was too tired that day.

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I’ll be going back to work next Monday, and it’s going to be quite a busy week. Not only am I working a couple of really late shifts, but I’ll probably be more tired out than usual on my off days. Just because it’s my first week back after two weeks of very little exertion of any kind and I’ve probably got a bit lazy. I have a few ideas for posts, in fact my drafts section is bigger than it ever has been, but it might be a good week or longer until I upload again. I started writing the next Books post about half a week ago but I found it much harder to write than I thought I would and I deleted everything I had. Before doing the same thing again with another post as I explained at the start of this one. So that next Books part might be the next one if I decide to give it another go, but maybe it’ll be something entirely different. I would like to finish that series up though, it’s gone on for far too long already.

I don’t really have much else to say, if you bothered to keep reading this far then I hope you’re having a good summer. Swans pictured below as promised.

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Alternate states: Test 3

Before

So this has come up sooner than I expected, I mentioned recently that I had purchased some tabs of 1cP-LSD online and not only did they arrive earlier than expected but an opportunity to take them has also come up sooner than I anticipated it would. I also mentioned recently that I was going to be meeting with my two friends last Wednesday to try and plan out some kind of trip away last minute, as my break from work officially starts this Sunday and only lasts two weeks. Now we weren’t able to plan anything, although they did seem slightly remorseful about this failure to plan properly and keep in touch so we may try to plan something early next year instead.

In the short term however, after realising I had these tabs and that one of them had his place to himself all week as his parents are on holiday, we thought that it would be a good idea to get together tomorrow (Saturday, I know my break doesn’t officially start until the following day but I’ve actually been off work since Tuesday as I had to take a few days off for reasons I’ll explain in a second) and take a tab each. I’m a little nervous as he has a dog, a young puppy, and I don’t want to start freaking out if it runs into the room and starts yelping and trying to lick me while I’m tripping or something. The other friend who’ll be there seemed to feel similarly to me as well.

So it’s possible we’ll end up not doing it but we’ll see what happens. Either way, I’ve started writing this now so I’ll probably upload the post anyway as another failure like the first part in this series was if that happens. I’ll still have all five tabs, and there will be other opportunities. I imagine if we don’t take the tabs we’ll likely end up getting quite drunk instead and large quantities of alcohol can also lead to interesting experiences, so perhaps I’ll end up writing about that instead. We shall see, either way I expect I’ll end up staying the night and getting little sleep so I probably won’t start writing the “after” section of this post until Monday or even Tuesday.

Speaking of lack of sleep, I’ve actually been having some pretty bad insomnia all throughout this last week. Monday was when it started, the first day my dad got back from his trip away. He brought some ciders back for me from where he’d been, and I had two which isn’t much as they’re only about 4% alcohol content and the bottles aren’t too big, but they had quite an effect on me. Maybe it’s because I had very little to eat that day, boiled eggs and soldiers in the morning and we ordered pizza that night. Either way I felt very sleepy after drinking them and I went to bed a couple hours earlier than my usual time. Instead of falling off to sleep though, I just lay there getting warmer and warmer and more uncomfortable. I felt myself slowly sobering up, and the dehydration and dry mouth really started to become noticeable.

I had to work the next day, a late shift as well so I got to start late at least but I was meant to be there until nine in the evening. I looked at the clock at one point and it was now one in the morning (the usual time I go to bed), then a little while later and it was half past two, and then I checked again when my pillow had gone completely flat and my heart was starting to beat fast as I freaked out about how I’d handle the shift at work the next day and it was after four. I read some things about how to help falling asleep on my phone for about ten minutes and saw something about how you should get out of bed and do an activity then come back. So at half past four in the morning, I went and took one of my sleeping pills which I have for emergencies (I usually take them the night before a morning shift, but I don’t get those any more thankfully) and took half only as the effects last eight hours and then I went and spent the next twenty minutes having a shave.

