Can’t be bothered to think of a title this time

Ok, I’ve had a little break now but I feel like I don’t want the gap between posts to be too long right now. It’s also quite therapeutic, and yesterday was another weird day although nothing like early last week so I can talk about that. Yesterday was the first day since starting this thing I haven’t posted or at least been writing something that I could post later on.

I had an early shift, which means waking at 5 in the morning. It’s not that difficult, but I’ve had mild insomnia since I was a little kid which comes in waves so I get several days or weeks in a row where I really struggle to sleep and then weeks or months where it’s fine. It’s easy to manage, but it will just come out of nowhere and if that’s the night before an early rise it can really fuck your day up. I can probably count the times it’s really fucked me on two hands though, due to being a NEET for a while and also just generally a useless cunt who never has plans I can usually just sleep in later, so again it isn’t the worst thing in the world. Anyway, after it happening to me on my second morning shift just after starting this job I found some sleeping pills to prevent this happening again. As always, recommended by an anon on r9k. They help, but you wake up in the morning feeling pretty groggy and they can also cause some pretty intense dreams although I’ve always had vivid dreams anyway. So I thought because this last week I’ve been sleeping better than I have in a long time, I don’t know what it is but since early last week I’ve just been falling asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow, I’ll skip the pill this time. Maybe writing my thoughts down clears my mind so I’m not thinking about things when I try to fall asleep. I didn’t fall asleep immediately, it took me a while so I probably got about six hours of sleep in the end roughly. Not ideal but I can work with it. I went in and did the work, and nothing of note really happened until about 15 minutes before I usually finish.

The shift was meh, nothing happened really. I got there and put on Klu Klux Glam, a collab album by Ariel Pink and R. Stevie Moore which I start every morning shift with. Not sure how that habit started, it’s one of the only “rituals” I really have other than my general morning routine on days I’m not working early or at all. The customers came, some were friendly some were cunts and most were just trying to get their shit and go. There was one 30 year old boomer type who said “at least this isn’t more bloody rap” about my music, which made me chuckle. Then just before it was time to go my manager arrived, along with one of the new workers. There’s two new people, one to replace someone who left a few weeks ago and the replacement for the girl who left last week. Speaking of her, I’m quite shocked about how quickly I’ve gotten over that whole situation given how I felt last week. I was seriously messed up for a couple days there, and every other time I’ve been in a similar situation it’s been rough for weeks and still might pop back into my thoughts months later. It could be that writing has helped me, in getting my thoughts out and having them heard like in a therapy session. It could be the distraction of writing and feeling of a new project or purpose (admittedly very small scale, but from literally nothing it’s still an improvement) that’s been helping. Maybe it’s getting that text from the other girl, I mentioned in my “first real post” that this powerful feeling of exhaustion came over me after the initial surprise and then internal freak out, but I didn’t elaborate on that at all. I think maybe I had what people call a moment of clarity. The whole thing was so out of left field, I was miserable and stuck inside pining for this girl who won’t even remember who I am soon I imagine and then this other thing I’d been upset about and thought was tied up in a neat little bow and left in the past was suddenly right back on my mind. It first completely took my mind off of oneitis girl being gone, after two days of trying and only making myself feel worse. Secondly it reminded me that I had been in almost the exact same situation only a few months earlier. When I woke up the next day, I saw still reeling from the previous couple days but it was different. I haven’t gone back to that video of the youtube cover, or checked any of her social media or even really thought about her once since the blogpost about that whole situation was finished.

Anyway my manager showed up yesterday with one of the new people. I’ll explain the situation at work to help understand things. There’s two different branches in the area of the city I live in both run by one manager. One is quite a bit smaller and gets a lot less customers, also the shifts are shorter. So when you do your training for the job you’re at the big place, then after you start properly you mostly work at the small shop or do weekends at the bigger place. At least that’s how it was for me, kinda, I’m gonna go deep on this shit be warned. When I had my first real shift, I had to go to the small shop and the person who had been doing the morning there was asked to quickly explain the slight differences between it and the main one. It was phone message girl who was there that day actually, if it was even her who sent that message which now I’m not even sure about. I know last time I said my main theory was it was an accidental message but now after realising it was the same number from before with the same local area code despite her leaving the country it might just be a completely different person. I’m very happy for this to be the case, it means things actually are still wrapped up neatly and the last exchange from when she left is where things were left after all. Or she never changed to a new number, I don’t fucking know. So she had to explain the slightly different till and a few other small things like that. I was expecting that I would be asked to do the same, and when I saw my manager show up with the new girl early I was surprised when instead I was just told I could go home early. I know I should be happy about getting to leave early but I’d be lying if I said this didn’t bother me. See this isn’t the first thing like it that’s happened at work, in fact it’s one more in a long list of things that have been really bugging me for a while now.

