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s see 1ee 33lets3 skeletons and fetid was made for something new - 11 into the future; the future echoes into the past, in dreams and visions and potentiality. searching for what will be in the bones of what was. in january of 2033, the ³3a states 3emilitary dropped a chemical weapon of ee3ese33ese3e3³3333³³33|3W2 ³l uninhabitable in thee long #e³s33³33 in wor the sake of noaaaeaeething3 but themselves, aaand the sescar still oozes. for @/awhitehead

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1.

• I wake up every day with the knowledge that the only truly moral move I have to take is to become a XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
• I spent most of my summer sitting in the heat and running moral calculus on whether or not it is okay for me to turn on the air conditioner. I have been thinking endlessly about how electricity consumption is going to boom across the Third World as air conditioning becomes necessary in the next century and beyond and how that is likely to feed itself further and what an American Life means exported to the entire world. I go on walks in the cemetery and I look at the deer and I listen to the immense rumble of the HVAC of the children's hospital echoing against the hills and I wonder which year will be the last one that I see them prance over graves. Everything ahead is survivable if we start acting now, but are we? Will we?
• Videos of dead children and knowing that I'm not doing enough and knowing that I'm somehow doing more than most and videos of dead children and videos of dead adults.
• The present moment is a test, and we're failing it like we've failed every moment before. Americans are uniquely poisoned in their faith that having the right opinions means literally anything at all. I want movement. Action change dreaming growth, an open door - I have been getting claustrophobic lately, especially when I smoke, even outdoors. I think about the heat and pressure and proximity, crammed into a jail cell or a train car or a bus, unable to escape things touching me, my skin touching my muscles touching my bone, the death of escape.
• I don't think I'm supposed to feel this trapped in my own body nearly eight years on HRT.
• Is this sustainable? Is this moral? Is this sustainable, is this moral - this mix, this computer, this software, these synthesizers? - I've been wearing shoes with holes in them for over a year and that is certainly my moral OCD personified (christ this entire screed certainly is but man look at where we live and how we live and what is done so that we can do this and tell me we shouldn't all be a little more OCD about our position in the world, for fuck's sake), but the frequency with which I see "you are allowed to want nice things" repeated and sloganized and embodied makes me nauseous with the desperate expanse of absolution it encapsulates. What nice things and how much and to what ends - I am anti-"let people enjoy things" and could write an essay on how vacuous of a statement it is - this laptop was $600; the combined synthesizers, just under a thousand and that's only because I got them all used and one of them for free. Who could that have fed? - who could my fucking tuition (for a bullshit comp sci degree at a rich kid school whose only application is evil military shit or evil finance shit or evil big tech shit) have fed?
• I think about every time I told a homeless person that I didn't have any change (which is usually true) instead of taking five minutes to buy them some food from a corner store; doing some vulgar karmatics with all the times I have I think I tend to land net positive, but then I remember, I'm an American, there is blood on my hands, there is blood on your hands, there is blood rising up from the keys that I'm typing on, there is blood pooling at my feet and in the soil and in my veins like so much microplastic, and I think I've started so far in the negative that all I can do is desperately try to crawl my way towards zero.
• "Not being bad" is not "being good."
• I started believing in hell on Friday and while I can't find room for the idea of eternal damnation within my conception of God, there is plenty in each of us that will need to be burned away before passing on to whatever's next; I have never directly ended the life of a child, but I have not done enough to prevent the infanticide that lies downstream of gas being $3.75 a gallon. Even while I try to balance the debt, I find comfort in awaiting my own accounting.
• I think I need to stop smoking and go plant some flowers in the vacant lot on my street. I will not feel good until I see the White House on fire.
• A better world is possible but no one else will build it for us or me or you.

2.

I've been thinking lately of entities, objects, concepts, ideas, being not split or located among a binary spectrum between Reality and Fiction, with Lies being located between the two, but instead located within a triangle of Reality, Fiction, and Magic. This has the effect of situating Magic directly opposite Lies, which provides an easy negative definition of Magic. You could, in fact, redraw the triangle as two parallel and exclusive spectrums:

Magic is the thing that is neither exclusively Reality or Fiction, nor is it a Lie. If it is not a Lie, then, it follows that it must be a Truth, but not in the same way that Reality or Fiction are alone. In this parallel configuration, the intermingling of both is considered to not destroy the truth of either but to instead transcend it - much as Lie transcends truth in one sense, Magic transcends it as its opposite.

To return to the triangle: the midpoints between the three poles then become Lies, between Reality and Fiction; Imagination, between Fiction and Magic - that which is emphatically not Reality, but contains some element of reference to its form of truth through connection to Magic; and Faith, between Magic and Reality. Magic can be understood as a derivative of Faith and Imagination just as much as it could be their antecedents. To complete the hex fusion, what lies at the center of Faith, Imagination, and Lies -----?????--------?---?-----? I don't know like God? THE MYSTERY? It feels tryhard to even write this. It seemed less so before I smoked.