I reasoned that it would be better to do it now and then I wouldn’t have to worry about getting up early to do it before work, if I still couldn’t sleep after that I could at least stay in bed until midday. Luckily it worked, I fell asleep shortly after returning to bed. I had forgotten to turn my alarm off though, and so at half past nine it went off and the daylight made it impossible to get back to sleep. So I figured I probably got about four hours that night, and went in to work. Now it’s been a long time since this happened but I did once stay up for over 36 hours and so I knew I could get though the day if I had to, but it was not fun. Luckily I didn’t have to deal with customers for too long, as the manager had a special job for me in the office (sorting out old papers, which took hours) and I went back to finish the last hour and a half of my shift but the girl working there who I was sharing the shift with could tell I was struggling to stay awake and she let me go home early. Which was really nice, but it didn’t help that much unfortunately as even though I was struggling to stay awake as soon as I got home and into bed I was suddenly no longer as tired.

I managed to fall asleep after a couple hours, I’d taken the other half of that pill after an hour and the complete exhaustion eventually overtook me. So I was fortunate that night, but the next day I woke up kind of groggy still, perhaps because I overcompensated and slept too much that night in the end. I probably got nine hours or more in total that time. This was Wednesday, so the day I met my friends and we made the plans we have for tomorrow, and that was fun but then that night I had the same problem. I went to bed at one in the morning, but after hours and hours of tossing and turning it was once again getting close to five am. So while some of my co-workers were getting up to start their morning shift, I was still trying to get to sleep, and I had to work again, this time until half past ten at night.

I did luckily fall asleep shortly after taking the a full sleeping pill, but then I ended up waking up before the alarm even went off for some reason at around eight. I assumed that the day would be impossible to get through, and so I called in sick and asked for the day off. My manager said it was fine, and gave me the Friday (today) off as well, which helped me to relax a bit. In fact I didn’t actually feel that tired yesterday somehow, it was the night in which I got the least sleep of all of them but I somehow felt fine all day. It certainly helped that I could just lie around at home instead of having to go in to work, and perhaps what little sleep I did get was of particularly high quality thanks to the pill I took. I don’t know, what I did know was that that night before bedtime would be like preparing to go to war and so I took precautions.

I decided that my current mattress was not good enough, there’s a big dip in the centre that’s got worse over the years and makes it hard to get comfortable, so I took a blow up air mattress that is for camping and used that instead. My dad let me use one of his pillows, as again mine have just been worn down over the years and have no substance left. My dad also went to the chemist while doing other shopping and they suggested these valerian root drops which I dropped in my chamomile tea that night. They have a nasty taste but seem to be helpful. I did 100 sit ups a few hours before bedtime, then had a cold shower a little after that. I had a banana one hour before going to bed, then turned off the laptop and read for a while and then finally got in to bed. It still took me a good hour or so, and I woke up in the middle of the night around four-ish and briefly freaked out before realising I had just woken up and already had some sleep, but I did get back to sleep a little while after that and so overall things were a success.

As for tonight I’m still a little worried, unlike yesterday I had a good night’s sleep last night so I’m not too tired yet even though it’s getting dark now. I have done 50 press ups and 50 bodyweight squats today just to use some energy up, and I’ll have a cold shower and do all the same stuff as last night later on, but I can’t say I’m not a little worried. Then again, maybe that worry is one of the things causing this. I know that after tomorrow I’ll have two weeks with no obligations to fix this, but I really don’t want to be running on half fuel tomorrow. Especially because I have heard a lot about how an LSD trip can make it difficult to sleep, so no matter what I’ll likely get very little sleep tomorrow night. Sunday will be unbearable if I have two nights in a row with only a few hours.

I just don’t understand why this has happened to me this week, once every couple months I’ll have a particularly bad night like Monday or Wednesday this week were, but this is something new. I’m really worried that I’m going to inherit my mother’s chronic insomnia, which is weird because she only seemed to develop it quite late in life. Maybe I’m wrong, but it really only seemed to start while I was in my very early teens, and she had me when she was 39 so it was her late 40s by the time she started to experience difficulty sleeping. So for most of her life it wasn’t a problem, or maybe I was just not told about it who knows.

Now even though LSD might cause sleeping trouble in the short term, the ray of hope I have is that there is some evidence to suggest that in the long term it can actually help with insomnia among other things. It’s mostly anecdotal, as far as I’m aware there haven’t been any medical studies like with the positive benefits of certain psychedelics for depression and PTSD, but you can certainly find reports of people online who say that LSD and other psychs like psylocibin helped with sleeping troubles.