I’m going to try and hit everything, might forget some smaller things though. So the first thing that made this an issue I paid attention to was shortly after the last time I ever did a weeknight at the main shop, I didn’t stock up perfectly and I also spent like half an hour longer than normal closing the place. I haven’t been there on a week day since, except one time where I was asked really last minute because the person there left mid shift and I was around. Also after that point I stopped getting weekends there for months. I’ve also never had a weekday morning there once, other than when I was training and with someone else. The busiest the place ever gets is the mornings, or certain special occasions when the area is way more busy than normal. Even before that point I wasn’t there week nights very often, I only ever had a week I was there multiple evenings one time. So this bothered me a tiny bit, but I prefer the smaller place anyway so I didn’t really think about it much. I did get to thinking about some things though when the subject did pop into my head. I know I look young for my age, I’m 21 now but I still get people thinking I’m way younger. I had a customer, this old lady, say I looked about 15 not too long ago. If I ever try to buy alcohol I need ID, and even the people who know I’m a legal adult often assume I just turned 18. When I mentioned it was my birthday to oneitis girl she assumed I was about to turn 19. I think you can tell where I’m going with this, I’m fairly certain this leads people to think I’m less competent than I am. That fact combined with my criminally vulgar shyness anyway. I’m not saying I’m especially competent, but I think I could manage whatever the rest of my co-workers can. Anyway, after message girl (I guess that’s what I’m calling her now..) left and she was replaced the replacement was working weekday mornings at the main shop her first or maybe second week. I think she’s done very similar jobs before so had experience, but still after this I started feeling really insecure. The same thing is happening again with one of the new people, the guy who I haven’t met yet. Lastly, my manager seemed kind of annoyed at me too when she was there yesterday. More abrasive and in a rush than usual, usually she’s really friendly. I thought that maybe it was because she had to explain things to the new girl herself because I couldn’t do it (even though I could) but thinking about it now more clearly it’s probably just been stressful having to find new people and do interviews and all that crap. I have a tendency to make things that have nothing to do with me all about myself.

I’m not sure how to feel, I have enough reason to be insecure at this point but not to say for certain that the reason I’m being kept at the smaller shop is because I can’t handle more responsibility. After all, I have mentioned to some of my co-workers that I prefer the smaller place so maybe my manager is just trying to be nice, plus everyone else seems to feel the opposite so it does work out fairly well this way. There’s good reason to believe this too, because a similar thing happens with the evenings and mornings. That is, I prefer the evening shifts because I can wake up late and everyone else prefers the morning shifts because they’re normies who have crap to do during the day. I know everyone at the job knows this, and I just happen to be given mostly evenings. I work less than everyone else too, I only do part time so an average of three or four days a week whereas everyone else does five normally. Writing it out like this really does make me realise just how petty I’m being, how I’m worrying about nothing. Even if they do all think I’m a stupid child who can’t do anything why should I care, it’s literally making my life easier to be thought of in such a way. Anyway that’s what was bothering me all day yesterday, I feel like this post does a bad job of expressing how I felt but a good job of explaining what I was feeling.

I felt small and useless, I know it’s silly but I get into this negative spiral over the tiniest things. To try and relax and clear my head I thought I’d run a hot bath before going to sleep. I can’t even not fuck that up though because the bath ended up practically scalding hot. I wanted to wait for it to cool down for a few minutes so I thought I’d choose a new album to listen to while I had the bath, and I’ve been slowly going through /mu/core stuff for a while now so I thought Loveless would be a good pick. I know a lot of people think of /mu/core as pleb tier but I’ve said before I’m new to this as a real hobby and I have to start somewhere. It’s taking me a while too because I’m mostly using the chart as a jumping off point to find other things I like. I haven’t yet listened to the main 15 at the top even. I like to mention what I’m listening to, if I am listening to anything that is, at certain points in these blogposts because it’s kind of like giving it a soundtrack. I put Loveless on and get into the ridiculously hot bath that hasn’t cooled down a bit. I haven’t listened to much shoegaze but a few times when I have it’s given me this feeling like something pressing me down. It’s like being on an aeroplane or underground and that feeling of pressure you get. This was no exception, and combined with the heat I had to stand up after about ten minutes because I was going to faint. I stood against the wall, and I was hardly paying attention to the music it was like this whirring in the background. Then eventually I slid back into the water and it had cooled down some, I stayed there for a while just staring up at the ceiling until the record finished. I’m not retelling any of this for a reason, it’s just the only noteworthy thing that happened. It was a strange experience, I enjoyed the album a lot more on my second listen today sitting in my main room with the window open.

This post is a fucking mess, I did a bad job getting across the feeling I wanted to. I feel like that one about the nightwalk and surrounding events really conveyed the place I was in at the time well but I can’t do that tonight. That was also an unusual few days, I suppose I could try and make life more interesting so this online diary thing is worth reading. I’m not sure how I’d do that though, I’m all alone out here it’s difficult to even force myself out of the door for the necessities. Either way hopefully next time I upload it’ll be something I can be proud of like with the other entries, because I really am happy with those.

