It feels as though my life were a chess match between I and an old friend who I’ve long not spoken. I do try initially, but I’m so outmatched it’s as if he knew rules I didn’t, openings, castling, always where I don’t want him to be and never where I do. Him obviously my better, I let my pieces slide off the board in polite abeyance, more inclined to conversation and him obliging, though sometimes curt in response. And as he deftly knocks one more, one more, one more and one more of my pieces off their square, I come to realize that this idle, this white noise as sought sensation and movement set aside for sight and sound was it after all, the only thing I’d ever do. I see my old friend a friend no longer, still old, more familiar, I feel futility at my diminishing resources, my increasingly limited options, how I let top tip to bottom without care, accusation: my eyes rise to meet his, my old no longer friend, finding not malice but apathy of scalpel steady, while unchecked black and white slither off tabled end, plane to pool one check at a time to climb his calves, wrap his waist, around the chest the last white spent leaving only one black square left, one square, one move, one life, one wasted, one of talent left in trash, one of relations renounced and finally fate one’ve no option, finality sense falls to compulsion and I’m gonna show my ass. 1 23 4

Few years ago. I’m unwell, past-tense in particular. Reached out to a stranger because I liked his pictures and his familiarity with the topic at hand.

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Benighted Bedrot

The zoomer’s are right. The cyclical cringe drive has gone from needing to invent new words for the same definition every 2-3 years to accelerating at such an exponential pace that now acknowledgment of your surroundings is a profound humiliation. Nonchalance is embarrassing. Sincerity is embarrassing. lower-case is embarrassing. Old toons realizing it and adopting formal grammar is embarrassing. Normal grammar is embarrassing. Indulgent alt-lit is embarrassing. Structured work is embarrassing. Meaning is embarrassing and nihilism is embarrassing. Were Harold alive they’d salute the bedrot, blooming ( embarrassing ) in bulwark as vanguards of dignity, like Thermopylae, Persians being making eye contact when spoken to. The daemonic genius can wait, we have to focus on not being gay. And the same applies to consumption as production.

If I could make a brief appeal to any young writers feeling these restraints, allow me a short apologia for the performative. Novelty is a finite resource. If you read The Brother’s Karamazov at 18 it’s a genuinely transformative experience. If you read it at 45 you’re fat. There’s a small period when acuity of feeling is sharp enough to pierce and effect, things harden and it would be a shame to calcify acceptance over ascendence. You may have to plod through 400 pages of tedium but it’s punctuated by 40 paragraphs of divine, when finished I considered the author near deity. Don’t deny yourself sustenance due to discourse, the canon is good and the window smaller than you think.

Sermon over. We’re at a real impasse. Art is dead. But not to worry, I’ve been hard at work. For you guys. Think Jung stumbling out of his bedroom in an authentic alchemist’s robe from the Zoroastrian era after a 6 month psychosis and addressing the schizophrenic, currently catatonic, patient he’s been fucking: “The red man is like the black swan, but then he was a snake.” That’s the level I’m at right now.

I’m going to save art.

After years of analysis, reading, research, experimentation, unemployment, ruining my life 3 times, research chemicals, normal drugs, and just kind of fucking around I have synthesized:

The Secret

Solution to Modern.

If you’re wondering if I’m schizophrenic and retarded I would suggest you read my new About page for context.

If you want the alchemical process to achieve this state of creative nirvana, hard won trust me, merely sign up for my Gallowglass founder’s plan, a meagre $250. There’s also other amounts of money you can give me including none. But this is only the first half of The Secret. You have to give me money for the Second Half of The Secret.

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The modern malaise is less powered by a deluge of pressing existential questions avoiding capture but a mind not designed for holding every single aspect of it in abstract, when you stare up at the sky and apply meaning to it, what, exactly, does it mean? What does meaning mean? Actually? Significance? Impact? Identity? Longevity? Essence? Passion? No one really knows, because a label of mean or less couldn’t mean less about the ing in itself. You’re here anyway, and the definition you’re chasing is about as vague as can be, at least in the modern connotation.

Previous generations found meaning innate, a burden to be carried that would vary by luck and circumstance of birth. The prosperity of your family, village, city, nation were of existential importance and not optional. Though born to constraints of status and class we would call barbaric I imagine little time was given pondering their true purpose, though given, maybe he made boots better than shoes and we’ll never know because of the patriarchy. The truth is that a very small minority of people excel in complete autonomy, most reach their peak form from navigating non-optional hierarchies and impediments, and as its compulsory meaning is irrelevant. We get to browse the shelves now, true. What options.