Now of course I’m not actually taking LSD, and this is the last thing I wanted to talk about before ending this section. I’m actually going to be taking a chemical called 1cP-LSD. From what I understand there are several analogues to LSD that have been synthesised over the decades since it was made illegal, and 1cP-LSD is one of the most recently created. From what I understand though, what’s on the tab is a slightly different chemical but once consumed it becomes indistinguishable from LSD proper. There are a few trip reports I’ve been able to find, which seem to describe it as an incredibly similar experience although a little less long lasting (which is preferable actually), but it is a relatively new and untested thing and that is a little concerning.

I only bought it because it was the only one I could find when I went looking, on the “clearnet” anyway, as I still haven’t figured out how to buy bitcoin without using ID. I was initially looking to buy 1P-LSD, a much more well known and established alternative, but the company that manufactures and distributes it is based in Germany which recently banned the substance. Conveniently though, this new alternative just so happened to be discovered as this law came into effect. There’s actually a bit of a conspiracy theory that the company has made this new substance up and is actually just selling their old 1P-LSD off claiming it’s something new when it actually isn’t. Who knows, who really cares. I would actually prefer that to be true, I’m a little nervous about trying something with very few existing reports around and I did initially intend to just buy 1P-LSD. Either way, I don’t have anything else to say now.

After

Ok, I’ve delayed writing this because I’ve been feeling a little odd the last couple days, but I think I’m ready now. I’m sure that it was in part a drawn out “come down”, but what’s odd is that I’ve been told that the come down from pyschedelics is usually very warm and more like an afterglow than the kind of experience usually associated with coming down from a high. I don’t really understand exactly what these terms are meant to be for, obviously I’m not frequent drug user and I kind of have a bit of disgust for drug culture and psychedelic/ pot culture especially so. I’m just being honest, I don’t like the way they talk or express themselves, I don’t like the aesthetics or style associated with people like that, and a lot of them seem really dense as well.

My point in saying that is that I’m possibly using terms slightly wrong, but from my understanding the “come down” is the period in the day or so following a drug experience. It’s basically another word for a hangover, maybe a hangover is more describing the physical effect of alcohol (dehydration primarily, which is why drinking lots of water can significantly minimise hangover effects) but it is also about the altered state of mind. So the term come down might more be describing the state of mind but I think the bodily feeling is also considered. It’s a matter of emphasis, that’s all. At least that is how I have interpreted it in reading the reports of others.

So this kind of leads me into the first very noteworthy thing about the whole experience actually, which is the physical effect of the drug. It was something I was quite unprepared for, and I’m very glad that one of the friends there (the very much more normie one of course) was around to explain to me how normal what I was feeling was. Within half an hour of swallowing the tab I felt very constricted, like my chest was being crushed and it was hard to breathe almost. If I had been on my own and started experiencing this it would have terrified me, but he explained how it was pretty standard and it would pass shortly. See he didn’t actually take the drug, only me and the other friend (the one who’s place we were staying at) took a tab.

Now this other friend didn’t have anywhere near as intense an experience as me, I have no idea why but it seemed to hardly affect him at all at first. While I was burying my head in my arms, or the sofa, the two of them were just chatting normally. I had more to eat than him because I had a full meal that morning and a pizza at his, I’m quite a bit taller than him and so probably weigh more although I am quite skinny and he is quite overweight at the moment (his weight fluctuates pretty drastically, I’ve seen him go from as big as he is now to skinnier than me and back to being fat again), it’s very odd. He is quite a resilient individual, he also rarely seems to suffer from hangovers after we drink whereas a bad hangover for me can last two days. So eventually he decided he needed to walk his dog, about an hour after we took the tabs.

They were considering leaving me behind because I didn’t seem up to it apparently, but I insisted on coming along. As soon as we stepped outside I felt better, the cool late afternoon breeze immediately lessened the heavy feeling I had. See as well as the constricted feeling I had also begun to feel very heavy and slow, and I had a weird feeling that is close to nausea but I would say was something different. I didn’t feel like throwing up at all, there was no feeling like that, but it was related to that feeling you have when you do need to throw up in a way I can’t quite articulate. A sort of sickly, unpleasant sensation like how it is right before you start to feel that way, but drawn out.