Maybe it’s ok to just let this keep happening

Ok so before anything I just have to say that I’m obviously not an expert, I have no academic qualifications because I’m a dropout piece of shit. What I do have is way too much free time (if I’m not working I’m at home almost guaranteed) and an interest in this kind of thing. It’s hard to find the best place to start when it comes to this subject, I’ve thought about it so much for years now and I keep getting thrown off every time I think I’m getting somewhere writing this up. I’m just going too have to accept that I won’t cover everything I have to say in this post. It’s like when people say “I could write a book on X subject”, I keep getting sidetracked by other aspects of the issue. Basically, my idea is that mass shootings are a form of performance art and I’ll try to explain how and why I got to this perspective. I’m not going to talk about the gun debate, the mental health of these shooters, the very particular time and place of this modern phenomenon (the US in the last 30 years or so), how overblown the whole thing actually is and the disproportionate media coverage it gets when compared to literally any other fucking violent crime except maybe sandmonkeys blowing shit up, etc. outside of when it directly relates to what I’m trying to talk about.

So quickly some background information, there are two definitions of mass shooting and it’s important to be aware of each. Not just for helping to understand what I’m saying either, but also because all the major media institutions are aware of the difference and abuse that knowledge. There’s the official/ legal definition which I’ve posted a screenshot of above, and there’s what I suppose you can call the cultural definition. The cultural definition is much more limited, it’s really a kind of story that follows a similar pattern and has the same theme every time. For each beat there’s at least one exception but this is a general rule. The shooter is male, which is why in the only instance I can recall of a mass shooting orchestrated by a woman everyone was pointing it out constantly. I’m pretty sure she didn’t actually kill anyone though and she wounded only three people so that’s another example of her not fitting the official definition despite fitting reasonably well into the cultural one. Truly showing how women can do anything men can there. Second, the shooter is a loser or social outcast and probably a virgin or at least kind of unsuccessful with girls. Again, you can find counter examples but the fact alone that this isn’t a shocking statement is enough to prove my point about the cultural definition. The school shooter as a loser/ nerd is something firmly in the public zeitgeist. Third, the shooter is taking revenge. The story of the shooting is ultimately a revenge fantasy. The shooter is going after people who bullied him, or who shunned him or stood by and did nothing to help him in his time of need. Which is why the terms “school shooting” and “mass shooting” are so closely linked. All these kind of resentments centre around school, a place where the social hierarchy is much more overt than anywhere else in life other than maybe the military. You have Chads/Jocks/Alphas and Nerds/Losers/etc. and everything in between. Of course on closer inspection usually it isn’t actually that cut and dried but then if you look at a rainbow close enough the colours blur together you’re not gonna tell me green and red don’t exist. What I’m saying is that your average normalfag has this very specific idea in their head when you mention the term mass shooting. They think of the story as mentioned above and also usually the shooter is white or east asian in this mental image and there’s probably more but you get what I’m saying now I’m sure. The mass shooting has a second definition that we kind of all agree on but isn’t really written down or laid out anywhere in whole (other than above kinda…) and you can see it made reference to all across the western/ americanised world. People jokingly talking about “that white kid everyone thought was gonna shoot up the school” or even nerdy/ loser kids themselves daydreaming about shooting their classmates. The killer is a villain, an anti-hero or a protagonist depending on who you ask, but they all agree on the narrative structure.

Most actual mass shootings are gang related events, nig on nog crime which gets hushed up until the statistics are useful to create a false perception in the minds of the public. Because when someone says mass shooting you think of the two or three big news stories of the last few years, and now you’re being told that that is happening way more than once or twice a year. The second unofficial definition is something that has been deliberately placed into the public consciousness, or more accurately the seeds have been placed so it appears like people came to this shared view naturally. Really think about it, every time one of these specific shootings happens that fits the standard setup it’s a huge news story. Nasim, funny how we keep coming back to her, didn’t even kill anyone. Elliot killed six people, Chris Harper-Mercer (some of you guys are alright) killed 8. There was a shooting a few days ago in California where six people died, yes it got news coverage but it’s not still going now. These numbers are not that unusual in the grand scheme of things. Just go back and look at the aftermath of the Elliot Rodger shooting where the same amount of people died. They were interviewing people related to the story including his scumbag dad weeks after the thing happened. You can say it’s because we’re desensitised to these shootings but think about it. Before Elliot you had Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech and a bunch more very deadly shootings but they weren’t enough? I’m having a really hard time staying on focus here, fuck. I made a mistake thinking I was up to this I really did. I’ve written so much and deleted almost everything to restart twice now. I’m not doing that a third time so everything from here on is staying. It’s fucking impossible to do this the way my mind works, because I get completely distracted and then get convinced that this tangent I’m on is crucial to my main point. No more preliminary bullshit it’s just bogging me down. I want to talk about my ideas, but I’m just not able to lay them out for people the usual way. Rambling aimlessly the way I did in the last posts and being a miserable git is easier and more enjoyable and actually quite cathartic, plus the few of you who have been here since the beginning seem to like it so far because you’ve come back for more. This is new ground, and I feel like one of the dorks who writes articles for Return of Kings when I read back this and my previous attempts to make this post.