Meaning in our era is corrosive. We’re all sent off to find our own, to be the truest you you can be, The only problem being meaning cannot be recreational, by definition. No matter how hard you try to convince yourself that this is it, yep it was Pickleball waiting for me at the end of road all this time, the soul recoils from this conceit and is embarrassed. If you pick something out of a listicle it doesn’t mean anything. If it comes with a dress code it doesn’t mean anything. If you articulate instead of act it doesn’t mean anything. Choose carefully, lest you share your meaning with an earnest dork. What would the rest think? About your meaning?

MF Doom was an incredible musician.

Portion of his fanbase was pretentious.

Now he’s ick.

And the same applies for cliques, philosophy, literature, film, religions, diets.

Saturation of opinion and surveillance makes association certain.

One retard with your thing, you’re retarded.

Meaningful.

What meaning really means in a modern context is the achievement of self-actualization, an equally amorphous notion. Where are those people at? The actualized? Let me know if you’ve seen them. It’s become a status marker with all the baggage that comes along with it. I’m just, sooo happy to have finally found my true self after all these years searching. You can’t imagine what a blessing it is guys (takeaway being that her true self is better than you and her meaning is taking pictures at restaurants at angles that hide her nasolabial fold.) I would suggest anyone still enraptured by the notion of the real you, the one that doesn’t suck, waiting impatiently for your therapist to tell you it wasn’t your fault one last time so you finally emerge from your cocoon, intuit the universality of it all, discover latent abilities - and go fill out an excel sheet, actually read Jung’s Red Book, useful if for nothing else outing the occult's puerile nature through the stripping lens of nordic autism: 'to go up you have to go down but only from being up can you begin to go down' is the exact sentence structure consuming 80% of the book, and if you’ve done your research, any occultist text. I’ll let Pessoa have a word.

More pernicious still our instinct is we don’t warrant recording let alone romanticization, that’s why any media featuring modern tech is tagged as gauche, our lives are embarrassing. They’ve convinced us that living and narrative are synonyms in an arc famine. Straight line right 65 degrees and a sudden 90. A matter of stage design if nothing else, 40 years ago walking down the street held a certain aesthetic neutrality, meaning it was an apt setting for say a short story about a pigeon or some shit. We are now decidedly of negative narrative or aesthetic value, in form and function. Phones, screens. You’ve heard it. Descent is movement, and demands momentum, but I’ve seen that plot through to termination. Lord Byron used Baby Bell wax to plug a hole in his air mattress.

The real formula at play is our conviction that pain has to mean something, endurance has to be rewarded. I couldn’t of gone through all that for nothing, it’s not possible. There’s rules.

And I believe that despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s load bearing.

There’s no ascending ‘but’.

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Continually perplexed at people’s ubiquitous + irresistible reflex to aggressively respond with some variation of ‘it’s ALWAYS been that way!’ to negative aesthetic observation. Why are you angry I don’t like muted netflix dfilm color palettes?

Really can’t track the specific conditioning that would generate personal offense to the notion of taste but very consistently manifested. Intuitively know part is [criticize present = romanticize past = reactionary = bad] and part class acceptance demands holding explicitly incoherent and immediately irrational views, an initiation producing a concrete (though incredibly irate) acquiescent loyalty with the educated, the current, the modern, the accepted, the experts, the valid source, the decidedly unquirked whiteboy: chest; concave and something as innocuous as criticism of modern media, even outside any political context, is somehow translated internally as countersignaling this vibe: that they are.

If It’s Gray and Gay That’s Me.

A bizarre personal identification with the times in isolation of its content, a radicalized one I think unique to our era.

“Nothing has ever been better and nothing has ever been different, though it’s been worse, in fact if it ‘has’ it’s worst, and any ‘is’ that’s bad ‘has’ been so eternal, but actually it is good, sorry rather what was good is bad, and it always has been.” (Daenerys Leibowitz, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Identity” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34 (2022): 89–97.)

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Obscure Structure

I don’t think an agitated prodding of the word meaning, suspecting it of harboring an extra vowel and three consonants qualifies one to be a nihilist when there’s figures like Cioran to contend with. Believing himself to be of a particular type, now diagnosable and internally mapped to near perfection back in the 60s by disciples of Freud and object-relations theory. The basic thesis, in regards to schizoids, which I assert Cioran was, being that of a bifurcated mind occurring pre-cognition producing three pseudo egos with contested domain: ‘the non-libidinal ego’ responsible for dealing with the real world, the repressed ‘libidinal ego’ shoring up fantasy to maintain vitality, and the masterstroke of the system: the ‘internal saboteur’ responsible for making sure no part of the self ever got close to being an ‘object’ again, initiation almost always a rejecting mother. Simplified: child’s needs met with negative response but survival dictates attachment, few green neurons do the best they can and direct libido inward. The external can only be endured, so I live internally. That’s the foundation on which the psyche is built.