So we went to take the lift downstairs and I remember as soon as we were inside it these feelings got worse again. I had to crouch down, leaning on the wall somewhat, to keep my composure. The dog did not enjoy being inside the lift at all, it was bouncing around and kept pawing at me as if I could somehow help. I did feel a certain connection to the dog because of this. I hate using that word to describe the experience, because it makes me sound exactly like the kind of people I was talking about at the start of this section of the entry, but I can’t think of a better word for it. I was able to empathise with it, dare I say to relate. I could understand how it felt, because as soon as I was inside the lift I also felt instinctively uneasy.

It’s weird, I’ve been in lifts many times and never had this problem but this time I did feel it. “I’m stuck in a small metal box with no window, no escape!”. Of course the dog would freak out, it doesn’t know what the hell is going on when it’s brought inside such a place. It’s an environment that is so far removed from the kind of place any mammal would seek out in the wild. So I guess this means that the drug somehow allowed me to be more in touch with or closer to my “natural state”. I was still conscious, I was still ultimately me with all my individual and civilised peculiarities but there was this clarity. I was a little more aware of how unusual said peculiarities were than I usually am. The thing is though, most drugs can do this to me. Even alcohol, the first time I got really seriously drunk I remember remarking that I felt like “what normal people feel like all of the time”.

It’s a bit like what I talked about in this older entry, in a sense. I talked about quite a few things, but there’s a similarity in that I’m talking about similar ideas. I suppose, if you haven’t already, by checking that post you’ll have a better understanding of the deeper point I’m trying to make in this one. Possibly anyway, although I admit that post isn’t one of my best. It’s from very soon after I started writing so there are mistakes, and I don’t agree with everything I said as I have evolved in my thinking as I’ve been writing this blog, however it’s good to have a record of how my thoughts have developed. Back to the account of the trip though.

So we got outside and were walking down the side streets as my pupils had become rather dilated and I was a little worried about people noticing. Shortly after the dog needed to poo, and so my friend pulled a plastic bag out to pick it up. I of course was a little disgusted by the sight, and we were all joking about how gross it was and being silly. I made a retching noise, in jest, but by doing so I actually felt myself doing it genuinely. I somehow willed myself to actually feel like vomiting, and I had to sit down to relax or I might have actually thrown up. Perhaps I was in a more malleable state, I’m not sure, it was very odd. So I sat down on the curb, and looked down at the ground.

This was when I had my first odd visual experience of the evening. It was a very mild one, much like what I experienced on 2-CB, really just a slight distortion of what was already there in front of me. See I was intending to just sit down for a second to relax, and then I was going to catch up with my friends, but instead one of them came running back from some distance away and said I’d been there for ages. What happened was that I had just been admiring the pattern on the tarmac and completely lost track of time, I can’t really explain why because it wasn’t really very different from how it usually looks. I was just drawn in by the complexity of the swirls and little stones, there was also a pinkish glow coming from it and I imagine that was because of the drugs.

So I was completely and totally contented to just sit there staring forever and I kind of forgot about anything else entirely. Then as I said my friend came and brought me out of that state. I was a bit shaken at first, and when he asked me if I was doing ok I just mumbled something about how I was doing fine and had just been enjoying the patterns. He seemed to find my response very amusing, but also seemed a little concerned and he said we should probably get back inside soon. I’d had a few seconds to get my bearings now though, so I explained that I didn’t mean I was just seeing imaginary patterns I meant the patterns that were already there. So we caught back up with the friend walking the dog and walked for a few more minutes before going back to his flat.

We got back inside, and the friend who was sitting (trip sitting that is, as in he was the one not taking the drug) decided that maybe we should put some music on. We had started watching The Two Towers before we left, but we had hardly been paying attention. Not that it matters, I’ve seen all three of the Peter Jackson LoTR films so many times I basically know every line that’s going to be said before a character says it. At this point any unpleasant bodily feeling had left, and I sank into the sofa with the fan right next to me feeling incredibly comfortable. So one of them opened up spotify on his xbox, they were signed into my spotify account already from earlier that day, and someone handed the controller to me. For some reason, in recent years when the three of us hang out I’m put in charge of the soundtrack.