Here’s the point, and if it has a ton of holes fine. I’m not writing a paper for an academic journal here I’m just trying to share the stupid shit that goes through someone’s head when they’re cooped up inside for days on end. School shootings are a performance, they follow a pattern just like a Punch and Judy show. Or at least those that do are highlighted, the more on script they are the more intensely so, while those that do not are disregarded. Elliot didn’t ever harm any of the people who actually bullied him or shunned him, he killed a bunch of random normalshits who were of a similar social standing to them. They were a representation of those people who he mentioned (by name in many cases) he was actually resentful towards, they were props in his big show. Cho talked about how he was doing what he did for “the weak and defenceless”, he wanted to make a point with what he was doing it wasn’t about getting revenge on his classmates. Adam Lanza went back to his elementary school for his shooting at the age of 20, he wasn’t avenging himself upon people he knew he was killing the school as a representation of the suffering he and millions of boys like him went through in schools across the western world. Look at the fucking most famous of all these shootings, Columbine. Eric and Dylan were in full costume, that black “trenchcoat”, edgy printed t-shirt, black boots ensemble is something that everyone is familiar with today two decades later. They secured themselves a legacy, something all performers long for. Bones put it perfectly in a song about the subject, “young dead suicidal superstar icons”. It’s well known that the fame is a huge motivator, and how not showing the faces or names of the killers is one of the best methods of preventing copy cat crimes but yet every time the exact opposite is what happens. I’m struggling to find it now but there was a paper and interview by this criminologist talking about it that was circulating in pol9k circles not too long ago. You can look for that if you’re interested, or just assume I’m making it up whatever suits you. These shootings are a spectacle, there are various different interpretations of what it all means just like with any good piece of art. They give losers all over the place something to fantasise about as well, they serve as a form of escapism in a sense just like many videogames, movies, books, shows, etc. When I was in school with that friend I mentioned in the last entry we would regularly joke about it. What groups of other kids we’d target, how we’d do it, shit like that. This is when I was at my most mentally healthy… Yes I said I was actually doing reasonably well and was hopeful for the future but we were still the weird kids. I had someone there with me though which also made it way easier, and I was young enough that the whole “they laugh at you now but they’ll be working for you one day” meme and it’s variants were something I thought had some truth. They also give the people who do bully and ostracise these kids validation. You can hear it when that bulldyke 56% face whore from the Florida gun grabbers squad talks about how she and the other normies actively ostracised him because “it was no surprise to hear that he was the shooter”. I suppose this kind of goes against my earlier point, because in the case of the Florida shooting Nick Cruz did personally know the people he was trying to kill. That clip isn’t hard to find if you haven’t seen it btw, the kind of thing that really activates your almonds.

I have to say, there is a kind of beauty to these events or performance pieces as I now tend to see them. Like I’ve said a lot of the victims are totally random. Yes a certain demographic is targeted but that really is the only trend. Some shooters go across the country, others target schools they once went to but students in a completely different age group, the message is that it could happen to anyone. It could happen to you. It fits perfectly within the contemporary view of any hierarchy, that your place in it is random. These kids, the ones who shoot and the many many more who feel they can relate to those who shoot feel like their place which they’re of course unhappy about is random and unfair. What are the chances I ended up at the loser table? Whenever the normalfag hears about these shootings they can’t understand, how could you go and kill a bunch of innocent people? That’s the point, sometimes the best way to express yourself is to just fucking do it. Now people are dead, people like you, you get to experience that feeling of unfairness. The shooter is the performer, the victims are his props, and the normalfags who get sp00ked every time one of these attacks happens are the intended audience. If this were a youtube video essay I’d play Kids With Guns by Gorillaz as my patreon supporters’ names scrolled by now. There’s more I could probably say, but I don’t know what I’m doing and I think this is good enough for me. Not sure what I’m going to talk about after this. There’s two new people at work I haven’t met yet, sometimes interactions with customers can put me on a weird train of thought, who knows. Next time I’m bored with nothing but hours of scrolling through the catalog on r9k to look forward to, somewhere I’ve been an ungodly amount of times the last few years, I’ll write instead.

I coulda been somebody!

Well shit, I’m not sure what to write about. It’s not like I don’t have ideas, I’m overwhelmed by them but I have no clue where to start or how to elaborate on any one of them enough that it’ll make a worthwhile read so I’m just gonna put something down or I’ll work myself up into a frenzy and be unable to get to sleep tonight. Which can’t happen because it’s back to work in the morning. I have to say though, I actually quite like this feeling. You see, it reminds me of when I was still in school. Homework or any other kind of written assignment would always cause me to go blank. I’d get so worked up thinking about all the different routes I can go I would end up sitting there staring at the page for hours and not writing a word. Then I’d feel shitty and go play vidya or watch something and say I’d start the next day. It’s a pretty common experience this isn’t anything insightful, I just like having that feeling again. I have an assignment due in and now I’m even more free in my potential options than ever before.