Into adulthood the non-libidinal ego is semi-functional (this being the exterior system, it has come to define it in the modern DSM, a false and hollow caricature), and treats reality like a 16 year old working cash at McDonald’s. During isolation the libidinal ego asserts itself, sure of their infallible youth, talent, and beauty they’ll drift off engulfed in fantasy, often spinning elaborate worlds with years of continuity and poetic pathos. But unavoidably night comes, and with it the internal symposium resumes and has soaked more blood than the senate floor: Cato told to speak the fuck up, Cicero dismissed for his spartan tongue, and Tiberius thrown out for lack of cruelty. Let’s pick up where we left off: we’re garbage, why. The Saboteur takes the stage: Nlib you’re a dullard hermit wasting your life operating below your capabilities. Libi you’re a petulant egotist addicted to dream masturbation, and despite claimed talent produce nothing. That settled, let’s try to conclude if we should exist, and if so what to be. I would also like to revisit suicide if we have time.

In an attempt to simplify things I’ve presented this chronologically, but in reality all these processes happen simultaneously at a frenzied pace and it doesn’t stop, ever. The outer self and inner self are generally quarantined, but the saboteur is omnipresent. Every thought or action immediately negated, nothing goes undebated. We haven’t decided if we should exist and you want to do laundry? Constant conflict without motion, a searing engine of inertia apt described as tortuous. A marathon well ran demands less energy and toil than these guys putting on a shoe.

This sounds absurd, but testimonials to this tri-formation of self don’t just live in object-relations theory but of excess in the literary canon. Cioran, Pessoa, Beckett, Bernhard, Kafka, any chronicler of paralysis with dazzling style. Pessoa’s entire heteronym system was designed around it. The one benefit of being confined to recursive self-assessment aeternum is a sharpening of the mind, at least while it maintains material to support an edge. Cioran most acute, his first work gave articulation to a suffering that was previously beyond coherence and with undeniable brilliance, manic lucidity, intuited metaphysical mastery, hero of hysterics, the hidden tribe had found its voice.

Unfortunately, by publishing a book, a widely acclaimed one at that, without even a pseudonym, he had exposed himself to the most terrible danger imaginable for his kind, evidence left behind that could be queried without his aid of interpretation, at any time, by anyone. While the saboteur will leverage any argument necessary to fulfill his aims the original fear driving it is preverbal and thus hard to articulate: they fear becoming an object because the external self was designed for compliance and de-escalation, if someone perceives them incorrectly they become incorrect - perception is possession of both definition. It escapes our comprehension for the same reason it renders them untreatable, there was never a coherent cognitive structure to begin with, nonetheless return to. And Cioran’s first work being so honest, naked - and thoroughly consumed: compulsory symposium resumes! They imagine every possible interpretation or criticism stemmed from it along with each variation and subvariation and proceed to internalize and debate it to dust until they fall of exhaustion and wake convinced they should be crucified. Possibly for months. Their life in microcosm. Unwilling to pay this price ever again, Cioran developed his philosophy of total negation. He claimed hours meditating upon the void, hoping for erasure he began to worship it. The schizoid suffers because he can never give up on his dream of becoming, but if one could CLEANLY deny existence, ALL relation, everything with COMPLETE discipline - the paradox shatters. A legitimate victory. He wrote his next book.

A Short History of Decay

His prose here is immaculate, crystalline, an irony so refined and light by the 2nd page you place yourself his pupil, propelled in the wake of an icy confidence that each aphorism could be carved in stone and every single syllable spit into them was to spec, consciously designed with aim of seducing the men he knew his brothers towards the conclusion of the complete and final futility of their lives. He wasn’t exactly wrong. Rationalized in forms the ever cerebral schizoid would never be able to clean himself of hypocrisy if denied, a lil lick-spittle romanticism if some got spooked - just come stand here, and it won’t hurt, it will stop. In the venomous subtleties his artistry shined the brightest, the nods, grimaces and bearing of teeth sparse throughout to you, the reader, each earning an uncanny pause, the odd sensation he was looking right at you with a smile of unknown origin.

This was not an act of liberation but genocide, knowing that once the desire to ‘be’ had been excised, the tension required to produce their single redemption and refuge, the creative capacity born of the necessity of illusion just to endure existence would be extinguished with nothing but a brittle synthetic nihilism in its place. Enjoy void worship.