I was flicking through the albums and being really indecisive, to be fair I was very easily distracted in this state and finding it hard to focus on more than one thing at once so every turn of the conversation took me away from deciding what music to put on, but eventually I decided to play something by The Cure. They are my favourite band after all, and I haven’t listened to anything from them for a while so I thought that in this state something familiar would be nice and so I decided to go with Wish. I thought that their earlier stuff would not fit the mood whatsoever, I wanted something more cheerful, and the cover of this one really stood out to me. I’ve never really paid attention to it before, but for some reason the art just really stood out to me this time.

It’s a really cool album cover actually, and The Cure have a lot of fantastic album covers but after this I might have to say this one is my favourite. That’s partly because I had what was probably the most crazy hallucinatory experience of the evening while staring at it though, so there’s a memory attached to it now. I’ve also really changed my mind about this album since I last talked about it, I think maybe I overlooked it which is easy to do as it’s overshadowed by Disintegration which came right before it but I actually think it has a real charm. It’s probably the best of the “cheery” Cure albums to be honest, and sure it still has a somewhat melancholic undertone this is The Cure we’re talking about but it did a great job of bringing me out of the dip I was in after the somewhat unpleasant come up experience.

So, we were listening to that for a while and I was somewhat zoned out for a while, but the dog was really energetic because the short walk had woken him up and he was running around the flat and jumping on the sofa barking and panting. Now while that would usually bother me as I’m not great with animals and I’ve always been a little uncomfortable around dogs I actually wasn’t bothered by it at all. Despite having very little energy all of a sudden after returning from the walk, I kind of just wanted to sit on the sofa and let the fan cool me, I ended up playing with the dog quite a bit. I played tug of war with it, it bit onto this rope and we’d both pull against one another, and then after that I sat back down and it came and sat down right next to me and leaned against me.

Honestly this was the most comfortable I’ve ever felt around a dog, I was completely at ease even though it was right next to me. I put my arm around it and rested my head on it’s side and I was so comforted that I remember thinking to myself that the thing I was most concerned might lead to a frightening or negative experience was the thing that helped me the most. There was something about how innocent and full of energy and life it was that was weirdly very reassuring for me. It’s hard to explain how I felt, but it was something I hadn’t experienced before.

It got bored of just sitting there after a short while though, and the friend who hadn’t taken anything decided to go and play with it some more to help get him to settle and relax. So at this point I turned back to the television screen to look at the album art some more and I noticed it slowly start to move. Take a brief look at it, as I said it’s the image in the header. Now to me it looks a little like sperm and egg cells, the black stringy ink figures might be people or creatures of some kind (they also mostly form into eye shapes, but notice in the top right there’s also some kind of bird or bug) but when taken as a whole the image does resemble a microscopic image of sperm and egg cells meeting. Well they started moving, just lightly swaying from side to side in time with the music at first.

Then the blue circle, which could be representative of an egg cell (life, I suppose) but also has a blue and white pattern inside like the sky on a summer’s day, appeared to be closer towards me than the rest of the album. It’s hard to explain the effect, but the closest example I can think of that might give you a good impression is like when you see a 3D film at the cinema. How some things will pop out from the screen, and seem closer to you than others. It was like that, but only slight. The egg (which I’ll call it from now on) seemed to be floating out in front of the rest of the image, but only ever so slightly. It wasn’t right in my face by any means.

I looked back at the black figures, and at this point they weren’t simply swaying they were dancing. There’s no other way to put it, they were moving completely in time with the music. I can so vividly remember it, the song Doing The Unstuck was playing and they were so crisp and clear when they moved they looked like real living beings. I was shocked, completely taken aback. I remember putting my hand over my mouth unthinkingly, thunderstruck almost and unsure how to respond. I turned to my friend after watching them for a moment, the one who had taken a tab with me, “you see this too?”. He said he couldn’t, even after I explained what exactly I was seeing. I had thought perhaps it might be an effect of the app, bringing album art to life somehow, but in retrospect that couldn’t have been true.

I turned back, and now instead of just a static blue and white inside the egg I could actually see a sky inside of it. Like looking through a portal, or a window in a brick wall, I could see clouds gliding past from one side and disappearing as they reached the other. It was amazing, like there was another world I could climb through to on the other side of the egg. And yes, all this time the boys all around it continued to dance and shimmy. The music slowed down, I think the song Trust was playing, and so they were moving without as much gusto as at first but they were still at it. Then from the bottom of the album cover I noticed that there was smoke rising, as if an invisible bonfire was there just beneath it.