That age was also the last time I was truly happy, not to say I haven’t experienced happiness since then of course but that was the last time I was truly happy and optimistic as a general rule. Nowadays to be happy is something I actually appreciate, at that age it was something I could take for granted. I had finally managed to get a small group of friends at school and one other boy in particular quickly became a very close friend. We were together so often the rest of our friends and people we associated with were constantly making gay jokes, a teacher of ours even made a similar quip although much less crudely. That teacher while I’m on the subject was hugely important to me, he was an English teacher and was one of the few I genuinely always wanted to impress with my work. He also said something to me once that left a huge impression, something that’s been back on my mind the last few days. In response to an assignment we had, a kind of mock review of a television show of our choice, he said he laughed out loud multiple times while marking it. He also said he could picture it in a genuine pop journalism publication, or something like that but I might be looking back with rose tinted glasses because this was a huge moment for me. I’m not sure I trust my memory completely in this case, but still it was certainly a very well received piece of work and one I never quite lived up to again. Naturally that one comment was enough to make someone as insecure as me feel indebted to him right until the last day of school. The reason it’s been back on my mind though, is because writing again in a longer form than just the occasional effortpost is reminding me how fun this is. I used to write for fun and that particular assignment I remember especially fondly. I remember laughing at my own attempts at humour the entire time I was writing the thing up. It was just a silly school assignment in the grand scheme of things though, only impressive to him because I was about 14. If someone my age were to write that it’d be laughable, but because I’ve dropped off in almost every single one of my interests and pursuits since not long after that age I haven’t progressed. Hopefully doing this will help me to catch up to where I could be if I never quit writing, one day.

Back to the what I was going over though, at that age I was still hopeful for the future. Not only did I finally have what you could call a best friend, and we really were incredibly close. We were together at all times outside of lessons, and also in lessons that we shared. We would hang out after school every day, on Fridays for hours and hours and most weeks one of us would stay the night at the other’s place. Weekends we’d hang out too, often with a few of the others from the group at school. He also first got me thinking about politics in a meaningful sense, my politics have changed drastically several times over since then but it started with him. Before him I was really uncritical, I don’t know how but he awoke this thoughtfulness in me that never went away. Not just in regard to politics, in how I looked at any kind of art or media and how I analysed the things people did. Maybe it’s all a coincidence, this was after all around the same time I went through puberty so maybe this was all latent. I don’t think so though, and at the time I definitely didn’t. At the time I felt this huge sense of gratitude, I felt like he’d saved me. To keep up with the current memes, it was like I was an NPC and he somehow made me into a player character. We were also actively looking forward to our futures, we spoke about what we’d study at uni and the places we’d travel to in our 20s. I was enjoying life and looking forward to every day, and excited for what the future would hold. I wasn’t even really bothered by not having a girlfriend, I would have liked one and I’d certainly already had crushes/oneitises at this point but it wasn’t something that I really thought about frequently. I just assumed I’d get around to that aspect of my adolescent development later on. There were girls who had expressed clear interest in me, but because I always dropped my spaghetti I ruined it, so naturally I’d just get better and things will work out like everything else had been doing I thought. Just not right now.

My music taste first started to develop around this time too, I was mostly listening to a few fairly well known alt-rock and indie bands so I had pleb tier taste but it was the first time I started paying attention to what I listened to and actively developing a certain taste rather than just seeing music as something that’s in the background. I wouldn’t say I saw music as a hobby or real interest of mine until about a year ago though. The album Velociraptor by Kasabian is basically the soundtrack for those three years, along with maybe Nevermind or In Utero. I don’t listen to any of them very often now, but the few times I have I get hit by a wave of memories from back then.

That’s why I like this feeling anyway, it puts me back in the headspace I was in when I was last truly a happy person. This was the last meandering post for a while now though. I have that idea about school shootings which I really want to talk about. I just hope it is as original as I think or I’ll feel like an idiot. I know I have an insight that most people don’t, and I’ve read and watched a lot about the subject and never seen someone put it quite like I would so far. Making a whole blogpost on the thing though is going to be difficult and might take longer than these last few did. Talking about myself is easy, but writing an intelligent (hopefully) and in depth (kinda) commentary on a modern phenomenon like school shootings isn’t. Also I’ll be working on and off again over the weekend and into next week. What I’m trying to say is I’m not done yet, and there will be more from me.

First real entry

So, I suppose I better start somewhere.

Now I’ve had some time to think about this more clearly I’m going to lay out my plan for anyone who might be interested. I’ll be using this as a diary or journal like I mention in the introduction. Now I actually need to have something to say it’s hard to know where to start. So as a general rule I’ll make an entry or post, not sure what to call these, if I have an interesting day or event happen around me and whenever I get to thinking about something in particular detail. For today I’ll go over the last few days events, which ultimately led to me starting this. The last few days have been really difficult and confusing, but it was all in my head. I’ve thought about recounting what happened in detail but after reading back the draft I realised how insane it makes me look that this is all it took to completely throw me off baseline. So instead I’ll just go over it all as briefly as I can and use that to springboard to other things. I think this post will probably still be atypical for what I generally plan to do here though. No matter how hard I try I can’t get this particular entry to not come off as completely self indulgent and wanky, but going forward I’ll try to keep things more in the spirit of my introductory post.

