* * *
3 AM.
I can’t sleep because my room is filled with bugs. There is a gap between the air conditioning unit and the window ledge, maybe less than half an inch, but it's enough. Moths are writhing in the big light on my ceiling and I watch them struggle against the clear packaging tape holding the ac unit in the window. I should feel some kind of sympathy or at least disgust but all I really feel is annoyed that now I can’t sleep in my room.
4 PM.
Tore the bumper off my car last night. Missed my turn and drove into the tiniest of ditches, hardly even a ditch, more like a dip in the grass to the right of the driveway. Not my finest moment. Drove all the way home and didn’t realize until this morning. Feeling like I’ve got a strong gravitational pull for fucked up shit to happen lately. Not to absolve myself of agency. I am the one creating the pull but damn, the recursive nature of these events are really starting to add up.
Tried not to play video games today. How are you 26 and your vice is video games? Shouldn’t you be doing drugs or having destructive relationships? Instead, I can’t spend a day without thinking about a game engineered to weaponize the dopamine cycles of twelve year olds. Awesome.
Instead, spent two hours outside tanning and finishing Say Nothing. Burned my nose and cheeks a little. Tried not to cry about the bumper. It started to thunderstorm so now I’m at the bar writing & reading with my sister. Is drinking a gin & tonic on a Tuesday afternoon enough to make it a problem? Am I pretending to be an academic just so I can drink on weekdays without feeling like a failure professionally?
The books I brought were Pornography by Dworkin, Border & Rule by Wala, The New Age of Sexism by Bates, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Zuboff, Plato’s Republic, and Heaven in Disorder by Zizek. I don’t even know what I’m trying to write about anymore but instead just trying to consume anything with even the slightest interest to me, that and a collection of recommendations from friends and various corners of the internet (most often, other neocities sites that inspire me).
I’ve Bricked my phone every day for the past few days for about 10-12 hours a day. I hope it helps because it has been otherwise to painful to wrench myself from my virtual self. I know there is no real way of disentanglement anymore, but I feel like I walk around the “physical” with a blur effect on, a filter that is dictated by my online interactions and consumption. If I can’t find it in myself to live in the real world unobstructed, and the virtual is all consuming and corrupting, there has to be some kind of third space (not the elusive, social kind) that allows for a more controlled movement between the two. If there isn’t, I can’t imagine a future that escapes the repetitive cycle of virtual abstinence to reckless online abandonment. I literally could’ve just written that I’ve felt chronically online lately, but I have to type out all this bullshit instead.
* * *