I had what I'm choosing to regard as a spiritual experience in April. It lasted maybe three weeks, with a peak of about a week and a sudden, sharp fall off at the end. All of this made even more sense then. Everything made sense, even what didn't, and I felt Possibility and Magic - partial synonyms - more deeply than I ever have before. Desire, above all, was suddenly true - counter to an entire life of constraining myself and what I want within the boundaries of what is expected of me and what is okay to want, the world opened up. My sister gave me a locket with a rabbit engraved on it for Christmas and inside is a bent embroidery needle. I held it and I could see the million potentialities of Mes I could be stretching before me and all of them felt like they could've been real. Life felt worth living for it's own sake, not just out of duty to my loved ones. I woke up happy to be alive. I dreamt of the future. It was nauseating and terrifying and demanded the world of me and I have despaired deeply of ever experiencing it again, and I have come to realize that my inability to identify and name it to anyone but myself - to acceed to its demands - is part of why it left. I hope that when it comes again, I'll be better equipped to shelter it. But it's been a long time, and my apostasy often feels coldly inescapable. I still flinch every time I try to open that door again.

3.

4.

I have no idea how to thread the needle of desire and duty. I do not know where loving yourself ends and wallowing in yourself begins. I do not know where wallowing in yourself ends and autodevotion begins. I do not know where autodevotion ends and devotion to the world begins. I think that there is some degree to which none of these things are fully inextricable from each other - I think that maybe they're mutually supportive - I think that loving other people requires you to first love yourself and that loving yourself first requires you to love other people - I think that my flinching away from desire is downstream of this country and its culture being based on and within puritanism - I think that my flinching away from duty is downstream of this country and its culture being based on and within individualism and atomized pursuit of self-interest at the expense of everything else.

<redacted: like a week.>

5.

there is no future that looks like This. there is no future that looks like industry and consumption and data centers and modernity. ted k was right!!! a mode of government that produces genocide demands its destruction, and a mode of living that produces ecocide demands the same. no amount of solar and wind and wave and nuclear can change the fact that the future WILL NOT and CANNOT be eco-modernism cyberpunk disposable food grown on the other side of the world hi tech extractivism productivism laptops smartphones synthetics streaming virtual reality artificial intelligence gaming vsts graphics cards; the only question is if that'll be because we've built something better or killed ourselves off in the process. i don't want to live in the world where i watch the latter.

6.

i hate this because i want to do nothing but make my music - i played live for the first time last month and it was incredibly wonderful and affirming but is that compatible with Something Better??? is it REALLY?????? no vibes, fuck off - is it really? - is any of this? writing this is the first time i've opened my laptop in like a week and the heat pouring off of it is making me sick. maybe the answer is only hardware but can we square that anti-extractivism??? maybe we just never make synths again - and what i have now is what i have, that's it, forever, if it dies it dies. maybe the music im sitting on right now is the last stuff i ever release. maybe the ephemerality of what i write or perform in the moment is what makes it beautiful. maybe the only writing or art i ever do is pen/cil on paper in notebooks that only ever get shown to whoever asks. maybe, maybe, maybe.

7.

Oh, I want to play. I want to PLAY!!!!!!!!!!! I want to play, I want to dance in my little worlds and fuck in the street and bathe in the cool grass and love reflection again, I want to know myself, I want to feel the divine spark, I want to touch myself and touch my Self and feel how nothing it all is - ! I want, I want, I want. Everything feels real. Nothing feels real. Jokes about the Demiurge are not quite just jokes anymore. The magic will come back, the Frenzy will return, the sister of my soul will speak to me again if I only let myself want her to!!, but!!!; what I also want is, still, the white house in flames, the steps of the capitol bathed in the blood of world-killers, and faith that there will still be a world in five, ten, fifteen years, on the other side of groundwater depletion, topsoil annihilation, 3-then-5-then-8-celcius and the dozen tipping points along the way and the DNC's tools of massacre aimed at the border should anyone come seeking shelter or revenge (either of course more than justified). Always always always always the question is if and how I can get both - does the Revolution need another unstable tranny choosing to lean harder into the glimmers of unreality that dodge at the corner of my vision, words whispered in my ears at the rising and setting horizons of sleep, mirror waiting for me to laugh first? Would dropping in or dropping out be a grain of sand missing from the shore or the straw breaking the back of civilization? Is autolumpenization revolutionary or just bourgeois ideology bubbling up from my veins to keep me from being bored knocking on doors for like PSL or something?? Or are either eclipsing the awful truth that the only people of real courage in the moment are willing to kill and die for a better world most of us don't dare to really really REALLY REALLY REALLY dream of????

I overestimate my own importance for sure - but, well, someone has to.

8.

Risk is necessary - safety is a curse - we are either going to live ourselves to death or die our way to life - AND WE ARE ALL ALREADY DEAD -

life is waiting to be built.

⁂