So as background information starting Tuesday morning I’ve had the home to myself and will for the next month, my parents are away. My last day at work was Monday, and my oneitis co-worker will be gone when I start back next. I knew she was going to leave for a while, and I knew but didn’t mention that Monday would be the last time I’d see her. I also knew she’d be opening up the next day, so I left a goodbye note that evening before going home. I didn’t “confess my feelings” or anything faggy like that but I was more emotive than I ever was in person. I wake up and immediately check my phone the next day hoping for some reply but there’s nothing. Parents leave really soon after that and I basically do nothing the entire day but scroll through the catalog on /r9k/ and check my phone every few minutes. It’s still the busiest part of the shift maybe later, she’s still working maybe later, etc. It’s clear there’ll be no reply after a while but I still do nothing except listen to Filosofem on repeat incredibly loudly and lie on the floor constantly checking my phone.

At some point the bright idea hit me that I should check her social media, because I didn’t feel like enough of a creepy fucking loser already. Some anon told me that putting someone’s email address in quotation marks into google would help and through that I found her Instagram, Facebook and an old youtube channel with one video public. Now, going through all of that crap for the following few hours really illustrated something to me that I’d been going over in my head the month leading up to this day when I first found out she was leaving. I never really fell for her, I fell for a creation that was based on the few snippets of information I got in the time I knew her. Because we hardly even spoke, for months I couldn’t even manage basic smalltalk without my voice shaking and even after getting more comfortable the conversations were really brief. I didn’t fall for a person, in my desperation and loneliness I convinced myself she was something she wasn’t and that that person I imagined was who I wanted to be with. I hope this makes sense, I know if you’re a khv like me you’ll understand but I want normalfags to get it too. Like I said I was already thinking about this for a month, but finding out in a few hours that this person was a performing musician, an amateur photographer (this one I was aware of actually but I had never seen any of the photos), had been on several trips over the summer, might very possibly be a lesbian (something I did have very slight suspicions about before) and just had a life that was so much more active when looked at next to mine the two weren’t even comparable really hammered it home.

I’d been awake since about 6 and it was starting to get dark, but at that point the racing thoughts were so intense I had to do something so I got my coat and left. I got a bus to the city centre, which was around half an hour as I was listening to the ep Nightshade Forests by Summoning and it synched up almost exactly. I know it seems like I listen to a lot of black metal reading this but I actually don’t very often I just happened to that day. The bus ride itself was really something, I actually made a thread about it on /r9k/ after getting back. I was staring out of the window and it’s like every single inch of the city had some memory attached for me. It all suddenly hit me how limited my life has been. That’s where I’d hang out after school, that’s where I got stuck for hours in the snow that one time, that’s where X used to live, that’s that place I used to go on weekends when I was little, that’s the shopping centre where I got chased around by the older kids. Like that but non stop, a new one every few seconds for the entire trip before I had time to really think properly about any of these memories. I genuinely started to feel nauseous after a while, it was relentless. Most of the memories weren’t bad, they were either good or neutral, but realising how my entire life could be relived in a short bus ride was a really awful feeling. Especially because in the back of my mind this whole time was the knowledge that oneitis girl had lived in several cities and I couldn’t help but compare myself to her. It’s not like I even want to do that though, I want to travel yes but I don’t want to live in a different city or live the kind of life she does. I want to see mountains, and sprawling deserts and third world shanty towns. I want to go on adventures, which is another reason this ride bothered me because I realised I’m in my early 20s and haven’t progressed mentally or materially since I was 15. I could elaborate on why I think that is for hours and have and probably will in future posts but not right now. Short story is I think the suicide of someone very close to me when I was around 14 and seeing their embalmed corpse at that age may have caused some kind of PTSD. I don’t have a professional diagnosis though so don’t trust me for a second. I haven’t progressed because I still talk about wanting to “go on adventures” like a fucking child and also because I haven’t been on any adventures yet. Well, there’s one brief holiday I went on with my only two friends earlier this summer which kind of fits what I’m looking for but it was only a couple days and fairly local in the grand scheme of things. It was an interesting few days though, I had my first psychedelic experience too while there.