I was of course quite enthralled by this scene playing out in front of me, and so I spent quite some time just staring at it. At least, I think I did but it was really hard to keep track of time at this point. In some cases things seemed to move faster than they actually did and in others things lasted longer. See the “peak” of the trip which started with me putting Wish on seemed to last around half an hour but in hindsight it was actually closer to two hours. On the other hand the entire experience went by really fast, a whole ten hours that seemed to last half that time. Shortly after this my friend was quite annoyed that he wasn’t experiencing any effects when I clearly was, so I offered him the third tab which I had intended for the other friend to take initially. Instead, they cut in in half diagonally and took one piece each.

Which means the one friend who had taken the tab initially with me was now on 150ug, I was on 100ug, and the other friend was now on a minor dose of 50ug. The friend who took just the half tab didn’t seem to experience much, but after about an hour the friend who took 150ug in total started laughing pretty uncontrollably. It was a laughing fit really, he didn’t stop for more than a minute at most over a period of about two hours, even when he went to go and take a piss I could hear his laughter loudly through the walls. He didn’t however, experience any hallucinations apparently, which was interesting.

There were some more minor hallucinations I experienced, but none that quite stuck with me like that first one. One was when I was looking at the cover for a different album we played a few songs from before getting bored, Virtue by The Voidz, the grid/ cube thing in the background (the whole thing is up on youtube if you’re interested) was rotating in a way that didn’t make any sense and small coloured beads/ or lights were moving along the white lines of said grid like electrical signals or something. The colourful V shaped graph line thing in the foreground was also seemingly coming out of the screen like the egg had been as well.

Later on I was just staring at the ceiling and I noticed that it felt like a reptile’s belly, like we were staring at the underside of some giant lizard. It was like it was breathing and moving, it’s very hard to put into words but think of how you can just tell when you look at an animal that it’s alive by how it throbs and pulsates. The ceiling was like that, like a living being. I say reptilian because the wallpaper pattern my friend has looked like the scales of a crocodile, in fact it even had a slightly greenish hue but that might have been coming from the television. Much later after I thought the visual aspect of the trip was completely over I looked back up at the ceiling and noticed a more traditional LSD/ trippy pattern all around the lampshade. Colourful geometric shapes and patterns spinning around it, although they were very faint and I had to really concentrate to see them.

So eventually the peak of the trip ended, and for the rest of the night (which was quite some time) I would describe my experience as a pretty generic “high”. A little similar to after smoking weed or having a few beers, but most similar of all to my experience with the morning glory seeds a few weeks ago. Which makes a certain sense I suppose, they are both psychedelics and therefore the most similar. I’ve also heard it said that at lower doses most drugs seem pretty similar, and it’s only really at the higher doses that the unique aspects of a drug really shine. Which leads me into what I want to talk about to finish this post.

I’m not sure if I should have taken this drug this way, remember that I’m not really someone who engages in recreational drug use and I really started looking into these drugs because of all the stories about how they can be mentally beneficial and even have a healing effect. I’m not really looking for a good time, and in fact when speaking to the friend who only took the half tab about this disappointed feeling late that night he said that the more introspective experience really requires that you take the drug alone. He also advised that I don’t do such a thing though, and I don’t plan to in the short term as I want to let any tolerance I’ve built up (and psychedelic tolerance builds up very quickly, it’s even possible my experience with the morning glory seeds lessened the strength of this trip) go back down, but I think I have to do it alone next time.

So now I have two tabs left, which is 200ug in total. When I do eventually have a day alone, and both the day off work and the day following off as well, do I take both tabs or just one? I’ll be honest, if the body load I experienced at the beginning will be twice as intense on 200ug I’m a bit scared to do it. I won’t have my friend around to reassure me that it’s normal and part of the come up experience this time as well. I just feel like if I don’t take a higher dose, and 200ug isn’t an insane amount by any means, I’ll never get anything even like what I’m looking for from these drugs. The experience described in this post, while certainly very interesting and different for me, was not particularly helpful in any long term way.