As for motive: a sealing ritual ensuring the soul’s exile , and in the process of reconfiguring his psyche for durability he became a little morbid, and his lifelong fixation on death turned extinction fetish. Be wary of voids, they tend to fill. In lust he saw all things coming to an end, soon, and believing his tribe to be the only ones composed to produce illusions capable of replacing our failing institutions his goal was to simply nip it in the bud. He made indulgences to malevolence but didn’t quite believe himself, it was a cold appraisal that held this world had to end but temperature did little to hide the bias. I can’t deny him his grudge, if you knew how it’s earned. But even today schizoids seeking insight into their condition can find themselves strangled in the crib by the first person they felt ever really understood them. Think what you want of Cioran’s dubious claims regarding his tribe’s capabilities (still haven’t done the laundry), but he believed it and he believed in the consequences. It wasn’t enough it means nothing, it should be nothing, and I will do it. That’s a nihilist. Would you be surprised to hear I admire the man?

Cioran continued to be a prolific author well into old age, though his genius spent he never lost his cold brilliance; analysis/style intact, inspiration not. He was willing to talk of the book at times, but always defensively, it was what he needed to do to survive he said. He failed to acknowledge that he escaped having already won his glory. By what right did he deny the seduced their trials, that faint chance of redemption? Their victory?

None, but they never had the right to exist in the first place. Symposium’s opening.

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Love being assaulted by 10 invasive prompts per action as apparently the natural response to ‘may I scam you’ is to insta hammer yes, if you weren’t abused as a child get the fuck off the internet, being well adjusted was a valid meta for like 40 years outta 4000 and now you idiots are back to (with trauma processed and a healthy appetite for new experiences) getting raped phys + psych + spirit + materia 24/7

but now instead of gazing ambivalently from my mountain i have to wade through a barrage of warnings pertaining to the danger of height when existing within 5km of it. please elucidate us on being disemboweled (bulletpoint presentation by retarded woman 9 slides, 6 hours, intestine coiled around ankle)

neuronal lifting and installation of body wide silica + polypropylene translucent apparatus (smells like piss and itches because they put fiberglass in it for no discernable reason) so immediate tactile sensation can be properly translated via passive aggressive 5 line email body, access naturally requiring corp vpn/2fa/sms/3 captcha and cum tribute on login, mouse1 input, and mandatory refresh every 45 seconds

over your shoulder “Heh simple, right?” you know exactly the adult cartoon she lifted the intonation from

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It’s imperative to know where exactly you’re at, we do not live in a time where the individual can be made more by external, pandoras out she got that dumb bitch hat on high waist jeans and her mandate, or what can even be interpreted through the ground slop evicted out the mincer of like 4 different paradoxical neurosis handed down from on high, pressed upon from without, alien, inescapable, is the desire to construct for themselves themselves, notary collection foraged persona borne of pinecones, heap up the pile, a collection of experience associates contextual consumption contrived construct reflected like 5 panes back at min from the immediate - you have to extend repeat and fold over that truth to a level of abstraction that isn’t even communicable, outside of physical pain and the gooncave any thought, feeling emotion or you may have is hopelessly corrupt, profane, a pretense contrived as paper folds to unveil the lotus-autist embarrassment before god - he just brought home dinner n adams getting fisted with the fortnite end match screen still on cousin: provided an apparatus whose structural components entail an active awareness of a growingly limitless set of fundamentally irreconcilable and acutely malicious Views the output is and can only be: retard, accent on the e. stimulus most vigorous say passive media consumption, you have to realize that for a large and growing segment of the population the unbearably brief and labored for schopenhauerian moment of pure perception is utterly beyond reach, even for a second, an over-agitation so taut that before the RGB values are even translated a galaxy of interdependent and cannibalistic social complexes awake and as god’s universe is governed first by grace then gravity our souls are stirred by void then affirmation, though matter be negative or not at all if moving it still is, and all thought race to justifica to exonerat to counter to rebut to vindic to deni to refut to finally it always ends in a fucking apology.

Note: This is the first thing I ever posted as a ‘piece’ and tried to clean it up and do SEO shit etc and 1. It sucked. 2. I hated myself. Here’s the original.

Left, keep the cleat off the main sheet, weather helm your right and translated through simple abrasions of the palm courtesy of rope and cherry oak know God: between the ethereal shriek above and sinking baritone below you, inexplicably, have direction, moment held taut between two eternities and that is Grace: all in the forearms. So sound this world’s darkness to silence, light between the panes illume the animation, movement is the point, do so beautifully all virtue and though I dance vicious through I love the neck between my teeth as every end had begun and point tear point is divine. Gotta whore in the hull my head out the hatch a horizon to snatch and some swells back a seal’s sympathy ‘you’re right they’re all retards back there for real’ and he’s right I’m right and I’m not, gay, or anything like that.

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