I’ll try to keep going with the story though. I got off the bus and began to walk, I walked along the river for a while until I got to a bridge and crossed that. I walked around fairly aimlessly until I found myself at the city cathedral, then crossed back via a different bridge just as it began to rain and the fog was getting pretty dense. I have to say that second bridge crossing was really beautiful, it was completely dark by this point and through the fog you could see the lights on the taller towers shining through. I should have taken some photos, they’d have gone down really well in a /comfy/ thread. After that I was getting pretty hungry after eating nothing the entire day so I went around searching for a nice ramen stall to eat at. Of course I didn’t find one because I don’t live in an anime and eventually settled for getting my calories in drinkable form. I found a little alcove down by the river and sat there for a while drinking my ales and watching the rain hit the water with some tunes. Curtains by John Frusciante, as you may have noticed music is quite a big part of my life. This is actually fairly new though, it really only started when I got this job. I used to listen to music occasionally before, but when I started in order to keep myself entertained through the long shifts I began listening to lots of new stuff every day. This new interest in music and appreciation for it has been really helpful in getting through the harder times the last year. This lasted for a while anyway, me sitting there, I’m not sure how late it was at this point but it wasn’t yet midnight because the shop would have been closed.

Eventually a homeless man barged into my little outpost and I had to go. The interaction we had was noteworthy though. I was already at the end of my last bottle so I quickly finished it off and got up to leave and on my way out he started complaining about his situation. He said he’d lived in this city his entire life, and watched new apartment buildings go up every day for people with no connection to this place. I said something in reply I don’t remember exactly what and as I was heading up the steps he said “I wish I had somewhere to go home to”. I felt I had to say something, but as nice as I think I am I’m not going to invite a total stranger into my home so I replied “you might find somewhere” which he misinterpreted as me saying I didn’t have any money. He got visibly angry and said “I’m not asking for money” and being the sperg I am I said “No, that’s not what I meant” but the no was far louder than the rest and that’s all he heard. Then he had this look on his face, which still bothers me now. I think what happened is he thought I’d misheard him both times and the second reply was me saying I didn’t have money again but louder. As I walked back to get the bus home, the rain now heavily coming down, the internal monologue started playing up again. I started thinking maybe I really am a good person. The fact that I even care about this guy at all when he can’t possibly do anything for me must show that. See, there’s this immediate reaction people have when you refer to yourself as a good/ nice person now which is why I never do it. They think you’re just another example of the “nice guy” meme, an opportunist or someone who’s just trying to get in a girl’s pants. You’ve heard it all before “you’re not nice you’re just doing nice things to get sex”. Well disregarding the fact that that doesn’t even matter because you’re still doing nice things it’s often not even fucking true. However, it’s such a widely held view of things that someone as self doubting as me still sometimes starts to second guess themselves. Which is exactly what I’d been doing before the homeless guy came along. I’d been thinking specifically about one day when the oneitis girl had been ill and I went into work despite it not being my shift to bring some medicine. That was the main thing, but there were a few others. I was still bitter at this point so it started with me thinking about how I’d done all this shit and she didn’t even think to send me a goodbye message back in response to mine. If she even ever saw it and it didn’t just blow onto the floor overnight which was something else worrying me. That made me think though, maybe the legion of cunts are right and I’m not really nice. Did I just do those nice things because she was my oneitis, I’m still not sure. Would I do something like that for someone I wasn’t attracted to or thought I could get something in return from? I’m not sure, but I did realise that I certainly care about people who can’t do anything for me. So my “nice guy”ness is universal not contextual at least in theory. I suppose if I was a real good person I’d have let him stay in my parents’ bedroom though wouldn’t I, what a piece of shit I truly am.

The rest of the evening was uneventful, I started writing this on the bus or at least the other draft which was more in depth (would you believe?) but I wasn’t sure if I was going to ever put it anywhere yet I just needed to get my thoughts out. Then I got home, rewatched that one video from her old youtube channel a bunch of times on repeat and went to sleep. It’s a cover of some latin american pop ballad, with an acoustic guitar. She doesn’t even show herself in the video but given the name on the account and some tells at certain points in the song I know it’s her. It’s funny, a few times when I was not feeling great she asked if I was doing ok and it really helped me cheer up. When you feel like no one in the world cares about you at all and then someone does something to show they do it really can make your day. Given that she didn’t even think to reply to my message though, something which would have taken a few seconds, I guess it was all false. Assuming she got it in the first place that is. She never cared at all, and the video is quite a fitting metaphor. It’s this love song, I looked up an english translation of the lyrics, and in the video I can feel what seems like true emotion. The main reason I was listening to it that evening was because it almost helped recapture that feeling of being asked if I was doing alright. It’s a cover though, someone else’s words about someone else’s love. It couldn’t be any less genuine and yet it feels so real. I feel like I need to say this too, I’m not saying she should care about me or even that she’s a bad person for not caring. I was stupid for believing she did based on nothing more than her asking me how I am a few times. I don’t think I’m entitled to any space in anyone’s head, I’d just like it.

The next day was better until the evening, I woke up and managed to actually eat something. I did some push ups, and while some part of me still was hoping for a reply I had accepted that were wouldn’t be one realistically. I still did nothing, I continued with that draft and had it mostly finished but other than that I was lying around feeling sorry for myself and going through the /r9k/ catalog over and over again. It wasn’t until later that night, not long after it got dark again that the next and final interesting thing happened. I hadn’t checked my phone in a while but I looked at it and there was actually a notification. Of course my immediate thought and hope was that it was my oneitis with a more likely guess that it would be my friend who I had tried to call earlier that day. It wasn’t either of them though. It was someone I hadn’t spoken to in months and expected to never hear from ever again. This serves as a good way of showing just how different my experience is from the typical normalfag btw. If I get one (1) notification on my phone that’s an unusually eventful day. I’m not trying to compete for biggest loser on the planet here but if I was I’d probably beat you.

Anyway, you’re about to understand just how neurotic I really can be, this next paragraph could have been written by a 14 year old girl. Quickly going back in time, when I first started my job there was another girl who worked there. We actually got on probably better than I did with oneitis girl and I was able to make her laugh a few times even. On the day she quit she actually sent me quite a heartfelt goodbye message. In response to a text from me first but still I really appreciated it. At risk of sounding completely shallow she was prettier and younger than oneitis girl too, I guess because I knew she had a boyfriend I managed to not develop feelings for her. I’ve looked back on the time with her fondly because I know for sure there wasn’t any kind of unconscious ulterior motive and I did just enjoy her company in and of itself. There’s an innocence to it all, or at least there was. Anyway, she’s in a completely different country on the other side of the continent now but for some reason last night I get a message on WhatsApp saying hi. Not the exact message but that sums it up. No question just hi and because I’m so taken aback I have no idea what to do. I’m wondering if it’s an accident and was meant for someone else (most likely in my mind now) or she really does want to catch up or I don’t even know what. After I take a minute, and ask for advice about what to say on 4chan which was no help, I reply back “hi.. what’s up?” to which there has still been no reply almost 24 hours later. There’s two things that may have happened here, and both bother me greatly. Either it was an accident and she hasn’t replied to my reply because she didn’t ever want to talk. Which might also mean that the goodbye from before wasn’t as heartfelt as I thought and was just something she sent to get me to leave her alone. Not that I was going to try and contact her again after my goodbye text, but she might have thought I would. If this route is the accurate one then it ruins that entire time I’ve looked back on fondly and also ruins how it was all wrapped up and left in the past. Closure is such a nice thing to have in life, so when that is retroactively taken from you it really isn’t fun. Alternatively, she did mean to send the message but my reply wasn’t satisfactory. Maybe because it was too soon after her message and I seemed too enthusiastic, or because the message was fairly brief and reserved so I didn’t seem enthusiastic enough. I really don’t fucking know, there’s this whole millennial code around this kind of thing that being separate from normie life I never picked up but I thought it was only really important in dating/ romantic exchanges and for catching up with an old friend things would be less strict. I’m still checking my phone now like holy shit why would you send a message to someone and then just ghost. If it was an accident just tell me, and the fact that this happened to me right now when I’m in a particularly emotionally fragile state it’s like I’m being divinely fucked with. I really can’t shake this feeling that I’m living in some Truman show style simulation and the viewers or the showrunner or the harvester robots or whatever are just messing with me for kicks. This is why people shoot up schools. Well, not really I actually have an interesting theory on that which I don’t think anyone else has talked about so maybe that could be the concept of a future entry if I can think of a good way of presenting it.

Anyway, that’s where we are now, there’s nothing else eventful that’s happened other than me making my introductory post. After seeing those blue ticks show up on my message and then radio silence this powerful feeling of exhaustion just came over me. I was so completely unprepared, maybe a better reply would have been “hey, thanks for the anxiety attack” after all it would have been more emotionally honest than what I actually sent. It might have gotten a laugh, not that I’d see it but I do miss her laugh. So I fell asleep after that, earlier than I planned but lately I’ve found going to sleep and escaping this mental hell the part of the day I most look forward to. It’s starting to get darker now, I’ve been writing this on and off all day long so it’s tonally all over the place. Maybe that’s fitting though, if this thing is meant to be truly representative of my state of mind it should be all over the place. Comical and absurd at parts, melancholic or outright miserable and bleak at others. Of course everyone goes through changes in their mental state, I just think the rapidity is uncommon.

Anyway I’ve been thinking about this blog thing all day while writing this up and I do want to keep going. It’s quite cathartic to get my feelings out and know that someone will hear them in full. And that really is crucial, I don’t want to be screaming into an empty void I’ve been doing that without a blog for years. /r9k/ can be a great place to vent but it’s limiting, I really got to lay out my mental journey over the last few days here. Even if the tl;dr of the story is just, I woke up and hung around at home, then I went for a stroll, then I came home and did some more nothing, my mind has been on overdrive so it’s felt like an emotional odyssey. Right now my audience, or potential audience is limited to the anons from that thread and I’m not sure if even you’ll stick around. I said I’m not going to shill this there again, but if I want to get people reading I’ll have to learn to be comfortable shilling somewhere which I’m not right now or be good enough that people shill for me. I don’t want much, just a small following of people who are genuinely interested in what I have to say or maybe see me as an interesting case study worth paying attention to. So, if you think I’m worth shilling for I’d appreciate it. Also I think there are comments if you want to call me a faggot or something.